The why of the wounded artist
As I write this, I am sitting on my front porch watching the cotton candy clouds sweep slowly across this Solstice sky. My pollinator garden, full of rainbow blooms, are all leaning west as they savor the last moments of the longest day of the the year. I dream about this moment when we are in the depths of winter, and here it is. We will wake up tomorrow, spiraling slowly back towards the darkness, and it all reminds me of the cycles in life that we must learn to befriend. These perpetual comings and goings and impermanence are written into the code of our time on this planet.
The poetic irony of all of this is that on the day with the most light, my heart is feeling a substantial counterbalance of heavy darkness. Last weekend, my partner and I caught up on the Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi series. There is a moment where Obi-Wan and young Leia are traveling together and Leia asks him about her birth parents. This is one of those moments that adoptees will understand implicitly—the moment another orphan conjures up the ghosts that can be calmed, but will never truly sleep.
In scenes like this, you are reminded, no matter how hard you have worked to mend these wounds in yourself, that even the deepest scars ache from time to time.
Like Leia, adoptees will never stop asking questions. Questions about their birth mother or father. Questions about the unlived life that lingers in the periphery of our psyches. The hardest question most of us will wield is: Why? Why did our family leave us? Why do we exist? Why me? The “why” is in the ocean of grief.
Being an adoptee means existing within infinite unanswered questions. Even if you do eventually reunite with your birth family, or find tangible answers to your story, you will never touch the bottom of the well of “why.” There simply are not answers for all of the questions. Sometimes, things simply are. I know this, and even after many years of working and reworking these parts of myself, there I was welling up with tears over Leia asking Obi-Wan the same questions I have relentlessly asked myself and others.
The next morning, I was irritated with the feelings this dredged up for me. The same way I imagine all humans feel when we come into contact with that thing we thought we had somehow moved past. Do you ever move past being an orphan though? Or losing a loved one? Or all the other multitudes of human experiences that find their way into our DNA and become a part of us? At best, we learn to bear the weight of the mantle of our losses and sadness. Rumi would say that the darkness of the wound is the place where the light enters us.
This week, I have been attempting to allow myself to feel into these watery, weighted spaces. At times, they can feel like a river running through my soul, sweeping me clear of my own resistance towards grief. I am left finding ways to bend towards the light in the same way my flowers do. For me, I come back to images and metaphors. Many artists, musicians, poets, therapists, and writers have learned to transmute the weight of the wound into the imaginal realms. This is the gift of the mantle of losses—to be able to find ways for the pain to become a healing force, both for ourselves, and for the world.
Have you ever looked at a painting and had a welling of emotion? Read a poem that stirred your soul? Heard a song that seemed to embrace you? Or had a therapy session that reminds you that you are seen and loved? The very best artistic (and yes, therapy is an art) antidotes to the darkness of human experiences are born from that same place. This is the light that I believe Rumi speaks of—the brilliant gold hidden within the dark.
On a podcast this week, fellow poet Michael Longley said that “part of writing is adoration.” I feel the truth of this statement deep within me. I could spend my lifetime adoring the wounded places in humanity and the brokenness of this world. I suspect for me, this has become the reality of all the questions I have asked that have no real answers. Learning to accept the dark places within my being allows me to become the wounded artist—the wounded healer, the wounded writer, and the wounded poet in me that longs to etch the gold of my own darkness into something that transcends the “why.”
It is possible that in the transcendence resides something that has the power to touch a soul and honor our existence that is forever cycling on its axis of darkness and light.