A guest blog by graphic novelist Jennifer Hayden.
I was giving my favorite drawing pen a nice hot bath when I noticed for the thousandth time what a sacramental ritual it was.
The pen—a rapidograph, popular during the 1970’s, my youth—has to be taken apart, the tip unscrewed into two pieces, and each one dropped into a small jar of hot water and cleaning solution. Soaking time: precisely one hour. Then: rinse, dry, refill, reassemble.
I do this every three weeks or so, when I run out of ink. It keeps my pen from clogging. It keeps me from clogging. It keeps inspiration flowing unobstructed through my hand and into the graphic novels that are my
chosen art form.
The card in the Tarot deck (I’m a fan of Rider-Waite-Smith) that most reminds me of the work I do at my drawing desk is The Magician. With arm upraised to channel universal spirit, and wand aimed earthward to bring that spirit into form, and the tools of the trade spread out on the altar nearby: pentacle, athame, and chalice.
In my twenties, I wanted to be a writer. I struggled, though, to find out what my story was. In my thirties, I rediscovered the drawing that had soothed me during childhood. Still, I couldn’t figure out what the story was. Then I had breast cancer, and that was the story. Like a magnet, it drew to it all the other stories that were lying on my heart. I discovered graphic novels, and within a year I was writing and drawing—together, not separately—everything I had been meaning to say.
What gave me the courage to do it was a vision that dropped in on me while I was meditating, a vision of my personal conception of the Divine. This vision was the first inkling I’d had of the existence of anything divine. At first I doubted it. Then I reached out to that vision and took the leap that is the beginning of any faith.
That vision popped in right before my mastectomy, a great comfort to me. That was twenty-two years ago. My artmaking became an overtly spiritual practice from that moment on.
The first story I set out to tell was my life leading up to the shakeup of breast cancer, hoping to help other women going through the same thing feel less frightened and alone. And maybe to help their friends and families understand what they were going through. Every panel I wrote and drew seemed like a transmission from a divine source. Be courageous, be honest, be truthful, be your whole self, and never give up—that was the guidance coming through.
And finally, after years of effort as an artist, my work was blessed with success. My graphic memoir The Story of My Tits was published in 2015, translated, and nominated for an Eisner, the highest comix award in the land. Better than that, though, I got emails from readers who said it had helped them through their needle biopsies, lumpectomies, cancer scares and family losses. Never doubt the healing power of memoir.
After those heady days, I floundered, creatively and spiritually. What do you want me to do next? I asked the Divine. No answers were forthcoming. I explored Paganism, got deep into Tarot, felt drawn to witchcraft but had no instruction, and wondered where my magical talents lay.
Each day I worked at my desk, though. Each day, the ritual. The notebook and the (swiftly flowing) pen, the clean sheet of paper awaiting the line, the truth hovering just above me, waiting to be captured gently, reverently, if only for a moment, in just the right words and images to resonate with another human, sharing a story with them that might just help us both along.
Last November, my new book came out, a kitchen memoir called Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook. I thought the subject of food would be lighter than breast cancer, but I found that many of us still need healing around it all the same. In my new book I explored why I’m such a picky eater, lousy cook, cranky nurturer, and danger to myself and others around pots and pans and knives and burners.
But as I progressed through the chapters of this graphic novel, I noticed Icould not ignore my spiritual side. The folk names of healing herbs, the magical properties of certain ingredients, the cauldron as a place of symbolic transformation, started creeping into my story.
And I began to wonder if this, the act of creating something with meaning and beauty (and humor, of course) had always been my spiritual practice. Had always opened a sacred place for me, where I could play and connect the dots, and really try to understand the invisible. Even when I was small. I used to feel, when I was drawing—which I did everywhere and anywhere from the age of about one—safely held. Whispered to. Encouraged and challenged to grow. Connected. Made tiny within something absolutely
huge.
I’ve been a fiddle player, a singer, a dancer, a spoken word storyteller, an artist and writer and comix maker, but in all of these things I have been, I realize more and more, at prayer. Whether I have practiced any of them well hasn’t been the point. I was engaging in a spiritual practice. Answering a call to be courageous, be honest, be truthful, be my whole self, and never give up trying to make the connection.
The pen may be small. The jar may be small. But no ritual is too small to be sacred.
Learn more about Jennifer, and order her graphic novels, here.
