DECEMBER

…and inevitability of change

It is that strange week between Christmas and New Year again. Although there’s stillness in nature I can feel energy stirring under the cold surface. Changes used to hit me like a brick in a face but I’m  experienced observer now, I recognize the signs, and i can sense atoms shifting, clustering together, rearranging themselves into something that hasn’t been, creating new shapes, awkward at first.

  There’s always a risk when new ideas pushing from underground into a  light filled space. Baby ideas are restless, they scream for attention and keep me up at night feeding on the milk of my dreams and flickers of candlelight that I keep burning on the nights when I can’t sleep. I keep loosing myself. Changes are coming.

Now I think changes are mostly a matter of shifting perspective. We moving through space and time even while reading on a couch or laying in bed. We got two hours older while finishing up the book, and our internal landscape shifted too, to make room for what we just read. Location of the planet where our couch is also shifted, changing our perspective. We can’t go back to being the same person in a same place where we read last pages of the book, Schrödinger’s cat not only out of the box - it left the room but there’s a faint grin hanging in the air still.

  I open up my instagram app to see if the rest of the world feels the same way. I visit pages of my favorite artists. I click through links and gallery images following breadcrumbs into their past. Some artists have such a solid base their changes are minimal, some different techniques, brighter, riskier color palette. But some - some changed beyond recognition. Watching this change happening in real time is quite a spectacle - like watching super nova - new layers opening up and swirling and twisting and expanding, a true artist taking his rightful space in the universe.

  Since beginning of my days as an artist I made a rule to put ten percent of my earnings back into artistic community- art is my church. I have some beautiful early pieces from artists I admire, and can’t afford anymore. Then, there are some that acquired brilliant technique but lost originality that I prize so much. Some switched to more conventional careers - starving artist is no joke. They look healthier, and say they’re happy. I wish I didn’t wait to get their artworks while they were still creating, but it’s too late now.

  I wonder, ten years from now, what will my art look like? What will I look like? What books future me read, what music she’s listening to? The thoughts I think now - will they still be relevant? Will i be here at all? Will you? Constant change, the universal oxymoron, will be here however, the only thing you can really count on.

“Imaginal Cells:

When a caterpillar undergoes metamorphosis, within the chrysalis the old form completely dissolves, becoming a kind of cellular caterpillar soup. From the messy soup, previously dormant “imaginal cells”start to develop the first idea of radical future form. The first Imaginal cells to appear are often killed by the former caterpillar immune cells, the old self believing it is being attacked. But eventually the Imaginal cells prevail , working at first in isolation and eventually together, and a new butterfly form emerges from what was.”

I believe we're all ready.

Happy New Year of Change

Much love, XOXO Larysa