The TIghtness of Trauma
Acrylic and Lino Cuit Prints on Canvas
6’ x4’
The Llama Truth
Life through the eyes of a girl called Llama
Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.
(Source: onlinecounsellingcollege, via kit-catalyst)
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.
Echoes of Fear on Flickr.
A Painting I did about my car wreck. This is a low quality picture (taken with an iphone).
Llamas have bad hair days too.
Fear Not
Recently, I have had a couple of debates centered around the idea of wrestling with God. I have always considered wrestling with God to be health: not just for mental health, but also healthy for our relationship with God. However, I have found that many people consider it quite the opposite. This has been pressing on me, so I am going to try to share my interpretation of this passage and the concept that comes with it. (I can’t emphasize enough that I am not seminary educated. All of this is based on my own understand. Please take it as only that.
Genesis 32:22-29 (NRSV)
“22 The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. 24 Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26 Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ 27 So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ 28 Then the man* said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel,* for you have striven with God and with humans,* and have prevailed.’ 29 Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. “
The first thing that stands out to me in this passage is the time of day. It is night. It is dark and Jacob is alone. This can be paralledled to times of darkness and/or fear encountered in our lives: those times when we don’t know what the next day will bring and all the signs indicate whatever comes will not be good.
A Llama in Times Square, 1957
by Inge Morath
love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear:
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star
ee cummings, being to timelessness as it’s to time,
(via herewecollide)
Let’s Talk About hCG…
I have bit my tongue about a diet that is all over my university and my church, but it is far past time for someone to say something.
The hCG diet, was a fad in the 70s, and recently had a resurgence of popularity. After watching a dozen people I care about go down this dangerous path, I snapped after seeing another beautiful girl look absolutely ill (as every one looks on this diet) because she was on this plan.
“We’re so desperate to have good solutions for weight control that a lot of people with good common sense literally suspend it when it they confront weight-loss claims,” Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, said. “This diet is appalling. It takes irresponsible diets to new heights.”
The ability of hCG (synthetic form included) to aid in anything other than appetite suppression is dubious at best and it is much more likely that the diet is quite dangerous.
It’s reckless, irresponsible, and completely irrational,” says Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Can you lose weight on it? Of course, but that’s mainly because you’re hardly consuming any calories…
Even if it could release more calories from fat, your body still can’t get adequate nutrients from your own fat storage.( Just as you couldn’t get adequate nutrition from eating only fats.) Your body still needs protein, amino acids, and vitamins to handle daily functioning.
When a body is subsisting off 500 calories a day, the body leeches protein from the heart, and this makes the heart muscle irritable, which can lead to ventricular tachycardia and sudden cardiac death, said Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center in Connecticut.
Do you lose weight, sure. But is that all that matters in life? You don’t have to be emaciated for malnutrition and related symptoms to be a problem.
If you have weight to lose, don’t worship thinness and speed so much so that you sacrifice your own health.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way - things I had no words for.
My moment
I had a moment of clarity while walking across campus this morning. Such things are quite rare during the usual end of the semester frenzy. This semester’s end is compounded by the looming GRE and applications to grad schools. But really, the truth is that I don’t need to be so anxious and worried. I know I am suppose to be a therapist and beyond that I know that art is a powerful tool in therapy. If i don’t get in to GWU, then I go somewhere else and get my LPC and use art in therapy. If I don’t get in anywhere this year, I do an internship somewhere and make it work until I do get accepted into a program. My road doesn’t have to be straight. It can be. If it is, that is fabulous; however, if it is not, that is fine too.
(Source: letstalkabouted)
Fear is the memory of pain. Addiction is the memory of pleasure. Freedom is beyond both.
Deepak Chopra
(via letstalkabouted)
How to Think Creatively
1. Saturation: Once the problem or creative challenge has been defined, the next stage of creativity is a left hemisphere activity that paradoxically requires absorbing one’s self in what’s already known. Any creative breakthrough inevitably rests on the shoulders of all that came before it. For a painter, that might mean studying the masters. For me, it involves reading widely and deeply, and then sorting, evaluating, organizing, outlining, and prioritizing.
2. Incubation: The second stage of creativity begins when we walk away from a problem, typically because our left hemisphere can’t seem to solve it. Incubation involves mulling over information, often unconsciously. Intense exercise can be a great way to shift into right hemisphere in order to access new ideas and solutions. After writing for 90 minutes, for example, the best thing I can do to jog my brain, is take a run.
3. Illumination: Ah-ha moments - spontaneous, intuitive, unbidden - characterize the third stage of creativity. Where are you when you get your best ideas? I’m guessing it’s not when you’re sitting at your desk, or consciously trying to think creatively. Rather it’s when you’ve given your left hemisphere a rest, and you’re doing something else, whether it’s exercising, taking a shower, driving or even sleeping.
4. Verification: In the final stage of creativity, the left hemisphere reasserts its dominance. This stage is about challenging and testing the creative breakthrough you’ve had. Scientists do this in a laboratory. Painters do it on a canvas. Writers do it by translating a vision into words.
