There’s someone I’m grieving right now, and it’s one of the most intense griefs I’ve ever known. The importance of feeling all the things has been very clear to me. The need to feel the pain, but also the desperate need to feed myself with beauty so as to be able to let the love and beauty I’ve received from this person keep a place in my heart.
Letting myself live the grief deeply has been really beautiful because grief comes from love, and letting myself live in the depths of the grief is putting me right in the core of the love I have for this person. Simply to feel that so potently is already healing, and is keeping me alive. And I’m finding there a primal need to create. I NEED to create, to do something with all the love and pain. I NEED beauty to come of this. Beauty is the only thing helping right now, but also, all the passion when I live in it is tending back to bringing forth beauty. What a beautiful cycle.
I’m painting incessantly, because I must. I started with this. It’s a scene from the monastic cemetery where I love to walk. A place first associated with loss, but when we take a deeper dive into it it’s a place of memory and story and such rich beauty. A place where you can go to let the memory of those you love be just a beginning of the gift they are to you, because you can keep living out of those gifts and letting them inform who you become.
God brings beauty from ashes, and he lets us in on the process.
