Reflection
Sometimes it’s hard to have any idea what you are doing. Take this morning. I woke up and before I knew it I was involved in a long back and forth dialogue with an unknown person on facebook that was all in response to a posting that quoted Darwin saying “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
Why did I bother to involve myself with this discussion? Was it because it piqued my interest or was it because I had dreamed that I rode my bicycle down a deep chasm that brought me to time in the future and that I couldn’t get out but the cat woke me up?
Later I went to the studio and started working on another painting of reflections-which seems to be part of my water theme, that no matter how I think I might want to swim out of, just don’t seem to be able to do so. For now, it remains paintings of reflections.
The funny thing about facebook is that people that you haven’t thought about in a very long time seem to emerge and surface. Take last Saturday night. My old friend from the second grade, Marilyn, queried to find out if I was the person who had been her friend so many years ago. It turned out that I was, we had been friends! In our conversation she asked me if I had remembered that her mother had been a brownie and girl scout leader and had I been in the troop. I had and the memory that came back to me was a memory that left a very big impression, a memory of reflection. The ritual that we as brownies did when we went from being a brownie to becoming a girl scout involved a make believe pool of water, made from aluminum foil, each girl went in front of that aluminum water pool (on stage of course) and turned ourself round and round in a small cirlce and while we did this we said “twist me and turn me and show the elf, I looked in the water and saw, myself!” We were supposed to be very surprised and pleased with ourselves for discovering this new improved more grown up version of ourselves when we saw our own reflection. At this point I don’t think that I am looking to see a more grown up version of myself, but somehow the allure of the reflection of something is somehow more interesting than the thing itself.