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Lived experience and art

“I found that life has to be edited to continue” Tracey Emin

 a) A short film that uses footage from a documentary about Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho’s life in the street. It is about a man who was homeless in São Paulo, Brazil, for nearly 35 years. In April 2011, he was befriended by Shalla Monteiro, who was moved by his poetry and created a facebook page to feature his writing, which led to his reconnecting to family and publishing his poems at: https://vimeo.com/217764756

b)  Figures portraying the female experience, loss, the agonies of heartbreak, bereavement and reproductive trauma…. by Tracey Emin at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/05/tracey-emin-a-fortnight-of-tears-review-london-white-cube-bermondsey

c) “Ο αληθινός καλλιτέχνης είναι αυτό το παιδί που υπάρχει μέσα μας” – Λίνα Νικολακοπούλου ΤED talk at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l—fqBWdlDE

‘Η σωτηρία της ψυχής / είναι πολύ μεγάλο πράγμα
σαν ταξιδάκι αναψυχής / μ’ ένα κρυμμένο τραύμα’

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“We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives… not looking for flaws, but for potential” Ellen Goodman

Over the Christmas week we visited my parents’ birthplaces and hometown. Ι had set several intentions for this trip, one being, to visit spots I had frequented as a young teenager and see things through the eyes of my current age. I was reminded of her reality and take on things and I witnessed dynamics from a different vantage point. The beauty of the places was freed of memories as I re-inhabited them in a more grateful and spacious now. Outside the Metropolis (the bishopric) I remembered that in one of its rooms a good looking guy had tried over coffee or tea to persuade me to enter monastic life. The memory brought home to me the vulnerability of adolescence and how important it is to teach children ways to engage with making age appropriate choices aligned to their authentic self. It was also amusing to experience houses and rooms as smaller than how I had remembered them. In my teens I spent part of the summer time at my mother’s siblings’ homes. Their homes that now belong to other people, since they have all passed away, seemed smaller, tucked between the new houses that have risen on back yards, lemon orchards and olive groves. The sea is not visible. The dirt path that leads to the beach has been fenced.

I remembered my aunt’s simple meals based on seasonal produce and on the day of the week. On Wednesdays and Fridays she strictly abstained from meat and dairy products for religious reasons.  On the other non fasting days she made dekoto for me from fresh eggs she brought from the neighbours who kept hens. It is one of the most basic and old fashioned sweets I know of. It only takes a few minutes to prepare. All you need are a very fresh egg yolk, three teaspoons of sugar! and some cocoa (optional). You beat the mixture in a cup for about five minutes until the sugar has dissolved completely and it has doubled in volume.  Memories of food, the stories shared around meals and emotions become intertwined and they linger in our psyche.  In her book, The Endless Table: Recipes from Departed Loved Ones, Ellen Goodman has brought together leading chefs’ stories and recipes of loved ones that have died. She writes: ‘There is something both primal and intimate about the act of feasting on food and rich conversation. We share stories like heaping platters of warm pasta and pass traditions along to the next generation like salt to flavor their lives. Memories and menus are bound together in our emotional makeup, whether it’s the hot dog at Fenway Park or the iconic turkey at Thanksgiving.’

Below are some photos from our recent trip

So, may this new decade bring more peace, love, freedom and justice to the world. May we let others be and may we have faith in ourselves and life. Rick Hanson says: ‘without some realistic faith in the world and yourself, life feels shaky and scary. Faith grounds you in what’s truly reliable and supportive; it’s the antidote to the undermining of endless doubting. Brother David Steindl-Rast writes that ‘at times of doubt we can lean on our commitment to living gratefully as a reminder to look for the opportunity in a given situation’. In the last part of his pledge for grateful living he says: In thanksgiving to life, I pledge to overcome FEAR by seeing in what I might otherwise fear, the opportunity to cultivate courageous TRUST IN LIFE and so to lay the foundation for a peaceful future. Finally, may this New Year be ‘….full of things that have never been’ (Rainer Maria Rilke).

