The telling of story made an appearance in my thinking this morning. I know it has been a while since I have written in here but quiet is also good for a person and I needed a little. My art work had become predictable and felt like it wasn’t where I was at. New came when I began to explore someone else’s idea for their CD cover. A young man trying to tell me what it is like for him to float through time and emerge somewhere. I haven’t found his image yet but I am loving exploring story and space.

This whole series of soft pencil images have emerged as I have let myself experience other people’s ideas of being and belonging. Then something even more lovely happened when the colours were inverted and the dark lines became trails of light.

The sky is our story of space, points of light in the night among what appears dark, blackness in cities full of ambient light. In reality there is colour where the light meets in the ‘space’ between the light points, a Milky Way full of purples and charcoal blues…. I have considered the notion of what is space? Is it what is between the points of light or is it the light? I think really it doesn’t matter.

Stories…. they have lots of names for those who study and look for such things. They are the internal narratives of life. Some we create, most we reinterpret into our own. All seem to be linked to why? Explanations of being and the obsession we have with self definition in our time. Many are told as stories of belonging and tradition that add to identity, almost as a right of membership. All I believe are about how to hold life when life isn’t so wonderful and how to accept goodness when it comes our way. The stories we repeat to ourselves tell who we are to us. It is not enough just to be, I have to prove that I be.

Perhaps the obsession with self-definition that leads to self-justification and declaration of that self-truth is needed in a society that often lacks a satisfactory story or belonging or story of enemy outside it to polarise identity. Perhaps it is the side effect of knowledge. Perhaps it simply is the effect of good marketing. Whatever the reason we as humans have the capacity to record the passing of time as memory and then remember that it has passed by touching the story we build from the elements saved away.

Whatever the reason….it doesn’t seem to matter. The thing about stories is that they have so many facets that they can be seen at different times and events in life and seen as if they have never been understood before. Many people have told me their story. Parts of their lives that have been gifts to mine. Strangers in railway stations or youth hostel in the country; friends and acquaintances; parents of children I work with and the children themselves have all shared some deep part of their identity with me. It has been a gift to listen to who they are from an open heart. I don’t need to make their stories mine, but sometimes their stories touch me and take me back to how I see my own story and look at it from a different perspective. All stories are a gift as they speck of the life we live….Life is a gift and I get to live it. Live yours and tell of it here. What do you know today?

Happy Day,

Sandy