I began January with intentions of being more creative, with an image I wanted to examine and express through oil pastels and rice paper. When the color touched the canvas, I still had not finalized how to capture or perceive this image or the ideas behind it. I sketched outlines and tore up several versions before deciding on a form and reaching a state of mind that would free the image as well as the ideas. As my hands moved across the canvas gluing and drawing, I knew, intuitively, that I had failed to give the piece a life all its own. I had hung too closely to what I thought it should be. I drove instead of being driven and did not accurately depict the mauve, turquoise, and cobalt pulsating and blazing within the sky. I looked at the picture I created and saw an image lost in translation, words waiting for a page of their own. I should have written this, sifted and shifted it until the sentences aligned themselves like the squares on a Rubik’s. I gained perspective.

While sitting in class discussing paradigms the following week, I realized how art helped me to process and perceive life. Through the artwork, I had a media to give the images and ideas texture, dimension, and contrast. I could see it shaped in pastels and paper, provoking, portraying, and distorting. It was alive with meaning depending on the perspective. Similarly, a paradigm provides a lens, language, and logic for perceiving, speaking, imagining, interpreting, and acting. Each day in class, at field, and at night in the library, I am exercising my knowledge and use of paradigms, developing my skills as a clinician, an activist, and an artist. I am learning the many ways to process and perceive life. Whether through psychodynamic theory or oil pastels, a picture emerges that is accurate but misleading, beautiful but dangerous, whole but partial. There is always more to see, to know, another form it could take.

What I once viewed mistakenly, I see clearly, burning and illuminating, like violet and sapphire, into a life all its own.