Dear __________,
I remember the image in my 8th grade physical science textbook. I had a very hard time comprehending “real” and “virtual” image concepts. I still remember the feeling of not understanding it. I joke with myself that this is the explanation my teacher couldn’t give me— just a few decades down the road.
The brain is doing so much that we don’t notice until it’s injured. I had not heard of the occipital lobe before this. I recently looked into the research around it and learned that the occipital lobe is the part that has changed considerably over 200,000 years while other parts haven’t change quite as much. It used to be elongated at the back of the head “like a ballerina’s bun” as one article said. I enjoy wondering what it was up to that required such heft.
There’s a dimension to this that I’d like to share with you. It’s beyond all the science except the autism sense-instinct material. In March 2022, seven months before the fall, I started painting again after a few paintings in 2016. I was healing. I felt as though my whole being was encased in concrete. One afternoon I felt the urge to paint. A powerful urge. I got to work, listening to Fugee’s “Killing Me Softly” non-stop as painting after painting came out of me, all of them bright and unlike my other painting jaunts.
Suddenly I had color! The forms emerged from the colours with zero intention. I “had to” paint five paintings every day. By the time five were done (these were small), I could breathe and relax and go on with my day. The paintings moved me through that horrid locked-up sensation of abuse, and soon I made a playlist with three-hours of my favorite pop songs and called it “Painting Music.” The paintings were all connected to Georgian Bay, Ontario, my favorite home in nature. They went from scenes and memories to a focus of water and stones then into trees with magical and symbolic significance. I can watch the progression: from beauty of this primordial place I have visited all but two summers of my life on earth, a region where original earth’s crust can still be found; from this “heaven” my attention was drawn in.
For a month I painted the rocks of Georgian Bay, former mountain peaks higher than Himalayas and now washed smooth save the ribbons of rose quartz; after a month of rocks and water, my hand began making an upward stroke. I thought it might be the rotted posts under cottage docks, and I noticed that this was the stroke that formed decades of doodles on pages of notes. I also remembered that when my father was dying, I painted, and this stroke repeated some fifty times across a canvas. I called them sailboats. These weren’t sailboats now, though. I waited for the next move, which came from deep someplace maybe or maybe not in me. It would become the trees through which I’d travel canvas after canvas, trees with as many colors in each leaf as I could fit on a brush. Leaves as language, trees as connection between earth and sky. The rocks and water had been lateral in their orientation. Two elements interchangeable. Horizon.
The trees were my psychic connection with something higher, something simply up.
Going back a bit farther, when the shelter-in-place started, I chose to reach out to my friend in London and write a play with him. I also enrolled in a six-week course with Pema Chodron called “Turn Your World Around.” It was Buddhist mind-training wherein we are to seize control once and for all of our emotions that bring us pain, the kleshas, hobgoblins of primordial consciousness. I took it entirely seriously. I didn’t meditate, but I did use the tonglen breath to get through the horrid discomfort of zero distraction. I used every emotion, every craving, every taste of anger as an opportunity to learn about it even if it really hurt. I read all the Pema Chodron and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche books and started to form an image of myself as an instrument of receiving the stresses and horrors of my own experience and churning them into creativity before they got a chance to settle in my body. Like Keanu Reeves dodging slow bullets in Matrix. The books supported me because my intellect has always liked to play a part. Buddhism allowed for that. I was struggling to apply all I knew to the awakening when painting arrived with such a surprise.
So, looking at the brain injury in terms of a timeline, I don’t set its beginning at the fall in November 2022 but in 2020 when I said “yes” to turning my world around. I can’t disconnect these events. If I had not done the mind-training, I would not have been able to handle the fall’s fall-out (!) well at all. I maintained the mind-training throughout, allowing zero tipping over into suffering. I maintained watchfulness, presence, watching it all worsen and develop from a mindfulness perspective. The paintings, visible in the dim light and glasses, provided me with beauty of my favorite, most healing place. In short, some profound foresight made my experience of losing sight not only bearable but strategically managed from deep within. I had even named the symbolic tree paintings with phrases from the Buddhism books, one of which was Fourth Moment, outside of time/space, which describes and contains this four-year transformation.
all my best,
Laura
This (above) is the first painting of March 2022, nine months before the brain injury.
These are just some of the paintings that followed within that first month.
This painting developed during the darkness of acute photophobia. I completed this one year after the first painting.
I do not know how to paint. These emerge and tell me a story of what I cannot see, cannot name, and certainly cannot explain. I can love this world they show me. I love it entirely. I am grateful. I visit as often as I can, and each trip into it, I come back stronger, kinder, gentler because I’m safe now. I’m protected. I’m alive.