When I sit with myself like this, in stillness and silence, I feel vast and impervious. I am a stone that gets wet and dries off. A stem that leans into the wind and straightens again. A curl that bounces back.
— heidi kalyani, 2018
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line
I lie here nurturing my imperfect self, with my imperfect bear (worn thin from so many years of silent giving). Sometimes the tears puddle like a lake on my pillow (and Bear’s ears get wet), and sometimes I laugh so hard my body shakes. Freedom after so many years of suppression actually hurts. I’m unaccustomed to taking up so much space, to breathing so deeply, to expressing myself so fully. I know I’ve made mistakes, hurt others when I didn’t intend to, misunderstood, miscalculated, fallen down and hit my head so hard my jaw slammed shut. I know that. The reminders are everywhere for me to see (and sometimes shouted at me). What I forget is how resilient I am, how much courage and flexibility I’ve cultivated. How much awareness. I’m relearning how to love my imperfect self, as I love my imperfect bear — with curiosity, compassion, kindness and warmth.
— heidi kalyani, 2018
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line
Woke up to chainsaws, diesel, cigarette smoke and the death of trees. Cracking branches splitting my heart. Tidiness destroying wildness. Shade, shelter and vitality crushed and chipped and blown into the back of a truck. Beauty disappearing in favour of efficiency. Another patch of pavement because, clearly, we need more.
— heidi kalyani, 2018
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line
Every time I saw her she told me her heart ached — though, of course, she never said so in words. Born on a cold corner in Winnipeg, watching siblings multiple on the Prairies, growing up too fast on a train ride to Ontario — her father dead before he could fetch them at the station. The play of her hands in her lap, her not-so-gentle smack a “love-pat”. A serious oldest sister, the only one with work during the long depression, waiting for marriage, waiting for children, already forty-six when her baby turned five. Patience and perseverance knitted and twirled into dog blankets, shawls and slippers in colours all longing for spring. Widowed early — outliving family, dogs and flimsy tin houses. Creases at the edges of her lips, a rough tremor in her voice, a distance in her eyes like waiting for things to die.
— heidi kalyani, 2018
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line
Thank you for helping me end the deep aching aloneness I have known for so long. The kind of aloneness that comes from not being heard, from believing in shades of grey others see as black or white, from being on the edge of no longer trusting my own intuition. The kind of aloneness that permeates so fully it becomes a surface, a skin, something that sheds kindness and human contact even when I want it more than anything. The kind of aloneness that is amplified by large crowds, and the quietest, darkest hours of the night. These are the kinds of aloneness that had become so ingrained, so habitual, so conditioned, that no matter how hard I tried to move forward, I always seemed to rewind.
— heidi kalyani, 2018
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line
Sometimes I feel like grabbing my house and shaking it upside down until the dead bits that no longer serve me all fall out. But some kind of ancient fear keeps stopping me, whispering, taunting, trying to bury me — all under the guise of protection. THINGS are a lifeline that you might need to survive, it tells me. Don’t you want to survive? Piles and piles of protection. Cloth. Paper. Metal. Wood. A thousand ideas written in tiny letters on fading scraps. Instruction manuals for things I no longer remember. Broken glass and pottery from twenty year old accidents. Kitchen utensils someone gave me that I’ve hardly ever used. A stack of black t-shirts with necks so tight I feel like I’m choking. Keep it. Save it. You might need it. Winter could be hard. The war might go on forever. An ancestral desire to hang on to what might keep me alive, what might help me thrive. A childhood habit of collecting and saving for when I might have a someone to share it with. A cultural mantra that more is better. And yet, when I’m away from this place, with only a bag of clothes and books, I feel strong, not vulnerable. Empowered, not impoverished. Rich, not overwhelmed. So, little house, with your closets bursting, your basement overflowing, your flat surfaces all smothered with stuff, it’s time to let go!
— heidi kalyani, 2018
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line
Today I am a tiger. Rrrrr! I’m processing emotion before it sinks into my gut and makes tight, hard places that are almost impossible to release. Rrrrr! I’m feeling the deep, sticky entanglement of frustration. I’m noticing it, naming it and letting it go. I’m riding the crashing wave of fear. I’m noticing, naming and letting go. I’m whirling under a cloud of pain, alternately thick and dull or shifting and stabbing. Rrrrr! I’m using my awareness of the present moment (the taste of my tea, the tiny creases in the back of my hand, the rise and fall of my chest) to hold myself tenderly through these emotional storms — the way you would hold me if you were here. Rrrrr!
— heidi kalyani, 2018
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line
When the world is too much for me (or I’m too much for the world!), I burrow down, down, down into a place of warmth and darkness with stuffed bunnies and bears. I rub my hands over their soft fur, align myself with their namesakes winter patterning and retreat for awhile from a world that is too cold and harsh to feel liveable. In these moments of quiet conservation of energy, with the external noise of the day at a minimum, I can finally begin to hear myself — my body, my mind, my heart, my internal wisdom. And though not a full hibernation (neither rabbits nor bears actually hibernate either), I emerge from my warm burrow refreshed and refuelled enough to carry on.
— heidi kalyani, 2018
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line
In this shut-tight sealed-in half-asleep state in the first rays of light, my limbs ache from gripping, my brain aches from looping, my heart aches from lack of air. In the darkness that surrounds me, with the blankets pulled up high, I can believe anything — the world is on fire, I live in a house made of ice, my siblings are four-legged, my hair is olive green, no one is starving, we’re all starving. And what I believe (or don’t believe) becomes my reality. It etches itself into my still-impressionable being and colours how my day unfolds. Alone, in this cocoon of a bed, as I wrap myself in imaginings, in futuristic predictions, in half-digested memories, I enter into a powerful transition, an emerging from the other side, the swirling fog of a half opened/half closed mind, the daily practice of awakening.
— heidi kalyani, 2018
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line
I’m being cut like a frozen river by the blade of a skate. It stings and seethes — for awhile — then heals over with fresh snow or the thaw and re-freeze of a sunny afternoon. I’m tracing circles through the layers of my life — trying to make sense of patterns that aren’t clear, or perhaps aren’t there. I’m looking at myself in the mirror, on the shiny surfaces of the technology that surrounds me, in the reflective eyes of the people in my sphere. And I’m seeing a crust, a veneer, a peel. But what am I beneath my outer layers — the ones that I ritually put on for protection when I walk out the door, or that I let others slip over me so that my packaging pleases them more? What leaks through when I’m cut by loss or fear — or love? (For when it’s open and deep, love makes a cut too.) Is it emotion? Vulnerability? Honesty? Integrity? The wildness of possibility? And how beautiful would it be if we let ourselves, and others, bleed our glorious life-juices all over the fresh white snow, instead of trying to pretend that we’re perfectly smooth and together both above and below the surface — especially when there’s a vibrant, messy, unruly fire burning in us!
— heidi kalyani, 2018
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line