Out of your comfort zone

Today Sunday was another gorgeous day here in the valley.I had a nap after lunch, then an artist friend visited me. We opened a bottle of home made wine on the dock, then I stayed home this afternoon to continue to work on my current project, a landscape painting. That is totally out of my comfort zone, at least for paint. I can do nice pastel landscapes, but never tried it with paint. So I started this thing and for the first 2 days when I looked at it I didn't like what I saw, and there was that little interior voice saying things like"what do you think you're doing? why don't you stick to what you do well?" So I had several tempations to just destroy the painting, since it was going nowhere. Because I'm also demanding, you see,I don't only want a nice landscape to look at, I don't want to paint a cheesy one. This afternoon I came back to it however, and tonight I discovered it was starting to look like something, that it was going somewhere. How painful, but wonderful hours I spent. This painting, if it does end up being nice, will have a special value for me, since it will have required much more effort pulling things from inside of me. I worked with my current favorite painting music"Le mystère des voix Bulgares", and that music alone lifts me up. Sometimes between that and the painful process of trying to create something from within, I'd feel like crying, the type of tears that come as a blessing. So I'd work for a while, then go in the garden, then come back. Till exhaustion, which I think is now. I need to let this thing sit and simmer for a while. How exciting to do something different!