This morning I created the most amazing tile.  The strokes flowed from my pen with ease, and I immediately fell into the meditative zone that I love about the Zentangle Method.

I have had some ideas/conflicts/questions brewing in the back of my mind for a while, and  sitting in the cool morning air, I lost myself in the strokes of ink on my paper tile.  I found clarity for a few things that were bothering me. I resolved an issue by just letting it rest as I gave myself permission to really focus on the tangles I drew.  I could almost feel the worries disappear little by little as the long strokes of the Fescu tangle ended in a seeded punctuation of resolution.  It seemed as if the structure of another item on my mind found its shape as I filled my string with the woven shapes of Keeko.

This little piece of art is not beautiful because I agonized over the composition, nor because I wanted to post something as visually stunning as the overwhelming number of images that come through my social media feeds every day.  This little tile will be added to my ever growing collection of tiles and only I will know how really beautiful the lines, dots and curves are, because of how I was able to find a bit of relaxation, mindfulness, peace and resolution.

This feeling is what I love about Zentangle. Occasionally there are some stunning visual results, and that is certainly what attracts a lot of people to the art form. It is so much harder to explain the feeling you can get from approaching Zentangle as a process, focused on each stroke and giving yourself permission to not worry about the outcome.