Perspective

Do you ever notice that people are very keen to talk when they propose the subject of discourse, yet not so very disposed to listen when others like to share their interests? ---- I am not one of those people. So this is very difficult to do, though I do enjoy a challenge and I like new experiences. I am so excessively private, in fact, that I'll regale you with the minutiae of my need for privacy :) ---- Do you get the joke?

In school, whenever asked to write creatively, I had to pretend I wrote only for myself - like keeping a diary - locked tight against intrusion. Teachers would enjoy my work and ask me to share with others. I just couldn't do it. And my teachers were kind enough not to press me. Though like as not, their eyes would glitter with amusement (I felt then) as they passed to the following student, though I now realize that they understood me...just a little. They probably thought me merely shy, but trusting others with my internal vision was a sacred act, leaving my being bare for scrutiny and perhaps, derision. One's perspective on the world is vastly different from another's even if two could share the same eyes. I thought about my environment and all in it with fresh eyes and an unsullied mind, very unlike most others I knew instinctively. How I wish I could recapture the beauty that the world was to me then, even if it shone with the pearly glow of my vast naivete.

When I paint, I reexperience this freshness, as if everything is new to me again and I have no preconceptions about anything in my field of vision. Shapes, gradations, colors soothe my mind with their simplicity and I render them faithfully, finding solace in the act of capturing the external world as it is from my momentary perspective. I never feel the anxiety I do with words, which seemingly expose so much of my inner self. Yet looking back at old pictures, I realize that they convey a great deal more than I expected, still they don't hold any old terror of exposure. So with this thought uppermost in my mind, I will write again from a new perspective.