The Lady, The Unicorn, The Drop

iris 2001, acrylic on canvas 26"x8"

Iris detail 2001, acrylic on canvas 26"x8"

Drop - a poem August 2004
Aphrodite's Mustang- a poem August 2005

I love Iris. She is the spirit of Dawn, butterflies and transformation. Here she is found comforting the mythical unicorn (or mustang with horn).

This painting was very difficult for me to complete. I began painting it in the summer of 2001. It took me two re-designs and nearly three more years before I felt finished enough, to finish, and I'm not yet certain if I am really and truly done.

At first, she was wearing a butterfly mask, had purple, green and blue hair and was striding across the landscape of moutain and water that I love so much. Her hands were positioned in the act of pouring, I was to add the colours of dawn, spilling across the canvas, but never got around to it. The painting was too busy, too colourful, too confusing. It wasn't what I had in mind.

Eventually, with the aid of gesso and blue-grey paint, I repaired the broken background and against my grain, added the mythical beast.

I say against my grain, because I had no interest in painting unicorns, or faeries, or sweet sublime landscapes. Yet, out it came anyway. "No!" I hollard at my hands as they spread the tell tale spiral, "No! This is a serious piece, not cutesy, not fluffy! Serious I say!"

I had imagined I would repaint the unicorn, to make him more beastly, more mythical, darker. But I never did. I pulled the canvas out a few times, even made preliminary attempts by dragging a water filled brush over the dry canvas, just to imagine how it might look. I scanned the painting into photoshop, my digital studio, and still, no dice. So I left it.

There was a time when I collected unicorns, crystal ones, porcelain ones, stuffed ones, books, bumper stickers, you know the whole merchandising kit and kaboodal.

There was a time before that where I drew the unicorn, over and over and over again. I drew the unicorn, I painted the unicorn, I spent hours perfecting my techniques in pencil, pen and paint. Then I became old enough to work. With my earnings, I began to collect.

Then, I stopped completely.

My therapist had noticed a strange phenomena regarding children who've been sexually abused; A majority of her patients, such as myself, also collected unicorns.

I add this detail only to expound on my relationship to the unicorn, to art and to my search for well being, and this particular piece.

I suspect my refusal to continue collecting and painting unicorns at that time in my life, was linked to my refusal to accept or recognise the abuse I had suffered as a child. I couldn't face it, I couldn't bear it. I was still too young and fragile to deal with concepts unthinkable to a child. Identifying as a lover of unicorns lost its appeal once I recognised that very identification also illuminated me as a survivor of exploitation.

Iris, is an example product of flow. I stopped the process several times, and tried to intellectually control its compostion. Those efforts I finally deduced, were interrupting the "flow", and ruining the compostion. Once I stopped struggling with my distaste of the subject and surrendered to the process, I was left with a perplexing, but lovely image.

Perplexing enough to engage my mind in a question and answer game about hidden motives and the personal language of symbols each of us uses in creating our various and respective worlds.

The search for the unicorn, is a search for purity, chastity, beauty. The tale told is that only the innocent can ever hope to meet, see touch or otherwise commune with the magical beast of Eden.

This, I think is crucial to the compulsion of children such as myself, to collect and draw and dream of the unicorn.

The search for the Unicorn, is the search to validate ones existance as a spiritual, magical being. It is a search to invalidate the damge and hurt inflicted by the "wicked" against the "innocent".

I wrote the poem Drop around the time I last worked on Iris. At first I didn't see any connection between the two pieces. I had composed Drop, during a free flow moment while journaling. I had been reading a book called Singing the soul back home: shamanic wisdom for every day, by Caitlin Matthews.

In Chapter 8, Healing (pg 219) she discusses the Shamanic World view of soul loss. The shamanic view is that an individual soul is held up by a scaffolding of power. Personal power. When this scafolding becomes damaged, through trauma, loss, accident, abuse etc. the soul becomes vulnerable to fragmentation, these fragments can then split off from the individual soul, can be lost or stolen.

Chapter 8 helps a person identify the symptoms of soul loss by symptom (depression, loss of will, inability to care for oneself, development of addictions as a compulsion to fill up the empty space, or void left by the vacating soul fragment, etc) and goes on to describe ways of soul retrieval. Rather than revealing the whole chapter, it is sufficient to say the word recovery, is much more integral to the process of healing I had ever considered before.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes Phd, author of Women who run with wolves discusses the root of the word reclaim. "The word is derived from the old French word reclaimer, meaning ‘to call back the hawk which has been let fly’."

These two jewels, found in two different books, read at two different times, collided in my mind, stricking a chord. The result was my poem Drop, my attempt at calling back my lost part, my drop of golden love light, a fragment of my own soul.
I remember thinking at the time, "Hhmmm, now why did I chose the foal/horse imagery?"

That mystery was recently solved, when on Drop's first year anniversary (or thereabouts) I penned a poem called "Aphrodites Mustang".

It only took me a couple of days to recognise the connection between these three pieces, Iris, Drop, and Aphrodites Mustang.

My work on my root chakra produced the poem "Instinct" which in turn prompted my own realizations of personal power, and the need to stand apart from the messages my "tribe" instilled in me, so that I may manifest my own special individuality.

The painting Iris, heralded my arrival at my second chakra issues, those of personal power, sexuality and the application of Will.

One of the symbols of the second level chakra, happens to be a horse. Wild and powerful, I often imagine the white horse of salisbury plains when I internally envision my second chakra during meditative practices.

So there I finally have it. The part of myself that has been reclaimed, my injured spirit and all the memories contained within, is integral to the machinations of that very special part of me, a part we all have, a part that enables a person to shine their spirit into the world, that very special, divinely decreed gift called Personal Will.

I rejected that part, my foal, my budding self because I was terrified of who I was, what I was, what I was capable of manifesting.

I felt that there was something about me, some big, blinking neon sign I couldn't see that was apparent to everyone else, that I was a perfect mark. I even began to believe that the people who hurt me were really, very decent people, and that if I were just a better person, a good girl, if I could just locate that blinking sign and turn it off, I could escape all unwanted attention. I felt responsible for other people's actions, so much so I had no room left over to be responsible for my own actions, or lack of action, whichever the case may have been.

I identified my sexual abuse as a part of me, instead of something that happend to me, and as a result, I distanced myself, I disconnected from the girl "it" had happend to, and later, when confronted with sexual situations beyond my abilities to negotiate, I dissasociated, further fragmenting my injured spirit.

Aphrodite's Mustang indicates my call to my soul was heard, and headed. Aphrodites Mustang returned to me full grown, wild, perfect, beautiful and powerful despite the fact Ishe had been so lost, so long ago. When she was "just a foal".

I have reclaimed my will to be.