Process is the underground spring that feeds the rivers of our lives:  We affect.  We cause ripples; the current of our lives wears away the stones in our paths and carries us steadily from landmark to landmark.  Deep underneath the currents, in the darkness of earth and clay, our foundations are formed and reformed, and it is to these depths that return again and again to abandon our external identities and rediscover what Joseph Campbell referred to as "the hub of the wheel".

   

   We live in a culture that is obsessed with product; a culture that carefully conceals the ugly mess of process so that we see the polish of accomplishment without the chaos of development.  This leaves us worshiping at the throne of cleanliness, organization, and productivity, and fundamentally cut off from the less than tidy pieces of our lives and ourselves.  The widespread use of social media and constant exposure to photo-shopped advertising has strengthened this disconnect, and made it increasingly easy to turn a blind eye to the horrendous undercurrents of slave labor and environmental devastation that run under the surface of our consumer culture.   

 

   I too, struggle to present myself to the world in the most flattering way — adjusting, selecting, magnifying and disguising my presence in the world to create a certain kind of image. On an artistic level, I have managed for many years to produce a fair number of projects while white knuckling my way to completion.  These projects, which seemed successful from an outside perspective, have often left me physically ill, depressed, and stressed to the point of collapse.  For me, high-level artistic production is nearly always coupled with intense depression and/or illness.  This, at heart, is disingenuous.  I produce work about being whole and connected and allow the process of creating that work to take me apart.   

 

  Inhabiting my own authentic space means accepting exhaustion, frustration, pain, anger, and shame… C. G. Jung's “Swampland of the Soul”.   It is in the nether-regions of this dark side that the mythological "wasteland" appears; a place in between the comfort of the outside world and the willingness to surrender to the inner.    The wasteland appears in mythologies from around the world in ancient stories like the Legend of the Grail and the Mabinogion (a compilation of Welsh tales from the 12th-13th centuries).  Jungian scholars like Jean Bolen associate visits to the wasteland with the despair and depression characteristic during middle life: those who find themselves in the wasteland withdraw from their worldly roles and shut down; they have lost their connection with what Jung called the anima: the soul.  

 

   Long before I was familiar with the Jung's ideas about the wasteland, or with the metaphorical implications of the mythologies in which they occur, the wasteland made itself known to me through a powerful dream that awakened me to the imperative of self-knowledge.

 

The Dream:

Grey and brown planet,

I speak the language of the world

Mine. Dig. Burn. Conquer.

My lungs burn

My body is being danced, is being danced

I collapse.

 

I awaken in the desert

Scorched bones under the unrelenting sun.

How did I get here?

I walk for what seems like forever

Seeing nothing but sand and the marks of my bare, burning feet.

 

Then, in the distance, a tree

Giant mothering oak tree

Growing miraculously in this world of emptiness.

A refuge.

(Strangely, It is also a school for the arts)

I am happy, peaceful.

 

One afternoon, sun pouring over the branches,

I sit in the crotch of the magnificent tree.

Suddenly,

The liquid ice of self doubt pours down my back like knives.

I hear a sound.

Like the striking of a match upon pavement.

A single flame and then..

 the tree

the whole world

magnificent even in death

burns ferociously down to the ground.

I shudder.

 

It was I, I realize now. I created and I destroyed.

And now that I know, I can leave the desert

I arrive in Central Park

Home of a strange utopia. Artists weave together like threads

Symbiosis in living color.

 

   While exploring the potential symbolic meanings of this dream, my husband suggested that I look at Carl Jung’s theories about alchemy and transformation.  It was then that I encountered Jung’s remarkable ideas about archetypes, and eventually stumbled across The Red Book; a remarkable diary of sorts in which Jung meticulously documented his own descent into his subconscious.  In this stunning collection of illustrations and beautifully calligraphic writing, Jung describes his experiences facing the desolate landscapes within and the encounter with his own neglected soul.   

 

   Where did these profound ideas of inner transformation come from?  Like all great thinkers, C. G. Jung was a man who was both ahead of his time and inextricably of his time.  The development of his ideas was largely dependent upon a relationship with a culture for which free association, the power of dreams, and the collective unconscious were new frontiers to be explored.  It was during this intense flowering of awareness that Jung went through a profound period of inner transformation.   Embarking on visionary quests, he came face to face with his own "wasteland".  These experiences became the material for what could be considered his magnum opus, Liber Novus —The Red Book.    

