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December 18, 2006
I just re-read a book I absolutely love called "Orbiting The Giant Hairball" and it reminded me of a journal entry relating to the first time I read this inspiring book:
I was painting on a large canvas today and appreciating how wonderful it is to be free to paint whatever I am driven to paint. I found myself contemplating my future as a blank canvas and it reminded me of a fabulous book I read recently called ‘Orbiting The Giant Hairball’ (Viking). In the book the author Gordon MacKenzie (who was a creative genius at Hallmark cards) writes about turning one's life into a masterpiece.
He talks about imagining that when you are just about to be born, God hands you a blank canvas and asks you to do him a favor and paint a masterpiece for Him while you’re on earth.
“Sure,” you say to God and roll up the canvas and tuck it under your arm. Then you head off down the birth canal clutching the canvas as you are born.
MacKenzie asks us to imagine the doctors saying, “Hey look the little kid is holding a rolled-up artists canvas.”
He then goes on to talk about how the people (around you when you are born) realize that you do not have the skills to do anything 'meaningful' with the canvas. So they take the canvas away from you, for safe keeping, until you have acquired the prescribed skills needed for the canvas’s return.
MacKenzie brilliantly describes how society, while holding the canvas for us, cannot resist the temptation to unroll the canvas and draw pale blue lines and little blue numbers all over the surface.
He mentions how eventually the canvas is returned to you. However, it now carries the implied message that, if you paint inside the blue lines provided, your life will be a masterpiece.
“And,” says MacKenzie, “that’s a lie.”
Finally he talks about a time, a half-century after his own birth, when traumatic events made him pull back from his ‘masterpiece-in-the-works’ only to realize how awful his canvas looked. How the strokes of paint oh his canvas had nothing to do with him. They did not illustrate who he was or what he could become. They were someone else's idea of who he should be.
So he decided to white out his canvas and (with colorful paints) create his own picture, some of it OUTSIDE the lines.
He concludes with the following passage:
“You have a masterpiece inside you, too, you know. One unlike any that has ever been created, or ever will be.
And remember.
If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it. Only you.”
Unfortunately Gordon MacKenzie died in October 1999. After reading his book I know he took a brilliant masterpiece back to his maker.
Posted by trevor at December 18, 2006 08:15 PM
Comments
Coloring outside the lines is what makes us unique. Thank you for a post I really needed.
Posted by: dutch_kids at December 19, 2006 09:04 AM
wonderful trev,
i've heard of "orbiting the giant hairball" via SARK, and it's on my list of things to import from the US amazon...
hearing you talk about it has moved it UP the wish list!
Posted by: Leonie at December 19, 2006 04:58 PM
What a beautiful, impacting story Trevor. Thank you for sharing the true gift that comes with believing in one's self. And for those of us who are lucky enough to work with you, thank you for sharing your "canvas" that makes such a huge, impacting difference. Canvas colors have changed along the way...because of you. May God continue to bless your journey of creating a brilliant masterpiece!
Posted by: Daphne at December 20, 2006 07:53 AM