"Sedna" and a syncronicity

"In the archaic universe all things were signs and signatures of each other. Inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly."

Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill

Every time I sit down to write, I always feel like it entails constructing articles complete with footnotes and addendum.......which is one of the reasons my articles have been not very inventive lately. Having said that, I'm going to loosen up, maybe make a few subjective statements and meandering surmises, and stop feeling I have to write as if I was defending my ideas at a podium. So here's a mysterious synchronicity that involved my friend, sculptor Georgia Stacy recently.

Last week I sent out an announcement about "Restoring the Balance: the Mask of Sedna" being published in   Coreopsis : A Journal of Myth and Theatre Summer/Autumn 2009: Mask, Mirror, and Muse   

I'm proud of this article. It was the last event I did with the Masks of the Goddess collection. It was also wholly infused with, for lack of a better word, a kind of numinous presence. I've always felt I had a duty to document and share these stories, not just the myths, although they are beautiful and significant, but especially the stories of the rituals, the performances, the insights of the people who were involved. These were collective re-mythings, shared prayers through the medium of story, performed within the liminal landscapes of theatre and sacred space.

As Reclaiming members used to say when a circle was cast, "We are between the worlds now, and what happens between the worlds can change the world." To be "between the worlds" is to be in that zone between the secular and the sacred, a "wholly" place that is fertile and imaginally fluid. ("Imaginal cells" is the actual scientific term for the cells that are responsible for transforming a caterpillar, immersed in its chrysalis, into a butterfly. They are utterly transformative agents of biological change.)

"I think many artists feel they are weaving some form of energy into their work. It's what psychometrists see when they "read" objects. There is an aesthetic psychometry each person does as they look at a work of art. Artworks are like batteries - if we're receptive, they can charge us. My idea of reality is that there are many, many interpenetrating dimensions." .....Alex Grey

"Between the worlds" is a creative place, ripe with syncronicities, because the boundaries lessen.

So, what this is leading to is an email I received, after forwarding my article about the Myth of Sedna, to Georgia in New Mexico. Recently, Georgia has begun, for reasons she doesn't understand, to include whale flukes instead of wings in her pieces. Here's a new piece (this one with arms of bones, although not with the "fluke motif" in other recent works) and an email she sent me back.

Lauren, This is more than a coincidence. I was reading the "Inuit Imagination". When I came to the sculpture carved for Sedna, with a whale fluke, I cried for the second time. I cried the first time I heard the story, many years ago. But, the clincher...right before I turned on the computer to find your email, a friend called and wanted to read me the story of Sedna, because I had just finished a sculpture with bones for arms. Life is so interesting.

Georgia

Why this confluence of syncronicities? Who can know? I personally, having worked for years with myths, believe that the archetypes are alive in our collective consciousness, within the "dream body". The story of Sedna is a very important story for our time and for any time; a story about the suffering Earth Mother, and the rites of at-one-ment the Inuit do to regain balance and good relationship with Her. It's about exactly what we lack in our industrialized world: a deep ecological understanding of reciprocity with the living Earth. That event was ripe with synchronicity because it was a story that needed to be told, and continues to be so, passing through different hands, different minds, different voices. When we enter creative space, when we step inside the magic Circle "between the worlds", when we enter the "fissures", we find we are not alone. Here's another quote from Alex Grey, in an interview I did with him and Allyson in 1989: "If you reach down far enough, we're all made up of the same archetypes. Joseph Campbell talked about what he called "core myths". As did Jung. If you go deep enough into yourself, you find yourself in a noisy place with a lot of other people. And if you draw symbols from there, you plug into a collective form of consciousness." Well, to work now, and hopefully, the Cracks will continue to open, even if I'll never understand why.

"There's a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in."   .....Leonard Cohen

Painting by Tyler Gore