Carousel of Happiness

Doing a web search for "trickster imagery" lead me to a fun website. I can't help but share. I love the healing intention of this carousel and the beautiful animal/symbolic interpretation.
http://www.carouselofhappiness.org/flashcarousel/flash.html

The carousel has a marvelous rabbit (trickster) image, which initially brought me to the sight. In this class I keep on circling back to my internal dilemma of chaos vs order, organization vs creativity, and the reading on the trickster is no different; he seems to be little animal who darts in between different worlds. As The Lucky Find states, " trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity an ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox". I love that there is an archetype that plays with this contrast...if feels comforting that my inner struggle can be more playful, and reserved for the trickster inside of myself.

I see the trickster coming from the creative side and hopping over to the more structured calling "'Dare to be different!'" as in The Trickster writes, "'Hear and speak that which shatters tradition!'"

this thing called sacred, part two

The doing vs. being concept tugged at me for quite a while. The dichotomy was extremely apparent between my very planned day job, and my open artistic life. I like the contrast, but figuring out how to make the two fit puzzles me greatly. Hoping to get a better understanding of the process I decided to do my healing altar on time. As the "Stealing Fire" article noted, "to harness the healing power of a stealing fire story, we have do the work". I felt like if I worked through the concepts, or at very least honor them, I'd have a better understanding. I'd steal my own fire back.

Part of the embracing of my fire story is to accept that I like organization....and that's good. Almost embarrassed to admit, but I set my timer in 15 minute increments to get things done. This routine gives me the structure gives me the sense of freedom. It allows my mind to stop thinking about the time (that's the timer's job!), and rather to concentrate of what I want. What I want to heal myself from is the obsession of time, and specifically, the stress of thinking that I have limited time.

The central element on my altar is a broken stove timer; the idea was to make time stand still. To honor the pause in between seconds, to understand that it's about seeking the joy in the moment. The roses are the reminder to literally stop and smell them, and the Mexican flags are for celebrating wherever you are. The candles represent past, present and future; as an understanding that it's all one. And the stones are symbolic of eternal life.

My favorite element on the altar are the purple leaf/branches. To me this represents the underworld, and the ebb and flows of time. I will be adding in pomegranates tonight once I go to the store. There is something about the myth of Persephone that seems to resonate here. As if the organizational part of me is the underworld: a sense of duty. If Persephone was raped and pulled to the underworld, I feel like my own dramatic event was my mother's alcoholism that lead to an unstructured childhood home. As an adult, I've learned that having structure can give me a sense of peace and order. In pyhc speak, it calms my inner child. This is my "planned work life" that I have created. The spring time is my opening up to my creative freedom, the going back to the peaceful life I had before being innocently abducted to the underworld. This is the myth that I'm living.

Pulling this back to the reading, I was really struck by the passage, "some Native American elders teach that any time we make a difficult decision, a part of us goes the opposite way, following the path of the choice we did not take". The myth of Persephone illustrates that she went both ways, splitting her time into two worlds....which ends up being a very comforting myth for me.

Meditative Mandalas on Antibiotics

I went into this exercise on my first day of antibiotics, second bout of strep throat. To me, the three drawings really show the healing process in a mere 10 hours.

In the drawing before bed, I see the beginning of chaos in my line, really showing how uncertain I was with the world. Get strep again really shook me up. There is a cyclic movement between the tree, the moon and the mountains. I also put in salmon (or some sort of fish) jumping in the water. I feel the optimistic blue skies and a pretty silver bow to wrap it all up show my faith. The bow really feels like I'm trying to contain everything . Getting strep again was very stressful to me....I couldn't figure out how I was going to get everything done. The bow looks like I'm trying to keep it all very contained, with just the elements of nature popping out. A metaphor for me trying to keep everything together and the mother nature taking its due course anyway.

For the middle of the night drawing, the chaotic line is very apparent and starts to take over the page breaking it up into quadrants . I remember waking up and anxiously feeling my sore throat; disappointed that I was still affected by the bacterial infection. I see a spiral (spiraling down or spiraling out of sickness?), and lots of chaotic energy going around. As if on a cross, I wrote the words: here, love, now, rest. Feels like a prayer of acceptance and healing for the fight against bacteria. Like the first drawing, the blue dots (night sky) is repeated, this time at the middle of the spiral; almost like a black hole.

I am surprised my the calmness of my third drawing. It's important to note that I did wake up feeling much better, which seems to be illustrated. The buoyant doodles seem to contain a fresh energy coming over the hills, and they are topped off by opaque circles, which seem to represent the four directions (not initially intended). The four directions are connected to four feathers that give a lightness to the drawing, and certainly that is how I was feeling. Again, I've taken blue dots (night sky) and put them around the piece.

Doing the third piece was by far my favorite; it felt much very meditative and gave me a sense of calm centerness. I felt release have all drawings, but centered only after the third. I also find it interesting that the third piece takes elements from the first two images and combines them into one piece that feels much more stable than the other two. There is a cross-like foundation to both the second and third piece, which gives it a meditative feel. Mountains are also represented in the first and second piece.

