Finally, it's starting to well up. First was anger. Anger at my work, anger at the whole situation here, where I've been so busy keeping up their goddamned schedules and killing myself for a bunch of lousy abusive beancounters who won't so much as say "thank you" for superhuman efforts and more. Lousy schedules that kept me from the bedside of a dying friend for more than a single weekend, because I need to pay my mortage and eat. Anger at myself for not just telling them all to go to hell and quitting. Anger at my common sense that keeps me from doing this to this day.
Then, last night, for the first time, the pain hiding under the anger started to rise. It started showing up in feelings of why Ireland was special to me, of how I the pain of the Irish land, the underlying tragedy of her history, matches well with my own history. We are alone and grieving together, Erin and I. And once I allowed myself to feel that, I started to cry. I put on some music I had bought on my Ireland trip, which embodies some of my feelings of sorrow, and let myself fall into it and feel. The pain was the most beautiful, agonizing, soul-awaking experience. And I cried. I fell into it, and cried for too many losses.
And needed to draw. It was after midnight, but I pulled out vintage drawing pencil (better than modern ones) and my sketchpad. And let my mind seek Jana, and see what would be my mourning art for her. And what emerged was a standing stone, flanked by two smaller ones, with a sheela-na-gig sculpted into its base, and a wreath of flowers and berries draped over its top at an angle...or was it a flowering vine? The ambiguity came with the drawing. I do know that I captured something, some essence of my feelings, of old and new, life and death... I did another sketch, then, not a mourning sketch, but simply one to let the spirit flow, and found a sunset, looking west at midwinter, with a standing stone and a far-off point jutting into the sea, that I realized had been in one of my paintings of Irish fantasy landscapes. With pain, the gates unlock, and I walk between worlds, and find my creative spirit again...
I'm still feeling, today. This is good. I don't want to lose this crystal sharpness that cuts like blades into the flesh of the soul. Sometimes, one must let the black blood flow, in order to be healed.
"Open your heart/Let the black blood flow,/Gotta be on your way/'Cause you're movin' too slow." --Irish Rovers
