The Talisman

In my recent loss, I’ve drawn numerous love letters that consist of an amalgam of love, hope, grief, more love, forgiveness, compassion, surrender, a wake, desperation, calls into the thin air because communication is fractured, sadness, healing, and more love.

With more love comes space for healing and knowing that that initially has to start within oneself, this drawing is a tiny talisman for our hearts. Fate doesn’t always bring us through life in ways we wanted and through hardships, our hearts aren’t perfect either. Sometimes what our hearts represent are awkwardly shaped but it’s up to us to learn to live and navigate the difficult cards drawn for us. It is ultimately our choice to stay in a negative space of resentment and anger or to move forward with love and compassion. This is a reminder for that. I believe that love wins.

This is in conversation with my first drawing, “Hope and Love” which is inspired by loss, the subsequent grief and hope, and Japanese concepts of musubi and kintsukuroi. The red thread of fate that connects two people is called musubi in Japanese. Musubi has numerous meanings from connecting people, representing the flow of time, knotting- which is also time, unraveling – breaking – connecting human life again. Kintsukuroi means golden repair or more popularly written as kintsugi – golden joinery, the idea to mend something with gold to repair and embrace the flaws.

I have hope that in the repair of this loss, that all isn’t lost, and that we can grow stronger. The golden fissure over the heart represents kintsukuroi which is the act of repairing a break in ceramics with gold.

Framing courtesy of Museum Quality Framing. It has clear spacers, museum glass, and is ready to hang.