Day 5 – a quote

I was in the middle of an MA when I discovered I was pregnant with Laura. It was all group theory, personal process, boundaries, lengthy assignments and brief interjections from the kids before I buried myself in books again. I am an artist (not a very practicing one), but I am an artist. Creativity is my thing. I may have been wandering the corridors of applied psychology, but I was carrying my life experience as a creative person with me.

Any second now, when I get myself into gear, I will start writing my thesis and finally put that MA to bed. When I start to write, it will be all about creativity and art-making and their role in reflecting on and/or processing experience. Phew! Good luck.

I have two quotes that I came across from this time before Laura. I am offering them here because they fit. They fit with my process of coming to terms with overwhelming loss and they fit with who I am as a person.

What if imagination and art are not, as many of us would think, the frosting on life, but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms, rather than the other way around?

Rollo May “The Courage to Create”

Writing and metaphors and images and imagining have been the starting point for me as I have searched for a way through my grief. They have been, and continue to be, the fountainhead of my experience, the place from which any of my more rational thoughts have emerged.

The second quote is from a book “Boy in the World”, by Niall Williams. It isn’t one of my favourite books, but this author’s earlier books are some of the best I’ve ever read. Anyway, a character in the book is describing her experience of God. After Laura died, a friend who knew loss himself sent a card with the words – She is still here, just not sadly as you would have her. As the months have passed I have come to understand more what he meant by those words. Laura, in her absence, has become my life lens. She is not here. She is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

‘He has all the languages of the world, and I mean also those of light, of shadow, of sunrise, of sunset, of music and laughter. Tell me you haven’t heard him in autumn leaves, in April rain, in Mozart’….’I have even heard him in an abundance of blackberries,’ the wise nun added, bringing her tiny twig-like fingers to her mouth and making a small bird-like laughter.