Though many with disabilities, and who have gone through transitions with age, find ourselves alone, love still remains a priority in many of our hearts. I’ve known several people who found a life partner in their 70s and 80s. I painted this to celebrate that love that can transcend physical problems, age, and social disapproval. Loneliness can be a part of one’s life no matter your age or abilities, even if you’re in a relationship. Still…
It was never too late… by Joy Murray, 20×24″, 2022
As we get closer to the opening of the Opulent Mobility art show in LA, in which 2 of my paintings will be shown, I’ll post my paintings that celebrate physical diversity and our dreams and fantasies. You can follow Opulent Mobility on Facebook and Instagram. It’s going to be at a physical gallery, the Makery, but also online. Here’s the schedule:
Other artists include: A. Laura Brody, Kat Chudy, Julie Forbush, Patricia Fortlage, Bronte Grimm, Ash Hagerstrand, Austin Lubetkin, Ellen Mansfield, Monica Marks, Lisa Merida-Paytes, Tom Peters, Elizabeth Rajchart, Priya Ray, Abigail Stockinger, Emily Tironi, Celeste Tooth, and Rachel Ungerer.
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Last summer, my elephant ear garden looked like this:
This year, it looks like this:
We had an abnormally cold winter and it killed off many of the bulbs. Elephant Ears make new bulbs every summer, often along the bottom of the old bulbs. I think these are all newly made bulbs that grew from underneath their frozen parents.
I love my elephant ears when they get dramatically big. I like seeing the slender stalks of the first small leaves divide into larger and larger leaves until they are nearly as big as me. I get cocky about them. I see other people’s plants and think, mine are bigger. It’s a bit of delusion that I have anything to do with how big they get. I do my part, of course: making sure they’re watered and have enough room to grow by weeding and tending the ground around them.
Or I used to. Now, I get other people to help me with it. Now that I’m a full time wheelchair user, I can’t get to the weeds, I can’t divide the bulbs, I can’t do all the little fussy things an urban gardener does to get credit for beautiful plants. I appreciate those who’ve helped me weed and keep some order in the small patch by my porch. I’m not totally happy about having to give up the responsibilities I enjoyed, but I’m happy that the garden grows.
I’ve also had struggles cultivating creativity over the past few years. I don’t get as many paintings done. I don’t have the energy to organize shows or to participate in groups. I don’t write as much. I don’t even go to art shows as much – transportation and fatigue issues. Like so many of us, I was changed by the arrival of COVID in our lives. Also the continuing fragmentation of our country and a seeming inability for us to build working bridges to help each other out. In my personal life, I’ve aged enough to have to deal with death more often (also a COVID factor), and my own disability takes its share of my energy. I’ve often felt as if my well was empty and I couldn’t tap into a new source of flow.
But watching these scrappy plants emerge and grow after a hostile winter, has inspired me. Slowly I am writing more, drawing again, painting again. Since I have no deadlines, I can set my own pace. I don’t have to create things at the same rate. And as I look back over all that I’ve done in previous years, I realize that I’m a productive person, even if I never actually create anything tangible ever again.
There is a form of art called “social practice.” It “focuses on engagement through human interaction and social discourse.” If I’m feeling small and insecure, I can always say I do social practice art (though no one will know what I’m talking about). To me, in its simplest form, social practice art is a way of living creatively, sharing ideas with others, contributing to a better, more peaceful and beautiful world. The goal is not necessarily a finished object or project. Living is an art. The creative ways we deal with life’s challenges are an art form.
I may just be trying to give a label to my fallow periods to feel better about them. These periods are a part of the process. Are they an art in themselves? It’s not like I’ve stopped thinking about creativity, or living creatively for even one day while I’ve navigated these past few years. I’ve been helped a lot by others, and had lots of conversations with them about the world at large, and the small world that I occupy.
And now this little garden is growing back. The plants on my porch that I can tend to are thriving. Whenever someone walks by – and looks up from their phone – they see growth and blooms. I don’t actually create it, but I facilitate it.
I once led an art workshop and one of the young participants asked if you could make a good living as an artist. I said it’s difficult. But you can make a good life.
If we survive a brutal winter and grow a little slower afterwards, there’s a lot of beauty in that. Noticing gardens is being creative. Carrying sorrow, but living with delight, that’s a good life.
Joy At the Memphis Brook Museum – living a good life
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Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.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. If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypalCards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble. You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.
