Author: Joy Murray

For my open studio I painted this piece, but I didn’t really want to sell it.  I think I finished it the day before the show and hadn’t had a chance to study it much.  Fortunately, a close friend bought it, so I can visit it:

It was a small piece so I decided to paint a similar one on a larger, 16×20″ canvas.

What do you think?

I revisit ideas in my paintings a lot.  Do you?

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This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

“I always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Louis Borges

Often I get mired in the muck of all that I’ve lost.  As I tend to a body that is deteriorating, I wonder why life is so hard.  Add to the life changes that come with a degenerative disease, I feel all the troubles of friends, of strangers and the world, and I find myself in a dark powerless place.  I find myself blinded to what is rich about my life.

Yesterday was Veterans Day, and I thought a lot about how terrible war is, how so many Veterans never recover from their service, how people and lands are lost for what seems to be no good reason.  I felt the beast of depression nibbling away at me.

Last night I didn’t sleep well, but I woke with a sense of fear that I wasn’t seeing straight.  Am I blind to paradise?   What is really all around me?  What is truly happening in the part of my life that I can touch?  I am surrounded by friends and family who love me, I have ways of expressing myself, I have a collection of books.   And I have the time to read them, too.

Yesterday, I felt tired, so I lay down with a book and read my way into another world.  If I wanted, now, I could, on this earth, do nothing but read.

I got a pile of new books for my birthday.  I get books from the library.  Books are all around me – novels, children’s and illustrated book, pop-ups, books on art, geography, history, natural science.  I even have a book on assholes (Assholes: a Theory, by Aaron James.)

I follow a blog called The Book Keeper Book Shop, written by an independent book store owner in Strathalbyn, SA.  She writes little stories about her customers and books and life.  Recently she quoted Lebanese writer Nassim Nicholas Talib: “A library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.”  The anti-library, he calls it, filled with unread books.   The number of unread books grow as we realize how much we don’t know. “Let us call this an anti-scholar – some one who focuses on the unread book and makes and attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even, a possession, or even a self esteem enhancement device.” (from The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)

I have so many unread books here at home and at the library.  I have often felt bad about the unread ones.  I’ve also felt guilty reading instead of doing something more productive.

But if I listen to Borges, if I really hear him, I have been given a slice of paradise here on this strange and fractured planet.  And I keep turning my back to it, chasing after some sort of normal life.

Because I live in a country that tries, in its own fragmented way, to take care of those of us who have a major disability, I get to move at my own pace.  At that turtle speed, I get to paint, I get to read.  I get to shed this tight skin of independence, and learn the more sustainable and softness of interdependence.  I live in a world where many of the people are conspiring to make me happy.

I don’t always remember that, especially when faced with another health challenge, but love is all around me.  And as artist Frankd Robinson says, “Love Never Fails.”  I have friends to help me, friends to cry with me.  Friends who give me books I would never have found on my own.

Arms wrap around me.  Ideas bloom inside me.  Books wait patiently for me to lay down my burdens and pick them up, to leave this body and journey into another world.

In spite of all the traps of our planet, I have found a library of books, friends, doctors.  I have seen paradise, like a sliver of sunlight in a dark room.

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This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

I used to wonder why there wasn’t more public weeping.  There is so much sorrow — illness, natural disasters, man-made disasters, wars.   Often the sad realities of the world sat right behind my eyes.  I would feel that I might dissolve into a puddle of salt water at any minute.

When I started taking antidepressants in my mid-thirties, I learned why people had more control than I did over their tears.  As soon as the medication kicked in, all the woes of the world moved from the front of my thoughts to the back.  They didn’t disappear, but it was like a veil was lifted and I could see the beauty of the world, too.  I became hungry for color and started making art.

Last week, I saw a woman in the grocery store parking lot, collapsed on the curb of one of the parking buffers, wailing and crying.  I was in my power wheelchair, and had just finished buying groceries.  I stopped to watch and to see if there was anything I could do to help.

She was a large woman, in a yellow shirt, black pants, and pink footie socks. Where were her shoes?  People spoke kindly to her, people spoke sternly to her.  Once she tried to get up, but just crumpled back to the ground.

I saw someone on the phone talking to 911.  The crowd around the woman dispersed and went on their way.  The weeping woman stood up, muttered to herself, wiped her face, and looked around as if she didn’t know where she was.  She wept softly.  She wept and wept.

I didn’t approach her.  I’ve had a few bad run-ins with people in my neighborhood, where an offer to help was repaid by harassment.  I wanted to say to her, it’s okay to cry.  Sometimes we just have to.  But I left her to let her own story play out without my interference.

I still have crying days. The world is too confusing and painful not to spend some of it in tears.  We have to mourn our losses.  We have to clean our internal wounds with the strange and powerful process of tears, the ocean within washing a tide of sorrow from us.

Usually after an emotional flood like that, I try to spend some time outside in nature.   Even just touching a leaf. or standing under a tree, helps.

Scientists are finding that trees have ways of communicating that we’re just beginning to understand.  I like to imagine they feel our sorrow and send some untranslatable bit of healing while I’m in their presence.

I hope the weeping woman found comfort and a place to heal.  I hope she feels no shame.  It’s life, intense.  It’s our own life and the lives of women past.

I think there is a spirit or goddess, A Weeping Woman, who has held the tears of centuries and sometimes she possesses someone.  I’ve seen women in her throes on the bus, in the store, and on the street.  I have been embodied her, too.  But she balances me out, when she leaves, internal pain shed, internal wreckage cleared away for new life to grow.

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This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.