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In life, pain and loss is inevitable…it simply comes with the human experience. Our suffering, as we negotiate the emotional labour that naturally arrives through this pain, is something that bonds us all. We all know, to different degrees, how this feels. I recently lost my father to cancer. It was a long two and half year illness that brought much change to my family and offered us all an opportunity to meet our loss and grief in our own way. Grief is a unique process for everyone, as we all experience it differently and find our way with it, as it finds its way with us. It can be a time of deep loss and suffering, a life-changing event that alters our lives and our relationship to ourselves. Grief is felt when we experience any significant change that disrupts our lives. It can come as a result of losing someone we love, or moving to a new home. It’s a natural, but often a confusing emotion for us to embrace. As artists we experience most everything through the filter of our creative process - how our art-making is being altered and impacted by our experience. As life changes, we change, and our art and practice changes in response. These experiences of loss and grief will intertwine with our creative process as a result. Earlier this year, perhaps in preparation for what I knew was coming, I interviewed an artist, and dear friend, Caroline James, on this topic for my membership community. Caroline had lost her partner to cancer a few years prior and was able to share from her experience, allowing us to understand how it impacted her art-making, and what helped her to reconnect to it once more. She spoke about the poignant beauty of loss, along with the arrival of unexpected emotions and creative paralysis. How it feels to lose the self, and what it means to meet yourself there – untethered to what once was. Caroline also offered us insights on how to begin again after such a huge shift in one’s experience and life, and what teachings are accessed through this profound vulnerability.
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