Over the Wall

January, 1996
Oils on Paper
16” x 20”‍

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My determined words are scratched on the painting: “It doesn’t matter what anyone says, I’m going over the wall.” To which I added, “And Tom is going with me.”

During the first spring, I had a lot of paintings with an audience in the foreground – first my parents, sometimes Tom and my kids (“Gifts for the Journey“) or the Fire Mountain School community that was feeling deserted. The audience usually felt disapproving or fearful of the journey I was undertaking and waiting for me to return. In Over the Wall, I kept trying to get rid of the audience, who were saying, “No! Don’t tell our secrets” but I knew I was saying to them, “But I can’t hold them anymore.” Thus the renewed commitment of this process to keep using the stories that I am vouchsafed with as grist for my paintings and writings.

Journal 2/5/96

I fought my way down to my space past fallen elder branch that dangled upside down at the curve. In working to pull it out my basket tipped over and all the brushes and candles spilled. I wondered if I were meant to be doing this. Came cautiously up on my deck which was encrusted with ice – my footprints earlier in the day still in evidence. Only to find that I couldn’t get the door open! I pulled and tugged, laughed at myself and pulled and tugged again. A warning or a test? I pulled one more time and then turned around and came up to the cozy house to paint with acrylics upstairs. Damn the other painting and all those glaring faces anyway.

Journal 2/7/96

The splash behind the audience had from the first felt like me flying over a wall. I highlighted the wall a bit – adding scratchy wavy lines and then writing to the effect of: “it doesn’t matter what anyone says, Lane is going over the wall.” Kind of damn the torpedos and Morgan’s whining or Mother’s disapproval. But in a flash I realized how to incorporate the insight I had earlier in the week: that Tom is now in partnership with me on this endeavor. We are reaching together. We talk wonderfully in our intimate moments. So when I clarified the “splash” I made it two figures. And I added the words, “and Tom is going with me.”

2/ 26/96

Went back on Friday and tried to paint out the infernal “audience” of my last painting. Then read in Barbara Brennan about walls of fear being what keeps us from remembering who we are – keeps us separate from our true selves and the reality of our oneness in the Universe. Our fears are based on our reactions to our realities as perceived as babies/children. I keep going back to my Break painting! The world is grim and my parents have too much to handle already so I’d better be a very good girl – and not bother them with silliness about fairies, spirits and God. Now it’s being given back to me and I’m realizing how many of my fears are based on a reality no longer real to me. Unfounded! Unimportant.