Join me?…

When I lost my Dad over 13 years ago, people were so kind and tried their best to say the perfect thing.

The ‘I’m so sorry for your loss‘s and the ‘he’s not really gone he’s just in the next room’ or ‘he’s watching from above’ … ‘he’s always with you’ etc etc. All of it was immensely appreciated and I was grateful for the sentiments but none of it helped.

You see I had lost MY Dad… mine …

And although I can be quite spiritual and I can believe in signs and messages ..

He was just gone. I couldn’t ‘feel’ him anymore.

Gone.

So nothing anyone said to me really made sense to this completely absurd situation… this human who my entire world had revolved around, who motivated most of my creativity and gave me a reason to want to achieve just wasn’t here anymore .. he didn’t exist.

Instead there was just an immense dark hole where there was once my shining light.

And then I read something that shifted everything…

Something that made so much sense to my logical, scientific, practical mind and gave me a sense of peace …

this made sense when nothing else did …

‘There is only a finite energy in the world, you can neither destroy it or create it’

Life changing….

So… I thought, if energy can’t be destroyed then every energetic force that was my Dad has to have gone somewhere ….

He’s not just ‘gone’ … his life force is literally absorbed into the earth, the birds, the sea, the flowers … he is quite literally everywhere around, as you and I will be one day.

I was recently reading an artists biography and he was explaining that he is unsure where his quirky art comes from but that in some way it helps him to express his feelings that are difficult to put into words.

It made me think of Roger.

Roger is my little skeleton friend who features in my artwork.

He first appeared on a blank page in my sketchbook in 2020 when I was taking part in the Inktober drawing challenge. Each day Inktober publishes a single word and artists from all over the world draw their response and then post their art on social media. This could be a literal interpretation, or something obscure.

I’m not even sure which word Roger appeared under but there he was… delicately fascinated by some fluttering moths.

Since that day Roger has become a little phenomenon featuring in so many of my drawings, T-shirts, Christmas cards, Valentines and even Mothers day cards! Then his toothy little grin spilled over into our jewellery and Roger can be found as charms and necklaces and even little earrings. He has quite a fan base and to my happiness appears to have won the hearts of quite a few people.

Recently an old friend asked me to ‘talk him through it’ when he saw a painting of Roger … and I couldn’t. I simply didn’t know what to say… Its just Roger! ?

All I knew was that Roger has been an important part of my coping strategy during a challenging time of emotional upheaval.

He makes me smile and brings me a sense of peace.

Then, I picked up a book.

A book I just stumbled upon via a Brene Brown podcast. The book is called ‘Burnout’ and is written by twin sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski. As so often seems to happen when the universe hands you something like this.. the book was so incredibly relevant to my life and, I think, modern life in general … especially in the light of recent global events.

In the book they discuss emotional burnout and the concept of finite energy that I previously mentioned but not in relation to losing a loved one but to creativity.

The sisters talk about how a child intuitively knows to create.. give them a crayon and a blank page and they will fill it with lines, colours and pictures. They understand on a instinctual level how good it feels to take what’s inside of you and put it outside of you …

How creating something with pens, clay, metal, clothes, make up …. Is a way of expressing your inner most fears, thoughts, emotions.

Everthing you make, is made from the finite energy of the world, the universe.

Everything you make is made of YOUR energy and is therefore partially made out of you.

Whatever experiences you have had translate into an emotional response, so your artwork, sculpture or creative expression is quite literally made of rage, or fear, or uncertainty or joy…you are quite literally putting the emotion you have inside in a safe place, outside of yourself.

This made me think of a history of famous paintings such as Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ representative of the immense rage and sorrow of the artist and the Spanish people in the light of the horrendous chaotic events experienced during the Spanish Civil war.

For me, I truly believe Roger  (my Guernica… ha ha!) was born out of my  own inner turmoil brought about by the pandemic and the consequential personal upheaval caused by the changes we needed to make to our professional life as well as our personal life.

I began to draw each day, almost obsessively.. it was, and still is, such an important part of my life that often, if I ran out of time during the day I would sit up to the early hours, lost in my sketchbook, awaking the next morning with my pen still in my hand and a new little Roger drawing or my cat (Millie) and her wolf or some other pen and ink design depicting some cryptic emotion.

Truly a sense of some kind of cathartic counselling.

So… , I thought, if energy is finite … it can not be created or destroyed..

Then we, and every other living thing, share this energy… are made up of the same energy…right?

And if energy is released through creativity, allowing you to express rage, or fear or happiness, then surely, the expression of emotion, however it is released has a domino effect on surrounding energies ( am I losing you here? ) .. like a kind of mass hysteria, doesn’t this whole concept point towards the idea that if we project a positive energy, then it will in turn create more positive energy?

Contagious positive energy? …… or, of course, negative, fear induced energy?

Another powerful example of the sheer strength of shared energy also landed in my lap in the form of Netflix’s ‘Trainwreck - Woodstock ’99’, a fascinating and horrifying documentary about the 1999 Woodstock Festival revival that went disastrously wrong. A series of events and a lack of responsible organisation led to a form of dangerous mass hysterical rioting, where people were hurt and property destroyed.

All energy.

This time anger, frustration and most likely fear expressed in destruction.

But it made me think how easy it could be to actively, intentionally move through your day with positive energy, create safe and uplifting spaces and communicate with respect and compassion?

What kind of Mexican wave could we create if we all made a concerted effort to be kind?

Recently, over the course of a few days, I have found feathers …hidden amongst my post.

A glorious green and purple oil slick magpie feather, a pure white swan feather and then another day, a peacock tail feather. Just sitting there amid bank statements and letters.

They were left for me by my postman.

Because I like feathers.

A random act of kindness.

Just because.

It made my day.

What if we all did something small to make someone smile, every day? Surely it would be contagious? Surely our shared energy would change colour … and turn from the insipid green or red of fear and anger to the cool, calm turquoise and pink of warmth and safety? The kind of safety that comes from a sense of community?

There is another awesome book I read many years ago called ‘Join Me’ by Danny Wallace.

It’s a brilliant and humorous look into human behaviour in which Danny asks people to ‘Join’ him, just to see if they will … and they do, with no idea what they were joining or why. Eventually he realises he has created a vast group of people who were all waiting with anticipation to find out what they had joined… which in truth was essentially … nothing. So, in a panic, he asked his followers to perform one random act of kindness every Friday. The stories that followed were just amazing, inspiring and so uplifting.

What a simple idea… how easy it can be to make someone smile by posting a feather in a letterbox.

Imagine what could happen if we could shift the colour of the energy from fear and anger to love and kindness.

Books:

‘Burnout’ Emily & Amelia Nagoski 2020

‘Join Me’ Danny Wallace 2004