Spirals: Re-considering the Past

Spinning the wheel, spinning the prayer cycles, spinning the threads for the web of life. 

I started to use tiny pieces of things, broken bits of china, a coin, a little turquoise stone, along with woven pieces of a Tibetan prayer flag in four paintings on washed linen, in 2006. The pieces were like relics or remnants from some place, with earthy elements embedded into the paint surface. I worked on them on the floor of my studio, painting imagery and then adding the found objects to the surface. I am like a crow, who likes to collect shiny things and bring them back to the nest. I am always drawn to building texture into my work and the suggestion of history those acts evoke. I am part painter, part sculptor. I am a layerist.

These four pieces: A Bird in the Heart I-IV, became part of a mini-retrospective that year. From there I developed a new body of work, a series of seven pieces, using elements of broken china adhered to the surface of oil paintings on panels. I showed this series in a one-woman show called Rota Fortunae in 2010. They were in part an homage to the artist/fimmaker Julian Schnabel whose work influenced me in the 80s to go to graduate school.

Friends gave me broken china dishes, and some bowls and cups that they had saved, beautiful pieces--treasures they couldn't quite part with. I also found many broken pieces of china, they would show up as I walked with my dog along trails throughout Albuquerque, I always wondered of their history, how did they get to be there. A favorite vintage dish from a beloved friend that I accidentally broke became the basis of a painting called Milk and Honey, True Love. The dish pattern is called Etruscan Vase, we had traveled to Tuscany together to visit his sister and soak up Renaissance art. (Fidelity Investments purchased this painting in 2009 for their corporate collection and it was more recently gifted to the Albuquerque Public Arts Collection where it resides in the city's convention center.) 

By the end of 2008 the world economy seemed irreparably broken, we were in a sea change of experience. People have said, maybe this work was a comment on the state of the world at that time. Perhaps, yes. But, in a positive way considering ideas of regeneration, reconnection, reuniting, reusing and/or reinventing.

A white porcelain cup with a gold handle, from my Grandmother or maybe my Great Grandmother, broke in my hands while I was washing it. The break was clean, a perfect line almost exactly in half, a happy accident, it became one of the primary elements for a painting I titled, Rota Fortunae. Another lovely yellow cup, English bone china, was given to me by a friend, a writer. It was from her mother-in-law, sent to her in a cardboard box with the whole set, nearly every dish arrived broken. I think there must be a poem in every piece. I know there are stories of domestic life, nourishment and harvest-time held within the glazed surfaces.

Paintings are often ahead of me, they reveal themselves more in time. I am grateful when they continue to speak to me like a horn of plenty. The Wheel of Fortune is a tarot card, the meaning in part implies ʻa positive turn or changeʼ. It seems we are in deep change once again, post-Covid, and not entirely certain where to head, I plan to spiral back to the form of the Medicine Wheel and spin through its directional wisdom one more time. 

 

Be Here Now

Be Here Now: Ram Dass

 

At the end of calendar year 2019, just after the winter solstice the great teacher, Ram Dass passed from this world into the next.  I was saddened to hear of his transition but I was equally aware that he had a phenomenal life and gave every ounce of his being to the Divine and to raising consciousness on the planet.  He was a premier example of the healthy balanced masculine at work in the world.   Ram Dass, former professor at Harvard, partner in crime with Timothy Leary, inspired a generation in terms of conscious raising through their experimentation with LSD.  Before Ram Dass was Ram Dass, he was Richard Albert and he and Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner collaborated on a book called, The Psychedelic Experience.   It was published in 1964, another, LSD, was published in 1966. These were pivotal years- the cracking of an egg, a big egg of consciousness,- like no other period in the history of the consciousness movement.  Ram Dass went on to meet his  root teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, in India and to take the sacred path the year the book, LSD, was published.  He brought yoga and meditation to the United States, he wrote many books about consciousness and meditation, he walked his talk. Even when he could no longer walk. 

After he had a seriously debilitating stroke, he recognized his own need to surrender to receive , to receive nurturing from others.  He often said, he had been ‘stroked’ by God and he wrote about this near death experience.  His realization that while he had been busy giving and serving he also needed to learn about receiving. The last decades of his life, he taught by example from his wheel chair.

