Tornadoes

The room was impossibly large and bathed in the brightest sunlight — flooded here and there and dappled in others. I darted my eyes around the room until they landed on an easel, nestled comfortably around primary colors, soft textures, and collections of nameless shapes.

“Go on and grab a brush — use your hands — we’re just getting to know each other and the space.”

I stared intently at the pots of color, made my way to the blank white paper and found myself adding color after color, pushing primary to secondary to tertiary to — mud. The basics. The presence of it all pushed together and molded by those little hands of mine. The Creator.

I turned around with a grin on my face: “It’s a tornado!”

From that absence, everything sprang. It’s always something underneath, half showing, half hiding. Even as a little girl I knew of this spinning and churning. Was it the picking up of debris and precious cargo along the way and the dropping of pieces here and there that I was trying to capture? Or perhaps it was the impulsivity that caught hold that afternoon; adding and mixing, spreading until the only thing discernible was the force by which those little fingers melded the colors — dashes of yellow, hints of green, a speck of white.

Or, perhaps I was capturing the beauty of messy living and the knowledge that it brings happy, tortured hearts. That those moments of forgetting oneself is where life really is. In the in-between, the Meanwhile. That sweet girl was on the cusp of leaving her home for the first time — to venture out on her own, and from that emotion and anxiety came a beautiful technicolor garden.

I’ve carried the spirit of that Kindergarten afternoon throughout my life, forgetting sometimes, that the destruction of the tornado is what has always paved The Way.

And so, Painter, paint her.