Creative Rebellion Essays: Courage and kindness
“Talitha Kum” – painting as therapy for trauma.
This seemingly never-ending pandemic and the political state of the nation, along with dealing with the balance of work and life has me, like pretty much everyone else I know, thinking about how to conduct oneself in these turbulent times.
For me, it seems to come down to two simple issues: courage and kindness.
I’ve written before about creative courage and being kind but I think it bears repeating.
Courage can just be getting out of bed in the morning when all seems lost.
Courage can be really rethinking what your true values are. Or remembering what’s truly important in life. And taking action on those values. You want to help people? Do more than post online about it. Contribute time and money, if you have it.
Courage can be the realization you are in a toxic relationship: to another person, to food, to TV, to social media, to the news, to alcohol, to drugs, to our job. And having the courage to do something about it.
And kindness.
Kindness comes to the fore when you truly realize that everyone is experiencing their pain.
Kindness is when you allow someone to express themselves (shouting, crying, or whatever) and you don’t retaliate or worse, try to fix whatever it is in the moment.
Kindness is forgiving yourself for messing up.
Kindness is forgiving others for being cruel. But, again, doing something about it.
A few weeks ago, Nickey Frankel, a fantastic executive producer who produced my Adobe 99u presentation “Designing a New Day” asked me if I’d be interested in helping her out with a project run by an organization called Talitha Kum. This group of “super nuns” is an international network against trafficking in persons. Their mission statement is:
“Talitha Kum’s mission is to end human trafficking through collaborative initiatives focused around prevention, protection, social reintegration and rehabilitation of survivors, partnership and advocacy, promoting actions that affect the systemic causes.”
Nickey wanted to know if I could do something similar to my 99u masterclass, but this time using my art process as a way to help people who have been traumatized by inconceivable horrors. I immediately agreed to help out, with the caveat that I’m a designer-artist, not a therapist, but I’d be happy to contribute my time. My wife, JC, also agreed to help with her own session wherein she would teach how to make a prayer mandala out of readily available natural matter – she walked around our garden to find flowers, stones, seed, and grasses as her materials.
I’m not Catholic (nor particularly religious) and Nickey wondered if it would be an issue that the program was run by (super) nuns. I responded that I don’t mind what anyone’s religion is as long as they are doing good things to help people in need. It doesn’t matter to me if someone is Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or Atheist – if they are doing impactful deeds to help others and the world, fantastic.
Nickey FedExed over a camera kit and we set up in the studio (which used to be our living room) and shot my session.
My session was pretty simple. I broke it down into three parts:
On a canvas (or on paper with markers, if you don’t have canvas and paint), write down all the things you are feeling. For me it was “sad,” “angry” and “unsure.” I used black paint on the canvas. Then I transformed the words with more paint, not covering it up, but transmuting the words into abstraction.
Then I used white paint to cover the abstraction, mixing black and white together. Upon this new surface write down words that describe what you are. I used the color purple and wrote “powerful,” “kind” and “forgiving.”
Finally, I used more white paint to transform the words to make a surface for an “ensō” – a circle that symbolizes strength, the universe, and the void. I used green paint and ended the session. We start from when we began.
The painting continued to evolve after the session and the complete painting can be found here.
My project can be found here.
It’s not much but I hope that the session helps someone deal with their trauma. Talk about courage. And these super nuns – they are the embodiment of courage and kindness in action. It’s inspiring.
I’ve found that small acts of courage (like presenting my artwork to the world and even writing these weekly essays) help me develop as a human. And I hope that by putting it out there into the world that it lands constructively with the person who needs to see or read it.
Small acts of kindness also have great power to affect good. Especially if they are done without the need for acknowledgment, fanfare, or even secretly carried out.
Go out and transmute trauma into beauty. If not for yourself, then for others.
We are all in this together.
John
More on Talitha Kum’s projects:
https://www.patreon.com/SuperNuns
What I’m reading:
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel – by the brilliant David Mitchell, who also wrote Cloud Atlas. Set in Japan in 1799, this is a story that follows Jacob de Zoet as he struggles to make enough money to marry his fiancée back in Holland. But that’s simplifying it way too much. The book is about so much more than that. It opens with a midwife helping a Japanese courtesan as she struggles through a breech birth and then never lets the foot off the gas.
What I’m watching:
Palm Springs – a truly wonderful Hulu Original film (and I’m not just saying that because I work at Hulu). Equal parts comedy, love, and existential-philosophy-meets-quantum-physics, Andy Samberg stars as a man resigned to his fate reliving the same day over and over (yes, tip-of-the-hat to Groundhog Day) until he meets a woman played by Cristin Milioti who throws a monkey wrench into the system. I’ll leave it at that.
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