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Yesterday afternoon, I completed my (spiritual) self-portrait for this month's work with Black within the Temple of the Twelve. The finished product feels good to me, I have a sense of accomplishment with it, but the process getting there was cathartic, energy-shifting, and surprisingly enlightening. What I started with is not at all where I ended up.
I lit the black candle on my black altar and turned on a music mix I made last year that is as much a portrait of me as this will ever be. I pulled out scissors and Mod Podge, a box of words and phrases and images I'd spent two weeks clipping from magazines and junk mail, and Graeme's crayon, color pencil, and marker collection. I knew, from the beginning, that I didn't want to try and represent my physical self. At the beginning of the month, I'd taken a photograph for that. Instead, with what skill and insight I have, I wanted to draw my energy anatomy, to represent how I feel, what my aura's like from the inside out, and to get at the Light and Dark halves of me.
There's an emptiness inside her, and she'd do anything to fill it in, but all the colors mix together--to grey.
I started with the corners of the paper. The marker should have been black but came out a dark, midnight blue. I am separated from things around me. Observing from a dark place that gives me perspective and calm but leaves me feeling alone in a crowded room. Underworld energy gives me power and wisdom and connection to the beyond but also leaches away immediate, material joys. Everything comes through that dark filter to get to me--I could win the lottery and not do more than smile, mourn a lost friendship or a death in the family with little more than intellectual introspection. I see the big pictures and by doing that, I'm a distance away, almost unreachable. It is a trade-off I'd gladly make again and again and again, but there are times I wish I could shine, too. I don't have that leonine fire and sparkle, that vitality. I serve Death and in that capacity, I am detached in many ways from life's immediacy and twisting currents of emotion.
And no Message could have been any clearer--if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself then make a change.
I went back to start at the center--what's at my center? I drew a large heart, black-framed, with a core of purple, an outer area of pink with threads of blue-green. My spiritual life is at the very center of what fires me, inspires me, shapes my energy anatomy. Every part of my life is informed by my belief in the divine nature of everything and everyone around me. That is the root of my compassionate spirit. I'm hematite and rose quartz--cool and strong, loving. I keep my place on dry ground, removed from the emotional river most of the time, but I have a no-nonsense, calm in a crisis way of pulling others out without having to jump in myself. Like Death, I love everyone who comes my way, though I very rarely cry over their plights. I have a different perspective and yet, unquestionably, I have a big, beautiful, pure heart.
You gotta swim, swim for your life, swim for the music that saves you when you're not so sure you'll survive. You've gotta swim, swim when it hurts...the currents will pull you away from your Love, just keep your head above.
While Air dominates my chart, myself, I have a lot of Water in me, too. I moved on to that, sketching a watery, radiating energy around the heart. Spirals and coils and waves of Water, my connection to the world around me, the only thing that anchors me here and keeps me present. Love. Family. Compassion. I stepped back, looking at that shapeless blue aura, and saw the beginnings of a Goddess, entirely unplanned. Filling in some areas, adding detail to others, within a minute or two I had uncovered that archetypal Goddess shape, arms overhead and curled towards a spiral face, bountiful, watery body below. How had that happened? One arm, I saw, was my Airy side, the other, my Water. What was going to be just a field of color to collage upon had become an image in its own right and one that hooked me right in the chest. What was this becoming? I added more hearts, scattered within the body, because there is a lot more of love, compassion, care within me. It is in my fabric.
We're all staring down the barrel of a gun, so if your life flashed before you, what would you wish you would have done? Gotta live like we're dying.
I finished the background by coloring in everything not watery-airy blue as a solid black. I am aware, at every moment of my life, how short and fleeting my life is. I am aware of death, of the limited amount of time I have to make an impact, and that is a two-edged sword. I am grateful for everything, one of my greatest strengths, but I am also at times overwhelmed with a sense of not-doing-enough-fast-enough. I want my life to matter and so far, I'm not content that it has. How many more days before my last? What am I here to contribute, what need can only I, in this body, help fill? That drives me, surrounds me, at times haunts me.
~*~
With my background completed, I moved on to the intuitive collage portion of the project. I spread out all the words and phrases and images that I'd clipped over the last few weeks, being delighted and surprised with some of what I found that I hadn't remembered ever reading, seeing, cutting out. With music still playing, inspiring me, I just let myself move words around on the background, piecing them together, moving them away, cutting them apart, until I felt the right words were where they wanted to be in the image, part of the messages they were intended to fulfill. Even as I went to work gluing each word in place, there were times I stood back and realized I needed to move more words around, away, getting rid of the things I had added instead of the simpler message the Universe was trying to share with me, through me.
By the time I was done, I was in tears. It was more than I'd expected, more loving, more worthy than I'd expected my self-portrait, myself, to be. The largest words on the page and the most difficult to permanently affix to myself were "GOOD" and "Beautiful". I accept that I am both good and beautiful, but it seemed very hard to incorporate that, so boldly and unapologetically, into my self-image. Where were my flaws? In finishing the self-portrait, I realized that my flaws, the things I mourn and hate myself the most for, are also the trade-offs for my greatest talents and attributes. The Black balances the other colors and makes me who I am, as a whole, a being of heart and goodness and gratitude, yes, as well as loneliness, feeling inadequate, and maintaining a cool distance in life. That is me and taken as a whole, when I allow myself to acknowledge my talents and abilities, it makes for a beautiful, unique, perfect Me. I am made, ideally, to fill a need in the world that only my collection of bright and dark attributes can fill. I am what I was meant to be and I'd lost track of that in my self-criticisms. I am what I was meant to be, all of it.
