Resilience - Page 3

Resilience + Persistent Creativity {#1 in my series on resilience}

by Susan Seale | Jun 8, 2014 | Resilience

I realized this week, my heart has been slowly healing through what Dr. Joan Borysenko terms “radical creativity”.

For 19 months, I’ve unconsciously been engaged in an ongoing, focussed, baby-stepped creation here in our garden…an act of what I would call ‘persistent creativity’.

This is what I started with.

Nothing really…it was a tree stump.

I don’t have a BEFORE picture because I didn’t realize I was creating something when I started. So imagine one big tree, clear cut in the garden. An exposed stump about 4 inches high.

That stump wasn’t pretty and I had to walk by it everyday at our new home. It looked lonely and sad (and flat) this tree stump. It needed some love and to be honest, looking at it reminded me of how raw and vulnerable I felt everyday when I got out of bed.

This stump would become the focus of my persistent creativity…but not right away.

On my first visit to the ocean in November of 2012,

with our little dog in our new neighbourhood, I found a heart-shaped stone.

Our dog is a sniffer so there is not much walking that really goes on. Mostly a lot of shuffling and waiting for him to finish sniffing.

It’s kind of boring + restful and I find myself looking at the ground a lot.

On that first visit I looked down and there was the first stone. It was clearly heart-shaped.

I picked it up (you would have done the same…) and considered it a private message intended just for me, a reminder that even though my entire life had turned upside-down, that there would be love in this part of the world too. Soon.

I kept the stone in my pocket…for a long time…it was a promise of some kind.

One day found several more heart-shaped stones in one visit. I picked those up too. This went on day and after day for many weeks. Of course, I was taking them out of my pockets by this time and they were sitting by the sink, by the door, in my work space. They were gathering. The way a small child gathers.

Then it started. I was compelled to cover the stump with heart-shaped stones. They were so small no one even noticed what I was doing at first. Then I found some BIG stones and small heart-shaped shells and added them too.

I started to count them. 12 stones. 15 stones. 28 stones. 45 stones. 62 stones. I kept track the way a 5 year old does. Imagining how long it would take to cover the stump. A loooong time.

One day, I added our mosaic.

It was made by a group of children in 2008 and gifted to me in celebration of my marriage that year.
My husband noticed. Are you collecting rocks? he said. Yes. I said. Heart-shaped ones. They’re messages for me and I get them at the beach. Looks nice. he said.

By the fall of 2013 (a year later) it looked like this…

No more room on the stump! Tidy.

This is what it looks like today…

A little unwieldy. A sprawling giant heart-shaped installation.

One stone at a time. About 6 feet across and 4 feet tall.

19 months of collecting. Hundreds of stones.

It’s spread to the garden itself and I have to pull weeds now. I even take time to remove the leaves from the arbutus trees as they shed (did you know arbutus trees lose their leaves in the spring and summer…not the fall?)

So…my lesson?

Time doesn’t heal all wounds.

Wounding is just an opportunity to create something new, something unexpected.

This tree stump was something I could actively + persistently love. A natural canvas that allowed me to engage naturally with my new topsy-turvy world and put a bit of my own soul into a space that I don’t own….a space I will leave for sure. My liminal abode.

Next post…I talk about The Liminal Phase. It’s part of the Map of the Territory for resilient folks going through transformation.