And an AI Haiku on This
I would like to take up a topic again today and I promise it will be the last time – for this year.
I recently wrote about my winter blues – and the winter depression is gone! Hopefully sustainable. This is notable as it generally lasts well into February.
What happened? A reader (Thank you, Annie!) asked if I had ever tried a lightbox. No, I haven’t. But I really liked the idea of the light and so I took up this idea in painting.
One of the works from the beginning of this year’s phase looked like this:
The idea was varied with the “characters falling from the sky like poems“. The objects, black and heavy, dance awkwardly down from the sky. Of course, they stand for the complex thoughts of this phase.
Then I thought: Just make them lighter, more dancing – and bring in more light. It looked like this:
The thought was modulated by using warmer colors, but essentially not much changed:
Then, at the beginning of the week, I started with a new variant, which I based on Daoist thinking [1]:
The steps I took:
1) Make it tangible: I started to give the feeling of depression a “face”. It is no longer an “abstract” thing, but something that I can see, that I can modulate and thus change.
2) Giving New Meaning: Why see depression as something that “comes from heaven” – or that surrounds me 360 degrees? From a Daoist point of view, “they are heaven”. They are part of the great void like everything else and what meaning we give to things and events is our choice.
3) Changing the narrative: Also in some western perspectives, it plays an essential role to enrich one’s thoughts, desires… with emotions. So I lustfully painted depressions fading away like fog in the morning sun. In a way, I watched as the exodus began and light regained the upper hand.
extra:
I couldn’t help but try what AI says about my painting [2]. I wanted it in the form of a haiku – here we go:
Winter’s shadows fade,
Light shines bright once more,
Depression’s grip loosens.
Well, it’s not extremely exciting – I paint better than AI writes 🙂 – but it’s remarkable.
Of course, after just under a week, you can’t say whether the whole thing is sustainable. But even if not, working on the topic was great fun and brought more sunshine to my cloudy days 🙂
footnotes:
[1] This is of course a very complex thing and I don’t want to repeat myself too often. Most of this can be found in my posts on DAO
[2] I used ChatGPT, described the image and asked them to write a haiku about it.
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