If I was a linear person with well thought out ideas, this blog post would have appeared as the first. It might have come with a grandiose plan, a vision, something I saw clearly, a story I could have told that would have settled the field around me by telling it what I was doing. But I am not linear. And I don't have visions of the future.
Altho, it is from the future I feel I have come, for the older I get, and the more this world unfurls before me, it feels like I am moving more and more into familiar territory.
It is now a year and a half since I began painting, since the inception of Carmel Boone first appeared to me when I found myself schlepping a canvas, tied to the rackless roof of my car, too big to fit inside. I had but one thing on my mind - immerse my self in an endeavour, so creatively luring in it's seduction that I could handle my four year old traveling 6,000 miles away from me for a whole month. I needed something so enticing that, if anything disastrous happened to him or his daddy who he was traveling with, I would be clear and embodied to navigate being prohibited through mandate to board a plane as a step to resolution.
It was going to take a whole new level of trust, and a completely different therapy than talk. Talk was getting me nowhere in my most intimate relationships.
A new approach was required.
So I surrendered to the heed of iNiTiATiON - a 48 x 60 inch acrylic mixed media portal - and was literally pulled through its vortex into my new world as a contemporary abstract, mixed media artist. I literally painted myself a new reality and rewrote my future through ART. Then I stepped back into myself and rode the tide from one canvas to the next, saying YES to the opportunities that started emerging before me as I went.
I was starting to feel something more pleasant than the previous couple of years had allowed.
At first I couldn't put a name to my paintings. It didn't feel like 'me' who was painting them. "I" didn't know how to paint. But some thing was painting through me, telling me what colors it wanted, what brush to use, what way up it wanted the canvas, even where it wanted to be hung. Initially I just put an 'X' on the painting. But in time the painter wanted me to know that the act of painting was a blessing, a gift, and further, that it was a way of pioneering a new future... a true Boone in every sense of the word.
And Carmel was receiving this Boone. The silver that was lining the monstrous hole in my heart.
Boone is also the middle name of my son - a name he was given for being exactly that... a complete and utter gift... a gift I was told (by various people in white coats, throughout two decades) would never happen for me. So the Boone of my child came as unexpectedly, and as unplanned, as this gift of ART... which came because he was now being taken away from me. In time I would reperspectivize him being "taken away from me" to him exploring the life he's here to live via the unfurling nature of his own personal codes and his bi-country parents. He was here to live the life he was born to live, who was I to hinder that. My job was to bring him in, set him up and let him fly free. It was just happening WAY sooner than I'd anticipated. He was upleveling me.
The second meaning of Boone - one who is a "pioneer" for new ways of being in the world - was kicking into play. Pioneers rewrite the future and bring into experience ways of being that wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for their bravery in exploring new terrain, either within themselves or the world around them. Pioneers are disruptive by nature - for themselves and those around them, both intimately known and strangers alike. Pioneers affect everyone and everything, as their ways disrupt whole paradigms. Not only had I birthed a pioneer, but I was also meeting the pioneer that lived within me too. Much was being disrupted and ART became the axis around which I spun.
Through this perspective I found deep gratitude and undeniable, yet heartbreakingly perplexing, reverence for his father, who so diligently and devotedly tends to him and his every need while they are together on their many, many trips. Daddy Day Care is truly something else.
This kid is uplevelling us both from the inside out. And I was realizing that this kid was now living my old life - some parts of which I deeply missed and bought me much. heart ache to loose, and yet I was now finally getting to do the things I didn't before feel I could. Such paradox to realize that we often receive that which we most want at the cost of what we most love... and yet isn't that just love living through us, carving our paths in life like water forming the earths bloodline as rivers throughout the land. Love isn't always sweet. It can be fierce and harsh, it takes no prisoners and it carves new paths. So many ways in which love flows. Some stories making us laugh, others cry in desperation for all that seems lost. Yet in the end how we feel has more to do with the stories we tell ourselves as to wether something is a "good" story or a "bad" story... reperspectivizing turns out to be another Boone I had to embrace if I was going to live in this world.
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So as I look back, the story, that has been playing out through the image that appears as me in this reality, now shows it’s plot. The haphazzard ways of lifes messy maize are wildly wise in retrospect. And what seemed like collateral damage in fact may be what might have saved us each from ourselves.
Comprehension and clarity often comes retrospectively. Whatever part of me it was that signed me up for the Art Trail this year was certainly more brazen than I. I couldn't have cognitively planned this year, I never would have done it. I would never have been so bold, had I known what I was really signing up for nine months prior, had I known how hard it would be to give up what wasn't working, and had probably never worked, said the goodbyes, lived through the fears of all the 'what-if's' and felt the pain of being alone as deeply as I have. Could I have done this if ART hadn't held my hand in paint, coaxed the pain and torment from my soul and led the way through the messy corridors of my tangled heart? I doubt it. ART got me to this place that truly trusts this shaky thing called life and all its questionable so-called truths, and that all that is unfurling is Natures choice. ART led me into the purity of my personal field where the only truth that makes sense is the one that lands me in the purity of my own deepest place unfurling as Nature one frond at a time.
I just had to let my self unfurl to the point where enough ground had been trod for my little-self-mind to receive the comfort that comes from hindsight. Here I can know, and learn to trust, the wisdom and foresight of this greater personal field holding the image of me that appears within in it as this precious human form.
So who is Carmel Boone..... well she is Mama, Artist, Mystic, a somewhat Feral Muse. She is a new beginning aligned with her own personal instructions.
But the real question is… How much of the name story do you want to know?
Where did it really start?
The name at birth?
The married name at 23?
The spiritual name at 36?
Becoming a mama at 44?
Or this marriage to myself at 50?
Most women change their last name at least once in their life. Some more often - most because they take the name of the man they bond with. Some hyphenate. Others re-create.
My first husband couldn't wait to give me his name. But I ended up giving it back two years and three days later when he proposed divorce over spinach soup. My second husband wasn't stoked his first wife had left with it, so two decades later we gave it to our son instead.
My Zen Master gave me the namesake of the Hindu Goddess Kali when I was 36. I gave that back a decade later after the nuance of that lens grew sticky and slim in the shadows of spirituality. That's another story for another time.
And now I'm 50, not Mrs, nor Miss, not married nor divorced, yet somewhere in between, separated from family life, transmuting from therapist to artist, integrating my inner mother… knocking on the door of my empty spinster, reperspecitivizing her to the wisdom and creativity of a masterful Crone... content with my cats and my paint, aware that at some point I must embark on modelling to my son how a respected woman truly loves, while in the meantime, I am schlepped through the portal of a world that doesn't work through it's unrealized dreams, into one driven by the purity of love... somehow apparently moving from dystopia to utopia in the process. To some this may seem fanciful, but trust me, when you find the purity found within your deepest place, you find a power you were not meant to find and a contentment you were led to believe was not possible. Here you find the only kind of world that can work, you discover the technology of free energy right here inside your precious human form.... you only have to give up all that you've come to believe you are, to find what you've been all along.
Reaching 50 helped too.... it pretty much makes you let go a bunch of shit you suddenly don't care to carry any longer.
Changing my last name without the excuse of marriage is not about rejecting the name of my family. It's stepping into the expression of me I came here to experience… the me I was before I was born this human… before all the names and identifications came about... before the life I thought I was going to live was replaced by the life I came here to live. It's about claiming the me I've been all along but was too timid, too naive, too asleep, too numb, to know. It’s about living the patterns that spontaneously unfurl through the frequency of the me I am as per my own personal instructions. It's about delving deep into the powerful gifts that seek their emergence through this image that appears here as this precious human form. It's about marrying and committing to the best and most creative, purest energy version of me - knowing that as I do I free the space for others in my field to move more into their own alignment with their deepest truth. It's about satisfying the part of me that was yearning connection in namesake to my child. Most of all, it's about marrying and committing to the me that is rewriting my future through ART.
Like every girl who’s been sucked into the fairy tale dream of the woman she will become upon her marriage by the exchange of her fathers' name for her husbands' , I now claim the me who’s been within me been all along…. But whom for various reasons was not ready to emerge in her full creative expression till now. I'm glad to finally explore Carmel Boone.
My art is about stripping it all away and coming back to what it feels like to be in the raw moments of this life that I have created by being this me. To be simultaneously in the mess of an aching heart and the laugher of a child running rampant and free... to be in the joy of this mysterious and miraculous life, while tip toeing through heartbreak and tears, caught between human and not human, love and raw grit, knowing that there's little difference in between any of these.
It's about knowing that our deepest nature is Nature itself. And that only I can unfurl the way I came here to - and so I better do that ,or else the trees standing in my forest will be compromised in ways we will likely ever know.
So it is in and through this ART that Carmel Boone has appeared as the portal through which my human is now schlepped into this next phase of life. I can't imagine where this will lead next.... but led I shall be by the tugs of that which feels pure from my own personal codes.
Unfurling in each now moment, frond by frond, like Nature.... let's see where Carmel Boone traverses from here.
If you'd like to keep in touch with me and be the first to get access to new work and read the prose each painting comes with, receive invitations to events, limited edition prints and whatever inspired note may pour forth, please let me know here. I'd love to rewrite the future through art with you.