i Want To Be A Polar bear

In 2020, I experienced along with the whole wide world, the soul crushing reset of our daily reality. The consensus we can all accept, is that the world has changed and with it the way life tastes. We and I, as an artist, in the dwindling days of 2023 are still dealing with the fallout.

In 2020, I painted my Corona Bears and wrote a reflection called The Bear In The Room. It’s one of my former posts on this tiny platform. Well, the bear is back and he’s got somethings to say.

He showed up last week, like all the best guest invasions, beautiful and nocturnal. I am a chronic Hieronymus Bosch nightmare person. To experience a visit to the Arctic under a silvery moon instead- and in pristine detail-, oh yes we are painting that. There was my bear of 2020 swimming and crying , a tiny bit, in this magical setting. I painted him as I saw him.

Soooo. Tell me, ,my Jungian soul, what might this mean?

THIS

Year 2023

A painful and bereft year for so many of the people I love and interact with. The world has not recovered from 2020, nor reset. We are going through the motions of contented activity but without the savor and sweetness of life before. Loneliness and the absence of elan, that rousing march, is everwhere.

My Polar Bear came to me and says by his very existence:

The world is Big

The World is wild

Strange

and so Beautiful.

Swim on

head above water

Dump the garbage feels.

Cling on dear people.

Let’s close out this bit of a year. It is over. We are not.

• November 16 2023- Anne