About Me

My name is Christine. I'm a visual artist, musician, traditional storyteller, DV survivor, and have been a fulltime caregiver for an individual living with various diagnoses. After my marriage, I learned how to play various instruments, started exploring various means of creative expression, worked with at-risk teens/families, volunteered with the local crisis lines, participated in starting up a family resource center, completed my BA, furthered my studies towards becoming an art therapist, managed homes for adults living with disabilities, and facilitated therapeutic music/art sessions. I was doing everything I could so my children and I could have a brighter life, present and future. My physical health, however, continued to show evidence of too many chronic stressors over many decades. This blog is about my journey in discovering peace and better health by meeting life in the most basic and, in my opinion, the most rewarding of ways - by focusing on the riches of simplicity. If you're a new visitor to my blog, you might be interested in starting here: Finding the Riches.

Saturday, November 02, 2013

Light


Today I came across this draft that I hadn't posted last year. I remember that I'd considered deleting it last year. Today I realized how pertinent it is to my present journey:

"Last week, I was sitting in a closet-sized room at a hospital lab where the only view included the three bathroom-stall walls around me and the empty wall on the other side of the corridor. Against the wall was a metal shelf unit on wheels, housing folded hospital gowns.

As I sat in the tiny space waiting for the lab assistant, I became aware of the sense that there was nothing inspiring that I could see, and I hadn't brought along a notepad for writing/ sketching/scribbling ideas. There was no window offering a glimpse of a tree or birds or sky. There was no music, no artwork on the walls - only my imagination.

So I challenged myself. I looked at that institutional metal rack and considered the possibility of thinking creatively about it. It was shiny. It was silver. Still nothing. It had wheels - that gave my mind a microsecond of a grin imagining the adventure Lucy Ricardo or some other character might have with a wheeled shelf unit in a hospital hallway.

And then my thinking took a sharp turn. I considered the idea that we often don't see because we don't "see" - we don't look, we don't understand, our interpretation is too shallow, too limited. Something inside me wanted to find what I wasn't seeing.

I considered that maybe that's what happens when we're in a desperate environment - we're reminded of the inner life within us rather than being so attached to the environment around us. We're beckoned to reclaim how we view life rather than having our view dictated by our surroundings. We're called to take the time to really see rather than just exist. And then I saw it. I caught my breath and smiled at the timing of the thoughts I was having and what I was seeing - the glint of light on the corner of one of the shelves. Reflection."

Light. It's what draws us to the magic of the stars in the night sky; the glow of the moon in the dark. Our ability to see colour is dependent on it. And it's within us.

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