Returning from Exile to Self
I was born during the war years in a small steel-mill town along the Wabash River in Attica, Indiana. I had never heard of China. I did not know the word exile. I did not know that art could become a homeland. I only knew there was something in me that felt larger than the world I lived in — and too tender to risk showing.
In a house where certain things were not spoken, and in a culture where girls learned early to be careful and pleasing, I learned to tuck my bigness away. It did not disappear. It went underground.
Years later, walking through Chinatown in San Francisco, I stepped into a narrow shop filled with ink, paper, and stillness. Before ancient landscapes — mountains rising through mist, twisted pines gripping stone — I felt recognition. Relief. As if the river of my childhood had been carrying me there all along.
There were years when I lived for the art, through the art — when the brush became something to hold onto because what was “out there” was not reliable. The things I chased never filled the deeper longing. Eventually, I began to see that the longing
was not outward at all. It was inward.
The Still Point™ is the place I enter when I paint. It is not dramatic. It is a quiet center beneath performance and striving, where brush, breath, and memory meet. From there, I place my work beside the masters who inspire me — not to measure, but to listen.
What survives exile? What softens grief? What returns when we stop hiding?
As I paint, long-buried grief loosens. What I once called “lost potential” reveals itself as waiting presence. The young girl who hid her brilliance now stands beside the woman who is beginning to trust her brush — and herself.
I thought I was becoming someone new. But I was coming home to who I had always been.
I come back to the paper each week. Ink. Water. White space.
If this speaks to something in you — the ache of exile, the longing to return — I invite you to come back as well.
A new painting and reflection is added to Notes from the Stillpoint™ each week.
