Abundance

I’d been practicing painting skulls for months—honing my craft around this particular form—and this was the first one that worked. I felt a tremendous amount of abundance as I stepped back, the feeling of giving oneself to something over and over again until it comes to fruition with you. Unsurprisingly it was the color of the seventh chakra, the center of knowing and wisdom I’d been cultivating all along.

We think of “skill” as an ability gained in repetition, but the word once referred to the power of discernment. It takes repetition for abundance to come; my work gets stronger and the message becomes clearer. But discernment happens too. I learn to trust what doesn’t have to be fully-developed to work as a piece, what’s going to hold its own in the painting.