Deep in grief work

It's been a while since I posted. This last year has been terribly hard and I've lacked the energy to keep plugging away at blog posts and social media and all that entails. But slowly I'm finding my way and encountering tools that are helping me reengage. It was explained to me by a pain expert that pain, whether physical, mental, emotional takes high levels of energy, up to a quarter of our total bandwidth, just to hold it. It's overwhelming. This helped a lot.

Now, I don't want to dive deep into all the reasons for this high frequency pain I've been feeling and dealing with, but I am wanting, in this instance, to link it to my creative process. I paint what I feel and man, I've been feeling angry lately. Angry at the residential schools that damaged my family, angry at the predators who took advantage of children there, angry at our government, angry at the Catholic Church, and angry at violence and colonialism and misogyny. Angry isn't even the right work. Furious. Terribly angry. Incensed. How do I work this much energy responsibly and still be honest with it? I have taken a dive deep into my creative process in order to do this and the result is art that feels honest, raw, and potentially controversial. I will share this art soon, as I bring together a number of new pieces that are related to this grief work, but before I do, I felt a need to just say it out loud

Ancestral grief is hard and brings with it the opportunity for big work and healing. But it dives into controversy and difficulty and even deliberate provocation in order to really address the issue. It's my belief we need to do this in order to evolve, grow, and become better

Sna chail'ya