Soul Mosaic

In stories of adventure and quests, the hero battles mightily and, with any luck, returns with the gift of the effort — some kind of prize. Emotional quests are no different — they give the prize of insight and wisdom, and the desire to know more, so you can keep healing.

At the end of this battering, I wasn’t whole or healing…yet. But I was given a glimpse of a sacred insight…what had been hiding within me all my life. I saw my heart…my tender, bloodied, aching, abandoned heart…fully…for the first time. It was broken, yes. And life’s events had shredded it. But it was still there, beating.

Now, it was up to me to decide what to do with that heart….

As I dug into this with my therapist, I was doing some of the hardest, deepest work in my life, then going home to try and capture what came up. I would paint as fast as I could, barely able to spread the pigment on the canvas quickly enough. After opening Pandora’s box, the waves of things I’d never felt before just kept coming. Again and again they’d swell, crest, crash over me, and then swell up again. I just held on. I had wanted to confront it all, my free choice, which was a gift in its own way — self-agency. So there was no turning back now.

Painting by author

The place of ghosts

We all have a shadow side…a place of dark rage, born out of the pain of abandonment that wails the cry: “What about me?”

It is a place of our ghosts, filled with toxic poisons, bubbling, oozing, and swelling in a stoppered bottle. As the fires of life’s pain intensify, the heat and pressure build. The boiling liquid rises, forcing itself hard against the stopper until, finally, the block gives way.

If we’re lucky, it will just push the stopper up enough to leak out and ease the pressure. Or, if we can bring attention and wisdom to the process in time, we might be able to toggle the stopper slowly and safely release what’s under it. But if we ignore it, it builds, explodes, splatters, and destroys.

Transformative wrath

I love mythology and stories about old wise women and crones…especially since I am one now, at least, old. So, this excerpt by Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, in her book, Goddesses in Older Women, says it eloquently:

Painting by author

You can run, but someday you will have to slow down. And what if what chases you doesn’t?

I was never one to run away from a fight. Once I got out of that house, I never backed down or yielded to a challenge. They were “gauntlets thrown down,” and it was my ethic to always pick up the gauntlet and fight back. At least with concrete things like confronting my father. Protecting my son. Learning the “next thing” I needed to, so I could live a healthy, useful life.

At that point, it was the right thing to operate from a place of “keep going and tough it out, because others need you.” It was the truth. You don’t stop to examine “within” when you are fighting external battles.

And society encourages that too, with its spoken or unspoken, but expected rule: Move on. Get over it. Leave it behind. It’s better now, so why dwell on the past? Sometimes society can be downright cruel and tell you that to revisit the past wounds is just indulgence or navel-gazing. But regardless, for those times, I did what I needed to when it mattered. And I am satisfied with that.

But after Mom died, and the emotional roller-coaster that followed, I realized there finally comes a day when there are no more “priorities” in line ahead of you, and life is asking, “Are you ready to face yourself?”

Painting by author

While I couldn’t articulate the issues yet or name all the ghosts, I could feel them. They surrounded me, pressed up against me, shoved me down from above, and choked in my throat. They seemed to take up all the oxygen and all the space, until I finally felt like I couldn’t move.

If I tried to pull away or in, they just took up more space, leaving little for me. Who were the ghosts? Who was I anymore?

So I painted what they felt like. At least I could “see” how bad I felt. Their presence was like an emotional version of that stomach bug.