I share these images with you who suffer illness as a lens through which you might see more deeply into your own experience. I invite you who suffer in any way, to engage with the darkness of suffering-- however it presents itself--and to trust there abides within the darkness a holy presence and potential that longs to be discovered.

You’ll See Recurring Images

• The Self: egg, hands, human figures, sometimes pregnant.
• Four Elements of air, earth, water, fire: as flames, droplets, plant life, petals, streams. The elements mirror the whole within which we live.
• Turtles & shells: reflect an ongoing, not always self-aware intent to self-protect, to hide.
• Egg-shaped forms: express potential for life.
• Flower of life: expresses the ongoing presence of the Holy within.
• Consoling figures: convey a divine presence comforting or holding.
• Swirl: divine presence, the presence of Great Spirit.

Being With These Images

I invite you to make your way through these images however you like. Perhaps you might skim through them and note ones you’d like to sit with. You may approach them as a puzzle: “What does this express?” You may regard them as an icon: you look at the image and it looks back. You may approach an image as a mirror and discover what it offers you of yourself. You may find an image reminds you of an experience or a feeling or something you have barely sensed and hardly could put into words. Find relief/release in knowing someone else knows. You may be drawn to one section, one theme of experiences or you may choose to make your way through as if you were reading a story and see how a process of noticing experiences, grappling, resisting may soften, crack, somehow yield to discovering more you didn’t guess could be there. You may choose to consider these images as “interesting.” Or you may find one that stirs something in you that you may want to find a way to express from within yourself.

Responding to an Image

Options are many: let your body take a position that expresses your state, and work your way through a series of changes toward something other. You may use words to write something. These images came from a “journal” of sketches, but you might journal with words. Share an image with another person and tell that person what this stirs in you. Or…whatever works for you.

Thematic Arrangement

The images are arranged to portray a kind of sequence from innocent appreciation of how things are, a sense of energy that creates from abundance and births to new beauty, then moves into images of nature, all that is with its unity and diversity. Images move toward ongoing creation in the evolving self—a self moved from a sense of who I am, who I think I am, who I’m sustaining (protecting?) myself in being…into the shock of change that stirs pain, evokes darkness of different kinds and degrees, raises question: “Who am I, really?” Images convey resisting the change, grappling with to minimize, get back to normal…then breaking through to a sense of what is now, trying to deal with “it” and me…more images offer the possibilities in not just accepting grudgingly, but in opening to and embracing new realities, sensing how to incorporate them into life, becoming a new version of the more real me…

Throughout the sequence, the sketches reflect a sense of Other Presence, of being companioned, touched, held, comforted, carried, opened into more. Throughout the sequence from the shock of change are images that convey the fierce pain, struggle, darkness, sense of resistance to the presence of “it,” the illness, loss, pain. Throughout as well are images of rootedness in creation, in the Holy.

The final images offer the prospect of life flowing through and out of me—an experience of being “flowed through” by Holy Mystery, of being blessed and being blessing for others. Something has changed, much has changed. Life goes on…

Warning: Do not think of this as a linear path from here to there. Along the way for me as for you, new things happen. I’ve found myself back in shock, resistance, grappling, in pain, darkness and reaching to experience how the Holy accompanies, sustains, invites me now.

Using the Galleries

• Select the thumbnail image to view a large version.
• Select the large image to show/hide the controls.
• Touch device: swipe left or right to scroll through the pages gallery.
• Computer: use the arrows to scroll through the pages gallery.
• To exit the images and return to the web page, select in the transparent black area or select the “Close” text or press the Esc key.