photo credit John F. Ramsay, artist - see his Instagram profile and paintings here
Dearest Natural Medicine community,
I'm sharing these photos and this post here, as a genuine attempt to speak to everything as medicine - which in turn makes it natural medicine; the above snap was taken as I was painting directly with my hands on the wall of my studio space in the Glasgow School of Art - probably in 1994. I was around 20 years old, and I am now precisely 50 years since my co-creative conception: a lot has happened in my life since then, and I'm able to look back on that time with new eyes, as to the burden I was carrying - I can see now that I was primed and tense with chaos, and was using my creative energy, though expressively, as a means of wrestling with the system (via art institution and living in the city for the first time: very ungrounded and reactionary).
The photos take me right back to the feelings I had as an art student, as a young woman from a very rural, wild island location growing up, thrown into hierarchy and commercial structures and industrial thinking - and struggling to maintain my vitality and clarity of thinking.
Seeing the old photos let me feel how far I have come, and how I have succeeded in regaining my rootedness: affirmation of how we have grown-healed-evolved is a powerful motivator, in my experience. Seeing how we have transmuted pain, affirms that we have a capacity to transmute pain further. Seeing an image of when I first stepped out into the world away from my home and community that I'd grown up in - this lets me feel how far I have travelled, earned, survived and come to peace and spirit since then - and thus I am able to see this trajectory as a continuum in which I am co-creative.
Though our conditioned neuroses are significant even at a young age like this, I know that our Natural Vitality and Will can - when used consciously - find a means of keeping us on the right path. Even when life spirals downwards, in every moment that we exist, we have the power to consciously change that cycle into one of spiralling upwards.
I feel that this is the true purpose of celebrating the return to the same point of any cycle, anniversary, or suchlike; we are meant to spiral upwards, expand, become wiser, feel more, discern more skillfully. All that is transmitted through old photos - especially those which are uncontrived - can reveal to us what our true nature was and is trying to express: we can come around to the spiralling and through our use of concentrated attention simply expand, enlighten, move upwards and outwards.
photo credit John F. Ramsay, artist - see his Instagram profile and paintings here
The second photo is from another year later, I think: from before I graduated: it seems heavier, as relects my experience in the last years of art school - my spaced-out-ness, and mybeing more set in an effort-full stance against the systems which it felt were trying to devour my creativity. I see my makeup as protective shield, where before it was more about expression and my identity. I see a hardness to my field, and this makes sense in the context of how I further descended and then rose up.
The choices that we make about direction, purpose and identity are so significant, when we are in a 'locked-in' state like I can observe now in myself then. A slippery slope into chaotic entanglement and in our sense of self depending on opposition to an enemy person or state or situation. In that reactionary/ polemic thinking, everything becomes a battle - and with this war-like thinking, our own spirit-mind-body will eventually express war/ dis-ease/ conflict.
In reflecting on the difference between one - dying - state and the other conscious living reality, I'm able to know the medicine that lies in all things: the pill of a metaphor, a snapshot, a memory trigger - can lead to profound reintegration of separate aspects of self - a gentle, homeopathic transformation of realignment and return to harmony. By seeing what we are not, we can know what we are. Our true, divine Nature is always present and always accessible in us, and is always the most direct means of realigning us with Self and with the Cosmic Soul. There is no external medicine that is more natural, than our settling down into Self.
