Between More and Less

This morning I am driving to Whidbey Island, Washington State, to guide one of my favorite workshops: Exploring Minimalism in Mixed Media. And although this trip up north from my home in the Willamette Valley, Oregon, requires a few steps to get there, there is something about it that feels surprisingly, to me, simple, calm, enjoyable, soft, even adventurous. One that involves only myself, less stress, and more peace, compared to any trip involving flying, hurrying from place to place alongside many other hurrying people I know nothing about.

I often think about these things. Ask questions like: What makes a journey, any, have qualities of peace, or of turmoil, invoking rest of the heart, or way too known overbearing intensity? What lies between liveliness and silence? What makes either of those pleasurable? or not at all? And these questions always turn to be about quantity. The number of emotional ‘events’ crammed into any particular amount of time. When does ‘very much’, ‘rich’, ‘abundant’, becomes too much? Intense? And when does ‘little’, or ‘less’, becomes scarcity, or turns into a longing, an aching?

This type of pondering makes regular appearances in my daily life, in my mundane existence as a human, in my relationships with other humans, strangers, beloveds, and the spectrum in between, in what I make and how, what I plant in my garden, and what I remove from it, in what I eat, how often, in what I speak, and the silences between the spoken, whispered, written, or typed words, between landscapes, drought, or lusciousness. In what I choose to hang on my walls, cover my floors with. Who I invite into my kitchen, my bedroom, my bed, for how long, and how often.

And so when I leave my house to meet people for ‘Exploring Minimalism in Mixed Media’ it’s not a separate undertaking than any other in my daily life. It is one, however, that includes others. One that invites to examine the perpetual question of: What is Between More and Less? When does a thing we make stop being inspirational, pleasurable, and starts becoming overwhelming, overstimulating, a spike in Cortisol level? When do we start listening to the cues that tell us to stop, that enough is enough. To remove. To simplify. To breathe.

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