This day is always so strange. I know it’s coming, but it still sneaks up on me and I wake up feeling off. I feel called to do on this day, but do what?
I went to see Marianne Williamson, the brilliant author, teacher, and activist, speak a few months ago in Edmond, OK on her “Healing the Soul of America” tour.
She told us about the painting of an angel that hung over her bed in her dorm room in college. She didn’t know who painted it, but she was moved by its colors and essence. She loved it. A few years later she was walking by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and the same painting of an angel was hanging outside as the poster for the artist’s exhibit inside.
I don’t remember the artist’s name, I don’t even remember what the painting looked like (she did show us).
I do remember she went inside and took the tour that day. She learned that the angels were each painted in response to German attacks during WWII. The artist said something along the lines of, “I will paint an angel for each bomb dropped.”
I recall the slumber party I hosted full of eighth grade girls on the night of 9/11, or a day or two after, for my 14th birthday. The barn in our sideyard had just been built and stood empty, the concrete floor brand new and perfect for doing cheerleading moves. We spent the evening on our bellies, painting our feelings on scraps of paper of all kinds. Painting and singing our broken hearts over what had happened in middle school community. We didn’t know what to do, but we knew we had to do.
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by the seemingly chaotic world, feel paralyzed with fear, hate, sadness, pointing fingers at “other”. But, you can choose to be a part of the change or keep turning your head from the pain, but pointing at it nonetheless. Saying it’s someone else’s problem. If you are triggered by it, then it is yours as well. You must look at it in order to begin to heal it. Then, like magic you learn to alchemize your heartbreak, our collective heartbreak into wisdom, beauty, and change.
I know what I will do today. I will “paint my angel” in rememberance.
What if in response to this hurting/changing world we “painted our angel” everyday? Whatever that is for you. Letting our thoughts and actions be for and from love, would our lives become the angel painting? When we are willing to look at the pain, and channel it into our individual “angel paintings”, there is/will be healing, there is/will be movement. There is/will be love and grace.
I pray that we become a community of Alchemists.
