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Move Through is a kind of "map" of a journey through pain and feeling lost to grace and finding my center again.
Move Through - front: I created this art image while on a working prayer & art retreat in October 2005, and I literally felt sick with all the anguish of grief and frustration of the difficult life of artist and spiritual director. I found a five-year old small color study scrap from the first Redemption Series piece, called Pain, and it became a perfect centerpiece to describe my feelings. I sketched in ink and added it to another background scrap left over from the creation of Tunnel Story #1.
Move Through - inside: If you were to poke around at this art and spends some time with it, you'd discover that the pain image opens like a door, but hinged on the "wrong side" so it's harder to find the opening. I feel this way about entering grief or frustration-- I have to be willing to sit with it and feel around in prayer for a hidden opening. On the inside of the door flap, I've written out my complaints and fears on slips of parchment that can slide in and out and be replaced. See detail 1. I have a thousand blocks and fears that come in and out! But there's more. Once again, if you were to look closely at the darkest place inside this image, you would find a tiny hole and some spider-web like threads leading into it, barely visible. See detail 2. This monofilament thread glistens to represent the glimmers of hope and release that naming the darkness and fears begins to open up. If I follow these whisps or whispers in the prayer, something begins to turn inside out and to change.
Move through - back: I pretend to go through that tiny hole, following the tiny threads, and find a whole backside to what I thought was only grief. The blue flame or smoke represents the Spirit that transforms suffering. The poem here-- see detail-- represents my actual experience on that retreat-- I walked down to the ocean beach when I felt most anxious and alone, and a sighting of pelicans cruising across the waves caught my eye and changed my heart. I saw the larger view of the world and my pain as a part of a bigger pattern of migration and seasons. I could move through to another place through these fears and this pain to a new time in my life. So the pelicans literally emptied me of my fears and frustration. Then, as I left the beach to walk back to the retreat house, a small brown wren followed me through the bushes and almost landed on my arm. In an instant I felt joy filling the emptied places. I'm completely in love with birds, and I cannot resist their luminosity.
While birds certainly don't erase pain or difficult circumstances, sometimes sightings of Holy creation or God in motion capture my imagination and remind me of a larger perspective. I am lifted from the mire of self-pity and the prison of endless questions and pointless fear. This is healing, and this is grace. |
