The Artist, the Alchemist and the Pioneer at Work in My Garden
These archetypes will help me create a new life in my octopus’s oasis marooned at times alone under a sea of humanity
Stream of Consciousness Introduction
Friends, followers, and subscribers, hello, it’s me! I’m back again. I linked the Todd Rundgren song because as I began to draft the intro to this essay in my mind, I thought of these lyrics and got goosebumps and a little teary-eyed:
Hello, it’s me I’ve thought about us for a long long time
I’m not sure why I had that reaction but that I did means I needed to include the link to the song. Someone reading this will be glad that I did. I have experienced this before, for example, even though it had no readily apparent connection, I embedded Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train in this rant against spiritual listicles that instruct without sharing a piece of the writer and said with respect to the song, “This lovely song just hit my Spotify and judging by the emotional energy surging through me and the sounds emanating from my soul I just know I am supposed to share it with you now and am not going to think about the why,” and one reader commented to me privately that it was exactly the song she needed hear at that moment.
I’m sailing away Set an open course for the virgin sea ’Cause I’ve got to be free Free to face the life that’s ahead of me
On board, I’m the captain So climb aboard We’ll search for tomorrow On every shore And I’ll try, oh Lord, I’ll try To carry on
Styx — Come Sail away [I included this song in my first draft several days ago. Upon reviewing the current draft, I recall that I read a wonderfully spiritual piece of fiction by Joe Merkle (Come With Me, Sail the cosmic seas) about ten days ago and felt moved to include a link to this song as my comment on his story, which he wrote in response to another of Ravyne’s prompts.]
Ok, it’s time I remove this gliding essay from my streams of consciousness and chart a course on the path Source’s (and my other higher powers’) jet stream intended.
This essay emanates, as did my essay last weekend (Are You Living or Merely Existing? My thoughts on the Oscar Wilde quote: To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all), from a writing prompt issued by the deliciously angelic vampiress, or perhaps not to scare readers with that oxymoron I should have said, the Sympathetic and Empathetic Spiritually Surviving Warrior Queen of Goth Imported to Earth from Andromeda, Ravyne Hawke.
In last weekend’s essay, I touched on one of my post-spiritual-awakening epiphanies — that having spent my entire adult life as an attorney and a real estate owner, manager and developer left me battered, bruised and unfulfilled, and frankly, unsuccessful by any reasonable metric, because my round peg did not at all fit into that very large square box. Ravyne’s prompt to which I now respond provides me the opportunity to explore where I find myself in the process of creating a better fit.
“The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation. You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew. Seek therefore, not to find out Who You Are, but seek to determine Who You Want to Be.” — Neale Donald Walsch
Ravyne provides this quote:
Don’t be discouraged if people don’t see your vision, your harvest. All they see from their perspective is that you’re watering a whole lot of dirt. They don’t SEE what seeds you’ve been planting with blood, sweat, tears and lack of sleep. Make sure you don’t abandon or neglect it because “they” don’t see it. You have to KNOW and believe for yourself. They don’t see the roots and what’s budding under the dirt. But it’s okay, because it’s NOT meant for them to see it. While you wait, MASTER it. You continue to do YOUR work and have unwavering faith! Remember why you started planting in the first place. Your harvest WILL come! ― Yvonne Pierre, The Day My Soul Cried: A Memoir
and prompts us thusly:
As you read the quote, ask yourself if you have or are planting the seeds toward your own visionary garden. Did/do you trust your own vision? Or did/do you give into the naysayers?
I spent much of the last several months pondering and struggling with these very questions. Actually, as I read through some of my older work on the subject, I find myself reminded that I started feeling stuck back in February. In April in an essay titled My Stress Avoidance Spiritual Tool Kit, A case study on receptiveness to messages from the universe and comprehending synchronicity, I wrote:
One of the reasons I moved to New Hampshire in December 2020 was to leave behind my old vocation as a real estate lawyer and investor, in which I had chased my tail and treaded water for years, to dive into writing on Medium both as self-psychotherapy and as a stepping stone to some new career. At first, I had grand ideas of becoming a late-blooming syndicated columnist, then for a long time, I saw myself going back to school for a self-designed multidisciplinary MA and Ph.D. in spirituality, philosophy, and writing so I could become a professor, which, based on messages in comments to many of my essays, I recently scaled back to starting out just finding a position as an adjunct professor, teaching any one or more of a number of subjects such as business law, philosophy of law, writing, philosophy of spirituality, etc.
