Tag Archives: photography

Persephones Descent

Short surreal film ritual featuring Reese miller as Persephone/the Kore, and me as Hades

Photographs of Persephone ( see a former blog post of the photographs of Reese as the Kore before the descent and becoming Queen of the underworld)

The Kore Jester Maiden

🌹 “This time of year my thoughts always return to the rites of Kore. I might be coping with the world folding in on itself, and the similar changes I experience within my own inner world, or it may just be an inherent fascination with etiological myth, to say nothing of the powerful duality of delicate springtime maiden and Queen of the Underworld within one goddess.

Her more widely known name, Persephone, means “bringer of death,” in the sense that her deft but gentle hand is a comfort and a guide to those making their descent. In this way, and as the goddess of the Eleusinian mysteries, she herself is the door to worlds unknown, a portal to revelations. Among her other epithets in Homer and among cults (Euripides calls her arrētos, “she who none may name,” Homer calls her agauē and hagnē, “venerable” and “demanding respect”). Persephone is her name as mistress of the house of Hades. In these rites, she is often referred to as Kore, which means, simply, “maiden.” “

~Sara Long

🌹

Reese Miller as the Kore , (or Jester Maiden) before being Taken by hades to the Underworld to become his Jester Queen

The Kore archetype, traditionally representing youthful innocence and potential in mythology and psychology, symbolizes much more than just the early stages of life. It is a powerful symbol of transformation, growth, and the cyclical nature of existence. The Kore, as a maiden figure often associated with goddesses like Persephone in Greek mythology, also carries deeper meanings about the illusions tied to youth, time, and identity. By examining the symbolism of the Kore, we can explore the larger themes of human experience—innocence, growth, and the journey from one phase of life to another. ~ Jenna Lilla
The Kore is often depicted as a young maiden, symbolizing the freshness and purity of youth. This stage of life is marked by innocence, untested potential, and an open future. In mythology, the Kore is often paired with the figure of the mother, as seen in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Kore, in this case, represents Persephone in her youthful form before her descent into the underworld, where she transforms into the queen of the dead. This dual role of the Kore—both innocent maiden and future queen—symbolizes the unfolding of life from youth to maturity.
While the Kore is a symbol of growth and transformation, this very cycle also highlights the transitory nature of life. Youth, while often idealized as a time of beauty, vitality, and potential, is fleeting. The attachment to youth and the fear of aging reflect deeper psychological and spiritual challenges. Just as the Kore will eventually transform, we, too, are called to move beyond the illusions of youth and embrace the full journey of life. ~Jenna Lilla
The Kore’s association with youth also raises questions about how we perceive time and change. The concept of youth, as something idealized or feared, is tied to the larger illusion of time itself. We often become attached to the idea of youth as a period of innocence and purity, but this attachment can lead to a sense of loss as we grow older. The fear of aging, or the desire to remain forever young, is an illusion created by the mind, which clings to temporary states of being.
~Jenna Lilla
In reality, the essence of life is timeless and not bound by the cycles of youth and age. The Kore archetype reminds us that while we pass through different stages of life, these stages are just phases in a larger continuum. The true nature of our being—our consciousness or essence—remains unchanged, even as our bodies age and our experiences shift. The Kore, therefore, symbolizes the movement through these stages, but also serves as a reminder that beneath these changing forms, there is something timeless and unchanging.~Jenna Lilla
One of the central themes of the Kore archetype is the journey from innocence to wisdom. In many myths, this journey involves a descent into the unknown, a confrontation with darker, more challenging forces. In the case of Persephone, her abduction by Hades and subsequent time spent in the underworld represent the loss of innocence and the gaining of wisdom. This is not just a story about personal growth but about the necessary transitions that all individuals must undergo to attain greater understanding.
In this context, the Kore symbolizes the tension between innocence and experience, youth and maturity. While youth is often seen as a time of unblemished potential, true wisdom comes through the trials and challenges of life. However, both innocence and wisdom are part of the same journey. The duality between these states—between youth and age, innocence and wisdom—reflects the deeper truth that growth and transformation are part of the natural order of life. ~Jenna Lilla
The Kore archetype also speaks to the cyclical nature of life, where birth, growth, decay, and renewal are intertwined. In many cultures, the Kore is connected to the cycles of the seasons, particularly in the myth of Persephone, whose descent and return from the underworld are linked to the changing of the seasons. Her time in the underworld represents winter and death, while her return to the surface symbolizes spring and rebirth.
This cyclical pattern serves as a reminder that life is not linear but is made up of repeated cycles of growth and transformation. The Kore’s journey from maidenhood to queenhood, from innocence to wisdom, is not a one-time event but part of a continuous process of renewal. Just as nature moves through its seasons, so too do we pass through different phases of life, each phase offering its own lessons and opportunities for growth. ~Jenna Lilla
While the Kore represents the cycles of life, she also invites us to transcend the illusions of duality that often accompany these cycles. The distinction between youth and age, innocence and experience, can create a sense of separation, making us believe that these stages of life are opposites. However, the Kore archetype teaches that these are not separate states but are interconnected parts of a whole. ~Jenna Lilla
In the myth of Persephone, her role as both Kore (the maiden) and queen of the underworld shows that youth and maturity are two sides of the same coin. The cycle of life encompasses both light and dark, innocence and wisdom. By embracing both aspects of ourselves—the youthful, innocent part and the mature, wise part—we can move beyond the illusions of duality and experience a more integrated, whole sense of self.
~Jenna Lilla
Ultimately, the Kore archetype symbolizes the potential for growth, transformation, and renewal. She represents the beginning of a journey, but also the deeper truth that all stages of life are interconnected. The youthful innocence of the Kore is not something to cling to, but something to honor as part of the larger process of becoming. Her story is one of continuous transformation, reminding us that life is a series of cycles that lead us toward greater understanding and wisdom.
~Jenna Lilla
By reflecting on the Kore, we are reminded that the passage of time, the movement from youth to age, is not something to fear but something to embrace. Each phase of life brings its own gifts, and by accepting the flow of time, we can experience life more fully. The Kore symbolizes the beauty of this unfolding journey, encouraging us to embrace both the innocence of youth and the wisdom that comes with experience.
Jenna Lilla

The Dream and The Underworld

“⭐️This book changed the way I look at dreams, or maybe the book taught me what my heart always wanted me to understand. Hillman looks at the dream as happening in the “Underworld” – a place of death – and wants us to enter into that world to understand the dream instead of trying to drag the dream up into the day-world by interpreting it.

