chaos & compassion
Out of the chaos, her creativity was protecting her, guiding her, and holding her close
She wondered what it was that kept her going, kept her going back to her stack of mark-making papers, and kept her cutting them up into squares and rectangles.
The artist didn’t see that her mark-makings were expressions of her wide-open vulnerability. They were all too chaotic, so she made them into neat shapes.
She wondered why she was rearranging them in collages, why she was containing them in books, and why it mattered.
The chaos of her mark-making was overwhelming, so she tried to make it manageable. The artist didn’t see that her inside chaos was also the outside chaos.
What was too much was the wide-open abyss of political chaos that was happening in her country, the cruel pressure of it unleashed mere miles from her home, and the rippling effects on nearly everything she cared about.
The artist’s heart was shattering, and her headaches were getting worse, and she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t see that out of the chaos, her creativity was protecting her, guiding her, and holding her close.
She wondered how it was that she was able to keep her creative focus and flow despite the pain, and how she noticed that making the books helped her contain something that was too wide open—her vulnerability, the chaos.
As she lay on the acupuncture table with needles on her face, feet, and head to treat her headaches, the image of Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion came to her — “she who hears the cries of the world.” Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she wondered if Kannon heard her, too.
The artist’s head was aching into fragments, just like Kannon’s, when the suffering of the world became too unbearable. Kannon was given eleven heads and a thousand arms so she could take it all in and offer infinite care.
The artist is starting to see that her creativity, her seemingly infinite collages, is a way of holding compassion within the chaos, for herself and others…
Seeing…
LouLou
