crazy mad careless scribbling...and color

Just looking at this photo makes me happy.

"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling." ~G.K. Chesterton

Yes, G.K., yes.  So true.  I woke up thinking about color, and I'll probably go to sleep thinking about color this evening.  Color, color, COLOUR.  (Ok, we don't spell it that way in the USA but if I spell it as Canadians/Brits do, it gives me an extra letter and that means I can squeeze an extra color in there!) 

What's not to love?  And how to begin to comprehend the power of color?

At the moment I'm completely smitten with colored pencils and with coloring.  I've seemingly "regressed" to childhood, not that I see it as a regression.  In the words of the world-famous philosopher RuPaul,  "Life is about using the whole box of crayons."  Oh yeah!  So that got me thinking...

---

To the left is some crazy mad scribbling, with no regard whatsoever for art, proportion, realism, or care for what others think about it.  I did this tonight because when I went outside earlier and saw what kind of day it was, I could not help thinking about my childhood and spending time outside on days like this.

In 1955, when I was 8, tv existed but we didn't get one until I was about that age, as I recall, and of course, it was only black and and we could only get about 4 channels...if we were lucky.  So no tv, no video games, no internet, no smartphones, and the ways of "filling up time" were limited.  I was a great reader, and still am.  But there is only so much reading one can do.  On gorgeous summer days in the mid-1950's, after riding my bike all over town, reading, hanging out with my best friend, there were those lengthening evenings when there was "nothing to do."

I remember many days and evenings when I would go out to the side of our house, where we had two large lilac bushes, and lie on the earth between them.  The lilacs were so lush they would almost grow together at the top, forming a delicious little alcove where I could pretend to be in a secret place, and just lie in the grass looking up at the sky and watching clouds go by.  There was nothing else to do.  Just be.  I spent hours at it.

Who does that now?

Nobody. 

Certainly not me.  There's always one more thing to do.  Or forty-five more things to do.  And the pressure to do them.

I have been thinking about this not-doing a lot lately.  Going outdoors today (on a must-do errand, of course) reminded me so strongly of this childhood experience of simply being.

“The object is to keep busy being something...as opposed to doing something. We are all sent here to bring more gratitude, more kindness, more forgiveness and more love into this world. That is too big a job to be accomplished by just a few.”
― Richard Nelson Bolles

It seems to me that the only way we can accomplish this is by more frequent not-doing.

...But perhaps we can look at the COLOUR of the sky, the irises, the early roses, while we are engaged in just being?  Just sayin'.

---