I often speak of being claustrophobic — and though I am mildly disturbed by being squished into small physical spaces — it’s actually a scrunching of being, a smallifying of heart or spirit, a condensing of imagination or intellect that I’m troubled by. My soul wants to be big, uncontained, limitless — its arms stretched out everywhere, trying everything. And sometimes, it wants to be alone — for days or weeks at a time — not to disregard others or love them any less, but to bask in its own experience, its own rhythm, its own unexplored depths. Rainer Maria Rilke said it well: “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
— heidi kalyani, 2016
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line