This is your brain on evacuation.

Evacuation Brain/Mixed Media collage on canvas/8"x10"/Erin Stinson May 2016

I'm a person who asks that dangerous question, "Why?"

It's got me in trouble before.  But still, I have this unquenchable thirst to analyze and dissect, philosophizing until both my heart and mind can figure things out.  No wonder I'm always exhausted.  There is so much of life that simply cannot be figured out.  It is beyond our understanding, and perhaps that's the point.  Maybe it's best that some things are shrouded in mystery... 

In typical fashion I've been trying to make sense of this wildfire disaster every step of the way.  I long to take the mess of it all and turn it into something that can be neatly packaged and put on the shelf to reference later.  I don't want to waste the opportunity to learn and become better through this. So, I contemplate and ponder, question and analyze until I can't keep my eyes open any longer.  Did I mention I'm exhausted? 

This time - through this crisis - I'm having a difficult time making sense of anything.  There are huge life lessons to learn and I'm trying to gobble them all up at once.  But it's really hard to focus.  There are a million things going on and my thoughts and emotions are all over the place.  It's difficult to put all these fragments into coherent collections.  Writing is almost painful yet therapeutic enough that I keep pushing through, using the backspace and delete keys more than any others.  

I don't know how to feel, how to act, what to say, what to do.  And still, I'm working to break it up into small, manageable parts, desperate to find a method in the madness.  I feel like I'm choking on the lack of normalcy and routine but so stuck that even the thought of a new normal, while in this state of limbo, is just too overwhelming.  

It's so much to process.  I've been glued to social media, desperate to stay informed and even more desperate to be connected to everyone from home.  I want to reach out to everyone and respond in meaningful and loving ways but that perpetual lump in my throat leaves me speechless much of the time.  I want to find the words that can fix and heal the heartaches I see around me... but I'm left helpless to do so. And there's certainly no emoticon for times like these.  

I find myself often speechless in prayers too.  I am so overwhelmed with it all that I don't even know where to start... I have more questions and uncertainty than faith, I fear. In the Bible there are many accounts of people groaning to God.  And there's a verse that assures us that He actually hears and understands exactly what's going on behind those wordless sounds.  What a comfort that is to know that I do not have to have it together - I'm accepted and heard in all my incoherent mess.  

In the artwork above, I let whatever wanted to spill out, do just that.  I went back to the beginning, scrawling my fragmented thoughts on the canvas.  I cut out more fragmented statements from newspaper articles about the wildfire and shredded an aerial photograph of the burnt out forest.  I'll continue to push through and process, creating whenever and however I can manage to do so.  I trust that by doing so, one day I won't feel so stuck.