Dark Moon, October 25, 2022 March 4, 2019 I don’t know how to write of her. It must have been one of the thickly veiled days, a day of rising grief fogging my mind. My body, filled with a leaden darkness. I lay myself down in black paint, the grieving one, in thick outlines. A…Continue readingCelestial Whale
Full Moon, October 9, 2022 December 4, 2018 The one who paints merges with the woman who grieves, the pain too intense not to bleed out, blurring the edges between them. In twenty days he will be dead one year. No, no, no, no…dead? No. A year. No. One year, one day, forever and yesterday. …Continue readingFalse Hope
DARK MOON, September 25, 2022 December 2019 She stands before the large white paper, a refugee. Flashes of grade school, bottles of paint all around her, big fat brushes, tiny scissors, cup of water, the air hollow around her shaking body. The tremor invisible, until the evening when her teeth rattle with the discharge of…Continue readingI Have Made a Place for You
Full Moon September 10, 2022 November, 2018 Shattered by grief, betrayed by her body’s failure to withstand the absence of her Beloved, she lays on the ground, prostrates herself to the agony she cannot fix. Her body crazed like old fragile pottery. Hands reach from nowhere, holding her pieces together, one rests on the back…Continue readingCrucifixion
Dark Moon August 27, 2022 October 29, 2018 She is a few months away from a year. A year since he died. This is her first painting group. She is drained, as though her blood, her heart, everything is gutted. Hands shake, heart races, tears fall. Elisabeth greets her tenderly. Seats her at a table.…Continue readingThis Woman Needs Saving
FULL MOONJune 3, 2023 March 22, 2022 I am an ordinary woman Grieving Putting bananas in my cart It calms your hearts, you who don’t dare to look too closely at what life brings Inside is a woman who lives in a different skin Wearing a necklace of skulls and roses Death and love…Continue readingRooted One
Full Moon April 6, 2023July 30, 2020 She stares into the sheered off rock – grey – her naked body pressed against the cold and mineral stone, smelling of metallic earth. She feels the jagged edges, the layers of rock face, impenetrable, unwelcoming. The painter thinks of Rilke’s grief poem. Rilke asks god to be…Continue readingVigil
FULL MOON July 2020 She sits in the white chair in her studio, light streaming through the open skylight, wind-fingered trees whisper, creating moving shadows, dappling the room with an underwater sway. It is what others call a beautiful day. For her it is another grief day and it is the hour of her painting…Continue readingTornado
February 20th, 2023 New Moon April 30, 2020 She blackens the canvas, Mars Black, the god of war. She isn’t at war, is she? At war with what is, at war with grief, a world turned upside down and now again by an unseen messenger? Who stops us in our insane movement. So many dying. …Continue readingStar Woman Painting
NEW MOON May 19, 2023 April 2, 2020 Weeping She seeks She prays She conjures and begs She despairs At Mystery’s Gate the Wild Guardian She learns is within her own body unlocked by love by spirit medicine by dream and silence in the humming language of the other world trusting implicitly in its presence…Continue readingTrickster Gatekeeper