Thought for The Day - Continue

Out for a Drive 8 x 11 colored pencils

"Just keep swimming, just keep swimming!" If you have children or a love for children's movies, then the opening line is familiar to you. It's the voice of Ellen Degeneres, as the fish character (forgetting all the names of the characters right about now - ugh!) in the movie Finding Nemo. The song was something she created to keep her and Nemo's father going as they swam across the ocean, looking for his son. Nearly every story has a theme and a purpose; it's part of the fabric of story telling. If we allow it, we are always learning and if we're feeling very generous with our selves we learn something dramatically different every day! Watching this movie for what seemed like a hundred times with my youngest,  the scenes became very familiar and the story line was drilled into my head. But it was such a great movie, I enjoyed watching it with my little one.

But here I am, sitting in my make-shift studio. It's very early in the morning, before 5:00 and this has become my routine. "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming," comes to mind as I consider going back to bed, "it's cold in this room" and a thousand other reasons I can use to avoid the work. But I have a goal in mind and the only way I will get there is to "just keep swimming, just keep swimming!" Now I've always had an idea in my head, but years ago, it looked like it should be" a lot closer in relationship to the course of life. No one attends college with hopes of "one day" getting to their desired career! If you attend college, you expect immediately afterwards, you will be sitting in the space where you can exercise your talents and abilities. But I got off track; WAY off track! Like getting married, raising children to adulthood, off track before I felt comfortable dipping a brush in paint on a regular basis. And still, I hope, just around the corner, over the next hill, the life I desire will be waiting.

I continue,  I go on. I get up early, relearn techniques and new ones and I write. I write enough to fill thousands of pages and imagine pictures and series of paintings endlessly. And I "just keep swimming, just keep swimming!"