What burning question of possibility will influence what and how you create in the next 3 months?
If you’d like to join us on this living quest, here’s a link where you can read about what us questers on #Quest2015, now #LivetheQuest, are up to. When you sign up, you’ll be in the loop to join us. Read more about our guide, Jeffrey Davis of Tracking Wonder here.
As I engage the Major Arcana of the Tarot, stepping in to meet the first six (Fool to Hierophant) at their borders along with my writing students in this January’s Wheel of Archetypal Selves course I’m teaching, and in keeping with a new habit of answering the prompts of Tracking Wonder’s #Quest2015 in color, I started with a circle on a blank page. Cipher, zero, for The Fool, starting over in the New Year. Then the urge to give that zero color, and it quickly became zero as sky, eye of the storm or lighthouse tip, lens, unknown, with a landscape of the colors of Earth behind it.
The burning question of possibility that sums up my core fascination as a writer at this time in my life (one poetry book, November Butterfly, out about women, charisma, motherhood, rape, and art and the next poetry book mid process about a commune, its trespasses, its leader, and the lives of those who thrived after they left the commune):
What if I trusted the noir fairytale?
I mean the noir fairytale I’ve lived to get here. I mean the gritty, real, Bluebeard and Red Shoes fairytales we all live, that braid of what we go through to grow.
And what if I trusted the noir fairytale, as in go jugular, not apologetic. Face and write the core story. Again. Follow it round and round the growth rings of the body’s trunk.
Typically the Fool sets out on the next leg of adventure with tool bag casually slung over shoulder, his animal familiar, a rose in hand, perhaps a cliff he nonchalantly approaches in oblivious joy.
When I was coloring, I thought about the different objects usually surrounding the Fool, but had no urge to include them yet. I thought about self as instrument with animal familiar, rose, and that hidden cliff inside. Later, looking at progressive versions of the drawings in a row, I saw that the figure enters the open circle as spine of pen hovering over bed of leaf. I see she also occupies the layers, neither choosing to fully enter from above or below but at some combination of merged selves at the threshold.
While the writer self addresses this “trusting the noir fairytale” in new work about the past, the “What if” for the self in present time, questing and pressing forward with joy, asks:
What if I trusted the universe again, with the passion I used to have as a child, going forward into the beautiful projects in my lap this coming year, which include co-blogging at Tarot for Two (launched last week) with my writer friend Mary Allen, editing an upcoming anthology for The Fertile Source, mapping the rest of this year’s Workshop/reading book tour for November Butterfly, and writing new poems towards the new poetry manuscripts.
Happy New Year; I’m so grateful to already be running with #Quest2015’s growing, extended pack of creatives–see below to read other questers posing their own burning questions.
Related Links:
Healing Power of Our Stories #burningquestions by Ginny Lee Taylor
Here Be Dragons by Brenna Layne
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