An Unlikely Heroine

I have some rather good news. Another of my stories is to be published in the next Heroines anthology, due out in September.

This is both wonderful and sad, for I wrote the story nearly three years ago, back when I was still able to write. 

I am unable to write stories now.

I began writing creatively at the beginning of 2014, starting tentatively, not knowing how, yet gradually being drawn more and more to create characters and settings, and to see where they led me. I experienced, from 2013 to 2017, a time of wonder. I had increased (though still limited) energy, and this is what made it possible, yet it was the newness of what I was learning and experiencing that drove me onwards. It was a time of profusion. The possibilities of my life expanded, my imagination flourished, and I felt like I had found not only what I wanted to do, but something that I could do, despite having CFS.

Perhaps I was naive. Maybe things went to my head. I forgot that nothing is certain when chronic illness is involved. 

So, there are mixed feelings about the impending publication of my story. There is a sense of hope. If my story can be selected (again!) from more than 100 submissions, then surely that means I can write well, given the right circumstances. But there is also a sense of defeat, for I am not in control of the circumstances. I do not know when I will be able to write again.

I’m trapped in a great tangle of possibilities and limitations, trying to make sense of it all, and not having much success at present.

It’s hard work being the heroine of my own life, but I must trust that I will find a way to save myself, to keep on living as best I can, whether I can write or not. 

More Lost Days

A number of weeks ago I began a new painting, and was very much looking forward to spending time working on it. Then I came down with flu and was out of action for a couple of weeks (and I am still not entirely recovered). And now I am away from home, dog-sitting, so it will be some time before I can get back to my studio. 

I am watching movies, reading, going for walks, snuggling with my dog friend, and keeping warm on these chilly winter days; and I will probably remain quiet for a bit longer, though I do have some rather good news to share in time.

Happy solstice, whether you are celebrating it in winter or summer. 

Wise Words: To Know the Dark

For the first day of winter here in the southern hemisphere, this little poem seems apt. 

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

(Wendell Berry, New Collected Poems, Counterpoint: Berkley, 2012, p. 121)

The Lost Days

There are struggles with physical limitation in illness, the pain, weakness, and fatigue that so quickly erode our pride and aspirations and make simple tasks, even breathing, so difficult. But the pressures of these limitations call forth a deeper struggle which is ongoing within us but usually unconscious—that of the self in its efforts to be, to unfold and fulfill its purpose. 

~ Kat Duff (1)

* * *     

I’ve not been well for a number of weeks, and consequently I’ve barely set foot in my studio, let alone been able to work on anything. It’s strange how the onset of illness causes interests and aspirations to slip away to be replaced by apathy and meaninglessness. It’s painful. Yet for all its harshness, this lack of purpose is itself a self-protective message from the body, saying, You must rest.

I’ve rested and done very little. Still, there is a sense of loss at the days that have been consumed by illness, each day blurring into the next, such that there are few events to anchor memory on. It amazes me that autumn is almost over. Where has the time flown to?

It seems that I can trace the passage of the last few months through the paintings I have made. Creativity was beginning to flow more easily. To not create anything for weeks leaves an emptiness that begs to be filled somehow, but it brings with it an all-familiar stuckness. It took such effort to begin to create images, and now I have to begin yet again, not knowing what I am capable of.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés says: ‘Do your art. Generally a thing cannot freeze if it is moving. So move. Keep moving.’ (2) I think this is good advice. Yet how does it apply to someone with a chronic illness who needs to cease moving from time to time? It is all the more difficult to keep a creative practice alive when there are often long periods of not working that must be endured, and a deep sense of doubt that returns with every retreat from activity. I become scared that I will never have a good idea, never be inspired. I descend into a depression that makes me wonder if I will ever be creative again. 

It’s therefore just as strange that when I begin to return to some kind of wellness—meagre though it may be—I feel what I can only describe as a sense of euphoria. Joy begins to surge tentatively through my veins. I can’t say where it comes from, for the current state of the world still angers and upsets me, so it feels a little incongruous. I suppose it must be the energy of life, for life always wants to live, even when it seems an impossibility.  

So, I’m spending time in my studio once more, taking some cautious steps back into art-making. I trust that work will emerge again soon.

To be honest, though, I haven’t quite done nothing recently. I’ve knitted one beanie in readiness for the fast-approaching winter, and am working on a second. 

And I have begun reading a book that I hope will bring me some inspiration—Susan Griffin’s account of her own experience of illness, What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows. As she says, ‘the truth is that illness … uncovers hidden reserves of strength.’ (3) 

I suppose that is why I continue on, trying to make up for the lost days, and saving what inspiration I can for the next fallow time I will endure.

References

1. Kat Duff, The Alchemy of Illness, Bell Tower: New York, 1993, p. 71

2. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman, Rider: London, 1992, p. 183

3. Susan Griffin, What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows, HarperSanFrancisco: New York, 1999, p. 43

An Ode to Brain Fog

I can’t remember where I put my mind 

what thought I was last thinking 

left unfinished, open-ended 

dangling 

over the edge of 

nothing

I can’t remember what it feels like to be 

fully awake and alive 

knowing there is a path to follow 

scattered with experiences and emotions

There are a great many things I can’t recall 

or just don’t care to acknowledge at all

The spark’s gone out and I can’t see a thing

My life’s gone dim and I don’t know when I’ll live again

But life’s a funny thing for it just keeps going 

even when the going’s rough 

because at the core of it there is 

something

(A little seed of defiance?)

