Healing Trauma Is a Creative Art
Our creative and spiritual energies come together in healing to restore the whole self, over time.
“Every child,” said the great Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, “has the spirit of creation. The rubbish of life often exterminates the spirit through plague and a soul’s own wretchedness.”
In the almost-500 years since Rubens was born in 1577, we’ve gained a few things: For one, it’s easy to dig up obscure facts. So: Artists in his day didn’t expect to live much longer than 40 years. Covid-19 may have kicked our ass, but on average, we in the US have till age 75 to work things out.
That’s progress, but we’ve lost something along the way. The Old Master uses both lofty and brutal language, words that one might be embarrassed to write today. It’s too religious-sounding, too hifalutin’ given our collective cultural delusion that life should always be manageable. “The spirit of creation” is inborn, but it can be “exterminated...through a soul’s own wretchedness.”
Today, “mental health” is often viewed as something you either have, or something that you need to obtain through proper medical channels. In a strictly medical view, we who keep living despite life’s attempts to exterminate our spirits are reduced to being little more a collection of…
