“Relics are treasured as something close to the divine.”
Sarah Vowell
A reliquary is a container designed to hold sacred objects. Wearable reliquaries serve to protect these artifacts while making them accessible for veneration and safe for transportation during pilgrimage.
I build these reliquary pendants by hand; layering metal with the intent to create a sacred vessel to hold a cherished object.
I use plexiglass to cover the container so the piece won’t shatter if accidentally dropped.
These reliquaries are a “lover’s eye”. They are a nod to forbidden love and remembrance of the window to the soul of our dearly departed.
I commission genuine prosthetic glass eyes directly from the artist in India who paints each one by hand. I then enshrine them in a shadowbox pendant made with a tiffany soldering technique. Each necklace is hand-knotted to protect the stones and crystals from damage from rubbing against each other.
Please let me know if you are interested in having a reliquary custom made to hold your personal treasures.
“Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and – as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis – emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness.”
Annie Besant
As we grow spiritually, we leave behind the things that no longer serve us. We shed the old to make way for the new.
Transformation is never a simple process. It is wrought with challenges and choices. One must be willing to find the courage to keep moving forward, through darkness and uncertainty.
We must also trust our inner voice, especially in times of darkness. When the snake sheds her skin, she becomes almost completely blind for a period of time. She sees only light and shadow. She must trust her intuition to know where safety resides.
But once the scales lift, and she crawls forward and away from her past, she leaves it all behind her.
Never to crawl back inside.
This necklace contains the shed skin of my bow constrictor, Lilith. She was an amazing creature. It is forever enshrined between glass and surrounded by tiffany solder.
It hangs 11 inches and rests just under the clavicle.
The necklace is made up of black obsidian and black rudilated quartz. It is hand-knotted with intention.
Obsidian is made of volcanic glass. It is renowned for its qualities of reflection, protection and grounding. It allows the wearer to see the innermost truths as it cuts through illusion like a scalpel.
Rudalated quartz is a master healer. It enhances intuition by removing the scales from our eyes.
This is a powerful talisman for those stepping into a new light.
“So we know that purity emerges from impurity, and light is born from darkness” Zicheng Hong
There is a very old story that teaches us that cicadas were once human beings who fell under the spell of The Muses.
They sang and danced without sleeping or eating until they died, without even realizing they were dead.
The Muses transformed them into cicadas, and gifted them with the ability of life without needing food or rest.
In return, these human cicadas keep an eye on human beings, and report to The Muses about who is honoring the gods.
Cicadas are symbolic of transformation and rebirth. They give us access to the spiritual realms. They remind us of the power of our voices.
Strung with dragons blood Jasper and Palestinian olive wood, this hand-knotted necklace hangs 12 inches, with the enshrined cicada adding an additional 3 inches in length.
Dragons blood connects the root and heart chakras, combining strength with compassion. Like the cicada, dragons blood facilitates admittance to the spiritual realms of our ancestors. It reminds us to “be here now” in a world that is ever turning.
Palestinian olive trees grow with deep roots. Their wood symbolizes resilience and deep connection to the land.
This necklace will help to facilitate change in a person’s life, while remaining grounded in the strength of our ancestors.
In the 38 years I have been a bodyworker, I’ve become very good at noticing patterns in people.
I see and feel the way the body changes to hold fear, grief, stress and anxiety and how emotions find certain places in the body to reside.
Knees, for instance hold the energy of forgiveness and forward movement. The pelvis holds the energy of survival and basic needs. Shoulders can become heavy with worry. The belly and throat can tighten with swallowed feelings or words.
Right now in my practice, I’m noticing the patterns of fear, worry and anxiety in my clients.
I believe we are experiencing a collective trauma like never before.
There have been 4 mass shootings in Minneapolis in the last 30 days.
There have been 362 mass shootings so far in the US this year.
On top of that, we are watching the ongoing chaos in America and around the world.
We have images bombarding our eyes and our brains, and there are just some things a person can’t unsee.
But the more we see them, the more the algorithm sends us more of the same image.
The archons are feasting.
I think it’s more important, now than ever, to make time to find peacefulness. To stand barefoot on the earth. To fully inhale and exhale breath. To seek healing for the body, mind and spirit. It’s important to take a break from the screens and the scrolling.
