Impressionism, Potatoes and The Scent of Kids - On Being Fed

This morning as I pulled from my driveway I smelled children. Yes, the sweet, surprising scent of Ella and Lily permeated the car and until that moment I didn't realize my two favorite girls even had a specific scent.

We had the night prior finally made it to the movie "Tangled" (two thumbs up). I initially promised this adventure BF (before flu) to Lily the night of her piano recital. That evening my experience was auditorially enriched by Ella and Lily's performing their own compositions. I sat there sensing my heart and insides thanks to "The Happy Orange Inch Worm" and "The Stinky Cheese Man." Yes, speaking of scents......"The Stinky Cheese Man."

Something similar happened this week as I washed potatoes for lunch. I stood at the kitchen sink holding a potato when suddenly I "sensed" I was connected.

It wasn't news to me that I had been disconnected. For the past month, I had been episodically AWOL a result of lingering disappointment from having the flu over Christmas, an unusual white Christmas for us which I could only enjoy from the inside looking out.

It didn't take long pondering the potato in my hand to realize what had shifted. As with Ella and Lily, this potato and I have had a many-leveled, ongoing relationship. I had first seen these potatoes a year earlier in a gardening magazine. Our relationship ensued even as I anticipated their arrival by mail and heightened through summer as I planted them in mounds of earth and kept them moist thinking the green stems might never emerge and certainly not bloom. But they did. Everything happened as it was supposed to and in time, I turned over the bags in which they were planted and rummaged through the piles to find gems that had magically manifested. We've continued to be engaged for months as they're kept in a basket from which I occasionally choose 2-3 for a meal.

Just as magical is the fact that these earthen orbs become part of my body. Yes, concretely they are no more, but as they nourish me they only change form. They live on through my body as do the soil, rain and sunlight that nourished them.

This happened in early Winter BF with an apple. As I bit into it, I tasted summer and thought,
'How could that be?' until I realized this was the last apple from our tree, the tree which is home to many birds in winter as two feeders hang from it, then home to leaves of green and blossoms that become fruit. Thanks to my relationship over the seasons with the tree I tasted Summer in Winter. In the apple. I was fed.

I was fed repeatedly at the Frist Art Museum in the last several months thanks to the exhibit "The Birth of Impressionism" from Paris' Musee d'Orsay. Knowing the exhibit is in its final week, I went again wondering what experience I might have.

I arrived to find the parking lots full in addition to three empty school buses. I should have been happy, but instead I was sad, disappointed. I wanted to steal one last quiet moment with the paintings. In reality I knew the crowds don't really deter me, only my crowded insides can do that.

I thought of artists painting from experience so I had my experience -sadness- and soon it passed. (There is something beautiful I often find and forget about accepting 'what is' rather than resisting it that allows it to flow on like a stream within.)

In the place of sadness, I felt the paintings.

During my second visit months ago, I realized I was experiencing something I've only felt with Nature. I sensed energy in my body's core, energy that came to me from the paintings, energy that fed me.

Here I was on my sixth and probably last visit, feeling the cycle, a circle, complete as not only the energy came to me, but I felt my energy going to the paintings.

Knowing this time might be my last, I had such a hard time leaving each gallery. Sadness returned, for seeing France at the Frist over these months has resurrected me and I didn't even know I needed resurrecting. I've been reconnected with the experiences of my 50th birthday in France through the faces, the hands, the scenes and the countryside. I've been reconnected with something that feels old and dear, earthen and deep.

I really did not want to leave.

Then I heard: "Dawn, in your openness to experiencing these paintings they become part of you just like the potato or piano pieces played by kids and smells of soap and shampoo." How beautiful is that?

We are sensory beings, yet how often do we hear or say, "That makes no sense" or "He doesn't have any sense" as if sensing was a heady, brainy, mental process?

With scents, sounds, sights and the body, life is rich. In this richness, we are fed. We are fed by our senses, the arts, the Earth and others if only we are aware. And in this being fed we are given the opportunity to come home to ourselves, to be in relationship with our bodies and in turn with all that is around us.

-Dawn! The Good News Muse, 20 January 2011
dawn@imaginetheshift.com

To chew on:
How do you experience being fed?
How do you experience your senses?
When you find yourself disconnected, how do you reconnect?