Welcome

Life started out normal enough. I was born in the US South,  moved across the pond and back, and then moved 5 more times with my beautiful, educated, young parents and three subsequent siblings before we settled in picturesque Bucks County, PA, just as I was entering high school. A bit of madness swept in and normal turned to chaos; drug and alcohol abuse, an exceptionally nasty divorce, a haunted house, a seriously impactful car accident, a lot of very bad behavior, and the lingering memory of coal in my stocking.

In the midst of the turmoil my grandfather shared a book with me by C,S. Lewis that proved to be the catalyst for a journey towards faith along with a discovery of Lewis’s writing. For all of my life I had found myself calmed by beauty and the order that came when creating.  Lewis’s quote helped me both embrace the experience and understand its limitations:

“I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I have a wonderful life. I have learned a lot through the struggles and the joys, and I understand how little I know the older I get. I know that what my spirit longs for most is not to be found here in this terrestrial life, but I do my best to celebrate the journey and I continue to paint that which moves me. Thank you for being here.

Solid and liquid, cool and warm. Darkness and Light. Opposing forces always requiring balance.

Inquiries welcome. sherieharkins@gmail.com