Some quotes from the book:

“Freud’s method projects the persons in a dream back over the bridge into the dream-day, even if for the sake of their latent meaning. We associate my dream-brother and dream-father to my day-brother and day-father and, by this association, return the dream to the day. Jung’s method of interpretation on the subjective level takes the dream persons into the subject of the dreamer. They become expressions of my psychic traits. They are introjected into my personality. In neither method do we ever truly leave the personal aspect of the dream persons, and thus they remain in the upperworld. Dare I say it loud and clear? The persons I engage with in dreams are neither representations of their living selves nor parts of myself. They are shadow images that fill archetypal roles; they are personae, masks, in the hollow of which is numen.”

“Public performance on a stage, perhaps because it puts us into the underworld of theatre, also constellates the curious interplay between life-soul and image-soul. The almost depersonalization experience of stage fright makes one feel deserted by one’s soul. All that one memorized and trained for has suddenly vanished. It is as if another soul must play the role, and this moment of going on stage is like a rite de passage, a transition into death.”

“For a dream image to work in life it must, like a mystery, be experienced as fully real. Interpretation arises when we have lost touch with the images, when their reality is derivative, so that this reality must be recovered through conceptual translation. Then we try to replace its intelligence with ours instead of speaking to its intelligence with ours.”

Hillman notes that when we see a killer in a dream, we tend to fear him. But Hillman looks at this figure as a helper who is trying to initiate us into the Underworld land-of-the-dead; the dream world:
“There is a divine death figure in the killer, either Hades, or Thanatos, or Kronos-Saturn, or Dis Pater, or Hermes, a death demon who would separate consciousness from it life attachments.

Hillman, in one section of the book describes the circus as a metaphor of the Underworld:
“Where else but the circus will we ever see the underworld in daylight: the tent of enclosed space, the rings, everyone as close to death as his or her art will allow, the freaks of nature that are beyond nature, and above all, the precise performances of repetitive nonsense, as if Ixion, Tantalus, and Sisyphus had once worked for Ringling Brothers.”

“The comic spirit masquerades in all things we do and say; we are each a joke and do not need to put on a white face. The matter is not one of becoming a clown but of learning what he teaches: making an art of our senseless repetitions, our collapsing and our pathologizings, putting on the face of death that allows the dream world in and watching it turn ordinary objects into amazing images, our public persons into butts of laughter.”

“Unfortunately psychology emphasizes attention and recall; the dayworld wishes to have, must absolutely have, a ‘good memory’; a bad memory is more devastating to success than is a bad conscience. Forgetting therefore becomes a pathological sign. But depth psychology based on an archetypal perspective might understand forgetting as serving a deeper purpose, seeing in these holes and slips in the dayworld the means by which events are transformed out of personal life, voiding it, emptying it. Somehow we must come to better terms with Lethe, since she rules many years, especially the last years, and we would be foolish to dismiss her work only as pathological. The romantics took Lethe most seriously.”⭐️

James Kulm, in reference to the book ‘The Dream and the Underworld’ by James Hillman

{self portrait series Kennedy Peak 8-6-24 part 4
::::The SilverScreen of the Underworld Dream }