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Tiles and glass

‘Part of the nature of man is to recompose a unity that has been broken. In mosaic, I re-create an order out of shards.” (Marco de Luca, cited in Terry Tempest William’s book Finding Beauty in a Broken World)

‘I believe in the beauty of all things broken’ Terry Tempest Williams

War, trauma, neglect, early programming and life in general can shatter our sense of wholeness and inescapable connectedness to everything around us. Some types of adversity leave us feeling shattered whether in relation to our worldview, sense of self or relatedness.  Our sense of being the Universe is pushed aside and our sense of separateness is magnified. The experience of an expansive Self in continuity and as arising in every moment is lost and replaced by a sense of constriction, smallness and lack of flow. Some people ‘fall apart with greater ease’ when bad things happen and get the chance to come together again. Some people are more like an opaque glass ball or diamond. They keep going. They keep it together. They persevere. They hide the pain. Some kinds of trauma can leave us feeling more opaque as if we have solidified into stone or glass. Set in stone. Set in glass. Nothing comes in. Nothing goes out. And yet, as Leonard Cohen sang: ‘there is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.’

On the one hand, the glass metaphor conjures images or experiences of immobility, frozenness, solidity, non communication. Decorative opaque glass spheres or frosted glass balls, sometimes with an embedded image, message or small object, come to mind. Years ago in Venice I bought a glass sphere with two little butterflies solidified in the glass. On the other hand, shattered glass has become a metaphor of the aftermath of assault and of the sense of ‘scatteredness’ and discontinuity that trauma can cause. Diaspora, a Greek word, comes to my mind now even though it is usually used for the diaspora of a people and its culture through immigration and other processes. The diaspora of our sense of self, of a life, a country, a world. Maybe it has popped up because I have recently encountered the word in Terry Tempest William’s book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. She writes: ‘Diaspora. I think of the people who fled Rwanda before the war, during the war, and after. Diaspora. The word sounds like the definition it holds: a scattering of language, culture, or people that was formerly concentrated in one place. The African Diaspora. To disperse. To scatter like seeds. Scatterlings.’

We heal through the light that comes in through the cracks and we heal through putting the pieces back together to create something new in the place of disruption and disaster.  Like young children we assimilate and accommodate (Jean Piaget), that is we make sense of the damage and what has happened through our existing understanding of the world, and then we make new meaning of our experiences.  We welcome the cracks that allow the light to pour in and we do the labor of putting the pieces together.  Thus, the art of mosaic becomes a healing process. Terry Tempest Williams describes the process of creating a mosaic out of old tiles for a Genocide Monument in Rwanda…. ‘For hours, we work on the mosaic. Cement on trowel, pick a piece of tile, set it, smooth the surface and see that it is level.  A mosaic is like a puzzle. It engages the mind through a sequence of possibilities, trial and error. You look at the broken fragments of tile; your eye assesses the space and searches for a corresponding shape. Piece by piece, you come closer to the desired form and effect.’

Whether we are creating a tangible mosaic out of terracotta, pebbles or glass as part of a process of personal or collective healing or making sense of events through other means and modalities we cannot put things back exactly as they were, but through embracing the ‘brokenness’ and constructing something new out of the old pieces and the new ingredients that bind the pieces together we create healing and integration in our personal space and in the collective. I should perhaps mention that we all begin life as scattered pieces when we are babies. As we develop, get attached to caregivers and others, and have our needs met we integrate all our aspects of self and we gradually develop a more solid sense of who we are. Life events and temperament shape who we grow into and our sense of self, which shifts and emerges anew as we accumulate life experiences. So, we all have different aspects of self, which communicate and influence each other. Severe trauma and other learning experiences can impede communication within and lead to a more compartmentalized organization of self and memory; however, this is material for another post.  Also, it is important to remember that at some deeper level we are whole and boundless and maybe it is in that space that we catch a glimpse of what we call eternity.