This process feels like it summoned the magician in me. Though I felt like I forced myself in the for drawing number one, the rest of it seemed to flow easily. As The Magician put it, "magicians discover that, at a deeper level, force does not work". I love this philosophy for life, and enjoyed using it in my art.

According to The Secret Language of Symbols:

mountain = masculinity, eternity, ascent from animal to spiritual nature

sun = male; higher self

moon = female; resurrection, immortality, cyclical nature

feather = Great Spirit and the sun; ability to visit other worlds

salmon = prophecy and inspiration

circle = perfection, eternity

spiral = energy flow

stars = less important gods/goddesses

Need to mull over the symbolic meanings; right now nothing is jumping out at me.

this thing called sacred

I was in a Yin Yoga* class last weekend, and the instructor asked us to go inside ourselves and locate a low-energy feeling that we were having, give it a name and this using our unconscious, figure out what that feeling needed. I named my "sickness/strep throat" and consciously, thought I needed more time.

My logical mind started announcing:
more time to heal
more time to do
more time, more time.

I could tell by the way my mind was shouting at me, it wasn't the right answer.

So I breathed back into my body and tried to let the nothing envelop me. And that when the word sacred slowly appeared. Yes, of course...there is always the to-do list and most everything I really want to do, but I'm just galloping from one thing to the other with out the right mindfulness (similar to the Knight of Swords I pulled a while ago).

Knowing that this connects to one of our next exercises, "Sacred Space: A Healing Act of Art", I couldn't help but ask the question: what makes something sacred?

My first reaction is "intention", it's the moment when you intend for the activity to be sacred. For physical spaces, I think it may be easier (we shall see after the exercise) as you can bring in special or sacred objects to create a sacred space. Granted this takes intention, but it's a visual form.

But what about activities? I think eating, sleep, etc can be seen as rituals and easier to make sacred. But what about the day-to-day chores. Especially when there is a whole lot of them. The washing of the dishes, a 45-min commute to work, work itself, washing dishes, etc.

How do you make the mundane sacred?


* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_yoga

Four Selves

I am recovering from strep throat (day 4 of antibiotics), and unfortunately I don't have the capacity to properly reflect in my blog, but here are the images and I'm happy to discuss in class tomorrow.

More or less, I found the reading to be much more verbose about the "self" process, almost unnecessarily. At one point I wrote in my notes, "the ego is a pacifier-sucking infant and the hero myths are verbal baby blankets to provide comfort". Clearly I'm not getting the myth thing. However Campbell's comment "In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream". I fell this makes reference to the collective unconscious that you end up accessing whether you are aware or not.

I definitely feel like I was accessing universal symbols during the brief meditation and then the actual art process, but I don't immediately feel any connection to the 3-step hero myth. Anyhoo, my 4 self-portraits are attached, in order: public self, secret self, spiritual self and future self.

Spirtual Vibration & The Tarot

I ran across a very interesting blog/podcast by Robert Zink where he suggests using the 22 major arcana from the Tarot as a way to raise your spiritual vibration. You pull a card the night before to figure out what the focus is for the next day; he lists a description for each card. I've been working with this for about a week now and I've really enjoyed the process. It helps center me for the next day, and I feel like I'm more aligned with spirit in my focus.

http://robertzink120.wordpress.com/

Creative Spiral

Process

While brainstorming for this piece I talked to my girlfriend and reviewed the major points in my life and I suddenly exclaimed, "Is your life defined my the bad things that happen?" "Wow", she responded. After a bit of discussion we agreed that it's not about whether an event is good or bad, rather, your life is defined by shifts in consciousness. It just happens to work out that these shifts happen to correspond to dramatic events. Though this assignment was to pick out points of creative transition, I feel that most moments connect with the major points in my life. For the transitions that are both, I used art as creative expression leading to healing.

Grateful Epiphany
After completion I gazed down at the piece and was enamoured by the organic process of my life. I had a wave of gratitude for each event that was initially perceived as "bad". Upon retrospect each event is a critical point on my life path leading me to who I am today. And while I already knew that in a abstract cerebral way, doing this process helped me internalize the observation.

Point of Inspiration
And finally, I thought that it would be really interesting to use this same concept as a "Soul Spiral" by dong several past life regressions and then do a spiral based on the symbols that come across during the regression.

Culture of Desire

After a week of looking at my collage on desire I am struck by the placement and connection of images. While I was making the collage I was consciously aware that I was putting the Buddha image with love over the face in the middle, already believing the philosophy that it's all about the love, and spirituality grounds and centers us, both illustrated here.

Unconsciously I put the following into an order corresponding to energy levels. In lower energy (bottom area) I pasted material wealth, beauty and a superficial career. As we rise it feeds into other items we seek outside ourselves: a vacation, a day out, a movie, serene scenery. As you go to the top of the collage, the items that vibrate at a higher energy are eating fresh and local ingredients, a serene home and loving partnerships.

The connection of items is also rather telling: material wealth melts into the myth of consumerism (take this vacation, buy this yoga video, watch this movie), with the hope that these purchases will make you feel whole. This connects into the authentic points in our life: its the food we use to sustain ourselves, the environment we create and the relationships we foster. All these ingredients are what we really bring joy into our life.