I love my mother in law. She's kind and sweet, and courageous and strong - and hasn't always had an easy life. I have a lot of respect for her, and admire the relationship my man has with her. He has her intelligence, curiousity and interest in all things - it is clear he is his mother's son.
But when anyone stays with you for a few weeks, you need to make them disappear. It's hard to be available all the time, especially when, as much as she likes me, she doesn't visit to visit me - she is here for her son. I'm okay with that, really. I'm old enough and wise enough not to be jealous that I take second place - it's not even really about that, it's that she lives ten thousand miles away and every second counts. Sometimes it's far more adult of me to disappear into the background. Perhaps making myself disappear, rather than making her disappear, would be a more apt title.
And so, when she visited in 2016, I spent two very hot days with the air conditioning on, I picked up my pens and drew. Let me get one thing straight - I don't draw. For me, this is a big deal. I'm not even sure if it's a drawing, more of a doodle - but it was a pleasurable escape for me. There's something very meditative about putting ink on the page - I feel the same way when I write.
I disappear. The world disappears.
On the wings of the dragonfly are two worlds - on the left, is Glastonbury Tor and the moon, and memories of living in England. It's about inner worlds - mythology, spirituality, the stars, the night. On the right hand side is the beach I surf at in summer in Australia - the sun is hot and bright, and the waves roll in. It's about activity and movement, action in the world. Underneath are lotuses, labrinths, spirals, the sun and the moon, sunshine and rain - the natural world and symbols of journeys - we walk to the center of the labrinth to know ourselves, and the lotus too is about suffering - no mud, no lotus, as someone said once. Or maybe they didn't. It's just stuff we know.
'There's your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your own way out of that maze' - John Green
So the dragonfly was going to be a paste up. I was going to photocopy it and paste it under the railway bridge in town, over the 'C*NT' that was sprayed there in fluoro pink (nice). But I'm impatient, you see. So I made the glue from flour and water and pasted it onto the bus, totally oblivious in the hot sunshine that the rain would come, eventually, and wash the ink away.
Sometimes art is just a lesson in impermanence.
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