Trauma & Art

One more thread….

‘Now is not the time to shrink from the challenge of saving our only home in the universe. Now is not the time to pull into ourselves, retreating into either survivalist or escapist mode. To the contrary, this is the time for titans, not turtles. Now is the time to open our arms, expand our horizons, and dream big. Big problems require big solutions’ Van Jones

This post is written in the ‘aftermath’ of listening to the series on waking up in the world and action hosted by Sounds True. Thirty inspiring people from very diverse fields and backgrounds discussed waking up to the truths of the world and life in the world and the gifts and challenges of taking up non-violent action to create change in ways that heal and support the planet, connection, dignity, kindness, safety, social justice and access to resources for more people, but also, respect of Other and diverse ways of being, For as Jon Kabat Zinn writes ‘Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count’. Naturally through engaging with the material things happened in me like new learning and integration processes, gratitude, remembering, thinking and feeling. One thread of my own life journey unfolded and became more integrated.

In childhood I wanted to help those in pain or need when I grew up and I loved writing stories, reading books and doing art to my heart’s content. This was before familial and broader societal shoulds and dont’s created a stifling internal infrastructure that I am still dismantling. This is before I fell asleep in my assigned, not very spacious box. Tara Brach writes ‘perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns…We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small’. However, boxes and cages do give us the illusion of safety. That is probably one reason why so many of us never step out of them. Playwright, performer and activist Eve Ensler writes ‘I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves…’. This is especially true for girls. Many are raised to become obedient, perfectionist, people pleaser, self-sacrificing robot kind of creatures. Bearing this in mind one understands at some point that self care is a revolutionary act. Parker Palmer writes: ‘Self-care is never a selfish act – it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we touch’.

In adolescence and later in my youth my desire to help others mutated into a desire to change the world and fight for change and freedom. My interest in writing got dampened, but my love for art still often raised its head. Actually, this love has never been stifled totally out of sight although it has often manifested as other more acceptable ‘creativities’. I read Karl Marx, Simone Beauvoir and Angela Davis among other things and dreamt of more justice and equity. I got politically involved at the age of fifteen and participated in peace marches, women’s rights activities, strikes and demonstrations. Eventually, disappointment set in, my views shifted as I got older, and also, life happened and to some extent I followed prescribed ways of being within contexts that did not always feel home to me.

In my forties I started retracing my steps back to me. My desire to speak out and do good and underlying ache for freedom manifested as a need to heal my wounds and then others’, return to school and take up art. Breaking the silence through art felt necessary in order to heal and mostly contribute to prevention. I put out a little book of words and images. The short review in Athen’s Voice (20/12/2007) wrote ‘a different kind of fairy tale that links art and child abuse through an ostensibly simple story, with biographical elements. It is self-psychoanalytical, therapeutic, shocking, with beautiful, melancholic aesthetics…. It can have many recipients or no one to capture its weight ….’ (‘ένα διαφορετικό παραμύθι που συνδέει την τέχνη με την παιδική κακοποίηση μέσω μιας προσχηματικής, απλούστατης ιστορίας με εμφανή βιωματικά στοιχεία. Αυτό-ψυχαναλυτικό, θεραπευτικό, σοκαριστικό, με υπέροχη μελαγχολική αισθητική. Μπορεί να έχει είτε πολλούς αποδέκτες είτε κανέναν που να συλλαμβάνει το βάρος του….’. I myself was not fully aware of the depth, breadth and severity of what I was symbolically uttering in that moment through that product, and thus, could not anticipate the backlash I would experience. There is often a price to pay for speaking out and taking action and a much bigger price for forgetting the totality of who we all are and suppressing our heart desires to fit in. Since my teens I have been fired simply for taking part in strikes, suffered poverty, been harassed in work and educational settings, been deprived of basic rights, been stalked, suffered violations of privacy and interference, suffered pet atrocities, road accidents and injuries and assaults on my dignity, been persecuted from authorities, etc. I have also fought to break the silence in court and maybe find justice through court procedures and I have visited authorities and agencies often in vain and from a place of urgency. We only do what we can and we respond from the breadth of awareness and knowing and available resources at any given moment. Our lived experience and agency, as well as, capacity to clearly discern the bigger picture are to a great extent fear and context bound. My favourite defense pattern of minimizing and also the continuous string of smaller assaults distracted me and created emergencies preventing me from asking why and what for.

Then in my fifties after suffering more blatant losses I had no choice but to override my fears and become the canvas for oppression and violence to become visible. Meanwhile, the bigger picture was slowly birthing itself for me and others to see. I have written more about this in previous posts. For instance, on May 1^st, 2018, I wrote ‘it was as if through her willingness to make herself the art object and to endure the suffering in public, artist Marina Abramovic, had made her commitment to something unquestionable. Her art performance could also be viewed as an offering of herself as a canvas on which the violence became visible, an act of ‘bearing witness’ to acts, practices, dynamics or narratives…..’

Even summarizing all this here takes my breath away, as I am forced to feel unmetabolized emotions, but putting this thread of my lived experience in words brings balance and goodness and restores dignity, and more importantly creates a bigger more integrated picture perspective. So as I ponder on the wisdom and experience that all the courageous people, involved in this series, shared I feel the necessity for all of us to  participate in some smaller or bigger way in alleviating suffering and in changing things from a place of more mindful presence, deeper awareness of inter-connectedness and sense of Oneness. I will end this piece today with a quote from Valerie Kaur: ‘Revolutionary love is a well-spring of care, an awakening to the inherent dignity and beauty of others and the earth, a quieting of the ego, a way of moving through the world in relationship, asking: ‘What is your story? What is at stake? What is my part in your flourishing?’ Loving others, even our opponents, in this way has the power to sustain political, social and moral transformation. This is how love changes the world.”