Birthday Gift

Fire in the Sky - December 2023

For my birthday a few days ago, one of my daughter’s gifts to me was a delicate silver bracelet centered with an oval portrait of Frida Kahlo. Frida’s black hair is pulled up in her trademark style, adorned in vibrant red flowers. 

Frida Kahlo is a fascinating woman. Some of her story is in this blog post from August 2023. Despite intense physical pain, she created prolifically on the canvas.  Despite the exhausting chronic nature of the pain she experienced, she devoted hours to her clothing, presenting herself in exquisite and elegant manner. She was open about her ordeals of multiple surgeries and their lack of success to heal her body. She was honest about her emotional pain. Her humor did not subside, even when she was deeply wounded by her husband Diego Rivera, even when she could not carry a baby to full-term, something she wanted very much, even when her pain forced her to lie in bed for weeks on end.

I wear this bracelet, this lovely gift from my dear daughter, and I think not so much of Frida’s pain but of what she created out of that pain. The vivid audacity of her work, a community of artists and friends who loved her fiercely, a legacy of confronting her deepest fears and slicing them wide open, spreading them on the canvas for all to witness. 

Though I do not have the experience of her injuries, nor her skill in painting, I am motivated by her: to tell it like it is, to accept my own shortcomings, to understand that the excruciating edge of life is a part of the deal. When I gaze at her picture there on my arm I think of her fierce conviction in living, and her ability to create beauty and love in her suffering. And I am inspired.