Today is Day 10 of the Art Apple A Day Retrospective – for information on the project click here.
Day Ten – October 10, 2010
Please start by reading the original post – here.
My reflections looking back 10 years are mostly reminiscent of standing in the kitchen of my parents home and coating a sliced apple with paint. If you’ve followed for the past 10 days you know it wasn’t an easy start to this endeavor but this apple was another necessity. A beautiful simple apple to lead me to another day.
Shifting to today in 2020 this apple reminds me that sometimes art is finest in its most raw and simple form. An artist who has the ability to show restraint and pull back the urge to stay in the creative process is one of the most difficult to master. I LOVE being in the flow of creativity so my current work tends to be very expressionistic and involved. Restraint is not something I’ve worked on at all in my creative life but this apple now reminds me that I should contemplate that a bit more.
This leads me to thinking about how the chaos of our world can be detrimental to our health. During this time of the pandemic I have had to eliminate outside stimulus as much as possible because the high emotions, fear, and anger affect me powerfully. When I get into a state of heightened agitation, it leads to anxiety and stress. And there is absolutely no way to separate the fact that anxiety and stress make autoimmune disease worse. For me, much much worse. I’ve had to develop skills and find techniques to be more at peace to self protect. I promise to share all these tips this year but I’ll leave you with a very key one today.
Notice when you begin to spin in something that is upsetting. I call it spinning – your brain goes over and over [something] and you can feel the wind up inside – the tension – the desire to “vent.” Venting is fine and often healthy but for me I needed to do it less. Until I started to be able to recognize when I was spinning I was destined to stay agitated, anxious, and in a state of high tension. The spinning could be anything – maybe it was the neighbor leaving the trash can out for days, or someone implied that I could afford to lose a few pounds, and on and on – it didn’t matter, my body wanted more of the same unhealthy state. I realized that yes, those things are annoying but how I reacted was in my power. My spinning was really bad and I’m not sure what woke me up to the fact that when I went into that mode, everything in my body got worse and depending on how much I worked myself up – the flare could be extremely bad and last even longer. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that once you work on reducing the spinning and anxiety/anger/stress that you’ll be well. I’m saying it is one tool, one aspect of a larger picture, that helps bit by bit to build on a path to a better place. I still spin, I just recognize fairly quickly now that I’m doing it and I shift out of it as quickly as possible. Food for thought I hope.
This leads to a much more simple approach to life – like this beautiful day 10 apple.
And the story continues tomorrow…