That essay discussed how various synchronicities in April led me to move to an area of Pennsylvania that contains many small schools. Yet, here I sit, five months later, having taken no steps toward this goal. Why continue to procrastinate? My sister asked me if I fear failure, which is a common reason that procrastination as a defense mechanism arises. Possibly, but I don’t think so.
I know I am constructed to teach. Yet, there are many paths that include teaching. In my Medium bio, I describe myself as “a deep thinker; an explorer of ideas and the mind.” In an essay about purpose that I wrote back in January 2021, I wrote “I am here to share my insights with whoever finds them interesting.” In a discussion this past Wednesday with my spirit guides facilitated by my channeler, Ane, who has played an integral role in my spiritual journey since 2010, Rama asked me if I wanted to be a writer. Apparently, my guides see me writing a book one day, which as they put it, would be my legacy.
So it seems my procrastinating does not stem from fear of failure but instead from lack of conviction about which path I want to take. Interestingly, in the midst of writing this essay, I noticed that a piece titled The Discipline of Clarity — According to Jung, How to Find Your Way (J.W. Bertolotti) appeared at the top of my Medium feed. Always on the alert for synchronicity, I clicked into it and found several pearls of wisdom, including:
Finding clarity is a challenging endeavor for several reasons. First, our uniqueness demands that we all discern our path. Jung said, “The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”
Second, finding clarity is an ongoing process; one does not find it one day and no longer needs to contemplate life’s questions. The discipline of clarity requires us to walk the path while continuing to navigate our direction.
That essay really discusses spiritual and philosophical clarity. That I think I have, though it can ebb and flow. In my essay Spirituality Redefined, in which I distinguish spirituality from religion, provide my own definition that bridges the gap between theism/deism and atheism and, then list many spiritual principles (honesty, hope, faith, courage, integrity, willingness, humility, self-discipline, love for others, perseverance, spiritual awareness, service, empathy, and compassion), I write:
While all those words have feelings that come with them, they are more states of being than emotions. Emotions signal to us. Spiritual principles not only serve as lighthouses when our vision is foggy, but they also guide us to and present safe harbors in which to live, and anyone and everyone can live with contentment and serenity by working Step work into their self-improvement and spiritual growth routines.
I enjoy bridging gaps between various writers, enabling readers to travel to destinations previously unknown (oh, that’s another song I love, which to me speaks to some of the questions that spiritual seekers ask about reincarnation and purpose). So now I want to connect some dots between the quote and some interesting essays of others that I have read recently on Medium, the first of which inspired the title of today’s piece.
Keri Mangis wrote the other day about a few creative archetypes, to wit: the Artist, the Alchemist and the Pioneer. Echoing the quote from Ravyne’s prompt, Keri writes of the Artist:
They see a beautiful butterfly garden whereas others see only soil and seeds. They see a successful dinner party and a kitchen filled with the scents and sounds of ingredients coming to life, while others merely see a bag of ingredients and envision a sink full of dishes.
Keri continues her discussion of the Artist by quoting George Orwell:
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” [emphasis added]
That Orwell quote connects to one source of inspiration for my writing — for planting and tending my visionary garden — calling bullshit when I see it. For example, you may see 1) J’Accuse…!, 2) Experiential Based Take on the Twin Flame Soulmate Concept, Beware of those selling it but know that there is something so much more special and eternal that may describe you and your eternal flame, or 3) my essay on hypocrisy at the Supreme Court. (See, also for agreement with Orwell, Harry Seitz’s Fuck Prestige and Being Distributed: “You write because you want someone to hear you. You want to be understood or to say whatever you think is important, but don’t conflate that with being popular.”… “And if there are issues you truly care about, write about them, no matter how unpopular or how much rancor they draw.”).
Keri includes this wonderful quote in her piece:
“We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own and other’s people’s models, learn to be ourselves and allow our natural channel to open.” – Shakti Gawain
I connect that to the thoughts of my Medium friend, Chelsea Mandler MAT in her recent essay with real advice to writers (not BS advice about how to make money on Medium):
planning does not determine if one’s masterpiece will come to fruition. This is rarely the case. Instead, the writer becomes privy to the message of the writing like an artist being led by a sense of intuitive factors that graze the page independent of the writer’s experience. …
Once again, a master artist analyzes the process of his own work and concludes that the statue unearthed itself from the confines of his chisel! …
All writing is forsaken to the process of what the writing in itself desires to say. Yes, I am saying that the story writes itself.
