Welcome to Steemit, @animalartclub! Your work is beautiful and your words equally so - I found reading your post very moving and it resonated with me greatly <3 Art provides great healing for me too, so I totally get what you are saying here. And I have similar experiences with difficult family members. For example, my mother took her own life after years of - albeit unintentionally - making mine miserable. Unlike your father, she was all too adept at expressing her feelings, but to the point of being completely unbalanced and unable to consider the consequences of unleashing them upon me as a child. My healing sounds very similar to yours, even though the cause of our distress (our parents' - and our culture's - lack of sound and supportive parenting skills) presented in somewhat different behaviours and attitudes.
At its heart, I feel that our human suffering is caused by the same root - the failure to adequately understand our own feelings in relation to the world and other people, and the skills to communicate them in ways that serve us well. The beauty of artistic expression is that it rises above all of this and conveys, without the need for words, our innermost thoughts, feelings, observations and needs. Our art reflects our true nature back to us in ways that are healthy, supportive and therapeutic, as does the whole of nature and all of nature's creations. I will be following your blog here with interest and enthusiasm, and I LOVE what you've shared so far SO MUCH. I wish you continued healing from the life and death of your father. You are on the right path <3 Jay xx
P.S. I have resteemed this post and given you my 100% upvoted (for what its worth!)
Dear Jay,
Thank you so much for the kind words, for opening yourself up and for being so real. I believe we make it easier for ourselves to heal as a whole when we see how much alike our journeys actually are. You're right, behaviors and attitudes do change a lot, and yet I feel that the source of our collective distress is a lack of awareness of and connection to our own emotional life. Perhaps most of us just don't know what to do.
In any case, either extreme of this spectrum - not allowing any emotions to surface (filtering everything out) OR having no filter whatsoever, just seems like a huge waste of opportunity to really be present for ourselves. Of course, it's not anyone's fault to never having learned it. And that's the reason why we must share our journeys - and happily watch as the old paradigm just falls off.
In a nutshell, what I've learned from my father's death (he has also taken his own life) is that I was still waiting for him to offer my heart the safe space it needed in order to feel seen, accepted and loved.
And that in reality, I am the one that's perfect for the job. I was the one my heart was waiting for the whole time, while I was waiting for somebody else.
No more, no more :) <3