Fault Lines

“I have found that the broken spaces are my living canvas,”

Lily Yeh

I sometimes see the broken spaces that have cracked me open as fault lines.  Those running, often jagged lines left in the devastation of an earthquake.  A colossal shaking strong enough to significantly displace the very bedrock upon which we stand and live our lives.  Sitting in my father’s hospital room in Illinois at the age of 23 where he was dying of cancer at the age of 54 worried for me because back home in California divorce proceedings were waiting for me and my young 2 ½ year old son.  My father holding my hand and apologizing because he was not going to be around to help me.  The loss and the tenderness of it broke my heart.  Fault line.  The subsequent kidnapping of my son 6 months later by his father.  Fault Line.  The finding of him 15 years later.  Faultline.  The loss of my beloved mother to Alzheimer's disease.  The fault lined broken pieced endings of two more marriages.  The wrenching ending of a many year significant love with the woman of my life (also later found).  Fault lines.  Loss of integrity.  Loss of the sense of other.  Self inflicted loss of faith, of hope, of charity.  Fault lines.  Broken spaces.

I so love the concept of these very spaces being a living canvass.  The living canvass of my life where I admit that while I am not in control of many, if not most, the significant displacements that shake me, I can ultimately choose the medium of my own healing.  Plaster, clay, mud, metal, sticks, stones, paint, tempura wash, oils, charcoal, pen and ink, a box of crayons.   Mine to shape and color and shade with forgiveness or non-forgiveness.  With compassion or mercilessness. With disregard, indifference, unconcern, or with charity, clemency, commiseration, compunction, condolence, consideration, empathy, grace, heart, humaneness, kindness, humor, sorrow, sympathy, tenderness, yearning…..  A canvass where the fault lines become not simply running lines of sorrow and suffering, but inspiration. “

Footnote:

Lily Yeh is the founder of—and force behind—Barefoot Artists, an organization that revitalizes neighborhoods around the globe through the transformative power of art. In Palestine, that meant working with villagers to create a wall mural that Yeh calls “The Palestinian Tree of Life.” In China, it meant transforming a once imposing, prison-like school into a bright and brilliant place for learning. In Rwanda, it meant helping people heal the still-raw wounds left from that country’s genocide with a memorial to the lost.