Stars are my favorite suit, the one that hits me the hardest. They are the suit of spirit and spirituality. I’ve always felt like my body is weak but my spirit is strong, that I’m more connected with the Earth and the stars than with other people… I’ve always been an outsider, wanting to fit in but always unable or unwilling to conform to the social norms and expectations of other people. It started with gym class when I was five, picked last for everything because I was the smallest and had skeletal deformities that made others mock me, and it just … permeated everything. I spent decades trying to fit in with different groups, prioritizing friendships above my Self, but I found my strength, my spirit, my own universal connection in times when I was alone, in nature. In the sounds of birds and owls and rustling weaves and water moving in streams. In the softness of dirt, the hope of planting seeds, my horse and my dog. In every flower I saw.
Nature is almost always beautiful, but it isn’t soft. It’s textured. It provides and it destroys, not because it is evil or cruel but because it is balance and diverse and never-ending… It is infinite.
But at times, for me, there can be an extreme loneliness to creativity. I’m sure there are diagnosable reasons for this: ADHD causes long periods of hyper focus when I’m completely in my own world, social anxiety keeps me from meeting new people, I don’t have a close or supportive family, social media algorithms just don’t seem to like me. I’m bipolar with PTSD and what mental health professionals might call an anxiety disorder: I pay attention to the news and a lot of it significantly troubles me. But I think I handle it all well enough, most of the time, because I can find strength in my spirituality: in my belief that my Creator whispers to me and acts through me. I use my creativity to build that connection, to show my love and gratitude for every tiny beautiful thing I see and wished I saw, to create worlds that could exist, does now exist, in one of the infinite multiverses theorized by astrophysics and sciences I can’t even name…