There are many versions of Skeleton
Woman, this is the condensed Inuit story told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes,
Jungian analyst, poet and story teller. I roughly follow her breakdown of the
story to illustrate how the story is rich in various parallels in life, is a
metaphor of creative process and how it particularly relates to
Transformational Painting.
In the Inuit story of Skeleton Woman, a young woman is thrown into the
Artic Sea by her father, and eventually is turned into a tangled mess of bones.
It is significant that no one remembers
why she was discarded into the icy depths, only that she offended her father.
In time, she is hooked
by a fisherman’s line. He thinks that he has caught a great fish. When he turns
back with his net and sees her mossy bald skull rising from the water attached
to his fishing pole he is terrified and paddles like a demon for his life.
Clutching his pole the whole way he hears her at his heels. He hits land at a
dead run until, at last, he reaches his village. When he dives into his snow
house he breathes a sigh of relief thinking that he has been saved, but as he
lights his whale oil lamp he sees that she has come home with him
Slowly he recovers from
his fright and, in the soft light, our fisherman reaches over and begins to set
her bones in order. Singing as he works, he finishes by wrapping her in warm
furs. Completed, he then crawls into his own sleeping furs for an exhausted
sleep. In the depth of night Skeleton Woman arises and crawls close to him to
drink the one glistening tear of his longing, thus satisfying her thirst of
many years. She then reaches into his chest taking the drum of his heart to
sing on her flesh. After calling forth "all the other things a women
needs" she returns his heart, undresses him and joins him in his furs to
spend the night together, “as men and women do”. Thus joined it is said that
they lived prosperously and happily together until the end of their days.
In the story, as in the creative
process, you cannot go from finding accidental treasure to love making in one
fell swoop. You cannot go from beginning a painting to a finished piece by skipping
the chase, the untangling, the tear or the fleshing out through heart as in the
story. In our contemporary culture we are bombarded with stories of the magical
union where a couple meet and go straight to bed and thus all is complete. We have
come to expect a fast-fix, from food
to medicine to information and we expect satisfaction as soon as we engage. We
have carried this expectation over to love and art making. Transformational
Painting offers a way to reestablish that essential path of development and
provide an avenue to reclaim the other kind of satisfaction that is received from
fully engaging in the process.
The Call. The treasure we receive from creative
process is equal to our willingness to enter into the depths of the psyche. The
portal into our essence demands curiosity and wonderment and a release of the
unfolding images of our deeper being. Like the fisherman in the story, we are unaware that we do not know. Also
like him, we are hungry for relationship to our creative self but may not
recognize it. So we search for a way to catch the big fish. We coast for a
while and think that we can play around, unaware of the profound journey that
awaits us. There may even be a ticket in our fist at this very moment, but we cannot
know the scope of the journey nor the price it will entail. If this is more enticing than frightening you
may be a candidate yourself.
Answer to the Call. If all parts of the story are indeed us, the
fisherman must answer the call as well as the Skeleton Woman. He puts her bones
in order out of compassion and covers her in furs. He trusts her as he falls
asleep letting his deep tear of feeling escape and begin the transformation to
meet her in lovemaking. She makes the agreement too, as she is being dredged up
from the depths of the ocean floor to create an existence bigger than everyday
life. That is what art is about. It is the soul that answers the call. The poet
David Whyte defines this as “the largest conversation (relationship) a person
is capable of having with the world.”
Our Skelton Woman story tells us how to have that conversation. She is
the Life/Death/Life force beginning as disused and misused and resurrected
again by answering the call. Creativity
is set free when we make her ally, lover, and teacher. She will guide
us through our wounds if we give ourselves wholeheartedly and begin our own
life/death/life or creation/destruction/creation cycle.
The Vertical Alignment. Poets as artists help us to understand creative process and even more so Transformational
Painting. Deena Metzger, poet and author, contrasts poem and story, describing
poem as a penetration into the essence of something. A poem expresses the
inexpressible adventure deeply. While, she says, story and prose, spreads out,
wanting to speak to the mind, to the intellect. The horizontal gathers
information, technique, momentum, while the vertical is outside of time, it
changes our life as participant. Jane Hirshfield, Poet Laureate, tells us
poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being. Poetry creates a
vertical experience, an evocative and in depth exploration that is mirrored in
the methods used during Transformational Painting.
continued with The Shadow, The Chase, Organization of the Bones, Sleep as Rebirth & more.
