This week I am painting white azaleas. It’s a work in progress. I am trying to record their images in watercolour before they are gone for another year. I am a slow painter and I notice that the flowers don’t sit frozen in time while I work. They move, they turn their faces to the light, they expand, they wilt…they are ever changing. As the day progresses, the light moves around the room and the shadows on the flowers change position.
I work to capture an impression, not to replicate a photograph.
YOU and I also are works in progress. I am not the person I was twenty years ago. Or even a month ago. Are you? It's mind boggling to list all the changes we have embraced, sometimes resisted, since 1980.
Have you ever met someone after a long separation and been greeted with the words, You haven't changed a bit? That's a bit of a worry, do you agree? I wouldn't like to be the person I was at twenty, I wouldn't agree today with the opinions I held then.
The world, society and our community is a work in progress, in a state of perpetual change and growth and we don't see it happening minute to minute. Most of the time we change and grow with it and we always have, even though we sometimes loudly protest about change. I know I do.
Twenty years ago I spent a lot of time writing letters to friends living elsewhere, postage stamps were always on my shopping list. Now, I rarely write or receive letters because those friends are no longer with us. Friendship is always a work in progress.
It's rather nice to be 'a work in progress'...it means we have endless possibilities for change, for reinvention, and reparation.
Azaleas from my garden. The garden is a work in progress.
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