The Voices in My Head - Part VII
I’m not schizophrenic, but sometimes I hear voices. They’re not loud, but they’re assertive and are really part of a tide of knowingness that I’ve experienced at different times in my life. So when I woke to a voice that told me I was to spend my next birthday in Santa Fe taking Ayahuasca, I wasn’t surprised.
THIS IS PART 7 of an EIGHT-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
Image: Pavel Danilyuk
On the Friday night of the workshop, the facilitator, a middle-aged woman in yoga pants and a light blue tank top, told us to wear old dance clothes because we’d be painting. Painting? I thought. Screw that! I didn’t want to dilute my dance experience.
The next morning I arrived in an old pair of Lululemons. The workshop was situated in a studio I’d never been in before, a big, well-lit space with a springy wooden floor and many tall windows that looked out over a parking lot and an orchard of trees. The facilitator, whose name was Susan, told us to partner up. There were thirty of us and we divided into twos, one lying down on a long strip of butcher paper, while the other bent and outlined her form. When we returned from lunch that day, the strips of paper had been tacked to the walls and buckets of water, brushes, acrylic paint were scattered about the room. Susan put on music and told us to go for it. I went straight to the strip of paper that held my outline, which I would have recognized anywhere. (Years before, diagnosed with breast cancer, I’d had a skeletal x-ray done at M.D. Anderson, and the form, which seemed to strip me down to my essence, looked just like this.) I stared hard at it, and then I grabbed a brush.
I don’t think I can ever properly describe the thrill of dancing and painting at once, music pouring through my limbs as I whirled around in front of the drawing and began applying paint.
If there were a heaven, this would be it. I spent the next few hours thinking of nothing but perfecting the drawing, and people began coming up to me and pointing at the piece and saying, “Did you know you were an artist?”
Well, I did and I didn’t. My mother, an abstract painter, had taught me to draw when I was a child. Throughout college I’d taken art classes, but I’d never considered myself an artist because, even from early childhood on, I’d wanted to write novels.
So now what? I was unable to contain my excitement over this new-found ability to put an image on paper that people would immediately be able to recognize. As I thought about it, still dancing and wielding a paintbrush, I added a figure to the background without realizing what I was doing, a woman offering a bouquet of flowers. It was my mother, I immediately realized, letting me know from whatever afterlife she was in that she was the one who’d pushed me into joining this particular dance and discovering a whole new direction. No one could talk me out of that belief.
Cover Image: Pavel Danilyuk