The Canyon of Lament

"The Canyon of Lament" - mixed media on 300 lb watercolor paper, 22" x 15".  Ready to frame.  Available here and at Artfinder.

​Since childhood, I've been fascinated by bones.  I dreamed of becoming an archeologist, certain the bones I would find would whisper their secrets to me.  There are stories in the bones, clean of all their earthly housing and bared for all to see.

My own bones speak loudly every darn day.  Mostly groaning and creaking and complaining.  Not exactly the kind of magical whispering I had in mind.  But Mark Nepo might caution me to listen more closely to my own skeletal murmuring..."Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow cycles of nature, is a help."   This May Sarton quote is in the beginning of the chapter titled "Regret" in Nepo's The One Life We're Given.  Like a bag of rocks dumped on my head, a bit of an "aha" moment as my own bones slow me down to tortoise mode and force patience beyond my abilities.

There is grief in my bones...the loss of parents, of pooches, of strength and youth.  A nearly empty nest - the loss of fertility and motherhood.  The running shoes I can no longer wear to lope through forest trails and city streets.  But Nepo warns us of these canyons of lament; easy to sink into and flounder in our own regret and attempts to unravel the knots of the past.

When lamenting the past, our own reception is limited...Nepo compares regret to  misaligned plumbing pipes - things cannot flow through us and to us freely because the flow is interrupted.  How do you know if your pipes are askew?  "...if you have trouble hearing or taking things in."  Well sure enough that happens often.  So what now?  Call a plumber?  Nope.  The answer, says Nepo, is to "give of yourself - anywhere and everywhere.  Sometimes the only remedy is to empty ourselves and begin again."

Though I don't think Nepo meant this literally (my apologies, but the plumbing metaphor has my mind turning to all the wrong images here - as if you could read my mind, dear reader!  Wait - maybe you can?), I can't help but wonder at the universe as I prepare for a surgery this summer where the insides of parts of my cervical spine will actually be removed - emptied, as it were- and a long recovery set back into slow cycles begun.

Whew!  That's a lot of philosophy for a Monday morning.  Let's enjoy some classic dancing skeletons instead. :)