love and loss, watercolor/ink on paper, 8.5"x 2.5", 2012 It hurts, but yield to the pain… process it and know that it is an operation of nature. So you loved, and now you mourn in loss. Yet know this pain is limited and will end, and to feel it through knowing it is tolerable so as to know no matter how deep the abyss may feel in waves of distraught, that you will never actually drown but rather wash up on land that much faster if you do no not resist and add to it with anxietal fantasies of past or future. Understand that the pain is the companion of love and to not be faulty of desiring one and not the other but to accept the whole as a construct in the human experience. And do not be intimated, fearful to love again with this insight knowing nothing lasts forever and that to deny the experience of love so as not to suffer, is to deny life itself. Rather love even more intensely, deeply, fully in the inevitably knowledge that it will end too inevitably and from this vulnerability the pain may be that much more intense as the love was. And with the rational mind, to recognize the present and how though maybe difficult from the suffering of loss, how one feels so alive. And perhaps this invigorating feeling of vitality is the result of having not felt so for such a period of time, which maybe went against nature's operation and perhaps created the transformation from love to loss.