The Picture

💌A story about learning

Dearest reader,

Happy Sunday evening!

This week I’m sending you The Picture - a short story about learning how to see the world through the eyes of your inner child.

Sound on!

Have a beautiful week ahead.

Love,

Eleanor Flowers

I’ve always had an innate understanding of the power of a good hat. For this look, I paired a ballgown with a jumper. Thanks to my lovely mama for rifling through the family scrapbooks for this post. 💗

The Picture

I get a kick out of changing my mind. Changing my mind is the rarest of treats. I want to tell you about what it is like to change your mind.

We have a lot of art in our house. My love – he is my partner, but I think love is better - works as a curator in street art and collects pieces by the artists with whom he does projects. Our little flat is a bit like a gallery: he is always switching the arrangements on the walls around, finding new corners to squeeze a small piece into.

It is as though our walls grow to accommodate just a little more art every time. It is the flat I always dreamed of living in: a cosy inner city apartment, with old wooden floors, a fireplace, and stuffed to the brim with art and photography. Before my love moved in, I had already begun to collect my own pieces of art, though I’d never really thought of it as a collection. Art is our love language. When my love moved in, we spent a lot of time going through our art and deciding where to hang everything. Each of our pieces has a story, a memory behind it.

When you move in with someone, you move in with their idea of beauty too. Everybody’s idea of beauty is different. The more that I make my own visual art, the more I come to appreciate my own sense of beauty and understand that each individual’s sense of what looks good is to be cherished.

I gravitate towards the macabre. I like vintage drawings of skeletons, old books and tassled lampshades. I also love bright colours and lots and lots of pink. My taste is as diverse as my inner terrain.

My love, on the other hand, has a vast collection of drippy (graffiti) tags and throw ups, playful images made up from spray cans as well as paintings, dishes and embroideries. When we made a home together, he bought us a beautiful painting by a Finnish street artist – it is of a tassled pink lampshade next to a clock whose face bears the image of the virgin and child. I am deeply spiritual and keep religious art around the flat as well. The piece he brought for us hangs above my writing desk. I look at it and feel the best parts of myself reflected back at me.

We have dedicated a wall in our house to sad and spooky paintings. Instead of Live, Love, Laugh, we like to joke that our wall is Cry, Grieve, Die. Hear me out: I invite laughter, love and life into my house and heart as often as I can, but I recognise, sadly, that I cannot maintain a state of perpetual joy. Worse, whenever I fall back on the idea that I should be happy all the time, I make myself even more miserable.

I have quite a bit of miserable looking art, so I brought up the idea to dedicate a wall to the tougher parts of living, because I want to create space for them. In our house it is OK to grieve, it is OK to cry, it is OK to acknowledge endings. This wall of sadness just happens to be right next to the dinner table, where we host and feed our beloved guests, friends and family. It never once stopped us from laughing together.

We agree on each other’s idea of beauty, I like his sense of fun and I think he likes my sense of drama. There was one, small print of my love’s, however, that I just could not wrap my head around. He was attached to it in a way I couldn’t seem to sympathize with. It wasn’t quite my colour palette, not quite my style. But he loved it and wanted to put it in pride of place on the wall at the foot of our bed so, after a while, I agreed.

Something never sat quite right within me about that picture though. It was just a pair of legs, wearing a pair of clownish, giant undone shoes. It went up, but I asked on more than one occasion that it be moved into the hallway. It wasn’t that I did not like it, it’s just that I did not connect to it in the way I usually do with his taste in art. Sometimes love is like that. You don’t get what your person is doing, but you accept it if it makes them happy.

One evening the other month, we were lying in bed. I remember feeling particularly relaxed that night. For whatever reason, perhaps I had slept well the night before. Whenever I am relaxed, I am most able and open to learn something new. When people ask me how I learned Norwegian so quickly, I always tell them it is because I learned the language during a beautiful summer here and because I put no pressure whatsoever on myself to learn it. I just did it for fun, and it’s one of the achievements in my life of which I am most proud.

I wonder now what it was we were discussing that evening before bed. I was looking at the picture of the skinny legs in the big shoes, not really seeing it but just looking at it, while focusing on what my beloved was saying. Then something clicked, something inside of my mind opened. My world expanded just a little bit. It was a wordless shift, a silent loosening.

“That picture, I said, it’s a child wearing his father’s shoes!”

My partner looked at me and asked if I was joking.

“But it’s a child!” I laughed.

In a heartbeat, I recalled those deepest memories hidden inside of me, of climbing into the bottom of my mother’s wardrobe and fishing out her high heels, of clopping around in my own father’s lace ups, of being measured at the shoe shop for a new pair of school shoes. All of these memories of my childhood, of becoming, of being small. All of this, depicted in a few clever lines.

My little nephew is nearly two years old, and he is the light of my life. Nowadays, he likes to answer the phone to me and carry me around my sister’s flat with him. I’m always so surprised to see the world from his eyes, how vast it all seems, how challenging even the smallest step.

My beloved was still laughing with me.

“You really couldn’t see that it was a child?”

Then I looked at him and saw what that painting must mean for him too. I think that when we love someone, we often want to stand in their shoes, to know how the world looks to them. I marvel that my beloved has lived an entire lifetime before I met him. I wonder how much more we have to learn about one another.

It is amazing that art can do this for people. That it can transcend the borders of the bodies and lifetimes that keep us separate. That art can provide a meeting place for us, just once in a while, to remember we are one. Life has a funny way of expanding the realm of our understanding in an instant. Sometimes we make furious efforts to commit something new to memory and understanding, and sometimes that understanding comes to us in an easy flash. An epiphany, I guess you would call it. I wonder: what else don’t I understand yet? How many more surprises will there be?

I love that painting now. It’s the last thing I see before that lights go off each night. A sweet little pair of legs, standing in their parent’s shoes. The picture is angled from way down low, so it is as though we are in the child’s world with them. That too, is a kind of magic that artists are able to share with the world.

I spend a lot of time these days, connecting with my own inner child, soothing her when need be and encouraging her to express herself. The little girl in me loves to play dress up, hates injustice, and wants all the world’s children to be equally loved. She is my guiding light, and that is why I write in my poem “Hunger”, that “I am the child who knows how to paint all the ways that we lie to each other”, because grown ups are very good at lying to themselves, and often at lying to others.

I think that to make good art and good poetry, we have to stay in contact with our inner child. Which is why we are often not very good at lying when we make art. This is why art and poetry challenges propaganda. It forces us to grapple with our inner child who, like drunk people, have a hilarious propensity to say it like they feel it is.

I like to change my mind. I love to try on new thoughts for size and see that they suit me well. The old thoughts I used to carry do not fit me anymore. I am increasingly surprised to think that I once believed I didn’t matter, that I was not good enough, that my creativity was self-indulgent, and that nothing new of value could be brought into this world that didn’t already exist and hadn’t already been done better by someone richer, or younger, or more talented or more beautiful.

My new thoughts look something like: I can do this! I am allowed to do this. I am more than good enough. I am afraid but I have enough courage and faith to carry me through this. I used to be attached to status for my writing. I wanted to be taken seriously as a clever scholar or a high-brow poet. I don’t care anymore what labels I use to describe myself. I don’t need to make sense to anyone. I proudly use the word blogger for my writing, I joyfully use the word artist, even though I make my art on building paper.

This story is about changing your mind. We use this phrase all the time: to change you mind. As though it were like changing your socks. But it is so difficult to change your mind! Changing your mind is like changing out your own internal world. To change your mind is to map an entirely new system of belief onto terrain you’ve know perhaps for all of your life. Changing your mind requires learning, and mostly learning anything requires practice, patience, repeated exposure to an idea and above all: frustration. Neuroscience tells us that frustration is absolutely key to learning a new skill.

No one likes to feel frustrated. Whenever I am frustrated now, I hold fast to the knowledge that it is probably because I am learning something of value: how to run a business, how to be consistent, how to love myself and my family better, how to make good art, how to learn my lines for a show, how to make a difference in the world.

Very occasionally, I catch a flash of someone’s inner child upon their face. Usually when they are telling me about something that makes them feel scared, embarrassed, or vulnerable. It doesn’t have to be someone I know very well, but if you choose to look you can see the child that lives within us all. You can spot this inner child, in particular, in very angry and powerful men.

I have written to you before that as poets, artists and writers we are contracted to keep our hearts and minds wide open, that we are bound to living “in the flame of curiosity”, and so are likely to take risks in life just to see what’s waiting around the corner. This is the pursuit of knowledge, which is never easily won. To change your mind is to see the bigger picture and expand your capacity for empathy and compassion. It is the gift of starting over and of seeing the world through the eyes of a child.