Conflagration © 2012 Jane Waterman
This picture is not what I thought I was feeling. When I reach for the brush, real or virtual, I’m never sure what will appear.
While my physical self feels more like a grey cinder, when I look at this painting, I wonder if that cinder is carried aloft on the conflagration.
Facing fire, I’m awed not only by its life and dynamics – I’m amazed that somewhere beneath this life is in me.
Time for this cinder to float to the stars.
Blessings,
Jane
Yesterday morning I felt grounded. I observed that I had moved to give up my fear of falling. I had taken a step toward mastering the shifting ground of my past.
By the evening, the world had fallen down. Pain and self-doubt arose – the nagging fear that something was creeping up on me from that aforesaid past.
In truth, I said what I felt. I meant what I thought. I used my voice.
I worked during the night. I was pleased with the work I got done. Today I paid for it, and the sleep deprivation gave me the worst nightmare I’ve ever had in my life.
Life with an autoimmune disease is a constant game of give and take back.
Yesterday morning I observed that I was okay with the impermanence of the experience of life. That I had begun to appreciate the Buddhist concept of suffering caused by grasping and aversion.
Tonight, I still stand by that. The pain of the day has faded to manageable levels. I sat for a while this evening and created. All is good in my world.
No matter what we go through in this life, this too, shall pass.
Blessings,
Jane
Creation © 2012 Jane Waterman
This is the colour of my imagination before it was asked to behave itself, take a seat, and sit up straight. These are the colours I feel most at home in. Anyone who sets foot in our house will attest to that. This is experimentation with Artrage, my favourite computer painting software. I’m playing with colour (obviously) and technique. Just scratching the surface of the dozens of virtual mediums and tools it possesses.
Something about the brushstrokes makes me think of a late William Turner, although I’m sure the colour would make Turner ill. I find myself thinking back to art in high school, and my meagre exposure to his work: fog and steam, trains and boats, on fire in the sunset. I have so much to learn, but it’s been so long since I’ve picked up a brush, virtual or otherwise. I must grant myself permission to be totally mediocre.
I feel a buzz from the act of creation – rioting colours – hints of clouds, sunlight, reflections. It makes my mind sing.
I need to do this more often. We all do.
What act of creation makes your mind sing?
Blessings,
Jane
Balance © 2012 Jane Waterman
I sit around making pictures at 2am in the morning because I’m no good with balance. I’m okay with that, sort of. When you work around an autoimmune disease, and work around the stuff that is as deeply entrenched in the mind as the body, I suppose anything feels like an achievement some days.
This morning, due to pushing myself too much, I was pretty shaky. In fact, I had to meet the challenge lying down. I started my day later, accelerated, trying to remember to cram eating, taking meds, working and finding my cell phone into an hour or two.
I then took an hour off to listen to a webinar on photography. Amazing how afterwards I felt an inordinate amount of guilt because I’d been “slacking off” while the “normal” work world is ticking over. I’m sure even the normal people would have grabbed the chance, if not for a webinar, for some other guilty pleasure.
I’ve been thinking about balance a lot lately, and how much I want it (so taking an hour for me doesn’t seem like a reason for guilt) and yet how reaching for it is exhausting.
Some days you just have to take life as it is, messy, arms flailing, and be happy that you got to squeeze any of these things in, much less sit down at the end of the day to write about it.
I guess balance is what happens when you let life slosh around in some kind of ungainly rhythm.
Blessings,
Jane
A Storm Comes © 2012 Jane Waterman
I am the part of me I can’t accept. I think of dark things. I am twenty-five years old. I live behind closed doors, afraid of who might come to call, afraid that I will have to speak. Sometimes when I go outside. I cross the road so I don’t have to talk to people. I walk on the pavement, but I’m anything but grounded. I am the child who cried wolf, but that’s not so endearing for someone in the midlife of their twenties. One day I started taking a pill and my life started unravelling. You are from the future, can you tell me why?
I see you, I hear you. You are young and blooming. You are not all the dark things you feel. You just forgot your dreams.
