One bleak English winter a long time ago, wandering through London in the wake of a relationship that had just unraveled, I walked into an antiquarian bookstore and chanced upon a rare century-old edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales — which I had grown up with — illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
All fairy tales deal in enchantment, but the Grimms’ are especially powerful cautionary tales about the treacherous line between true and false enchantment in love — something Rackham’s art captured exquisitely.
One particular illustration stopped me up short, unnerved me, captivated me with its disquieting fusion of terror and tenderness:
The image haunted me for years. I kept returning to it, puzzling over what it was telling me. I lived more, I loved more, and eventually came to see it as a perfect and terrible metaphor for what happens when two people with attachment trauma mistake their trauma for love. Most relationships fail and falter out of this confusion, whatever its manifestation. Here, in this century-old illustration, was a key to an elemental truth: You cannot hold, or hold on to, anyone else unless you can hold yourself — hold your own heart, hold the roots of your pain, whatever it may be — with absolute golden compassion.
I wanted a response to Rackham, a counterpoint, something to visualize the power of that truth, so I set out to make it.
I began wandering forests and shorelines, looking for driftwood and windthrow trees, exerting inordinate joules taking off their centuries-old roots and giant burls with my Japanese hand-saw, spending inordinate hours sanding them and polishing them with urushi lacquer, then making for them small ceramic hands covered in kintsugi gold powder.
They now live in the Museum of Delight as large-scale reminders that we spend our whole lives learning how to hold our own hearts.
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For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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