A Mural On An Old Shed

The unexpected meeting of diverse beings; a manatee and a gopher tortoise.

It has been a long couple of months.

An 18x11 mural I painted on a very rough shed building by the highway for the Unitarian Universalist Friendship Fellowship Church, where I play the piano. 2024.

I learned a lot from this mural.

#1 It had been a very long time since I had done one. I wanted to know if I “could still do it”. Theoretically, I knew I could, but actually doing a thing is much different than imagining it.

#2 I will NEVER paint on a wall with such structural damage and difficulty again.

This wall was the outside of a shed building. The slat across the center of the thing isn’t straight and it comes forward here and there. There are pieces of wood (like splinters) sticking out of it that I could just scrape off with my bare hand.

I took some close-up pictures of some rough spots to give you an idea.

There are screws in it here and there. There are ¼ inch cracks between each board(which breaks any line you want to make in intervals of about 4.5 inches).

If you take a wet rag and try to run it across the board, it’s so rough that the wood will grab your rag and keep you from traveling in smooth lines. This makes painting anything smooth and organic very difficult. You cannot paint a straight line. I should have mudded it in before painting on it, but I have never painted such a rough wall. I didn’t realize this until it was well underway and there was no going back. It ate all of my brushes.

I was a bit delusional about how it would go.

Now, I know better. “Live and learn!”(And buy new brushes)

I think if I hadn’t struggled so much with texture, I would have realized that I needed more shadow in my water. From a distance, those ripples coming on shore could use some more shadow. But, I am lucky I pulled off what I did, so I will take it!

#3 There were many reasons I wanted to do it. I was called by Source. All the signs were there that I should do it. (even though I could have made it easier on myself by mudding the wall first) I wanted to show my children that you can put yourself out there, not knowing what the outcome will be. It’s okay to learn in “real time” with the whole world watching you. If you are genuinely interested in something you should go for it.

I wanted to learn about myself in the process. I wanted to thank the community I play for. I play the piano for the people who own this property. Even though I don’t agree with them on MANY topics, I have been with them for 12 years and I love them as individuals and as a collective. I wanted to demonstrate what I can do, even on a crappy wall. Even though it’s a rough surface and very difficult to work with, it is right by the highway on US1. So, if you are driving down US1, you will see it.

We all care very much at Friendship Fellowship about the manatees and the gopher tortoises. I also did it for them. We have 11 gopher tortoises on the property and a dock that is maintained across the street where they will be running education programs for local young people regarding the Indian River Lagoon and the care of the manatees.

Now, it is a highly unusual circumstance that a manatee would be hanging out with a gopher tortoise.

And this created some interesting perspective issues in my design. The manatee needed to be fully immersed in the water and the gopher tortoise needed to be on the sandy land area. That was a difficult feat in and of itself. I am happy with how he steps on the midway point.

Also, manatees are rather strange-looking. Their profiles are highly variable. If I had done one “realistically” it might not have come across, so I softened its features up a little bit to make it slightly more cartoony and therefore, more malleable as a character in this situation. (I gave him a normal eye rather than the strange button eye they sometimes seem to have).

I am fairly new to painting water. Water is difficult. I have only painted it three times.

The last few times I needed to paint water, I had an image to look at. It’s MUCH easier to paint something you don’t know how to paint if you have something to look at.

In this case, it was an unusual situation that I was in. The manatee had to sit deep enough to be immersed, yet some of that water had to wash up on shore.

a) How would the water move?

b) How would it look when it washed over the sand?

These are difficult questions.

I had initially intended on having a sunbeam coming across the whole thing at the end but I ran out of time. More on that later.

I was meant to be here though, a lot of amazing things happened to me while I was painting this wall.

As for the trees, I did not stay true to what a mangrove tree looks like in real life. There are a few different kinds.

But I like these trees. I had fun painting them. It was really weird painting across that center board though. These are squiggle trees already, and with that added, there was the occasional optical illusion created from the right or left and I had to address those.

Once I had the mangrove trees drawn on (with a carpenter crayon), I decided I wanted bigger and brighter leaves toward the front (foreground) so they could be better seen from the road. I exaggerated them kind of removing some of the realism of what mangrove trees look like in real life, but at the time I thought that was best for the near and far perspective I was going for.

