Collapse

Making art in times of crisis

Collapse (15.10.2024)

I have been looking for a place to collapse

Fires - everywhere 
Everywhere - fires
Forest fires, tents on fire
People on fire. 

Calendula cannot soothe these wounds
Or bring back to life - a life.

I have been looking for a place to collapse
A lap
A place to relapse 
Curling up, a child.

Mother, are your hands big enough?
I am grown now
And I have been looking for a place to collapse.

I have been seeking:
A place of receiving and collective grieving
With my body heaving and a world bleeding

I have been looking for a place to collapse
To lean in - to grieve in
To breathe in.

I have been looking for a place to collapse.

A mother holds a child and a child is held by her mother. The mother’s cheeks are stained with tears, her daughter’s arms thrown around her neck. The mother is bigger than her child and the child is smaller than her mother. A snake is near. Are they below ground? Is the snake tunneling? Tongue out the snake sniffs them. The snake has traveled from above, from the forest floor. There are three tree trunks in this dark forest. The trunks have been burnt out from the inside. Look how the one tree leans on the other. I am sure their roots intermingle underground. And this? A curious staircase runs through the large trunk.

Collapse, “to fall together”.

I have been seeking a place to collapse as I breathe in and grieve with the world. So much loss, on our small screens, witnessing all these screams. Phone in hand, alone in my room, in a feeling body, a receiving body. Restless nights and nauseated days. I write with a lump in my throat, prickly eyes, and constricted breathing. Maybe I can surrender to tears this time.

My hands stop scrolling and try to shape something, something small. A drawing from the dark, a small response to the world. A small practice, I promise to continue to see you, to grieve with you, to be with you.

I am in the world and the world is in me.

It feels strange to make art in the face of so much suffering, but it is the only form of prayer that I have. My hands and my body call me to my table, “Sit here a while, let us lead the way. Be with us, feel, look, see, remember, it’s okay, we will help you hold this”.

As I sit and shape these images from the dark, I am reminded of my capacity to respond to the world that I find myself in, to respond to the most devastating, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching realities in this world, to give them a place of belonging in my psyche and on this paper. To bring something into the world that moves me, and might move others. At times I create alone and at times with others, but, always, with the world.

It can be hard to trust enough to lean in, as the tree trunk leans on its companion, who has been burnt from the inside, and the child throws her arms around a weeping mother, in grief and suffering our arms widen into larger circles - inside of these circles we can collapse.

I hope we can all find a place, a circle of arms, inside of which we can collapse. A place where we can fall into each other, into feeling, and find our way towards prayer and towards our ability to respond.

I am writing to you with a tender and tearful heart.

I send my love to you.