Hanged (Wo)Man
untitled monoprint, 1993, 30″ x 22″
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In the tarot deck there is a card called THE HANGED MAN.
It is a card that keeps coming up for me whenever I have had my cards read.
It always used to send a chill through me.. sort of like the kiss of death or something dire..
But that is not it at all.
THE HANGED MAN key words: yield, suspend, surrender, sacrifice, non-action, submission, in between.
From the image I linked to above, you can see he is not in a struggling mode.
He looks almost beatific as he hangs there, content in his suspension.
I look at this image as a sort of bridge when it appears in my life, as it did this morning for some unknown reason.
The thought of it just passed through my mind.
I spent most of my weekend horizontal.
Reading a great book and passing from sleep to waking and back to sleep again.
It is a good thing I like my own company so much as this healing path has alot of solitary time built in.
After the marathon rest-a-thon, I awoke from that suspended state feeling new. Different. More, somehow.
Yielding to WHAT IS is a challenge for me.
I still seem to hanker after some ‘type-A’ American cultural awards..
Non-doing still feels slightly grating and anti-purpose.
But really, when I think of it, this ‘non-action’ is really jam packed with stuff.
I’ve been writing this blog for almost a year and still seem to have things to say.
This enforced’ slow-it-down’ is really a GATHERING TIME for me.
The cultural imperative of DOING, WILLING, MAKING is suspended in me.
Who does that make me now?
Less than I was when I created art-in-form?
I think not.
I seem to be sculpting emptiness with the same skills I used with clay.
The trick is not to be attached to the outcome, isn’t it?
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