It was very difficult to understand how the light should hit the water. I have more to learn there.

This year I will be buying some MDO boards (medium density overlay- sign boards for exterior use) and I will work on things like that on those. I will be making a few murals that way, murals that can be moved around for interior or exterior use. I think I will focus on light and water to see what I can learn there.

I will say this though, if you want to initially “INDICATE” to yourself where the water will go and how it will flow, you naturally want to mark a smooth line. You take the rag or brush, whatever you are using, and you gracefully imagine the water in this direction. Boom, there is your smooth, curving line.

Not on this wall. Hahaha.

You CANNOT make a smooth line on this wall, so GOOD LUCK. Hahaha.

Imagine a rough texture pulling at whatever you want to use, thereby stopping its forward progress. Also, the paint gets stuck in the “crags”.

I think that considering my lack of expertise in painting water, the difficulty of the wall, and the unusual nature of the composition, I did a decent job of it.

That’s a problem with wanting to be a perfectionist in life.

“Oh, I can’t make a smooth line, therefore, I cannot do this” never entered my mind. I had set aside all expectations.

I felt “the call” to be there. I trusted Source through the whole thing.

And, a couple of times I doubted myself and had a crisis of confidence, Source reached out to me.

I initially intended on having a sunbeam that hit right below the tortoise and lit the place up.

But when my husband lost his job. I threw myself into “wrap up the mural” mode. It was my job to pay some bills suddenly and unexpectedly. I had to take on quite a few different kinds of jobs during those months.

I was up at 5 am most days. I would get up, make everyone breakfast and take care of things at the house, load up my supplies, and be at the wall set up and ready to go by 8am. Then I would work until I was exhausted with no breaks, come home, make dinner, run some clothes, and do various tasks before sitting down at the computer for my evening job. I worked until about 10pm each evening (on grant proposals and busy work), passed out, and did it again the next day. We got through it. I was exhausted.

I had previously had discussions with myself and Source at “the wall” about how I would handle the sunbeam. If it hit where I wanted it to hit, how would that affect my shadows and such? They would have to be accentuated and elongated. How translucent would I make it, how would it affect the trees as it went over them?

I had doubts about it. One day, I had to take a bathroom break. I was months into this thing and I have NEVER taken a bathroom break. I was working HARD. I would travel the 20 miles to the site in the morning, use the bathroom, gather my water and supplies, and get to the wall. I worked, unstopping for four to 5 hours each day.

So, this day, I snapped a picture of the wall and a couple of closeups, so I could see the photo whilst in the bathroom 😊 No need to waste any time, I think I have a clear personality type in that area.

Ps: playtime is not “wasted time” in my estimation.

Here is the photo I got.

In “light” of this, I do feel kind of bad that I finished it without a sunbeam, but it would have represented many more days of work and I simply did not have the time. Plus at that time, I was well aware that I had already worked way too long at this job.

It would have been great, but I walked away with no sunbeam. It was clear to me and to Source that I had other things to do.

I had to wrap it up.

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Anyway, I have learned many things there.

While I was there:

#1 I met Little Bird on that job:

#2. I had confirmation of a dream about a little girl playing in a road. She looked like the Disney cartoon character, Cocoa. She was playing in the road behind my truck. I had to stop backing up my truck and get out to tell her not to play in the road. I looked up the hill at two more cars coming down the hill toward us. I pointed at them and said “See, honey? You can’t play in the road, there are cars, and they will not see you.” Then the next day after painting on“The Wall” I was leaving in my truck when a ladie’s dog ran behind my truck. I had to stop and get out and correct her and I looked up the road and noticed two cars coming down the hill toward us! Then the owner yelled, “Cocoa!”. I mean…………come on!

#3. I listened to books, and meditated and talked to myself. I learned to meditate on this wall.

#4. I demonstrated to myself and Source, that I was willing to jump when the indications were that I should.

#5. I demonstrated through the incidence of a son falling out of a tree, a couple of hurricanes, a lot of weeks of rain, and financial hardship that I am willing to do the work. Once it is known to me what I must do, I DO IT. I persevered and showed an indomitable spirit. (Something I learned in Taekwondo, back in the day) .

