Most New Year’s wishes refer to the ‘horror year’ or ‘rotten year’ 2020. The same is true if you have been ill or have lost a loved one. Your business will just go head over heels or you work your ass off in healthcare.
The year 2021 has started… How can #Corona hold up a mirror to me like this? A mirror I normally hold up to someone else.
With that mirror, I hope another person will look at their own reflection with joy again. I draw permanent make-up in the face where something has been lost. I use it to create a brow that suits your face again, for instance, or an eyeliner for fuller eyelashes. But I also draw a nipple for someone after breast reconstruction.
And now during the lockdown, Corona holds up the mirror to me…. and it leaves me silent. Perhaps confused, a little panic and a tear. What do I want, what can I do? What do I know and what don’t I know? And precisely that not knowing is very annoying to me. It makes me feel cramped. I now know that exercise is good for loosening up and keeping myself loose. Only then can I move forward.
Last week, precisely to loosen up, I walked a lot with my daughter, my niece and my rowing friends. We chatted while walking and stepped through forests and along the Dieze river where we normally row. Through river landscapes near Woudrichem, the Geul valley in rolling Limburg. Walking connects and we have a listening ear for each other. On social media, I was silent for a while, in this jumble-period 2, because that’s where you tell the nice things rather than the doubts and worries.
Water flows downhill, but always downstream. Going against the current takes effort and eventually you lose if you don’t find a safe haven or a straw to cling to.
I am therefore working with Siets Bakker on Rake Vragen. In the day-starts of the lockdown period, 50 of us are systemically thinking and feeling about the confusion period 2 we are all in. I can heartily recommend these day starts, they put your brain on edge.
That’s why I do this work I’m passionate about. With every treatment, I set my brain on edge. That work comes out of my hands and is a creation of my creative brain. With that, however, I do much more than ‘draw something’. During my drawing work, I get very close to the other person and that is where a person-to-person conversation develops. For many, I conclude a process and start the healing process. And with that I try to help the other person and increase their self-confidence, so they dare to grow old beautifully. Happy with their natural radiance. And I wish that happiness to everyone, also in the tangle period 2, in 2021.
