Living a Fairy Tale. Embracing the Slide.

With the drama of all my recent posts about cancer and toxic air, it’s time for me to blog a happy tale. One that encourages you to pay attention to the whispers and follow where inspiration leads.

There is a fun, “spooky” story behind this picture of comp book and pen. If you know me at all, you know I like to write. If you know me really well, you know I have to write. Writing helps me maintain perspective, keep my sense of humor, gain clarity, and stay close to the guidance that gets me through this messy life with some degree of grace.

My favorite time to set pen in motion is in the morning during my quiet time, a daily ritual of contemplation, prayer, and reading that sets the tone for my day before the rest of the world does. It was in one of those quiet times that I was given the vision of two women sitting on a hill, silhouetted by a gorgeous sunset. I had the sense that one of the women was older and wiser, perhaps even an angel, when I heard her speak these words.

“Some might say this was a story told to me by a woman mad with grief, but to sit in her presence was compelling; the more she spoke, the more I was drawn in by a desire to believe that what she told me could be so.”

“Wow. What a great lead in for a movie,” I thought, as I took in the scene before me.

“Write that down,” something inside me prompted.

Cut And Paste Beyond Breast Cancer. When Art Heals.

Stitched and stretched. That’s what I’ve titled this piece because that’s what breast cancer ushered in with every decision I had to make. Cut it. Stitch it. Now, stretch it beyond anything recognizable as you.

Life flew apart like confetti without a party. Not unlike my private-moment, mixed medium attempts at depicting this most bizarre journey. (And so shortly after losing Ray to cancer.) Countless bits and pieces of paper – glued, splattered, pealed back up, and reassembled with the best of intentions – were tossed in the trashcan next to me because they did not fit the picture as I had imagined.

The writer-me has freely spoken about her journey with breast cancer. The artist-me had not taken her shot at it. Quite frankly, she couldn’t get the writer to shut up long enough for the artist to quietly seat herself in the studio and ask, “How do you heal through this with art – not words?”

Healing Art, Mixed Media, and Paper Flowers.

I saw the vision of a woman. She coaxed me into the studio after these words popped onto the page of my journal one morning.

“He gave her paper flowers,
because he knew that she loved words.
Wax-pressed intent upon her heart,
that his voice within be heard.”

I thought this piece of art was finished when I framed and entered it in last year’s Artful Harvest show, hosted by my local art guild. Since then, she’s been hanging on a wall adjacent to my computer area. I walk by her every day.

She quietly holds space for me, like one of those tent cards that reserve your seat at a banquet table, waiting for me to venture back into the studio. Time in the studio, that once was Ray’s, comes with hurdles. It’s that grace and grief thing, creating a kind of chaos in my heart, healing through a cosmic codependency with my creative compadre, now on the other side of the veil after losing his fight with cancer. Expressing my creativity looks vastly different now as I work to heal beyond not only losing him, but also losing a breast to cancer just five months after his departure.