#6. A man who owns the rock quarry across the street stopped by and told me to seek out the Veteran’s building in Rockledge, perhaps I could paint for them. I will practice receiving no for an answer on my first REAL BID with a price that actually reflects the work I put in. I now have a square foot minimum price. (And I am ready to turn down a wall or someone can mud it in, or I will mud it in at extra labor cost).

#7. I learned things from the books I was listening to on repeat. These things help me today and some of those ideas I have heard correlating information about. So, I learned a lot and grew as an individuated being there.

#8. I sat in a squat for HOURS. It was laborious, I am in better shape than I was when I started and I absorbed a LOT of sun and did some sungazing.

#9. I experienced a LOT of synchronicities there.

Here are some notes I left for myself on my cell phone:

a) Keep notes on all ideas, talk to rocks

b) How about an egregore of love and understanding, and nonjudgement about differences?

c) “As we swim through the ether together”…

d) Make books for men who cannot talk to their wives, nice things they can say (Haaaaaahaha).

e) If we need the gov to take care of us, why are they feeding us poison?

f) There is only paint, no people. A few things here. At the time I was painting the mural, my oldest sister told me that there was once a painter who had a wall built around his murals before he would begin, so no one could observe him or interrupt him. I would have LOVED a wall at that point in the painting. I was in a location where people were constantly pulling up behind me from two separate angles. This idea evolved. This is what I would speak aloud to myself when I would hear another set of tires stopping “Either they know what kind of work this entails or they do not. If they do, great; they understand. If they don’t, who gives a crap? They have no idea, therefore their opinion doesn’t matter. If you know, you know. If you don’t know, you don’t know.” Rude, but effective. Haha. (so much for egregores of love :)

g) I am relaxed from this segment of remembering to the segment of embodying the fullness of becoming

h) I forgive you and me, and I sleep in a peace-bubble garden.

i) Passive aggressiveness is a weakness. (reference to trouble with a particular relationship).

j) Suddenly the book was a click away, it was just one credit a moment ago what happened? I wanted the Wisdom Wheel on Audible and didn’t have a credit to get it with. I went back to the book after checking my account to see how much it was and suddenly it was available for download FOR FREE> I mean, COME ON! I proceeded to listen to that book about 7 times and it was good every time.

k) The weird baby with my hubby. My son, and my husband, and I went fishing. There was a young lady with her small child there, he wasn’t walking on his own yet. She was holding his arms and he would pull her this way and that. He walked along the shoreline toward us, mother in tow. He stopped in front of my husband and froze like a statue, staring at him with incredible interest for a child his age. He remained there unmoving, hands in the air reaching toward my husband, fixated on him. He wasn’t trying to be picked up by him or anything, he was just “BEHOLDING HIM” with his hands in the air like he had been struck by sheer magnificence. HAAAAAAAAAAhahahaha.

My husband was actually kind of uncomfortable with it so I said, “Honey, tell him ‘hello’. Take your sunglasses off so he can see your eyes.” (I thought maybe the baby was fixated on his polarized glasses. My husband took his glasses off and smiled and said hello. The baby was still just staring with his hands out like “WHOA….” or something. HAha.

The mother was happy to just sit there on the ground behind him, waiting for him to pull her somewhere else. She was saying nothing, just kneeling behind her son in her bikini and silently allowing her child to stare down some random stranger. It was very unusual.

It was a long and uncomfortable silence. It went on for a while, I let it. I found it interesting to watch. I had no intention of changing the strangeness of it. I was in an “I am going to observe this man right now” moment already. But when everyone had taken all of it that they could tolerate, I broke into conversation with the mother. At one point the mama MADE that baby look at me. Normally babies are drawn to me, not to my husband. So, I found that part funny too. She picked him up and made him look at me. I told him “It’s okay, you are interested in what you are interested in and you didn’t come here to talk to ME” to which the baby replied with his eyes and smiled in the affirmative of a knowing 30-year-old person. It was EERIE!

l) I told her there was another way and she agreed at 2:22. This is a reference to the very moment my son decided not to get a back fusion after falling out of a tree. He was right to choose that. He stared down a whole trauma team and stood in his own power. He is healing well.

