Art & Parkinson’s
More artwork and writing on the theme of “Anger & Perspective”
The Monster-free Caregiver
The writer, bell hooks, reminded us to beware of thinking that we are “monster-free.” This is a subject near and dear to my monster-ridden heart. How I long for my heart to be pure, good, empty of malice.
And yet, hourly, I hear the monsters announcing themselves, sometimes by tip-toeing quietly about and sometimes pounding the floor, letting me know that they are here, they exist.
I wonder what they look like. How tall are they? How many legs do they have? Where is their center of gravity?
My sense is that they like to move, to spread mischief, to not sit alone in a room. Maybe, in high spirits, they will dance their way out. “Would you like the next dance?” I could say, while moving them toward the door.
Replacing anger with love
I’m getting tired of my anger – the thing that commingles in my belly with fear.
Occasionally, I have glimpses of what’s beyond the anger. Like yesterday, when I was sitting at the table with Hal and he was trying to express a thought to me. His breath and his words were coming out so slowly – like a bellows being manipulated by a being who had been given bones, but no muscles at birth. I was getting impatient. Really impatient.
So I did my breathing and my brain went to imagination mode. A picture came to my mind – of my hands holding Hal’s brain, forming a bowl in which his brain could rest. I guess you could say that that was one of the many moments when anger flipped to love in my brain.
The fear (of his cognitive slippage, of my own rage at being trapped in this role) – versus – the love (of who he was despite everything and of who I was despite everything).
Red
Hal and I were talking about some paintings I had been working on that had a lot of red in them. I was saying that red is so insistent and it can easily dominate a picture. It reminds us of anger, of blood. It’s not the go-to-color for when we want to relax, to feel at one with the world.
The idea didn’t immediately connect with him, but he seemed interested. He gave me his associations to the color. “Conflagration” and “burning down the house” came up in our discussion. I hadn’t told Hal that I had woken up that morning full of rage about my life, feeling limited, confined. A temporary feeling, I knew, although it didn’t feel temporary.
I had tried to dowse my internal fire and engage in conversation with him. But as we sat there and talked, little flames kept flaring up out of the crevasses, the red matter of my brain.
And then out of his mouth came the words, “I am not intimate with red” – which I loved – and which added just the right cooling factor that somehow extinguished my smoldering fire.
Morning Sketches
