A Game of Magic: Artful Self-Care for the Caregiver

By Ahava Shira

There is the whole mystery of growth, of expansion, of deliverance from the traps which life sets us, because life loves the drama of entrapping us and seeing whether we can get out. It’s a game, a game of magic. Every difficult situation into which you are sometimes thrown has some kind of opening somewhere, even if it is only by way of the dream.

~Anaïs Nin

A woman (the author) with a calm face, wearing a white blouse and shorts, closes her eyes and leans back against a cushion on a white sofa chair with her knees out in front of her. Another pair of legs hangs suspended in front of her. It looks as if she is giving birth to herself.

I sit back against the cushion, pause a moment to feel the luxury of time to dwell on this activity so familiar and known to me, yet always new. Four years ago, my husband Gregory was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. What the day-to-day of caring for Gregory looks like is equal parts joy and sorrow, wonder and anguish. The pleasure and privilege of caregiving someone I love also includes compassion fatigue and anticipatory grief as his symptoms progress and our ways of being together change.

As a childless woman, I have never had the responsibility to offer this amount of care to another. Yet, in many ways, I have been rehearsing this experience all my adult life through my journey of learning to take care of myself. Besides meditation and healthy relationship skills, the most joyful and impacting tool in my toolbox has been creativity, which I have been developing and nurturing for over thirty years. I have turned to art for comfort from a worried mind, refuge from an aching body and solace for a tender heart. By allowing myself to play, make a “mess” and be in the magical process of creation, I have supported myself emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Shortly after his diagnosis, a dear friend told me that caregiving Gregory would be a marathon of love and endurance. She also told me that indulging myself with ongoing self-nourishment would be a necessary part. As the primary caregiver for her mother a few years ago, as well as for both her grandparents several years before that, she would know.

Commitment and escape. As a caregiver, both are important. The steady, patient collaboration of domesticity and the restorative calm and delight of creative retreat. Although the latter sounds elite and expensive, it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes I abandon our union for fifteen to thirty minutes. Other times it takes several hours to a whole day. Whether I have fled to my study—a 15 square foot spare bedroom opposite our shared one—to an open space in our living room with a cosy chair, or to a natural place on the island where I live, I gather my journal, art supplies, laptop and books around me and begin.

Changeling.

You thought it would be different. But dwelling on it is like
wishing the toothpaste back into the tube. Sorry. Not going

there. Like wishing yourself Superman, able to unspin the
globe to the days before Mr. Parker moved in, replacing

your husband with a tremoring, slowed-down, almost-gentle-
man, more emotionally available except when he triggers you

and you trigger him because there is now some glitch in the
communication and all your cherished skills are sorely lacking.

So next time you stand there, feel that punch in the diaphragm,
helpless before such courage and difficulty, look into his gentle,

forest eyes, and remember. Life is changing. Him. You. Dwell on that.

Mindful Un/Dressing

1.

I am hanging my sweater
when I decide to slow down

heavier with the tension

I swoop the wooden
triangle like a wing

into one shoulder
then, the other

like his cinched fingers

a heron steadying his gaze
for the next catch

when I ask him
how are you?

I listen for his tone
of voice, whether his
inflection goes up

or down. I can tell whether
his mind is a prison

or a garden then.

3.

Swoop the sleeve like a wing
over one shoulder
then, the other.

Heave through the
slowness

Grit your teeth
as you wrestle
with the zipper

Answer her
“how are you?”
with the right tone

Inflection rising
to reassure her
you are still capable

Unexpected Grace

I drew the first one in the middle of October 2023. Sitting on the white sofa chair in the living room, I’d just leafed through the pages of some books about fashion design, admiring the lines and colours of the fabrics. I pulled a red pencil from the bag and stroked a series of fine vertical and then horizontal lines on the next blank page in my journal. I added two dark flat lines for her eyes, shaped a beaklike nose and a simple mouth before I knew I was drawing a young girl. Then I proceeded to make her a dress.

I drew the second, third and several others in the weeks following: while meeting with my meditation sangha, sitting again in the white chair, and talking to my art therapist. At the time I had been reluctantly considering a new work possibility with children. After an unsuccessful attempt at building my writing mentorship business online, my husband and I realized I needed to find a steady, reliable job to take care of us.

The happy face of a young red-headed girl
wearing a purple dress with blue and green sleeves.
She stands smiling in a lush meadow.

A young girl with red hair smiles widely
as a red and blue butterfly perches on her head.
She wears a bright green and red dress and stands in a patch
of purple grass under a pale blue sky.

A young girl with purple hair wears a blue dress and a heart necklace.
She stands under the arcing branches of a cedar tree.

I named them all Grace, after one of my first poems, written in the mid-90s. A few weeks later I was hired as an Education Assistant at the Fulford Elementary School shortly after.

Interplay

“All of life is being revealed in its insistence on wholeness: the interplay between our bodies, the natural world, the lives we make, the worlds we create.”

~Krista Tippett

A woman with eyes closed lies on a white chair, surrounded and embedded within a forest of arching trees and wild grasses. Another woman whose eyes are also closed, sits in the shadows of her belly on the grass.

Each time I enter the creative process, I follow my heart, listen to intuition, and prepare to welcome something new. Artmaking allows me to express my sadness, soothe my fears and fortify myself for the ongoing, gargantuan task of caregiving. It helps me create a gentle, loving space for accepting, and releasing, it all.

Origami Tide

Here a wave is a wave
of sorrow
sudden, washes and
scrubs, deep cleans
wounds, what has
been longed for
surfaces, origami
tide

How you wait and wait
until a poem
lands in the center of
a daydream
and you turn to the
sun and say
yes

This is a life to come
home to
upright, humble
before ducks, gulls
and power boats

You can heal from it
the desire unmet
why you put down
words,
as waves whisper
on a shoreline
take notes
so you can trust

Everything is reaching
for your hand
while hope
has your back
reassures you
joy belongs here
and even in this
uncertainty, there is
grace

Limbinal Reflections

“Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of great joy.”
~Rabbi Alan Lew

A woman (the author) dances in different positions under a Japanese maple tree, surrounded by wild horsetail, blackberry and other flowers.

Each of the photos in this article were taken from videos I have been making over the past few years of my dance. I discovered the double images during the editing process, in the space of transition between one clip and another. As I worked on the images, I listened with my eyes, mind and heart to the different elements and sought to create an aesthetic whole.

Then I figured out I could export them as still frames.

I recently exhibited this series of photos as part of a shared exhibit with a group of women called She Said Collective, our 11th annual show.

Ahava Shira, PhD is a writer, dancer, multimedia artist and guide at the gates of Loving Inquiry. Read and subscribe to her Substack newsletter, What the Day Holds. She gratefully acknowledges that she lives and loves on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish, the Hul’qumi’num and SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples.