Loss can sometimes freeze us solid,
coldly hold us ,
bound and captive,
to another
time. Then we have to find a way
to breathe into
those icy bones
a fleshy warmth,
to take our loss and let it weave
us back into
the flow of life’s
many moments.
JDG
The soulcollage process developed by Seena Frost is described in detail in her beautiful book, SoulCollage Evolving, which I highly recommend. Our group came up with several brief descriptions of the soulcollage process as we have experienced it:
* a quick and easy, right brained, creative process for accessing inner wisdom available to anyone who can cut and glue images and let them speak
* an artful way to de-stress
* a way of creating a jigsaw puzzle of your soul
* dreaming on the outside
* making collaged cards that tell the story of you through found images.
In this post I want to relate an experience I had with a soulcollage card and the insight the words of a fellow participant, Amy Schaich, triggered. Before making this card I had been struggling for several months with a mild anxiety and the recurring thought that I might be near death. There were no grounds for this fear other than the fact that I was nearing age 70. I had no known health issues. On my card, against a background of outer space with one predominant partial planet, I glued a nude female figure with the seven energy centers marked on her body, a sea turtle, and an encrusted circle of sea matter with the eye of a fish in its center. I chose the female figure with the energy centers and the sea turtle because the sea turtle had appeared to me the night before during a guided meditation as an animal associated with my 5th energy center, the throat chakra. My throat had, in fact, been clogged for some months from constant sinus drainage and has been troublesome.
When I completed the soulcollage card, the female figure’s arms were a short distance from her body – at her sides – palms open, and since I was finished, I tucked the card into a transparent sleeve for protection. When I turned the card over, I discovered that in the process of being inserted into the sleeve, the female figure’s right arm had somehow come unglued and was now folded across her throat chakra, the 5th energy center. All the other energy centers were clearly displayed.
When told about this experience and shown the card, Amy commented, ” You can’t glue it all down.” I realized that that was what I try to do with much of my life. I keep trying to glue things down, get them figured out once and for all. Interestingly enough, all the images in this soulcollage card are floating free. None are attached to anything else. They all float free and except for the female figure, they are all either round or rounded.
The guidance I later received from three of my other soulcollage cards, selected at random, sight unseen, to help me concerning the fear that rises up in me when I sense I’m being called to surrender my illusion of control and radically open myself to the flow of life follows:
* From the soulcollage card representing the Eternal Feminine: “I’d like you to know that nothing is permanent, yet you are held by an invisible force.”
* From the soulcollage card representing the One Who Takes the Long View, ” I’d like you to know that it’s ok not to know.”
* From the soulcollage card representing the One Whose Mind Is Open, ” I want you to know you can fly.”
From my experience with making this soulcollage card and from the guidance I received both from the 3 other soulcollage cards and from Amy, I was given an opportunity to experience what it is like to open myself to the flow of life and to give up the illusion of control. I was given just what I needed and I was not afraid.
This experience was full and rich on many levels and I will be thinking and writing about it for some time to come. But for now, I just want to relate, with her permission, an experience that one of the other participants, Debbie Long, shared with some of us because it captures so well one of the potential effects of engaging in practices such as soulcollage, dreamwork, meditation, or contemplative prayer.
Recently she entered her kitchen and glanced over at a vase of flowers containing, she noticed, one particularly lovely carnation. As she paused and looked at it, really taking in its beauty, she found herself speaking to it, saying, “ I see you. I may be the only one who ever really sees you. You are so lovely.” As the days passed, she watched as the loveliness of this flower faded and still she said, “ I see you. I remember how lovely you were. I see your beauty now. I may be the only one to ever see you. I am so grateful we met.”
The same thing repeated later that week when on a walk she heard a cardinal sing. “ I hear you, ” she said. “ I may be the only one, but I hear you. Your song is lovely,” and she sang back to the cardinal. For a time she and the cardinal sang back and forth to one another, each hearing the beauty of the other’s song.
This is a poem I wrote February 5, 1983 – 28 years ago. I want to spend some time with it now and see how much it still speaks to me and for me.
If It’s Love You Want, O God
If it’s love you want, O God
come not to me as swan or dove.
Evoke not awe or fear or faith
with myth and miracle’s cold embrace.
Inflame me, O my God, instead
with increments of mystery
like unexpected radiance
of sun full-slant on human face.
JDG
To live a symbolic life is to participate fully in life, to live with an awareness that there is something bigger than ourselves and what we think we know. When we live wholly and symbolically, we move beyond the tidy measure of reason and convention into the vital mystery of life itself. What follows are my thoughts on what is required to live in this way.
The older I get, the harder it becomes for me to speak clearly or convincingly of things if they aren’t connected in some way with what I have experienced first hand. Thus, what I have to say about living a symbolic life is unabashedly grounded in the personal, but I think it has general applicability and some general conclusions can be drawn from it.
Let me begin with a quote from James Hollis: ” If one is not to surrender to the easy assurance of the herd…then as Jung said, ‘ he has to go on a Quest, he has to find out what his soul says.’ ” Living symbolic lives means listening to what our souls say. The soul speaks in many ways. It speaks to us, for example, through dreams, events, people, visions, stories, symptoms, nature, music, and art. The soul’s language is often nonverbal and almost always nonlinear. The soul speaks in symbol, myth and metaphor.
