And then, I cracked a joke. And it turned into a real thing. Like a really, really real thing! I cracked a joke and three years later, I turned it into an art show that explores the things we lose and find in the course of a lifetime; a testament to trying again in the context of loss, of pursuing a goal until all options are exhausted and then trying again anyway, to resiliency even when it doesn't look pretty or a whole lot like resiliency. It's kind of a photographic memoir celebrating the terribly beauty of hope and the power of imagination to create new things.
This art show is the thing in my life, to date, of which I am most proud.
And, since I had more than a couple people (who live too far away to have attended the opening) request pictures, I'm presenting my art show here. Let me preface this with, the title is in French for reasons explained in "An Idea" and since I do not speak French, I used google translate, and I'm ever hopeful that it is accurate.
Le Musée des Objets Perdus et Trouvé:
A Journey through Life in 27 Exhibits
“Theology is the search for meaning…meaning in the midst of tragedy.” ~ The Reverend Dr. James Hal Cone
An Idea, 2015
Three years ago, a friend from Chicago visited us for Thanksgiving. After we had sent him home again, I was tidying our guest space, stripping the sheets, collecting the towels. In the guest bathroom I found an electric toothbrush which our guest had left behind. It was well used and battery operated, easily replaced for $15.00 and a trip to Walgreens. Like a flash, I saw myself entering a gallery in the Louvre, making my way through the exhibits, beginning with this toothbrush, each object telling a story of the owner who forgot it.
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| The Prelude, as the pictures were arranged on the wall |
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| Introduction, 2015 When my husband's friend came to visit us that fateful Thanksgiving, it was my first time meeting him. He and my husband had been friends since high school. This was his first time voting my husband in over a decade. It was the first time my husband had the freedom to see his friend since his friend's own marriage - a lost friendship rediscovered, a toothbrush lost in the process. |
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| A Regular Visit, 2016 A pair of formerly white socks, well-worn and discolored, folded neatly and sitting in the middle of the messy Murphy bed in my office. My mother lost them from her suitcase when repacking after she visited me one weekend. We ate burgers and fries, went to a vitamin shop, she rad while I hemmed our new shower curtain liners with my new sewing machine, and we went to church on Sunday morning This was enough activity for her in the course of a weekend. |
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| Friends from Ph.D., 2016 A pair of black running socks, rolled and tucked under my office desk awaiting discovery, having been peeled off the tired and heavy feet of one mountain biker or another. I have no idea whether they were lost by my husband's former colleague or her sister - both having spent the night in our guest room as they returned to Indiana from an academic conference in North Dakota. We were happy to host them in the midst of their travels. |
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| Electricity on the Go, 2017 When a friend came to the area to see an aging and ailing family member, he spent the night with us. The next morning, amongst rumpled sheets and rental car agreements, I discovered a car adapter power station - designed to draw its own power from the cigarette lighter of years gone by, it provides two USB ports and two standard outlets. |
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| Coinage, c. 2016-1018 Perhaps the most interesting, a collection of spare change - a conglomeration of coinage courtesy of an array of individuals, mixed together in no small amount, totaling more than $5.00; a denomination of the power of scraps and refuse, little notices and often deemed unworthy of accounting, when joined together. Or, you know, the cost of a basket of tots at the local greasy spoon. |
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| Photos representing childhood as they were arranged on the wall |
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| Violation, 1986 I was five years old when I lost my internal sense of self. A strange fracturing can happen when a child is abused. I felt as though some essential part of me had been knocked over and broken apart. There was no one in my life to help me make sense of what had happened, to help me fit the pieces back together. Instead, the fracturing was ignored and I felt invisible in my brokenness. My deepest need was for recognition, validation, mirroring of the brokenness. In the absence of such care, I became enraged and violent, seeking to create brokenness outside of myself to reflect the fracturing with, to no avail. |
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| Out of/in the Cold, 1986 When I was five years old, I lost my wonderment for learning and friendship; joy at snowstorms and snowbanks and winter coats, snow pants, hats, mittens, and boots. I remember playing in the snow as a child, making snow angels and snowmen. I remember climbing snowballs created by the plows at the grain elevator, scooping tunnels and burrowing deep inside where pockets of blue could be found. But the burden of making my outsides match my insides stole away the possibility of free play. |
