The One Sitting Across the Room

I am officially in my new year. According to the iChing I threw it will be one of a, “Difficult Beginning.” The very last of everything that I had at my studio, now my former studio, is in a heap in my garage. My easels, paint jars, tubes & cans, brushes, scrapers, boxes of tarps, stacks of papers, canvasses, and all manner of stuff that caught my creative fancy are piled high. All of my paintings are stored in a warm clean room at a friend’s home. Done. Waking up this morning I feel it in my body, know it is finished. The last weeks of 09 were consumed with the thoughts and emotions surrounding that which today, this very morning, is complete. Now what? That’s easy--BE with the void, BE with the space of nothingness. For over 6 years I’ve had this other interest, this place to work, away from home to attend to with all it’s concerns and possibilities, and now?

It isn’t that I don’t have ‘stuff’ to do . . . I’ve got the small mountain of stuff in the garage to sort, and the regular activities of normal life--whatever NORMAL is. I’ve got ideas about possibilities for the future, etc . . . Life goes on, and I go with it, and . . . something more is going on in me--a true break with the past. There’s that word--break--showing up again, and in January no less . . . a BREAK with the past. I said it in my thoughts on the trail yesterday and just saying that startled me! Last January I had the feelings of breaking, cracking, and on the 27th broke my wrist. Since then all manner of stuff in my life has broken and now, a year later, I sit separated from the carnage . . . It is as if the breaking away from habituated patterning in my primary relationship, in my work, in finances and friends sits across the room as another being looking back at me through time--a ghostly reminder of all that has washed away in the turbulent, hungry waters of 09.

On this side of the room I sit in 010 like a warrioress who has seen the length and breadth of the battle through to the very last. I’ve had scrapes and bruises, broken heart and bones and still, I am whole. I am more than whole, I am stronger than before. I look at the figure of 09 and see confusion, wavering determination, and flimsy, faulty structure. I don’t see any ill will or deceit surrounding her frame, but much embodied dross. Across the room I can almost hear the one inside who begged and pleaded with life--”Help me find liberation, wring this ballast from me. Please! I need to be free!” In great kindness the universe colluded and the great battleship Destroyer 09 moved into my harbor . . . Moved in and stayed for the duration with a seemingly endless supply of ammunition, firing round after round after round of demands for my very blood and attention.

The campaign wasn’t endless. I didn’t know it at the time, and I do now. There was an end to the warfare waged in and around me, an end to the devastations. The bones healed, the tears dried, and the piercing pain of loss softened into acceptance. The rooms that once held my work are now bare on this morning in my “Difficult Beginning.” Empty they may be, but not I. I am full and strong and whole, though all around me might suggest the opposite. I, like so many, know that all I really have access to in creating my life is, in the end, myself. We know it, and yet at times become hypnotized into thinking and believing it’s in the stuff of our lives. The truth is that we enter and exit the world alone, one person at a time on their singular journey. We ‘can’t’ do it alone, and at the same time only truly have access to life through our own. I find a bittersweet taste in these thoughts . . .

I used to ward off being alone at any cost. I was uncomfortable in my own skin. I developed a strategy of care-taking . . . By attending to other’s needs in place of my own I had the feeling of living a vitally alive and fulfilled life. I was actually burning cycles of my own energy to promote the lives of others . . . it was sacrifice--not a wholesome life strategy.

I have come to recognize the distinction between being alone and loneliness. The one I now find wholesome, life-supporting and delightful . . . the other? A distant memory that I see moving in and out of the face of the one across the room, a ghostly reminder questioning my absence, wanting me back. I smile and appreciate her for she offered up the opportunity to inhabit this day, the beginning, difficult or not . . .

That’s what this artist is thinking about today . . .