Reflections

These reflections are about the synthesis of experiences with what we know and don't know. This page will contain short essays on topics that intersect with creativity in its various forms, the occasional poem, musings on myths, archetypes, lineages, about the roots of humanity, doesn't that sound grand? For good measure, a few good quotes might also be in order. This page will build gradually after I've got the bells and whistles working for subscriptions, registrations, and memberships functioning smoothly. Let me know if there is a theme you would like explored with a comment.

Hero or heroine’s journey, I ask you? Yes, it's a rhetorical question, but relevant to our creative journeys through process painting.  As an avid reader of Tolkein, T.H.White, and the sci-fi greats of my youth, I learned to know the hero’s tale in my bones.  As a tomboy lover of the wild spaces and solitary seeker of adventure, I recognized and discarded all things feminine as lesser and unworthy of my attention.  I defied the behavioral norms of the female adolescent and began my journey like the bumbling fool in a tarot deck. I was seeking a mentor who upon seeing my novice potential would surely boost me up the ladder into significance and mattering regardless of my gender. Mentors though, being in short supply during that recessionary period, I settled for a lover instead.

It was another decade before motherhood truly woke the anima within and a curiosity toward the heroine stirred like a sleeping dragon from her hidden lair, a lair filled not with hard-edged gemstones and gold, but with vulnerable half-formed nestlings as its hoard.  My identity shifted to become the dragon and not the knight armed with a shining silver sword.

Here, clearly, the paths of the hero and heroine diverge.  Into the dark passage I went finding gates that led to a new sense of community, belonging, fostering, and nurturing the learning and dreaming of others. I moved through gates of fear and loss that brought me to my knees before strange altars as I begged for the life of another. Slowly I learned how to both hold tight the hand and to give rein, as I learned to embody the words of Crosby, Stills and Nash and to teach my children well. And to fail many times, tripping over the stubborn interests of self with each repeating cycle, cycles that I hoped would become upward spirals, but of which I was never quite sure. With time the pilgrimage has become more that of the matronly elephant elder charged with holding the herd’s memory of the lay of the land, while trying not to be Cassandra foretelling only doom until all threaten to become deaf to her words.

What is it to be in service to myself and others, to the world?  I find this heroine’s journey to be less about venturing and conquering and more about brick-by-brick building, gathering the provisions for a larder, weaving the structures of ritual, myth, and memory that sustain the community.  It may be the quiet finger in the dike, while reading the bedtime story, or the always anticipating of the what’s next. Or not, and doing the cleanup on aisle 4.

The feminine heroine's journey may start with the spring that needs cleaning in order to run pure, fresh and burbling down the hillside.  It may, as she matures, involve the willing entry into the dark realm to retrieve lost souls and take them to their treatment programs, feed them hope in small spoonfuls when they can hardly swallow. She may sew on the patches, or lead the children over the border to safety when she would rather be the one to stay in the fight. Or she may become the healer who knows how to provide the herbs that will take away the pain for now or perhaps forever.

It is the heroine that anticipates the next transition, takes the fallen hero up to the threshold, holds his hand in the between time, creating the calm space for transition. It is she who accepts limitation, even abandonments not of her own choosing, and starts again on the shaking shoulders of her own history. Her feet rooted before the white paper and the brush in hand weaving curious colorful stories and images of fate.

Processing the heroine’s journey with paint, we follow her energy from Persephone’s fateful spring to Demeter’s transformative well, and from grief to power, while we take in the raucous and irreverent laughter of Baubo. Then we take our brush again plunging into the dark simply because it calls and all that has gone before fails to satisfy in this current moment. We may gather the ripening harvest from the famine tree and leave a trail of breadcrumbs in white dots for the journey home, collecting what can be salvaged and sweeping the last details clear in completion for our next fresh beginning. The archetypes, the wombs, and hearts that stand-in for our deepest being, express the inexpressible, darn the parts into a wholeness made of color on paper, over and over repeating and evolving the image of I, of me and of all of the "us" that paint today and tomorrow.

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I just have this thing for llamas and roots, so we've put them together into a single image! Below is an early logo courtesy of my favorite artist and designer, Nori Retherford.