Samain and the Gratitude Moon
A note on hope. Been working with the idea of hope for our next mussar class on Thursday. Painting it. Not sure about the piece I’ve done, but I’m sure about the process that got me there.
Hope. Hmm? John Desteian, my Jungian analyst of many years, used to say, “Don’t get me started on hope!” What is about hope that got him riled up? I don’t remember. Wish I did. But ever since I’ve had a skeptical attitude toward hope.
Biggest issue with hope? It puts the self into the future, takes it away from the present. At least the usual senses of it. I hope I graduate from high school. I hope I’ll meet a guy. I hope I’ll get better someday. I hope Trump will disappear from the White House.
Hope doesn’t matter. What matters is the action you’ll take right now based on your values. I want to learn something. I don’t say, I hope I’ll know more Latin in the future. I say, how do I find somebody to teach me Latin. I hope I graduate from high school. Go to class, do the work, keep your grades up. All stuff to do in the now.
Hope might even cause you to distort your values in its name. I hope I’ll graduate from high school. I need good grades. Sally writes good papers, maybe I can get her to do mine for me.
Hope by itself is evanescent, a wisp, perhaps at best a distraction from whatever doesn’t exist now that you hope will exist in the future.
But what about such big hopes as freedom? If I’m in a Trump concentration camp, doesn’t it make sense to hope for release? No. You need to figure out what concrete steps you can take right now. I want to be free and here’s what I’m willing to do about it is a very different statement from I hope to be free from here.
So the painting. I began imaging a bright light, perhaps an area of cadmium yellow and titanium white somewhere in the upper left. A bank of darkness, ivory black or a deep shade of blue, would dominate the bottom and strands of lighter colored pigments would snake up from it, never quite reaching the light. It would be just out of reach.
I kept the bank of black, made the dominate color cerulean blue, and added rectangles of orange, egyptian violet, cerulean blue, and phthalo green. At the end of the painting, I accidentally created swirls in the blue background and added them throughout the background.
Not sure whether this relates to the first idea at all. Probably not. In fact, I may start tomorrow morning and work on the earlier idea. Not sure why I didn’t use it. Oh, well. I like the second, finished one, but it really doesn’t go very far toward the idea of hope, bah humbug.
