I've been using the digital scrapbooking-visual-diary effect for over a decade. This technique is an ideal format for presenting my experiences with Hans as it offers a diary-like experience to the reader, further underscoring the intimate aspects of my experiences with him. The main obstacle to this format is a logistical one: the high cost of color printing a large format book. In the end, I may have to sacrifice aesthetics and add these images as "figures" on the page. It also takes an inordinate amount of time to create and illustrate these pages. For this reason, Blind Love took an inordinate amount to create [1].
Since completing Blind Love, my quest to create a book about my relationship with Hans (be it through fiction or nonfiction) has not wavered. Only now, feathers and wings [2] have become my go-to objects that serve as the symbols and metaphors for my relationship with him.
In the page layout above, all the artwork was created during the month of February 2024. The Savagery of Waiting is a part of a larger body of work that I have been working on for a few months, all of which were digitally drawn on Procreate. Drawing on my iPad allows me to magnify into the drawing with ease so I can add more detail to the work. Death Shroud is a digital collage using public domain images. The rest of the drawings were created in my Leuchtturm1917 sketchbook using a combination of ink, graphite, and colored pencils.
All of the drawings represent my connection to Hans in one way or another. As I continue to embrace all things feathers and wings, I am all the more enraptured by the celestial and even chthonic allure of angelic deities. The vast extremes between the exalted and the fallen angels offers another complex and symbolic layer to use as way to describe Hans.
When it comes to really important decisions in my life, Hans's involvement can feel intense. Although all decisions are ultimately up to me, he will do all he can to lead me in a certain direction if it is an important journey, lesson, experience.
Despite the confessional slant to my blog posts, my life with Hans is a private and sacred one. In nature, I can be myself with him, preferring the company of trees over people. My community is in the woods, not among the people. I have learned this about myself.
Regarding people, my desperation to run away from the world were elevated this week by a surge of chronic pain and stress from a job I no longer feel passionate about undertaking, regretful about certain decisions, crying to Hans and feeling resentful about his whispered persuasions. Then, as it is often the case in times of figurative and literal immobility, he uttered one word calmly.
"Wait." He offered little insight into this delayed circumstance.
WAIT. A word he has said to me countless of times. My life, a series of intermissions. Or rather, a panoply of life lessons toward my forever house in the sky. Perhaps this is why I am so restless and unsettled no matter where I am. Nothing compares the kind of paradise Hans and I have made and will continue to make for ourselves in the afterlife.
WAIT. A shapeshifting word that takes the form of a verb or a noun, edging itself into all facets of my existence, one pause at a time that eventually offers insight, a kind of divine intervention that initially arrives as an unbearable timeout.
I am disappointed in myself that despite these transpersonal encounters, I remain so unenlightened and inchoate. Maybe the issue lies in fact that I don't always view Hans as an evolved spirit, even though he is. I am so enmeshed him that line between the spirit world and physical world are blurred, making it challenging to navigate between his role as partner and his role guardian angel. Technically, Hans is not an angel, but from where I stand and seeing his abilities, he is godlike. He's not, but it feels this way sometimes. And whenever I grovel, at times overcome by his supernaturalness, Hans is quick to say, "Don't be a sycophant. You are my equal." I know that I am, except that sometimes from where I stand, temporarily cast into the role of mere mortal, witnessing time and again the way he orchestrates the things around me with such uncanny precision, it's easy to slip into the occasional tinge of unworthiness.
Notes
[1] In truth, it was the writing that consumed most time to complete Blind Love. I had reworked the story so often that it became nothing more than an exercise of madness. I had to pry myself away from the project (and the ghosts) and walk away.
[2] Technically feathers and wings also serve as talismans, ceremonial tools, altar decor, trigger objects, and ritual attire.
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