Pathway Ahead

I own a book called "Living Creatively with Chronic Illness" by Eugenie G. Wheeler & Joyce Dace-Lombard, that focuses on "developing skills for transcending the loss, pain & frustration" of chronic disease & pain. .  The book is okay - medium only - with the really useful bits coming (of course) from the statements by the people with chronic diseases & pain themselves, rather than by the average, stressing the positive repetitively & inanely, authors who are - of course - not afflicted by chronic illness or pain themselves, but consider themselves experts because they "work" (in some way or other) with people who are.    I've had to deal with people like that in my now 19 years of severe, chronic pain , & still occasionally have to, & it's grim, to say the least.  Unfortunately, the authors have written most of the book themselves, stressing their own opinions & only let the afflicted speak for themselves in carefully chosen, short excerpts.

On the cover of the book, is a small picture of an arched window with a flat, yellow pathway that curves very slightly to the left, and runs between flat, juicy. green grass with dots of yellow for flowers, with some low, manicured green bushes ahead & 3 small, rounded mountains in the distance.  Most of the picture/painting is taken up by a sunset of purple at the top, going down through orange to yellow.

Rightly or wrongly, I imagine this picture to symbolise the pathway of the chronically ill, chronically pain-afflicted & disabled person in life, & frankly, I think it's ridiculously inappropriate, so I decided to draw a picture of what I feel that it's like to look ahead at the lands that people like me are likely to have ahead of them.  I do not see pretty, flat green grass all around me, with little twinkly yellow flowers alongside a flat track at all.

I do, however, see some or quite a lot of us as having learned some very hard, valuable lessons, as depicted by the lantern that the sufferer/undergoer is carrying ie some of us carry our own lantern, and we sure as hell need it.

Watercolor & fine liner.
Completed April, 2015.