Being Still

 

Farm Fatales visit 1

This was a place built by women.

She had come to meet a friend at her home on top of the hill. Her friend wasn’t home.

Maybe she’d remembered the wrong day. So she walked down the hill a bit, looking for a neighbor who might know.

Only to spot a woman banging on her water tank’s reverse thread coupling with a hammer yelling, “WHY? WHY? WHY?”.

It was, she says, a sister-in-need moment.

Time to help with the skills she had learned all those summers of her childhood on her uncle’s ranch in Oregon. She knew how to live in the weeds. Always carried a toolbox in her truck. Had one that very day, in fact, just another walk up the hill. She would end up fixing the toilet, too, and staying another seventeen years.

Farm Fatales visit 1 8

A morning meeting at a friend’s ranch. Gorgeous views. Stories. Two horses, two cats, a dog.

Hens and roosters. My sketchbooks, water brush, pencil, and paints.

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For me, creating is as much about the making as about being ready to observe, becoming still within an experience of a place in time or space. The act of drawing or painting is one of the ways I become still within an experience.

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Walking, breathing, and getting very quiet in my mind, I begin to notice what I notice. What stops me in my tracks? What takes my breath away for a moment? I have studied and practiced all these ways of “getting ready” in order to have a full experience of being. To have a taste of what that is for me.

 

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All of my habits of “being ready to observe” support me to create in any moment.

What I make is simply one way of remembering my present experience in some form — color, line, shape, word.

 

All words, paintings, illustrations, and photographs were created today by Lisa Chu.

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