Unprecedented Times
- Digital Print with Hand-Written Text
-
17 x 11 in
(43.18 x 27.94 cm)
- Wendelyn Barrett
We’ve had unprecedented times... leading to unprecedented stress, isolation, moral injury.
Delivering diagnoses that are complex, unexpected, with limited language and on occasion knowledge to
meet the needs of those trying to understand.
Our human compassion has been saturated in ways we have not experienced or been trained to cope
with. We’ve felt abandoned by our families, our administration, our society because of the lack of
empathy.
Where do you put it when all of the shelves are full? When there’s nowhere else, we can categorize
them into?
How do we navigate professionally? How do we navigate personally?
We all carry this stress, strain, burnout of the last few years. All of the conversations, diagnoses,
emotional conversations, even deaths we carry.
Maybe we carry them in our bodies in sleepless nights, addictions, ulcers, musculoskeletal problems.
Perhaps in emotional shut down, defiance, in relational toxicity with co-workers or maybe it’s more
hidden in our intimate relationships.
We need to be taught how to store these things:
difficult conversations, emotional encounters, sacred moments, trauma
Teach us how to place them in other sacred spaces in music, in movement, in writing, or in art.
This is the invitation for you to burn down all of the shrines in your body dedicated to coping. Just burn
it down and rise up into
The wilderness or snowy peaks the hiking, skiing...
The beaches jumping waves, snorkeling, laying in the warm sand
Into the words written madly without inhibition
With art medium spread across canvas or journal
With movement around the dance or yoga floor
Or in lyric sung loudly in a closed car, or softly in tears spilling down cheeks
- Subject Matter: Figure