The Eye of the World | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, January 12, 2023

(Golden Age of Gaia)

January 11, 2023

Open your eyes, for this world is only a dream. ~ Rumi



I promised myself yesterday that I would spend some time with sketchbook and drawing pencils…and I did not. There wasn’t anything I absolutely had to do which took up so much time there was none to spare for feeding my soul, but somehow the day slipped away and I neglected to nurture something important.

This morning, while I was waiting for breakfast to heat up, I sat with my ancient yellowing sketchbook and an orange woodless pencil and started shading a single balloon in a drawing I’ve just started.

Before I even touched pencil to paper, a subtle mental shift occurred. It wasn’t so much that the worries that envelop me like a noxious fog just up and vanished. It was that a hum of joy, subdued but steady, overwrote the ominous thrum of worry.

The timer went off and breakfast was ready. I had no more than circled the outline of the balloon a few times and begun shading the interior. The shift to quiet joy from perpetual worry was a respite, no more.



But I realized that engaging with art in this rudimentary way, every single day, must not be relegated to the land of New Year’s resolutions that become guilt fodder by mid-January. I hadn’t made a New Year’s resolution to “be more artistic.” It was an organic seeking that propelled me a few weeks ago to find online art instruction videos and rekindle my rusty skills.

Previous efforts to engage in daily art time have guttered and died in the past, victim to the winds of perceived necessity. There’s always something more important, more necessary, that needs attention.

The dormant yearning to hold pencil or charcoal in hand and move it across the page has resurfaced quietly this time. I invite it closer, come here, come here, come here. Set a spell with me, and whisper of universal truths disguised in two-dimensional strokes of burnt wood or powdered ore streaking across the page.

*****



The act of engaging in a creative pursuit, like the act of meditating, bumps our mind tracks from the mundane into the realm of magic and mystery, where we can almost hear the faint, haunting songs of elves in the forest, or the distant hammer of dwarves striking ore in mid-earth rock.

I’m reminded that the urge to doodle originates in the wise, all-knowing part of self. I know that engaging with artwork opens channels to clarity and inner freedom. Doodling in my silverfish-nibbled sketchbook is at least as important as making meals and doing chores.

Now, if I can just remember that from day to day.

*****

It’s been a day fraught with health concerns, rescheduled appointments, and disappointing culinary efforts. Minor irritations, tiny specks in the vast eye of the world.

The eye of my world can focus wherever I direct it. I can cultivate disgruntlement and disappointment at the happenings of the day. Or I can reach again for the sketchbook and the orange pencil, and fill in another circle of balloon, disengaging from the hamster wheel of the everyday and allowing myself to rocket off into a much more intriguing realm.