What's the Point of Coloring?

What’s the point of coloring?

A close friend asked me that last night in response to a fun extra credit assignment her highschool-aged daughter was working on.  Since we didn’t get to follow up on the conversation, I’m not sure how she really meant it, but I was aghast. And still find the question rattling around in my brain the next morning.

What’s the point of coloring?

What’s not the point of coloring?

Coloring is how most of us get introduced to art. It’s our first magical taste of creation (and of wax, for some of us.) We make something, a scribble, a line, a shape, that didn’t exist until that very moment. Something that is unique to us, that no one else could have made.

And the memories that even the sight of a box of crayons evokes.

Coloring and drawing with crayons ties us together through the generations as much as food or music. I remember coloring with my mother  - who is a great colorer and drawer – and my brothers and sister. Coloring books at the dentist’s office, at the kitchen table. Mimeographed sheets from school and the back of any loose paper on those magical times we would go visit my father at work. (He worked in the airport hanger. It was very exciting.)

My Mom as a toddler

Drawing us connected to family that had long since passed on. One of my family’s most treasured possessions is a crumbling, 80 year-old yellowed sketch book from my great-grandfather of his incredible drawings. Among the treasures are a handprint he traced of my mother’s baby hand in 1931 and some crayon drawings of Mickey Mouse he did on the back of cardboard boxes.

What’s the point of coloring?

Another favorite memory is watching my mother paint a Christmas scene, backwards, on the inside of the plate glass window that face the front yard. If we were very lucky, we got to help. It was tricky to a kid. The color you painted on first is the one that showed from the yard, you couldn’t paint over your mistakes.

I remember the excitement of finally getting the 64 box of crayons with the sharpener in the back and the annoyance of having a younger sibling you were forced to share with break one of the crayons. I can feel the shaking motion you have to do to settle the crayons back into their cardboard homes.

And the memories were passed down. I have three children of my own, all close in age, and we spent many, many hours coloring. We learned new techniques together. I taught them how to color a rainbow over with a thick black layer and then scratch to reveal the colors. They taught me how to let go in art, to not worry about getting everything perfect or even recognizable. They taught me, in so many ways in those coloring and art sessions, to just let go and live.

We learned that Rose Art crayons suck. That Crayola is a reliable standby. We learned about soy wax and beeswax candles. We searched for projects to do with the broken ends of crayons that lurked in the bottom of the hundreds of Playtex Chub Wipes boxes that lurked in every corner of the house. We explored colored pencils, watercolor pencils, pastels, metallic crayons, special crayons for black paper, charcoal pencils, and markers of every shape at size. (Rose Art markers and pencils suck, too.) We colored on printer paper, newspaper ends and the insides of brown paper bags (a personal favorite). We had fancy coloring books with fractals and Japanese art and modern Western art and uncoloring books with suggestions and fifty-cent coloring books from the drugstore. No matter how little money their was, or how frazzled I was, or how tired we all were, we could always find something to color with and something to color on.

And yet, no matter how many different media with colored with and on, there is something special about a brand new box of Crayola crayons and plain white paper. Try to stop people from coloring when they can smell that particular crayon smell and see that unmarked paper just laying there. Even now that the kids are teenagers and so busy with life and friends and schoolwork and work, a new box of crayons and some paper laid out on the table will have all of us and pretty much any other adult or child in the vicinity gathered around, laughing, talking, drawing and coloring.

What’s the point of coloring?  Love. Love is the point of coloring.

Burning Desire

Wanting.

Somehow I've talked myself out of wanting. Out of letting myself fully embracing my desires. Not of experiencing it, desire comes and goes many, many times during the course of my day.  But somehow, in attempting to achieve a Buddhist detachment or to avoid attaching significance to my desires, or to avoid the fixiating and daydreaming that I slip into like a soft t-shirt, I don't let this desire take hold. I distance myself from it, make it disappear. Like Pierre, I say "I don't care."

But I do.

Like so many other things I do unconsciously, it's been in an ultimately futile attempt to avoid pain. Wanting, desire, feels like pain; more accurately, it feels like the herald of pain to come. In this mostly unconscious reality in which we live, desire leads to pain - unfulfilled desire hurts, hurts like heartbreak and unfulfilled dreams. Desires that are met hurt too. When reaching goal weight doesn't make us happy. When love brings real world issues of children and money and the other person's baggage and happily ever after takes work. So we apply the old "post hoc" false logic and think that the cause of the pain lies in the desire itself. So I tell myself, I won't want anything strongly. I'll have goals and things I think would be nice, but mostly I'll just float and be happy with what I have. (I'm past the sour grapes response for the most part, though I have my moment. For that, you have to acknowledge that you wanted something in the first place.)

I have a habit of closing myself off when I'm overwhelmed. I know I'm not the only one. My world gets small, physically and emotionally and spiritually. And I don't look at things because I "know" I can't have them, it will just hurt to want and not have. So I won't want.

I am a rock. I am an island.

But it isn't that. Desire isn't where the pain lies. Far be it from me to argue with Buddha, but I think he would say it is in the attachment to the results of desire rather than the feeling itself that pain and suffering lie.  I think, if you don't want things, if you don't allow desire to breathe through you, your world collapses and then you die.

Desire, as I see it, is like breath, like a heartbeat. Desire is where the possibilities for change live. It's where change and growth is born. Pure Desire resides in the realm of undifferentiated possibilities. Some traditions teach the universe as we know it came into being because of the desire of the Divine to know and love itself.  The cosmic I Am.  It's the meaning and we attach to the outcomes of this desire that causes the pain.

So can I find a away to let desire back in? To let myself want things? Everything from banana cream pie and new knee-high boots to a fulfilling job and true love? It does feel thrilling in that beginning part, doesn't it? The first rush of desire. And we are capable of amazing things when fueled by that desire! We'll move mountains for love and cross continents for ambition.  I want to feel that all the time and let it inspire to greatness and move me and make me a better person. I want to learn to get past the fear.

And so I simply chose to. At this moment, I'm inviting all my desire for things and opening up my world. And I'm going to act on my desires without judging the outcome or expectations. Think how happy I could be!