This painting addresses, or at least attempts to address, my emergence from the depths of an existential rawness I still hesitate to call “depression” (this word feels both too bleak and too simple) during postpartum. After an initial week or two of glowing contentment following my son’s birth, the fall I was warned about came, and I plunged into a strange and alien part of my own psyche that felt utterly unfamiliar. I realized that while there are many supports and some kind of framework for healing your body after it opens, there is no discussion whatsoever of healing your spirit, or energy, when it does the same. I spent several months feeling like I was walking around without my skin on. I looked far and wide for help with this, but nobody—psychologists, friends, other mothers—seemed to understand quite what I was describing.
“You know when you felt like a house in a storm with all the windows and doors open and banging furiously in the wind?” I would ask. “Like all the elements of the world could pass freely through you and into you?”
“Um, not really,” they would say.
Ultimately, I worked through it on my own with the aid of meditation, uninterrupted time with my baby, and some profound bodywork. I hadn’t realized that I had relocated the countless shattered pieces of myself (well, most of them), reassembled them, and fused them back together into some semblance of the woman that came before until one afternoon when I was driving to Boulder. I was on my way to an appointment, and I had just driven through a ferocious summer storm. I emerged from the other side of it on highway 36, and the late sun above the Flatirons blazed through my pitted windshield, making it difficult to see. When I glanced in my rearview mirror to check my son in his car seat, I was struck by the sight of the most brilliant double rainbow I’d ever seen, radiant against a slate-dark sky, writ small within the tiny frame of my mirror where I might have missed it were it not for the light-blindness I was experiencing. Though I tend to shy from such clichés, even I could not ignore a rainbow in my rearview mirror. A little vestige of the solidity I’d been missing settled gently into my bones, and I finally felt the ground beneath me. I realized I would rather return home. I didn’t want help from someone else anymore. I turned back towards the storm—and the rainbow—and drove home with my baby. I’ve been on an ascent back to myself ever since.
I have always loved the optical truth that all rainbows are complete circles. Our perception of them as arcs has to do with our point of view. Only under certain unique circumstances can one see a full, circular rainbow, sometimes visible from very high vantage points that do not often fall within the realm of daily life. However, the vision of this particular rainbow reflecting in Standley Lake on my way home made me realize just how capable we are of reaching beyond our perception, and beyond the visible, into what we know to be true. Everything has to do with our point of view, be it that of the eye, or that of the heart.