~all photo captions contain quotes/excerpts from the book by Hillman

UNDERGROUND AND UNDERWORLD
When using the word underworld, it is imperative to keep in mind a distinction made by some classicists. This distinction is of great psychological importance, because it frees the psychic realm from nature. Chthon and ge (“underworld” and “underground”) do not necessarily refer to the same region or evoke identical feelings. “Chthon with its derivatives refers in origin to the cold, dead depths and has nothing to do with fertility. “This kind of deep ground is not the same as the dark earth; and the Great Lady (potnia chthon), who sends black-winged dreams and who can also be called Erinys, cannot simply be merged into the single figure of the Great Earth Mother.
Psychology’s great-mother complex has swallowed even her own differentiations. Small wonder that this complex is also called “uroboric consciousness,” for even she herself vanishes into an interpretive monotony that makes me believe that the monotheistic psychology I so often belabor is less a mimesis of ancient Hebrewism (within and alongside of which there was much space for imaginal variety) than it is a mimesis of the Great Mother. Monism as Momism. Be this as it may, when we read analytical psychology today to discover about the ‘chthonic,’ we find it has taken on her meaning of primitive earthiness. Morever, as primitive and earthy, it must mean matriarchal and feminine. Thus our instinctual body, whether in flesh or image, in men or women, in the past or now, belongs to her, and we must become murderous heroes to get it back. The great-mother complex hangs the trinket of female gender on agriculture and fertility, as well as on the earth, body, instinct, and on depth. This move ignores that chthonic is an epithet belonging in the sense of “Is ignorant about,” a chthon that cannot be identified with instinctual body or earthy soil.
Let us be clear: the chthonic is not only female, not only instinctual, not only physical, and it does not have to do with fertility rites. As Wilamowitz-Moellendorf said, Ïf modern scholars, who talk so much about chthonian cults, think in this connection of agriculture and all that goes along with Demeter in that sphere, they have not accustomed their ear to the overtones of Greek words.” The two words ge and chthon imply two worlds, the first of the earth and in it, the second below the earth and beyond it.
There are even three distinctions here which have been imagined as levels of earth: an earthed imagination in keeping with Ge herself, whose name we still find in ge-ography, ge-ology, and ge-ometry. The first of these distinctions is between Demeter’s horizontal green plain with its activities of growth and Ge, the earth below Demeter. This second level Ge, may be imagined as the physical and psychic ground of an individual or community, its ‘place on earth,’ with its natural rights, rituals, and laws (Ge-Themis). Here, Ge serves as a fundament on which human life depends even more deeply than on food and fertility, like a governing maternal principle that makes material fertility possible and is its spiritual ground, and then beneath these the third, chthon, the depths, the dead’s world.
Of course, a polytheistic mind does not firmly divide these “levels,” and so Demeter-Ge-chthon frequently merge in epithet and cult. (What scholars imagine about the Greeks does not correspond, nor must it, with what the Greeks imagine about the Gods.) Also against my distinctions is the fact that one can as well view the entire complex of the underworld that one can as well view the entire complex of the underworld from the perspective of Ge, as does Patricia Berry. She then is able to see much of the chthonic spirit that I meet in Hades to be equally present in Ge, and that Gaia (Ge) is both material, maternal earth, and chthonic void with its own spirit.
The question here partly turns on how one regards earth.
The strata of meanings which I have just laid out in terms of Demeter-Ge-chthon imagines a nonphysical earth or terre pur, below or beyond and maybe prior to the ground that we touch. Some etymologists and classicists try to relate the three “levels” culturally, believing one level of meaning to be prior in the sense of historically earlier than another; as if in a genealogy fantasy themselves, they try to derive one level from another, tracing the historical development of these three concepts. For example, Kirk refers to the very early pre-Socratic Pherecydes of Syros (frg. 1), who placed Chthon at the beginning with Zeus and Chronos, “but Chthonie acquired the name Ge…”
Rather than enter the arguments of historical fantasy, I would keep to the psychological distinctions reflected in the three words and three personifications. Ge herself shows two aspects. On the one hand, she has to do with retributive justice, with the Fates, and she has also mantic, oracular powers. (Ge chthonia was worshipped on Mykonos, together with Zeus Chthonios and Dionysos Leneus, as she was linked with the chthonic Pluto and Hermes and the Erinyes at Athens [Areopagus].) This is the “great lady” who sends the black-winged dreams and is appropriately the mother of Themis (“Justice”). This spiritual side of her can be distinguished, on the other hand, from the physical Ge to whom grains and fruits were given (Ge-Demeter). Demeter too has a mystery aspect; her daughter Persephone belongs to Hades and has an underworld function. The spiritual significance may not be reduced to the physical (death cult to fertility rites, sense of justice to agricultural rituals) without ignoring the blatant fact that there are different figures with different epithets. In other words, even the earth and nature have their psychic function as well as their terrestrial ones, and one may serve the earth and be on the ground in more ways than one, i.e., through psychic activities, and not only through natural ones.
“Is it the transition to light that gives the dream its shadowy quality? We all know how much of an art it is, not to dream, but to recall it.”
The distinction between chthonicand earthy, between invisible fundaments and tangible ground, between darkness of soul and blackness of soil, between three Egyptian hieroglyphs, one for earth, another for Aker or entrance to the underground at the edge of existence, and yet another for the realm of the dead of Anubis, the blue-black jackal-dog.
Once again, the distinctions are presented in terms of distance. The most radical classicist of the late nineteenth century, Erwin Rohde friend of Nietzsche, said in his great work Psyche that the underworld of Hades and Persephone is so remote from our world that those removed there “can have no influence upon the life and doings of men on earth.”He further emphasized the distinction between the underground of Ge and the chthonic underworld by saying that Ge ïn actual worship was seldom found among the groups of male and female deities of a chthonic nature such as were worshipped together at many places.”
The spiritual quality of the underworld stands forth most clearly in descriptions of Tartaros, which, from Hesiod onward, was imagined to be at the very bottom of Hades, its farthest chasm. Tartaros was compared with the sky – as distant from the earth as the heaven above, and it was personified as the son of ether and of earth, that is, a realm of dust, a composite of the most material and immaterial.
As the fantasy of Tartaros developed, it became more and more a pneumatic region of air and wind. Unlike the Christian hell of fire, in the imagination of late antiquity Tartaros was a region of dense cold air without light. Hence, Hades often was spoken of as having wings, just as in the Gilgamesh Epic, Enkidu dreams of his death as a transformation into a bird, his arms covered with feathers. The dead are clad like birds, their element evidently air.
The volatilization of the underworld contrasts it sharply with the ground under our feet. In the Alexandrian age, the netherworld lost its localization in the earth altogether – that is, it became free of natural literalism – and was geographically transposed to the underside of the world. There was now a lower hemisphere. The word subterranean (hypogeios, or “below ge”) referred to the whole celestial hemisphere curved below our earth and which, like Hades, must necessarily be invisible from our perspective. It cannot be seen from our usual standpoint. Already then the dayworld and the nightworld, the two sides of the romantic soul, were conceived in a geographical theology of the upperworld and netherworld.
In “this theology the world is divided into two halves by the line of the horizon; upper hemisphere is the domain of the living and the higher gods, the lower that of the dead and the infernal gods. “The Egyptians had carried into extreme detail this reversed world below our feet. The dead walked upside down, feet up, heads down. “People there walk with their feet against the ceiling. This has the unpleasant consequence that digestion goes in the reverse direction, so that excrements arrive in the mouth.” The Underworld is converse to the dayworld, and so its behavior will be obverse, perverse. What is merely shit from the daytime perspective – or what Freud called day-residues – becomes soul food when turned upside down. The way we go about there, the way we ruminate, even logic is stood on its head, for there our heads are in another place. (In Chapter 6 we shall look at some contemporary examples of this “upsidedownness,” including excrements in dreams.)
Might there be an archetypal figure within Freud’s “day residues” that are the material of the dream? Could these leftover scraps refer to the household garbage that was sacrifice to Hekate (Cults2:515)? Hekate has long been implicated in dream interpretations. Both the magical view that considers dreams to be foretellings and the nineteenth-century mechanistic view that attributes them to waste products of physiological sensations (garbage) show Hekate’s influence when she becomes equated with Nyx (night), as in Spenser and at times in Shakespeare, then dreams become her province and our interpretative ideas reflect her perspectives.
