Drawing is Dangerous
Drawing is dangerous. It shows you what you are seeing, how little or how much, or how skewed your perceptions might be. Writing is dangerous too, as it reveals what you know, and maybe what you didn’t know that you knew, and puts it in black and white on a page. This a story of Light and Dark.
Last year when I saw signs of a mouse in my house I called the exterminator. This year my friend Mariette told me about the little mouse she found on her doorstep. He was taking his last few breaths. She wrote a poem about him for her blog and asked me to draw a picture. I wouldn’t have thought I’d feel such empathy for a mouse, but as I studied his little body, recreating it in light and shadow, the indefinable delicacy of his last moments moved me to tears.
They say we need more beauty in the world, but sometimes all we have to do is see the light that is already here. I saw it in this study of a mouse whose life was ebbing away. Mariette’s poem is at https://mindelesjourney.com/2023/02/13/tiny-mouse/
It took me three months to come to terms with the experience and post about it on Facebook last week. I didn’t know it was only Part One, but these things have ramifications. Here I am, the kind of person who sees signs of a mouse and calls the exterminator. Whereas my friend Mariette from Belgium who was a hidden child of the Holocaust, whose family was exterminated in WWII, writes a poem about the beauty and sadness of a dying mouse and buries him in the garden to preserve his memory in the scent of flowers. Of course she does. After witnessing the Battle of the Bulge she became the kind of person who taught the beauty of the French language to inner-city children, then wrote about the small pleasures of sights and sounds and smells, especially of food and flowers because she knew about death, and these sensory pleasures had to do with life.
When Mariette asked me to draw a picture of the dying mouse for her blog I took out my pastels for the softness of fur and observed the tiny being I had often wished was dead myself. And as he became more real on the paper and more filled with the life that was ebbing away, I become more conscious of my own murderous desires to banish from sight that which infringed on the positive ideas I had of myself. But all that came through at that moment was a feeling of sadness, which is why if you look at the mouse you might feel the poignancy of mixed emotions.
Get Nancy Wait (aka The Nancy Who Drew)’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The story doesn’t end there. It took me three months to write about the drawing because I was now in touch with my shadow-self, the part we don’t want to look at because it’s so hard to explain. And maybe I didn’t want to think about it because I didn’t want to think what would happen next time I saw a mouse in my own house.
Oh, blessed are the light-bearers, for they will more quickly be confronted by their own darkness, the faster to shed light upon it!
So, the other night, five days after posting the pastel of my friend’s mouse, I saw a mouse in my house. Or did I?
The light was dim, and I wasn’t wearing my glasses when I thought I saw a mouse dart out from the shadow of the sofa, halt for a second, then dart back into the shadows again.
This is what I know. We draw to us that part of ourselves that is still dark in order to bring it into the light and resolve it. I also know that is all is light. The dark is only that which we cannot see. And I know that all is energy, and physical matter is simply spirit at a lower frequency so that we may see it and touch it and feel it with our physical senses.
Am I seeing a mouse in my house or am I in actual fact perceiving my own lower vibration that has taken the physical appearance of a mouse in order to teach me something about my own prejudice manifesting as disdain for an intruder disrespecting my borders, infringing on my space. An outsider, a pest who deserves to die because I don’t want him eating my food. If he be real, should I try to capture him and release him back into the wild so he can be my neighbor’s problem? Or if he be unreal, a figment of my imagination, will he disappear once I raise my vibrations?
