>I have about a hundred and one finished drawings and paintings stacked up in my art room/studio. In another life I was an artist. Yes, I used to enter various competitions and once in a while would win an award or two. People paid good money for some of my stuff. What happened? My daughter died. After she died, the yen to draw and paint somehow went with her. Or that’s the only thing I can figure out so far. The fact that my studio is a monumental messed-up-mess couldn’t have anything to do with it, could it? Actually, that really isn’t the problem because this happened to me right after she died. My joie de vivre, which had stood me in good stead all of my life, some of it took a long vacation. As a shrink would say, “It’s just part of the grieving process.”

Well it has been eleven years now and that urge to paint has not returned. Perhaps I don’t court it enough. Yes, artists (and writers too) are infamous for hitting brick walls, dry spells, no inspiration, etc. I don’t think of Mary Alice as often now as I did at first. But when I do think of her, as I did last night reading a story by Laurens van der Post, I think of her as he described some of the beauties of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa:

“…it was so uncontaminated by anything that was unnatural, was so much an expression of creation for creation’s sake, that spread out as it was in the elegiac early morning with a light that fell upon it like the tongues of fire wherein the authentic spirit of creation had first come to comfort a small group of bereaved and frightened people in a moment of great darkness in Palestine. There was something sacred about it.”

Mary Alice, with all of her fallibilitys such as we all share in our imperfect human states, had a glow about her, some of that fire of the Spirit. And when I think of her now, I imagine her experiencing “coming to a country uncontaminated by the mind and will of man, exhilarated by seeing something new, and feel for the first time what it could mean to be oneself, how much of a child of life in one’s own right one is; how much a ward in a great all-embracing chancery with a rich and lawful inheritance of one’s own spread out before one”. Her heavenly life, veiled to us who are still poor struggling vessels of clay, lies around her and I know she is dancing before the Lord, stirring up sparkling angel dust.

Quotes from A Far Off Place
by Laurens van der Post