There must be a reason for this fog 

for the dimming of mind 

for the enclosure of self into 

a small space 

all fuzzy round the edges

I don’t understand 

but I let things be

Meinrad Craighead 1936–2019

Today I learned of the death of the artist-mystic Meinrad Craighead at the age of 83.

Born Charlene Marie Craighead in 1936 in Arkansas, she lived a remarkable life, teaching art in Albuquerque, then Italy and Spain, before spending fourteen years as a Benedictine nun in Stanbrook Abbey in England. It was there that she took the name Meinrad, after her mother’s great uncle, who had been a monk in Switzerland. (He is said to cure people.) In 1983 she returned to the US, settling near the Rio Grande in Albuquerque. 

The Moons of the Vernal Equinox (from The Litany of the Great River, 1991) 

It is only in the past year or so that I have discovered Meinrad’s art, and watched the short videos made by Amy Kellum, Praying with Images and God Got Bigger, which I know I will continue to return to whenever I am feeling particularly uninspired. They do not fail to invigorate me, to show me what is possible, to make me want to keep seeking, keep trying, to be receptive and ready, and to create from that vast space of openness.

Though she seemed a small, unassuming woman, she was intimately connected with the wild, with the spirits of animals and the land around her, and the often overwhelming nature of God the Mother, who is certainly not just sweetness and light. Her work is beautiful, strange, and sometimes confronting in it’s depiction of birth and death, dream and transformation. It links spirit, woman and nature into a seamless weave of divine immanence.

Crow Mother Over the Rio Grande (from The Litany of the Great River, 1991)

What I also love about Meinrad was that her studio was a shrine, and her art practice was ritual. Her approach to her work, as a sacred calling, as a communication with the many spirits she was in contact with, is an inspiration. 

She wrote:

My personal vision of God the Mother, incarnated in my mother and her mother, gave me, from childhood, the clearest certainty of woman as the truer image of Divine Spirit. Because she was a force living within me, she was more real, more powerful than the remote Fathergod I was educated to have faith in. I believed in her because I experienced her.

…

I draw and pain from my own myth of personal origin. Each painting I make begins from some deep source where my mother and and grandmother, and all my fore-mothers, still live; it is as if the line moving from pen or brush coils back to the original Matrix. Sometimes I feel like a cauldron of ripening images where memories turn into faces and emerge from my vessel. So my creative life is itself an image of God the Mother and her unbroken story of emergence in our lives. (From the introduction to Meinrad Craighead, The Mother’s Songs: Images of God the Mother, Paulist Press: Mahwah, New Jersey, 1986)

I feel so lucky that I have two of her books (which are mostly out of print and difficult to find). I will treasure them and remember Meinrad every time I return to their pages for inspiration and guidance.

Farewell, Meinrad. Journey well on the next stage of your being. 

Throne (from The Mother's Songs: Images of God the Mother, 1986)

Wise Words: The Sacred Image

We cannot know or even imagine the nature of the consciousness which is the universe. All we can do is formulate an image of what we conceive as divine in relation to the limitations of our own consciousness. We do not know how or when the goddess-or-god image first arose, whether from dreaming sleep or from waking vision. All that can be said is that the experience of divinity exists in the soul and that the soul insists on making an image of it because, through that image, it feels itself related to something greater than itself. The image is sacred, for it is this above all that binds that part of the psyche incarnated in time and space to the unseen dimension that enfolds it.

(Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, Arkana: London, 1991, p. 484)

Rainmaker

Rain has fallen recently, out west in the drought-stricken places, and the early weeks of autumn in the mountains have been cool and damp. 

From thoughts of rain has come my latest work of art: Rainmaker. 

Rainmaker, watercolours on gesso prepared paper (2019)

As I slowly read The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas recently, two images of Neolithic figurines stood out and combined to form a vision of blue and watery life-giving. The first is a masked figure—I love her face!—from southern Italy (c. 5300 BC); the second is a figure with streams flowing down her body, from north-east Hungary (c. 5000 BC).

 

In my own way, I united these figures, and included: meanders, which symbolise water and the Bird Goddess; Snake, as life force (amongst a host of other meanings); tri-lines/the number three, which represent totality, abundance, triple sources and triple springs, along with being associated with the birth/life-giving functions of the Goddess; and the open mouth as the Divine Source.

As Gimbutas writes, ‘the realm of the Goddess is the mythic watery sphere’ (p. 25) and ‘The Bird Goddess was the Source and Dispenser of life-giving moisture’ (p. 29). 

This work did present some challenges. I had to discover how she wanted to be depicted, which meant some exploratory drawings; and then I needed to work out how to paint her, which was something of an adventure in itself. In the end, I’m so happy with how she has turned out. 

May rain continue to fall where it is needed, and the wellspring never run dry.

Whence She Grew

It took three attempts to birth this image, but here she is.

My first attempt was short-sighted, for I quickly realised that, as the snakes and tree roots are quite stylised, the tree should be so too. I rethought things, came up with a new drawing, and began painting again. However, I did not prepare for the second attempt with the same sequence of colours that I used on the first, and was not happy with the result. So, with as much patience as I could muster, I began yet again …

This is, perhaps, a valuable lesson. I’m often so eager to be working on something that I have a tendency to rush into an idea without thinking it through sufficiently. From now on I’ll try to slow down.