Healing metaphors One of the things I learned in medical school that struck me to the core was the difference between healing and regeneration. Regeneration is when your body returns seamlessly to its preinjury state. By just looking at someone you can't tell anything happened. A bit of skin scraped off your knee will regenerate. But scar formation is another matter. Scars are a new tissue formed when injury is too substantial for regeneration. Another fact: scars require constant energy and nutrients to be maintained. This explains why Vitamin C deficiency causes old wounds to open up. At sea without fresh food the wounds of sailors would open up and terrify the afflicted as well as those who watched. It must have seemed a judgement from on high--a living hell revisiting all old wounds at once.
The images here are about healing, how we might think about creating something new to fill in an injured place. They are about making do and celebrating what is. They are about what
Rumi says in his poem, Childhood Friends:
"Don't turn your head. Keep looking
at the bandaged place. That's were
the light enters you."
have started writing on the walls of my house. Because the pipe burst over Christmas and the wallpaper had to be stripped, I thought it might be time to experiment on the walls. The contractor is mostly finished preping to paint, and now I've put him off so that I can play for a week. Here's a couple of pictures from the hallway going up to the attic. I just know he's going to hate me when he sees what I've done. I just couldn't help myself. The plaster that he's put down and partially sanded is so smooth, it's lovely to write on it. I haven't used charcoal in ages. It was Irving's poem from our book, And Beyond Laughter, that I wrote on the wall. Then I put up blurry pictures form my mother's photo box of her and Peter, and me, blurry too, in my pink tutu and my green skating outfit. Maine, Monterrey, Houston. Now, here, Syraucuse. The span of time. It's accelerating.
