For many years I have been interested in the connections people make regarding their leadership when they get out of their verbal capacities and tap their non-verbal ones.
With the permission of a past client (she’s reviewed this post), I share the image below. When I asked her one day what art she included in her life, like most of us she initially demurred, but soon mentioned that she sometimes created cards for other people, cards that they kept and that touched them. Because my client was at that moment challenged by her circumstances, I suggested she might create a card to give herself, as a potential access point to her own inner wisdom about what to do. She possibly thought I had gone off the deep end, and for a moment or two I wondered that, too. I mean, what could anyone learn from such an exercise? It took awhile for her to get back to me.
And yet my experiences with drawings have been nothing less than extraordinary. I have watched people create drawings that suddenly revealed a key hidden dimension of a problem. A woman with constant back pain discovered her anger by looking into the scribbled portion of a picture she’d drawn about her life. Another client learned about a promise she’d made to her deceased son, a promise that was consuming her and eroding her relationships with her reports at work. And yet another had to face the distance he felt from his family — and he had tried to trick the process, too. In the end, however, despite the trick he found himself in tears.
Somehow it seems, we are able to tap an inner understanding of our dilemmas by letting color and shape pour onto a “canvas” before us, rather than thinking and analyzing.
Just so, the client who made the card. You might want to click on it so you can see it in a larger form for a moment. It was created from materials found in a flea market in London. On the right you see some gauze-like material tied with a ribbon to the edge of the card. In my client’s view, this has come to symbolize a pattern of “going into the fog” at times when difficult decisions are pending. The gauze protects her from moving too fast, but also from seeing the reality she is facing. Her work is to consciously lift that gauze — to cut through the fog — and see what is behind it.
What is there is the back of an old postcard, a swirl of words, which she described as her real circumstances, or the feeling of those circumstances, at least, swirling around her. Her goal is somehow to get to the center, that empty place like the eye of the hurricane where she can be calm. What guides her in that work are the three virtues named on the Italian stamps, Temperantia (self-control and patience), Justicia (justice and fairness) and Pax (peace). These are her life values, her guiding sources of stability when all the world, her work, her life, seems a hurricane.
But there are still two more layers. Behind the gauze, the old postcard with its swirling messages, and the guiding values of her life, is another old card, filled with colorful circles, and beyond that, a map.
“What do these layers symbolize to you?” I asked.
“I don’t know about the colored circles. They just felt good to me. They added color,” she replied. (I choose to believe in retrospect they show a side of her that is spontaneous and “colorful,” that might yet be hidden from the world).
“And the map? Well, I have no idea what place it really is, so I imagine it is Athens and Athens has always been very beautiful to me,” she continued. And then, referencing her Greek heritage, “Even though I no longer have family there, it always seems like home.”
So that was the goal then of this process of seeing down through the layers, of sending a card to herself: to find at bottom a map of home — or perhaps to it.
And what might be the value of that? What can be learned from this art?
In the daily swirl of our lives and our work, we must have what’s truly important. We must find our “home,” our center, vantage point, ultimate value. We must have our real Self.
In line with a recent post on power, it could be said my client’s work is coming out of the shadows of sacrifice to finding her own best affirmation, of learning how best to say yes to herself. Her card is a symbol, what the poet Wallace Stevens once called “the speculum of fire” on the prow of the ship that carries us toward the unknown. Reminder, centering agency, and pointer. Past, present, and future. Even as the challenges mount, in the art that is really ours, invisible beauty — and meaning — wait. And perhaps one day that art will even reveal, intricate and clear and fully laid out before us, a magnificent map of our own true home.