Yvonne Pierre’s quote also speaks to me about personal transformation and thus speaks to a spiritual journey and connects to how Keri describes the Alchemist:
The Alchemist archetype is interested primarily in change and transformation, both for themselves and for the world. … the search is what matters.
Tending to one’s spiritual garden requires a lot of hard work. I have many flaws. I will never achieve perfection and progress ebbs and flows. The alchemy will not result from spiritual hacks such as affirmations, breathwork, crystals, smudging, Tarot, etc. Those tools all have their place and worth but are designed to do work for the users — that’s what tools do — they make work easier (on the spiritual journey, “work smarter not harder” does not apply). They have nothing to do with putting in the hard work, whether through shadow work, Step work, psychotherapy, or other methods of inner exploration, behind the journey of transformation that is the goal of spiritual practice — of the journey without a destination.
Describing the Pioneer archetype, Keri writes:
Unlike either of the previous archetypes, the Pioneer is not interested in working with existing material. They seek out new territory, the new frontier. They call down new inventions, ideas, and ways of thinking directly from the cosmos.
Pioneers are characterized by their joy in risk-taking and adventure. They walk their own path, however lonely it might be. Public opinion does not sway them; they seek their direction and encouragement only from within.
It will not surprise you, particularly if you have familiarity with my thoughts on non-conformity, that I identify particularly strongly with this archetype and see it in Yvonne Pierre’s quote. It makes perfect sense that this archetype resonates with me because Meyers Briggs typing (and this personality typing method draws from Jung’s work on archetypes) pegs me as an INTP (to any science-based reader with knowledge of the Big 5 test favored by many in the profession, my Big 5 results correspond with the INTP results). A letter I wrote to my best friend in October 2020 in response to him asking me rather unintentionally stiltedly what positive results I see from my having spiritually awakened (published with names redacted here), included:
INTP’s “focus on ideas and concepts rather than facts and details;” INTP’s “prefer to be spontaneous and flexible rather than planned and organized;” INTP “minds are complicated and active” — we “go to great mental lengths trying to devise ingenious solutions to interesting problems;” INTP’s are” typically non-traditional, and more likely to reason out their own individual way of doing things than to follow the crowd;” non-conformity is our natural state of being — it is not something we practice to shock others or make a statement. We “tend to share thoughts that are not fully developed, using others as a sounding board for ideas and theories in a debate against themselves rather than as actual conversation partners,” making us “appear unreliable, but in reality no one is more enthusiastic and capable of spotting a problem, drilling through the endless factors and details that encompass the issue and developing a unique and viable solution — just don’t expect punctual progress reports.”
non-conformity is our natural state of being — it is not something we practice to shock others or make a statement
I often ponder the concept of non-conformity. Especially when my son will ask me “why do you need to be so weird?” For me, it comes down to thinking independently and not being afraid to express what others may find weird. If one exercises critical thinking abilities and concludes in alignment with a group — wonderful. I cannot expect any more of anyone than to practice discernment over resonance and confirmation bias and group-identity-based thinking.
Now I can connect all this to some essays I read recently by Douglas Giles, PhD on the age-old philosophical question of individuality and whether humans are individuals and whether or not this proves beneficial and then how this relates to the oft-misunderstood and misused concept of freedom. As a lead-in, I recommend these two essays of his, Am I an Individual, Part 1 and Part 2, for their presentation of the history of various schools of thought.
This next essay on the philosophy of Daniel Ortega y Gasset really grabbed my attention.
Ortega saw human life is a dynamic dialogue between the individual and the world. Each one of us are individual humans who live in a reality of situations, people, and things. He said that every individual human life is a point of view directed upon the universe. Each person’s perspective is a component of reality, and all knowledge is knowledge from a definite point of view. Every truth thus connects to a person’s perspective placed in space and time. Ortega saw his perspectivist philosophy as expressing Einstein’s theory of relativity, replacing in philosophy the classical Newtonian mechanics from which physics had now stepped away.
