Natalie Rich

Through the Lens

by

Natalie Rich

1 thought

Thought Think-Me-Not: Such a swell little flower, which grows in the mind.

Always ahead, never behind.

the seconds that

splinter the minutes that

fracture

the days that

rage the hours that

collide

Snake that cannot Shed its Skin parishes

the

topple

Topple

Topple

Topple

Topple

Topple

Topple

Topple

Topple

Topple

Topple

stand tall stand tall stand tall stand tall stand tall stand tall stand tall stand tall stand tall stand tall stand tall

Fire, flickering flames, h Boxed in, architecture,

But go ahead light your world on fir Just remember to enjoy t Because come dawn’s fir sleeping peacefully, snow tinderbox of ashes

hot so damn hot structure

re the pretty sparks rst light, you’ll be w white in the gray

Isolation

Then we will dance the night away. Before you must tiptoe back to bed where you shall sleep. Sleep my child.

Solitude

When the stars are in their indigo quilt, I will walk you to your mushroom house.

To another place, another more distant, untouchable time, where they can’t reach you. Share my meal of acorn stew.

Let me take you away from the worries. Come with me. Escape. Float above it all.

Heaving, gasping,

Numbs my body, Exhilerates the mind

Waves propel me

laughing

Breathing life back in through your barely stirring chest until you’re

Do they touch the ground?

A firm, lean hand, warm, clasping Tightly to the wavering, ghostly pale one tethering the thin balloon animal that is the girl Holding her to the earth.

He feeds her a banana perhaps if he puts something inside of her she won’t float out of his reach. eyes like glassy sea stones cast Downward hiding beneath a shag rug of bangs

Moral culpability vs Freewill

A tiny child walking adult halls Footsteps patter so quietly they mightn’t make any sound at all

She doesn’t speak to the boy because she craves nothing more than to Drift Away into the crying sky where she would be weightless, and see-through.

She knows it would hurt him; So instead she makes her tongue mush the banana against the top of her mouth like a Swollen slug ripe, Sickly sweet oozing. sentence.

Punishment. string. knotted and tied very Firmly.

Regret I don’t believe in regrets. However that doesn’t mean I don’t feel them.

To regret something is to want to take back the words you mistakenly spoke, the things you inflicted on another out of spite, the unallowed thoughts you let enter your mind. These things weave a tight, sticky web to trap you in. Spun out of others’ reactions, the way they look at you or would look at you if they knew.

No matter how much time passes the twinging, twisting feeling in the pit of your stomach will always linger.

It’s important, though, to make peace with your mistakes. Your mistakes define who you’re not, not who you are.

thoughts are the

shadows of our

feelings

The man lost his hands. They detached and levitated away, floating

approximately six centimeteres from his wrists. The man was greatly puzzled and didn’t know what to do with himself. When he moved forward, so did the hands. When he moved back, the hands did likewise and so on. He tried forcing the hands into a corner of the room, but somehow they always slipped away like slinky silver fish.

It was as if thre was a wall behind him made of one-way glass. It had

to be some kind of cruel joke produced by an optical illusion. The laughing behind his ears was constant and manic. They were laughing at him! They hated him. “I’m a freak of nature,” he thought with selfloathing. That was when he realized the laugher was his own. And he was utterly alone.

Reflection At first it was very bizarre to have to respond ‘without thinking’ to the prompts because an integral

part of my personality tends to lean towards over-thinking and over-analyzing most aspects of my life and relationships. However as we continued it became easier and easier to very much disengage that part of my mind that chatters and just focus on being in the moment and doing what felt right. This progression was similar to the one I went through with my writing as well. Over the course of the unit, I found myself more readily pouring out the words I felt onto the page, worrying less about how it would seem as perceived from an external view and instead concentrating on the images and words that most accurately depicted what I wanted to express.

One thing that did remain constant throughout the process though was how I rarely responded to

the written prompts in my writing. Instead I always let the visual I created inform my writing. For instance, for the prompt “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings,” my drawing had a man with his hands detached. So I wrote a story about the mental state of that man finding out his hands were suddenly detached, the phases of denial, self-loathing, and despair. Likewise for “Solitude vs. Isolation” my painting shows a mushroom house and my writing talks about escaping to a relaxing imaginary place, a kind of childhood-fairy-land.

My favorite prompt was the “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings” one because it caused me

to produce something I never would have thought of otherwise. I tend to be a literal, emotion-based thinker. I’m not good at producing surrealism work, so I’m especially proud of that piece. On the other hand, my favorite medium was paint. I love the texture of it; it’s very therapeutic and relaxing.

One of the largest risks I took throughout this project was expressing a much darker side of my emotions. This

year has not been easy on me, but I’m someone who’s very conscious of how I present myself. I don’t like the world to see me at my lowest; it’s not something I choose to share with anyone but two or three of the people I’m closest to. However, this project came at a time when I really needed an outlet for the things that were eating away at me from the inside, things I felt I would get in trouble for talking about, or even suggesting. It became a way for me to grapple those heavy ideas. This is most vividly expressed in “Moral culpability vs. Freewill,” which depicts how it feels to want to vanish into nothingness.

The work has a dichotomy not present in my older art and writing. It flip-flops between a serious tone, with sub-

dued color schemes and an otherworldly, bright “escape.” The former is seen in “Regret,” “Moral culpability vs.

Freewill” and “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings.” The latter in the line structure of eight and the colors of “Solitude vs. Isolation.”

Themes: Mistakes, alone, day dreaming/mental escape, the places we hide in our mind, shedding every color, partisanship, lack of will, wanting, crushed, fear.