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| A Place to Call Home, 1991 I was ten when my three siblings and I were taken into foster care. Though widely believed to be a system in which people who care deeply rescue children and place them in the care of still other people who care, this was not my experience. Three different homes in three months' time when the stipend that paid for my foster parents' alcohol was deemed insufficient compared to the trouble of housing traumatized children. I loss the sense of safety which comes with the certainty that while life may be terrible, at least I knew each morning where I would lay my head that night. |
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| Reunited with Hopelessness, 1992 When I was eleven, I lost the delights of adventure, when the future was unknown but held so much potential and glorious opportunity. I was living under the same roof with one of my abusers again. I knew the road to something different, a new kind of life, a hope for a different future, was a road I would never be permitted to tread. |
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| Photos representing my adolescence as they are arranged |
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| A Silent Red Scream, 1995 When I was fourteen, I found my own voice - a silent scream as I zippered open my arms with a double-edged razor blade. I could no longer try to make my outside world match my inside world by destroying the things and hurting the people around me. Instead, I found the relief that came when I made my physical body as broken as my sense of self. I watched the blood pool like a poppy blooming against the backdrop of white skin and knew my pain was real. |
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| A Silent Red Scream Revisited, 2002 When I was twenty-one, I lost the voice of self-mutilation, sutures, scars, and third-degree burns. Gone was the easy relief and gratification in the form of instant validation; replaced by the elusive and evanescent sense of self-worth, hinging on hope - the size of a grain of sand - that the ethereal voice of the divine had truly spoken, "This is not who I created you to be." |
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| Photos representing post-secondary education as arranged |
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| Jesus was a Raccoon, 2005 When I was twenty-four, I lost the Christological paradigm of Jesus I had carried since earliest childhood. My childhood conception of Jesus was wrapped up, almost exclusively, in the "person" of a plush toy raccoon, whose I named (some fourteen years later) Ricky. Ever-present and always willing to listen, affirm, and appropriately challenge, this raccoon taught me about presence, compassion, empathy, and emotional regulation. The loss of my understanding of Jesus (the person as opposed to the Christ-form) was a significant challenge to my entire theology and required a systematic dismantling of that theology, examine every piece of it. Over the next five years, I continued to search for some workable sliver of my lost theology. I never found one. |
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| A New Hope (Not the George Lucas Kind), 2006 When I was twenty-five, I found the ability to love myself and others. It came to me through the perpetual examination and reworking of my theology, through the constant challenge to better understand what I believed, why I believed what I believed, and whether or not such belief connected authentically with my actual lived experience. It was akin to seeing the first sunrise after years of knowing only sunsets - the same colors and lighting, but wholly different in orientation and texture. (This is a photo of a glitter-painting rendition of a picture of a sunrise I experience in Hawaii many years ago). |
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| The Pit of Despair, 2007 When I was twenty-six, I found The Pit of Despair. It swallowed me whole. ("Not to fifty!") I was mostly dead for seven years. Where were you, Miracle Max? |
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| Resurrection, 2007 When I was twenty-six, I found the beginnings of a new theology. Divorced from the magical thinking of an omnipresent and miracle-working Jesus, I was in need of something of my childhood tradition to anchor me in my faith. Removing the language of "father" from the equation, for the first time, I began to think of "God" in positive terms and began to lean fully into the process of creating my own theology. Having spent years studying other traditions, I remained connected to Christianity, though now by choice rather than default, because it is my theological mother tongue. |
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| The images of moving forward in life as arranged |