This was a journal entry from earlier in the month, but there was a beautiful sunset as the night plunges back down to freezing weather. Winter isn’t my favorite season, though we have it easier here in Memphis than a lot of places. The jeweled sky reveals itself often enough, I shouldn’t forget that:
Winter Sunset, January Visual journal, acylic paint, markers
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It used to seem to me that processing change should take only a short time — as in a few months or a year. In fact, one of the things I require of myself when I have a major body change is that I wait a year before I decide whether or not I can live with it. If I can’t, if I haven’t experienced moments of delight, if my change hasn’t become my new normal, then I can re-examine the question of whether this life is worth living or not.
Loss for Words by Joy Murray, 2013
I’m talking about major health changes, more than economic or relationship disasters, but sometimes they feel unbearable, too. So much of life seems unbearable at times. But they are usually bearable, often they make us stronger, wiser, wanting to live fuller. Sometimes, of course, experiences, changes, hurts — they’re pointless and painful and have no lesson. But we get over them in time. In time, we process it, get our bearings right, and find a new way of feeling happiness and contentment.
We all carry sorrows with us. Sometimes sorrow so heavy we can hardly move under the weight. Sometimes, we dance while bearing that same weight, sometime with another who is also carrying unbearable sorrows.
Life lately has seemed to send me one challenge after another and I’m trying to process these and get on with it. I have paintings to paint, stories to write, a life to live. But I still feel confused and muddled about what to do next. I keep having complications, either from my neurological disorder, or the treatments for it, or the endless bureaucracy and screw ups with my medications.
by Joy Murray, 2017
I feel like I’m caught in a state of constant processing. And I feel bad that I’m still processing things that I should have already dealt with and moved on. (Oh, the sorrow spiral of feeling bad about feeling bad.)
I found myself last month watching a mystery series that dealt with the aftermath of a rape for the 8th time. I knew I was using it to process past trauma and to escape the present complications of my medical problems, but it seemed weird and maybe self-destructive to keep looping through this drama again and again.
I called the National Suicide Lifeline, not because I felt suicidal, but because I felt I might be self harming and I wanted to talk to someone who didn’t know me about it. I was reassured that people process trauma all kinds of ways and that there’s NO WRONG WAY, and NO DEADLINE. Watching a woman regain her sense of self after a terrifying event is probably a benign way of helping myself grieve things that happened in the past and that are happening now and will continue to happen possibly for the rest of my life. Not rape or sexual abuse necessarily, but things that make me feel utterly powerless. And worthless.
I’m dropping and breaking things. I’m running my wheelchair into door jambs and tearing up thresh holds.
Dragged in my front door thresh hold after working on the porch garden
I feel scattered. I feel like I’m not reading enough or keeping up with the news enough or enough in general. I’m not able to do a lot of the things I did before to make myself feel better. (I may be romanticizing the past, though. Because I have bi-polar disorder, I sometimes think I did things better before, but I can’t really tell you what those things are. Toni Bernhard wrote a great article about that in Psychology Today Online: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/turning-straw-gold/201308/good-old-days-syndrome
I’ve spent a lot of time planting things for my porch garden and now I’m spending a lot of time looking at dirt, waiting for those first few leaves to break through. Shouldn’t I be working on my something or something else? While I still can?
I’m not writing this to get sympathy or reassurance. I’m actually doing well. Remaining productive while dealing with what feels like a rapidly deteriorating health condition in a slow, slow, slow health system. I’ve experience such moments of bliss and joy in this past year that I could hardly keep from weeping — even in this past month. I feel loved and valued. I am so grateful to everyone who supports me, those I know well, and those I only know marginally through the internet.
Still, I’m processing things and I can’t quite get my mojo working the way I want. Does any one? Do you? How do you process change?
I talked to a friend, after talking to the kind person at the Suicide Prevention Hotline, and my friend said she did the same thing, watched things over and over. She didn’t feel like she had to justify it either. She just did it because it was what she felt like doing. Ah, how I complicate my own life and emotions and needs.
Well, I’ll keep processing things. And when I’m ready, I’ll do something else.
Processing by Joy Murray, 2018
(The National Suicide Lifeline is a great place to find someone to talk to, even if you’re not necessarily suicidal but standing on shaky ground. Even if you have friends and counselors and doctors. They listen and hold up a life giving mirror to reflect life in. Hope is their specialty. They also have a chat line.)
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