Painted Into A Pollock Painting

It was a wonder-filled time with mountains and lake and the sound of water and loons overlaid with magical moments with children. It was also a time in which anxiety was always close to the surface, even when the new was turned off. Usually a retreat or vacation is a time of rest and reorder and yet this year the disorder and disorientation was so close pervasive that it needed to be appreciated instead of analysed. Fortunately, Richard Rohr was offering meditations on “order, disorder and reorder” which triggered memories of Brueggemann’s psalmic orientation, disorientation and reorientation which in turn aligns with human development and how we learn and move through life, how our identities are formed. And so I found myself on the dock gazing at Rohr’s image of a Pollack painting and noticed myself. It was a hopeful if disorienting experience.

I feel painted into a Jackson Pollack painting

A red splat or a yellow sloop

As though tossed rapidly and randomly onto a chaotic canvas

No paths 

No order

No precision

Other than the precision of persistent randomness 

Who am I in this disarray? 

I am certainly not alone

There is a community of misfit strangers

Trying to reorder and rearrange

It is really quite interesting and inspiring when I accept the uncertainty

We are all on this canvas together

Dots and slivers of color in cosmic display

I think of jazz and the notion of improvisation. 

When I began this poem I wanted to convert to a Monet like moving from the United States to Canada 

At least the impression of clarity

Now I am content to linger in this joyful anxiety

Hopeful of a variation composed communally.