Margaret Mair, Man/Mountain/Emerging, Watercolor, Original Art
It’s time to come back.
Finding your way back to your normal life is a very important part of recovering from illness. Maybe life is not, will not be exactly as it was before, but you hope it will be something like. Because when your life changes, it changes you. Not just physically, but mentally. I probably do not know, yet, how I have changed.
But some things do not change. Making art and writing about art and sharing interesting things artists have done or are doing are all part of my normal life.
And I’ve decided that writing about and sharing art are a part of my life that I can pick up now, even if I’m not writing as often or as much as before.
It’s even more important to me because I am not painting again yet. I’m adjusting to having one fuzzy, blurry eye, wondering how much vision it will have, struggling with depth perception. Meantime I sketch, concentrating on the shapes, the outlines. I think. I imagine what I will paint, and am glad I can.
People talk about fighting an illness, conquering a condition, but it’s not like that for me. Recovering feels more like emerging. More like a long slog along a dusty road, a hard climb up a steep mountain, a crooked walk along a winding path, leading to re-emergence into the world as I knew it. There are corners to turn, milestones to pass, obstacles to climb over.
And that’s why my watchwords now are: Onward and upward. One step after another. I’ll travel this path, even if it’s just a little way at a time.
