This is the first of a series I’m calling “Dark Matters” where I’ll be exploring some areas of life that may be a little uncomfortable. Some are taboo, some are awkward, but the idea is that they are important issues to explore and discuss openly – if we bring these issues out into the open and shed some light on them, maybe they won’t be so dark. It feels particularly fitting to be exploring these topics during the darkest part of the year, moving with the season and embracing the things they bring up. Today is after all the solstice, the day with the least amount of sunshine, but the beauty of our world is that the darkest day is also the beginning of the days getting brighter.

I don’t mean to be morbid, but pain and suffering are things we must all confront throughout life. As a healthcare practitioner I’ll become especially well acquainted with them. They are also topics that happen to be showing up in my personal life recently. Pain and suffering are dark and heavy topics, and because they don’t feel good we generally try to avoid them. I’ve learned through experience that there is a lot of important and powerful energy locked up in those dark places and they are therefore very worthwhile places to explore.

When I first started writing this, I was going to explore the different attitudes and perspectives on pain a suffering that come from different religions and cultures. The first and most obvious was Buddhism. The Buddha makes it’s seem pretty simple: Life is suffering, suffering comes from attachment, cessation of suffering is possible, the eightfold path is the way to end suffering. I’ve engaged in Buddhism a bit, mostly on a superficial level, and it hasn’t proven to be an effective way of coping with suffering for me, though this is probably due to the superficiality with which I engaged it.

Another interesting approach that resonates with me comes from a lecture my Classics professor gave my freshman year in college when discussing Greek theater. She said clearly that we gain wisdom through suffering. I like this idea, but it wasn’t really touching me in the right place in this instance.

While sitting and writing in my journal one day, I realized that what I’ve been doing, what I always do when confronted with things that I don’t understand and can’t comprehend, is try to to understand them – what do they mean? I search for a way to make them meaningful – to me that makes it all more manageable and more digestible and easier to experience. What’s the reason? What’s it for? This is the coping mechanism I’ve learned from my ancestors – tell the story, even if the story ends in a question mark. But first you have to find the story. Where is it? You have to weave the story.

I  saw an image of  raw emotions, like wool, and shearing them out of places in my body and spinning them through talk and expression into threads and then weaving them into a tapestry that tells a story.

It’s a power we’ve been endowed with as humans – to make stories out of this nonsensical world – some are tragedies, some are comedies, some inspire, some leave us with a sense of wonder, others with confusion – but they’re all beautiful, each in its own way, and they teach us and move us.

Some people tell their stories through music and other through dance, some through painting or poetry – that’s my understanding of what art is – storytelling. And we’re here on this planet to make art to express the richness of our lives – to share it and touch others with it. I’m not saying that I see all art as a depiction of pain and suffering, rather that all art is an expression of the human experience, and pain and suffering are inevitable parts of the human experience, so at least some art is about going to be about pain or suffering – there’s really no avoiding them. Numbing ourselves and running away from them potentially even takes away from our humanness and generally has a way of creating more pain and more suffering.

The power to tell our stories, to create art, is something many of us have become disconnected from. Many of us weren’t taught a craft and some of us have been busy with work or caught up in consuming the stories of others through the media and we haven’t had an opportunity to write or sing or play or paint our own stories. It’s a process and it isn’t easy and it can be very scary, but part of the beauty is that you can always edit and revise, you can rewrite a paragraph or paint another painting, or dance another dance, or sing a different song. It’s all ephemeral anyway, it’s all changing, and each time we make art, we get a little better, we hone our skills and we gain new insights.

But there’s another piece: we can’t create art without the help of others. Someone else is makes the brushes and canvasses, someone else is playing the music we dance or sing to, or acting out the play we wrote, or printing our story. And even if we could make art all by ourselves, it wouldn’t be worth much without having others to share with.

I happened to watch the latest Woody Allen movie “Midnight in Paris” last night, it’s quite excellent and I highly recommend it. There was a quote that seemed to echo what I’m trying to say here, so I’ll leave you with that:

“The role of an artist is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote to the emptiness of existence.”

To me pain and suffering are potent raw materials that we can turn into art.

Let’s all make some art.

Happy Artful Holidays! May we all be gifted the opportunity to share our stories with loved ones this Holiday season.