Once I was at an event in Santa Fe where he was speaking. Before he took the stage, I was compelled to leave my seat, and stand up in the back of the theater. With my back to the wall watching whomever was on before him, I looked down and noticed a man in a wheel chair next to me.  Ram Dass!  I have thought about that close proximity to greatness many times, I am not sure which of us was there first but it was remarkable in its ease. We looked at one another briefly. I was so surprised to see him by my side, where the light was dim in the recesses of the hall.  It continues to be a touchstone for me, while everyone was focused on the stage, the teacher was in the shadows, observing. 

In his book, Living the Bhagavad Gita, he wrote about the ideas of non-stealing and non-killing and other areas we should avoid on the path to enlightenment:   “They all sound like reasonably good ideas.  The question is, what happens, if we try to live by them?”  

He helped the imprisoned, literally and figuratively, to open their hearts and consciousness to love. His teacher imparted the wisdom that we are here to love and serve and he followed that direction throughout his lifetime. Some of his work, in service to humanity, was to encourage convicts to use meditation, the Prison Ashram Project. It was started in 1973 by Bo and Sita Lozoff in cooperation with Ram Dass. Ram Dass had asked them to take over his role of writing to prison inmates and over time they developed workshops to offer yoga and meditation to inmates.  In an interview with Sun Magazine in December 1981, Bo Lozoff said, 

“there is no difference between me and the other people in the room; I’m no freer, no more fortunate; all those roles are parts of the stage characters.  Backstage there’s nothing to do except to be.  It’s a vehicle for being in love together with the prisoners who want to be with us in that consciousness. When I walk into a prison room and see ...prisoners expressing their desire for this love just by coming to the workshop, the purity in the room starts blowing me away before the thing even begins. ....By the time I’ve sat down and cleared my mind and opened my eyes, it’s like looking at so many angels in front of me, beyond space and time.  When we sit in this love together, there’s no prison and no inmates and no me and no...nothing other than love.”

We have an opportunity to consciously connect to the space of the infinite in each moment. We can connect with Mother Nature on the inside.  Raising the energy within our own auric field and allowing for more abundance and ease happens when we get quiet.  When we meditate and bring our attention to the midline of our bodies, into our heart center and connect with the energies within, our frequency automatically lifts.  The teacher waits in the shadows, observing,witnessing at our side. 

Ram Dass, quoting his guru, said, “The guru is not external.  It is not necessary for you to meet your guru on the physical plane.”  But there may be gurus along the way, to show us the way. The way to opening to love, to the deep stillness that comes from the practice of meditation and other forms of connecting with essence.

There is nothing to grasp onto other than the still place within each deep breath, the place of connection to the Higher Self. Sometimes when I feel lonely, fearful or confused and I want to cling to dark chocolate, shopping or something else that isn’t necessarily in my best interest, the best medicine is to sit quietly and ask myself, "what's really the matter?" If I am impatient or I am bouncing around unaware that I even have an issue with balance and harmony, I can slow down.  I can take time in self-awareness, find my breath, then I can usually find a healing solution that is healthy and inhale my better nature. The teacher is always there, right beside us.

 Thank you Ram Dass!!

Notre-Dame and Symbolism

"A little consideration of what takes place around us every day, would show us that a higher law than that of our will, regulates events...."  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Twelve apostles flew off the roof of Notre- Dame de Paris a few years ago.  Perhaps you recall hearing about the restoration of these larger than life statues.  A plan long in the making because each of these complex figures weighs a tremendous amount, originally cast from plaster molds in poured iron and then covered with hammered pieces of copper.  There was a pragmatic determination to remove the heads of the figures and then transport the bodies from the roof via cranes and then transport them to the south of France for repair. (In the photo above, note the line at the neck that suggests that the head had been cast separately.)  

Four days after the disassembled figures were moved from the roof of the grand cathedral, remarkably, a fire broke out exactly where they had stood:

“It was a beautiful spring day in Paris on April 15th, when tourists walking about the Île de la Cité in the early evening noticed something unusual at Notre-Dame – smoke was wafting above the Cathedral. Word began to spread quickly, and as the gaze of bystanders was drawn to the iconic spire of the landmark, one tourist tweeted at 6:52 p.m., “It appears Notre-Dame is on fire.” ”

 ~from Tom Brandt, The Tragic Fire at Notre Dame Cathedral

The green guardians of the spire had been moved to safety but the spire was not. 

