An Emotional Reunion With My Archetypes

I’m really struggling with the transition to menopause. Obviously it is hard for most women. I can deal with the physical symptoms for the most part, though yesterday it was hot all day and when it finally cooled down I started having rather intense hot flashes so that sucked.

But the thing I hate the most is the affect it is having on my attention span. I don’t know what to call it, brain fog I suppose, or adult onset ADHD. I am really having a hard time just being in the moment, especially with art.

Some of it is the ongoing struggle to make art that is personally expressive, and figuring out what that even means. I have a lot of experience with art and art materials. I am in a class (Find Your Joy with Louise Fletcher) that encourages experimentation as a pathway to finding your artistic path, and I don’t disagree with it. But my problem isn’t an inability to experiment with materials. What I am lacking is content. I like to play with symbols and archetypes. And that has been the hard part lately.

Perhaps it is that the things that I want to express are mundane and not sexy. In my earlier work I was grappling with motherhood, my sexual orientation, and male energy in terms of being more assertive as the head of my household, and setting boundaries. I am a divorced mother and the main support. I had to be a mother, but a father as well.

I explored these aspects of my life with anthropomorphized animals. I had the Rabbit, which represents an inner child energy, innocence, my wounds. I also worked with the Horse woman, which represented motherhood and female energy (though not in a way that anything to do with horses really). And then I also had the Stag woman, which represented the male energies I was trying to integrate. Working with these archetypes was deeply healing and helpful. But they also represent the past – my son is adult and my daughter is close to adulthood. I’ve solidly accepted my bisexual orientation and am in a deeply satisfying, loving and healthy relationship.

I am in a women’s group run by my dear friend Rev. Pamela Dawn of The Sacred Outpost. Over the coming year we are working with the archetype of our choosing, and I am working with The Artist. She led us in a meditation in which we encountered our archetype and received 4 gifts or objects from them. My archetype appeared to me as the Horse Woman, the Rabbit, the Stag Woman and relatively recent archetype I’ll just call The Angel.

When I picture creativity, I see a void, with a hapharzardly nailed together set of planks going into it. As I create, I am blindly adding a new plank, unsure of where I am going. This is the space I was in during the meditation. The Horse Woman gifted me a Cup, and pointedly told me it is meant to be FILLED. The Rabbit gifted me a hammer. The Stag Woman gifted me some nails. At this point in the meditation I was quite emotional as I deeply missed these archteypes that had given me so much in the past. I asked them “are you coming with me” and they said “…do you WANT us to?” And then I saw a lovley room for them, behind me, where they all sat together like content old women, drinking tea and relaxing, their work done.

But I had one last gift, and the Angel appeared, flying around into the void and back, and said that she’d be coming with me. She went into the void and returned with my final gift, some planks. I held one to nail in place, and invisible to me, I felt the presence of an unknown entity, holding up the other end of the plank, helping me. They’ve always been helping me, these entities in the void, wanting me to come and find them.

So, while experimenting with materials is fun, what I find most deeply satisfying is experimenting with relevant archetypes, and that has been my struggle to find. I am still searching.