Recently I read Richard Merryman’s biography, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, and was moved by his portrait of this complex man. He writes:

“This tenderness for unappreciated people reduced by life – his reverence for self-sufficiency and perseverance – is a fundamental energy in Wyeth’s work. He has said,  ‘ I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.’ He has also said, ‘Love is not nearly as useful as hate.’

The opposite energy – ‘hate’ – is a coadrenaline driving the intensity he pours into each painting. It is his word for the free-floating rage and fear – and the profound seriousness – he hides beneath a puckish irreverence. Ricocheting between love and hate, he is a thicket of opposites – kind, weak, tough, selfish, insecure, egotistical, poetic, wise, elegant, vulgar, naive, and ruthlessly determined. A mischievous anarchist, he is excitable to the point of wildness; his square, boyish face – below wiry, close-cropped light brown hair – is as rubbery as a clown’s. Laughter puckers the corners of his bright blue,  hooded, conspiratorial eyes into crow’s-feet. He clicks his teeth as he cackles with delight.

Yet this intricate sprite is drawn to simplicity, to the understatement of winter, to white, to the restrictions of realism, and the driest, most lapidary of all mediums – egg tempera – a compound of powdered pigment, distilled water, and egg yolk that hardens on the panel almost instantly. He says,  ‘I begin with emotion and am excited to the point where it affects my stomach. That’s where I’m odd to paint the way I do, these immaculate pictures, closely done. You’d think you’d find a very calm mathematician.’

…In the winter of 1945,  Andrew painted the dilapidated interior of Archie’s [Mother Archie’s Church]. Its name was a mispronunciation of its founder, Mary Archer, a stocky, quiet woman of mixed blood who wore a black bonnet and preached in a black dress with white lace around the neck…[In the painting] a jagged hole shows black in the battered plaster. Beneath an oil-lamp chandelier a white dove flutters. Talking about  Mother Archie’s Church, he tells of an Easter Service when the climax was to be the Holy Ghost released in the form of a dove. The cue was sounded, nothing happened; a long pause. Then a voice called through the trap door, ‘ The cat ate the Holy Ghost. Shall I throw down the cat?’ “

What stays with me is  how lovingly Merryman captured the many, often contradictory,  facets and layers that made up Andrew Wyeth. If only we could all see and be seen so wholly and so well.

Gray mist rises on rolling hills.

Six horses graze.

Lone tree glows gold

in morning haze,

softly signaling change is here.

Go slow. Go slow.

You never know

what is coming

around the curve, what it could mean.

A tree?  A call?

Take it slow. Graze

on all this green.

                                                              JDG

No one understands

how a butterfly is made.

Yes, we can name the stages:

egg

larvae

caterpillar

butterfly

But, how does a caterpillar know

to shed its skin and be wrapped

in self-created darkness?

How can it let itself liquify

in order to be made anew?

This we do not understand.

But, we know how essential

the chrysalis is,

this place that holds,

gentle and firm,

for the mystery to play out

until  we get our wings.

                                                                                                   JDG

Sometimes responsibility

sucks. Enough of

this character

building and all.

I’m practically a monument

already, which is

not how I saw

this late season.

What I had in mind was fooling

around, being

no account, a

joyful deadbeat.

                                     JDG

To Get Home

Laser focus each day

on one pure joy-

a vivid red maple leaf,

sun dazzling layered pine branches,

a purple beauty toad lily,

the touch of a gentle breeze,

the melody of a garrulous brook,

tangled thick vines encircling a tree,

an utterly naked sycamore,

fuzzy moss creeping up an oak,

flickering candles at a Celtic service.

                                                                                                                  by Betty Williams

 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.

1. A symbolic life is grounded in our own experience, not someone else’s experience, no matter how powerful or attractive that other person’s experience may be.
   
2. We must be willing to be radically open to new experiences that are unlikely and unusual and not dismiss them as mere imagination or temporary aberrations.
3. A symbolic life is a life lived in relationship with something beyond ourselves. It is a life lived in what Henry Corbin calls “creative prayer – an intimate dialog between two beings who depend upon one another and whose interaction leads to ‘new creation’.”
4. We must be willing to actively engage what comes to us, to struggle with it if necessary, and not just passively receive it or be completely taken over by it. Rollo May says that creative people often possess talent, but something other than talent is also needed. That something else, he says, is intensity of involvement. The genius, he goes on to say, has both talent and intensity of involvement. For living a symbolic life, talent helps but intensity of involvement is essential.
5. We must have the capacity at some point to step back from our experience and reflect upon it, allowing an element of objectivity to enter.
6.  We must take some action as a result of our experience. We must find a way to bring it into our everyday lives.
7. A basic steadfastness of spirit is essential. Even when we get caught up in our usual concerns, we have to return again and again to our dreams, to meditation, to our journals, to creative expression, to prayer, and we must let what we discover there infuse our daily lives with meaning and compassion.