It burst into brilliant orange flames, consumed along with the extensive scaffolding in place around it and crashed down from the roof while onlookers gasped below in disbelief. At 7:50 pm the roof collapsed into the sanctuary below, leaving gaping holes in the ceiling, fire and charred debris dropped through to the cathedral floor. To save the structure from further collapse, some 500 firefighters focused their efforts on saving the twin towers.

Whatever happened to ignite the fire is not known for certain; investigators believe either someone in the scaffolding crews dropped a cigarette, or a spark from the elevator installed for the restoration set off the blaze.  An alarm sounded and a newly hired security person, working a second shift, checked the site but missed the actual location.  His supervisor did not respond to his call immediately, which delayed the response further. Rapidly, that April evening the fire swallowed the spire and the scaffolding leaving little to examine.

The elegant spire of the cathedral contained relics— teeth, bones or hair — of the patron saints of Paris, St. Denis and St. Geneviève. The relics were placed in the spire by an archbishop to protect the cathedral.**** Tons of rubble, burnt black beams and lead-based dust had to be removed before any further restoration could take place, but remarkably, the main altar and the large gold cross on the altar remained in tact.

The forest of trees used in the original roof will likely be redesigned to be risk managed and more fire-proof safeguards put in place when completed.  Since the fire, Notre- Dame’s signature flying buttresses have been repaired and its enormous rose- patterned stained-glass windows have been sent to contractors for restoration, along with several statues and large 17th and 18th century paintings. **  

A (very brief) History of the Spire and Its Statues

Construction of the cathedral began in medieval times, 1163, under Bishop Maurice de Sully and was largely completed by 1260, though it was modified frequently in the centuries that followed. In the 1790s, during the French Revolution, Notre-Dame suffered extensive desecration; much of its original religious imagery was damaged or destroyed.***

The initial spire was supported by a well-designed system of frames and its significant weight anchored on four pillars on the transept, it functioned as a bell tower and held holy relics for the cathedral. In March 1606, the large cross atop the spire fell due to strong winds and degradation, but the spire structure remained on the cathedral until 1792.  For several decades afterwards, there was no Gothic spire. 

Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, “Notre-Dame of Paris,” published in English as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” educated readers about the building’s decrepit condition.  Hugo's book helped to awaken the public sphere to make significant repairs from 1844 to 1864, when the architects Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus and after his death, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc recreated a new spire made of lead and oak, 315 feet in height, and additionally 16 copper statues of the disciples and four winged ones, around its base. 

Symbolic Meaning

At the time of the 2019 fire, Notre-Dame was certainly one of the most famous cathedrals in Europe and drew in about 13 million visitors each year.  Notre-Dame, meaning Our Lady, was built on a small island called the Île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, it was and continues to be considered a crown jewel of medieval Gothic architecture.

The removal of cathedral's roof statues seemed a practical decision for restoration, but only after a recent conversation with someone, was I inspired to consider the story from a symbolic perspective. One-by-one with a holy wind under their patinated robes the statues descended to the earthly realms. Once the apostles left their medicine wheel of two centuries, guarding the parameter of the roof and the spire, in the pattern of the four directions-- through rain, snow, sleet and hail-- silently, fixed and firm, something shifted. Could it be that the energy of their formation-- copper is a high electrical conductor-- set something in motion energetically when they were moved? 

All depictions of male figures and/or symbolic images of them, guardians of the holy grail, (if you follow the meaning of the grail as Jesus’ blood-line, as an analogy or something else*) departed the roof of Notre Dame, sans heads and four days later the historic nine centuries old cathedral burst into flames! Dream Master teacher and writer, Robert Moss, after a lifetime of dream study, claims that one might consider dreams more real and everyday existence more symbolic. With that in mind, could the unexpected fire be viewed as a mark of change in the world in general and in Christianity specifically? A burning bush of our times?

The statues embody the essence of the sacred circle surrounding Christ Jesus during his lifetime. They were stationed around the spire in four groups of three plus four additional figures symbolizing the Four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John-all looking down over Paris except for the figure of St. Thomas who was portrayed looking up at the spire with a face patterned after the designer, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. From a shamanic perspective, a medicine wheel holds space, sacred space and the attributes of the four primary directions. This archetype is a living mutable medicine that one can connect to at any time.