I admit that I’ve been doom scrolling too much. It’s my trauma response. I scroll so know where the danger is, and how close I am to it. I think living so close to the occupation these past 5 years has made me hyper aware of surroundings and sounds. I’m almost always on high alert.
But when I realize I’m dooming, I find my feet and my breath and I remind myself that in this moment I’m safe. In this moment I’m ok.
Sometimes I go from one moment to the next reminding myself that I’m in the present moment and not the future that I can’t control or the past that I can’t change.
I think I learned this from my years of recovery. To take life one moment at a time. To find some kind of peace and acceptance in the things I have no control over. To find the fortitude to take action in the things I can influence. And to have the knowledge to know the difference between them, which is often the hardest part.
So if you’ve made it this far, inhale slowly and deeply. Hold that breath for a moment. Long enough to feel chest expand fully. And then exhale completely.
And then do it again.
Take a moment to look at this image. If it’s moving quickly, you are anxious. Take some deep breaths and relax your mind, and you will see the image slow down. If you can center yourself, the image will stop moving all together.
One of the first things people notice when they walk into my house is the bones. There is a goat’s skull above my couch. Small skulls of birds and reptiles sit in my window nooks. Hanging above my dining room table is a large water buffalo skull, an antelope skull and multiple dog skulls.
I have an ancestorial altar in my home that enshrines the ashes of my Father, my Mother, a dearly departed friend, and two dogs and four cats, as well as photos of friends and family that have died. It is encased in a permanent hutch that divides my living room and my dining room. There is a tall selenite lamp that sits on top of the hutch that softly glows as a beacon to guide the departed, a candle for warmth and an offering bowl with gifts of food and water. When I had a friend who is a feng shui practitioner come to map my house, she told me I had instinctively set this altar in between the baugua positions of family and knowledge.
My altar to Hecate’s Hounds
As you move deeper into my home, you will find more bones, many in different stages of cleaning. Some still hold on to bits of dirt or patches of skin and fur. Others bathe in the degreasing sink. I have several hearts that are mummifying at the moment, buried deep in salts and herbs.
Each bone has a story to tell, and I am a willing listener. When I receive a new bone, I sit with it for a long time. I hold it in my hands and I listen with all my senses. Bones have their own stories to tell, and if you pay attention, you learn so much about the spirit still present within the bone.
When I create a piece of artwork that incorporates bone, I always make sure that the bone is willing. Some bones want to be seen, heard and felt. They want to be acknowledged and not forgotten. Some bones have no one to remember them, and they want to participate in the artwork so they are not forgotten.
Deer and Hound
On the other hand, some bones want to sleep. They want to rest, undisturbed. Many are still sorting out the confusion of their death. This happens a lot with animals killed by cars along the highway or ones that have been hunted. Many of them still carry the trauma of an unexpected passing. These bones often need soothing. Sometimes I rebury them or I tuck them away in wooden boxes lined with soft fabric. I check in on them from time to time. The dead like to be remembered.
Cat’s paws
I rarely purchase bones. Most of the bones I have are found in forests or along roadsides, or are given to me as gifts. Of the few bones I’ve purchased, they seem to come into my awareness in special ways, as if they aligned themselves to me. One dog skull I purchased happened to show up while I was looking for jewelry supplies on Ebay. When she appeared in my feed, I felt drawn to her and made the purchase. When she arrived in the mail, her energy literally leapt out of the box as I lifted the skull from the packaging. I instantly saw the image of a small purple flower in my mind’s eye and realized she was telling me her name was Violet. She has a special place in my home and in my heart.
Violet
As bone art becomes more popular, many people are cashing in on selling bones as craft supplies. Animals are purposely killed in order to monetize their bones, teeth, claws and pelts. These are often imported from places like China and Ukraine and are usually easy to spot. These bones come with complicated emotional energy, and are often wanting to hide. Many are sold under the heading “ethically sourced” and are produced under conditions that are undeniably unethical. They come “clean and sanitized” from the supplier, and confused and frightened from the process.
The final rinse of a dog’s spine
To work with bones, you have to be willing to embrace the process of death. The stigma, the smells, the rot and the adipocere (corpse wax) that comes with the process. Death is not “clean and sanitized”. It is slimy and stinky and dusty and dirty. The process of taking a rotting limb and producing a beautiful bone specimen is art in itself.