m) Thank you self, I find you to be very interesting. I like to practice being nice to myself and I do, actually find myself to be interesting. Not in a self-obsessed way, but in a friendly way with my 3d forms perception of me. I am more than this body, as are we all. I find most people interesting. (probably all)

n) A tree is a fractal and you paint it like jazz. Everything you do is correct (like jazz) in this approach. Some jazz musicians say that when they make a mistake, they just include the mistake again a time or two and it becomes what was “meant”, therefore, “there are no mistakes in jazz”. Trees are very forgiving that way.

o) Everything is just a weird shape with an outline. I want this on a shirt. It’s just this artist’s momentary perspective. Also, someone wanted to do a couple of modulations in a song we did for my Dad’s funeral recently. We did Amazing Grace in Bflat, then Eflat, and then F major. He was playing Trumpet with the piano. While I was practicing, I told someone “Please don’t ask me to do anything right now, I am modulating”. I thought that would be a funny one too, it would have to have a picture of a piano, of course.

p) There is no point in doubt (once you have decided you must do something), it’s a waste of energy.

q) TRUST ME

r) Source is speaking to you in sunbeams.

s) Dream of a man with parasite seizure (castor oil tinnitus): One night, before bed, I put castor oil on my feet (with socks over that), on my neck, and on my tummy.

After a few minutes of it soaking in, I started to experience tinnitus, and the outlines of things looked more pronounced. I thought, “Hmm, should I get up and wipe some of this off? Did I go overboard?” And then I fell asleep…….

……….and dreamed of a dark-haired man walking beside me in a long, sandy-colored jacket. The road was sandy too. He suddenly fell face first into the road and started seizing, but not in a normal fall into the road kind of way. His body kind of picked up as though a big invisible hand had grabbed him and he was a stiff child’s doll. He went head first into the dirty ground with his body and legs stiffly sticking into the air at about 45 degrees from the ground. It was a weird way to seize. Anyway, when he could stand up again, I started swatting at the small grey bug that was quickly zipping across his chest. I said “Hey, don’t worry, I had one of these before. “Here, take this towel with water on it and wipe yourself off and it will go away. It’s a parasite.” When I woke up, I felt so good. I had slept so well. I felt different in a way that I can’t really describe and I thought, “Did I just kill a parasite?”If there are any castor oil naysayers out there, don’t worry about me. I love the stuff. I will be using it again tonight.

t) Dream of Monad: Okay, I heard an Australian Aboriginal woman describe her art once. It was filled with circles with dots. She said each of those circles with a dot “represents the individuated soul of a loved one or an ancestor that has passed so they could be with us” in her painting. How beautiful is that?

I love circles too. So, I draw a circle with a dot on my hand. I do this almost every day. Sometimes it’s something else, but usually a circle with a dot. Now I know that also denotes the sun. I heard someone say it was the “common mark of the Nephilim”, I don’t know about that! Anyone here?

I thought it was “the Monad”. Google seems to think it is. When I look up the Monad I see a circle with a dot. But my dream said otherwise. Also, I think it means a lot of things that I am unaware of. I may have to do a deep dive into circle symbology.

The whole dream, I was just staring at this empty circle hanging in the air before me. There was no dot in it. In the dream, I was thinking, “Everything and Nothing: The Monad”. That was the dream. So now I denote the individuated being as having a dot, and the Monad as having none. I am interested in what anyone might have to say on that subject. I have some reading to do on that subject. It’s such a simple symbol too, I mean, it has to be EVERYWHERE and every “when”.

So, now when I make a circle with a dot, I say “I am the individuated being” and if I make a circle, I say “The One Thing”. If you make a ven diagram and one circle has a dot, I would call that “The individuated being Going back to Source”. I am interested in everyone’s impression of the Monad, how it is symbolized, and what it denotes.

u) Huacas rocks - a native people mentioned in The Wisdom Wheel, believe that spirit comes to you in various forms. If you find something that you believe is energetically meant for you (like Little Bird), you should hold onto it, take care of your relationship with it, and treat it with the reverence it deserves. I am not clear on the details. I will have to look it up, I haven’t yet. But, I have always loved rocks. Once upon a time when I was coming out of great sadness after a period of homelessness, I picked up a rock and stuck it in my pocket. I have been carrying rocks ever since. I find them very soothing and fun. It sounds like “Whackas”. It’s a funny word. I like this word. Someone mentioned in the book that a rock is a “condensed spirit or frequency”. I find that intuitively correct.

It has been a learning journey!

Peace