The Tetramorph

Each of the four sections of the roof had a row of three Apostles, standing one behind the other and staggered by elevatioin above one another.  In front of each grouping was another statue, a tetramorph: the bull for St. Luke, the lion for St. Mark, the eagle for St. John and the angel for St. Matthew. Each grouping faced one of the four cardinal directions. A tetramorph is a symbolic arrangement of four differing elements, or the combination of four disparate elements in one unit. The word tetramorph is derived from the Greek tetra, meaning four, and morph, meaning shape. 

In Christian art, the tetramorph is the union of the symbols of the Four Evangelists, derived from the four living creatures in the Old Testament, Book of Ezekiel, into a single figure or, more commonly, a group of four figures. The most common association, but not the original or only, is: Matthew the man, Mark the lion, Luke the ox, and John the eagle. In Christian art and iconography, Evangelist portraits are often accompanied by these tetramorphs, or the symbols alone used to represent them. Evangelist portraits that depict them in their human forms are often accompanied by their symbolic creatures, and Christ is often depicted surrounded by the four symbols.***

The Book of Ezekiel speaks of a strange vision, difficult to interpret: “Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. ….Each had the face of a man in front, the four had the face of a lion on the right side, an ox on the left side and the face of an eagle at the back.  Such were their faces.”  One might also think of this description as a medicine wheel with the faces representing the four directions. Or perhaps the arrangement of the constellations in the heavens. 

The Christian tetramorph originated in the Babylonian symbols of the four fixed signs of the zodiac: the ox representing the constellation of Taurus;  the lion representing the sign Leo; the eagle representing Scorpio and the figure of a man or an angel representing Aquarius. Scorpio is connected to the Eagle, and also the Phoenix. These four fixed signs fall in the middle of each season. Astrologers say, fixed signs are gates of power! They are known as the workhorses of the zodiac. In Western astrology the four fixed signs are associated with the elements of, respectively, Earth/Ox/Taurus/St. Luke, Fire/Lion/Leo/St. Mark, Water/Eagle/Scorpio/St. John, and Air/Angel/Aquarius/St. Matthew. All of the four elements were present on the day of the fire: Earth, Air, Fire and finally, quenching Water. 

The figures of the Christian tetramorphs were also common in Egyptian, Greek, and Assyrian mythological stories and sculptural reliefs.  The early Christians adopted this symbolism and adapted it for the four Evangelists, which first appear in Christian art in the 5th century, but whose interpretative origin stems from Irenaeus in the 2nd century.  (See Note 1).  Is this assembly of God disassembled, revealing a larger shift? If so, the sacred light of the fire consuming the spire after the apostle statues were removed, is a theophany, or Divinity for all to see. The appearance of Our Lady in a form that is visible and sends a message.

Fire is a release of the old. Perhaps Our Lady is communicating, it is time to transform and reset to a higher expression of living. 

 

(Video footage of 2019 Notre-Dame fire can be found online at the NYTimes.com). 

Notre-Dame on Fire:

A film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, with Samuel Labarthe, Jean-Paul Bordes, Mikael Chirinian, Jérémie Laheurte, Chloé Jouannet and Pierre Lottin 

References from:

Online eutouring.com

Quotation fromTom Brandt: The Tragic Fire at Notre- Dame Cathedral

*By analogy, any elusive object or goal of great significance may be perceived as a holy grail by those seeking it.

** Notes from Friends of Notre- Dame de Paris

***Notes from Wikipedia

****https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/world/europe/notre-dame-cathedral-facts.html

1. See Wikipedia on Irenaeus (/ɪrɪˈneɪəs/; Greek: Εἰρηναῖος Eirēnaios; c. 130 – c. 202 AD)[3] was a Greek bishop noted for his role in guiding and expanding Christian communities in the southern regions of present-day France and, more widely, for the development of Christian theology by combating heresy and defining orthodoxy. Originating from Smyrna, he had seen and heard the preaching of Polycarp, who in turn was said to have heard John the Evangelist, and thus was the last-known living connection with the Apostles.

