Painting allows me to learn a lot about myself. The inner battles, the confusions, the calls to make decisions, to be honest and genuine with myself, looking inside and conversing with my being, not in words but in silence - for words have their limits - and embracing my dark sides, and most important of all, to be human and to be loving notwithstanding.
I came across the writings of the great author Etty Hillesum today:
“I feel like a small battlefield in which the problems, or some of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accommodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.”
Before she and her family were deported in September 1943 from Westerbork to Auschwitz where she was soon killed in a concentration camp, when she was waiting with 10,000 Jews to be sent off, she said to God:
"But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn't seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last." -- Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943, edited by Klaas A. D. Smelik, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002, p. 488-89.
In her time of suffering and through the Nazi terror, Hillesum had achieved deep realisations, including a call on all of us to turn inward and destroy in ourselves all that we think we ought to destroy in others. I found this really revealing.
