Today I want to share with you the latest painting I just painted.
You can probably tell from some of my recent blog posts that I’ve been thinking a lot about the preciousness of our fleeting time on this earth. About how our bodies reflect God’s divine design, and about the beauty that is inherent in the death transition.
So I wanted to paint it. To somehow capture that moment when your physical body releases your energetic body and the dissolution of the tangible flows into the intangible. How must that feel?
I think how it must feel is that I am nothing, and I am everything, both at the same time.
When I think about death sometimes, like for anybody, I am gripped with fear. The fact that I am nothing, I am no longer, that one day everything that I have ever loved will be removed from this planet, it’s almost unfathomable.
But the reassuring thing is that if I am nothing, I must also be everything. If no part of my physical body remains, then every single part of it, every single cell and every single molecule, has been transformed back into the massive soup of matter that makes up the entire Universe.
You can not possibly be more at one with the totality of everything you love, and everyone you have ever loved, than to dissolve into them all. No separation. Closer than you could ever be when stuck in the confines of a human body, a body that has edges and boundaries.
Dissolving into the primordial soup of it all is the ultimate reconnection. A coming home to everything you’ve ever loved that has gone before you. This is what I tried to paint here. All of the loved ones who have gone before you, waiting for you to join in.
But lately, I’ve been enjoying my new mantra, I am everything I am nothing. It reminds me I don’t have to force anything. I don’t have to grasp at anything. It puts me in the truest most pure state of our soul being, and that is the state of allowing.
Now every time I think, “I am nothing” and I fear that nothing I have ever done or ever will do actually matters in the long run, I remind myself that equally true is “I am everything.”
And so are you. You are everything. You are inseperable from everything you have ever desired or wanted or felt love for or connected with.
One of my very favorite quotes, one I actually have framed in my bedroom, is:
“For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river.”
– Ghalib
It reminds me that becoming a part of everything, allowing my little droplet of soul energy to splash back into the energy of All That Is, losing my personal boundaries in favor of emerging (or more accurately, re-emerging) back into pure positive energy, is natural and right.
So here is how I have painted this moment of transition, when I am equally becoming nothing and equally becoming everything:
1. First I drew the outline of a person standing on the physical earth and reaching up towards the sky, space, and beyond.
2. Then I started on the background — I knew I wanted to use that beautiful golden ratio, those divine swirls to represent the dissolution of the body and the expansion of the soul, both back in the physical matter of the earth as well as the connection of the Universe.
3. I kept working on those spirals, and added some stars in the background of the sky. The spirals into the earth represent “I am nothing” — my carbon based life form releasing it’s atoms to the earth to transform into other forms of matter. And the spirals in the sky represents “I am everything” — expanding with every part of the universe that has ever or will ever exist.
Here is the final painting. I am nothing and I am everything, all at once.
Painted on a gallery wrapped canvas so it is finished on all sides, ready to hang, and signed by me. More details available here.
I hope you love it.
xoxox, Laura Koniver MD
