Containers

Tonight in Art Therapy we made containers, which was something I had been looking forward to, until it came down to doing it. I had thought, what a convenient thing, a place to put things, recovery things: emotions I don't know what to do with, hopes, fears, momentos, whatever.

But when it came down to decorating it I froze momentarily. There was the magic threshold of self expression, and what did I really want this container to be for anyway? for the good? the bad? the ugly? What I really need is a container for the confused, the lost, the unknown. But in order to have a container of these things I need to be able to hold them, to put them away, which is where the real problem lays. If I knew what these things were I would be able to put them in their proper containers in the first place.

There was something else bothering me too though; I am tired of putting things in containers, I just want things to be, I want to just be, I don't want to be contained. Also containers seem so stagnant and still and what I am trying to do is a process, it cannot be contained, which is part of why it is so hard, and hard to describe to people who are not going through it.

I ended up thinking about what I need to do to recover, and I realized that I need to let some things die, I need to let them go. Years ago I missed the Samhain celebration here because I was too afraid of what I really needed to let go of. Thats when things started to go wrong.

So I went back to that place of letting the leaves fall and moulder and protect the growth that was yet to come. I came back to where the leaves turn to rich loamy soil. It occurred to me that that process was just one part of the wheel of the year that turns so effortlessly. So I put a bit of winter ontop of the autumn (time to mourn that loss, and understand it) and had to follow that with the spring of course (turning that loss into something beautiful and new). But I left the summer for the inside of the container. That is what I want to contain: flowers and growth and beauty.
Looking at my container all you see is process (some of it not so pretty). That is what the world sees right now, a girl still too sick to drive herself around, a girl hiding at her parents house. But inside, there is all kinds of growth, it is beautiful and rich and colorful. If you are lucky I might let you peek inside.