“Will this ever be over?” It’s a question we ask ourselves, each other, and the universe, when challenges and unpleasant situations persist, way beyond our patience to deal with them. In recent weeks, two different friends, in different parts of the country traveled to visit family and needed to extend their visit another 5 to 7 days due to contracting Covid. I’m guessing like me, everyone who hears their stories mutters or mumbles this question. When will this ever end?Years ago, when our family moved from Nebraska to Texas, interest rates changed overnight in the direction of skyrocketing, and we were unable to sell our house. The people who wanted to buy ours couldn’t sell theirs, and thus began our “when the house sells” mantra. “We’ll consider taking a vacation when the house sells. We’ll stop worrying and get a good night’s sleep when the house sells.” “Life is on hold till when the house sells.”
It took a while, but I finally realized that postponing life until something happens or stops happening is not really living your life. This led me to see grieving disappointments and losses as an art we need to get good at in order to have a satisfying life. Grieving is the process of making sense out of what happens to us, metabolizing our losses to make the wisdom in those experiences available to our future life. The arts and art-making provide inspiration and help in our developing those skills.
In grieving our losses, whether particular people, places, or things that are turning out differently than we had expected– we long for closure. But in grief, there is no closure, unless we are talking about the person who is dying. But there can be a kind of resolution, a closure to an episode. Art, performed in the presence of witnesses, or received by a reader or viewer, can provide a way into our grief, – a beginning, a middle progression, and a way out – an opportunity for completion of a particular chapter of the story in this time and place.
“Art stops time,” according to Bob Dylan, and takes us out of the “hurry up and finish” messages of our western popular culture. We enter liminal time, “the space between the worlds” as indigenous people refer to it. There our rational mind becomes the servant of our intuitive mind, as Einstein recommended. We change the shape of grief we’ve held in our minds, no longer seeing ourselves climbing stair steps that represent stages, to dust our palms off as we celebrate arriving at the top landing.
Instead, the image of a spiral informs. We expect changes and challenges to come around again and again, but each time, we are in a different place, on a different level of the turning world. We become different each time.“Stories are data with a soul,” as social work researcher Brene Brown reminds us. Each life has specific losses and specific gifts of grace, while we all share the common challenges chosen for us by history and fate. This is the raw material from which we fashion our lives. Like the artist who creates her art through the arrangement of found objects, we lead an artful life by making art out of what happens to us and discover that, in community with others on the path, order and beauty and repetitive musical rhythms are where our souls find their way home.
Note- Would love to have you join Scottish musician Mairi Campbell, members of the Wing & A Prayer Pittsburgh Players, and me this coming Sunday July 24th from 1 – 2:30 pm eastern time on the Reimagine online platform for The Art of Grieving: How Art helps us live our best lives. We’ll be exploring music and voice to create rituals of remembrance for community transformation. REGISTER HERE
