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Becoming

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Even substance

can not slow to definition

The holiness

of momentum

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Weather

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It’s called the “Bone Crusher”.

At the end of 2019 and five days into a month long artist residency in Mexico, I fell into a deep viral vortex known as dengue fever. As the virus rummaged through my physiology, the microscopic mutants concentrated in my skull. My brain swelled with a pain so focused that I couldn’t open my eyes and for days I lost all sense of whether it was day or night.

All I remember of this time is literally having no other choice but to surrender to the pain. Finally, within this weird dark place I “saw” what I remember as an image of the archetype of Mary, which I held on to with the thought that perhaps I wasn’t being swallowed whole afterall.

Shortly after the pain subsided, and other than the bones in my head being tender and my lungs congested, I slowly re-entered the day to day world of the rest of the residency.

The canvasses I had prepped were all ready and hanging on my working wall. My paints were arranged on the table, but I found that I could not tolerate color! Light also bothered me and I was unable to look at a phone or computer screen without feeling some internal wires were being crossed. My original intentions disrupted, I sketched instead in black and white trying to express the experience and make something of the residency.

Even more disconcerting was how it felt simply inhabiting space. When walking there was the feeling of riding up and down an elevator. For months afterwards I would have to stop to steady and ground myself….in a panic. Since this feeling was this side of actual dizziness or vertigo, it took months to understand my eustachian tubes had been permanently altered. Finally allergy testing confirmed this and also that my body remained on high alert. I continually exhibited allergic reactions, and I became a human barometer of weather and environmental and seasonal changes. It took years to convince my neurology that neither hard wood trees, nor a new weather front, would upend me.

I was finding that I was having to come into perceptual relationship with everything around me…in a deeper way. This relationship wasn’t a new experience. I had been relying on nature for a sense of wonder and relationship, but also emotional regulation, since a child old enough to wander alone in the wildness of it. This is where I found true beauty in the rhythms of life, sometimes death, and learned to trust change.

Considering the archetypal image of Mary that I saw during my dengue episode? It has become clear to me that this was the Earth herself….in one unbroken seam.

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Drawings by Jana White ©

Instagram @ Jana_h_White