Below is what I wrote when I first started working on "Through The Tunnel" (c)

"Through The Tunnel"

In 2009, I was hit by lightning during a thunderstorm while I stood at my kitchen sink doing dishes.  When you know you shouldn't be doing dishes during a thunderstorm, and well, there were only a couple of dishes to do, and the storm wasn't that bad yet......well, the shock threw me to the floor, I couldn't speak but for "Gaaagh, gaagh"..trying to speak, trying to form words.  I felt myself fade to black, only it was grey.  I saw my grandfather and a Native American elder at the end of a long tunnel.

It took me four years to fully address what had happened.  I knew it, could "see" it, but didn't face it.  At the time, the right side of my face was bruised and blue. And, typical for me, I didn't go to the hospital, I went to bed.  And for those four years couldn't quite get why my left side would just stop working, why my arms would cramp up, why my speech would stop, why I have nerve damage to my face.

In 2012, my mother died, very suddenly.  I was lost.  And in order to find myself, I had to back up and face the lightning strike, and the damage to my thinking, to my physical being.  For about a year now, I have not been painting very often.  Until last week, when I saw a doctor who finally started helping me put pieces back together.

We discussed that I hear color instead of seeing it, that I was afraid I had lost my touch with the correct use of color.  But I came home and did a couple of small paintings.  They were in brown.  Without going into all the medical details, I'm a colorist at this point in my life, they should not have been brown.  So, I started a bright whale painting.  And color hurt - it hurts my eyes, hurts my head, just hurts. My color perception has been thrown- whether by the lightning, or by a condition called being a "migraineur".  Prone to constant migraines, only in my case, again perhaps because of the lightning, I don't feel the pain, so my body keeps going, even though it's in a full migraine state.

To heal, I feel I need to first work in brown and then work back into color.  I've been working on this very hard for a few days.  And all I seem to be able to do is draw faces. In my near-death experience, I have remembered the end of the tunnel, perhaps because my grandfather was there.  It occurred to me this morning, what about that whole long length of the tunnel?

What if that was a space of living thought, of faces, people, activity, between life and death.  I can't get to my grief for my mother if these faces are in the way, and I can't fully pull back from that tunnel until I face my mother's death. I lost her and I don't know where she is.  If these faces are keeping me holding onto that tunnel, well, I won't get my own life back. She isn't in my tunnel, I don't think, so hopefully when I again get to the end of the tunnel, past the faces, maybe then color won't hurt. Maybe then I can paint a flower for my mother, or finish the oil of a bench just like the one she enjoyed sitting on.

(note added August 29, 2014- I am finding that working in browns and neutral tones is not helping.  I will continue to do these face drawings, but I feel I also need to push myself to work in a familiar full color range in order to keep my overall color perception accurate.  I am supposed to be focusing on pain so my brain realizes I am in a migraine state.  There was no pain in that tunnel. )