🎨 How Pouring Paint Taught me to Surrender
Letter 162
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Aloha fellow learn-it-all 👋
Greetings from Honolulu, Hawaii 🌺
On Sunday evening I took an art class.
I imagined creating something beautiful blue with clouds or ocean swirls. What I ended up with was the farthest thing from that. It felt like I failed even though the whole reason I signed up was to do something novel with friends.
Eventually, I was okay with it. I surrendered to the outcome. It wasn’t easy.
Let me back up a bit. This is the first art class I have taken since high school.
This wasn’t a typical class though. My friend Marta facilitated it calling it “Art & Wellbeing”. She shared her story of how the technique of acrylic pours became a hobby during the pandemic and allowed her to process her emotions without judging them.
Before painting with the group, we did a meditation and imagined different emotions we’d been feeling that we wanted to release. What came to mind for me was how my doubt has felt heavy with sharing vulnerably. And also how grateful I am to experience pure joy while rewatching The Little Mermaid. The colors that came to mind with those situations were light sky blue and canary golden yellow.
I was instructed to have six colors that we pour together in a kissing method of two cups lightly touching each other and letting gravity do the work. In a silly way, I realized that the beautiful blue and yellow I mixed together made this vibrant green.
I watched as my friends around me poured and came out with beautifully chaotic outer space pieces that felt majestic and mine was a grassy blob that my Judge was screaming at me for making something that was absolutely hideous and would never see the light of day in any space of my apartment. (Maybe the bathroom.)
I thought maybe I could turn it around. Wrongo.
The more I poured the paint, the more I panicked.
More and more green flowed out of the concoction of colors in my cup that I poured into it. This Judge in my noggin was having a heyday! It perceives life to be its own little perfect world of controlling everything. It’s SO annoying. It was ruining my fun and I was freaking fed up.
I eventually came to peace and realized that I honestly love green. This green symbolizes a sense of aliveness. At the end, I poured some of my favorite color of light carnation pink. It symbolizes to me a reminder to myself to be soft and kind and loving. I poured it over some of the green and called it a day.
This whole exercise of pouring paint was my first attempt at leaning into surrendering to life. There’s no use in trying to control it all the time.
I welcome you to do the same.
📜🖋 Poetry Corner
Though the moon is full,
there seems an absence —
Suma in Summer.
— Robert Aitken, co-founder of the Honolulu Diamond Sangha in 1959 (From p.31 of A Zen Wave)
🔍Word to define
Surrender: to abandon oneself entirely to a powerful emotion or influence; give in to
Example: It’s naive to think that I can always be in control. Learning to surrender is a new mindset I must learn if I want peace and acceptance.
🌟Quote to inspire
“The creative process is a process of surrender, no control.” — Julia Cameron
📸Photo of the Week
I am so grateful to be a part of the House of Pure Aloha team and community. Over the weekend, the team celebrated the 12-year anniversary for Uncle Clay’s HOPA. The shave ice-eating contest was surely a hoot to watch!
I am floored at my current project in editing the manuscript I wrote in collaboration with others that share the HOPA story and invite others to start living with Pure Aloha as well.
🙏 Shoutouts
To my friend Maddie, who I met while playing beach volleyball in Honolulu. I offered her a template, ideas, and accountability to publish her Peace Corps updates since moving to Colombia:
To my friend Brendan for racing against horses in Wales over the weekend. What an epic event!
I appreciate you reading this!
If ideas resonated, I’d love you to leave a comment, reply to this email, or send me a message on Twitter @JenVermet. If you forgot who I am, I welcome you to my online home.
Never stop learning 😁
Mahalo 🌺
Jen
PS - in case you missed last week’s letter on 🏄🏻♀️ Why the heck do I surf??
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Art IS about surrendering. To let one's mind wander into the depth of one's mind. To let emotions inside grow a hand and paint whatever it is it wants to pour.
I remember one time I was just like you. I was trying to copy an image from an animated movie through memory instead of having the original image in front of my eyes. But the outcome was not the image I tried to copy but rather an art that I'd never seen before. An art that is original. An art that came out of me.
This letter was a beautiful reminder of what art is supposed to be and how there are just things with an outcome that we can't control.
Maybe all of art is an exercise in surrendering to life--or at least cataloging our fight with it. Thanks for sharing!