Listening to the Maestro

The evening sun brushes the Japanese Maple with just a bit more flaming red, the saphire of the lobellia is royally rich, red and yellow begonias in azura pots and the fresh long thin reed like blades of various grasses all have different green colours. I am drinking in these colours as I sit in my apartment, Sebastian the cat on my lap, and inhale the gloriousness of colour.

Colour. These last weeks have been all about painting lessons with my Divine Maestro. Lack of colour, missing passion, hopelessness have haunted me in my last two weeks as I travelled in Crimea. I felt as if the Artist of Life was taking me - body, mind and heart, into conversations, stories, and places where he weeps over the repression and oppression that have shut out his invitation to splash colour and passion. Places where hearts have forgotten how to mingle laughter in the sorrow. Hearts that have hidden tears and pain and allowed them to become encased in numbness. Where the music is a lament that desperately needs grace to allow the dance of redemption to bring glorious hues of indigo, violet, magenta, gold and every other colour combination the Artist of Life created!

Perhaps I realized that charcoal etchings are not enough. Wild bohemian colours that come from grace being mixed with redemption, laments mixed with celebration, the fruit of the fields and the earth being mixed with passion and presented as a banquet.

The artist within me went to the Ukraine and wept as I saw the pain of oppression that still grips the country, the Church in that place. It will take time to hold out my thoughts and have them breathed upon with the breath of the Creator of Life - the Divine Artist/Maestro. I don't know what to do with all these thoughts yet.

At 36,000 feet, somewhere between Kiev and Vancouver today I heard a piece of truth that fits: "if there is something wrong, those who have the ability to take action have a responsibility to take action" (from the movie National Treasure)

I glance again out at my patio, a riot of colour as summer approaches. I look at the tools of my trade - food artist - sitting in my kitchen, at books on the shelf, rich brochade fabric covering the bed. It gives me such shalom to see all this while at the same time I weep for those who are colour blind to life. Perhaps the colour of hope is the place Maestro will begin.