The Journey Within: Expectation by Katherine McDaniel

Journeys are often described as physical experiences, but they involve our internal world too. Does our mind determine our journey?

Anyone who has undertaken a long journey can attest that many of the challenges encountered along the way were internal. When faced with extended travel and exploration, we reach a point at which we want to quit, to give up, to go home before it is time. Outer circumstances, such as weather and other forces of nature, illness, our fellow travelers or any number of unforeseen or expected roadblocks, help uncover our personal strengths and weaknesses and throw us into conflicts that help us recognize who we are. It is the response we make to these challenges, based on our talents and limitations, that determines our survival, the weight of our experiences and what, if anything, we learn. That doesn’t mean that we can’t surprise ourselves; there are plenty of colors waiting inside us that we don’t yet recognize.

Expectation is my latest painting. For me it reflects that the outside world is colored by our perceptions. That which we find in ourselves we will find in the world around us and vice versa.

Not all journeys are physical, but all journeys happen within our minds. Travel requires that we be open to experience, vulnerable to the fact that what we know is incomplete and inaccurate even as we recognize our beliefs as our own best attempt. We cannot see anything until we are ready to see it, nor can we believe anything until we are ready to believe it.

The more colors we can realize and recognize, the more chance we have to broaden and enlarge our fragile visions and discover common ground. We may find echoes of these colors in other people and in the natural and spiritual world around us. This is synchronicity.