Artistic endeavours - Part I

One of life's biggest marvels is those activities in which one can completely and utterly lose oneself.  Not know what time it is, not be aware that four hours have passed, not have anything at all as a preoccupation except that present activity.  The activities which make you whole.  All part of dwelling entirely in the present, I guess.

There are many of these and they're different for everyone.  I know people who come alive when they play hockey, or who have a new perspective on life when they horseback ride.  I have friends who lose themselves in the wonder of taking a perfect photograph, or creating a watercolour.  For me almost all the separate activities which accomplish this for me fall under one banner:  the arts.

I hate even using that title because it almost needs politicized capital letters:  The Arts.  It smacks of subsidies bestowed or witheld, of hoity-toity sections in urban newspapers.  However it is simply the category into which my most absorbing activities fall.  Not all arts, mind you.  Not being a terribly physical person I have to exclude dance (regretfully), for instance.  But when I think of the hobbies which have the potential to transform me -- not including yoga -- they are mainly arts based.

Ah, where to begin?  This is Part I, after all.  Let's begin with the visual arts.  I am not a talented visual artist -- ask anyone! -- but I had a lengthy period in my youth where I absolutely loved to sketch, mainly in soft pencil.  Roses, leaves, the stock picture of Jesus, you name it.  I relished looking for the details, the wrinkles around someone's mouth, the tiny twist at the very end of the leaf.  It was the first time I had a taste of how time can be suspended simply by virtue of what you're involved in.  Three hours would pass in the blink of an eye and absolutely nothing else existed in that time.

As I have no real artistic talent, I never ventured outside sketching, and it largely got neglected when I got into busy adulthood.  But in the last few years, for reasons unclear to me, the urgency to draw still seizes me from time to time.  I spent hours over a couple of summers capturing the curls and flaws of the birch tree on the corner of our cottage deck.  Getting lost in trying to get the shading of one piece of errant bark was bliss.  It's almost like getting lost in the tiny corners of a poem one's writing...but that's a topic for another time.