Medicine Wheels Part II: December 2021

 

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into your life.  Then, without effort, you are impelled to truth and to perfect contentment.  Ralph Waldo Emerson 

On Walden’s Pond

My mother sent me two books of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) when I was living in Boston many years ago. She knew I had visited a property near to where he lived.  Of all the gifts she gave me through the years, those books, one still nestled on my shelves thirty plus years later, were such thoughtful gifts.  We may have talked about Emerson and Walden Pond (where he walked along a footpath from his house in Concord), I do not recall, but she came upon these used books, maybe at a library book sale and made the decision to send them to me. It was 1988 or 89, and they arrived as a surprise, I doubt I ever told her how much that gesture meant to me. She could not have known that I would soon be applying to graduate school and would be moving away from Massachusetts.  She could not have known that one of Emerson’s essays in the books, would be an ongoing inspiration to my artwork and my healing process. She could not have foreseen that, as I am missing her now, those essays, and memories of Walden Pond are a solace to me.

     Emerson wrote, ‘the eye is the first circle, the horizon which it forms is the second.’  Perhaps the arms of mother should be first.  Being at Walden’s Pond with my friend Claudia one afternoon, walking the perimeter of the pond, I noticed many mothers were there with their children.  The setting was full with play and laughter, I wonder if old man Emerson was looking down upon us with a twinkle in his eyes and if he was pleased that his circle was still so full with life from when he walked the circumference in another century.

He had the tragic experience of losing his five year old son to illness.  Knowing the circle of life continues must, on some other plane of reality, touch his soul.  The pond has continued to be a living mandala of a mother’s nature, holding the community throughout each season. The mandala, the medicine wheel, the sacred geometry of the circle is everywhere, in the rim of the eye, the planets, the structures of cells, as it is at Walden’s Pond.

Nature centres into balls…

Another geometric shape that is also a portal, or signifies a portal like a mandala or medicine wheel, is the mandorla.  Mandorla means ‘almond’ in Italian.  It is a shape that is also known as the Vesica Piscis, a fish shape, the literal Latin translation meaning, fish’s bladder.  The shape is often used as an architectural form to enclose the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ in medieval art, an aureole.   The shape is the form of the outside of our open eyes, and the shape created when the outlines of two perfect circles are partially overlapped. This is the form, the almond shape, that the Goddess known in Mexico as the Virgin of Guadalupe stands within. Her figure, cloaked in a star-studded mantle of blue, is surrounded by what appears to be fiery flames or the brilliant energy of her auric field within the mandorla. 

This almond shape is exalted as a portal of reverence for the holy Virgin within a golden haloed light. Her day is celebrated in Mexico as a national holiday  and across the border in New Mexico on December 12th. It’s common here in New Mexico to see images of the Virgin of Guadalupe painted onto natural formations of mandorlas in trees.  I saw one recently that was beautiful, a pastel drawing on the raw, ‘unbarked’ opening along the trunk of an old an elm tree, soft and abstract but immediately recognizable and very tender.  Sometimes when a tree forms a natural portal to the interior surface of itself, like this one, the shape is altar-like, it becomes a natural place people are drawn to embellish.  Individuals frequently make offerings of loose change, Mardi Gras plastic beads, rocks, crystals and other things in spontaneous gestures to these feminine, natural altars. 

When abstract circles overlap within the context of the world, we merge with something, an idea, a landscape, or a person and through our interaction, we create something new.  The significance of two becoming three is the center point of all creation and myth. The convergence of hand with spirit, eyes on nature, transforming the medium of paint or chalk to the tree surface, is an offering back to creator.  This shape, commonly used to denote the third eye, during meditation, becomes a visual portal, an inner doorway to spirit.

When I am too focused on the physicality of my existence and not in the wonder and  mystery of how spirit creates matter, I miss something.  Yet, with each action I have the opportunity to create a new portal of energy for the highest vibration. I am not always mindful, but if I set the intention to be heart-centered rather than in a linear mind, it’s always a benefit.  My mother sent me two books; Emerson, founder of the Transcendentalist movement, feels like a mentor friend.  Living in harmony with nature, as he so avidly advocated, seems crucial at this critical time. 

Medicine Wheel: The Power of the Circle

The famous pen and ink drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, renders the proportions of the human form as they relate to the geometry of a circle and the square. When we stand with our arms stretched out and our legs spread wide, like a cartwheel, (think snow angels) our bodies make a shape that relates to a circle. We are medicine wheels in our human forms.

