Confession

 

Over three decades ago, I went to a communal art therapy session in which we were asked to draw or paint our mind as a house. 

All the other participants set to with great enthusiasm, their images of self perception flowed easily, but me, I sat staring blankly at the sheet of paper on the easel, sadly wondering why I could not see inside of me. All I could think of was the tentative little spider pencil drawings drawn by Marianne in a book I had loved as a child called Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr. It's one of those stories in which the child is poorly in bed, Marianne grows very attached to a stubby pencil with which she draws a house and this immediately features in her dreams. The story goes that she begins to manipulate the recurring dreams she has of the drawings she makes by adding extra features, a garden, landscape and eventually people. 

I eventually painted a small house upon a distant hill and, rather reluctantly as I remember, added a long windy path up to it. 

It was colourful enough, looked homely and inviting, somewhere one might imagine enjoying visiting or living in, certainly not haunted looking or forbidding. One could imagine it having comfortable, warm,  rooms, maybe just the odd broom cupboard or pokey corner where a couple of hostile spiders resided would be the only scary parts within it. 

I have often blocked access to my inner self with a reluctance to ' make stuff up ' not so much regarding the products of my imagination to be nonsense or non-truth, but rather, convoluted distractions which would lead me away from that house on the hill, rather than to its door. 

So where have I been looking ?

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