Life, Loss, and Little Me Under the Eternal Blue Sky

With all that this year has brought me, another big change is now presented to me since my last post. My living situation is changing and even though my dear friend and roommate of 13 years and I are parting ways in our living situation (I will miss the Will to my Grace, the Lucy to my Ethel and we’ll forever be friends), it is something I must embrace. It’s uncomfortable. It’s triggering loss and abandonment in me, and anxiety. Fears come like big waves at times and moments spark memories of the other losses over the course of this past year. Ouch, ouch, and… ouch.

Then again, there is hope. I have done this before, many times, in different guises. Somehow I am always okay.

And then again, perhaps this coming time of more space and more privacy and more quiet will be exactly what I need to move into the next phase of my art, deepen my spiritual work, and heal and create in ways I cannot yet imagine.

But when the sparks of fear come, I have to reach. I turn to music or art or nature. Any of these will lift me into a state of being and smallness and knowing that there is something so much greater than me carrying me through this lifetime. I do not believe in coincidences, however I do believe in free will. When the sparks come, I choose. Check in with my body first to see what I am physically up to because sometimes brain can’t think of details, or process and sometimes it needs rest. Sometimes blankness is best which is why music and art are easier than speech now. Most of the time. When the sparks come, I reach. Art museums, favorite nature walks, drawing, painting, guitar, singing in my own language, recording tracks on the cool Roland Quad Capture Douglas gifted me and was teaching me to use. I really miss his being in the world, so much more than I can say.

I am so small and this feeling under the big blue sky is the most helpful. That I am small. If I am small in the midst of this great big universe, then perhaps so are my challenges, at least for a while. Everything is temporary. Knowing that takes the sting away for just a bit. Then I reach again.

It's Okay to Be Sad, It's Okay to be Scared

A young, vibrantly creative woman of 28 sat in her hospital bed as a doctor who she later found out had no idea what he was doing was about to give her an unnecessary pacemaker and perform numerous unnecessary EPS procedures on her heart while she was fully awake. Her mother died less than a year earlier and her father, once caring but now aloof with grief, had just married one of her childhood friends. After the unnecessary pacemaker was installed, her left lung collapsed. Her grandmother who lived in another state, who she was very close to, was about to have open heart surgery and they spoke over the phone from their hospital beds. Her fiance, who didn’t drive, came to visit her every day by train. At least she had that connection. She had to stop working. She was also in the middle of a lawsuit where a public library banned several of her paintings the year before and when she challenged them, they canceled her show. Two years later she won the case in Federal Court and it set a precedent in the Eastern District of New York. But here she was, almost helpless not knowing what to do and so very sad for the losses in her life, and scared for her grandmother, and in need of support, and feeling so very alone. The sketchbook this drawing is in and these pastel drawings were her way to cope. That woman was me, in 1993. I am so strong and really see how strong I am when I think about all the things like this that I’ve been through and all the times when I’ve had to dig the deepest to find my inner core of strength, and I think f*uck yeah, I AM STRONG. But now…. so many years later, after strokes and other things….. some days I feel I just can’t do it anymore. I just cannot take one more thing. I love life so I will keep rising with every new day, every sunrise. But I just don’t know how some days to make my way.