I was in the garden when it happened. Cutting last year’s brush from the edge of the pond, the next thing I knew I was looking through the grid at the blue sky, and the nurse was saying they wanted to keep me overnight.

I recognized the blue sky as the one inside the MRI. She told me I’d missed lunch and dinner, and promised she’d bring me a tray. Nibbling on a turkey on white bread, sticking to the roof of my mouth the hope of going home.

I agreed wholeheartedly as Jim and I expressed our wish together.

It was dark and raining as we pulled in the driveway, anxiously looking for Zipper. Her gps tracker showed her on the map, off in the woods beyond the pond. I called her from the deck, hoping my voice would carry through the quiet night air.

She’s all ears, foxhound/beagle tracks by sound and scent. We watched her movements on Jim’s phone tracker ap, as she made her way out of the woods and up the driveway. Wet, hungry, and immediately forgiving of our unexplained absence.

My symptoms fit Cleveland Clinic’s description of transient global amnesia. Jim told me I kept asking the day? Kept repeating myself. 10 in 100,000. No known cause, not expected to ever repeat. My symptons fit the professional medical community’s assessment, but I have more questions than they have to offer.

I remember transplanting daffodils, from the too shady garden at the entrance of my studio. Not blooming for years since I planted them there, I tucked them in to my meadow garden in the sun where they could replenish themselves.

On the mermaid bench, I meditated in the garden. Being here in the center of my meadow felt grounding, coming home to my place in the sun. In a flash, I noticed the threshold at the edge of the pond had been weed wacked. O dpm’t remember doing it. I recall wanting it done. But the weed wacker had no battery, and Jim was out running errands.

***

Was it a psychic episode? Would a psychic or astrologer be able to provide a wider understanding of what I’d experienced?

A quick search for trusted readers who had guided me decades ago led me to obituaries ~and the realization that my own powers of knowing will guide me now.

***

I lit a candle and opened a sacred space.

I released the old survival pattern. Like wacking weeds, I’d been playing wack-a-mole with obsolete patterns of energy. I released my focus on finding resilience. All winter I’d painted the essence of orchids, hoping to garner a deeper resilience than previous traumas had gifted me.

All winter I’d nursed two orchids barely holding on. Distilling water, feeding them with a humidifier, watching them loose leaves as I held hope for them to recover in the spring.

Then the ice storms came. Instead of orchids, resilience showed up in the winter garden buried under ice, snow, and last year’s oak leaves. Beneath the shimmering metallic blue grey and soft lavender strokes, resilience emerged in lively patterns of coral lines.

Drawn from earth energies buried within, I felt my own inner resilience coursing through my body. The orchid essence series had morphed, drawing resilience from earth’s garden. The painting itself sprung from my hand without a conscious thought, just the intent of uncovering the mystery of resilience.

I opened the flourishing pattern, which I’d started painting alongside resilience ~ four expressive floral essences painted over top of orchids I’d given up on. They flowed organically, as if dancing from my body as the canvas. Without a conscious thought, colors aligned in layers of wavy efflorescence.

Abundance. I could feel it as I blew out the candle and closed my sacred space.

***

What if my amnesia is an invitation? An invitation to show up as an artist with questions? Would I have to be vulnerable as an artist who speaks from her heart? Absolutely.

Is it time to open my fifty-year art practice of co-creativity to women of light who share my mission of blossming human-nature relationships? It’s time.

I will have to speak honestly. I will have to share my messy creative practice.

I will have share in in a way that women of light can follow merging dreams, my sacred garden by the pond at the vortex of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed as it channels into the Atlantic Ocean, with life-size paintings and textiles that mirror and magnify the flow.

And so I begin a substact column, a podcast, a channel of heartful healing energy through art.

Resilience series