Number 39 in my series on healing trauma. This drawing was made in early March of 2020, a week before the pandemic shut everything down in my area. (Art which comes from the subconscious, tends to be just a bit ahead of my lived experience, while significant dreams take many months to play out.) This image exposes the body as a landscape, revealing the inner healing time that the Covid-19 quarantine engendered. It reminds me of the impossibility of separation. All boundaries (whether inner/outer, self/world, or self/other) are permeable. I may think that a boundary has a distinct line of separation, but in actuality boundaries are imaginal and fluid. When one takes the time to look closely, the sense of separation between things breaks down. We are perpetually exchanging elements with the world around us. We are permeable. Covid-19 makes this interconnected vulnerability more acutely clear.

This drawing also reminds me of a view from the side mirror of a car. Seeing a transient landscape or unreachable past recede behind me. (For many, the pandemic made our previous lives obsolete very fast!) Or perhaps the image is like the distortion from a lens, a magnifying glass peering closer into a central core of well-being.

Art is not my primary mode of healing. My foundation rests upon a simple holding of body and self. Profound healing arises out of simply being with what is. Integration, peace, wholeness, or whatever else one desires is already here. These qualities only feel inaccessible because we have been conditioned to resist and cover our essential humanness. The path of receiving a humble landscape of essential well-being, is to compassionately be with whatever arises. To be willing to accompany the discomfort and unease that exists in this moment. Things held patiently with love, eventually unravel themselves. Presence matters.

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