moonlit

I began exploring creativity and writing as alchemy back in the early nineties and one evening had a powerful image while meditating upon that. I seem to sense things rather than see or hear them. They creep around the periphery slowly gaining my attention. This time I had the crystal clear awareness of a round deep vessel like a cauldron or bowl, an intense pink with molten gold inside. That was as close as I could come afterwards using pastels to get it on paper. It epitomized the transforming power of heat and fire, the transmutation of substance under intense pressure, and yet it was also a safe container within which those processes could take place.

A journal became my vessel then, filled to overflowing. To write is to express, explore and transform. It can break the silence or keep it. Maxine Hong Kingston combines meditation and writing, saying that the writing comes in the silence. When she despairs, she always returns to the writing. Perhaps artists with different vocabularies find other means, and yet experience has taught me that words have the power to shape, transform and make us whole. Sometimes it feels like walking through or standing in fire, especially for survivors of trauma and loss. We come out imbued with the same experiences and histories, but changed by the process and our own truths. When we are then able to speak and be truly heard by others we are all changed.

Just a few years ago P, an artist and lifelong friend, invited my reactions to paintings she'd hung in a gallery show. I mentally walked through the exhibit again remembering pastel landscapes, snow on rooftops, stark trees...a range of styles and subjects. (Wolf Kahn's work will give you a sense of some of her pieces.) Many had appealed to me, but one kept returning to mind for no apparent reason. It was smaller than the others with translucent yellows, golds and pumpkin oranges licking the canvas like flames. My limited visual vocabulary cannot do it justice, but the overall impression was of sweeping arcs of fire -- a well of light -- rising against a field of purples, blacks, dark blues. I kept coming back to it at the show, ultimately choosing it to keep. It wasn't until later that I recognized the alchemical imagery.

P told me she'd titled it Moonlit. An earlier painting hadn't worked for her so she'd simply painted over it, inspired by a nighttime view of the opposite shore from her waterfront porch. I could suddenly visualize the far-off trees and moonlight on the water. Left to my own devices though, I still see molten gold.

It has been well over fifteen years since that first meditation: the indelible image burned into my consciousness, working on me and foreshadowing major changes to come. And now Moonlit hangs prominently in my new place, perhaps a talisman for this next period in my life. It's as though I'm seeing for the first time. I am also opening up to writing again and to new directions two years after my mother's death. Ready to delve deeper, to go farther. Wherever it takes me.

Alchemy takes time.