Category: Portraits of Self

I imagine doing the yoga wheel when I want to start over in my life. It’s a feeling of getting rid of everything; memories, pain, shame, my mistakes, regrets.  So with age, the crone – wise crone – allows me to do just that.

That old archetype is speaking to me right now. A collective image we all share. Somehow, accessing her, I’m in a new cycle: to turn over the pain of recent loss, age, maturation, all over to the dark, sharp crow.

Thus the crone.

 

I wanted an old time portrait. The kind of portrait for which great people and families would sit in front of library fireplaces and settees in great rooms.

Sometimes those photos feel sad, stale and lifeless- clownish – people sitting very still, no smiles, no movement, with a pressured expression of non-expression.

Only the cat shows movement, liveliness.

Right after my mother died, there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. I couldn’t seek my comfort as before. Where do I go?

The snake is a symbol that has played a big part in my dreams guiding me through transition in my life. It sheds old skin revealing new skin – a new life – which is also in line with the moon and its phases.

I am no different. Every new phase of my life has involved a dying off of the old, revealing something new in me.

My mother was born in the spring and died in the fall. She gave me an amaryllis to plant and I did. It comes back every autumn.

Still in the shadow of my mother’s death in the fall of 2011, the feeling of inadequacy hits hard.  With that feeling, I think of those old images of hobos with all of their belongings tied in a kerchief at the end of a stick. All I want to do is run away.