We may continue this tradition, although in a different manner. Yes, the dream is made of scraps that belong to the Goddess who makes sacred the waste of life, so that it all counts, it all matters. Offering the dream to “the mysteries of Hekate and the night” (King Lear, act 1, scene 1) means giving back the regurgitations that “come up” in dreams without attempts to save them morally or to find their dayworld use. The junk of the soul is primordially saved by Hekate’s blessing, and even our trashing ourselves can be led back to her. The messy life is a way of entering her domain and becoming a “child of Hekate.”Our part is only to recognize that there is a myth in the mess so as to dispose of the day residues at the proper place, that is, to place them at Hekate’s altar. Ritually, the garbage was placed at night at a crossroads so that each dream may lead off in at least three directions besides the one we have come from. Hekate, who has traditionally been represented with three heads, keeps us looking and listening in many ways at once.
Because the underworld differs so radically from the underground, that which has its home there, dreams, must refer to psychic or pneumatic world of ghosts, spirits, ancestors, souls, daimones. These are invisible by nature, and not merely invisible because they have been forgotten or repressed. This world is fluid, or dusty, fiery, muddy, or aetherial, so there is nothing firm to hold to – unless we develop intuitive instruments for seizing impalpables that slip through our fingers or burn at the touch.
By locating the dream among these impalpable fundamentals in Hades, we will begin to find that dreams reflect an underworld of essences rather than an underground of root and seed. They present images of being rather than of becoming. We will learn that a dream is less a comment on life and an indication as to where it is growing, than it is a statement from the chthonic depths, the cold, dense, unchanging state – what we so often today call psychopathic because, as Freud saw, the dream does not show morality, human feelings, or the sense of time. We can no longer turn to the dream in hopes of progress, transformation, and rebirth.
I think too that the underworld teaches us to abandon our hopes for achieving unification of personality by means of the dream. The underworld spirits are plural. So much is this the case that the di manes (underworld spirits), who were the Roman equivalent of the Greek theoi chthonioi, have no native singular form. Even individual dead persons were spoken of plurally, as di manes. “The ancient Egyptian was thought to live after death in a multiplicity of forms, each of these forms was the full man himself”(Ba, p. 113). The underworld is an innumerable community of figures. The endless variety of figures reflects the endlessness of the soul, and dreams restore to consciousness this sense of multiplicity. The polytheistic perspective is grounded in the chthonic depths of the soul. A psychotherapeutic emphasis will be upon the disintegrative effects of the dream, which also confronts us with our moral dis-integrity, our psychopathic lack of a central hold on ourselves. Dreams show us to be plural and that each of the forms that figure there are “the full man himself,” full potentials of behavior. Only by falling apart (RP, pp. 53-112) into the multiple figures do we extend consciousness to embrace and contain its psychopathic potentials.
We get into difficulties when we try to read the deep chthonic level from the viewpoints of Demeter or of Ge. To perceive the chthonic with Demeter’s eyes is to take the dream as signal for literal action and to translate it with naturalistic ethics into a moralized world. To take a dream as containing an immoral implication or a moral indication for setting matters right and redressing a balance is to read it from the Ge-Themis-Dike perspective. Perhaps we need the intervention of another lady of the underworld, Hekate, who was especially adept with ghosts, who both brought and banned fear, and who had nothing to do with the round of human life (marriage, birth, agriculture), herself without brother or sister or any descendants. “Her worship was without morality.” Hekate’s underworld perspective reaches to the chthonic depth of the dream, which, on the one hand, is a simple statement of essence – how spectral things look when stripped of their human context – and, on the other, elicits our psychopathy.
The region of the soul in which dreams have their home is deeper than flesh-and-blood urges, which we have been, mistakenly, calling chthonic, as if it were the same as natural, as if the underworld referred to ira and cupiditas, the blood-soul, the thymos. This all is earthy; the natural, physical, somatic soul of emotions. Our modern word unconscious has become a catch-all, collecting into one clouded reservoir all fantasies of the deep, the lower, the baser, the heavier (depressed), and the darker. We have buried in the same monolithic tomb called The Unconscious the red and earthy body of the primeval Adam, the collective common man and woman, and the shades, phantoms, and ancestors. We cannot distinguish a compulsion from a call, an instinct for an image, a desirous demand from a movement of imagination. Looking into the night from the while light of the dayworld (where the term unconscious was fashioned), we cannot tell the red from the black. So, we read dreams for all sorts of messages at once – somatic, personal, psychic, mantic, ancestral, practical, confusing instinctual and emotional life with the realm of death.
The pronounced distinction between emotion and soul, between emotional man and psychological man, comes out in another of Heraclitus’ fragments (85): “. . . whatever it [thymos] wishes it buys at the price of soul.” Thymos, the earlier Greek experience of emotional consciousness or moist soul, did not belong in the underworld. So, to consider the dream as an emotional wish costs soul; to mistake the chthonic as the natural loses psyche. We cannot claim to be psychological when we read dream image in terms of drives or desires. Whatever counsel an analyst gives about emotional life, supposing it drawn from dreams, refers to his experience, which he reflects from the dreams. It is not in the dreams. He is “sup-posing” about them, that is, he is “putting onto” them what he knows about life.
What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. We are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it.
Again, we can follow Heraclitus (frg. 27): “When men die there awaits what they neither expect nor even imagine.” The word translated here as “expect” is related in Greek to “hope” (elpis), so that the specific hope that is abandoned (Dante, Inferno 3) on entering the underworld perspective is the fantasy of daylife expectations and flesh-and-blood illusions. Souls in Hades are “incurable” said Plato. There is no alteration to be hoped for. Such hope would be hope for the wrong thing. We need more the hope of St. Paul, which is a hope of invisibles and for invisibles, than the hope of Pandora, who, as the wife of Prometheus, contains a hidden hope, which he makes evident in his mission to help mankind. To go deep into a dream requires abandoning hope, the hope that rises in the morning and would turn the dream to its purposes. At the Hades level of the dream there is neither hope nor despair. They cancel each other out; and we can move beyond the language of expectations, measuring progressions and regressions, ego strengthening and weakening, coping and failing.
Let me once more try to draw this distinction between the underground of vital, emotional life and the underworld Heraclitus said (frg. 15):
It it were not in honour of Dionysus
that they conducted the procession and sang
the hymn to the male organ, their activity would be
completely shameless.
Hades and Dionysus are the same, no matter
how much they go mad and rave celebrating
bacchic rites in honour of the latter.
The passage has given scholars – those who accept this phrasing at all – so much trouble partly because it juxtaposes, even identifies, the very different realms we are keeping distinct: psychic essences and emotional nature.
This fragment refers to the mystery of a sacred procession and it must be read with a similar reverence, even as a revelation of something profound in acts that seem shamelessly pornographic, raving, and mad. It is therefore not enough to pass it off with a moral generality, as some interpreters do, that Heraclitus means that even the wildest life forces also lead to death, or let it go by, as other interprets do, as another of his metaphysical generalities about the sameness of life and death (frgs. 62, 88). We are still left with the vivid imagery of this mystery in the sexual language that is so fundamental to psychology. So, Heraclitus, as one psychologist to another, across the centuries I read you to be saying that for this troublesome distinction between emotion and soul, between the perspective of vitality (Dionysos) and the perspective of psyche (Hades), sexual fantasy holds a secret. In what seems most evident, public, and concrete, there is also something covered in shame, hidden and invisible.
The Hades within Dionysus says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for soul in the phallic parade, that all our life force, including the polymorphous and pornographic desires of the psyche, refer to the underworld of images. Things in life, no matter how full of life, are not only natural. Dionysos is also a “downer.” We may believe we are living life only on the level of life, but we cannot escape the psychic significance of what we are doing. Soul is made in the rout of the world. What has meaning for life has meaning for soul at the same moment, so consider you living in the light of the Hades within it.
The other side of the mysterious identity, the Dionysos within Hades, says that there is zoe, a vitality in all underworld phenomena. The realm of the dead is not as dead as we expect it. Hades too can rape and also seize the psyche through sexual fantasies. Although without thymos, body, or voice, there is a hidden libido in the shadows. The images in Hades are also Dionysian – not fertile in the natural sense, but in the psychic sense, imaginatively fertile. There is an imagination below the earth that abounds in animal forms, that revels and makes music. There is a dance in death. Hades and Dionysos are the same. As Hades darkens Dionysos toward his own richness. Farnell describes their fusion as a “mildness joined with melancholy.”

