how my hands helped heal my heart

some drawings.

November 5, 6:00 am.

My world changed.

Today was to be a day unlike the string of ones that came before.

There was no routine coffee-making, checking of email, making of a bed.

The role of death doula was foisted upon me as I held close my once breathing, purring cat while he travelled back to whatever angelic realm he came from.

Death has a way of inviting your full attention into the only moment that exists.

Surviving the surreal calls you to dig deep and bend like a tree in the wind in order to not break. While storms always inevitably pass, the imprint they leave behind lives on as damage, destruction, loss, change.

Moving through the motions of what must be done was the easy part.

That afternoon Bodhi was buried at my mom’s place on the property of my childhood home in the country beneath my favourite tree. A perfect resting place.

As the dark and cold night of (the longest ever) November was setting in, I returned home for the first time in a decade to a house without a cat waiting for me at the top of the stairs, ready to greet me and ask for his dinner.

The hardest part was just beginning….

I’ve never in my life felt so alone.

Grief has a way of seducing your gaze backwards into moments, days, years already lived in the hopes something can shift powerfully enough inside the memory to effect physical reality, to alter the trajectory of the path that lead you to here. The mind seeks a detour around this painful moment that’s nothing but impossible to escape.

“If only I……”

“I should have…..”

“Why didn’t I…?!”

Is anything more irrational than regret? More painful than resisting what already is?

With death, with loss, with life it seems true the only way out is through.

My way through was to sit with the darkness, inside the silence, and draw.

To sit in being fully alone. For the very first time in my life.

No family, no roommate, no partner, no pet.

Just me.

A woman with a bleeding heart and an ancient instinct to heal it.

With pencil in hand, I sat and anchored myself to the minute that was presently unfolding….and then sat with the next….and the next….

Today, after nearly three months of travelling through the lonely tunnel of loss and a very dark season of winter, I marvel at how far I’ve come and at how much healing and transformation has occurred. Impossible to see from the outside but I feel it in me, as me.

I marvel at the hand-heart connection and at how the body naturally operates as a self-loving compassionate whole, endlessly and generously devoted to nurturing and sustaining homeostasis;

at how powerful our innate ability is to withstand, to adapt, and to heal;

at how many gifts lie inside the darkness, a nourishing soil that feeds us what we need for growing into our next phase as we lie buried beneath it, gestating.

Becoming.

As you will see, I found myself drawn (pun intended) to sacred shapes. Soothed by circles and cheered by colour. Controlling chaos by shaping potentia.

For those of you travelling through a dark night, I can assure you that daylight is coming. Surrender to the wisdom of the season you’re in. Make a companion of silence. A teacher of pain.

Spring is on its way.

With love,

Jacqueline 🤍

I also made a boatload of copper triskelions. I was sad when I ran out of copper.

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