This has been an interesting week for me. The weather hear has been amazing, and all I have wanted to do is be outside. My plants are coming up…hollyhocks, columbines, sage, oriental poppies, alyssum, pansies, and so much more. My Feverfew and Valerian are also coming back as my lilac begins to sport some buds. It is a great time of year…one that always makes me feel restless. My mom on the rez always says that I am a bear…I hibernate quite a bit. I need to have a lot of time alone, but when I am ready to burst out, I am ready to roam. All I want to do is drain my primary a bit, get on my Harley and go on some trips.

However, I also feel like I want to hold myself back and people in my life want to hold myself back. I am an artist and I do ceremony, and I happen to live in a community that accepts me, loves me even, but doesn't know what to make of me. I would love to open a gallery, but that is something that doesn't work here, at least not yet. Maybe in ten years or so. It is a small town, with a small main street. I think 800 people live in the town and close to 2,500 on the mesa. However, I think that number is a bit high. A lot of the people work in the ski resort 35 miles up the road or they are ranchers. I am grateful for the ranchers, because they preserve so much open space here on this amazing mesa.

However, I often feel alone here. I don't feel like there are many people that I can talk to, share my work with, or share my ceremony with. Sometimes I feel lonely, resentful and just plain lost. Other times I feel my deep connection to the land and the Spirit that lives within this land…to the Ancestors that once roamed here. The Anasazi pueblos are not too far from my home, and I then think, “How can I leave here?”

As I struggle with these paradoxes, I find that a thorn within the side of all of this is what people think that I should do. They think I should paint happy, I should paint flowers, I should paint more realistically, I should pain cleaner…I should be more polished in my work…..I should, I should, and I should! That is a word that may as well be a noose around my neck. I suffocate, and I can't create. I begin to doubt myself and my vision…my talent. Do I have any? Am I just fooling myself? Is my boyfriend believing in me for no reason at all?
Every time I listen to their shoulds out of my own fears and insecurities, that noose cinches up just a bit more.

I don't want to paint flowers or nice faces or paint in a more in a more polished way. Isn't that why we love Van Gog and Monet so much? It was raw emotion and expression on their canvases. In their day it was considered to be very unpolished. I want to paint the way Spirit guides me too whether it makes people uncomfortable or not. I am not painting to make money, I never have, and I have only been showing my work for two years. I do want to show it. I do want to share it, because I am being given these images…visions, dreams, whatever label is out there I guess. I don't come up with them on my own. However, I don't think I need to sell out in order to share my work.

Yesterday we went out to watch the sunset over the mountains in Utah, and it was so amazing. Purples and orange and yellows shooting upward from the horizon while the mountains were dancing within blues and reds and purples. My breathing slowed, and then I saw the image I am working on for my next painting. It is a reminder that just because the Ancestors aren't physically walking the earth, they are still here. The Ceremony is still within the land, and it is waiting for us to remember it, to bring our own contributions to it….

But while painting today I found myself crying. I found myself wanting to give everything up, because I am so tired of everyone telling me what I should do in order to be a success. Who asked them? I like my idea of having my own traveling gallery that goes to shows around the state and into a couple of other states. I like the idea of showing my work and talking about it with others, and maybe inspiring someone to create something from their own visions. I like the idea of getting people back in touch with their own imagination. Can't that be considered success in this world? I am a success just in the fact that I walk up to my studio everyday and face all of the feelings that come up each time I life up a brush or a pastel. Sometimes I have to do what Picasso did to get myself up there…I tell myself I am just going to go up there to straighten things out when I feel that dread in my stomach about what may come. I get myself up there to straighten up, but then I look at the painting or a blank sheet of paper, and I can't walk away. Can't that be success?

Sometimes I feel selfish, because I am not able to bring in as much money as I would like to. I feel the pressure to sell or what not…sometimes I feel selfish simply because it is an old recording…or because of the comments others make…sometimes it is because of all those darn shoulds. They need to be thrown out the window and replaced with could. I could paint more nicely, but I choose not to. I could paint flowers, but I choose to paint whatever it is Spirit wants me to pain. I can do anything I want….the noose is still there, because of that chorus of people in the background….trying to label me into something that makes them comfortable and able to accept me….but I can take this noose off.

This painting goes back to the Magdalenian era and the Goddess. I had a huge experience a few weeks ago that I will someday write about, and this painting is something that came from this…It is about reclaiming our womanhood…by accepting it. That is all I will say right now.