A few weeks back in my essay No-News News Fast Renewal, I suggested that in breaking the addictive habit of consuming manufactured news products, I found it helpful to have another habit ready to take its place. I also promised I would share in an upcoming post what I personally was doing about that.
Well, here it is. And it’s kind of simple, or might seem so initially: Instead of tuning in to “the latest developments” on the news each morning, I draw a circle on a piece of paper and I fill it with watercolor pigments instead.
That’s it.
Here’s the details: I got out some watercolor paper that I’d tucked away long ago and went to a local art supply store and bought a set of nice watercolor pencils. The pencil set cost about sixteen bucks. They look like regular colored pencils but once on paper can be blended and spread with a wet paintbrush. I had a few brushes in a box left over from old projects, and these have worked well enough so far.
The circles I’ve been drawing have been small: about 3-1/2” in diameter. With a mechanical pencil I trace a circle using my wife’s travel mug, the one our niece made for her that says, “COOLEST MARY SINCE JESUS” on the side. Over the next few minutes I fill that circle with color, with patterns, with lines and ink markings — whatever pleases me. Much like the new morning itself, the empty white circle is an open field, full of possibilities. Usually about 20-30 minutes later I feel complete with it. I know the work is done when it pleases me somehow, whether because I like the results or because I learned something in making it. I’ve completed one in as little as five minutes, but in some cases it can take as long as an hour or more if I’m having fun and it seems like it’s worth doing. Sometimes I run out of time in the morning and come back later in the day and see how it feels, see if it needs any additional input from me.
First off, here’s the deal: no matter what happens, I have already derived positive value from this activity because of what I am not doing: I am NOT consuming manufactured news products. Heck, I’m about 90 days into this transition and I really don’t even think about “news” much anymore. That’s saying something, because I was pretty hardcore into it for over a decade, with Mary famously chiding me: “Oh, no! Are you on ‘bad news dot com’ again?” For an analogy, one could compare my transition to that of a drunkard who wants to get sober. If the drunkard picks up a book at the library instead of a six-pack at the corner store, that’s already a better choice. For a person trapped in the miserable morass of alcohol, even the crappiest literature represents a big step up from even the highest-priced liquor on the shelf.
So too with me getting clean after being kind of a news junkie hooked on the mesmerizing daily atrocity that seems at times to suffice for both culture and political life these days. With that as the alternative, it wouldn’t have mattered if all I did was fill my circles in with a single color: red circle Monday, green circle Tuesday… that would have been an improvement. Honestly, I can think of a dozen daily habits that could have worked for me as a replacement for consuming news products at the beginning of my day: Doing 15 sun salutations, for example, or taking a spin across the piano keyboard for a few minutes. Checking in with a friend or family member. Taking a short walk. Maybe watching the birds at the feeder over a cup of tea. Greeting the houseplants. Any of these could be helpful morning habits, anything that helps me connect more deeply with myself and build local relationship with my world. Anything to break step with those who march lockstep to the beat of that infernal drummer.
For now at least, I like this painting thing. With these morning circles, every day is a discovery, a revelation, a transformative adventure: new techniques, new effects, new things to notice about my process. Taken as a whole, it adds up to communication with my inner self in a language I’m learning to pay attention to. Any value or pleasure the paintings offer to anyone else is entirely incidental, completely beside the point. This in itself is profoundly liberating.
Anyhow, sometimes I don’t know how to start, but my hand moves toward a pencil and next thing I know there’s a shape on the paper, a splotch of color. That first splotch of color seems to call for another movement of the hand. And so on.
How does it feel? That’s the main question. That’s always the question.
Lately in some of these I’ve been experimenting with painting one piece of paper, cutting it up and gluing the resulting pieces on top of a circle I’ve already painted. This presents some additional technical challenges. It can take additional time, and as I started experimenting with this technique I noticed my work started to take on a less spontaneous, more contrived look. Well, that’s no good. For the work to be sustainable, the process must be enjoyable to me and, as a reflection of that, the product should overall be pleasing, at least to me.
However, I had noticed inhibition starting to creep in, probably because the more time I invested in an individual piece, the more seemed to be at risk if I glued things together “wrong”. Just this morning, this mindset led to problems on the circle I was working on, but then I finally noticed what was happening and I let go. Channeling the wisdom of my child self, I just started cutting and painting and pasting. Instant gratification! The freedom I found in this enabled me to see how to get a little wild and thus revive a relatively “dead” looking painting I’d put together the day before. I didn’t see in it the life I wanted to see, so I found a way to add it. I had to connect with my own aliveness to do so. I’d say that’s a valuable lesson to get from a blank piece of paper the size of a postcard.
I’ve long said that artists are just children who never put their crayons away. So maybe what’s happening here is that I’m going back to kindergarten. What most folks probably do not know, however, is that kindergarten in both word and concept was coined by a German educator with mystical inclinations named Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852). Fun fact: The iconic children’s building blocks printed with letters, numbers and animal shapes on them that Milton Bradley introduced to the American market in 1870 were Bradley’s adaptation of educational materials developed by Froebel, what Froebel called “gifts.”
Of course, the mystical dimensions of Froebel’s thought and pedagogy were and are largely lost on the American public. For example, Froebel didn’t put letters and numbers on his building blocks. He saw the education coming from the child’s interaction with the basic thing itself: the cube shape, the sphere, etc. Let that sink in. Puts a whole new spin on the concept of “elementary education,” doesn’t it? Interestingly, my research on this topic in grad school suggested that some of the deeper aspects of Froebel’s thought and pedagogy probably did find points of connection with the mindset of 19th century USA, given that writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were still influencing mainstream American thought at the time.
Thoreau, for example, celebrated sitting by Walden Pond as a value, famously writing: "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!”
Compare that to this quote from Friedrich Froebel, which I found online just today: “It would prove a boon to our children and a blessing to coming generations if we could see that we possess a great oppressive load of extraneous, merely external information and culture; that we foolishly seek to increase from day to day.”
“…merely external information…” I love that! But that was me, all right. By consuming products of the news industry, I was increasing my “great oppressive load of extraneous, merely external information.”
I know I’m not alone in that. So I think more people might benefit from going back to kindergarten, or maybe even somehow finding their own versions of Walden Pond. For now, I like painting circles. It’s a convenient, low-risk place to experiment and learn, and I always find a way. I’m 61 years old, so the inhibitions and habits that I’m rewiring are age-old patterns. And one thing I’m finding is, there’s a huge difference between being authentically spontaneous and merely being comfortable in our established habits and programming. In fact they’re sorta the opposite, really.
Point being, since “how we do anything is how we do everything,”* finding our practice, our non-programmed place, our spontaneous selves, however we do it, can help illuminate other areas of our lives. And part of what I want to share here is, if it seems like life is looking and feeling sort of gray and dark and dull these days, we can find our color and illumination and spontaneity once again. Either we carry these things with us, or we won’t find them at all.
For this reason, finding that light and life in ourselves is worth doing, even — and perhaps especially — if the way we do so seems completely outlandish and outrageously silly.
Ask any kindergartener.