✨The Mist That Wasn’t Planned
I painted trees today.
I wasn’t trying to make them perfect.
I was playing with watercolor and
figuring out what the materials wanted to do.
I discovered that the edge of a plastic card
makes wonderful tree trunks.
I added color for the leaves.
Little marks here and there.
Red,
orange,
yellow
and green.
And when I was finished,
I sealed the painting with my wax and jojoba oil finish.
That’s when something unexpected happened.
Some of the colored pencil moved.
At first,
all I could see was what had gone wrong.
The clean blue of the sky had become gray in places.
Color had wandered where I hadn’t put it.
I learned something important about my materials.
I won’t use colored pencil beneath this finish again.
But then I looked at the painting instead of the mistake.
There was mist in the trees.
It softened the distance.
It quieted the mountains.
It made some of the trees seem farther away than others.
I hadn’t painted the mist.
But there it was.
And then I scanned the finished painting
and opened the image on my computer.
Behind it,
completely by coincidence,
was my desktop photograph of an autumn aspen grove.
White trunks.
Autumn leaves.
A path disappearing into the trees.
I laughed.
Sometimes making something
teaches us how to make the next thing better.
And sometimes
what wanders from the plan doesn’t need to be erased.
Sometimes it only asks us to look again.
The garden is never finished.
We are always becoming.
