This is a detail of a painting I created a number of years ago. The process of painting is a wonderful illustration of one aspect of what I learned during my Search: to embrace the unknown. When I started this painting I knew what was to appear on the canvas. Although it was an abstract painting, it was thought out, planned in terms of color and composition and all in all quite well organized, in some ways I was about to realize what I had dreamed of for this painting. The ideas were important to get me started.
The finished product looks very different than what I had in mind and not only because of my limited painting ability. Something else took place as well. When I thought a painting was done, my teacher encouraged me to continue, to let the painting paint itself. The result was often that I started with one idea and ended up with a different outcome altogether, often richer, quite beautiful, more meaningful and mysterious as if the road to getting to the result was contained in the result.
The process was not easy. Crossing the space from the known to the unknown, from what was to what could become is one of letting go, giving up and saying goodbye. The next brush stroke is an act of destruction as well as creation. There is this terrifying moment when the painting is already destroyed and not yet newly created, and it is not easy to put oneself voluntarily in this moment, it is easier to hold on to the known. This process of creation and destruction and creation is happening all the time. Perhaps it is just 'growing', or 'evolving' or 'searching'… What is particularly important to me is the intention of destructing in order to create, the choice of leaving behind in order to embrace and always with this terrifying moment - that sometimes last years - of not knowing. I have left organizations, family, friends and loved one’s, ideas, languages, work, religion, habits, parts of my ego, realities, ways of searching even... and embraced the unknown. All of this as part of the search and often with results that I could not have dreamed.
Georgia – a precious person in my life from the group relations world – alerted me to this story once, which I see as another illustration of the same process. It comes from the Dr. Seuss’ book On Beyond Zebra. It is about a boy who challenged his playmates to stretch their imagination beyond the traditional 26 letters of the alphabet – from A (Ape) to Z (Zebra) to create an extended alphabet.
In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z
I’m telling you this ‘cause you’re one of my friends
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends
