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.