Coloring My Way to Happiness

I had a conversation with a good friend of long duration this afternoon. She spoke of how often she finds herself feeling sad these days.

Sadness is not a comfortable feeling, and the longer one lives the more loss we will experience.

Writing often helps me, but one day it did not. One day I knew that no combination of words could assuage my blues.

That is why I color.

Colors are happy things. I use markers and acrylics. I am like a little kid who must choose among scrumptious desserts when it comes to choosing a color with which to begin . I want to use every color at once.

So in a way that is what I do. I just put color on paper until I get the urge to put another one on. Sometimes these colors turn into an actual picture, but more often they do not.

The point is to take an experience like sadness or anger or fear and transmute it into something else.
Something that  can be seen.  My coloring takes sadness and makes something pretty out of it.

When I was a little kid, I loved getting a brand new box of crayons. In 1958 Crayola came out with the silvers, the coppers and the golds and the bronzes. Ooh la la, what a happy little girl was I. All of my new crayons looked so lovely lined up straight in their box. Each one calling my name- "Use me. Use me".  So I did, and I do.