In Flux As We Sit

Everything is changing as we sit in the same place. We haven’t moved, but everything around us is moving. Our conversations are changing since the grandchildren have left home. At our family dinner this week, we actually talked about something else rather than the kids. We talked about us. We discovered some new things about ourselves.

I was really getting in to our conversation when I looked up and everyone had moved away from the table and had their coats on. I was still talking. Then someone said, “We’re going to miss the fireworks. We have to go now.”

I said, “I was enjoying our conversation, I forgot about the fireworks, we were actually talking from our heart and we all heard each other.”

My daughter said, “Mother, It was because you were talking about yourself.”

“Well, it was enjoyable to me, anyway.”

That morning for the 4^th of July parade, we sat in the same place as we do every year. It’s our tradition to do what we always do.  I said to my daughter, Allison. “There weren’t as many floats this year. I remember when I was a kid how the parade was a big deal. They started in March working on their floats to win First Place. In my small town, there might be thirty entries of floats alone. They built a frame on a trailer, wrapped it with chicken wire, then stuffed tissues in the chicken wire, making carnations and decorating floats with them. What happened to those beautiful floats?”

She was quick to answer, “If you notice the Senior Citizens aren’t sitting around quilting, needle pointing, canning, making carnations, or whittling. They are on the four- wheelers in the parade and actively doing things and living life. They’re in the 4X4 club, hiking and meeting for a latte. The 70’s are the new 50’s.”

“Back then older people were sitting on the front porch in the evening talking to their neighbors. They thought they were living life. Well, for sure, the kids today are running faster and aren’t going to sit around and make carnations. We’ve lost something, but maybe we haven’t. I don’t want to stuff tissues in chicken wire, either.”

July is in flux. It has come and is almost gone. So are those little annoying bugs that come to the Lower Blanco in June and won’t leave until July. The Wrestling Banquet in the park with the High Rollers is happening, yet there’s been a change of guard. New kids and their parents are stepping up to make the sports year a success. Things are in flux whether we want change or not.

Changes are happening as I type. I never thought about teaching art students from their homes as I sit in my home. I e-mailed one of my On-line art students and told him that his next watercolor exercise was to “Paint in Flux.”

He wrote back, “What is that?  And how am I going to do it?”

I e-mailed him, “In flux is the movement that is flowing in and out. I want you to sit in the same place and paint the same thing three or four times. It will probably take three or four hours. You will see different things in each painting, which you didn’t before. Don’t move. Let it happen around you. If you’re outside, the light will change and the breeze will move the leaves. Try it. If you sit inside, you will be changing in that moment toward that subject and seeing different things in it as you paint.”

I was telling my Sweet Al about what I asked my art student to do. I used the poem that T.S. Eliot wrote to explain my thinking. The moment of the rose and the moment of the pine tree are of equal duration. I said to my Sweet Al the present and future is in the same moment. Whatever is happening right now will be your future. I seized the moment over coffee as we sat in the same chairs as we always do every morning.

I continued to expound on the poem, even though I knew I had lost Al in MY moment. “You can sit still and look at a rose bud change into its full potential. The rose is in its moment. It’s going to take a hundred years to see the full duration of a pine tree. The two, the rose and the tree are in an exact point in time, but the rose’s moment is visual and is changing to the eye, but not the pine tree.”

My Sweet Al’s eyes rolled as he drank his coffee. Does Al care about my great discovery? No. Not at all. But he does care if I got his NASCAR race taped for Sunday. For Al, watching cars going around in a circle for hours is like watching a rose bloom. For me it’s like living in the duration of it and watching a pine tree grow.

Final Brushstroke! We are all in flux and living our moment. Our present will influence our future. A good conversation is always My Moment even if everyone puts on their coats and leaves me sitting. Watching NASCAR is my Sweet Al’s Moment.