My Sovereign Normality
by Sheila Sen
The lotus symbolises enlightenment, its flower petals the colours of the grace in my experience, yin/yang is infinity in the Now and its pearl shape invokes the cool blue pearl I visualised in meditation.
From outcast to sovereignty: this is my representation of self ownership. The petals colour vibrations do not speak of rage and shame, dark nights of the Soul, healing ancestral trauma and ending karmic relationships; nor do they tell tales of the years I spent sitting with my inner child nor of my self as an exile at the gates to my own City, nor the blood I shed as wounded warrior. Neither yet of becoming my own mother and my own husband.
But they might be about finding the guru I sought is my own heart.
The lotus petals vibrate in colours of the Grace between battles, the salves on my wounds, the kindness of allies and the happiness which comes from bursts of light, the gifts being a searcher. Authenticity.
Transcendence and Illumination.
Claiming an identity they taught me to despise. Mixed race, bipolar, skint, 60 year old single Mother and Crone.
Raising a son and a yard of veg and hens.
My Sovereign Normality.
To be seen is amazing and a big relief. Thank You for seeing Me. Having reason and deadline, theme and context, encouragement and company, to make something beautiful…when I am often quite ill: anxious, hopeless, agoraphobic and a hermit to my garden…is a very big anchor.
A distraction and diversion. The gift of focus and of joy.
The creative act is a series of meditations deepening and expanding in therapeutic alchemy. Peeling back layers and clarifying thoughts, feelings, memories, voices…until the revelations of the pearl, the perfection in inperfection, is obvious. Making art reconciles me when I feel fractured fragmented lost and useless…something real, raw, honest interesting, beautiful, sentient, always comes: either as a finished piece or a future starting point which is then a vehicle to go deeper into something hidden.
The process of making expressive art to be shown and seen, discussed and referenced and shared, elevates my continued survival into a pattern a story a conversation.
Beyond the necessary to the essential.
Inflation, from a flat piece of paper with my name on it to an increasingly buoyant, sensuous Self.