OGT DAILY - Day Forty Seven - MESS SOUP

I admit to being in a real mess these days.   My desk is a pile of receipts and papers; things pile up in the basement and attic and various other places in the house;  emotionally I can't tell which end is up; will I be positive and able to see the glass full or walking around under a cloud?   I can't get myself off Facebook and my computer habits are downright compulsive.  It's hard to take this yo-yoing, but it seems very much a reflection of the extremity of the times.   I'm trying hard to find center and "the centre cannot hold."

 William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

       THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

My right hand picks up the glass of water only to have the left put it down.  I head up the stairs and return three seconds later have forgotten what it is I'm after.  No focus.  No concentration.   It is the same in the studio.   I am messing around trying to find my way.  There at least I find some solace.  Messing in the studio, the play of work is where I need to loose myself.   But it is very much that right now - a sense of being lost.  Yet the more I keep at it, the more I paint, I realize that it is what I must being doing.

   

A young client requested a picture of a phoenix today and it seems an apt metaphor.   Will a phoenix rise out of the ashes of this current political turmoil or indeed a "rough beast" as it now seems?

Will a triumph rise out of the mess in my studio - the tangle of color and paint?

I have my hopes.   I also came home and cleaned out the fridge making soup out of leftovers.

That was quite good.