THE VISUAL HEALING LIBRARY

VOLUME TEN

YOU ARE WELCOME HERE

Welcome - thank you for joining me here in The Visual Healing Library.

The Library is a place to rest your eyes and heart - a ground for the extraordinary ordinary holiness of the world and our relationship with it.

This volume - You Are Welcome Here - is filled with photographs of things and places I love, alongside paintings, poems, and fragments. Together, they form a love letter to the creation field that is the body of the world itself.

These are visual notes from my archive of things that make me gasp in wonder at the beauty of being here now.

Here are some of the things I cherish:
Moss and lichen, stone and cloud, the space between branches, the shimmer of light that lives on water - seeing light refracted through a glass randomly left on my desk, coffee stains evident on the surface of the table top but not distracting from the primordial beauty of Light itself - rather, adding to the markings that life makes.

Shadows on red ochre earth, ever changing.

My studio as paintings appear from pools of wonder...

These paintings are not necessarily intended for gallery walls, but rather seeds, thoughts and fragments, murmurings from the living world speaking in its Mother Tongue - syllables from a language that bypasses our intellect and moves directly into the body connecting us with the visual language of the world.

These are Her notes - transcriptions of visual messages that pass through me onto the canvas, paper or page.

Each image is a doorway into a field of experiencing that lives beneath a surface reality - what John O'Donohue writes about in his book Divine Embrace as teannalach - the capacity to see seven layers beneath the surface into the vibrational bones of the world where our vision reveals the patterns that live beneath story - into the beating heart of matter itself.

This is a Medicine Archive - a visual gathering of love for the world - for its textures, frequencies, dimensions that live and express themselves beyond our comprehension - and the fragile immensity of this planet.

You are welcome here.

With all the blessings of Creation,

Suzette xo

KEEP SCROLLING

Paintings are a record of the first patterns of Creation....

This is the fluid language we spoke before we were born. I understand these visual patterns as painted words - nuanced minglings. Everything about this language brings us toward life and a remembering of where we come from.

This language lives in rocks and stones, faint quivers in leaves as the wind whispers. This is the place we come from, this language, this understanding of the world. We remember ourselves through deserts and dry earth, tree bark and pine cones.

The world is not a place that is created once and then waits for us to discover it. The world comes into being moment by moment, dependent upon our participation...

Interdependence - Biology and Beyond - Kriti Sharma - Microbiologist

Evidence

The witchery of living

is my whole conversation

with you, my darlings.

All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.

It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.

It’s more than the beating of the single heart.

It’s praising.

It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.

You have a life–just imagine that

You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe

still another.

- Mary Oliver

Go to the Limits of Your Longing

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going.

No feeling is final.

Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Paintings are like dreams - they unlock the profound healing power of the psyche. They are a compass that can give direction in dark times, when we feel we have lost our way or connection with an aspect of ourselves - when we need another kind of map to chart the Unknown.