Wordplay Collage 2012 by Nathalie Dignard

Take a look around the room you are sitting in.  What does it say about your story?

I gave my bedroom a makeover yesterday.  Moving and changing things around helps me think.  Built in furniture scares me!  Pushing furniture around, piling the superfluous outside the door, ready for the garbage or to donate to whoever was looking for a new piece of their lives, made me feel oh so good!

Neighbours and friends never know what they might walk into when they visit!  It’s my creative therapy; like playing a giant Tetris game, making the pieces of my life fit, adding and discarding.  Out with the old or out dated; in with the new or newly loved.

To say that letting go of what no longer serves is liberating is an understatement.  Over the last three years, my living space told its own version of my healing journey.  I moved in here freshly out of a very toxic relationship.  Within 24 hrs, I moved, started work (after a very tumultuous maternity leave) and my youngest, who turned one just a few days after the move, was starting daycare.  My oldest was 9.  I looked around and the furniture was dark, big and heavy, mostly browns.  This brown swallowed me whole.  I went from an upper floor with direct sunlight to a shaded lair, and the rain season was starting.  The weight of the moment, the rain and having two daughters to take care of all seemed a bit too much.  How was I going to take care of me?  There were many layers to sort out.

Along with my an obsessive need to keep moving things around, trying to fit into my life, trying to make my life fit me, figuring it all out, moving a piece here, selling a piece there; the magic started happening.  I was processing the last 40 years of my life and I didn’t know it.  Looking back, the last three years have been the most defining years of my existence so far.  They have been the biggest physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual and generational shift to date.

From the browns around me, red started to emerge.  At first, it was the red of anger, of hurt, of bleeding to death.  That red became love when I bought myself a comfy red throw to wrap myself in on days when I needed a hug.  I was learning to love me and my environment was beating to the very same rhythm in the way it was expressing itself.  After the browns and the reds, I fell in love with yellow/green iridescent paint, growth.  It showed up in my art, my creative process was alive again!  Vibrant and bold, the colours were making an impact.  Look at me!  I’m alive!

After brown, red and vibrant green, there was turquoise, patiently waiting its turn; a pleasant surprise, a moment of exhale, like a waterfall washing away what is no longer needed.   Like water bringing life to the desert; there it is… clarity, light and peace.

Take a look around the room again.  What can you let go of?  What can you let in to live your best life?