To Soar: why I made it

To Soar, by Cindee Travis Klement / Nick Finnegan Counseling Center.

Read more: To Soar — Why I Made It

When I was asked to donate a piece to the Nick Finnegan Counseling Center, I felt a spark of excitement because I've long known that everything we see and hear leaves an impression on our brains.

pastel mark detail

We know what hurt looks like. The black holes. The news and social media replay them again and again, changing our brains in a way that feeds the downward spirals that follow.

So I asked myself: could I make a piece that doesn't just decorate a wall, but actually changes the brain in a way that lifts the human spirit?

The counselors came out to my studio. We talked about their tools, the systems it takes to recover in a complicated world: not the hours they log, but the time they carry. The language they used was the language I use when I restore an ecosystem.

I went looking where I find healing, in the natural world.

A water lily rises out of the dark muck and opens toward the light. Again and again.

Sandhill cranes were once down to a couple dozen breeding pairs. In 1937, believing he was watching Wisconsin's cranes disappear, Aldo Leopold wrote “Marshland Elegy.” People came together and rebuilt the wetland systems. Each fall, tens of thousands of cranes rise out of the marsh, filling the skies, calling to each other, bonded for life.

In the piece, nothing stands alone. A bird's beak becomes a seedhead. A feather becomes a petal. A wing stretches into the horizon until you can't say where the bird ends and the sky begins. Step back, and the whole flock catches the light, lifting into a single white bloom: the water lily, made of wing.

It isn't one thing. It's the systems coming together, the way recovery itself comes together. It lifts the soul.

To Soar lives on the center's central wall, the first thing every family sees on their way to a session and again as they head home.

Let your eyes move across it the way they're guided to in EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing): side to side, working through what's difficult, the way our eyes once moved naturally across landscapes that were wild, messy, and alive. That's where recovery starts. Not looking away from the hurt, but moving through it.

Families will stand in front of this wall in the worst weeks of their lives. This piece helps make sure they are not standing there alone.

What follows are detail shots that are not seen in an image of a piece 8’X8’.