Mandala of Loss 1

Changing What's Seen

“You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather” Pema Chodron The changing nature of skies is one reason I use it to express emotion and mood in my drawings. It’s easy to recognize how shifting thoughts and feelings are. Physical objects are different. Their tangibility creates more sense of permanence even though they too have life spans. A meditation teacher once advised student not to look in the direction of a sound because everything that hits the eye has its own train of associations. So true. Almost everything in my house triggered thoughts of Michael. But they all must be kept because he might need them when he returns. And this is just the surface. There are many layers to grieving. I thought I was in it but had barely scratched the surface. The layers of things and their history of memories is amplified by the regular places and animated by their behavior there. When Michael’s sister Kathy described her side of the couch and how specifically she set it up, she could have been describing Michael. That was one of the reasons I couldn’t inhabit certain rooms at all until I rearranged them completely. The specter of his absence was too glaring where he spent the most time. It wasn’t enough. Even with the rearrangement the house has lost its feeling of home. I still look forward to getting back whenever I’m out. Until I walk in the door. The homeness came from his presence and it will take time to get use to the new status, the current loss of meaning that can only be regained with time and more living. The series I just started, “Mandalas of Loss” hopefully will help me work through the complicated quicksand of emotions. The first one posted above is as obviously flattened and shattered as I felt. The one I recently started has moved into a melancholoy resignation punctuated by the painful intensity hiding behind the surface. A whole area of self-definition, roles and responsibilities is gone. Though something similar happened when I retired, I was ready and had plenty that I was ready to fill the time with to restore the meaning of teaching in a different mode, This, I wasn’t ready for, and I don’t know that anyone could be. There’s no way to know in advance how woven into my fabric 50 years with a person creates until it happens.