Wounds as Doors

The pathologized images have moved the soul in several ways: we are afraid; we feel vulnerable and in danger; our very physical substance and sanity appear to be menaced; we want to prevent or rectify. Especially this last seizes us. We feel protective, impelled to correct, straighten, repair. For we have confused something sick with something wrong. […]
affliction reaches us partly through the guilt it brings. Guilt belongs to the experiences of deviation, the the sense of being off, failing, ‘missing the mark’. […]
However the true missing of the mark is taking the guilt literally, where failings becomes faults to be set right. This places the guilt on the shoulders of the ego who ‘should not’ have failed. Then pathologizing reinforces the ego’s style and guilt serves a secondary gain, increasing the ego’s sense of importance: ego becomes superego, drivenly busy with repairing wrongs. A guilty ego is no less egocentric than a proud one.

James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology

{self Portrait series part 3 : 8-6-24}

“The poeisis of space
In this chaotic time
Of birth”
~Charleen Johnston

What door is opened into soul through our wounds.

James Hillman
The cure of the shadow is on the one hand a moral problem, that is, recognition of what we have repressed, how we perform our repressions, how we rationalize and deceive ourselves, what sort of goals we have and what we have hurt, even maimed, in the name of these goals. On the other hand, the cure of the shadow is a problem of love. How far can our love extend to the broken and ruined parts of ourselves, the disgusting and perverse? How much charity and compassion have we for our own weakness and sickness?… Loving oneself is no easy matter just because it means loving all of oneself, including the shadow where one is inferior and socially so unacceptable. The care one gives this humiliating part is also the cure. More: as the cure depends on care, so does caring sometimes mean nothing more than carrying.

James Hillman, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature
For any one of us, child or adult, the question eclipsing all others is: How does what comes with you to the world find a place in the world? How does my meaning fit with the meanings to which I am asked to conform? What helps growing down?

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
But our task here is not to restore all the invisibles but to discriminate among them by attending to the one that once was called your daimon or genius, sometimes your soul or your fate, and now your acorn.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
Attention does for consciousness what our hands do for our bodies: it grabs hold of nature so that we can change it.

James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology: Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 5
For the daimon surprises. It crosses my intentions with its interventions, sometimes with a little twinge of hesitation, sometimes with a quick crush on someone or something. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.

James Hillman
Ideas that we do not know we have have us. And then they shape our experiences from behind, unbeknown. Psychology’s job, it seems to me, is to see the subjective, archetypal factor in our sight, before or while looking at facts and events. Other sciences have to pretend to being objective, to be describing things as they are; psychology fortunately is always bound by its psychic limitations and can be spared the pretense of objectivity. In place of the obligation to be objectively factual, it is obliged to be subjectively aware, which becomes possible only if we are willing to have an exhaustive go at the assumptions in our primary notions.

James Hillman, Anima: Anatomy of a Personified Notion
There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
“The work of soul–making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of the soul… Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, an interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life….”

James Hillman
Psychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to images and turns to them in its darkness. Its trust is in the imagination as the only uncontrovertible reality, directly presented, immediately felt.

James Hillman
Soul making, as work on anima through images, offers a way of resolving the dependencies of transference. For it is not the therapist or any actual person whatever who is the keeper of my soul beyond all betrayals, but the archetypal persons of the Gods to whom the anima acts as bridge. The shaping of her amorphous moods, sulfuric passions, bitter resentments, and bubbles of distraction into distinct personalities is the main work of therapeutic analysis or soul-making. Therefore, it works in imagination, with imagination, and for imagination. It discovers and forms a personality by disclosing and shaping the multiple soul personalities out of the primary massa confusa of arguing voices and pushing demands.

From Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50
This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
…you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you’re estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.

James Hillman
I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I’m in the psyche…

James Hillman
Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.

James Hillman
The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life – and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.

James Hillman
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.

James Hillman
Extraordinary people display calling most evidently…they are extraordinary because their calling comes through so clearly and they are so loyal to it. They serve as exemplars of calling and its strength, and also of keeping faith with its signals.

James Hillman
For centuries we have searched for the right term for this “call”. The Romans named it your ‘genius’; the Greeks, your ‘daimon’; and the Christians your guardian angel. The Romantics, like Keats, said the call came from the heart, and Michelangelo’s intuitive eye saw an image in the heart of the person he was sculpting. The Neoplatonists referred to an imaginal body, the ‘ochema’, that carried you like a vehicle. It was your personal bearer or support. For some it is Lady Luck or Fortuna; for others a genie or jinn, a bad seed or evil genius. In Egypt, it might have been the ‘ka’, or the ‘ba’ with whom you could converse. Among the people we refer to as Eskimos and others who follow shamanistic practices, it is your spirit, your free-soul, your animal-soul, your breath-soul.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
Perception bestows blessing—as the stories sketched in this chapter attempt to demonstrate. Perception brings into being and maintains the being of whatever is perceived; and when perception sees in “the holiness of the Heart’s affections,” again as these stories say, things are revealed that prove the Truth of the Imagination.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human
condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one’s character.

James Hillman
Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering.

James Hillman
I like to imagine a person’s psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.

James Hillman
Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.

James Hillman

Anything you attend to carefully can bring blessing.

James Hillman

An individual’s harmony with his or her ‘own deep self’ requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.

James Hillman
An individual’s harmony with his or her ‘own deep self’ requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.

James Hillman

The Artist Spews…..

🌟Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the “artiste-manque,” as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his in­troversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.🌟

:::🌟Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

{Self Portrait Series 8-7-24 part 2}

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The neurotic exhausts himself not only in self-preoccupations like hypochondrial fears and all sorts of fantasies, but also in others: those around him on whom he is dependent become his therapeutic work project; he takes out his subjective problems on them. But people are not clay to be molded; they have needs and counter-wills of their own. The neurotic’s frustration as a failed artist can’t be remedied by anything but an objective creative work of his own. Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he also satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
In Jung’s terms-that we noted previously-the work is the artist’s own transference projection, and he knows that consciously and critically. Whatever he does he is stuck with himself, can’t get securely outside and beyond himself. He is also stuck with the work of art itself. Like any material achievement it is visible, earthly, impermanent. No matter how great it is, it still pales in some ways next to the transcending majesty of nature; and so it is ambiguous, hardly a solid immortality symbol. In his greatest genius man is still mocked. No matter that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. The artist and the madman are trapped by their own fabrications; they wallow in their own anality, in their protest that they really are something special in creation.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something–an object or ourselves–and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Guilt results from unused life, from the unlived in us.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
And so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. If man is the only animal whose consciousness of self gives him an unusual dignity in the animal kingdom, he also pays a tragic price for it. The fact that the child has to identify -first- means that his very first identity is a social product. His habitation of his own body is built from the outside in; not from the inside out. He doesn’t unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him. As the child responds to the vocal symbols learned from his object, he often gives the pathetic impression of being a true social puppet, jerked by alien symbols and sounds. What sensitive parent does not have his satisfaction tinged with sadness as the child repeats with such vital earnestness the little symbols that are taught him?

Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man
Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the “character defenses”: he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn’t have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the “ways of the world.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
By the time the child grows up, the inverted search for a personal existence through perversity gets set in an individual mold, and it becomes more secret. It has to be secret because the community won’t stand for the attempt by people to wholly individualize themselves. If there is going to be a victory over human incompleteness and limitation, it has to be a social project and not an individual one. Society wants to be the one to decide how people are to transcend death; it will tolerate the causa-sui project only if it fits into the standard social project. Otherwise there is the alarm of “Anarchy!” This is one of the reasons for bigotry and censorship of all kinds over personal morality: people fear that the standard morality will be undermined-another way of saying that they fear they will no longer be able to control life and death. A person is said to be “socialized” precisely when he accepts to “sublimate” the body-sexual character of his Oedipal project. Now these euphemisms mean usually that he accepts to work on becoming the father of himself by abandoning his own project and by giving it over to “The Fathers.” The castration complex has done its work, and one submits to “social reality”; he can now deflate his own desires and claims and can play it safe in the world of the powerful elders. He can even give his body over to the tribe, the state, the embracing magic umbrella of the elders and their symbols; that way it will no longer be a dangerous negation for him. But there is no real difference between a childish impossibility and an adult one; the only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self-deceit-what we call the “mature” character.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead. There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Kierkegaard gives us some portrait sketches of the styles of denying possibility, or the lies of character-which is the same thing. He is intent on describing what we today call “inauthentic” men, men who avoid developing their own uniqueness; they follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children. They are “inauthentic” in that they do not belong to themselves, are not “their own” person, do not act from their own center, do not see reality on its terms; they are the one-dimensional men totally immersed in the fictional games being played in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning: the corporation men in the West, the bureaucrats in the East, the tribal men locked up in tradition-man everywhere who doesn’t understand what it means to think for himself and who, if he did, would shrink back at the idea of such audacity and exposure.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose their feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish: food is not the primary nourishment of man.

Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man
Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Take stock of those around you and you will … hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
There is no doubt that creative work is itself done under a compulsion often indistinguishable from a purely clinical obsession. In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jack-hammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are “right” for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum. Look at the joy and eagerness with which workers return from vacation to their compulsive routines. They plunge into their work with equanimity and lightheartedness because it drowns out something more ominous.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
In other words, as long as man is an ambiguous creature he can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust. Faith poses a new life task, the adventure in openness to a multi-dimensional reality.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The “healthy” person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the “real” man, is the one who has transcended himself.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. … What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Take the average man who has to stage in his own way the life drama of his own worth and significance. As a youth he, like everyone else, feels that deep down he has a special talent, an indefinable but real something to contribute to the richness and success of life in the universe. But, like almost everyone else, he doesn’t seem to hit on the unfolding of this special something; his life takes on the character of a series of accidents and encounters that carry him along, willy-nilly, into new experiences and responsibilities. Career, marriage, family, approaching old age – all these happen to him, he doesn’t command them. Instead of his staging the drama of his own significance, he himself is staged, programmed by the standard scenario laid down by his society.

Ernest Becker, Angel in Armor: A Post-Freudian Perspective on the Nature of Man
Secrets and silences make life more real: the individual, self-absorbed and inwardly musing, taking himself very seriously, radiates a contagious aura: the tacit communication that the serious and the meaningful exist.

Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man
Kierkegaard put it this way: But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by “the others.” By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of wordly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself… does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments…. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Creativity is Divine

🌟🌟🌟 “Creativity is divine! To me it is the virgin soul opening to spirit and creating the divine child. You cannot live without it. That’s the meaning of life, that creative fire………::”

“::….. My soul is fed. I see, I smell, I taste, I hear, I touch. Through the orifices of my body, I give and I receive. I am not trying to capture what is absent. It’s that interchange between the embodied soul and the outside world that is the dynamic process. That’s how growth takes place. That is life.”🌟🌟🌟

Marion Woodman

{self Portrait series at Kennedy peak 8-6-24}

This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.
Marion Woodman
To me, real love, the move from power to love, involves immense suffering. Any creative work comes from that level, where we share our sufferings, just the sheer suffering of being human. And that’s where the real love is.
Marion Woodman
When the power comes from within us and we claim it as our own, then we no longer have to affirm ourselves by dominating others. The irony is that we are actually afraid of our own power.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
Only by discovering and loving the goddess lost within our rejected body can we hear our own authentic voice.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul
I yearned for lightness; I still yearn for lightness. Lightness is freedom — freedom from the heaviness of too much stuff, too many words, too heavy a pull toward inertia. I feared being buried in stone — becoming stone.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life
Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you’re left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life
In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety—in fact, most neuroses and compulsions—are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition. We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light. Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
The Goddess is the unspeakable wisdom that grows into the very cells of the body. She lives with this sacramental truth at her center: the beauty and the horror of the whole of life are blazing in Her love. She is dancing in the flames.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
In the story of Persephone and Hades there is a child. Hades abducts Persephone and takes her into the Underworld, where in some versions of the myth she has a child. In many of the myths, Leda and the swan, Danae and the shower of gold, for example, the human woman is impregnated by the god. In other words, matter is penetrated by spirit and the child of the union of matter and spirit is the divine child.

Marion Woodman
You think of yourself — light, fast, free — free of earth, free of bondage to your body. In your ‘perfect’ body, you are in control, addicted to the light that keeps you out of body. You’re a swan maiden, addicted to wings, addicted to spirit. You refused to eat in order to fly.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life
The solid line throughout was my trying to make space to fly and forever smashing my wings against the bars of the cage. Granted, the cage grew bigger and very big, but I was always beyond the collective in my soul and always cut back by the collective in my body.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life
The word ‘feminine,’ as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
Why put them through the danger of the fire? And then, I heard, as though it spoke, the voice of the guardian-head: “Each piece must go through the fire. The cowl, the wings, the pneuma, the source, the flow. All must go the way that I have gone. Each may crack in the process, as I have cracked. But look, the crack has healed. I did not break. Without the fire, the piece is untested, unlived, raw. Each must go through the fire.

Marion Woodman, Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity
Kundalini power, the symbol of raising the energy coiled at the base of the spine upward through the chakras, is called by Sri Chinmoy, ‘the power of the Supreme Goddess.’ Repressed or coiled in a circle, she can be poisonous both to the body and the psyche, but once risen and standing upright, she is beneficent. The power of the serpent, rightly understood, is one of the ways the Goddess overcomes duality.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
So long as she is obedient to a mother—actual or internal—who unconsciously wishes to annihilate her, she is in a state of possession by the witch; she will have to differentiate herself out from that witch in order to live her own life.

Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study
The way to healing an addiction lies in finding a connection between body and soul.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul
If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life. We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment. A life that is being truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
Many people are being dragged toward wholeness in their daily lives, but because they do not understand initiation rites, they cannot make sense of what is happening to them. They are being presented with the possibility of rebirth into a different life. Through failures, symptoms, inferiority feelings and overwhelming problems, they are being prodded to renounce life attachments that have become redundant. The possibility of rebirth constellates with the breakdown of what has gone before. But because they do not understand, people cling to the familiar, refuse to make the necessary sacrifices, resist their own growth. Unable to give up their habitual lives, they are unable to receive new life.
Unless cultural rituals support the leap from one level of consciousness to another, there are no containing walls within which the process can happen. Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem—alone.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
What I learned is the difference between of destiny and fate. We are all fated to die. Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life. Fate is the death we owe to Nature. Destiny is the life we own to soul.

Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life
Linearity does not come naturally to me. It kills my imagination. Nothing happens. No bell rings. No moment of here and now. No moment that says yes. Without these, I am not alive. I prefer the pleasure of the journey through the spiral. Relax. Enjoy the spiral. If you miss something on the first round, don’t worry. You might pick it up on the second—or third—or ninth. It doesn’t matter. Relax. Timing is everything. If the bell does ring, it will resonate through all the rungs of your spiral. If it doesn’t ring, it is the wrong spiral— or the wrong time— or there is no bell.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul
A free woman has a strong neck—an open connection between heart and head, a balance between reality and ideals. To fall into the complex is to damn herself for her imperfections; to accept the attitude of the virgin is to accept her human life and open herself to her own truth.

Marion Woodman
Without embodied soul, spirit cannot manifest through human feeling.

Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women
Whether we like it or not, one of our tasks on this earth is to work with the opposites through different levels of consciousness until body, soul and spirit resonate together. Initiation rites, experienced at the appropriate times in our lives, burn off what is no longer relevant, opening our eyes to new possibilities of our own uniqueness. They tear off the protective veils of illusion until at last we are strong enough to stand in our own naked truth.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
A woman must be able to stand in the face of power, because ultimately some part of that power will become hers.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.

Marion Woodman
So long as consciousness is enslaved by the darkness of unconsciousness, we blindly live out these handicaps in our lives, projecting them onto our men or choosing defeated men as an image of our own defeat. The flames of our fear, grief and rage burn without light. Without realizing what we are doing, we can allow consciousness to fall into the service of darkness. If, on the other hand, we are conscious of the darkness, that very consciousness is the light that illumines the darkness. This is the journey into mature consciousness, with arms and legs, heart and genitals, strong enough to bear the lights.

Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women
Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to
try to be better than you are than to be who you are.

Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride:
William Blake says the body is ‘that portion of soul discerned by the five senses.

Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman
Love is the real power. It’s the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with–everyone blooms.

Marion Woodman
The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power.
Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
Women are, by nature, disposed to relationship and connectedness; yet true relationship cannot be embraced until a woman as a deep sense of her at-one-ment. Without this essential independence from all roles and bonds, she is a potential victim for servitude.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
She dreams she is in a glass coffin. From her prison, details have beauty. In her aloneness, she imagines emotions. Her husband is the perfect bridegroom, the trickster, the small boy looking for mother. She is goddess and mirror, siren and friend, femme fatale and sacrificing wife. He is attracted to her girlhood purity, her desire to sacrifice, to serve. At first he may be flattered: she sees him as a god.

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body & Soul
Since she has not been present in the culture, she has not been readily accessible to the conscious awareness of modern women. Without her, even the dynamic symbols of Virgin and Mother are distorted. The Crone is a woman is that part of her psyche that is not identified with any relationship nor confined by any bond. She infuses an intrinsic sense of self-worth, of autonomy, into the role of virgin and mother, and gives the woman strength to stand to her own creative experience.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
Can I really believe I am worth an hour a day? Am I, who have given my life to others, selfish enough to take one hour a day to find myself?

Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body & Soul
Change means change. We may have all the insights, but if we do not incarnate them, they are all in vain.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
We know we can change ourselves when we realize that we are not dependent on how we feel, nor on how others feel about us, nor
on what the situation is around us. The values we hold, the choices we make within ourselves and for iourselves remain our prerogative. In most situations, if we begin to change, to do our own inner work, to accept our own darkness and work toward consciousness, the situation will change. We will begin to emanate a different energy, one
that exudes a sense of autonomy and authenticity.

Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
It takes great courage to break with one’s past history and stand alone

Marion Woodman
Once the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her “mysterious and exotic darkness” inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this “dark” side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over “marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth.” The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.

Marion Woodman
We are all unconsciously bound to the wheel of fortune. It goes round and round and we go blindly around on it until one day something happens that wakes us up, face to face with ourselves. What for years we could not or would not see is made visible. The unconscious is made answerable to consciousness. The Self demands a reckoning: the ego must recognize what it has long feared and rejected. Whether we grow or wither in that encounter depends on whether we cling to our ego’s rigid standpoint or whether we choose to trust the Self and leap into the unknown.

Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

Chaos of Creation

🌟We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those strange and perished states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it had to be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make it clear that it is meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext−subject is my former life. It will be a present fixed with the help of the past, and not vice versa. Let it be therefore understood that the facts were what I say they were, but the interpretation that I give them is what I am—now.🌟

Jean Genet
We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.

Jean Genet
In space, she kept devising new and barbaric forms for herself, for she sensed intuitively that immobility makes it too easy for God to get you in a good wrestling hold and carry you off. So she danced. While walking. Everywhere.

Jean Genet
“Beauty has no other origin than a wound, unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that everyone keeps in himself, that he preserves and to which he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a temporary but profound solitude.”

🌟Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork
Certain acts dazzle us and light up blurred surfaces, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them in a flash, for the beauty of a living thing can be grasped only fleetingly. To pursue it during its changes leads us inevitably to the moment when it ceases, for it cannot last a lifetime. And to analyze it, that is, to pursue it in time with the sight and the imagination, is to view it in its decline, for following the marvelous moment in which it reveals itself, it diminishes in intensity.

Jean Genet
The hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two can’t be distinguished from each other, suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day…The hour in which…every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.

Jean Genet
Creating is not a somewhat frivolous game. The creator has committed himself to the fearful adventure of taking upon himself, to the very end, the perils risked by his creatures. We cannot suppose a creation that does not spring from love. How can a man place before himself something as strong as himself which he will have to scorn and hate?…Every lover does likewise, hoping to be loved for his own sake.

Jean Genet
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

Jean Genet
Would it perturb you to see things as they are? To gaze at the world tranquilly and accept responsibility for your gaze, whatever it might see?

Jean Genet
I had recourse to magic, that is, to a kind of deliberate predisposition, an intuitive complicity with nature.

Jean Genet

Sculpting in Time

It is a mistake to talk about the artist looking for his subject. In fact, the subject grows within him like a fruit and begins to demand expression. It is like childbirth. The poet has nothing to be proud of. He is not master of the situation, but a servant. Creative work is his only possible form of existence, and his every work is like a deed he has no power to annul. For him to be aware that the sequence of such deeds is due and ripe, that it lies in the very nature of things, he has to have faith in the idea; for only faith interlocks the system of images for which read system of life.

