Pain and Vision

PAIN 1. Could I make art when I had these extreme pains moving up and down my hands and arms? Like being ripped from the insides. My desire was freedom, relief, healing. I desired an escape. I felt like one hand was fighting the other hand as the pains crossed over. Left against right. I desired a unifying hand, an enlightened hand... Then a doorway into the Light appeared...

PAIN 2. The pain in my legs I described as fiery. Like fiery serpents within them. I couldn't look. I hid my face. But then I realized I was surrounded by Light. All around me, Light. I felt I could step into another dimension, free of pain. From a dark, scary place, I looked beyond, to a hope for the Light, the land of Light.

PAIN 3. Lying on my back for half an hour in an MRI tunnel, hands stretched back, to excruciating pain. How could I endure this medical torture for half an hour? I had to go beyond the pain, beyond the body, beyond the jarring blasting sounds of the machines, and let my mind drift, to the continent of Light, village life, childhood, sights and sounds... I was uniting the Light from the past with the Light within me, the Light around me ...modern technology colliding with dreams of Light.

VISION 1. Side effect of some medication I was given in hospital. I had temporary blindness in my right eye, which lasted between 2-7 minutes. I always saw a field of green around the eye and shapes and images, mainly yellow and purple, followed by total darkness. It was a nightmare. How I longed for the Light. As I got used to this recurring experience, I started to see dimensions of time, timelessness, a vision of the Light.

VISION 2. When this state of blindness came over me, I tried to focus on the last images before darkness. Patterns of yellow, purple, green. Many past images from the continent of Light were combining with fantastical images my brain was producing. A fascination took over and the fear was gone. They say it gets really dark before the dawn, but in my case, it was getting really bright, really light, an inner transformation before the blackout, after which normal sight returned.

VISION 3. Here the blindness reached its climax. The vision became 'other-worldly'. As usual there was the field of green vision around the right eye, but in that period before the blackout, a dramatic scene unfolded: all kinds of possibilities, the Light and the darkness, and worlds beyond. Beauty, serenity, and destruction all around me. But my eyes were fixed on the realm of the Light, from the continent of Light to future Light...