February 7, 2026
In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open except yourself. ~ J. Krishnamurti
Whenever I descend into some personal maelstrom, and I say, God, what the heck? What am I supposed to do now? I typically receive the unhelpful advice: meditate.
I contemplate the times that I have meditated. Sporadically, never consistently, never with great joy or looking forward to it. Basically a “meh” experience.
The only positive thing about meditating is that sometimes, I stop caring much about my life, the world, things that are “wrong.” It’s neither depression nor angst, more a sense of being on the observation deck. The current worry list of financial uncertainty, perpetual flea infestation, aging mother, and senior cats and their conditions, floats by, but it has nothing to anchor to.
I wish I could say the observation mode stays with me when the timer goes off and I finish “meditating.” It amounts to a nice mental break, nothing more, and although countless gurus tout the benefits of regular practice and the gradual (or sometimes instant) upliftment it brings, I don’t quite believe their avowals.
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What I do believe in is art.
I’ve spent many pleasant hours in my dentist’s office, contemplating the photorealistic paintings on the walls while waiting for my mother’s appointment to end. Last week, I picked up a book there and discovered page after page of works by the same artist, Patricia Chidlaw. A peripatetic native of many places, courtesy of a military father, she settled in Santa Barbara some years before I did in the mid-1970s and, like me, has stayed.
Unlike me, she has transferred her love of this place into painting after painting of familiar, iconic vistas and humbler, intriguing snapshots of downtown, with our quirky bungalows and converted motor courts and former estate workers’ cottages in which the modern population lives.
Paging slowly through that book, I felt upwelling in me the remembrance of exactly why I loved Santa Barbara for so many years. Decades of living and working downtown, going to Fiesta, walking for hours on the familiar streets. I can mentally follow my memory and the descriptions I write, and eventually arrive at that place of: oh yes, this, I love.
Patricia Chidlaw presents journey and destination in one multilayered, deep package of experience, in oils on canvas, the unapologetically realistic style still leaving room for imagination, interpretation, speculation.
Doing that is something I could dream on, aspire to, draw toward me. Not by taking classes and analyzing how to get from my extremely basic amateur level drawing capability…to Art with a capital A. Why can’t I be a self-taught artist? Who would know better which way to point my feet on this particular path?
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I’ve had Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards on my bookshelf for more than 30 years. I’ve reread the book a couple of times, and done the exercises up to a certain point, where I get stuck on one exercise and give up, filled with resentment and frustration.
This time, I’m applying an adage I learned many decades ago. Take what you like, and leave the rest. I opened the book at random and it fell to the pure contour drawing exercise. I read through it and felt a smile growing. Spirit guided me to that exercise.
If the only real point of anything is the now, and the happiest now I know is while immersed in art, however I make it, that is the point. The more I am connected with soul and spirit through my meditative art path, the more I pull Ascension toward me, and the less room fear or resentment have in the real estate of my consciousness.
I tape the piece of paper to the kitchen table, as instructed by the exercise, and begin the minute examination of my left hand, moving the pen in my right hand in tandem while never looking at the page. The suspension of mental chatter is instantaneous, something never achieved while “meditating.”
I may never do the exercise again, or any of the other exercises. But a door has opened, and whatever future exists – Ascension, living as a fifth-dimensional being, instant capability to do anything I desire – there is an eternal Now within the act of making art, and that door is always open, the sun peeking through beyond it.
