On Creation From Destruction
I'm writing this as the sun is rising, the sky shifting from cool violet to amber as it climbs. From my perch, I watch the light spill across the San Francisco Bay, listening to the rhythmic, quiet chirps of birds as the world stirs.
I've always loved this time of day. It is when my mind is most porous, free to sit in contemplative silence with my coffee. I feel this way every morning, but Easter morning carries a specific magic, the residue of childhood wonder I never want to shake.
Easter is my favorite holiday. When I was younger, I would wake to the muffled sounds of my parents sneaking outside to hide eggs. I found something profound in that ritual. For a few hours once a year, the ordinary world reorganized itself into wonder. You seek, and you shall find.
Growing up in Boston, it was the time when, against all odds, slight sprigs of green and daffodils would pierce through the grey, mushy snow, the world awakening in color in defiance. Every year in March, I reached a point where I thought it might never come, that darkness would prevail. And every year, as the first of the birds returned, buds slowly blooming on trees, life found its way back.
This time last year, chemotherapy took my legs out from under me. My mom rented a wheelchair so my family could take me out to the park for Easter, my first time outdoors in weeks. I had been confined to watching nature only from the window in my apartment, eagerly tracking the minute growth of early leaves as the ground thawed. They took turns pushing me up hills as I happily sketched trees, lamp posts, anything my eyes could hold.
I captured the world as if it were my first time, or perhaps my last. The membrane between those two feelings had grown thin.
As we moved across the park, I learned how much the world isn't made for the broken. My wheels would catch on every curb, every rough surface. My family scurried ahead, and my dad stayed behind with me to wait in a clearing, surrounded by the stillness of trees.
I love going to church, but in these moments, I remember it is an echo. Before there were cathedrals, there were groves. I find holiness in their quiet hush, the komorebi of the light filtering through their leaves. I am never more at home, I am never more at peace, than I am when I am held in the shell of nature.
As I drifted between the liminal spaces of hospitals in the months that followed, I anchored myself there. In waiting rooms, I drew wallpaper with my iPad, dreaming of room after room I could step into when the fluorescent lights became unbearable. I imagined a sanctuary of bark and leaf, a world of my own creation where I could finally catch my breath.
Creative compulsion is a bodily thing. It arrives like constipation, an uneasy pressure, requiring my full life force to emerge. I wonder if this is what pregnancy feels like, something slowly kicking against the walls of you, demanding to exist. When I feel it, I cannot rest until I've brought it from thought to form.
For a year, this one wouldn't release me. Some nights, I wondered if I was saving it or if it was saving me. To bring it to life, I had to survive long enough to be fully back home.
I wanted to burn something to make something, the elements of carbon rearranging themselves from destruction to life. Years ago, on a solo walk in the woods, I stopped in a circle of redwoods and sat for hours in silence. As I left, I wrote a note to remind myself of their lesson: Burn what doesn't serve you.
My need to create superseded any logic or safety instinct. The flames from my butane torch licked the plywood strips I nailed to my wall, my hands blackened with charcoal, the piece consuming my full body as I danced and drew in soot and shadow, releasing all that I held into the wood.
I found the trees inside the fire.
A few hours ago, I couldn't tell you why I felt compelled to do this, but as I sit here, the sky now turning blue, I realize that I'm sitting in a seven-by-ten-foot chapel of my own making.
And I, in the middle, the easter egg. In Dante's words, "In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost."
In the woods, I found myself. I found my way home.
