love is an art … our art.

I want to learn to express myself in new and different ways. To learn how to love.
I want my center of gravity to be pure joy and contentment.
Sometimes it's easy to get obsessed with being accepted or loved or tolerated by everyone.
But, the truth is, life isn't supposed to be that way. We choose outfits, meal plan, and go exploring because there are always new and different combinations just waiting to entice us and satisfy that hunger to express ourselves.  What I believe, in my life, to be precious, good, satisfying, just right, fun, or normal…could be the exact opposite for someone else.

Loving others is, I think, the precious art project of life.  With friendships, romances, relationships - we perfect our loving.  Strokes that seemed right or necessary, can get painted over or smudged…perhaps forgotten after a while.  Our entire project of love may be altered, erased, burned to ash at some dreadful point.  But, as we keep living, we keep painting and perfecting our loving.  We learn to plan our strokes more carefully, to really take a look at what we've done before we smudge it out or cover it with a new hue of love.  We may learn to be patient and observant of the thoughts and feelings of others…and that waiting will uphold a precious relationship.

Loving someone is so dear and yet can become foreign, confusing and desperately hard at times. What is the balance?  When can we know that it's time to rinse out our brush and choose a new color, or add a new medium to spice up our artful loving?  It's a journey that takes creativity, patience, wonder and more thought than we ever expected.  Fifteen-year-olds kissing for the first time have no thought of what is to come, they cannot comprehend it.  Some older people sit with a blank canvas, wondering what to do next…searching for a color…wondering where they even placed paintbrush, longing to start loving again.

There's nothing but experience and trying that can bring love to our own version of a perfect piece.  Smudges, streaks, cracks, mixed colors will be all over our canvas.  But maybe, our "love art" will shine so brightly and mean so much to us, that it will be beautiful and lasting in the end - mistakes and smudges won't be important, or even noticeable.