Life's Layers, May 2025

The painting I have chosen to illustrate my blog this month is called Tuscany Door.  I did this painting inspired by a photo of a door and wall I took in Tuscany last fall, while traveling in Italy.  What intrigued me the most about this door and wall was the layers of history showing through.  The wall was covered with stucco at some point, but weather and time have stripped away some of those layers.  Underneath, you can see some of the history of the wall.  To the right of the doorway, you can see exposed bricks.  Some of them look like they were part of another doorway or window opening at one time that was bricked up.  Time passes and functionality changes.  People renovate to suit their new needs or ideas.

When you think about it, our lives are a bit like that.  We have all had a variety of experiences over the years.  At my age, the layers are many and varied.  Growing up in a rural community.  Attending a two-room school, then being bussed to a large secondary school, where I knew one person, in a town not far away. Living with my birth family, finding my place, or not.  Moving on to another layer further from my childhood home that included a significant other, a job, and eventually higher education.  Relocating back to my hometown.  Building a life with a new home, three children, and a teaching position.  All of these layers build over time to create a life.

As time passes, more things change, and we renovate our lives and build more layers.  We accumulate experiences, including happy and sad times.  We seek to improve our lives.

Keep in mind that the original layers are still there.  Those childhood experiences don’t disappear, they just get buried under the many layers of living that have happened since then.  Often, tragedies will cause some of the layers to be stripped away, and things that were long buried will come back into our lives, just like the exposed bricks in the painting.  Usually, exposing past hurts or traumas gives us an opportunity to look at them with a more mature mind.  We can examine them, look at them through a different lens that comes from years of living our lives.

Another way to look at this is that these past experiences come to us like a dragon that has escaped a box where it was safely hidden.  We examine the dragon, look at it from all angles, deal with it, and put it back in the box.  The next time we open that same box, the dragon is smaller.  The dragon never really goes completely away, but over time, it is less of an issue for us. 

We are born with a genetic makeup. The layers we build, revise, and reconstruct as we live our lives are ultimately who we are.