Andrei Tarkovsky

It is a mistake to talk about the artist looking for his subject. In fact, the subject grows within him like a fruit and begins to demand expression. It is like childbirth. The poet has nothing to be proud of. He is not master of the situation, but a servant. Creative work is his only possible form of existence, and his every work is like a deed he has no power to annul. For him to be aware that the sequence of such deeds is due and ripe, that it lies in the very nature of things, he has to have faith in the idea; for only faith interlocks the system of images for which read system of life.

Andrei Tarkovsky
The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good. Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.

Andrei Tarkovsky
When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the ‘dirt’ of the world. On the contrary! the artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. Substitution… the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews
I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.

Andrei Tarkovsky
An artistic image is one that ensures its own development, its historical viability. An image is a grain, a self-evolving retroactive organism. It is a symbol of actual life, as opposed to life itself. Life contains death. An image of life, by contrast, excludes it, or else sees in it a unique potential for the affirmation of life.
Whatever it expresses—even destruction and ruin—the artistic image is by definition an embodiment of hope, it is inspired by faith.
Artistic creation is by definition a denial of death. Therefore it is
optimistic, even if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic.
And so there can never be optimistic artists and pessimistic artists. There can only be talent and mediocrity.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986
One doesn’t need a lot to be able to live. The great thing is to be free in your work. Ofcourse it’s important to print or exhibit, but if that’s not possible you are still left with the most important thing of all — being able to work without asking anybody’s permission.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986
Why are they all trying to make me into a saint?
Oh God! Oh God!
I want to do things. Stop turning me into a saint.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986
If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique. The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each time he hopes, though in vain, to achieve an exhaustive image of the Truth of human existence. The quality of beauty is in the truth of life.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Our fraught way of life gives each of us a narrowly defined role, creating conditions conducive to developing only those elements in our psyche which allow us to grow within the confines of that role. The other areas of our psyche waste away. Hence lack of contact. Here psychological and social factors combine, and produce fear, distrust, moral baseness and the death of hope.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986
For many years I have been tormented by the certainty that the most extraordinary discoveries await us in the sphere of time . We know less about time than about anything else.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986
I believe in one thing: the human spirit is immortal and indestructible. In the beyond there could be anything, it is of no importance whatsoever. What we call death is not death. It’s a rebirth. A caterpillar becomes a cocoon. I think there is a life after death and it is that that is unnerving. It would be so much simpler to conceive of oneself as a telephone cord that is unplugged. Then you could live any way that you wanted. God would have no importance of any kind.

Andrei Tarkovsky
If a writer, despite his natural gifts, gives up writing because no one will publish him, then he is no writer. The artist is distinguished by his urge to create, which by very definition is a concomitant of talent.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Journal 1970-1986
The death of childhood is the beginning of poetry.

Andrei Tarkovsky
All creative work strives for simplicity, for perfectly simple expression; and this means reaching down into the furthest depths of the recreation of life. But that is the most painful part of creative work: finding the shortest path between what you want to say or express and its ultimate reproduction in the finished image. The struggle for simplicity is the painful search for a form adequate to the truth you have grasped.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his own self-respect, and his capacity to distinguish between what matters and what is merely passing.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.

Andrei Tarkovsky
My objective is to create my own world and these images which we create mean nothing more than the images which they are. We have forgotten how to relate emotionally to art: we treat it like editors, searching in it for that which the artist has supposedly hidden. It is actually much simpler than that, otherwise art would have no meaning. You have to be a child—incidentally children understand my pictures very well, and I haven’t met a serious critic who could stand knee-high to those children. We think that art demands special knowledge; we demand some higher meaning from an author, but the work must act directly on our hearts or it has no meaning at all.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Never try to convey your idea to the audience – it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.

Andrei Tarkovsky
The beautiful is hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth, for whom it is contra-indicated. But the profound lack of spirituality of those people who see art and condemn it, the fact that they are neither willing nor ready to consider the meaning and aim of their existence in any higher sense, is often masked by the vulgarly simplistic cry, ‘I don’t like it!’, ‘It’s boring!’ It is not a point that one can argue; but it like the utterance of a man born blind who is being told about a rainbow. He simply remains deaf to the pain undergone by the artist in order to share with others the truth he has reached.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
Art is a meta-language, with the help of which people try to communicate with one another; to impart information about themselves and assimilate the experience of others. Again, this has not to do with practical advantage but with realising the idea of love, the meaning of which is in sacrifice: the very antithesis of pragmatism. I simply cannot believe that an artist can ever work only for the sake of ‘self-expression.’ Self-expression if meaningless unless it meets with a response. For the sake of creating a spiritual bond with others it can only be an agonising process, one that involves no practical gain: ultimately it is an act of sacrifice. But surely it cannot be worth the effort merely for the sake of hearing one’s own echo?

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
A work becomes dated as a result of the conscious effort to be expressive and contemporary; these are not things to be achieved: they have to be in you. In those arts which count their existence in tens of centuries the artist sees himself, naturally and without question, as more than narrator or interpreter: above all he is an individual who has decided to formulate for others, with complete sincerity, his truth about the world…

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
Despite the fact that God lives in every soul, that every soul has the capacity to accumulate what is eternal and good, as a mass people can do nothing but destroy. For they have come together not
in the name of an ideal, but simply for the sake of a material notion.

Andrei Tarkovsky
Finally, I would enjoin the reader—confiding in him utterly—to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
This is the law of life, its real meaning, that we cannot impose our experience on other people, or force them to feel suggested emotions. Only through personal experience do we understand life.

Andrei Tarkovsky
True artistic inspiration is always a torment for the artist, almost to the point of endangering his life. Its realisation is tantamount to a physical feat.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
How strangely people live. They seem to be in command of the situation and they do not understand that they have been given the chance of living and actually using the opportunity to be free. Everything in this life is terrible, apart from the freedom of will that we possess.

Andrei Tarkovsky
It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience.

Andrei Tarkovsky

(Self-portrait series KENNEDY PEAK 7-8-24)

Bond of Breath

Photo by me/Charleen Johnston. Models Reese Miller & Drea Bleu Good-Brown
A counterBalance ...perhaps....
When the chasm beckons
And the perilous chapel 
Seeks it's reckoning 
Thru maladies and maniacal 
Mishaps
That overlap Present & Past Times
That threaten to Bind
Tight
The blind spots with tangled knots
In games of Daimonic power
Buried
In unfolding fractal flowers
Of 'Sight 
   Or
     Blind DeLight '
As the shattered Tower 
Falls
 And Offers its gift 

A suture to bridge the rift

Shall i Fly from this precipice
Or fall to my Death
As the urge to transcend
The Bond of Breath

Charleen Johnston
9-30-21