My boyfriend found this cat’s skeleton curled up between boards at a job site. We named him Ikea, because he came in pieces.
Bones are sacred objects, and should be treated as such. They are a direct link to the archetypical energies they represent and can assist you in accessing the power of the animal and the magic it possesses. Like crystals, they can be employed to heal, to protect and to manifest, but they need to be cared for and cherished. They were once a part of a living, breathing being, and that energy still exists. They have so much to offer us, if we are only willing to listen to them and treat them with respect and reverence.
Ikea’s voice came through loud and clear. He wanted a name and he wanted to feel wanted.
It’s been a really long time since I put anything new on this page. I have sat down at my desk and fired up my laptop multiple times, but no words have come forth.
It’s been maddening, but I’ve been feeling a need to reemerge from my self-imposed exile and I want to pick up the pieces that I had to let go.
It’s been a long 5 years. I’ll quickly try to catch you up on the major events that lead to me pulling back from writing, hosting the monthly gatherings and book club.
One of the main reasons I stopped writing, was a feeling of complete and utter overwhelm. So much happened all at once. The world suffered an epic pandemic that was mismanaged from the very beginning. While trying to learn to maneuver my way through covid, I found myself living in the literal epicenter of a global revolution.
I feel like I’ve faded
I live 1 1/2 blocks from the intersection where George Floyd was murdered, and needless to say, the face of my neighborhood changed dramatically. I can literally stand in my front yard and see the large metal statue of a giant fist that marks the entrance to the ongoing occupation that is George Floyd Square.
During the uprising in Minneapolis, I had a front row seat to the protests, many which marched in the street in front of my house. While a barricade of pallets, couches and garbage cans was going up a block away from my house, the smoke from two burning police stations and other buildings on the four mile stretch of Lake Street floated into my neighborhood. Three helicopters circled my neighborhood around the clock for months. At one point, I allowed 16 of my friends and a few kind hearted strangers to board up my house and I took refuge in a hotel in an outer ring suburb of Minneapolis in order to clear my head, sleep without noise canceling headphones, and come up with a plan to postpone my yoga teacher training I was supposed to start the day after the riots broke out and to figure out how to reopen my studio after lockdown was lifted.
National Guard vehicle parked in front of Hope
When I finally made it back to my house five days later, I had to learn to live with an armed militia patrolling the “Free State of George Floyd which still encompasses four square blocks of my neighborhood. I had to get used to the 540% increase in violent crime that came with living on the boarder of a no-police zone. I don’t want to get into the gory details of what I experienced, for my sake as well as for my readers. I’ll just say that it was a very intense time in my life that left some deep scars on my soul.
One of the many marches that passed in front of my homeGeorge Floyd Square in winter
The Square became a bittersweet part of my life. I understood the protest, and I did what I could to support it by donating water and firewood to the People’s Way which formed under the awning of the abandoned Speedway gas station. I hugged complete strangers as I stood in a huge crowd there and heard Chauvin’s guilty verdict announced. I listened to speakers central to the Civil Rights Movement when they appeared at The Square, and I attended covid cautious neighborhood gatherings that taught us about the historical significance of my Southside Minneapolis neighborhood and it’s place in the fight for civil rights. However, the occupation came with a lot of very frightening experiences that I am still learning to come to terms with as I explore them with the guidance of my therapist under the diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
The uprising in Minneapolis was my third riot. I escaped Los Angeles with my infant son as the worst of the rioting hit the city after the police beating of Rodney King. Sixteen years later I was caught up in the RNC riots in Saint Paul. I never imagined that fourteen years later I’d be boarding up my house to escape Minneapolis as it burned.
Then I caught covid.
In July of 2021 I went to an outdoor music festival with my boyfriend to celebrate our birthday weekend. Knowing that I work so closely with clients, we were careful to maintain our covid protocol. The motorcycle trip to South Dakota was beautiful, but we rode home through thick smoke from Canadian wildfires that had drifted southward. I made an appointment to get a covid test before returning to work, just to make sure my stuffy head and watery eyes were from the smoke and not the virus, and received a positive covid test result on my birthday.
Caught sleeping with my puppy
While I didn’t require hospitalization, I rode through the delta wave infection with some pretty rough symptoms. I remember walking through my house all night long during the worst of it, because I feared I would drown in my congested lungs if I allowed myself to sleep. My quarantine lasted 21 days as I was still showing symptoms and testing positive at the 15-day mark.
