Looking at the sun shining in and thinking about what I eat and what the world eats

Take a look here.

This summer I'm eating generous amounts of a wide variety of delicious vegetables (including lots of fresh ginger root) and fresh salmon.  I've been cooking up a rich broth from salmon scraps and creating delicious soups full of vegetables and salmon.  I've been introduced to coconut flour and coconut oil recently and am enjoying them, too.  For me, food is one of life's pleasures.  It didn't used to be that way.  Learning to live in peace with food and with life has been an ongoing process for me.

 Here is some of my story from past blog posts.

I took this photo with a self-timer when I was 34 years old and had been actively bulimic since I was 17 years old.  Next to me is one of my paintings, "Woman Trying to Remember What She is Trying to Forget."

This is a photo taken at the Mt. Baker Ski Area when I was almost 36 years old.  My lowest adult weight was 10 pounds below this.  At the time, this photo was taken, I was still hoping to lose 10 more pounds.  People were beginning to comment on my weight loss in a concerned way.

There are no photos of me at my lowest weight.  That was in the spring of 1970.  I was 20 years old.  At my lowest weight, my goal was still to lose 10 more pounds.

Last fall, I discovered a world-wide community of bloggers who have had many of the experiences I had and survived to tell their stories.  I am deeply grateful for these blogs.  

If any of my readers have friends or family suffering from eating disorders, my hope is that they, too, find healing in this supportive community or in whatever way works for them.

Thank you, in particular, to the writers of these blogs that I have been reading since last fall:

Faith and Meow

My funny little life

Coffee Addict

and this new one:

Gentle Perseverance

Black and White Series: Baby Bird (2005)

Today is my 20th birthday of recovery from eating disorders.

Babybird
The Wallflowers

Calendar Series: 36th Month / Freedom with Tears and Laughter (1988)

"Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence." (Emily Carr, 1871-1945) 

In this second year of my recovery from eating disorders came a new freedom, with tears AND laughter. All my life I had been running away from sorrow, not knowing that I was also running away from joy.

Woman Trying to Remember What She is Trying to Forget (1986)

This morning I have been struggling to write about this painting which came from a personal experience of domestic violence in May of 1971 when I was 21 years old. The lingering effects of the recent upper respiratory illness are still with me. Although I got up at 6 a.m., I found myself so drowsy and headachy at around 8 a.m. that I let myself fall back to sleep. The sun is beginning to show through the morning fog, which was an ice fog before the sun came up. It was the sun coming through the fog that woke me up again. In this painting I was trying to talk about how it feels to live with the memory of having deeply loved someone who tried to destroy your love and who failed to destroy your love but left you with the knowledge that as much as you had loved that person, you would have to live without them. The terrifying memories don't go away. Neither do the memories of what I thought was loving and being loved. One set of memories keeps me vigilant. The other set of memories, of loving and being loved, is crucial to my physical, emotional and spiritual survival. The woman walking alone by the sea was beginning to remember the feeling of loving and being loved, but then she would find her herself wanting to return to the one who had hurt her. When this painting came to me, fifteen years had passed since that spring of 1971. During those years, I had married, tried to put the past behind me, struggled with depression, gone deeper into the eating disorder which had first manifested when I was 10 years old, begun to express myself more and more as an artist and writer, graduated from college and begun making a good living as a medical transcriptionist, which led to a decision to leave an increasingly troubled marriage and to live alone for the first time in my life at age 35. Thirty-six years will have passed this coming May. For the entire year of 2004, I attended a facilitated domestic violence support group which met weekly and which slowly brought the healing that had so long escaped me. The other women's stories helped me see how far I had come since 1971 and that I still had a journey of healing ahead of me. Currently, I am continuing the process of healing with the help of Jungian therapy on a monthly basis. Writing this blog and reading other blogs that give me reason to celebrate life in all its complexity have become part of daily healing.

People With Their Eyes Closed/Baby Girl (1984)

Looking at the first image, I remember those last dark years before I began to recover from an eating disorder. When I did that drawing, I was 34 years old, within months of the end of a marriage that was dead, and acutely aware that as long as I had an eating disorder I would never be able to be a mother. I didn't know where this drawing came from, as I had not had this image in mind when I sat down to draw. The image still disturbs me almost to nausea. 

During this time, a friend of mine commissioned me to do a drawing from a photograph of her firstborn daughter. I didn't think that my style lent itself to doing portraits of babies, and I said so. She insisted that whatever I did would be fine. She was pleased with the result. I almost didn't post this drawing because today I find the vulnerability of this happy baby girl, drawn in this manner, to be unsettling. 

As I wrote in my December 15th post, the human body is vulnerable and sacred. When I did the drawing, I was not at all in touch with my own vulnerability because I was eating massive amounts of food to keep from feeling vulnerable. 

 One of my earliest memories, at 2 years and 1 month old, is that I was standing next to a stone birdbath which had a statue in the middle of it. I looked down at the clear water and old leaves at the bottom of the birdbath and debated whether I should touch the water. It looked beautiful to me. At that age I was quite aware that there were many things I wasn't supposed to touch, and I knew I didn't want to be punished. But the water was so inviting, and I decided to take the risk. I remember reaching my hand into the cool water and then being startled to hear someone saying my name. When I looked up, my picture was being taken. I distinctly and clearly remember feeling fear that I had been caught doing something I shouldn't do. I felt vulnerable and not at all sacred. I am always amazed when I see people talking in front of 2 year olds as if they were not present.