I don't really know where I am going with this entry, so bear with me. This past Sunday I submitted my Practice-led MA by Research thesis On Encountering the Divine in the Act of Drawing and its supporting documentation The Polyhymniades for marking [HERE] and of course I am happy and tired and excited for what comes next and also absolutely exhausted. Still, the most important part in all of this - as it normally happens - is the realisation that this journey through drawing and materials and embodiment and the divine was just the gross aspect of something subtle that was going on underneath.
During these past 12-14 months I have revisited theories, writers and ideas I thought I had long forgotten but it was one morning last month when I opened Phyllis Curott's Book of Shadows that I felt brought back, unexpectantly and almost violently, to a room bathed in the warm sun, in the north of Italy, some 20-something years ago. Only last month, sitting here in the UK, I realised how invisible I felt for the past 20-something years. My body felt void of substance and weight; no matter. Only empty space, floating. Those days back home in the sun, albeit full of drama and pain and tears and anxiety and so much fear, still saw me having depth, embodying a volume, having substance. And that was because of the Old Ways I was practising. So, even though I do read tarot and celebrate the moons, I still felt light and with no roots.
But the memory of that room bathed in the sun re-awakened my body, even if here in the UK. Something has shifted. I walked out and saw the canal as watery embraces, ducks and geese as messengers of air, trees and flowers as grounding elements of the earth and the sun as a passionate fiery presence. I walk outdoors and collect wood and shells and leaves and adorn myself... As I said at the beginning: I don't know where I am going with all of this.
I am wondering if all these past months touching graphite and paper allowed for some of my senses to reawaken; if my hormones have shifted and something within has moved with them; if the comment of a dear friend on how my drawing as "almost erotic" reminded me of the sacredness of sensual touch and my body started resonating with the rest of the world. For the first time in years, I woke up and did not feel invisible. The body as a drive to healing: craving for acknowledgement, touch; to deservingly embody its own space, stating: I AM HERE. There is electricity, nectar, matter, the sacred and the arcane all flowing through me. I have been thinking, planning, reading, logically expounding and forgot, completely, that my body needed its space. I was just mind for so long! I was reminded this morning of the "As above, so below": there is divinity in all of us; if only we could remember that we are all still in the Garden of Eden and separation is just an illusion; if only we knew, recognised, experienced and believed. This is what I would call the alchemical path of the soul. Alchemical because it has to do with matter and the soul because it implies recognising and believing; this is transcendence. On the other hand, we are mostly working on a path of the mind: "As inside, so outside". We think, we plan, we work on, we try and manifest money and abundance and happiness on the outside because we are feeling broken and invisible inside; we try and cover ourselves with mud to be seen, to be visible when the first drops of rain wash away our cover and we revert to feeling naked. Horizontality vs Verticality.
If only we stopped. Just stopped.
Still, anything that I am writing now makes no real sense whatsoever unless it is experienced. So, please, go outside. Find something that enlightens your senses. To me, it's a solitary bench in the sun. I sit there and I feel the sun. I feel the air. I smell apples and roses. I feel hunger and thirst; I listen to my body. I then, and only then once I feel the body, remember that there is a body and this body is a vessel for the divine. When I open my eyes the world is pure enchantment.
onwards + upwards,
mx
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