How are you feeling today? Excited because you are starting a new job, yet nervous that you might make a rookie mistake? Exhausted because you have a newborn who is up every other hour to nurse, and then wants to play and coo for an additional hour, yet overjoyed at this darling miracle baby? Disappointed that an old friend hasn’t responded to the text you sent two weeks ago and confusion as you beat your head trying to figure out what you did to cause the “obvious” rupture? Grief and deep sadness as the anniversary of the death of your beloved grows closer, yet grateful that his physical agony is over? We rarely feel emotions in isolation. Instead, they are often mixed together. How can we experience all of these emotions at the same time? Because we love lots of different things and people, to varying degrees.
If what we love and care about shapes how we feel, then we will live constantly with mixed emotions. This is a right response, to hold in tension what appears at face value to be conflicting emotions. In their book, Untangling Emotions, Alasdair Groves and Winston Smith propose that “life in this world means the delightful glories of God’s handiwork always get the muck of sin and suffering spattered on them. We have no choice but to both mourn and rejoice, and oftentimes simultaneously.” But that doesn’t seem possible or right to our finite bodies.
I often do an Emotional Assessment with my clients and ask them to name six emotions that they regularly experience and assign each a color. Just the thought of mixing some of those emotions’ colors together makes me a bit nauseous. We all know enough about color mixing to know that if you mix all three of the primary colors together, the resulting hue is a yucky brown - not a milk or even dark chocolate brown, but a color that forms a sour grimace on our face. So how do we risk mixing these emotions? Perhaps a better image would be marbleizing…
I had the privilege of homeschooling our four children for about 13 years as they were growing up. I have always enjoyed the creative arts and wanted our kids to experience every type of art form possible; therefore I attempted to weave them into as many unit studies as possible. We made paper machíer crowns and masks regularly, illustrated stories using Eric Carles’ mosaic form, and sculpted clay. One of the most interesting and quite frankly, most difficult art forms we attempted was marbleizing paper.
There are several methods for making marbled papers, but I opted for the beginner method, in which a shallow tray is filled with water. Next, a surfactant additive, such as melted wax or even shaving cream are added to the water to help float the colors. Lastly, various kinds of ink or paint colors are carefully applied to the surface. A toothpick or skewer is then used to move the paint blobs vertically, horizontally or both, creating a unique design and mixture of colors. Lastly, blank paper is placed directly on the surface, then lifted off and placed right-side up to dry.
The result is a gorgeous piece of art, in which several colors retain their original hue, yet sit nestled alongside one another, enhancing the beauty of each. In Psalm 22:25-26 David writes colorfully of this tension:
“From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will perform before those who fear him.
The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the Lord!
May your hearts live forever!” (ESV)
The tone and colors of this lament call me forward to John 10:9-10, where Jesus marbleized several emotions for his disciples and us:
“I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture.The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (ESV)
Could it be that the key to mixed emotions is neither to whip them all together into a jumbled ugly mess nor isolate them and only experience them one at a time; but instead, to grow more comfortable sitting in the tension of them all existing side by side?
Blessings,
Gay B Brown
This was an awesome read. Thanks for sharing.
Love this! Borrowing the marblelizing activity to use with my grands! And the concept in counseling—I will be borrowing that, too, with your permission! So good! I love your creativity!💕