 

   “The years… when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”[1]

 

    Jung believed that sometime around the age of 35, with our lives nearly half over, we begin moving into the shadow side of life, and failure to attend to the messages sent by our subconscious to clean out our “psychic basements” will result in an inward or outward midlife crisis (i.e., illness or death of self or of a loved one).  At the age of 38, my own psychic “basement” is full of the bad, the ugly, the tedious, and the unsuccessful; the result of years spent careful sorting the public views from a private reality by carefully curtaining off the unsavory bits.  There have been times when the mania of a particular project or a physical illness has knocked me into my own psychic wasteland.  Here I am faced with emptiness. Where I thought that my identities would hold me up, they turn out to be flimsy and insubstantial.  I come face to face with nothing, and I wait.  

 

  “In the lonesome moment that falls between here and there, I wait.  Patiently at first, and then impatiently... agitated by the emptiness of space between.  The sun bears down on the desert floor, scorching even my breath as it enters my husk-like body.  I have been here for days, years, maybe even lifetimes- living in a mirage of people and thoughts and things that were never really there but quenched my thirst- almost but not really.  My skin has shriveled, lizard like, and I pinch my arms and the wrinkles map time all over my body, like hidden stories written in a language only my body understands.  Lifting my eyes towards the burning emptiness I walk, one foot in front of the other, footprints wiped away by time and space in the first moment of my body’s absence. The soles of my feet holler, the heat surging into every crevice- and I feel my feet for the first time.  How did I get here?  Is this yet a dream, more real than life?  I walk on and see in front of me a small skittering lizard- green- the color of life.  It pauses in its frantic dance, looks at me with strange alien eyes, and disappears into the wasteland.”

 

  Perhaps, like Jung, I have reached too far outside of myself and have been called back.  Of his own experience, Jung writes:

 

“Why is myself a desert?  Have I lived too much outside of myself in men and events?  Why did I avoid myself?  Was I not dear to myself?”[2]

 

  The desert is the place between the outside and the inside, where the superficiality of the external is realized, but still clung to, while the eyes are not yet open enough to fully see and inhabit the inner world. 

   

   Jungian scholars speak of the metaphorical descent to hell as integration with the collective unconscious. The desert is the stopping ground, where we are challenged to release our preconceptions and give up our identities. We come to the desert in order to release the ideas that keep us from being with our deepest selves.  This attachment to intellect is easy to identify with; science seduces us/words empower us.  We define and label and in the process grow our intellects and our egos.  Jung’s visions demanded that he free himself of his intellect, his reason, and his thinking mind.  They “took away my belief in science… robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things.”  In Liber Primus, Jung waits in anguish in the desert’s arid emptiness to become able/willing to release the scorn for his shadow self; for chaos, disorder, darkness, ugliness and cruelty; for innocence, unknowing.  What is my scorn for?  What part of me is trying to dissolve?  Is it my conception of self, my attachment to my beliefs?  Is it my carefully assembled and meticulously manicured adulthood?  Is it my relentless march into the future and scorn for the glamour-less present? Do I need to let the "devotion of the ideals of the time die out in me? "

 

   Modern life-in many ways - calls to mind a wasteland; a place where we have become increasingly disconnected from each other and the planet that we inhabit.  Many of us simply sleepwalk through our lives, too overcome by the chaos of Western life to imagine another way.

 

   The scorching sun of the desert bleaches us white; we become unadorned, essentially human.  In my desert, I cling to my vision of self - terrified to release to the swell of the wave that wants to catch me up and drag me under into darkness.  I am neither here nor there-of the world or of myself.  I no longer trust in the protection and solidity of my own cloak of knowledge - it is becoming flimsy and insubstantial; it cannot slake my thirst.  I return the underground spring and drink; deeply from the waters of my own slow, ever evolving process of awakening.  

 

 

 

[1]  Carl Jung Speaking in 1957 about the Red Book

[2]  Liber Primus, The Red Book, pg. 141