I struggled yesterday.
I struggled yesterday to move forward.
I struggled yesterday to choose where I needed to be when I looked at my "to-do" list and yet needed space to integrate what was rumbling within me. I am on a path of consciousness. That sounds so airy-fairy and I don't mean it to sound anything but clear and crisp so let me try this again.
One of my day-to-day companions is God. When I feel off-kilter, I open the window to God and poke my head out of that window, look up and do a "huh?" sort of thing. "What is up?" I ask. Sometimes I need sunglasses to see the light is so bright. Sometimes I need an umbrella. Sometimes I need a fog horn. Sometimes I need a windbreaker and sometimes I need waders to get through the bullsh*t piles I have created for myself.
Yesterday I leaned out the window with my "What?" and I got back, "Do what you need to do, that you said you would do, even if you don't particularly want to do it."
So I did.
I was later than I had hoped, but I got where I needed to be. I hadn't been to the Art and Spirituality Center since December when I lead a writing workshop there. I had missed the camaraderie there, I had missed the open ness of the other artists. I missed the way the light reflected on the stained glass. I missed what I felt when I painted there.
I didn't feel like talking when I arrived.
I picked up a palette and I chose three colors. Just three.
I said I chose three colors, but it wasn't me alone.
It was me and Marlena, my twenty-one-year-old daughter.
I don't mention her much these days. Many of my friends don't know she exists. Or existed. Marlena was born and died twenty-one years ago yesterday. She never lived outside my womb but she existed and for me, she exists in the present. Her birthday yesterday went unnoticed by most of the world. Today, I am fine with the "what is, is" aspect of her life and death."
Yesterday was more focused on remembering and creating from what is now.
Shortly after Marlena died, I would picture her conspiring with God to get her messages through to me. Her best collaboration with God was sending her little sister, Katherine, to me as a Christmas gift. Her pregnancy was a Mother's Day gift. She heard my tearful declaration-plea at her grave side. "I can't survive another Mother's Day without a baby!" Marlena and God decided to send me a positive pregnancy test the Friday before Mother's Day. When I woke up on Christmas Morning almost nine months later with my water breaking, I didn't recognize what it was at first. I was three weeks early and in denial.
I've gotten better at recognizing her living presence within and around me.
The three colors on my palette, for example. Teal, Fuschia and a peachy-color, not unlike the color her baby-skin would have had.
For the first time ever, I heard the paper as I hung it on the wall of the Art and Spirituality Center to paint on the impromptu easel. The paper sounded like thunder. As I affixed it to the wall, I heard an icy river flowing. I heard waves and wooshing. Through the thundering paper I intuitively heard, "Listen to the paint and the paper. Don't look at the paint and the paper."
I dipped the brush into paint and allowed it to go where it would.
I followed Divine and Daughterly instructions. Paint, sit down and write-listen on the
page.
I wrote:
"Get closer to the page and listen. Be fine with whatever the outcome is. Between painting sessions, gaze. Loosely. Move the paper. Listen to the wind-paint. Paint the wind. Listen to the waves-paint. Paint the waves. Hear the hush of the womb, universal in this world of sentience. The womb of you. The womb of her. The wombs that were. The womb of each woman, fertile or barren or absent wombed woman. This hush, hear it. Universal. Paint the hush."
I was standing in the dressing room at the Empty Space theater where I am preparing for tomorrow's opening night of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" when I received a text from Katherine, the Christmas Gift baby. I had shared with her how I missed Marlena and how I missed other people remembering. "Sometimes I feel like I am the only one who remembers her. That makes me sad for her."
Katherine's response was so wise. "Well the important thing is for you to remember her."
Katherine's womb joined the Universal Hush chorus as her words stroked my hair, my furrowed forehead, my nerves from her college dorm room three thousand miles away.
Divine and Daughterly instructions. Sit. Listen.
This morning I sat and uploaded photos from yesterday's painting session. There, on the screen, my divine and daughterly painting.
I noticed how purple appeared with the teal and the fuschia and how beautiful symbols were borne from the paint.
"Womb Dancers" was the title we gave to the painting, which I have chosen to leave unfinished, for now.
Such beautiful beginnings. Such awe-filled starting and continuing to come.
Divine and daughterly. Love.
Follow me on twitter: @JulieJordanScot
Recent Comments