HERE'S TO MOVEMENT

You are still worthy of love. You are still worthy of knowing what it means to know to love and to be loved. I am sorry for the one who broke your trust. I am sorry for the one who took you for granted. You should have never known what it meant for a heart to be broken in that way.

But you are worthy of love, anyway.

You are worthy of being able to move forward in beautiful, healing ways. You may feel the burden of the brokenness right now, but there is still much more to your story. Your life is not a checklist.

Just because the things you hoped for have fallen out of place does not mean you cannot keep living a meaningful, purposeful life. As long as you are breathing, you are not out of time. No matter what is not checked off on the “list,” you are still being called to go on the journey. Even amidst the brokenness. Even amidst the sadness. These feelings are real, but this is not all there is to you.

And you are going to move on.

My friend, you are going to move on.

You are going to wake up one day and realize:

certain things no longer bother you.

They may cross your mind from time to time,

but it will not feel the same,

and it is then you will realize:

you have grown

in beautiful, healing ways.

You have spent so many nights trying to communicate what you feel. You have spent so many years trying to get to the core of it all. You have wondered what you missed or what you could have done differently. And you have also been invited to step into Light and believe that even amidst the brokenness, you still have the capacity for love. The one that hurt you could not take that from you.

And love will look different here and in the seasons to come, but that will be a beautiful thing. You will find this was what you were needing: a new beginning. A new way of living. A new way of trusting that despite the one who broke your trust, you were still free to hope, to believe, to love.

Word of the day: ADVANCE: move forward in a purposeful way. - Oxford English Dictionary

Here’s the Movement

A Series

This particular flower was loosely inspired by the yellow carnation. As I looked up this flower, I found two interesting things: one, the carnation is often considered the flower of January, and two, a yellow carnation is often associated with loss, sorrow, and disappointment. How could something so beautiful be associated with this? I do not know the story as to how the yellow carnation came to carry this meaning, but the paradox really captivated me. Often times the story associated with something beautiful carries heaviness, struggle, sorrow…this is why I make art. Not to provide easy answers or try to fix them, but to honor stories and all of the feelings and colors and textures within them, and say, “your story is worthy of being noticed. You are worthy of love. You are worthy of knowing that you are worthy of encountering beauty, hope, and grace, even when you have known loss, grief, and heartbreak.” From time to time, I am told that my work is sad, but I don’t mind that criticism at all. Sadness reveals to us that we truly did love what we lost. I think there is something to be said about that, and I am curious about giving space for that feeling in my art. So here’s to flowers of every variety, amidst all they signify.

With these pieces, I really wanted to highlight the relationship between warm and cool colors. For me, when warm and cool colors run together, it reminds me of mixed feelings. It reminds me of how, even when moving on is a good thing, there is still sadness, and grief. It reminds me of how we can carry joy and sorrow at the same time. And when we look at these colors together, it’s like they belonged together. So different from one another, and yet, creating a landscape, a story. I am not sure why I am particularly interested in painting starry nights in nearly any color of the sky, other than this: the night can be beautiful, too. Many of the stories I have received over the years via DM and email come to my inbox during the evening. When the world is slowing down to go to sleep, the night can bring up a lot of feelings. I just hope that the stories can remind us: even here, there is hope for growth, healing, love.

Moving on. As I painted one color into the other, I thought about how, with real paint, this process always look imperfect. Whenever you move from one color to the next, there is a transition. There are hundreds, if not thousands of different colors between the 8 colors in this painting. Isn’t life that way, when we move from one thing to the next? Movement can be messy, complicated, a mixture of warmth and cool. And somehow, when we take a step back, we can still see how it all comes together.

I loosely painted a waterfall here in hopes to evoke how I felt when I first saw a waterfall, Toccoa Falls, in my home state of Georgia. I remember thinking, “the water found the way here…the water found the way here.” It is my hope that for the person I was writing for, and anyone else who encountered this piece that they feel motivated to not give up and to keep going, knowing that they will find the way down the path. They may not be able to see it all yet, but they are not yet finished. Keep trusting there is a way.

This is true with many of my pieces, I wanted to turn a lens on the beautiful mess that is mixing color. As mentioned before, the range of colors between them all is countless, and I just can’t seem to stop painting it and talking about it. Of the many things colors make me feel, they make me feel a sense of change. They remind me of movement, even when I have convinced myself that nothing is happening and I am in stagnant waters. I think this piece began a sweep of clouds pushing their way over a mountain, but somewhere in the middle of the process I just let the colors go where they wanted to go and I became proud of this piece. This series. Change happening in a beautiful way.

Thank you for reading,

Morgan Harper Nichols