Both sides of clouds

Today I made a collage in my art journal prompted by my art therapy course about ‘Dark clouds above’.

Click to enlarge

The prompt immediately reminded me of Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Both sides now’ where she sings about clouds, love and life and how you they show you their dark and light sides, their happy smiles and their tears and tell you that you don’t know clouds, love or life at all.
But through it all there is a journey, lessons, growth.
There is sunshine after the rain and laughter through the tears.
And the beauty is that we are all floating here together. We’ve all experienced both sides of clouds, love and life.

And it reminded me of a saying that helped me so much when there seemed to be only dark clouds.

“What screws us up most in life
is the picture in our head
of how it is supposed to be”

We have ideas, plans and expectations.
We picture things a certain way.
And then clouds, life and love show us a different picture and we get sad, angry, upset, disappointed.
It’s not our picture.
Who says there is only one picture?
Who says your picture is better?
Who says that the other picture, the one that will slowly emerge as you sift through your clouds, isn’t much more colorful and happy?
Nobody can.
Only our journey will tell.

I stopped defining clouds, love or life a certain way.
I stopped creating an ideal picture.

I start painting with the colors life gives me.
Sometimes dark. Sometimes light.
Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes beautifully ugly.
But all MINE. All my path, my journey.
Trusting that both sides are good and part of it.