I never felt like I fully recovered from covid.
The photo I sent my boyfriend when I found out I was sick
I found myself needing extreme amounts of sleep. I struggled to make it through a day of work and had to drastically cut my schedule of clients in order to nap in between sessions. On multiple occasions I would pull into a parking lot on my 40- minute commute home from the studio just to sleep for half an hour because I was so exhausted. I found myself searching for words that used to flow so easily. I couldn’t walk a flight of stairs without having to rest half way up because I would become so dizzy and breathless. My hands and feet would swell and my entire spine burned.
I asked my doctor to test me for mono and Lyme’s disease, but received negative results. Finally, after suffering for months, I was admitted into the long haul covid clinic at my county hospital. I spent 8 months working with a respiratory therapist and a year and a half with a neuro-cardiac therapist learning how to manage my many symptoms.
My journey with long haul covid is still on going. Since October of 2021, I have been poked, prodded, tested, evaluated and reviewed multiple times. Covid caused dysautonomia, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, syncope and mast cell activation syndrome. I can’t stand for long periods of time, because I get very dizzy. My heart rate will soar or plumet for no reason. I can’t regulate my body temperature anymore, especially in very hot or very cold temperatures. Sometimes I pass out if I stand too long or if I get too hot or too cold. My skin erupts with tiny blisters seemingly for no reason. Sometimes my throat forgets how to swallow. My spine often feels like it’s on fire. Sometimes my joints swell up. Sometimes I have tremors. My optic nerve is inflamed and my left eye shakes and often refuses to come into focus. I’m easily overwhelmed and my foggy brain often can’t handle simple tasks. I use a roller walker now, when I used to walk my dogs 5 miles each day. This is just a short list on-going symptoms that make every day a new adventure.
When it gets really tough, I remind myself that I survived a virus that has killed over six million people world-wide, but there are still days I mourn the person I was before I got sick. It’s not been easy to learn to live with a damaged autonomic nervous system.
The day I probably contracted covid
At this point, I’m doing my best to learn to live with my symptoms. The medical community is still shaking their heads at those of us who never fully recovered from covid. If I had a dollar for every time a doctor told me that they just don’t know enough about covid, I’d probably be able to pay off some of my ever-looming medical bills that I’ve incurred since I got sick. I’ve taken part in four studies on long covid and the dysautonomia it caused, and I keep searching for more.
I found my way back to art during the pandemic. I needed a way to ground myself during the chaos of the uprising amidst the lockdown and began sculpting, beading again and doing metal work again. My artwork has been supplementing my income since I’ve had to cut back on my hours of doing bodywork. I’m often seen at local art shows and maker markets, and I opened an Etsy store. I’m looking forward to writing about the work I’m creating here in the future.
The yoga studio I built before I got sick
I completed my Kriya yoga teacher training that I began the week the uprising started, but because of my dysautonomia, I had to adjust my yoga practice so I don’t get too dizzy or pass out. I’m not taking my long walks with the dogs anymore because I’ve passed out while walking them. Luckily, I wear a cross-body harness that I clipped their leashes onto, and they were still attached to me when I woke up. Even simple tasks can cause syncope, and my neighbors are caring enough to peek over the fence when they know I’m gardening or shoveling snow, because they have either witnessed my syncope or heard about the experience through the neighborhood grapevine. I’m so lucky to have such good friends around me.
Many of those good friends have been asking when I’ll be bringing back my blog.
Honestly, writing has been hard. Brain fog and brain fatigue have been some of the most challenging symptoms of long covid. My words used to come to me so easily. Now, finding the right ones is challenging and sometimes, very frustrating. I miss getting my ideas out on paper though. I always felt better when I sat back and read what I wrote, and from the emails I’ve received since starting this blog, quite a few of you have felt better after reading my work too.
So, I’m making a promise to myself, with you as my witness, that I will sit down and write more often. I’ll allow myself some grace when it gets overwhelming, but I won’t let being uncomfortable keep me from expression. I’ve already tucked a new notebook into my backpack so I have a place to scribble ideas and inspiration.
So, in the words of John Wick, “People keep asking if I’m back, and I haven’t really had an answer. But now yeah, I’m thinking I’m back”
Twisting and turning throughout the cosmos, the Ouroboros reminds us of the connections between beginnings and endings in the cycles of life.
