A Prayer for Relief 1995
No doubt the reason is that character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
–Helen Keller, Helen Keller’s Journal:1936-1937
While I’ve been blocked as I wait and wait, I’ve been looking at some of my older work. Lately I’ve been focusing on some of the pieces from my Exiles series from 1995. Hard to believe it’s been thirty years.
The Exiles series was created in the time just before and after my mom’s death back in November of 1995 and focused on how I saw her suffering in the last several months of her life as cancer ravaged her body. It’s a personal series, one that was important to me in many ways, both personally and as an artist.
This work has taken on new meaning in recent times for me. Not that I am going through nor do I anticipate going through anywhere the same sort of experience of suffering that my mom endured. Or the even the experiences of so many others who are now enduring far more suffering than me.
But I am a little more aware of her experience now and saddened a bit by my lack of this awareness when she was in her final months. I would like to say it was youthful ignorance but I was not a child at that point, in my mid-thirties. I suppose was at that time beginning the journey from my selfish nature of childhood to one of more understanding of our connections and responsibilities during our time here. I see Mom’s suffering now as an important and formative segment of that journey. I hate to put it this way, but her suffering was great gift in a way.
It put things into a wider perspective, allowing me to see that we all suffer in some way sometime and that my suffering is no greater than that of anyone else.
The suffering of anyone should be felt by all.
That’s the hope, of course. If we fail to feel the suffering of others, our journey stalls and we fail to gain what might be the better part of ourselves.
That might be the greatest gift that Mom gave me. And that means a lot because she was a great and generous gift giver.
Here’s a video from about 20 years ago with some of the Exiles series. This film is flawed and doesn’t contain all the series images, but it captures the series perfectly, at least in how I saw it then and see it now. Still makes me emotional…
Redtree Times 