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BOOK RECOMMENDATION
“The Clearing” by Samantha Clark
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In my dead parents’ home I went looking for what wasn’t visible through what was. (snip) I have been much in the company of the dead while clearing and thinking about this house, trying to detect the dark matter of my beloved dead who once lived here, who live in me yet, and perhaps also to look askance at my own death to come, a thought impossible to hold onto for more than an instant. And it turns out that death, my parents’, my own, or anyone’s, is not really a completion of something. Our lives overlap, each one in succession. The story doesn’t have an ending. It just takes another turn.
Samantha (“Sam”) Clark is a brilliant artist. She paints at the scale of photons and electrons and neurons. She plugs into the universal source of sunlight and the wide open vistas of turbulent oceans and pulsing skies. She captures and concentrates and distills all that energy in her luminous paintings.
Samantha’s talents are not confined to the visual arts. She is also an extraordinary wordsmith (with a PhD in creative writing practice). In her remarkable memoir “The Clearing,” she conducts an archeological dig through her old house and her memories of her recently deceased parents, her childhood with them, and her complicated migration out and into the world and her own life.
As Sam’s painting is flooded with the yin of light and energy and openness and freedom, her memoir is a deep dive into the dark yang of family life. Her explorations of illness, emotional entanglement, deep abiding love and the hard challenge of breaking free in order to breathe and live free are all rendered with the exquisite care and finely crafted detail of her paintings.
Samantha’s tale of struggle and extrication from her restrictive old home and family to her fulfilling life of art and nature on a small island, wide open to sea and air and light, is a perfect rendering of the archetype of the Hero and their journey of discovery and enlightenment. This memoir deserves your close attention and appreciation as does Sam’s portfolio of paintings to be found at samanthaclark.net.
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Samantha’s Substack: The Life Boat: substack.com/@samclarka…
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