Transformation is never a simple task. It is wrought with challenges and choices. One must be willing to find the courage to keep moving forward through the darkness of uncertainty.
This mala is the perfect tool to assist you through transformative growth.
Made from the vertebrae of a rattlesnake, this mala serves as a bridge between the physical and spiritual realms.
As we grow, we leave behind the things that no longer serve us in life. We shed the old and make way for the new.
The snake can be inspirational in this growth, as a snake shedding its skin always leaves it behind. It never tries to crawl back inside.
This mala contains 108 rattlesnake vertebrae held between two black glass beads. Each glass bead is separated by a small knot, representing the challenges in our lives. As we meditate with this mala, each vertebra is a step forward in our transformational journey.
We begin and end the circle journey with a devil’s seed pod, known to protect the bearer from malicious energy or entities.
The tassel is made with linen and silk threads embodying the energy of all things coming together as one.
This week a lost lover contacted me through the mists of the internet. When I saw his name in my inbox I didn’t know how to react. I was shocked. I was excited. I was a little afraid. Our last face to face moments together weren’t pleasant, and as I went through all the reasons why I shouldn’t respond in my head, my fingers typed in the words
“ I remember you”
and then they pressed “SEND”. This led to a phone conversation which lasted into the early hours of the morning. Even as I write this, days later, our conversation continues. I feel this is a good thing.
It has also thrown me into a deep pool overflowing with emotions, and I’m trying not to drown in them.
For 33 years he has held on to some photographs of us. He said he saved them from a former partner who tried to throw the evidence of his life with any other woman away. We can’t change our own past; how can we even think about changing someone else’s? He scanned the photos into his computer and sent them to me. Suddenly I was looking at a familiar stranger that resembled me.
I’m an addict and an alcoholic, and at this time in my life it was all just beginning. I had an appetite for cocaine and meth. Both seemed to flow freely in the circles I surrounded myself with, and I had discovered ways to feed my addiction that I’m not proud of. By the time I made it to rehab I was a broken shell of myself. The young woman I was seeing in this photograph was me just before the darkness swallowed me up and I began to fall into the depths of my addiction.
She is a ghost of my past. She is someone who died a long time ago, and is now resurrected and reaching out through 33 years of history, clenching my heart in her cold spectral hands. Her face is so familiar, but she is a stranger to me. She is someone I once loved, but she is someone I let down. She is someone I couldn’t save from all the heartache and pain she was just about to experience when this photograph was taken. She is me.
What would I say to her if I had a chance? What would I tell her? Would she listen to me? Would my words have even made a difference? Knowing her as intimately as I do, she would have looked into my 51 year old eyes and told me not to worry. She would have assured me that this man loved her like no other and would never dream of hurting her. She would have told me that the drugs were something that she could stop at any time. She would have talked to me in that sweet voice of innocence; that voice that knows nothing of how hard the world could possibly be to a lost young woman. She would have believed every word she said even though she probably knew deep down inside that she was lying.
The woman I have become is so different than the young woman in this picture. At 51, I’ve climbed the mountains she hadn’t even approached yet. I stumbled and fell and I bear the scars of every fall I took. At 51 my hips are wide from the birth of my son, my belly is soft and stretch marked. My hair is streaked with grey in a defiant act of acceptance. I have zipper scars on my leg, belly and breasts from surgeries. She has wounds that are still fresh. Her hair is streaked with color in an act of defiance of anything or anyone that had the courage to tell her what she should do, or who she should be. She still has the flat stomach of a woman who has never carried a child full term, but her eyes hold a sadness of an innocence that was taken without consent. Her heart had suffered the pain of loss already, but she was only beginning to accrue the burden that heartbreak leaves you with. She knew what loss felt like. She knew betrayal, fear and a deep sadness that a woman her age should have only read about in romance novels with happy endings, but there was so much more to come for her. For me.
She would learn that closure doesn’t happen if you seek it. She would learn that you can’t ever really go home again. She would learn that some people just want to use you up and leave you behind. She would learn that the sweetest words can cut you apart when you find they weren’t said with truth. She would learn that you have to scrape off the scabs and stretch the scars if you ever want to be able to function properly in life. She would learn that sometimes you have to leave everything you love and run and not look back because you could turn to stone or salt.
