Art's Ability to Heal

And Why the Pursuit of Beauty Is Not Vain

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful, which God has implanted in the human soul.

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

For many years, I held guilt over my career as a photographer. It wasn’t saving lives, it was documenting them. For me, though, this documentation was what gave meaning to life, because moments that were otherwise thought to be mundane or forgotten suddenly had their own stage and significance.

How beautiful! I’d think.

Still, as someone who was raised with the understanding that service was the most important thing in life, I carried immense guilt over my craft. At one point, I enrolled in a nursing program. Thankfully, that plan was foiled. I would be a terrible nurse. There would be no healing in that hospital room, only mixed-up IVs and notebooks filled with poems instead of prescriptions.

When I’ve looked to my own healing, it’s often been in complete silence.

In feeling every part, every sensation of my footsteps as I paced the hallway during a meditation retreat, the sunlight flickering off the oak walls.

Healing occurred when I saw a collage made by an artist that depicted a woman staring at a pink moon much larger than the sky.

When I found myself sitting on a chair outside in the middle of the backyard as a storm raged on, the wind whipping my hair across my face as I listened to the deep roars of the thunder.

Healing was in writing pages of poetry in a little notebook I’ve since lost.

In feeling the pain in my body subside after cradling myself from child’s pose to tree pose to warrior’s pose.

Healing occurred when I put the kitchen knife down, the juice from the tomato still oozing, the oil in the pan crackling, and began to dance to Patrick Watson.

In an embrace after months of solitude, the weight of our bodies tousling like a log floating down the river.

Healing occurred when I photographed flower petals falling from me instead of blood.

In running through the Olympic Mountains at sunset, the long grass surrendering to the earth as we laid a picnic blanket atop it.

Healing has always occurred when I’ve been able to witness existence—mine, yours or theirs—and realized that we grow, we sway, we die like blades of grass, and in the spring, we come back again.

Healing has been in our stories, our paintings, our songs, our sleep.

When we cry to the gods for strength and we’re offered a fresh rose, a painted sky, a Honeycrisp apple, a tissue while we weep.

Healing occurs from the sequoias to the Cascades, from the magnolias to the Appalachians,

to even here, west side of the Rockies, aspen and birch,
cotton candy skies.

I lay in a grassy field until the clovers cover me like a blanket.

Healing occurs like a gentle rain in the River Valley.

I pick up my camera and what was once smoke is now steam.

I call the doctor. Reception puts me through to me.

She writes out,
- sakura pigma micron 005
- twenty minutes on my mat
- page 179 of jeff foster’s the way of rest
- two new rolls of film from panda lab in Seattle

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