 I participate in a weekly study group with pastors preparing the preach for the upcoming Sunday. At a recent session one of the pastors was lamenting about a personal struggle in her life. She compared her experience to attempting to climb straight a brick wall to reach whatever "nirvana" bliss the top represents, when the reality is that the climb actually is a series of switch-back roads that gradually lead to the top. I scribbled a quick sketch of the brick wall/switch-back road in my sermon sermon with the intention of doing an art journal entry at some point in the future. This is the sort of topic that make a great reflection series: "The Brick Walls in My Life." I picked one theme at wrote it on top of a brick wall: "Write Again" (by which I know that mean return to published writing; something I've take a hiatus from for several years). For the symbolic brick wall, I used an embossing form and pressed the texture into damp watercolor paper, used acrylics to paint it "brick" colors, and then adhered it to my journal page. He sat like this for quite awhile before I finally finished it. It took intentional thinking/reflecting to identify the skills, tasks, etc. that I needed to enhance to reach to top of this particular brick wall-which I identified and wrote on the brick wall. The zig-zag path represents how those skills come together to get me safely to the top of the wall.
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