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| Meditation, 2014 When I was thirty-three, I found a very still, silent, insanely warm, black spot within my brain where it was okay to exist both within and outside of the world. Through mediation, I was able, for the first time, to quiet the frantic spinning of the hamster-wheel that permanently resides in my brain an feel all of the pain and devastation of my history (an on-going process). I discovered that such feelings would not, in fact, actually kills me - a long-held fear in the context of trauma-induced anxiety. I learned to separate out my experience of an event from my emotional response to the event. |
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| My Beloved, 2014 When I was thirty-three, I found my beloved. Quite by accident. And for whom I am every grateful. I tripped over his online profile and initiated contact, clarifying that while I was impressed by his profile, it was evident that we were not compatible, and wishing him luck in finding the relationship for which he hoped. (We married four years later). |
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| Images representing independence as arranged |
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| Vocation, 2015 When I was thirty-four, I found clarity of vision and passion for the future. Somedays it feels as though my long-hoped-for future is more a stick than a carrot. Still, I carry on, moving forward one step at a time, never sure how things will work out - confident that ultimately they will. It is a future built on hopes, dreams, much work, and in community with those who share similar passions and vision. |
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| Adulting, 2016 I was thirty-five when I left Iowa; I lost track of a side table and the vacuum. It was a progressive move, done over the course of a few days - the heavy stuff on Saturday, return to Iowa. The forgotten bits were gathered and moved on Tuesday after my beloved had cleaned and packed up the house and said good-bye to a building that was only over transitory for him, moving to the Twin Cities ahead of me, as I finished out my work contract from a small apartment in Illinois. This house that I was leaving, which I had shared with beloved for nearly two years, was the first house that was ever a home for me. I believe it was because my beloved's heart wit where I first found my home. |
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| Photographs representing moving forward in life as arranged |
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| Moving (On), 2016 When I left Illinois, I lost two dozen vanilla beans - grade B - and a pound of organic unsalted butter, forgotten in the he refrigerator of that one bedroom apartment in which I had spent six weeks. I also lost sight of stagnant water and a sponge in the bathroom sink, having cleaned the floor by hand and shut the door to let it dry undisturbed. In my hurry to close things up and return my key before the office closed, I forgot to open the bathroom door again when the floor was dry and drain and rinse out the sink. The property manager still refunded my entire security deposit. |
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| New Life, 2016 Somehow, over the course of time, I found so much joy, delight, wonder, and safety I was bursting at the seams with new hope and possibility every single day. When I moved to Minnesota, I lost all of these things. I wondered vaguely if they were packed in some box that fell off the moving truck at the Trails Travel Plaza in Albert Lea. I was an idiot to think I could carry them within me so easily and transport them to a new place by simple virtue of my being there as well. |
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| Out of the Tomb, 2016 When I was thirty-five, I found within myself a belief in my own resiliency. And I lost it again. |
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| Removing the Grave Clothes, 2018 And I found it again. On the Isle of Skye, I explored the tide pools outside of a bed and breakfast where we stayed. I delighted in the anemones, barnacles, and sea snails. Yet more astounding to me were the flowers growing in the cracks and crevices of a lava field. In a place one might deem inhospitable to flora, these beautiful plants grow, flourish, and bloom - a constant reminder of the hope that the human spirit, likewise, can blossom in the context of challenges and adversity. |
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| Co-Creation, 2018 When I was thirty-seven, I did not find but rather created a new family. I do not know what the future will hold - except brilliant possibilities, joy, light, love, and certainty that what challenges I may face, I am more than capable of overcoming. |
"I'm really into the idea of 'happily ever after'," I told my beloved as were planning our wedding. "'Happily ever after' is the end of the story. I don't want to think of marriage as the end of the story. It's just the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. What do you think about 'to be continued...'?" My beloved proposed "The road goes ever on" as a more lyrical play on the idea.
The final item in the art show is a picture frame with the words of the walking song sung by the hobbits at the end of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" as seen below:
Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where near sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.
Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadow green
And trees and hills they long have known.
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