The Phoenix-Day 10

The Phoenix is the one who builds his own funeral pyre.I feel his immense trust in transformation, his willingness to surrender to the flames again and again.

Over and over, he submits to the flames, falling to ash. Over and over, the ash coalesces into an egg. Over and over, he emerges back into life.

The psychoanalyst and mystic Carl Jung believed that we all have an immutable and even indestructible Self, and that this Self is the central force guiding our development. Like the Phoenix, we transform without entirely losing the spark at the center of who we are.

Dreamworker Robert Moss encourages us to create a pharmacy of healing images for our psyches. Perhaps that is what I have done with these paintings I have created. For me, the phoenix is certainly one of those images. When I am down or discouraged, falling to pieces or ashes, I remind myself that I have always risen. As myself. Or as my Self, as Jung would say.

Ups and downs. For better or for worse, it is my way of being in the world, my particular inner chemistry. For much of my life I’ve lived with cyclical depression. It got so that I could predict almost exactly how my months would go: one week of a mind racing with ideas and projects and possibilities, one week of wild activity and productivity and buying lots of art supplies, leading to utter exhaustion, one or two terrible days and even worse nights where I would believe that I just couldn’t go on. Where I would believe that my ideas were stupid and I was stupid and everybody thought I was stupid and why even bother living. Then I would wake up one morning, clear and happy and spend the rest of the month trying to clean up the messes I made when I started everything all at once.

I’ve come to believe that my cyclical nature fuels my creativity, but only if I have the self-awareness to accept my emotional cycles, my sacred cycles. As I’ve entered and passed through menopause I’ve become more even keeled. Sometimes, just sometimes, I miss those wild emotional roller coasters. Because of the overabundance of exciting ideas and possibilities.

When I made this painting, I was remembering a recent down time, or you might call it a falling into ashes time, a few weeks before--not a creative urge to be found. Suffering from overwhelm and stuck, I reached out to my memoir writing group and received such an outpouring of love and support that I couldn't help myself but to be inspired.

Carl Jung believed that we cannot transform our lives by ourselves or, as he put it, alone on a mountaintop. We are reshaped only in the fire of love or relationship or remembering that we are part of the entire world of ecosystems. This is something I have learned as I reshape and reform myself into an artist and a writer.

Submission to the suffering of writer’s block or artistic angst or fear of sharing my precious creative work in public is only possible if I care deeply and love with all my heart. And trust that those I love will help me to scoop up the ashes and gently fashion them into an egg of potentiality.

Who do I love: You, the reader, my creative tribe, my family. And the world.

This relights my sacred fire.

---

An excerpt from Rilke:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

---

A few years ago I undertook the 100 Day Project.

Each morning I would sit down with paper, paint, and a question:

Who wants to speak through me today?

As I devoted myself to this practice, I began to understand these small paintings as votive offerings to the living world — simple acts of devotion made with gouache, ink, and lustrous gold paint.

In the evenings I would sit with the day’s painting and write a short reflection about the life of that being, about the ways our lives intersect, or about what I was learning by paying attention.

I have returned to these pieces since, tending and enlarging them, listening for the deeper currents as they slowly gather into a book.

For the next while, I will be sharing these paintings and devotional reflections here on Fridays. Taken together, they form a quiet record of one hundred days spent listening closely to the living world.