This morning, I felt drawn to paint a blind-folded girl. Here’s a detail.
When I went to knit later that morning around 8:45, the ocean was completely obscured by mists. I almost had to remind myself that the ocean still does exist down there, despite being invisible today. I was thinking about how so much of my life feels like a journey into the unknown, putting one step in front of the other, hoping that I’m pointed in the right direction…waiting for the flash of illumination that sometimes breaks upon me, but only after long intervals of groping my way like a nearsighted mole. “I see feelingly,” the blind Gloucester says in Shakespeare’s heartbreaking play, King Lear. It seems like an apt metaphor for the creative process, not to mention, life!
Later this morning, I went to a training session for my new caregiver job, and found another gorgeous connection from a paper entitled “Dignity of Risk”:
“Anyone who leads a life of dignity and meaning takes risks. Each of us, in the pursuit of jobs, our personal and romantic relationships, our leisure activities, and our adventure have stepped into the unknown and risked failure, rejection, even our physical well-being. Anything any of us have ever accomplished has come from some level of risk-taking…Allowing individuals to take risks and step into the unknown is part [of] treating them as dignified adults…by supporting individuals in prudent risk-taking, and utitlizing the wealth of teaching opportunities it unearths, we can bring meaning into people’s lives.
