Learning Mahalo
So I finally got my three paintings done that inspired my last post about wanting to turn back. I finished them by sticking to the very simple idea of just continuing on until the paintings tell me they are done. No matter how many times I fear that point will never come, it always does; sometimes much later than I want, but it does always come.
The painting above is one of the three. It is called ‘Learning Mahalo’ and is an expression of the shift in my mindset as of the past few months. I took my eldest child Jordon to college this past week and the effect of of this mental shift was made completely apparent to me throughout this experience.
‘Mahalo’ is the Hawaiian word for ‘thank you’ and gratitude is a concept that I have been focusing on in one way or another over the last year. However, truly learning ‘Mahalo’ was something that did not occur until we took a trip to Hawaii this past June and spent a month surrounded by nothing but beauty, nature, water, sunshine and laughter. A portion of the trip was spent visiting my uncle and his family who live on the island of Kauai and we had some life-altering adventures there with them. My uncle’s partner became our personal gratitude guru and displayed for us, in the flesh, what one looks like when they live, eat and breathe gratitude: in one word, it looks like joy.
Upon returning to our regular lives, we each took away from those lessons our own impressions, and I have found that mine were deeply imbedded in my psyche and this concentrated beam of attention that I have placed upon gratitude has done nothing less than change the trajectory of my life and my perception of everything that enters it.
Now fast-forwarding to this past week when I left my baby and sent him from the nest alone into the big world of Chicago. It was excruciating, yet exhilerating…even in my moments of sobbing, the biggest portion of my emotion was attributed to this deep sense of gratitude that this wonderful creature had been given to me to care for for the last 18 years and now he had an amazing, exciting future ahead of him. What would have seemed like an ‘ending’ to me only 6 months before now felt like a beautiful, exciting beginning and I was basking in the amazing emotion of being in the current of this great forward motion of life.
And as one positive thought attracts the next, I am so grateful that my new ‘Mahalo’ mindset made available to me all the positive perspective that it deserves!
