What do you do when the sky falls, and everything that was your reality, your way of being, collapses as another forever comes to an end? The Universe you knew disappears, and you lay in pieces on the floor. How do you start picking up the pieces and start putting them back together?

When the dust settles, and we find that we are still alive, there's a spark. A fire still kindling underneath the warm coals, somehow, we find a way. One step at a time, one piece at a time, things start to make sense again. We pick ourselves up.

With every catastrophe comes gifts, they present themselves in the strangest of ways. New energy within ourselves we never knew was there, and it becomes the vessel that carries us through the pain. And though it may fade, and a remnant of a scar remains, we discover ourselves in a new way. Stronger.

The Always Broken goddess, she carries as a name, but Akhilandeshvari can also be translated from the old Sanskrit as Mother of the Universe. She is Parvati who once came to Earth to experience the Nataraja as her partner Shiva does, because she wanted to understand the Apocalypse.

This was a healing painting I did for a friend as a commission. It was meant to help bring the pieces of herself back together after a serious fall. And like all paintings I do for people, there is usually a double focus in that it heals myself as well.

Art is one of the best forms of therapy and healing, and as a creative energy, that makes sense. It's through acts of Creation that we best move forward through all tragedies, and find our way through.

We all have this inherent in ourselves, as Creatures, we are meant to Create. It always seems that Destruction is easier, but it takes more muscles to frown than to smile. To spiral up, when we realize it, takes less energy, and healing comes faster.

It's truly amazing the power we find in ourselves when we need to pick ourselves up and keep going, and more times than not, we always do.