Dialoging with my unconscious: Part 2

Photograph of my mask creadted 12/09/12

Part II: Dialogue with a master

See previous blog entry for Part I. 

Well, Peter, my mask is drying on a metal rack, preparatory to being fired… I am acutely aware that time is of the essence because my insights formed in the wet, fertile, aliveness of the earthy clay will dry out and become brittle and unyielding, just like my physical mask downstairs.

What follows are my discoveries about my mask and the collective unconscious, such as they are.  I’m afraid that Jung might be disappointed. To my mind, the first archetype, even before those that Jung explored, was our original oneness with the natural world around us. As Joanna Macy put it in her wonderful book, World as Lover, World as Self:

“In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb” – page 13.

To the best of my ability to decipher it what my mask did for me was like a bolt of electricity, jolting me back into a living, throbbing connection with my greater self, the earth. Below is my initial attempt to poetically express in words what happened. 

My mask, Part I: The Blind, Preyless, Predator

One who used to be the predator

Pumped with testosterone

Vietnam vet, avid hunter

Craving raw meat

Now old and neutered

Eating only vegetables

Forced to watch my mother

Limb by limb

Organ by organ

Slowly, agonizingly,

Tortured and killed…

…While my screams like

One hand clapping

Fall on deaf ears.

My mask, Part II: The Conch shell connection

Like a child tunes into the living world

Holding a conch shell to her ear

To hear the roar of the Ocean

So too, the conch shell opening

On the top of my mask:

The seventh Chakra point

  Of pure consciousness

  Without subject or object 

Tunes me in

Like the jolt of electricity

From the executor’s chair:

To the cries of 

Orphaned baby chimps and elephants

Disappearing fish gasping in gill nets

Honey bees suffocating in their hives

Polar bears drowning on disappearing ice

Like the jolt of electricity 

From the executor’s chair,

I feel the Pain we are inflicting

On our Mother, The Earth.

Again, Peter, thank you for your wise inspiration and guidance.