Dreams are the province of the insane. Can you see a future for those who dream and write and create? Those who live in the confines of their head?
I can. Some day you will learn to step onto the shore, other days you will swim the deeps bravely, aware of the currents pulling at the hem of your dress.
My dress – it’s too old fashioned. I like it, but I’m like no one else I know. Some call me weird. I like feeling thin and invisible. I hate standing out. Sometimes I talk or laugh too loud.
One day you’ll find it’s safe to raise your voice – to speak with confidence, clarity, love and compassion. You will look back on yourself as you are and see you aren’t mentally ill. You are different. You have magic in the corners of your mind, visions of things that the ordinary refuse to see.
I am young and bleeding, but it is all on the inside. No one can see how it feels to be me. The doctors give me medications that change my mind, that make my inner world thick, as though packed with cotton wool – although I want to say steel wool. Sometimes the doctors pull on the threads, so sharp, and lacerate my mind. I wish I could talk.
Why not talk of the things you feel?
I’m tired.
Can you talk a little longer?
I used to like going to the library, getting books that were about people like me. I would walk by the sea, the grey clouds skimming over the bay. I would walk for hours. I would talk to no one.
What was the bay like?
It was beautiful. I loved it when it was grey the most. It was like the subterranean cavern in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Walking there, I imagined strange electricities in the sky, and monsters beneath the surface of my subconscious. I read about those who saw the same things and survived. I wondered if I could too.
You can.
I’m on a raft on the water. I seem to be lost as the storm comes. Even the seagulls are afraid to fly in these skies. I’m trying to catch my thoughts as they toss in the air. I feel afraid. Angry. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me! I had dreams, I had visions! And now I hear the steps in the hall: the nurse comes to see if I’ve taken the meds that will dull my thoughts. It wasn’t so long, but those few weeks echo on forever. The doctors and nurses shamed me, and for a while I became part of the province of the forgotten. I wanted to be happy. Not this darkness – the darkness that makes loved ones look away. What do they see in me that makes them afraid? I wish I knew, so I could stop their fear. I’m just me.
Just me – someday, people will love you. More importantly, some day, you will start to love yourself.
When? It seems to take forever.
It will happen. Feel me reaching over the years, holding your hand, walking silently on the beach beside you, seeing all you see, hearing all you see. Seeing the grey clouds, the green water clouded with salt and sand, the gulls watching you with a steely eye. This is just part of the journey.
Sometime you will have to leave. I’ll still be here.
I’ll never let you go.
Blessings,
Jane
Purple Heart © 2012 Jane Waterman
Today was a day of contrasts, and this recent computer painting sums it up – the grieving heart surrounded by the energy of the new, the authentic, and the real. Where ‘real’ stands for anything I believe in, including the beautiful dreamer, and her right to lose herself in visions in her own sacred time and place.
We started the morning with a meditation class in the company of a few, but treasured souls. Although my body tends to be unforgiving and the seated pose sometimes causes great pain, I’m learning better to be with the pain and observe it. For a while, I even shared an ancestral memory of sitting with the Buddha under the bodhi tree, and had a glimpse of the enlightenment he experienced. I know this enlightenment is everyone’s birthright, and I feel patient waiting for it to burst open within my soul.
I continue to find interactions with certain people in my life confounding, and while this causes some of the hurt at my core, I find it easier to feel compassion – for those who have unwittingly disappointed me – and for myself and the feelings of hurt. I learn to observe them and let them go. It’s not easy, and it takes repeated practice, but I realize that as my expectations and needs of others lead to disappointment, so too, do I unwittingly disappoint others.
This world encourages, as Kabat-Zinn’s book title suggested “Full Catastrophe Living”. We rush around, losing our sense of connection and community in the “monkey mind” sphere of to-do lists, achievements, comparisons, and inevitable failures. Meditation gives one the courage to slow down, to blur that riot of activity into something more comprehensible, where we see that much of our own suffering is a result of western living.
