Arise; 2016; 14″ x 17.5″; mixed media: ink, watercolor, acrylic.

There you are, backed into a corner, walls closing in, ceiling compressing and floor heaving to meet it.

Suffering has a way of whittling the world down into compact space with infinite feeling.

Like a tiny dandelion in a vast open field, exposed. Like the deafening silence of lonely cries withheld in a crowded room, because no one will hear. Like the ache of an amputated limb.

But what if there, in the negative space, the space around what is, there is something more? What if it actually pulsates with something invisible, but something more real than what you see or touch?

What if it is actually love, standing there on the compact grave of buried memories of what was stolen and lost?

And, then, what if Love has the power to cry, “Arise!” and it pulls you up out of the dirt, into…