The Artist and the Healer

Today the sky fades perfectly from white mixed with crystalline
blue at the horizon
to a deep and pelagic cornflower at its highest peak.
O, how I long to live in the mountains.
But I am torn--am I an artist
or a healer?

Being an artist requires incredible devotion to the self,
solitude,
and a superabundance of beautiful and lighthearted surroundings
to quell and satiate the depressive melancholy that everyone creative suffers.
The artist must surround herself
with organic and resplendent comforts, must
create a safe place within which she can be sensitive and receptive without
being forced to absorb (via the sheer
and uncloseable openness of her heart)
bad energy.

The healer, on the other hand,
must dwell, by force of her profession,
around people.
She must be willing to absorb, and indeed take pleasure in empathizing
with pain, suffering, and existentialist ennui.
Unlike the artist,
who spends her days searching for and defining meaning,
the healer must have already found
or decided upon
her true concept of reality, and be ready
not only to impart this knowledge to others,
but also to infuse their very bodies with it--to use her perception
of the fixed and definite order of things
to re-regulate a broken heart.

To be both:
open and closed
solitary and social
depressive and stable
seems impossible.

It is true that the healer must be open, too--
she must be absorptive.
But at this point in my understanding it seems as though the healer cannot process
or retain all that she absorbs,
for what she takes in is not only alien, but lethal.
In order not to be taken down with the sinking
and mutinous ships of her ailing patients' bodies, the healer must possess an amount of detachment
and mindlessness
that the artist does not and cannot have.

//\\//\\////

Even the philosopher and the artist are different; I see this myself.
In all my efforts to create, I forgot
about the importance and the pleasure of processing
or analyzing, of pattern-seeking,
rather than simply making forms. I want to do both--
I want to do all.


7.18.10