I can’t draw or paint. My hands never learned how to
translate the elaborate images in my mind into 2-D representations. Yet I have
been haunted by an image in my head for months now and I’m suffering from
having it in there but not being able to give birth to it.
Tonight I decided to give birth to it with the tools I have
learned to use: words.
So let me draw you this picture…
A woman with long black hair that falls in big, soft curls
over a pleasantly formed body is kneeling on the ground. She’s naked with her
arms outstretched, holding on to trees either side of her. A thick green jungle
full of colour and light surrounds her. She kneels on a spot of soft,
dark-green moss, her head bent back gracefully and her neck thoroughly exposed
and surrendered to the heavens. Her eyes are closed. From the centre of her
chest springs a fountain. The waters pour strong and forcefully from her heart
and in the waves I can see the full complexity of life: birth, death,
happiness, pain, all of it, flooding through her with its paradoxical
intensity. Her mouth is open and from it fly messengers of love - despite or
because of it all - in the form of beautiful birds, all of which have a red
heart-shape on their chest.
Since I embraced the cycle of life, Pachamama, in the
Amazon, I feel very much grounded and supported by nature, like the woman in
that image. And since I have worked so much on acceptance and letting go of
resistance, I sometimes feel as if life's just flooding through me and suddenly, the
lines between good and bad, me and other, begin to blur, and each experience
becomes a curiosity, a new flavour of life, simply to be tasted and the beauty
of that makes me want to sing praises of love.