When I think on some of my greatest times of suffering in life, those sufferings were often compounded as a result of rushing. That time in 1996 when I fell and broke my arm, shortly after my divorce and the death of my father come to mind. I was rushing for a train, and tripped on the most imperceptible rise in the cracks between the pavement. How much extra suffering would we save ourselves if we slowed down a little?
That’s not to say that vigorous action is bad. There are times when quick action can save others and save ourselves. However, there are times when moving slowly, pausing to observe and honour our feelings with compassion is preferable to pushing those feelings down and letting them erode us from the inside. It takes time and faith to heal, and courage to forgive.
Take time to slow down, to forgive others, and most importantly, forgive yourself first.
Blessings,
Jane
Drowned World © 2012 Jane Waterman
Today was a tough day… one of those days when the energy is just not there. I had a bad night with little sleep, which didn’t help. Then I got up and did some work in the morning, but headed back to bed after and slept until 3pm. The pain wasn’t acute today, but it was that damned persistent ache in my kidney. I got depressed. In retrospect, I’m lucky I’ve come so far that I can go so often without focussing on that ever-present pain. It never goes away, but varies between a 3 to 8 out of 10. I have a couple of 9 or 10 times, but luckily they don’t seem to stay more than a few hours. I know I slept through some of the pain today, but I don’t feel like I totally dissociated from it. It’s a small victory, but it is one.
I hate waking up so late. It is so against the work ethic my parents instilled in me, and one I’ve lived by for so many years until the last year or so. I actually now let myself go to bed sometimes on days like this, when my body is drained elementally. It’s a double-edged sword though. In my undergrad days, I’d usually be in bed by 9 or 10pm, getting up at 4am or thereabouts to help Mum walk the dog, bake in the shop, do my homework, whatever. It seemed so easy. Now, while I can still get up at those times, it’s usually a couple of hours before I have to collapse again. The best part of the day is the night, the twilight before dawn. When everything is cold and crisp, and stars are the only illumination. I think of how we used to walk with Mum on the clifftops at 4am with this goofy great dane we couldn’t take out any other time. We were house-sitting, and the dog came with the house.
Mum and I looked for the return of Halley’s comet; we saw satellites, we saw the Southern Cross and the two pointers, and a range of constellations dancing around the southern celestial pole. I haven’t seen many of those constellations for 12 years, with the exception of a phone app that shows sky maps. Sometimes I point it in the direction of the Southern Cross and remember when I first became aware of it at 10 years old, out stargazing with my much-loved brother.
Today the rain came. It began to melt the snow. I know I can’t wish for more – I couldn’t live in the prairies with that ever present cold. Maybe it’s a moot point, when I go out so seldom. I don’t have to shovel snow often. The snow felt just right to me. A little bit of magic over the slumbering garden. I couldn’t ask for more.
Mae watched the rain run over the drowned world, and in a trick of light, it looks like one of the little juncos is trapped in the lantern we fill with seed. The rain washed away and all is well – the bird is not trapped. Mae loves the birds and the wild things, like her mother. One day I’ll write a book about how they see things. When I read Opal Whitely’s works, it reminds me so often of my friend Maire, and her daughter, Mae.
I feel a little sadness though, as the drowned world washes away. I was weak and laid down again. I dreamed a little, of some utopian world where I belonged to a group of drifters. We escaped on bicycles we’d put together. I awoke to on my pillow again, hearing water dripping from the leaking gutter, snow overflowing like a waterfall.
I took my blue mood and brought it to the computer to paint this picture. The act of creating and writing is helpful. I still feel the sadness. I feel like I can even cry a bit, which is a release.
I suppose sometimes we need a drowned world to realize when we are submerged and have to come up for air.
Blessings,
Jane
Snow Labyrinth © 2012 Jane Waterman
I made a snow labyrinth in our garden today, in too-thin boots, with my bare arms to the world, while starlings, juncos and red-winged blackbirds chittered in the trees, waiting for me to relinquish their frozen world again.
