I can't believe it, but I'm still painting

I went for a long time without feeling capable of picking up a paintbrush or even just a pencil, but in recent weeks I have experienced a resurgence of the compulsion to paint. This despite a couple of annoying ailments which might normally have sidelined me from everything.

I like the creative burst of "Must. Paint. Must. Draw." It probably drives everyone around me nutso, of course, but to heck with it. If ya gotta, ya gotta.

I used to be judgmental toward Paul Gauguin for abandoning his wife and children and his bank job to move to Tahiti and hang out on the beach with brown-skinned beauties and just paint them all day long every day. Such hedonism! Now I know that it's much more than just that. It's the overwhelming need to express what's inside... I suppose it seems selfish and, yes, it is. But the world would be a less beautiful place without Gauguin's works. There are sacrifices to be made.

No, I'm not planning to abandon my post any time soon. I was just saying that I *understood* the ones who simply HAD to... better now than I used to. My kids are part of my creative work... my "living epistles" ... so I won't leave them unfinished.

Henri Matisse left his family behind, too. Matisse's color genius was several orders of magnitude beyond other artists. His children, while deprived of a significant relationship with their dad, still grew up and came to understand their father for who he was, not what they believe they had been cheated out of.

Again, I'm not leaving anyone behind.

But I understand the need to. And I do intend, now that the kids are more and more capable of self-care, to carve out more and more "create" and "learn" and "grow" time for myself. It would be cheating God *not* to be who he made me to be.