Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Filling the void - a cure


Sometimes, I wander around with the vague feeling that something is missing. I feel compelled to check the post, I stare around the local bookshop, waiting for that mysterious something to announce its presence - expecting of course that when I find it, the void will be filled.

But even a cheque from gallery sales arriving in the mail or the discovery of a wonderful book does not alter the disturbing feeling of absence. Thanks to a post by Susie Monday I have found the cure. It is to be more of myself.

This solution felt right, but I was unsure where this more was going to come from. I already felt like most of my life was spent being myself, making art in the studio or writing my children's book by the fire.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes explains that nurturing your psychic life involves paying attention to your dreams. My dream in brief was this. I had walked into the sea declaring my independence only to find a large fish had taken my right arm and was pulling it into it's belly. With great difficulty I managed to extricate myself. Then, still in the sea, I came across a woman with a shovel looking for potatoes. I took the shovel and found a huge stash of them.

The beauty of Active Imagination is that the characters, creatures and things in a dream speak for themselves, they tell you what they mean and what they want - which is just as well for there is no way my mind could unravel this one.

Aware that creatures in dreams are often wise and helpful beings - no matter how they first appear - and that resistance in a dream is often a reflection of the ego resisting change - I asked the fish what would have happened if it had succeeded in pulling me in.

The answer was an image of a firelit cavern with a sheet of paper waiting for me. The fish told me it was starving. I would have to earn my freedom by feeding it with a drawing. I would be freed if I promised to continue to feed it with drawings done with care and lots of detail in them.

The potatoes on the other hand told me they were all the ideas, impulses and unlived potential that was clogging up my system. What they wanted was a special box with pieces of card in it, so each one of them could be written up. In this way they would be acknowledged and honoured and the heart would have a chance to choose from among them. They didn't all need to be acted upon - just brought out into the light - given a place in the conscious life.

So there in part was my answer to the more I needed to be. There was another part to this answer involving a crazy lady archetype - but more of that in another post!


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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