The healing process

I recently received an invitation to speak about my illustrated guide to the Gospel of Thomas at Seattle University's Search for Meaning Book Festival next February. (Yay!) One of the forms I need to fill out asks me to list books of mine to be sold at the festival, so I decided to take this opportunity to finalize the self-publishing of a spiritual autobiography I completed a couple of years ago.

It's been surprisingly fun to go back over the book and clean it up for publication -- partly because I love to edit, but also because it's a chance to walk again the path I've taken over the past twenty years, and to remind myself again of some of the insights gained along the way.

But it also forces me to re-visit some old wounds -- a difficult process on one hand, but rewarding on another: I can see now that even in the last couple of years additional healing has occurred, which means that some of the editing process involves a sort of wiping away of the occasional bits of venom that seeped from wounds that had not yet healed.

So it shouldn't be all that surprising that the painting that began so inauspiciously yesterday morning resolved itself into something that speaks of wounds and seepage; I call it "Slow to Heal."  I don't like it all that much -- it's not at all what I set out to paint -- but I'm not ashamed of it, and I do believe it's done.  And it's reassuring to discover that whatever it is that paints through me can still do so, even when I don't appreciate its efforts all that much...