She would learn that there are some people in your life that want to help. She would find out that there are people who will love you with boundaries firmly in place. She would learn to create boundaries for herself, as well as she would learn the consequences of letting those boundaries slide. She would find recovery and then she would lose it, only to find it again, and again, and again. She would have a child that created an anchor to the responsibilities of motherhood and through him she would finally know what it felt like to be overwhelmed with love. She would find independence that she never dreamed possible and a strength that only age and experience can bring. She would grow comfortable in her skin and in her spirit. She would learn to walk on broken legs, with her head held high with the elegance of a woman and not the arrogance of youth.
Every once and awhile someone comes into your life and changes your direction. They don’t even realize the consequences of their actions, and you don’t either, until you find yourself spinning out of control in the complete opposite direction you had intended on going in. It isn’t their fault. In fact you, unknowingly, probably changed their direction too. We don’t always realize or even understand the impact we can have on people with our words and our actions.
Every word is a prayer. Every word we speak or sing or write or whisper is heard by that divine self. Once it has formed in our thoughts and is released onto the world, it becomes something completely outside our self. This was such a hard lesson for me to learn. It was also hard to learn that I am responsible for how I allow other’s words and actions to affect me. I can swallow them and let them sicken me. I can step aside and let them fly past me. Or I can meet them head on, like a warrior picking her battles wisely and then proceed with grace. A woman’s grace is so powerful.
I’m so happy he found me again. I’m so happy that he searched for someone who has deliberately made being found a challenge. It’s made my heart feel better to know that I am still thought of with love. I’m happy to know that the wreckage of my past didn’t ruin the chance of healing what was and what has become. I can look back on this chapter in my life and know that although I’m battle scared, I survived. I survived gracefully.
I’m also grateful I was able to reconnect with this part of me. That I was able to dissociate from her enough to be able to see her for the person she was, and yet to assimilate her back into myself and hold her gently in my heart with love. I can’t take her into my arms and tell her everything will be ok. I can’t save her from the pain she is going to have to endure on my behalf. However, I can take her into my heart and let her know that she will never be alone again.
I recently had an idea to curate a recovery themed art show. In my mind I saw artists of many talents expressing their journey of recovery through all the many different mediums that art allows. It was my hope that this art show would spur dialogue between people in order to make recovery from addiction a possibility for someone who never believed it to be obtainable. I found a quote by Pablo Picasso which seemed fitting for a show with this subject in mind. “Every act of creation begins with an act of destruction”. It was relatable to creating a piece of art as well as building a functional life out of the chaos of addiction.
I shared
my idea with two friends and they saw the vision of what I was trying to
achieve. We met in the gallery space of
Magus Books and Herbs, the local occult bookstore in Minneapolis where the show
would be held, and came up with a plan to make it happen. First we chose a date. Once that was in place we laid out a plan
which included the call for artists, deadlines for submissions and requirements
for art and artist statements. There was
so much to consider. I had never been a part of curating an art show, but my
friends had done it before. Letting them
take the reins on this was easy. We all
had the same vision in mind and they knew how to reach the goal of making it
happen.
That allowed me to focus on my goal of creating a piece for the show that depicted my recovery and how my life changed because of it. I played around with different mediums, since I dabble in quite a few, and finally settled on a tape sculpture. It is a fun medium to work with, but I didn’t see the metaphorical references to my recovery until the piece began to take shape.
I decided that I wanted to show the weight of my addictions and how I was able to rise out of the darkness into the light. The form I saw in my head consisted of two human figures. The figure on the bottom would be on its hands and knees with head hanging low. The second figure would be rising upwards from the heart area of the bottom figure with its arms outwards and head upwards. I wanted this piece to represent both the heavy and dark energy that one feel caught up in when lost in addiction, as well as the freedom of release when one is able to find a way overcome it.
I spent a weekend with my son and his sweetie in Chicago, and she volunteered to be my model for the sculpture. We spent hours together in my son’s apartment, her, wearing barely nothing and me intently covering her torso and limbs with layers of packing tape while my son yelled at the video game he was playing. Luckily he’s used to me doing weird art projects like this. She, on the other hand, couldn’t imagine her mom doing a project like this. My son would occasionally put the remote control down and scratch her itchy nose or find the end of the tape roll for me. A family that creates together sticks together. Once the pieces were all formed and she was freed from them, I carefully packed them up and headed home. Once home, the building started.