The individual person attempts to order his or her world from the point of view of life. “Living,” Ortega says, “is to reach outside of oneself, devoted ontologically, to what is other, be it called world or circumstances.” It is I who lives and knows the world. Who am I? Ortega says, “I am I and my circumstances.” We are an individual human person, living in a particular time and space with a particular perspective on the world and on our life within the world.
Giles then discusses Ortega’s views on the duality of being an individual in a society.
Pursuing the phenomenology of human social life, Ortega realizes that he (and each of us) is an “I” who is in a human world and society. We find our authenticity in our individuality, as other existentialists say, but I do not exist in solitude, even though my being and my thoughts my ours and mine alone. I share the world with others. I have my life, for being an “I” means for me my life. You have your life, and your thoughts and convictions do not exist for me, but you are another “I” like me, and that means for you your life. We share this world.
In the social world, an individual is being-for-and-with-others. One cannot and should not view possibilities as exclusively one’s own but understand that social life is an interactive process relating to a common world of possibilities.
I urge everyone to read Giles’s Does Anyone Understand What “Freedom” Means? in which he points out:
Freedom is more than simply a lack of tyranny. Freedom is not thinking “I can do whatever I want.” These simplistic definitions feel good to those who declare them, but they do not reflect the reality of freedom and social life. We begin to understand freedom once we get past trying to reduce it to a binary yes-no….
The presence of other people in the social lifeworld is inherently a restriction on your freedom. Refusing to share the world with other people is refusing them their freedom. Life isn’t all about you and what you want….
We need to get past slogans and rhetoric and engage with the complex give and take of freedom in real life….
The challenge is to understand which rules are conducive to freedom — a deep and complex set of philosophical questions, but issues society needs to discuss sincerely and intelligently.
That last part reflects the type of class I would like to conduct (as opposed to instruct) one day.
Now tying my thoughts on Yvonne Pierre’s quote and the work of others quoted herein back to the subtitle of this essay, These archetypes will help me create a new life in my octopus’s oasis marooned at times alone under a sea of humanity, Giles wrote in his essay on Ortega:
He poetically says that we find ourselves shipwrecked in a sea of circumstances, and we save ourselves by holding onto our consciousness and the essence of our lives as an “I” who must face the problem that I am lost but capable of solving this problem that is life itself.
Last December, I wrote this poem, Oh So Alone on an Island in a Sea of Humanity, A rondeau of self-reliance, in response to one of Ravyne’s scrabble word prompts (include at least 5 of ten words from a list):
For more months than I care to count the divide continues to mount Grains of sand slip through my fingers On the beach I still malinger My truth society will discount
Must act now for my own account Show the world I am paramount Stand up front as lead singer Oh so alone on an island in a sea of humanity
Prey on sheep this stealthy catamount Conformity I shall surmount Liberty bell I shall be the ringer Take notice here comes a zinger Drivers of the herd shall now dismount Oh so alone on an island in a sea of humanity
If you’ve made it this far, I can indulge myself by dropping in another poem of mine, a terza rima sonnet,¹ about why I write (work my garden) that evokes Ortega’s thought about holding onto consciousness.
Write to merge my soul and my consciousness Write for expansion of my higher self so selves wonderfully become oneness
Write so my demons remain on the shelf and even when they escape their cages I learn and know how to protect ourself
Write to express and temper my rages Else my anger can turn to resentment Progress not perfection comes in stages
Write to increase base-level contentment Not for insane pursuit of happiness and to avoid depths of self-contemptment
Write to share feelings and avoid numbness and return to state of inner youngness
I have octopus’s oasis in today’s subtitle because I liked the alliterative reference to Octopus’s Garden by The Beatles (my favorite group), and now looking at the lyrics, I’ll end with this verse:
Oh what joy For every girl and boy Knowing they’re happy And they’re safe (Happy and they’re safe)
In Rama I create, with soul energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
¹“The terza rima sonnet is named for a poetic convention called terza rima, which is a three-line stanza that uses a chain rhyme (the carrying over of the rhyme used in a previous stanza). The rhyme scheme of the terza rima sonnet is aba bcb cdc ded followed by a rhyming couplet that usually echoes the first rhyme of the poem: aa.” — Source My poem uses aba bcb cdc dad aa. That is the scheme that Robert Frost used in the example on the website I linked. If it’s close enough for Frost it’s close enough for me.
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