labyrinth

I have longed for some time now to walk a labyrinth. It's my dream to someday own enough property to create a small one of my own, which I could walk every day if I wished.

This is one of my favorite collages, because of the rich colours and the bold graphic design. It's hard to beat red and green together.

blue flowers

I'm feeling a little better today. I'm a great believer in the power of positive thinking, so I'm taking advantage of this difficult time to put some of my beliefs into practice. A couple of my favorite e-newsletters are great inspirations for me. Check out The TUT Adventurers Club and Abraham-Hicks Publications. Both of them offer daily inspirational e-mails that I love.

This is another drawing from my afternoon with my niece and nephew. I think it's my favorite of the "abstract flowers" ones.

sunbird

I have an uneasy relationship with my faith - Christianity. I live for sacred music, but being an intelligent, educated woman, there are parts of the doctrine that - out of concern for my own sanity - I tend to block out of my mind every Sunday morning as I sit in church.

Still, I look to the faith for spiritual nourishment, and I'm always trying to reconcile myself with the symbol of Christ, and its meaning. My long-time interest in Jungian psychology tells me that every symbol lives in each of us. If I can't wrap my mind around the idea that a literal Christ died to atone for my sins, I can at least try to see the transformative power of the Christ-image in my own life.

These have been difficult weeks for me. Since my boyfriend and I broke up, I wander through my days with a low-grade ache in the centre of my chest. The colour seems washed out of everything. I'm restless, and I don't want to be alone with myself. I can't concentrate on my writing. Nothing seems worthwhile.

(And I just spent an ill-advised afternoon listening to Jann Arden. How much worse could my despair get?)

There is a MacKenzie-sized hole in my life right now, and it's all I can do to keep reminding myself that every end is a beginning, and new life will follow the death and decay of the old. I was sitting on my toilet in the dark just now, blowing my nose after a crying jag, when I had a sudden vision of Mary Magdalene sitting by the tomb, weeping.

I could imagine her pain - feel her despair. She'd already watched her teacher die on the cross; now she had lost his body. I heard her beg the gardener, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away."

And the gardener was Jesus. She didn't even recognize him.

How often do we mourn what is lost, not realizing it has been transformed, and stands right in front of us?

This collage is from 2005. The image came to me spontaneously - a crow flying towards the sun. I love crows - they are amazing, intelligent birds. One of my favorite Lieder is the Schubert song Die Krahe (The Crow), from the song cycle Die Winterreise (Winter's Journey). For many summers I was heartbroken at the disappearance of crows from my hometown of London, Ontario, due to the West Nile virus. (The crow population is now slowing increasing again.)

The man's face was cut from an issue of Runner's World magazine, so I know he is a runner, but have no idea what his name is. I liked the gold colour of his face, and thought he would make a good sun god.

gratitude

Former clients gave me a small journal when I moved away from my hometown. I decided to use it as a gratitude journal, although I keep forgetting to make entries in it.

This collage has bits of wrapping paper and a scrap of a pastel drawing. Sometimes I print out the gratitude lists on the computer and then paste them into the book as collage elements as well. Creating the book is a three-step process: I paste in random collage elements ahead of time, then write the gratitude lists day by day, then go back later and colour over the lists to finish each collage.

easter hangover

It's not a real hangover. I don't drink.

It's not even a chocolate hangover - I don't eat chocolate.

It's the feeling of letdown and restlessness after several days of intense spiritual and physical activity. We can visit the world of the numinous, but we don't live there. The symbols and rituals bring us into communion with the divine energy of the universe, but we can't hold onto the experience.

As I try to absorb everything I've been through since Thursday evening, I feel overwhelmed.

Happy Easter.

The drawing is one I made while colouring with my niece and nephew a few weekends ago. I love putting huge blobs of brilliant colour on paper; they were neatly colouring their colouring books. As I finished page after page of my blobs, I noticed a change in their attention. They pushed aside the colouring books and begged for some of my loose sheets of paper. Then they started making their own blobs of colour. I felt my work as a colouring anarchist was done.

i broke my bodum

It was sitting in my sink this morning, and I accidentally hit it while drying the dishes. My mother bought it for me from IKEA, and I treasured it because I used it every day to make my my herbal tea. Just checked online, and the closest IKEA is open this morning at 9:00 am. Gonna be there.

The drawing is from my art journal sometime in March. I paste collage elements on the blank pages of a book, several pages at a time, and then later go back and write, draw, and colour over the pages - usually with children's wax crayons. This page includes a scrap from a bill envelope, and a bunch of doodled circles in pencil. The embossed rectangles are the impressions from collaged papers on the reverse side of this page.

loss, and freedom

This post was originally published in one of my other blogs, an organized existence, which is about my life as a professional organizer.

I have frequent insomnia, and I often think up blog entries when I'm lying awake in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, many of those ideas have nothing to do with professional organizing, and then I realize I have no forum in which to share my nocturnal inspirations.

So I've started this blog as a repository of everything that won't fit in either of my other two blogs (the second one, tell it well, showcases my professional writing samples). I thought the following post would be a great place to start, since when I wrote it, I almost didn't post it to an organized existence - it's so personal.

The illustration is from one of my art journals, and it dovetails with the post because all of the collage elements have something to do with the Gilbert and Sullivan show, The Gondoliers, where my relationship with my ex-boyfriend began one year ago.

If you've read some of my earlier posts (look here, here, and here for some examples), you'll know that I encourage people to get in touch with their deepest dreams and desires. Sometimes it's not until we know what we truly want that we can make decisions about which direction to take in our lives.

The cyclical nature of life means that for every birth there is a death - but also for every death, there is a birth. It's no mistake that Christians, for example, celebrate Jesus' birth in the winter (when everything in nature seems to have died), or his death in the spring (when everything in nature seems to be coming back to life). When we live our lives in sync with these natural rhythms, the pain of loss can lose some of its sting.

My boyfriend and I just broke up. We remain great friends, and love each other deeply, but we are moving in different directions. For either of us to give up our dreams for the sake of the other would mean a loss of something so intrinsic to ourselves that it's unimaginable.

And yet I am almost paralyzed as I sit between two extremes: the pain of losing him, and the joy of finding myself.

I thought I knew what I wanted, but what if what I wanted isn't what I really want? (And I just went looking for some food to stuff into my mouth, which you KNOW can't be a good sign.)

Sometimes we can't know. Sometimes we're walking blind, and when we hold out our hand to find a wall or a piece of furniture to orient ourselves in the blackness, we hit instead a knife blade that slices deep.

But what if the blade cuts things not apart, but together?

I am in the first year of a kind of bodywork training called the Alexander Technique. Without getting too esoteric, the technique is about becoming aware of your habits of poor psycho-physical use, and replacing those habits with better use.

I've discovered that letting go of old habits and discovering something new is very frightening and disorienting. One of my instructor's favorite commands is to "not know."

"Don't KNOW," she intones with discouraging frequency as she works on me with her hands. (Discouraging only because it means that for the millionth time I've been trying too hard, and cutting myself off from true knowing in the process.)

"Don't know, don't know, don't know," I direct myself with fathomless panic inside my head, until suddenly her hands, in cooperation with my open mind, find new freedom and release within my body.

Don't know.

It reminds me of the Rainer Maria Rilke quote from Letters to a Young Poet, where Rilke says:

"...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

"Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.

"Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

Loss, and freedom. Perhaps deep down, they are really the same thing...