Life Anew

Today feels like a birthday, a day of new beginnings and possibility.  For more than two years I have lived with chronic leg pain that, for the last eight months, has kept me in my house mostly alone.  Being housebound was a surprising experience, not one I anticipated for my early sixties. It was hard and trying. Being cut off from friends and normal life experiences increased my sense of isolation and loss.


For most days I sat in a comfortable reading chair with my legs propped on the ottoman. My window on the world was three full length glass doors to the back yard where I watch robins skitter this morning after last night's rain and thunder.  I have seen the trees green, gold and bare. I have watched the days lengthen and shorten, the moon rise, wax and wane, the temperatures rise and fall, the hostas push, unfold, and die back. I have rested because I could not walk. I have listened to silence because the voices I love were not present. I have eaten alone, wondered and prayed, wept and whined, been broken and healed. For minute after hour after day after week I have waited and hoped for healing, for a return to active life.

And yet inside me, deep inside, was a relief, too, a relief for this pass from the daily chaotic scramble of my friends still in the working world. If I felt chosen for this pain, I also felt chosen for the gift of silence even though it was far more than I wanted. Because of my training in spiritual direction, I did not take this experience as purely a physical one. I have known that somehow this time would serve me even though I could not figure out why or how.

Today I feel like myself in more ways than I have for several years. After months of working with healers and sitting in solitude, I believe the healing has happened. I won't be running down the street or driving to DC but I believe I can walk again with out injury and that soon I will be driving myself and going places without someone to help me. I am grateful for those few who have stood with me, tended me body and spirit. I feel a surge of creative energy in my whole body, especially in my heart and hands. I want to bring forth beauty and love, compassion and creation. It is my time now. My time to live anew with more awareness of what matters to me, with less will and ego, with more true essence and less concern of what others might think. How grateful I am. How happy and thankful for this new day.

A Visit to an Art Museum

    The blunt shapes and colors: red, pink, blue, white, the big brown hands, the smoke of the train, the birds, the two women in their bright patterned dresses stir me. They say goodbye and my essence says hello.  I travel on the train, look out the windows to the backyards where families gather to listen to guitars played by men in railroad overalls. I sit on the porch with the family and look into Madeline’s lush gardens.  My hands ache with the work of the day in them and delight in the lift of a baby into my arms.  For several hours I move through the Mint Museum’s exhibition of Romare Beardon’s collages, and they take root in me.

     These images invite me to cut and paste, to paint and draw, to look out my own windows and create the vista with paper and glue.  I lean into the colors and shapes. I back away to see the views through windows in the kitchens of everyday people.  I wish I had come earlier so I could come again.

     We move to the yarns, weavings and textile creations of Sheila Hicks. Her use of yarn makes my hands want to hold thread and clothe. She gets me thinking. How can I create a piece with color and fiber? The large installations are too costly and big to consider. What could I do at home? Embroidery thread! Available in many available colors and inexpensive, the soft threads would be fun to work with. I promise myself that I will get some soon. I make a mental list of the creations I can feel on the tips of my fingers: collages, fiber sculpture, balls wrapped with ribbon and thread, lines of color side by side on white paper. My energy runs fast the whole day at the museum. An electric buzz permeates my skin and muscles, my heart smiles and my head says, “Create something. Soon.” Something is planted in me that I want to grow. The seeds have roots and I realize once again how important creativity is to my life. It makes me feel whole, open, at peace. It cultivates who I really am.