MY MUSE - TANYA BLONG
My Muse: Idleness
Growing up, I never knew a relaxed woman. Successful women? Yes. Productive women? Plenty. Anxious and afraid and apologetic women? Heaps of them. But relaxed women? At ease women? Women who aren't afraid to take up space in the world? Women who give themselves unconditional permission to relax- without guilt, without apology, without feeling like they earn it? I'm not sure I've ever met a woman like that. But I would like to become one. I would like us all to become one - Nicola Jane Hobbs author of The Relaxed Woman.
This reflection by Nicola Jane Hobbs resonates deeply with many of us who have learnt to measure our worth by a society that equates success with constant productivity and the accumulation of material possessions. However there is a profound richness in embracing moments of stillness and solitude.
Personally I think it was when my son was little and I was seeing the world through his eyes that I learnt the magic of really just being, not living in the future or the past, not being “mum” or “the artist”……. gender, race and creed, slipping away, it was like the edge of my being blurred with the edge of the natural world…. The figure in the landscape or the landscape in the figure, was a subject that always seemed to come forth. Yet we have grown up with centuries of quotes that tell us “Idleness is the mother of all sins” or “The devil makes work for idle hands”.
Henry David Thoreau once said, "Sometimes as I drift idly on Walden Pond, I cease to live and begin to be". This sentiment captures the essence of idleness – a state of complete immersion in the world, where self-awareness fades, and we escape the confines of our own minds. It is a moment suspended in time, quiet and slowed, where we become alone with the world – opposed to alone with ourselves.
I do wonder about all this "doing". The richness of life seems to lie in the "being" – being acutely aware of the magic that surrounds us, understanding that nature itself is the entertainment, just as nature is alive to be alive – we are too, here to encompass all the beautiful and the strange. Sometimes when I am in the throws of ploughing through my “to do list” I notice my own paintings hanging like idols, - idle idols, in their still worlds, leisurely unaware of time– gently mocking this rush rush world. The luxury of time, a commodity in todays world.
The word “relax” comes from the Old French relashier meaning to loosen, to liberate, to set free! There is a moment in time when the world is suspended, quiet and slowed, - this moment is my muse – Idleness, you have to be aware of it to notice it, present and observant.
Leave a comment