The Beautiful, Messy Art that is Living Life
You are the canvas. You are also the paint.
Our basic nature — our underlying foundation, our awareness — is like a canvas.
Everything that we experience — our interactions with other people and nature, our emotions and feelings, even our thoughts — is like paint.
Without getting and staying in touch with the canvas, it’s all too easy to get overly caught up in the paint. And yet at the same time, we also need to realize that the canvas is influenced — and to some extent, changed — by our experience of the paint.
The more we can be in touch with — fully present for, nestling deeply in our awareness, trying to understand—the paint that is our unfolding life, the richer and more textured our underlying canvas will become. The more we can be in touch with the canvas, the less attached to thrown around by the paint we’ll be.
With every passing moment the canvas is holding, perhaps even becoming, the paint. But with every passing moment, the paint is setting in in a certain way depending on the stability of the canvas, which, though sometimes it can be hard to separate the two, is always lying just a bit underneath the paint.
Perhaps this is what the art of living is all about.
