Negative Space
It’s been awhile since I’ve been on here — and there’s good reason for that! A lot has been going on in our lives lately. But more on that later. Instead I wanted to share some thoughts that have been swirling around my head in light of the holiday season and time to reflect on the year past.
When you move, you sometimes find things you haven’t thought about in years. For me it was a sketchbook from when I was about twelve years old. As I flipped through its dusty pages, I found a series of sketches from when the mom of my best childhood friends gave me a few drawing lessons. One in particular caught my eye; an abstract sketch of the branches of a maple tree. It was drawn using the technique of negative space, that is, rather than drawing the object of the sketch itself (like the maple tree), you draw the space around it (like the space between the branches). It’s a common technique in drawing lessons because it trains you to draw what you actually see, rather than what you think you see. By drawing in negative space, you often end up with a more accurate picture of your object than if you’d drawn it on its own. At least until you’ve better trained your eye.
Negative space is based on the idea that our brains often think we know what something looks like and takes over from our eyes. You’ll recognize that you see a tree, but once you sit down to draw it, rather than draw what you see, you draw what your brain tells you a tree looks like. To accurately draw a tree, you need to not look as it as the sum of its parts, as a tree, but as a collection of lines, shadows, and textures. You must draw each component part separated from its totality. Negative space becomes helpful because it isn’t easy to retrain the human brain to not tell you “that’s a tree, draw a tree,” instead of telling you “draw a short line angling ever so slightly left.” In fact, many artists, once they’ve trained their brains to no longer see the sum of the whole, struggle to tell you each element they draw, until it is completed. I am not a professional artist; I probably would still benefit from the exercise of negative space. I think, though, that the human brain’s power of perception and negative space’s of revealing truth, has broader application than merely an artistic medium.
As I ran my fingers over the faded pages and graphite dust, I began to think about the year behind me, as if I were to draw it using negative space. Looking only at the object of the last eleven months, it’s easy to see the hardships, rising up stark and prominent in the sketch. Yet, looking between the challenges, a fuller picture begins to appear. Suddenly the picture in my mind isn’t the life changes, the losses, the griefs. Instead it’s the people that loved us, that carried us through each wave until, before we’d even realized it, the storms began to cease. I always knew those people were there, I always knew how blessed we were to have so many people loving us and caring for us through those storms but if I tried to ‘draw’ it, I wouldn’t have been able to do so accurately, because my brain would have taken over my sight.
Earlier this fall, someone asked me why I wasn’t angry with God about losing our first pregnancy. All I could think to respond with was that God didn’t do this to me. Sure, at the time, it did feel like some force ripped my first baby from me, but I never felt that it was God who was responsible. Instead it felt like something far more capricious and far less relational, something like fate, if you believe in that sort of thing. As someone who doesn’t actually believe in fate, of course at the time I was aware how silly that thought was, but it was a reasonable reaction of grief.
Like our brains when we draw, grief alters our perception. We think we see clearly, when our grief actually twists our ability to draw reality, until the picture we produce is only a partial reflection of the truth. Like in art, overcoming this altered perception takes intentionality, practice, and, perhaps most importantly, a little grace with ourselves and, often, a little more time. What happens, then, when the punch of grief fades? Can I trust my eyes to see reality in it’s fullness? Yes, most of the time. But the kind grief I walked through leaves you a different person, not in obvious ways, but in subtle, though powerful, ones.
“ How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. ”
As time rapidly flows forward, bringing new changes, challenges, and delights with it, the world we inhabit now is radically different from the one we inhabited six, four, even two months ago. My eyes are more trained to perceive the beauty between the loss, the fuller picture of the last months that I’d been able to see previously. All the same, sometimes I still need to recenter my sight. Instead of looking at the future, and seeing on the possibility of repeating the agony of the last months, I need to take a step back and a deep breath (and often a nap). Those are the days that I cannot trust myself to perceive the whole, all the time. In those moments, I look at the in-betweens, the little moments, the collective bits to recognize reality. Together, they tell a different story with a different ending. More importantly, I am reminded that no matter the events of the coming year, tracing the negative spaces around the events will always remind me of how much stronger I am than I think and how deeply loved I am on all sides. That never changes. And after all, it is through love that we drive out all fear.
