Lily
This is Lily (2023). She is made with charcoal and acrylic paint on a canvas that is primed with grass and straws from the river and the forest close to where I live. Her name signifies purity and innocence, and was my late maternal grand mother’s name.
My grandmother, Lily, was a tough and elegant woman. I found her cold sometimes, but she was also a great source of stability for me. She was calm, collected, and kind, and a big part of my life growing up. When she got terminally ill with a brain tumor, I remember how she comforted me, and taught me how to leave this life with grace.
I remember this proud woman letting me take care of her, showing me how humble she could be.
If you are lucky, you will get the chance to know your parents and grandparents in a new way when you are an adult yourself. Because they are more than what you remember. For better or worse, they are more. Just like we, their children and grandchildren, are more.
I used to believe that they had to be around for that part. That I could only get to know people if they were available to answer my questions, and give me all their stories, because that is how we generally understand knowing someone.
But I know that it isn’t the only way. As I grow older, confronted with more life, my understanding of those that are now long gone, expands. I remember certain situations, or traits about them, that I now see in a new light. I am less afraid of death because of it. Mine and others.
This painting is about dying. And what comes after.
Every morning I set aside time to spend with my thoughts. I will light a candle, burn a piece of incense, draw some cards, make a pot of coffee, and sit down to write, for an hour at least. I get up early, I go to bed early, so that I can maintain this routine, because I need it. Some days I hardly write anything, sometimes I draw, and sometimes I can’t seem to make myself stop writing, and sometimes I meditate, and in that state I always see images.
One morning I was writing about how I psychologically speaking, died a few years ago. And that this - the me I am experiencing now - is life after death. I put my pen down, closed my eyes to see if I would embrace this idea or reject it, and that’s when I saw myself as a tree. I could feel myself growing from the seed in the ground, the soil and the sun and the rain nurturing me. I felt my roots deepening, connecting with all other life, and where I would have arms I felt a crown of branches and leaves reaching up and out, further than I thought possible, and it felt like my chest was about to crack open by the force of that image, and reveal life itself. And I knew that in the ground beneath me the tree, I lay dead. The me that used to be.
She was no more, but her end was the beginning.
And I thought to myself, this is heaven. This is what the people writing religious books all those years ago was talking about, when they made up stories about a paradise with a god at the gate that you had to please to get in.
I am not able to paint what I saw, I am not even sure how to explain why I can’t, because both of these methods of expressions can’t convey the multiple and simultaneously experienced dimensions needed to do so. But I try, because maybe one day I will be able to.
This is the practice, my praxis:
the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied, or put into practice. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practising ideas.
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The word praxis is from Ancient Greek: πρᾶξις, romanized: praxis. In Ancient Greek the word praxis (πρᾶξις) referred to activity engaged in by free people. The philosopher Aristotle held that there were three basic activities of humans: theoria (thinking), poiesis (making), and praxis (doing). Corresponding to these activities were three types of knowledge: theoretical, the end goal being truth; poietical, the end goal being production; and practical, the end goal being action.
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Marx uses the term "praxis" to refer to the free, universal, creative and self-creative activity through which man creates and changes his historical world and himself. Praxis is an activity unique to man, which distinguishes him from all other beings
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For Arendt, praxis is the highest and most important level of the active life. Thus, she argues that more philosophers need to engage in everyday political action or praxis, which she sees as the true realization of human freedom. According to Arendt, our capacity to analyze ideas, wrestle with them, and engage in active praxis is what makes us uniquely human.
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Paulo Freire defines praxis in Pedagogy of the Oppressed as "reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed." Through praxis, oppressed people can acquire a critical awareness of their own condition, and, with teacher-students and students-teachers, struggle for liberation.
I’ve had a praxis for some time now, but it is changing. I need more time, more space, more support. I feel like I’m starting to get something about it that I haven’t before. And I want to run towards it, because I feel like it’s just beyond my reach. But I also know that I have to slow down, and rest, before I can.
The solstice is only a few days away. A new cycle begins.