Our bodies are an expression in the physical dimension, similar to the growth of a tree with roots, limbs and trunk. Our crown like the crown of a tree radiates energy and light.  If we imagine the cross section of our skull as a mandala, at the very center is the mysterious place that when awakened allows us to be visionary, the place where the pineal gland sits within the center of the two halves of our brain. Leonardo da Vinci balanced the perspective construction of another painting, The Last Supper, so that its vanishing point is immediately behind Christ's right temple, pointing to the physical location of the centre, or sensus communis, of his brain. The sacred point of the sixth chakra. 

The Circle as Medicine

Medicine Wheels are not so much art forms though they are visual forms, but more importantly, place holders for healing.  They are guideposts to the energy of non-ordinary reality, portals into timeless space. They can create a sacred and safe space, a functional form of support. 

When I go to the river, I often draw circles in the sand with a long stick reaching out around me from the center. I sit down in the center and ground myself into the elements of earth, air, fire from the sun and water from the rio.  I send down a wide grounding cord, which I visualize as a corkscrew type of shape, that spirals down into the earth, like a big drill bit the width of my hips.  (It is very different for me than visualizing the connecting root as a straight line of energy.)   This is a very simple yet very helpful practice for grounding and connecting into the power of Pachamama. 

There is an infinite container of support in the medicine wheel. It is an archetypal form found in many cultural teachings, I came to the mandala through more than one culture. Almost simultaneously, I was attracted to the sand paintings of Tibetan Buddhists and the Medicine Wheels of Native American traditions in New Mexico, when I was in graduate school. I wanted to paint mandalas before I really knew why. 

The medicine wheel is one way to acknowledge the six directions. There are many ways of interpreting the directions, but I will share the way I have learned,  a simple practice of centering to begin the day:

Orient the body by planting yourself, your feet, and/or your seat onto the earth. Sit or stand facing the east to begin, but this can change given the season or what we are facing in our lives as we cycle through the year. Each direction has meaning which can correlate to the seasons and cycles of life. Call upon the spirit of the east as a place to begin, to open the heart center to peace as opposed to chaos.  I like to consider the dawn light as a visual for this ritual practice, imagine the rosy pink light of a new day beginning, if you can be outside, all the better. Sit or stand in peace, calm and equanimity.

When I sit early in the morning just after the sun has risen, during that quiet time when everything feels at peace around me, the sense of outer stillness helps me to reflect that within myself. This is the way it has been taught in India throughout recorded time, to face the new day with the rising sun. Take time to bring into your awareness each of the directions: east, south, west, north and Father Sky and Mother Earth. Consider what each direction has to offer in terms of energy: new beginnings in the spirit of the east, in the west the spirits of clarity and completion, and in the south, the energy of support through the movement of the sun. The north brings in the energy of effortless action through the movement of the holy winds. 

At the river it had been raining a slow deliciousness all day and dragging a stick through the wet sand was satisfying, I felt the resistance at the end of the stick as I circumscribed a line in a rough circle.  I marked the four directions and scratched the Rune symbols, from the ancient Celtic alphabet for All- That- Is, around the perimeter: an offering for spirit, a thank you, and a recognition.

Through the process of inscribing circles, whether drawn in the sand, painted on canvas, made from little stones, or great monolithic ones like Stonehenge, the circle establishes a place of power. It relates to the womb of mother, the act of nurturing, holding arms around another and motherhood. It relates to Mother Earth.

In the beginning of my own journey, the circle emerged rather spontaneously one day in the studio when I was trying to resolve a large oil on canvas and glass assemblage. I still recall the feeling of placing a big sable brush filled with a bright Chinese Red glaze upon the canvas. Not knowing for certain if I should let go of an expanse of patterns across the surface that I had labored to achieve, in order to arrive at the clarity of a circular image in the composition, it was a risk. There would be no way to go back once I made the decision.

First, I had to be willing to let go of what I had already created. This painting would eventually mirror my own healing, letting go of old patterns in order to get to a more resolved place. Finding more clarity would become an ongoing theme in my art and life. Years later, I would see the mandalas of the Swiss psychotherapist, Carl Gustav Jung in his extraordinary dream study, The Red Book.  His work gave me a much greater understanding of what my psyche was drawn to create during a time when my emotional needs were great raw wounds.  I didn’t know it then but I was on a desperate quest for wholeness, and a deep sense of grounding. Creating circles was natural enough, a geometric form for resolution.  Jung might say I was drawn to the power of the archetypal form through the collective unconscious. Maybe I was, or maybe it was something already present within each cell of my being.

I had not known that Jung was a supremely gifted visual artist until I saw the publication of this large scale reproduction. I was and remain stunned by his skill, the scope of his illustrative dream imagery and his expert calligraphy. The illuminated manuscript, a weighty tome of dream investigation, his magnum opus, was a work in progress for sixteen years between 1914-30.  It was left unfinished, mid-sentence.  I have an intuition that that was his intention, though, we will never know for certain. 

In November of 2013, I had the good fortune to be able to walk around the actual book, enclosed in a protective round glass case, in the Central Pavillion at the Venice Biennale.  On my first trip to this dreamland, watery Venice along with the dreams of Jung, brought me easily into a heightened state of reality. The exhibition, Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni was an incredible achievement, bringing together drawings from Rudolph Stiener’s lectures; the mystical paintings of Hilga af Klimt; Jung’s Red Book; anonymous Tantric paintings from Southern India, and many artists -- a plurality of visions.

Gioni said that the “representation of the invisible [as] a central theme” and the “challenge of reconciling the self with the universe,”was the intention. A sense that the spiritual was alive within this vision coincided with the curatorial decision to hang fine artists along side of unknown artists, artists within the canon and as well as outsider artists and Jung was the bridge to both, and to the unconscious realms. His mandalas and illustrated dreams were the gateway to this show.

Indeed red, weighty and bound in a thick leather cover, embossed in gold leaf, Jung’s book is something one might expect to see during the Renaissance, mid-fifteenth century in a Florentine palace. His monumental imagery, like the book itself, is too large to hold, it needs to be on a table or a pedestal to view. I find a New York Times article from 2009 written by Sara Corbett about the Red Book’s coming out from hiding from the Union Bank in Zurich.  It’s a cold day in Switzerland in 2007 when as Corbett says, a change was under way:

…the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.

The images and calligraphy, -the examination of his dreams, visions and fantasies- were presented as the center piece of the rotunda as you first enter the exhibit hall for the biennale, 2013.   The book, opened to one illumination and enclosed under a dome of thick glass (probably bullet -proof glass,) was slightly angled on an easel so that as one circumambulated it, the red leather cover was revealed. Around it, in the exhibit space, were mounted reproductions of other illustrated pages from the book. I would have travelled far to lay eyes on this holy relic and it is not an exaggeration to say the marriage of Venice and Jung was a dream come true.

During Jung’s lifetime, the actual Red Book had only ever been viewed by people within his family, friends and his patients. I guess one could say that, the book was hidden in plain sight. Later, the board of his foundation, close advisors, and those who worked on the reproduction were fortunate to view it first hand. Known widely as a psychotherapist, psychiatrist and writer, Jung, was also an exceptional artist. His mandalas, dream illustrations and the accompanying calligraphic text are exquisitely crafted in the manner of a fine illuminated manuscript. Examinations of his profoundly complex dream imagery, Liber Novus or The Red Book, was a personal journey and an archetypal reference to the unconscious, a healing tome of epic undertaking that he worked on following the ravages of World War I. It’s not hyperbolic to say, his dreams were of mythic proportions. 

Jung said this was the ....”the culmination of his self-analytic search for meaning”. He began the preliminary work for the Red Book one hundred years ago at a time after he was in the service during WWI, as a commander of the English prisoners of war.  “Swallowed by war” as he wrote, he felt he was in a state of psychosis which began to clear at the end of the war. From August of 1917 to the end of September, he drew a mandala nearly every day in an army notebook. These drawings would become the precursor to the Red Book. He said, “my mandala images were cryptograms on the state of myself, which were delivered to me each day.”   

His conversations with his soul-self could be considered as a way through. He said, “[w]hoever speaks in primordeal images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers...he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from the peril and to outlive the longest night."

 

 The Red Book on Jung's desk

1. The Red Book Reader, pg. 43-44

2. Ibid, pg. 63