Dancing With My Right Mind by Connie Livingston-Dunn

Sometimes you just want to get out of the left logical brain and say OK, I’ve had enough of that logical straight talk. It’s different over here on the right side of the brain and it spirals and swirls and colors and creativity and it feels good. You look at the world and see the mess it’s in and people running ‘around’ in disarray (like a chicken with its head cut off, frankly), and looking for a logical, linear, step by step solution that goes from Point A to Point B, from here to there. They’ve been looking for years and you just wanna say, ‘Let’s just all paint and dance and sing and teach our children to ‘be’ in their right mind and their left brain, so that they grow up being loving and joyful and learn to plant gardens and love the earth, because you can’t get there from here, or get here from there. Besides, you are already there/here.

Math and science are necessary and are brilliant when both sides of the mind are working together, so let us integrate both sides of the brain instead of emphasizing just one side, and then we are using a whole brain instead of using half a brain, otherwise known as a half wit. If we use both sides by opening up the communication through the corpus callosum, we will then be using our left brain that does the doing, in cooperation with the being and creativity of the right mind. And laugh for heaven’s sake, seriousness is too heavy and you sink into the swamp, bogged down with mud.

Today, I danced with my right mind, it was Awe-full, I played in the studio, listened to jazz, thought about a couple of important men in my life who went across the rainbow bridge, and I thanked them for being in my life.

This is called ‘Dancing With Colors’ and it is oil and cold wax on textured board painted with black gesso and I think I have found my really wild medium. The colors in the photo are not very true to the real colors of the painting and I will have to take another one in lighting that will give a truer color. I don’t think I’m done with it yet. The last photo is the painting with the box of tools and paints that I used for it.

Originally published at cowbird.com.