#SOL16: Mend My Life

from my Art Journal, 5.23.16 - Tell Me About Despair (gesso, watercolor, acrylic, collage )

I.

What do you love to do? the grief therapist I am seeing asks.
Hmm. I'm not sure. I love to teach, read, make art, write, walk, talk with others.

Our talk this week turned to taking action. Meaningful action.

Do.

Make.

Teach.

Begin to breathe, again--to mend this life of mine that has been torn apart.

II. 

Rob and I led an insular life in many ways. Our work brought each of us into contact with so many people each day that we tended to spend our weekends and time off together in quiet ways. Now, the spaces of quiet are larger than I need or want and Rob is gone.  My life is an absence I need to redefine and there is such loneliness sitting in the stew. The way through this grief that paralyzes at times is not to obscure it with trivial activity which only makes the loneliness loom larger, but rather to transform it with contact with others and work that is meaningful, playful.

Meaningful work.

I don't feel ready for the pace of full time education work, but I do think I would enjoy teaching again. With that thought in mind I contacted two friends to see about potential adjunct positions at colleges. I have taught graduate school for several years before and think such work would suit me now. In the past, my courses tended to be rather creative mixing the arts with the study of literature, reading and writing as a way to make the theoretical more physical, more inhabitable. 

Yesterday, I joined a book group that meets in June and I am going to try out a sketching group that meets locally. I am looking for a watercolor class to take this summer and Devon and I planned our summer with a bit more detail.

I also have a book in the planning stages and am setting a time to meet with two others about writing a book about early literacy in kindergarten. I want to write about the work I have made with others during the last five years in poor inner cities and how joyful, developmentally appropriate, and successful that work has been for children.  

All of this reminds me of a poignant poem by Mary Oliver, "The Journey." 

III.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

IV.

Trust the voice that is mine. Wade deeper into the world. This scares me as the confidence I have had feels less present, certain.  Rob's illness, the speed of his decline, the tragedy that dogged our every step, the loss of my true love--all of this has dismantled the certainty of love that once framed my life. I felt invincible with Rob by my side.  We were partners in all things. And without him venturing into the world feels scary, exciting, lonely, uncertain, sad. 

"Don't you dare hide yourself away," Rob told right after he bid my to live brilliantly. He said this an hour after we learned that the cancer had metastasized to his liver, spleen, ribs, sternum, both lungs and that we would now measure time by days and weeks, not months and years. Rob knew me so well--knew that I would seek the shadow, not the sun.

Will you welcome me, world? Torn and battered as I am?

Do what I love.

Make.

Be.

Breathe.

Oliver, Mary. New and Selected Poems, Volume One: 1 (pp. 114-115). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.