Mysterious Unopened Box

A narrow three-foot-long box packed in Victoria B.C. during spring of 1997, accompanied me for 26 years but was never opened. 

In 1991, a Victoria art student taught a community class on basic
techniques. For the painting session, we used house paint and brushes
on cheap paper. I was 51 years old. Another student asked,
"How could you not know you had this talent?"

The box and I went first to Meadville, PA where I had a housesitting gig but ended up requiring a modified radical mastectomy. Four months later UPS shipped my Victoria boxes to Eugene, OR where some friends were putting me up while I underwent chemotherapy. Six months later the Victoria boxes went into an apartment storage closet while I set up an art related business. 

My daughter’s January 2000 death precipitated my taking a job as a university administrator - a job that allowed me to purchase a townhome four years later where the unopened box moved to another storage compartment at my first home ever! There it stayed as I worked to develop a financial base, wrote three books, taught creativity classes, and created multimedia artworks.

On Sept 29, 1994 I made a collage on a file folder to represent
"What it will feel like to have my first book published."
It took until 2011 for that to happen.

Nineteen years later I sold my townhome and on June 2, 2023, the mysterious unopened box joined fifty or more others being moved to my newly rented cottage. It ended up in the garage (studio to be), completely ignored while boxes containing the essentials of living received priority. A month later a commitment was coming due; I had promised my grand-daughter that I would create a memento of her mother that she could carry during her August wedding ceremony.

Lorne Loomer, my seminal art teacher,
 taught me to make a bark brush and to use it
 to express energy - internal and external.

Was it needing to fulfill that promise or anticipation of my deceased daughter’s birthday on July 11, that finally nudged me, after 26 years, to slide a knife along one end of this narrow three-foot-long container still wrapped in the once-white paper used for all boxes packed in Victoria, with markings to and from Meadville?

After a year of figure drawing classes, when we switched 
from charcoal and pencil to paint, it was my love of energy
calligraphies that expressed itself.

Inside was a tightly rolled sheaf of papers. I had to slit one side of the box to remove its contents: my fledgling art making and several of my daughter’s masterful figure sketches. Suddenly I was transported to Vancouver Island where I dropped 30 years of social activism, changed my name, and began a tenuous creative journey. I was stunned. 

Moonlit Barn LiDoña Wagner 1993.
Alan Bruce was my first watercolor teacher.

Unfurling curled papers revealed seeds that were planted during six years on an island where 60% of Canadian artists lived. In the process of supporting myself as a Shiatsu therapist, I had ... 

• lived alone and loved being independent, 
• discovered that I could create a successful business, 
• reconnected with nature and took up gardening,
• launched dream groups that matured my dream inquiry skills,
• developed women’s personal growth workshops,
• conducted my first artful play creativity class,
• enhanced writing skills by completing an autobiography, and
• discovered methods for reinventing one’s life.

At some point I recognized myself as having become
FIRE WOMAN, embracing the loss of previous identities.

Everything in REINVENT YOURSELF with Dreaming & Artful Play 2022 came directly from living six years in the creative cauldron of Victoria, B.C. during the early nineties. Now in a new home, new seeds are bing planted for a future me that I do not know.

Temple Bells, LiDoña Wagner 1997

What new seeds are you planting during this time of radical global change?