I recall first discovering that my soul had a voice of its own when I was twelve. Several years after my mother’s death, my father married a woman who was horrified to learn that his three children had grown up unchurched.A rigorous plan of indoctrination, hymn singing and regular church attendance was promptly initiated. I wanted desperately to belong, to find a home, to gain approval and acceptance. As time went on, I became increasingly aware that all this would come when I was “saved”, when I would walk to the front of the church as the congregation sang “Just As I Am”. I also knew that coming forward would bring me a lot of attention. I wanted all of those things, wanted them badly, but something would not let me go forward. Week after week passed and I couldn’t do it, and indeed, I didn’t do it. I remember being puzzled at myself. Before then, I had not noticed any particular inability to do what was needed to gain acceptance, approval, and attention, and there have certainly been times since then when I have taken the easy way, when there was not congruence between what I knew to be true internally and what my outer words and behavior conveyed. But not that time. That time, I listened to what my soul had to say. In that case, the soul did not speak through dreams, stories, other people, art, nature, music, or symptoms. It spoke silently but compellingly and the result was that I was strangely unable to do something that seemed to be to my advantage.
My soul and I have been in intermittent dialogue since then. To be honest, much of the time I am not aware of being offered counsel, guidance, or correction, although dream work, journaling in the form of letters addressed to Abiding Presence, and soulcollage have helped me develop a sensitivity to soul and every now and then something breaks through my habitual patterns of thought, emotional reactivity, and behavior and redefines my sense of who I am, who I think others are, and what I believe the world to be. In tomorrow’s post, I will share a few things disciplined reflection on this experience at age twelve and other experiences since then have shown me about what is required to live a symbolic life.
I have just finished reading Melody Beattie’s book, THE GRIEF CLUB, which brings home the reality of the ever-changing, impermanent nature of life and the accompanying suffering such a reality brings. Told through the stories of her own experience and those of others, the book left me with compassion and profound respect for the struggles we all face as we attempt to come to terms with such a reality.
In the introduction, she writes, “It is not a book about overcoming. In many ways it is not a classic how-to. It’s for people in transition, people going through change and loss. It’s for people in pain, people who are numb, and people who aren’t sure what they’re feeling. ..This isn’t a book with a no-pain no-gain theme. It’s about that time in our life when what was familiar disappears, we’re not who we were, and we’re not yet who we’re becoming…One of the darkest places is that place where we don’t get or understand ourselves, and we think nobody else gets us either. We feel lost and all alone. We lose touch with the connection we have to ourselves and each other. It’s this connection that keeps us in Grace. When someone gets us, when they understand us, we understand ourselves. Then somehow the unacceptable becomes okay. We might not be happy about it – whatever it is – but we’ll find peace…Enlightenment isn’t waiting in the mountains of Tibet. It’s in the experiences we’re facing – and often resisting in our lives today. It’s in the changes we didn’t expect, ask for, or want. We can fantasize about the perfect life. It takes courage to have faith with the life we’ve been given and show up for it each day.”
In THE GRIEF CLUB we meet others, like ourselves, who have been initiated into clubs they never meant to join such as The Divorce Club, The Cancer Club, The Bankruptcy Club, The Alzheimer’s Disease Club, and The Chronic Pain Club. Even though we may not have been initiated into their particular club, hearing the honest account of each person’s experience connects us more deeply with our own experience as full time members of Humanity’s Club and gives us strength and encouragement. As Ira Progoff says, “This solitary work, we cannot do alone.”
Yesterday a friend reminded me of something she had read in AWAKENING JOY. The next time we find ourselves thinking or speaking of something we have to do, we can make one simple change and substitute the word “get” for the word “have” and observe what happens. It was a timely reminder. The past week had been filled with things I “had” to do and I found my resentment increasing. “When,” I asked myself plaintively, “was I ever going to get time for myself and what I wanted to do?”
So, I immediately tried out the suggestion and I was surprised to find that it made a huge difference. “I have to stop by the grocery store on my way home,” became, instead, “I get to stop by the grocery store on the way home.” A whole new perspective opened for me, one that included gratitude that there was a grocery store to be stopped by and that I was physically and mentally able to make the stop. I have tried it out on several things since then and what I find is that this simple substitution broadens my perspective, deepens my awareness and transforms irritation and resentment into gratitude . And I didn’t even have to go to a mountaintop in Tibet to come to this awakening.
You gave us more than a minute.
In that southern
drawl you told us,
“Take what abides.
Let it have its way with you.
Pull out stops, but
hold the tension,
until what lives
upon the page brings you to some-
thing old, now turned
new – a wedding
of form and feeling.”
JDG
Tell me, how did those angry words
multiply, add,
or take away?
What did they solve?
When inequalities abound,
when more is less,
and division’s
not short but long,
it may be time to turn the page,
broaden the scope,
and bring to bear
a higher math.
JDG
aholdingplace 