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I coloured in today and it was hard…not because the image was complex but because to colour in my own images means I am taken inside to the places I was at when I drew the image. I guess it it probably like that when authors read their memoirs aloud or a musician plays music they wrote during emotionally intense periods of their life. The image is one I call crossing over. About the idea of movement and following and being in a new place. I guess it is that we always assume a new place will feel better than the old one.
On my desk I have a statement I wrote in my diary that I have not yet explored with image. It says: ‘Life doesn’t happen to my head or in my head, it (my head) is simply where I record that time has passed with memories.’ Life is simply an experience we turn into communication because we seem to be obsessed with the sharing of it like a news report and in this day and age that seems to mean on electronic media and all over the place. Being that humans are obsessed equally with words as the idea that the brain must be in constant conversation with itself or someone else we so often find that we spend more time talking about ourselves and others and their lives rather than being present with another in their life.

Well life happened in 2013, when I drew that image and before it and after it. Earlier in that year my second grand-daughter was born, a beautiful and gentle being different to her sister but equally loved and all shiny and new. She died a month later. Her presence as memory and emotion did not but our chance to know her as a person in our lives stopped suddenly and painfully. It was a seminal moment in time, a watershed at which much was evaluated and a moving in a different direction happened. So much became unimportant and so much more became deeply apparent. The drawing of the crossing over lady came as I began to be able to breathe without feeling like my heart was splitting,  my chest could expand broadly and a tear didn’t fall without permission.

I was at this place of being in the middle of somewhere that was the same but different and the effect of beauty was deep and exquisite somedays and others like stabbing at the side of a steep cliff  to hold on before pulling upward to the top…if I could grip it hard enough I would find the top. This life happened in my heart of emotions (and lets not get all clinical, it is as it feels in my body to say this) and found its way as images and sounds, smells and sensations in my memory. Words trigger it. A traffic jam in a parking garbage took me entirely back to the moment in time in a paediatric ICU singing a Barney the dinosaur song and feeling so much it  wasn’t possible to feel.

Words defy that moment. All the moments of that time. Sadness robbed the joy of its place for a while. Silly comments that wanted to pigeonhole me into a process of grief when really it is a life of being touched by the wonderful and horrible and all in between. People I know were talking of someone they know and I met briefly, whose son is in a similar room and they, the parents are waiting. I couldn’t stay in their conversation. I know that place. There are no words to be spoken about how awful it must be for them and how sad that it is happening at Christmas (there is no good time for that place). It is alone and yet there are people all around. I was angry at the words now. I was hurt at the words now. I walked in that space again. I wanted to be held in my sadness and cry a little but I know that it was not there when it happened nor was it there the other day that sense of comfort and safe for this vulnerable place to be for me. It is what it is….   It has an impact for me, but it is in me.

I have never been angry that my grand baby died. Sad, deeply and forever sad but never angry. I just in that picture wanted to breathe and keep moving. I know that life can hold that feeling it just has to live, I drew to hold that thing that happened and I drew to remember and mostly I drew to give my heart a voice.

Crossing over is about me not her. It is about me living and seeking to be in the place where I am: to know all the emotions of life and find a way to walk in them all. This morning I was talking with  Big Sister of she who is in the stars. Big sister was sad because even at two when her sister passed life was recorded as memory for her. She misses her sister and remembers how small and cute she was. Big sister could barely say her name  at the time. She was confused for a long time about where her sister was. She is in the stars. Big Sister drew a map for the man on the bike that delivers the letters so he would know where to take her card some time back in the same way she drew a map for Santa about where to leave the presents last year for herself.

Anyway Big Sister was sad and we were talking about how sad will always be a little bit there but happy can be there too. Inside she could make a beautiful box and tie it with a bow to keep her little sister feelings in and sometimes she can look inside and sometimes it is ok if she doesn’t, she always loves her…. Funny this picture is the one she chose to colour in her book while we were waiting for lunch in the coffee shop, after we had been talking. Big Sister was talking about the light in her hand and the trees around herself. She was the girl in the picture too and finding her own story about why she was there and why she might find when she looked around.

It was a hard thing to do for me to colour this picture today. To remember in the fullness of memory. I thought it was a lot of other rings lately but really it is coming to Christmas and there is always a little sad inside but there are other colours for the other emotions that need to be found. That is the blessing and curse of being mindfully present in each space in life. Life is what it is. Somewhere we got an idea it should be excited and happy and giddy all the time. The advertising we have chosen for our personal script might have gotten out of hand. It is a cycle of feelings and everything has a place. the Byrd’s turned the words of Ecclesiastes into a song….Solomon said it so it is believed: to everything there is a season under heaven…..turn, turn, turn.

The temptation to believe that we can author every moment into some sort of perfection is perhaps what is actually making us sadder than we need to be. Perhaps the idea of simply being touched by what has happened because it is as it is, might help save us from our own sense of suffering. Life is a gift and I get to live it. All the moments with gratitude and my own imperfect journey through it. We keep walking because we do.

Tomorrow when I try to colour it again perhaps there will be a different memory to find among the trees.

To those who touch my journey, happy day and thanks.

Sandy

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