Take time every day to connect to your inner beauty and create something that is uniquely you. Make the world a better place, just because you are you. This is the path to joy. Being authentically you. No apologies.
Two years ago I decided to learn how to paint watercolor. My dabbles into art were hit and miss due to my chemical sensitivities using oils and I found acrylic paint dried to fast for me to finish the detail I wanted in my paintings. I thought maybe watercolor would be a better medium for me to try.
I found my “flow state” when painting where time stood still and didn’t seem to matter. I didn’t think of anything but the painting. For me it is peace and tranquility in a sea of confusion out there in the world.
I started with botanical paintings because I love flowers. I’ve photographed them for years and I wanted to paint them. With watercolor I found a method of painting that clicked for me. I painted every single day for hours and I loved it! I didn’t mind the snow and staying indoors all winter. I was happy, I found joy I thought I’d lost.
Later I tried other teachers with different techniques. I expanded and grew in ways I never expected. I painted this sea turtle (featured in my video Red Sky at Morning) and gave it to my primary physician. I told her I felt like that turtle, swimming in the big ocean of the medical world and was glad that I had a hard shell to protect me.
I gave her the painting for her clinic. Last I saw it was framed and mounted behind glass and ready for hanging on the wall. I hope to see it every time I have to go into the clinic, to bring me a sense of calm. I’m triggered by “white coats”, my blood pressure goes into outer orbit.
Writing, Music, Art are Avenues to Healing
My hope is that by writing my book it will help me recollect the stories of the past, both mine and some of my mother’s writings as well. She did extensive research into our geneology and shared many stories, birth, death and health records I wouldn’t have without her dedicated research and writing. The end result of my memories, hers and a shirt tail cousin who contributed to the family history. This should yield a little different perspective than mine alone. It should be interesting.
I’ve enjoyed music and art and believe they both are instrumental in helping find that calm spot, where time is forgotten and I enter the “flow state”. I learned piano growing up and played by sight, reading the music and playing it. My father played by ear mostly. He could read the simple melody, and learned the chord configurations on the piano keys and play the embellishments in the piece by ear.
He often encouraged me to play a new song for him to hear all the notes of the score. The ironic thing was that it turns out that I’m tone deaf. I sing so off key I was asked not to sing in choir. “Just mouth the words”, my choral teacher told me. How does that help the self esteem of a kid that’s struggling in so many ways? Answer me that.
Did you know that singing, humming or chanting will increase your vagal tone? I talk more about the vagus nerve and how it affects your health in my post on Stress & The Polyvagal Theory.
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
How Music Effects Your Health
I found these two Tedx Talks very interesting on the subject of music and healing. The first is How Music Can Heal Our Brain and Heart | Kathleen M. Howland and this one was fascinating, given by a medical doctor who happened to be listening to the crickets in the honey house and created a novel concept to heal the cells in the body using sound. Listen to Music Medicine: Sound At A Cellular Level | Dr. Lee Bartel to hear more about the studies with Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s.
Maybe He’s On to Something?
My favorite presentation hit a chord with me because music is so instrumental in my life. I took lessons on and off for 10 years. It wasn’t easy to keep it up. I had to find a new piano teacher every time we moved. Later I studied music theory in college for two semesters at Florida Atlantic University. I have a story about music therapy and how it helped me recover in ICU. This guy, although a little brash, hit’s the nail on the head and I enjoy listening to him play. I hope you do too.
Music and the Inner Self | James Rhodes
Classical music reached me in a place nothing else could. My life is music, it’s in my blood and in some very dark times music was my only friend. Music and art make the world a better place. You make the world a better place.
You are perfect, just the way you are. We all need to get together, celebrate with a connection with music and art that makes a culture special. We need to come together as a nation, as the human race, uniting together and celebrating and creating a community that feels together and heals together.
The soul resides at that junction point between our inner and our outer world. That small space between dreams and fantasy, and reality. — James Rhodes