Healing Tears, A Triptych

It’s A simple story in three parts.  A story that comes from reading how crying can be transformative in  the book Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and the power of tears in my own life.

One day a couple of weeks ago, the story ran through my head like I was watching and animated short film.

The girl is from my goddess drawings, the one with the pointed head and oak leaf hair.  The colors are pale, almost icy.  She’s sitting at a kitchen table crying into a bowl that her mother gave her to catch her tears.  She cries so much she creates a lake so big she can’t see the other side.  The bowl becomes a boat and she sails the lake for many days and nights, crying the whole time, making the lake bigger and bigger.  One day she stops crying and sees land.  She comes to shore and starts to sing her secret.  The one that was locked inside of her.  A shame that she no longer wants to bear. That wasn’t hers to begin with.  Her tears have unlocked something inside of her and  given her voice.  She has lost some things along the way.  Her old way of thinking about herself and some of the relationships that liked her the way she was before, some of the people who are afraid of her secret being spoken out loud.  But she has gained a part of herself that was buried for years.  She can’t go back and she can’t stop singing her secrets.  Always discovering  more and more of who she really is.

I’m figuring out how to tell the story in my pictures, although I may include some words too.   I’m planning on drawing them with my sewing machine and making them into a quilt or wall hanging.  There will be three drawings.  The girl crying into the bowl. The girl floating in the bowl and the girl on the land singing her secret.   Although I can’t quite picture how it will all come together yet, these are some of the drawings I’ve done so far: