Eoster: The Spring Equinox

I'm late posting this, but I blame it on Spring Fever. It hits me every year, and always at about this time. For me it is a burning desire to create something magnificent. I listen to music on the radio and imagine what I would compose if I were Beethoven. I can hear the entire score in my mind, but, of course, I have no idea where to start actually composing music. So I change to writing and begin outlining what I would write about. Only there are usually so many starting ideas without continuations that I don't get as much written. So I think about painting and sketching. You get the picture. I get much the same feeling when I have a cup of caffein coffee. My heart-rate steps up a notch. There's a rush of blood to my head and a feeling that I could create just about anything, if I could only get a few minutes to do it, instead of going to work or cooking dinner.

Perhaps you know the feeling as well. And it is not at all inconsistent with Eoster, the Spring Equinox. Because this is the time we celebrate growing and rebirth. (Christianity adopted the holiday as Easter from the original pagan celebration of the feast of Astarte, Phoenecian goddess of fertility.) It is at this time, however, that I ritually remind myself that true growth requires both fertile ground and diligent cultivation. This year I practiced this through drawing.

Now you don't have to be an artist to draw. You simply look at something and let your hand interpret what you see. The important thing is to open your eyes and truly look at what you are seeing. What your hands produce is not the key element. What your eye sees is. My ritual this year has been to sketch faces. Many of them have come from my ability to freeze frames of television shows and movies that I watch on my computer. I freeze the frame and look at what I see. Then I try to capture the essence of that on paper with my pencil.

The thing is, this ritual is not a ritual if you think you can sit down on the first day of spring, look out the window and sketch "spring", and be done with it. I have made it my practice since the first week of March to sketch a face every day. Some sketches have been so entrancing (the process, not the result) that I've lost track of time and spent as much as two hours trying to capture the essence of the character that I'm seeing. At other times, I've completed three sketches in 45 minutes (all three from one scene of a movie that took about a minute and a half to play when not frozen). I understood more about that portion of the movie than any of the rest of it, just by looking at those characters and looking at my sketches of them.

So, as this spring comes about, I encourage you to spend a little time each day (let's say for one week, in celebration of Eoster or Easter or your own well-being) and do a creative activity. Do the same activity each day. If possible, do it at the same time each day, though that is not strictly necessary. Some possible activities are to sketch, paint, build, sculpt, write, compose, or craft in some other medium. You might make collages, scrapbook memories, or make pottery. But spend just 15 minutes to an hour engaged in this creative activity.

While you are engaged in the ritual, try to absorb the essence of what you are doing. If you are sketching, don't just see but feel. If you are writing, place yourself in the center of your written work. You will find that feeling of euphoria, the elevated heart-rate, the rush of blood to your head as you engage to be all the result from the ritual that you need. If it results in something that you want to share with someone else, then do so. But understand, it is not the growth of an artwork that is important in this ritual. It is the growth that happens in you as you do it that counts.