It wasn’t my initial design. I was just taking scraps to the compost, observing how the trails of the dogs through the snow were rather the opposite of desire lines. They were more like the random walk theories, heard somewhere in a physics lecture room a lifetime ago, embodied. My eyes followed the trails across the snow to different corners, and saw the tiny scratch marks of the birds foraging, as I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, the scrap bin in my hand. I put it down.
Once the decision was made, my thoughts turned to symmetry, measurements, designs. I immediately threw those thoughts out. I started to walk. Walking a labyrinth in snow is not so easy, especially when you’re making it with your feet. I walked in ever shrinking circles, hugging the inside of the two furrowed path of my tracks, turning each time I reached my virtual entry.
Awareness of the birds slowly diminished as I walked the snow labyrinth, as I approached the centre, making a little flourish with the last of the snow left me, as I turned down the space I’d left to the entry. I walked out, back to the garden, with my bare arms, birds calling, the sky that luminous grey colour that suggests something magical might happen.
I returned to the steps, picked up the scrap bin, then went to the deck and looked down on our labyrinth. It’s amazing what you can create when you stop obsessing and let things create themselves. I stayed a little longer, aware of the urgent chatter of the birds to return.
I went inside, and the dogs, fascinated by my wanderings wanted to go out. The first to reach the labyrinth charged straight through the entry, followed it for half a circuit, then charged joyously off into the snow.
Today I walked the first labyrinth in our garden. It will not be the last.
Blessings,
Jane
P.S. Clare was an old friend who left this world many years ago, taking with her the dreams of the labyrinth. I feel it is through her that these dreams are returning once more.
Night Light © 2012 Jane Waterman
Yesterday went by in a bit of a blur. I lay down with the thought I hadn’t written yet. So far I’ve been able to get up and correct that, sometimes by waking up as is customary at some small hour of the night. But that didn’t happen.
Rather than beat myself over my failure to keep my daily run going, I figured I’d make up for it tomorrow by writing two. So here I am.
I did take this picture yesterday evening, however, as the icy blue twilight stole over the fresh snow. It amazes me how the fallen snow really does have facets – tiny jewels glimmering at random intervals over the snow. You’d almost expect the Queen of Narnia to appear.
The garden is sleeping under the snow, but I know that regardless of the cold (a chill compared to our prairie neighbours) the spring will bring bulbs flowering and the knowledge as Dickon (in the Secret Garden) once confided, that all was “wick” within: green and full of life beneath the dry shell the garden presents to the world.
That’s how it is for people too. Not necessarily in the spring, as I’ve already intimated. The sun is not my friend, unless we are talking about the distant star of my winter dreaming. The analogy holds up the same though. One day some people wake up, discard the husks of their old self, and show the world what lay hidden beneath. And like Mistress Mary of the book, some people can hardly believe that its possible, until one day we find ourselves dancing and singing and smiling, as if that other self was but a distant acquaintance.
Like the snowdrops and tulips under the snow, so too, I wait, all the time growing and waiting for my opportunity to return to life again.
Blessings,
Jane
Well there’s a way… and there’s a will. I just have to make these two possibilities collide. I just spent some time reading about the experiences of self-published e-book authors, and there doesn’t look much of a down-side to it. Fortunately between me and my wife we have all the requisite skills to put the books together. Looking over Kindle Direct Publishing (or KDP as it seems to be known by those in the know), it looks straightforward to put it all together, upload it to the marketplace (currently considered #1 in the world), and sell something. The chance of earning a 70% royalty (unheard of in the old days of paper publishing) is also a startling call to action.
That it’s that straightforward puts the urgency into my usual wallowing of self-doubt and ability to drift far from presence in the moment.
The answer is clear. Write. That’s what I’ve been aiming for with these daily entries. Some days it still seems mechanical, as my brain crawl (not flies) to the range of “tasks that must be done”. One day, I’ll practice not only writing but flying. Flying blind, I’ll probably crash to earth a few times. I’m prepared to get up and dust myself off to make this work.
Today was a day of tasks – not so much of writing or art practice. I got a little done, which was good. Tomorrow I must aim for more.
Blessings,
Jane
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