“Go big or go home.”
“Bigger is better.”
We all know the siren’s call of “More, more, more!”
Sometimes I get tired of it. The pressure to be bigger & better every day. To rock the world. To do epic shit. To be shiny, bright and perfect.
Bigger. Larger. More powerful.
And I’m not saying that these things are bad, or wrong.
There is beauty in power, in firework brightness. In that glorious thunderstorm rocking your soul and the world.
And yet…
Sometimes I yearn for simple, too.
Study: Sugar Cookies, 5"x7" oil on canvas board. © Sarah Marie Lacy, 2012
For the smell of baking cookies. For tiny flowers hidden away like secrets in a spring garden. For the light that hits your favourite knick knack and makes it glow. For the rich, sumptuous colour of a red onion, the elegant forms of the garlic, the rustic simplicity of the carrot.
I yearn for the divine in the every day. I want to sit and soak in what is here, now. To revel in the glorious simplicity of the warm sunshine on my back, the hot bittersweet taste of my tea, and the silence.
To sit and just be…me. At ease, in the places that I am. No need to be bigger or smaller, better or smarter, more pretty or more invisible.
There is so much power in just sitting and letting the space within me unfurl. Filling up with my own Rightness, my own Enoughness.
I paint my Tiny Gems because they are my quiet meditations on the small, the humble and the sublime. That is my way to sit and be with the space within.
My instinct knows the power of loving the present moment, of finding the wonder and divinity of what is right in front of you.
Study: Carrot © Sarah Marie Lacy, 2012. 5"x7" oil on canvas board
On the days when I was most ill, the days when the pain was unbearable, it’s what saved me. Looking. Savouring. Soaking. The way the early morning summer light would hit my childhood bedroom wall is something that is seared into my memory because I thought it was so beautiful.
That light reminded me of hope, when everything that touched my skin was like knives.
I am actually really terrible at remembering the power of this though.
Like the two sides of the coin, I may know how much power there is in the present, but I also struggle with patience. Patience to let things grow and heal and move at their own pace. “I want to be there now!” a part of me insists. “Time is moving on and we’re being left behind!”
Anyone who has even been ill, stuck in a bed for an extended period of time, or just trapped by circumstance knows this feeling.
The world is moving on without you. You’re missing out. You’re missing out on your life, dammit!
The irony of yearning for a life that you think you’re missing is that you’re often missing the life right in front of you.
And yet, it’s so part of being human, this push and pull between now and the future (and sometimes the past.) We stand on this tightrope between the two, always moving into the future and yet still standing in the present.
I’m still working out my own particular brand of balance, of enough being within and being without; of the right balance between savouring the now and pushing further along the edge. Like all of life, it’s a work in progress.
What about you? Can you relate? Have you found your unique brand of balance?