Cristina Calero
Where do you take cover when you don’t have shelter? Where do you find safety when all seems threatening? In whose arms do you find comfort when they are holding someone else?
It started with a light, gentle rain. Barely audible within the cozy walls of a quaint little cottage by the sea, but pounded like hailstones on the tarp of my new home. ‘Home’... that word would soon become heat in everyone’s mouth as it fired the topic of conversation and morphed into a primal need that would break the mind and the spirit of so many. As the gentle rain turned to an apocalyptic flood; a tsunami of grief gripped our land as the unbridled power of Mother Nature was unleashed, again, and again. She was creating space at an unbelievable cost.
I was one of the lucky ones. I had a roof over my head. My new home was a caravan in the driveway of my sister and brother-in-law’s rental. Cruisy Van Go was damp, moldy, cramped, an oven under the Sun, an icebox under the Moon, and I loved it! Cruisy and I didn’t float away, didn’t catch on fire, didn’t get ransacked by looters, didn’t fall apart under the weight of water that seemed to attack from all angles, and didn’t lose power. But we did cry and joined in the collective head-shaking question ‘How will people come back from this?!’ A couple of years on and that question is showing up as amazing stories of resilience, determination, and a sheer will to survive, with or without a ‘home’.
My mum used to ask me “Why aren’t you making music my darling?” and my answer was nearly always along the lines of “Because I am just trying to stay alive”.
When post-traumatic stress takes hold and manifests as a myriad of dysfunctions that range from the annoying to completely debilitating; the adage of ‘just trying to get through the day’ rings in our ears. My ears had been ringing for a number of years prior to stepping over the narrow threshold of the little caravan, but I knew I had found a ‘space to create’. I felt ‘safe’. To climb out of that deep well of trauma required a rope and now that I had a home, now that I had - ‘survived’, I was determined to find that friggen rope.
I had my laptop, I had clothes, I had coffee, and I had insomnia. And now, I also had time.
The rope came.
Wiping tears from your eyes can make for slippery hands and so, gripping that rope was not an easy endeavour. It slipped, it whipped, it tore through my strength but I just had to get my head above that wave and try living again. Grief can wake you, but so too can a creative project, and in those silent hours often a voice can be heard that asks ‘Which one will you give your energy to… now that you’re awake?’. To keep going, you have to find the tools to keep going. Mental illness has its habits, its patterns, and its preferred modes of operandi, and it can be a case of trial and error; finding the tools that circumvent those modes and take you to the edge of a shore that you thought you may never set foot on again.
Creating space left me with few options; the most comfortable being - standing next to the kitchen sink, laptop propped on a
tupperware container, van window open in daylight hours to let light, air, and smiles in, and closed at night to keep the mozzies out. Hours of standing and pouring my focus into creating had afforded me relief from downward spirals of negativity. Having an anchor for my days gave me gentle ripples of growing self-esteem, for which peeing in a pot had been the final act of erosion. I created a document with an outline of 1. Tasks to finish today 2. Goals for the week 3. Ideas for Project A 4. Ideas for Project B 5. People to call asap 6. People to call one month before completion etc. I then created a document for each of the numbered topics and pretty coloured folders to house the finished items. AMAZING! The power of FOCUSED distraction, an oxymoron that became the muse for my creations; can be quite gentle in leading us out of mental illness. It leaves scope for interpretation and for alteration, for those days when rolling over to face the wall is all that can be managed. Focused distraction under the wing of creation, allowed me to have compassion for what I was trying to accomplish - creating space; space in my mind, space in my heart, space in my biases, space in my outpouring of sadness, space in my calendar, space in my days, space from the past. There is so much power in being gentle and allowing space.
Since 2020 the escalation in mental illness is unfathomable. And yet, in the wake of so much suffering, so much grief, so much displacement, there has been an explosion of creativity. We are programmed to CREATE! Entelechy is our NATURE! Our unrealised potential is so much at the core of why we continue to suffer beyond the initial wound and it’s worth every effort we can muster, to find a way to express that potential.
The stunning examples of how others have found their way through this suffering are beautifully illustrated in the powerful painting of artist Karla Dickens by Indigenous artist Black Douglas. The 2022 winner of the prestigious Archibald Prize shows Karla wading through flood water carrying buckets filled to the brim with muddy invaders, and eyes filled to the brim with determination.
We can create a Heaven of this Hell. focusmindplusbody.com @focusmindplusbody @calerocstars
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