The Heart of a Scorpion
- Nov 1
- 2 min read
It began with two women — Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington — artists who transformed their pain into beauty. They painted what most people hide. They bled color and truth across their canvases until the wounds became something sacred.
I’m not a painter. I dabble, yes, but my gifts live in the elements — in fire and ash, water and reflection, the quiet pulse of earth. When I thought about creating something that could hold my own story, I turned to the language I understand: nature and light.
That’s when the mirror came to me.
A mirror is honest but never whole. It shows what stands before it, but never what lies beneath. What if I could build a mirror that tells the truth of what’s hidden — not the polished surface, but the living layers underneath?
So I began The Shadow Box.
At first glance it’s only a mirror. But when the lights turn on, the reflection disappears and another world appears — fragmented, mended, and alive. Behind the glass, burned photo pieces and torn memories are stitched together with moss, mullein, and stone. Even the scars glow.
Nature repairs itself this way — slowly, persistently, tenderly. It doesn’t erase what was broken; it grows through it. The moss covers the wound, the roots push through the cracks, the light finds its way back in. I realized we heal the same way. We can be both the scar and the bloom.
I named this piece The Heart of a Scorpion because it carries that truth: intensity, death, rebirth, and the courage to face what others turn away from. When the light shines through the mirror, it reveals that we are never just one thing. We are reflection and shadow, broken and whole, human and divine.
Maybe one day this piece will become a whole wall — a gallery of mirrors that reveal what hides beneath the surface. I don’t yet know whether I’ll call it my Shadow Wall or my Wall of Shadows. For now, it’s a beginning. A single heart, illuminated.
