Junk Mail
The Quiet Answer — part 3
I sent my therapist a new collage. She took it in hand during our zoom session and wanted to talk about it. She told me she had asked herself, “Why do I like this?”
I laughed. I had dumped all the paper scraps from my table onto a brown kraft card, then nudged them into a rectangular heap. Something about this pleased me, so I glued it down. Normally a collage takes me hours to complete, and I carefully glue one piece at a time. I thought she’d get a chuckle out of this because it was so different from my usual.
“It was kind of a joke,” I said.
“I realized it was the black line that I liked,” my therapist continued. “That’s why you’re an artist. I never in a million years would have thought to put that line there.”
“It was just an impulse,” I said. “I didn’t think about it.” I had added that line at the end, feeling that my scrap collage still needed something.
(Of course, not thinking about it is exactly how doing art helps to reveal things. Not-thinking gets around the blocks to awareness that our habitual thoughts create.)
