36”x36” acrylic on canvas, 2024
 
John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows offers linguistic shape to emotions and experiences for which words would otherwise fail… From this comes Sonder, “the feeling of realizing that everyone we see has a life as full, complex, and real as one’s own.” This is a profound realization - that we are separate yet we are one in the sense that each of us knows hardship and suffering, each one of us yearns for happiness and health. I intended to create a neutral piece after a number of colorful canvases were completed. I intended to create a piece representative of less. As I worked, I was drawn to layer deeper and darker, realizing the process of painting was becoming a means of processing headlines of war and threatened democracy and so much heartbreak, discrimination, and division. In this way, Sonder became a Tonglen practice for me, the Buddhist meditation where one practices willingness to breathe in others’ experience, visualized as black smoke… We quiet the personal and open to the universal - what arises when we attend, what extends empathy? The selfless aspiration to alleviate suffering by being willing to take on others’ pain meets the practitioner’s brilliant, loving heart, where the black smoke is transformed, radiating out as light from darkness, causing no harm. Sonder invites this contemplation. It is an unintentional piece exploring an intentional practice, taught by Ani Pema Chödrön as a means of contributing some good even when so much feels beyond the realm of our control. May our individual and collective efforts create some sense of peace.