SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 14
SINE QUA NON
|e yearning to create something artful begins with love.
Roughly thirty years ago, I lived in the cutest little craftsman-style bungalow in Altadena,
California. Shortly after moving in, I painted a mural on my small bathroom wall against the
bathtub. It was of a woman9s face, no one9s in particular, not a portrait. Her head tilted like
all the women in Renaissance paintings, and she noated gently over my tub, watching always,
whenever I was in my vulnerability.
I9m not a gifted painter, especially of oguratives. But I do have a vibe, and I liked
bringing that vibe into the home I9d christened my Zen Cottage. |e mural remained for the
nearly four years I lived there.
A couple of weeks after I moved out, I met the landlord there to deal with the onal
paperwork and turn in my key. I neither expected nor cared about getting my deposit back,
as I knew they9d have to repaint the wall to prep it for rental. Yet when I walked in and saw
the newly fresh paint, all white again, where once my guardian gal had loomed over all my
baths for four years, I was unexpectedly gut-punched that this man had not found my mural
arresting enough to keep, to defy the norm, to be a cool landlord and think it might be a
selling point for a potential renter.
And because I had never taken a snapshot of it, my beloved mural was gone forever. It
was no great work of art, but it was a part of me, like a limb. Well, maybe not a limb. Maybe a
lock of hair. Yet I found myself feeling profoundly chopped at the knees. Irrational, of course.
Its existence was always intended to be transient. Art is all things, and nothing. And when it9s
nothing to someone, it truly is never personal—simply that it is only as valuable as anyone
experiences it. And because at that point in my life I had not yet begun submitting my writing
to publishers, nor was I a painter in any capacity other than for personal joy and play, this
counted as my very orst rejection. We never forget the orst one, do we?
Fast forward thirty years, and sometimes rejection feels like waterboarding. At other
times still, it feels like an energy-potent vitamin B-12 injection of a self-talk spin:
