X Marks the Spot
And the only way is through.
A new mixed media piece I made this week, with acrylic, ink, colored pencil, and embroidery thread on muslin fabric.
Dearest Doodle Soupsters,
I’ve been combining embroidery with painting and drawing. I’ve been following a quiet voice that shows me the way. And the only way is through.
There’s a phrase that’s been coming up in my art for a little while: x marks the spot.
Back in September of last year (in “Begin Again”), I wrote:
x marks the spot but i’ve been there before
so i stare into the blank,
daring myself to begin again …
And this is the artwork I shared in that edition …
A few things I’m noticing:
In my drawings of faces, often the left eye represents my soul, wise mind, a zen perspective … while the right eye encapsulates how I feel in that moment.
Here, the left eye is covered by hair and the x isn’t too far away from where the eye would be, close, getting closer to marking the spot …
Anyway, so x marks the spot and the only way is through. What do I mean by this?
Well, bit by bit, I’ve been realizing:
start at the top, track back each layer of fear to the root and what do I find? grief
when I let myself feel my grief, the fear subsides.
when I let myself feel my grief, I start to feel compassion instead of disdain for myself because it makes sense, who wouldn’t run away from their pain at first? no one wants to accept hard truths, right? that’s human
i don’t have to be anything other than human
i’m allowed to take my time
i’m allowed to let the unknowns be unknown
confusion clouds the heart but it also points the way
I have the map to my own healing inscribed on my soul
I can just let myself feel sad and no matter how much I try to avoid accepting my grief, the truth spills out in my physical body or in restless thoughts in my mind or both … there’s no getting around the wind (as Alex Turner sings in “It’s hard to get around the wind” … along with more lyrics, looking for a new place to begin, feeling like it’s hard to understand)
I’ve berated myself for all the evading, all the ways I detach and hide and scream inside my mind so I don’t have to feel this ache … yet, observing those thoughts, acknowledging my reaction to my grief is the way forward.
I don’t think zen means having pure thoughts all the time, wow life is so precious, I am so grateful, let’s be present in the moment! No. Zen is accepting the struggles to accept what’s happening. Zen is being here with all my confusion, sadness, joy, misery, hope, hopelessness, wonder … because I am not merely sad. I am sad alongside so many other feelings and geez, I have so many feelings! And that’s okay too.
The same reason making art is so natural to me is why living can feel very intense. I am not bad or wrong or “causing my own pain” (as I’ve told myself I am) because life is hard sometimes and feeling is hard sometimes and sometimes I don’t know how to make space for what I feel and I run away from what I feel for a little while …
And I circle back …
And I observe my patterns …
I keep trying …
That’s enough. There is no shame in being in process. And I will always be in process. There is no finish line. No ending. As long as I’m alive and here in this world, there will be room to grow.
I’ve been seeking check marks, certainty, something to grab onto … as if I can achieve my way or stress my way or plan my way into permanence. Nothing is permanent. And that doesn’t mean that everything is about to slip from my fingers AND DOOOOOOMSDAY ALERT CATASTROPHE CATASTROPHE IS HERE!!!
I can accept uncertainty and understand why that’s hard to do. I can accept my struggles to accept uncertainty. I can be here with myself in my fear and my pain. I can stay. I don’t have to run away.
I made this drawing recently. Incorporated within is a phrase from the text I wrote for my Whispers Among the Trees series: “time gifts us glorious etchings simply for staying alive … stay alive.”
A couple months ago, I turned 30. When I was a teenager and early in my 20s, I didn’t think I’d make it this far. I wanted to, but I didn’t know how I’d keep going. Now that I’m here, I think sometimes I want to force myself to feel lucky or good or excited, like the pain has to make sense somehow, has to have been “worth it” but grief doesn’t speak in those terms …
Grief says:
it’s okay sweet child, just stop for a moment, let yourself feel the weight of all the things you’ve been through, it’s okay to let it be true and to sit with that truth for a little while.
Baby, slow down. Breathe. Breathe.
You are capable of living a beautiful, poignant, vibrant life. And to feel alive, you need to let yourself feel this too.
Unclench your fingers. Feel your sadness, let the dam break — this won’t break you. This will save you. Save you from the humdrum, monotone, from the allure of despair and disconnection.
You don’t need to tighten, to constrict, to conserve, to control this, baby. Just let all this co-exist. You are here. You are here. It’s enough. This fact. It’s enough.
Baby, let yourself want. Let yourself pine. Let yourself ache. You don’t need to fix this. You don’t need to hide or erase or eradicate or excavate your humanity. Just be. Just be you as you are.
It’s okay to need to be reminded. It’s okay to get swept up in all the shoulds that serve as tantalizing distraction from me (grief). I don’t blame you for evading me (grief).
The only way is through, but I don’t blame you baby for trying to get around this fact. It’s natural. It’s human. No one wants life to be as hard as it is.
And you baby, I grant you this wisp of light, this sliver of something too precious to encapsulate with a name. This is everything and nothing and everything once more. I love you, I love you in all your wrestling and writhing and suffering and evading and coming apart to come back together again.
New artworks splayed out in my studio
A few days ago, I named the following …
I don’t want to live in fear. I want to embrace the messiness of life.
I want to let myself make mistakes and learn how to have compassion for the ways my trauma pops up and trust myself to take accountability when I need to do that without over apologizing or apologizing in anticipation of ever messing up, apologizing for my existence!
I want to let myself try things and learn from what I experience.
I want to allow myself to have a beginner’s mind approach, knowing that there is so much beauty and value in curiosity and not needing to consider yourself an “expert,” constantly trying to justify and prove my worth.
I don’t need to apologize for my orientation toward life or prove I’m good enough. I’m allowed to want to build a life over a “resume” and that doesn’t make me less worthy of opportunities or love or anything.
I’m allowed to do things my own way and to trust that what I feel in my soul and what I see in this world is real.
It is safe to take leaps of faith. It is safe to let myself find out.
I don’t need to run away from truth.
Truth is home.
Truth shows me the way and reminds me that nothing can break me and I am not broken.
When frozen, truth can feel like shards of glass: sharp, painful, a threat. But really it’s just ice.
So I let it thaw and melt and I see it’s just cold water, I let it wake me up and invigorate me and it hurts but it’s flowing now, it can’t hurt me.
Then, I take all that cold water that’s been flowing through and I bathe in it and I let it pass through the drain or water the soil, I let it go.
And finally, I boil what’s left and make tea (this is the art-making!).
Still, it’s not always time to make tea (alchemize it, make art, etc). There are times where I just need to let it flow, let it just be there. And when that’s the case, I can trust that there will be a time to make meaning and art from this grief. But for a while, I can let myself just exist.
Above is a picture of me in my studio holding up a work in progress. The text included in the artwork says, “there is chaos and meaning co-existing here.”
I think I’ve been so afraid to return to what I know, to let the opposites co-exist, because being in the truth often means being aware of lots of truths. I can’t pick and choose what truths I want to be in touch with. When I’m in the truth, I just know. I feel in my body, in my bones, what is real.
When I write, when I make art, I listen to the quiet voice … this voice is gentle, this voice is firm, this voice is my own. There is no panic in this voice, no rush.
Last spring, in the “Secret Messages, In Pursuit of Catharsis” edition, I shared the artworks stashed underneath my desk and wrote:
What does it mean to move on? To move forward?
I keep catching myself in anxiety spirals only to double back, trace each piece of just barely visible fuzz in the spider web to the source, and find, oh hello it is you again, isn’t? Hello grief.
I bury my grief under layers of doubt, worries, insecurities, any scenario I can think up to distract me from this overwhelming ache. And when I stop, I remember all over again what it is I’m running from. A pain in my chest, hollow. A hole I can’t fill. A stubborn emptiness where a mother and father would have been.
Yes, and each time I’ve traced the anxiety back to the source, let myself feel and be in touch with grief, even just for a moment, I’ve gotten closer to this …
a few more scattered thoughts, puzzle pieces, something that feels important that I haven’t quite phrased in coherent sentences but hey, let’s let them be here too:
x marks the spot and the only way is through.
x can be a block. (don’t go here → X)
x can be also a marker → there is something buried here.
x marks the spot is for the glittery triumph (buried treasure!) or relates to death/loss/buried memories/buried truths/darkness that we don’t want to look at above ground.
When I mark the x, when I name the x, then I can excavate both the treasure and the knowing, the feeling of loss, at once. Because feeling my grief lets me feel everything else, the joy, the meaning, the beauty too.
there is chaos and meaning co-existing here, yes.
and when I block my grief, when the feelings don’t flow, piling onto of the dam instead of letting it break, the meaning doesn’t feel real. I see the chaos more fervently than all else that is real and true. I feel more hopeless too.
the meaning doesn’t cancel out the chaos and the chaos doesn’t cancel out the meaning
beauty and pain co-exist
and when I let the pain be what it is, the beauty gets unblocked too and instead of placeholders, I feel what’s really here and it is heart-breaking and wonderful and simple and complicated and joyful and sad …
Once again embracing life in all its messiness and confusion and beauty and pain and chaos and meaning and more,
Nicole Sylvia Javorsky