Creativity brings healing.
Last week, I attended a dinner out with my husband’s coworkers. I was privileged to sit next to a woman who had been suffering the pains of a divorce and likewise the glory of figuring out how she would eventually flourish, how she would reinvent herself and thrive. We fervently agreed that creativity was the answer. Among other things, she wished to write about the idea of place, even potentially personifying a place and all that it sees.
I longed to share all of my wisdom, having had several divorces stacked up like a cairn entitled The Past. I did my best to just listen. I longed to tell her that her anger would pass, and that her anger was just keeping her alive right now. I knew better than to share those things. No one in divorce wants to hear advice they never sought.
Suffering makes for good stories.
If I am being completely honest though, I sort of wanted to be her. I had spent so much of my life in that murky, familiar place of loss, humiliation, rage, and darkness – like a soldier home from war, I struggle now to live in the Peace.
Today, after all, is Good. Simple. Healthy. Hopeful and largely Healed. Where is the story in that? What sorts of paintings will bubble up and pour from my right hand now? Is it possible to be this calm and create anything worth a damn?
Intensity electrifies, while calm often sleeps.
The soul longs for the deep wounds that prompts our fierce vision, our brooding voices. When the world sees only blue skies, though lovely, it seems flat in the face of a roiling storm.
How can I be the new Isa, knowing closure on chaos and horror, and still feel the glory of being alive? How can I have once surfed the tidal wave of my past and now be satisfied with the lull of floating upon a still lake? Like many artists, I am best in a crisis. Maybe this is why I live in a van 30 minutes from a town. When things are this good for so long, I am nearly lost.
