Thank You, Georgia, For Reminding Me About the Void

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.” ~ Georgia O’Keefe

This week, I (and my date for the day: my mom) had the glorious opportunity to see the exhibit, “Georgia O’Keefe: Abstraction,” at the Whitney Museum in NYC. Of course, I knew of her work and in fact had seen her work exhibited a few times before, but I now feel like I know her work on another level — on a co-creative level. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to jot down the O’Keefe quotes written on the museum walls; a couple were jaw-dropping, from a co-creative perspective. Since I didn’t, the above quote (found somewhere on the great, vast internet) will do. “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.” My gosh…I’m reminded of my bird’s-eye jasper post earlier this week — how something so magical is waiting for us on the surface of a rock, but we miss it if we’re too far away to really see.

Many times while experiencing this exhibit, I felt a shared language and sensibility with Georgia O’Keefe. The most powerful moment came when I read a quote in which she spoke of going to a place of dark nothingness and bringing something into the world that did not exist here before. “She’s talking about the void,” I leaned over and whispered to my mom. We both breathed, taking it in. One of the deepest pieces of learning I received from Machaelle Small Wright was about the void, about how everything that is created starts there, about how it is necessary to go into the void before we can bring something new into this world. Standing in front of Georgia O’Keefe’s words, in front of a painting with an area of black nothingness filled with absolute potentiality, I realized that I’d forgotten to be conscious of the void. Without that consciousness, creating is (I have found) far more challenging and difficult than it needs to be. I am now ready to re-discover my void-awareness and to release to that place of nothingness where everything-that-can-be is waiting to be brought forth. Thank you, Georgia, for reminding me about the void.