Petals and Lilah

A meditation on Life and Death in alternate timelines

Finding each other had been like twin stars exploding into supernovas. Petals and Lilah had parts of each other. They saw through the same eyes, had the same instincts, shared the same grief, had the same heart. But they smelled the flowers differently, heard the music differently, tasted food differently, thought different thoughts, had different skills, experienced loved in different ways. They were together only briefly, but the encounter lasted forever, and on and on and on and on through time. They thought of each other, always. And then sometimes. And then almost never. But it didn’t matter, because they always had parts of each other. At night, they always closed their eyes together.

digital mixed media collage, music, etc by Mighty.Beautiful

In the background:

Behind the Scenes:

These last few months (okay, going on eight now, time flies when the world is crumbling) have consisted of the death of my horse, Jazz, which just shreds me deeply; the death of my long-time bestdoginthewholeworld Dante; caring for my mom as she died of Stage IV lung cancer (and her death, which I am still processing, months later); in the midst of a global pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands and isolating millions and creating economic collapse; and which has indirectly or directly lead to race riots, as three officers knelt on the neck, back and legs of a black man experiencing symptoms of covid-19 until and after that man died; one of like… I don’t know, way too many instances of police murdering black people, and unbelievable police brutality against crowds of innocent people demanding justice; in a nation lead by a clearly racist, authoritarian … oh god, I digress. There are moments when it feels we are just hitting rock bottom and drilling down toward lava. You see the escalation happening and you think, this all needs to STOP. WE MUST DO BETTER. WE MUST BE BETTER.

This is the collage I made from all that, before some of it ever even happened. I had just spent a month and a half working on this wildflower painting while caring for my mom as she passed away, which was devastating, difficult in pretty much every way imaginable and which I do not regret for one iota of a second, although I do wonder how many days I actually gave her or what it was I actually gave her besides the knowledge that I tried my very best. She might have lived longer in a nursing home, with actual professional caretakers. Except the nursing homes weren’t fairing well at all.

The painting (which is basically the background of the collage) was, in many ways, the thing that got me through it, because I really didn’t feel like I could leave my mom alone in the house, or leave the house, or have other people in the house. It was just something I tried to work on every night, whether it was just moving pieces around for 15 minutes or creating a new kind of flower to add to the array. It felt a little like gardening (and I need to become a much better gardener), just moving the pieces around and adding to it every day, creating short video meditations to stare at as I dreamed I was in some kind of magical wildflower field in another world. I finished it after I finally had the chance to show it to my mom, who spent the vast majority of time here sleeping and rarely had the energy to make it across the room. She looked at this thing I had spent a month working on every night while she slept just so I would be able to hear her if she needed me, and she said “it needs more yellow.” Which was true. In my life in isolation, I hadn’t seen the sun nearly enough.

But still, the last few months have shown me that no matter how difficult this road gets, no matter how impossible improvement may seem, no matter how much we have spiraled, art really can help save us — both individually just experiencing all the cathartic mental health benefits of the creative process, whether you’re “skilled” or not, and culturally, as we use art to spread our thoughts and our emotions, as we sing songs to unite us in both protest and isolation, as we take this moment to get to know one another better, even from afar.

ART WILL SAVE US.

And so this is kind of the story of my life at this time. One of the stories. We are all made up of so many stories, is really what it comes down to. Different kinds of human experiences, different challenges, different traumas, different wants and desires. We are the stories we tell ourselves. We can become the stories we tell ourselves. We can be the people we want to be. We are writing these stories right now. This is ourstory.

We are a nation in sorrow.

A little more than a month after my mom died, we had this terrible, awful, horrific moment — actually, 9 whole fucking minutes — happen. Three police officers executed George Floyd, a black man, on the streets of Minneapolis, while another one watched as people on the streets begged them, literally BEGGED THEM, to let Floyd breathe. They had him face down in the street, one officer on his legs, one on his back, and one on his neck — the only officer video audiences could see as George Floyd cried out “I can’t breathe,” over and over again, going to far as to even ask for his Momma, exhibiting all the signs of a dying person, telling everyone that he was dying, especially the way people die in the midst of a pandemic that puts people on ventilators. They can’t breathe. For nine minutes. Well after Floyd had stopped talking, well after his body had stopped moving. (If you care about why they did this to George Floyd, I will tell you: He bought a $6 pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill.) This paragraph literally sounds like it was written in 1859. Like what the actual fuck. What. the. actual. fuck.

And those 9 fucking minutes were followed by more and more devastating moments. Videos of militarized police officers firing bean bag rounds at protestors and journalists who are doing nothing but the most American thing a person can possibly do: protest against clear injustices and report on government tyranny. We are a country born from protest. We created a Bill of Rights and put it right on the fucking top. Before the right to bare arms. Before anything else. We have the right to assemble, we have the freedom of the press, and police are out there spraying bean bag bullets and chemical weapons of war — AGAIN DURING A PANDEMIC THAT KILLS PEOPLE BECAUSE THEY CAN’T BREATHE — at peaceful protestors.

This was a moment for deep, deep sorrow. A moment for deep reflection. A moment to apologize. We are a people feeling absolutely shredded by a system and a corrupt head of state bent on dividing us to gain more and more wealth and power. (I will not call him president, not anymore, not after that — I don’t have a word for it [ABUSE OF POWER] — he pulled teargassing those peaceful protestors in front of St. John’s church, and the words he spoke after asking for the military to stop the protests). We are a nation exhausted of violence, but we are also so conditioned to it. We are beaten down by it. We live in fear of it. I DO NOT WANT TO SEE ONE MORE GEORGE FLOYD. Not one more Breonna Taylor. But I’m furious and heartbroken because we’ve already seen more.

If this sounds like the start of a dystopian fiction novel, it’s not far off. This is chapter one. Chapter 10. Chapter 258. This is the end. This is the beginning.

Chapter one. Black Lives Matter. They are among our best athletes, our favorite musicians and rappers, amazing poets and singers and songwriters and actors and actresses and screenwriters and directors and doctors and nurses and hospice aids and EMTs and firefighters and Army soldiers and neighbors and friends and friends of friends and family and ancestors and futures.