I lit the black candle on my black altar and turned on a music mix I made last year that is as much a portrait of me as this will ever be. I pulled out scissors and Mod Podge, a box of words and phrases and images I'd spent two weeks clipping from magazines and junk mail, and Graeme's crayon, color pencil, and marker collection. I knew, from the beginning, that I didn't want to try and represent my physical self. At the beginning of the month, I'd taken a photograph for that. Instead, with what skill and insight I have, I wanted to draw my energy anatomy, to represent how I feel, what my aura's like from the inside out, and to get at the Light and Dark halves of me.
There's an emptiness inside her, and she'd do anything to fill it in, but all the colors mix together--to grey.
I started with the corners of the paper. The marker should have been black but came out a dark, midnight blue. I am separated from things around me. Observing from a dark place that gives me perspective and calm but leaves me feeling alone in a crowded room. Underworld energy gives me power and wisdom and connection to the beyond but also leaches away immediate, material joys. Everything comes through that dark filter to get to me--I could win the lottery and not do more than smile, mourn a lost friendship or a death in the family with little more than intellectual introspection. I see the big pictures and by doing that, I'm a distance away, almost unreachable. It is a trade-off I'd gladly make again and again and again, but there are times I wish I could shine, too. I don't have that leonine fire and sparkle, that vitality. I serve Death and in that capacity, I am detached in many ways from life's immediacy and twisting currents of emotion.
And no Message could have been any clearer--if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself then make a change.
I went back to start at the center--what's at my center? I drew a large heart, black-framed, with a core of purple, an outer area of pink with threads of blue-green. My spiritual life is at the very center of what fires me, inspires me, shapes my energy anatomy. Every part of my life is informed by my belief in the divine nature of everything and everyone around me. That is the root of my compassionate spirit. I'm hematite and rose quartz--cool and strong, loving. I keep my place on dry ground, removed from the emotional river most of the time, but I have a no-nonsense, calm in a crisis way of pulling others out without having to jump in myself. Like Death, I love everyone who comes my way, though I very rarely cry over their plights. I have a different perspective and yet, unquestionably, I have a big, beautiful, pure heart.
You gotta swim, swim for your life, swim for the music that saves you when you're not so sure you'll survive. You've gotta swim, swim when it hurts...the currents will pull you away from your Love, just keep your head above.
While Air dominates my chart, myself, I have a lot of Water in me, too. I moved on to that, sketching a watery, radiating energy around the heart. Spirals and coils and waves of Water, my connection to the world around me, the only thing that anchors me here and keeps me present. Love. Family. Compassion. I stepped back, looking at that shapeless blue aura, and saw the beginnings of a Goddess, entirely unplanned. Filling in some areas, adding detail to others, within a minute or two I had uncovered that archetypal Goddess shape, arms overhead and curled towards a spiral face, bountiful, watery body below. How had that happened? One arm, I saw, was my Airy side, the other, my Water. What was going to be just a field of color to collage upon had become an image in its own right and one that hooked me right in the chest. What was this becoming? I added more hearts, scattered within the body, because there is a lot more of love, compassion, care within me. It is in my fabric.
We're all staring down the barrel of a gun, so if your life flashed before you, what would you wish you would have done? Gotta live like we're dying.
I finished the background by coloring in everything not watery-airy blue as a solid black. I am aware, at every moment of my life, how short and fleeting my life is. I am aware of death, of the limited amount of time I have to make an impact, and that is a two-edged sword. I am grateful for everything, one of my greatest strengths, but I am also at times overwhelmed with a sense of not-doing-enough-fast-enough. I want my life to matter and so far, I'm not content that it has. How many more days before my last? What am I here to contribute, what need can only I, in this body, help fill? That drives me, surrounds me, at times haunts me.
~*~
With my background completed, I moved on to the intuitive collage portion of the project. I spread out all the words and phrases and images that I'd clipped over the last few weeks, being delighted and surprised with some of what I found that I hadn't remembered ever reading, seeing, cutting out. With music still playing, inspiring me, I just let myself move words around on the background, piecing them together, moving them away, cutting them apart, until I felt the right words were where they wanted to be in the image, part of the messages they were intended to fulfill. Even as I went to work gluing each word in place, there were times I stood back and realized I needed to move more words around, away, getting rid of the things I had added instead of the simpler message the Universe was trying to share with me, through me.
By the time I was done, I was in tears. It was more than I'd expected, more loving, more worthy than I'd expected my self-portrait, myself, to be. The largest words on the page and the most difficult to permanently affix to myself were "GOOD" and "Beautiful". I accept that I am both good and beautiful, but it seemed very hard to incorporate that, so boldly and unapologetically, into my self-image. Where were my flaws? In finishing the self-portrait, I realized that my flaws, the things I mourn and hate myself the most for, are also the trade-offs for my greatest talents and attributes. The Black balances the other colors and makes me who I am, as a whole, a being of heart and goodness and gratitude, yes, as well as loneliness, feeling inadequate, and maintaining a cool distance in life. That is me and taken as a whole, when I allow myself to acknowledge my talents and abilities, it makes for a beautiful, unique, perfect Me. I am made, ideally, to fill a need in the world that only my collection of bright and dark attributes can fill. I am what I was meant to be and I'd lost track of that in my self-criticisms. I am what I was meant to be, all of it.
