Love is Enough
Archeology of the Heart
Dear Starlight,
I haven’t stopped thinking about the word enough. Last weekend I completed a massive cleaning out of stuff1. I’ve been cross examining responsibilities, stresses, and desires and crossing the extra’s off my list asking: What is enough?
Lao Tzu said, “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” But how do you realize something?
Sometimes, realizing something feels like a game of hide and seek where you magically get a momentary view through your “real eyes”. Suddenly what you have been looking for appears unhidden as if it was there all along.
In 2011, during my first residency in Iceland, I experienced a breakthrough in my art and thinking. The painting I had planned to make indoors, the one I began in the studio, instead became a collaboration with the elements. I carried the canvas outside and rubbed mud over the sharp, deliberate lines marking its interior history. On the salty shores, I soaked it, scrubbing away the mud and peeling off earlier marks. In the fields, I scratched wild grasses into the coarse grain of the canvas. I asked myself: What is a painting? What is paint? What is canvas?
I rebuked the four walls of the studio. My paintings became stamps of time, created outdoors, merging myself with place. Every day, I greeted the wide sky with a gray bucket and a torn piece of canvas. I used rocks and sticks as tools, my fingers as brushes. I often found myself humming along with sounds of gulls and gusty breakers. The paintings became relics of being there. They were complete when they felt done, when we felt like enough.
I titled that first piece, Unearthing to Be Enough, a testament to excavating the layers of misfit ideas that cloak what is both desired and already present: enoughness.
It wasn’t easy to give myself permission to explore and create in this way. The hardest part wasn’t the process itself but the questions it raised: Was this a painting? If it wasn’t, then what kind of art was it? Did it count? Whatever it was, it brought me joy. Was my joy enough?
When I returned to America, my gallerist loved the work but immediately asked how to display and price it. How do you put a price on an imprint of an experience? How do you measure something shaped by wind and time? How do you assign a market value to ghostlines of memory? Then came the title of the first painting and the cover piece. Unearthing to Be Enough she felt it was “too much,” so the show became just Unearthing.
The titles and description of materials were as important to me as the paintings. Everything was equally a love story.
The paintings sold as objects, but their experience of becoming remained priceless.
The word enough comes from the union of connection—what is beside, with, or near—and aspiration—to reach or attain. It holds a tension between belonging and striving, between having and wanting.
When I reread Lao Tzu’s words, “When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you,” I wonder if enough is the space where striving dissolves into belonging. The word enough assumes separation, but the experience of it is union—belonging together.
When we realize we are already connected to all that is, we discover that we are, and always have been, love.
Love is enough.
Belonging is priceless.
I discovered my old Iceland blog that I created while on residency. https://eylenda.blogspot.com/2011/08/exi-s-t.html