I have a roommate. He’s a really nice guy, and he understands the quirks of living with a woman like me. My art collection leans to the erotic or the Satanic. I often have meetings of the Left Hand Path and Witch community in the living room. You just never really know who or what you are going to see at my house. He posted the following photograph on his Instagram one evening when he came home to find this on the table on the front porch.
The large inflatable penis in the background only added to the confusion he must have felt, but the photo shows the structure I had to build as part of the process of creating the base figure. A seven foot structure made out of something as thin as tape needs a structure to support it, and I made this one out of ¾ inch PVC tubing, using different connectors to piece together the angles needed to fit the form.
I wanted the figure at the bottom of the structure to portray the murky, heavy energy of addiction, so I chose to stuff this figure with black tissue paper. I didn’t realize how hard I would be hit by the act of stuffing this dark paper into a human figure. As I watched the limbs and torso fill with the black wads of paper, I was reminded of all the times I swallowed what I was really feeling. Pushing the paper through the hole I left in the heart of this figure where the top piece would attach, I was overwhelmed with knowing all the times I denied myself something as simple as love. By the time I finished stuffing the head of this figure full of blackness I had tears pouring down my face, because I was remembering every negative thought I directed at myself; every idea I had that I wasn’t worthy, wasn’t good enough to be loved even by myself. I stuffed fear into my stomach. I crammed loathing into my belly. My knees were full of things I thought I could never forgive myself for and my feet full of things I could never walk away from as long as I stayed trapped under the weight of this illness.
I’ve heard the phrase “art heals” at least 100 times. As I stood back and looked at her I felt a wave of healing come over me. Maybe healing isn’t quite the right word. Maybe it was forgiveness? Even that doesn’t seem quite right. I’m having a hard time finding the exact words to fit the description of what I was feeling; maybe because it’s a feeling too complex to be summed up in words. This figure, in the shape of a woman became me.
More metaphors became clear as I worked on the top figure. She was the representation of the Phoenix; the rising out of the darkness. Her energy was lighter, as the tape is translucent, and she glowed with the sunlight coming through the windows of the front porch. I left her empty, but she was full of possibilities.
Each layer of tape I placed on her represented another piece of me holding myself together as I rebuilt my life. One arm curved upwards, and the other arched towards the earth like the Baphomet, in an expression of “as above, so below”. It became evident to me that this symbolized Solve et Coagula; to dissolve and to make whole again. Each part of this sculpture had to be separated from the model and reassembled in a different location, symbolizing how I wasn’t the same person at this point in my recovery journey as I was when I began it. Her head was tilted to one side, yet she was gazing upwards. In this gesture she seemed to acknowledge her past as she was looking towards her future. She was balanced on the toes of one foot while the other leg gracefully kicked back behind her. This added to the feeling of weightlessness. She was spinning out of the heavy darkness of her past and rising upwards to the light.
The show was amazing. There were five artists represented, including myself. Each one of us created a piece that depicted our healing journey. It wasn’t until I saw all of us together in one room that I realized the bravery it took to be a part of this show. Not only were each of us stepping into a public forum with our art work, we were also making our addiction public. We were admitting to anyone who walked into that gallery that we had come from a very dark past. However, admitting that also gave the people who came to see the show permission to admit that the place they were coming from had shadows of its own.
I was so inspired by the stories they told and I was humbled to realize that I was someone lucky enough to hear them. It also felt good to know that I was part of a creative catalyst that gave people the opportunity to come together and acknowledge their journeys. We shared our clean time anniversaries. We talked about that moment we knew we needed help. We remembered the people who helped us on this path of recovery and the people whose journey ended too soon. One person told me that this was the best way they could think of to spend their first day sober.
This was a transformational experience. It was an experience I could not have done without the help of my friends Ryan Soberg and Markus Ironwood. I could not have done this without the help of Magus Books and Herbs in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I could not have accomplished this without each of the artists who took the risk to step out of the shadows and gave of themselves to create the work that made healing happen. This would have been impossible without the people who decided to go out on a cold and wet autumn day to appreciate the work of others.
Most of all, it couldn’t have happened if I was still living a life of addiction.
Jezebel Pride 