Gray Areas again

I'm still contemplating this idea of gray areas being a blending beyond distinction or separation. (See post "Gray Areas"). And then I found these:

These two pieces are called "The Kiss" (top) and "Lovers" (bottom) by a Polish artist Jarek Puczel. It represents a symbiotic union, no division of where one begins and the other ends.

Isn't that what intimacy looks like? Or at least what it's intended to look like?

COALESCE means to "come together and form one mass or whole." Plato said it like this in his work "Sophist", he said, "When a thing's own light and the light from something else, coalescing into one on bright and smooth surfaces, produce a form which yields a perception reversed from the way a thing normally looks."

Things so intimately and directly blended and joined that your very perception of its normal form is reversed...I want that.

I think that's what gray areas do for us, they reverse our perceptions...or at least they can if we would tap into it. "Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely." -Auguste Rodin

Maybe I'm not making any sense. Let me try putting it this way:

We typically label areas of doubt or uncertainty as gray areas; for example, the Bible is full of gray areas- areas that weren't totally unveiled, a lot was left for interpretation; more room being left for vague mystery than for solid-concrete-definitive answers. We all have gray areas like that in our life. So what if, instead of pushing these areas aside or leaving them to the perpetual back-burners, tossing them in the junk drawer, we turned to them and faced them head on; jumping off the cliffs of clarity into the illustrious pools of mystery and loom? What if we stopped soley relying on the obvious color choices on the pallet before us and we became immersed in the seach and discovery of the colors within the gray?

What if we stopped taking our observations of God from the obvious handouts passed down from vessel to vessel and we saught Him in the hidden realms where color has to be revealed and discovered? What if we coalesed with God? What if we coalesced with our gray areas, reversed our own perceptions and of those observing?

I think if we delved deep enough, lingered long enough, and soaked in the areas that we push out because they are messy, I think that we'd find Him there in ways beyond translation. I think we'd meet Him in an intimacy beyond words; a coalescing that leaves our perception forever reversed and areas of our lives so completely blended that we walk out looking like one of Jarek Puczel's paintings.

That's something I want.

 

Gray Areas

A dear friend of the family has graciously been trying to teach me how to paint and from day one she has been trying to get me to detach myself from an expected outcome, to stop forcing the process and to let it flow. Easier said than done. I'm just now learning and beginning to scratch the surface of letting go and trusting God to direct my hands and allowing Him the liberty of speaking to me through art without any pretense of subject and without an agenda.

What you see is what came out of one of these painting sessions. And totally unbeknownced to me as to why, I was completely and utterly drawn to it. It resonated with me on such a deep level and I had no idea what the hell it was about or what it could possibly mean. So I just listened.

I had started painting a picture of my Wonderland with pinks tones and trees and an ocean far off and myself in a spirit of freedom. Then I had this dark gray-navy color in my mind so I went over everything I had painting with it, still letting some pink show through. I put on the Narnia soundtrack (because it's deliciously mystical and haunting and I love it) and I painted. On my pallet was an array of colors, but it's amazing how all the colors I used made a gray when fully blended together. And as I reflected I began to see what it was all about.

Our gray areas are not void of color, they are simply beyond present distinction. There are hundreds of colors within the gray.

An excerpt from my journal: Perhaps this is a truer picture of Wonderland. Sometimes the colors are obvious and sometimes it's too hard to tell what it is, only the assurance that it is something and perhaps several somethings- that in the microscopic details of the gray there is color and life and communion of the two, too intimate perhaps to separate...the first attempt is what I can see. The second is what I feel. What I can see is limited, but what I feel in connection to Wonder is infinite...limitless.

Gray areas have such a negative connotation but it is a truer picture of where real life actually happens. And how beautiful to know that those areas are not denied color but that those areas are made up of color meant to be experienced and known beyond the surface.

Take heart. You're not lost.