“In the early days after our daughter left us, I used to sit on the floor with a big white chart paper in front of me and five huge cans of paint around me – red, green, yellow, white and black. I dipped both my hands in the paint one can and placed them on the paper. Repeated the same with the next one and then the next. No pattern. No shape. No sense. Doing something that did not make sense, made sense at the time. My unnamable, undecipherable, incomprehensible sadness and bewilderment wanted to become visible. How it looked did not matter. That something buried deep inside found a way to be seen mattered.”
A stack of multicolored charts still occupies a corner in her study. As she shows me around her house, my friend looks at that pile with a smile. “These things saved my life” she says thankfully.
In this year, I wish that you find your own unique ways to be fully expressed. It’s not important to understand the thing. It can be what it is as long as it helps your body connect with the underlying emotions and move in harmony with them. It’s not important for it to produce something of value or something pretty. It can be exactly what it is as long as it helps you be in tune with yourself. It’s not important that someone else sees it and appreciates it, it can be the most private, natural thing that comes to you from within.
In this year, I wish you sing your song, not because you have an answer but because the tune inside you wants to be hummed. I wish you write your words as those words can come from you, and you alone. I wish you create that garden, draw that sketch, recite that poem, walk along that river, click those photos, take that trip and give those hugs that only you can.
In this year, I wish you find the space and the people you need to enable you to open and express yourself, knowing you will not be judged, no matter what. You will be celebrated for being exactly who you are.
What a gift that would be, for you and the whole world!
(Photo: Ikebana – September 2024)