Trash Can Treasure. Hope I can thank the artist someday.

My son liberated one of my favorite pieces of wall art from the trash can of his art class. When he saw I loved it, he gave it to me. It's a crumpled up print. I hope one day I will discover the artist. There's no signature. I'd love to tell them that their work is profound and simple in its elegance. I won't berate them that it ended up in the trash can. I'd be sad but I'd gladly send it back to them.

I hope this post might remind you in your creative work to not be too harsh a judge of your work and its result. Sometimes we need some distance - physical, emotional, or mental - from what we create before assessing its meaning or worth. Or if we have the space, keep it a long while and return to it then. Or share it with others for their comments.

My treasured piece in my mind tells the story of a mother chasing her daughter. There's beauty and humor in this chase. It features the orderly mother fully clothed and the daughter apparently a free-spirited streaker who is sprinting away. Yet both are in the same pose reaching out toward what's ahead at a full run. So there is continuity in life. And irony that the more things change, the more they might stay the same? To me it's also a reminder to bridge two worlds: that of the adult and the child. Art, writing, and nature walks let me bridge those two worlds. And that run - the process of movement - takes us off the page to places we might not expect or envision. Stay open-minded and learn from the process.

One of my treasure art pieces my son found in his school trash can. Artist unknown.