For nearly 12 years I have attended the biannual Tempe arts street fair for the single purpose of seeing Ora Tamir’s surreal wonderlands. As if painted from within the landscapes of my own soul, her enchanting beings draw me in to a universe her and I have once shared. Each year I become braver and braver in my incitation of conversation, usually after I have spent some time preening over her latest masterpiece, I break into a humble will and tell her she has done it again. She has reached into me again. She always smiles with a compassionate and reassuring grin, as if to say, “Yes, I know.”
This year as I approached the booth I was more taken back than usual. After cancer, colors are more vibrant, textures more clear, and messages are heard from the belly of truth in which they rise to speak. I didn’t think I could experience more depth or inspiration from her oiled creations, but I was hooked and reeled into one particular painting. A beautifully haunting painting that was whispering to me, telling me to come closer, telling me to listen, to look closely, telling me to stand before it with a wounded faith that lets the pain of uncertainty in. The closer I got, the more pronounced the reds and blacks, grays and blues, and the more I felt cracks in my chest breaking me open. It’s luring magic sharing a wordless story, a story that was somehow my own. The image of a hairless, faceless, body-torn bionical dangling like a pendulum goddess between the living and the dead imbedded itself in my psyche like a modern archetype that even Jung would pause to contemplate.
Ora came to me like a warm blanket, her sapphire eyes tenderly holding my wilting face. She nodded to the painting, “You like?” Up until that point I couldn’t understand how such a simple image could evoke such a surge of grief. Mind hollow, somehow words spilled from my tear-biting lips, “Yes, I have been there….I have been that woman, in fact, I think I am her now.” I was no longer holding the grief alone, her eyes swelled as her own sadness began to seep from her body. We stood in a sacred space, a timeless space for one another, writing chapters…wordless chapters, aimlessly gazing back and forth into the painting and each other’s familiar reflections. After this shared ceremony of harrowing hearts, she asked, “how?” Of all the ways I could have tended my words, only one could bubble past the tightness of my throat: cancer. “Ahh, of course, you too,” she said. She proceeded to tell me that the inspiration for the painting was her dear friend, a breast cancer survivor. Ahh, of course. I thought.
I remarked about the feelings of uncertainty, the feelings of isolation, being suspended between the life I once had and a life more cautiously savored. I once felt that this far away tightrope was punishment, but I have come to embrace my top-of the world gaze for the gift that it is. To be able to float between the all knowing and the unknown, to bear witness with greater attention to truth and the unfolding of my radiant and mysterious life.
I now have this painting in my home, a gift from a friend of many lifetimes. It is a reminder that I am not alone, that countless souls peer into their lives with new eyes and pendulous purpose. Suspension has afforded me the grace to experience my life with enhanced meaning, to invest in my embodied self, a self that might have gone neglected, forgotten, cast away if it weren’t for the great quake of impermanence intensely shifting the ground so that I had no choice but to rise above it. The difficult times in our life can be resisted, falsely controlled, battled or they can shake us fee from what we know and allow us to pull back from the monotonous routine so easily taken for granted and look at Self from the Great eyes in the sky. Suspension is the ultimate of witness, to be removed from what defines us in the ordinary and drawn closer to what invites us into the extraordinary. I invite you to rise above the comfort and discomfort of your familiar life and to witness it from a universal pause, an existential inquiry of deliberate suspension, a sacred space in which new meaning and awareness is born.
Blessings, Namaste, Aho,
Robin Afinowich
Thank you, Ora for the journeys. From my heart to yours!
