Jane Moynihan | Sacred Art | Spiritual Writing | Psychology | Psychotherapy | Shamanism | Shamanic art | Healing Jane Moynihan | Writing | Psychotherapy | Psychotherapist | London
At the mid-point of the path through life, I found myself lost in a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Dante, ‘The Divine Comedy’ ‘The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.’ John Muir One Saturday I went down to the woods to make art and it was the biggest surprise! A surprise which left me mulling over something Charlotte Du Cann writes: that ‘we are born into circumstances which are often the very opposite of our real natures’. She also states it’s in finding this nature that we contribute to transforming the world. As someone who has spent most of life in the mind and imagination, I am an unlikely spokesperson for Mother Earth; in fact it’s as if the words ‘mother’ and ‘earth’ were not on the vocabulary list that taught me sentences. It just wasn’t my language, or mother tongue. But my curiosity perked up when I spent some time in London with geomancer and shamanic teacher, Karmit Evenzur. Something occurred to me that turned my world upside down. I wondered if it wasn't that I was born in London, but that London gave birth to me. It was a new vocabulary and an entirely different sentence. My curiosity led me to the forest to create art. The surprise wasn’t that I went native and got ‘lost in the woods’: it was far more startling. The surprise was I ‘got found in the woods’ and returned to my beginning. I might have known that once entering the forest things are never the same again, I would not be the same. Carl Jung prepares us when he says, ‘Whenever we touch nature we get clean’. We know this sounds what we need, but the cost is seeing the water turn black first. The forest is pure, wild and bare, and demands the same of us. I wasn't alone that day: my sister, who is also the artist Dezadie, came with a drum and a camera. When we entered the forest that Saturday we left our baggage at the gate, and our road maps too. The mind can become too much like the city. Or is it the other way around? We constantly stare into mirrors. I think what I left at the gate was my precise city speak, and my sure footed plans. I'm a proficient student of a culture that teachers mastery and mind, preparation and manipulation. Sometimes that can be helpful, no doubt about it – how else would I have brought along my seeds and nuts ready for the inspiration to flow. How else did we know to bring a drum to create ambiance and a camera to capture the image; how else am I recounting this to you in sense? But we shouldn’t mistake the empowerment of the conscious mind for power-over others and a tyranny that goes to great lengths to tell us that nature is wild and primitive and needs our help. But we only fight so hard against things we know have power. The forest's power is that it reflects our true nature back to us, because that’s the only way it knows how to be. To enter its cooling twilight waters we are stripped layer by layer as cultivation and synthetic personas drop away. It already knows armour can’t protect us from the fear we feel when our own nature creeps up on us and stands glaring back at us like a stranger. It shouldn't be so strange. The clues are all there in the fairy tales and other heroic stories we know. The forest is a mysterious and magical place of initiation; it is dark, sometimes dangerous, uncertain, and always transformative. Strange, hybrid creatures and weird (wyrd) women and men live in it. It is the dark route for which heroes leave the well-trodden path and encounter the adventure. Like in the Arthurian legend, where we learn that this is where we search for the grail and our success is dependent on asking the right questions. Bruno Bettelheim emphasizes that the forest is "where uncertainty is resolved about who one is; and where one begins to understand who one wants to be." In J.C. Cooper's description it is the realm of the psyche and "a threshold symbol; the soul entering the perils of the unknown; the realm of death; the secrets of nature, or the spiritual world which man must penetrate to find the meaning." He knowingly observes that "retreat into the forest is symbolic death before initiatory rebirth." This is what transformation entails. Afterwards I think what happens is we inhabit old words in new ways and transform language. When we breathe with trees we are resuscitated with inspiration (spirit within) because trees are the lungs of the earth. As anyone who practices the ancient arts of energy movement (such as tai chi, yoga and qi gong) knows, breath carries life force. Put it like this: it's one thing to breath in the forest air, but another to feel the trees breathe through you and carry you like a seed on the wind and allow yourself to land somewhere and just see what grows. Then it’s something else entirely to feel a heart beat deeper inside you than your own. It sounds a lot like being in the womb of your mother, and it is! Or perhaps it seems like the new life that pulses inside you, and it is that too! These are kaleidoscope moments, where art and life-giving overlap, and then come together in the picture, literally. To be honest it was so quick the way the image happened. I think it was because we thought it was going to rain, but possibly also that’s just the speed at which inspiration works. There was a pressure and an urgency, and then the seeds flowed out like paint. The process and the result was every bit like the art of sustaining life. That’s what I called the piece and the process in the end – The Art of Sustaining Life - and it has transformed the way I see art, the way I want to live life. I used to think art was about stretched canvas and paint, and life was about carefully controlled plans and rationally thought-out decisions; but what I learned was that the canvas is the very ground we walk on every day, nature a rainbow palette, and when we touch our wild nature we can create our lives with every step, and what we create teaches us about who we really are. We are nourished by this art. And we are also instructed in the nature of the life cycle, of the temporality of things. I wish I’d had a video camera to record how the piece of work was slowly destroyed by the very nature that inspired it, how art became just nuts and seeds again in the mouth of the earth. An artist has to learn to let go of their art and give it up, and it’s no different with our lives. The grail question is a good one, I think, for both life and art: and the question is for whom or what does it serve? Gratitude to: Karmit Evenzur, www.inlove.org.uk Dezadie Charlotte du Cann, 52 Flowers That Shook My World J C Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
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