Southern Indiana Business May-June 2020 | Page 35

Jamie Homeister  Self-employed, intuitive artist focused on creating a visual connection to the Self through color. The arts are a gentle pathway inward, and I believe we can use them as a platform for self-discovery and revelation. Single best thing about being involved — living or working — in Southern Indiana: There are so many beautiful things about Southern Indiana. Still I’d have to say that I am continually touched and inspired most by the kindness, talent, and skill of our community. We have constant access to a wonderful collective of professionals, intellectuals, and creatives that make Southern Indiana a unique and dynamic place to live. How has the coronavirus outbreak impacted your life most and what will you tell future generations about COVID-19 from your perspective? “There are significant moments in each person’s life where we’re given an opportunity to wake up to what’s really happening around us. If the summary of our life can be drawn in a map, these moments are the pins marking our trail along the winding and dusty roads of self-discovery. Imagine the pin to act as a timestamp, a moment of significant epiphany or awakening that furthers our self-concept. It’s something we can never turn back from, no matter how hard we try. Though some of these circumstances can create an extremely uncomfort- able or painful situation, it is also a time of great personal power, for we have given ourselves permission to come into reality. To really get clear about what is happening around us now, in the present. And this is where I see us, poised at the fork in the road.  All across our world, our pins are dropping. If we are quiet, we can hear the sounds they make through the cacophony of the gasping and purging lungs of our family and neighbors; from the hospitals and homes of souls releasing their last sighs of breath. My experience with the coronavirus isn’t over yet. None of ours is. We will all continue to learn from this for the rest of our lives. Perhaps I will remind my grandchildren that we are the spiders of the universe, spinning our strands of gold from branch to branch, hand to hand, story to story; weaving in and out of one another’s lives with our touch, our sounds, our breath, and our blood. I will tell them that COVID- 19 was an incredibly powerful teacher. CONTINUED ON PAGE 38 May / June 2020 35