Halo

"Remember those walls I built?
Well, baby they're tumbling down
And they didn't even put up a fight
They didn't even make a sound
I found a way to let you in
But, I never really had a doubt
Standing in the light of your halo
I got my angel now

It's like I've been awakened
Every rule I had you breakin'
It's the risk that I'm taking
I ain't never gonna shut you out!" -"Halo"(Writer(s): Ramon Owen, Beyonce Knowles, Evan Bogart)

Returning to my routine after a major break is hard: it's less about a dearth of energy or actual depression and more about having had all defenses, walls and filters ripped away. In a porous state, everything saturates me. During the episode, I usually have some understanding with the powers that be that everything that I perceive is happening to me is happening to raze walls. Walls that I have constructed between my emotional life or truth usually to manage reality.

Everyone constructs barriers for protection--against things that don't feed who we are in whatever way, against threats to happiness, against the frightening, against change, against the mundane, against the regular, against the "holy"... Obviously, some boundaries construct ourselves: our predilections, identities, beliefs, etc. The walls that usually get razed in my episodes are those that are somehow lacking use for me creatively, especially those that numb me to certain realities in my life that are problematic.

So, I spent a little over a week in the hospital in May. One thing that many don't realize is that in "that" ward of the hospital where I stayed-- one can have NOTHING. No electronics, no strings, no pencils, no phones, nothing plastic... it goes on. There's a blaring TV and no place to sit where I was so reading is also a challenge. But my parents pulled some random art books from my shelves. The environment was ugly with mint walls and bad wallpaper borders. So I studied the books. I made a few drawings from this book and others during the few hours a day that the art room was open.

I was mystified by the contents of the book and relished doing some figurative work after years of intimating figure through abstraction and material and seashell and landscape. Very satisfying. The neon colors from the dollar store paint set that my parents thankfully delivered were a happy accident in making something different of the Pre-Raphaelite content. So, one of my walls of definition of ego, of what I make in my studio was leveled in that coincidence.

Though I feel way more fragile than my usual self, I am also feeling this kind of "in tune" state of grace-- of change, of new presence, of freshness, of redefined borders. Writing in this blog is part of this experience. Letting go of my boundaries of private reality and answering to the truth of "how I am" extends the halo of the transcendental that graces me in an episode into the rigor of the daily.