On Night and Day
Regarding solar autopilot, black water, and the mandalas that are sprouting on their own time and terms.
Apparently, for at least several weeks now, I have been running almost entirely on solar fuel. Not just metaphorically, exactly, though certainly it’s that too.
I mean that I’ve been piloting around using the specific, identifiable mode where the “Captain” brain and the project manager tools lock in and I just go from one thing to the next. And there is always a next thing.
It’s been store development and product photography, client work, oracle card designs, garden beds, a T-shirt design thrown in, and somewhere in there a new mandala sketch that I started without knowing what it was going to be.
The productivity is valid at this point, but, when Captain go-mode is allowed to run on too long, there’s a flatness that surfaces, like looking at everything on a screen. It all becomes task completion and meaning starts to recede.
Over the years I’ve become better at recognizing the signs of imbalance and calibrating accordingly. Making sure all my inner council members (so to speak) are getting their allotted time and attention. But apparently my inner project management team has been pulling double shifts and I didn't even catch the murmurs of unrest until this week.
I sat down one morning with the vague intention of doing a little work on my Disciple card, and then, without a plan, I meandered over and began a fresh mandala design. As it developed, I started to recognize what I was making. The organic sprawl on a dark field. The dotted stars. The moon phases ringing the outside. And then, at the outer edge, a ripple effect — black water, with the moons reflected in it.
I know those motifs from my inner world. Years ago, in an art therapy session, while working with a drawing I’d made, I zoomed in further and further on something in the work until I realized I was looking at a reflection of it in the mirror of still water. Underneath the reflection, there was a whole other world, one that had been present the whole time, but unrecognized and inaccessible to me.
That was the first time I clearly and directly encountered what I'd call the feminine within myself. When I saw that black water mirror appear in the mandala this week, I knew what I was looking at.
“If it wasn’t for this new mandala sketch, which I’m loosely calling ‘The Night Flower’ mandala, the past several weeks, maybe even months, would be a gloriously growing pile of slightly flat productivity. ”
Now, this is going to seem a little off topic, but stick with me… I’ve been reading The Neverending Story since I was eight years old, circling back to it in the library until my grandfather eventually tracked down that same library copy and gave it to adult me for my very own. It's still on my shelf next to my reading chair. One of the oldest mirrors I have in this life.
There is a section of that book that resonates deeply with me. It’s the section where Perilin, the Night Forest, and Goab, the Many-Colored Desert, exist in symbiosis. By day, Grograman the fire lion rules and the desert blazes with color, burning back the overgrowth. By night, he turns to stone and the forest glows and thrives and reclaims the land. Neither one destroys the other. In fact, their very existence is depends upon the life and death of one another. The forest without the desert would consume everything. The desert without the forest would burn out life.
When I looked around my studio this week, I was surprised to find I was looking at both … but only by a hair.
You see, I also saw a whole lot of solar projects: the finished foiled mandala I'd been using for product photography — warm, golden, structured, blazing with color. In other words, Goab. And I saw new card designs, old imaginings being converted to more outward facing finished products. I saw illustrations moving toward their finished states, client design work, garden beds beginning to set fruit.
And that’s why I say I saw both solar and lunar energy, but only by a hair. If it wasn’t for this new mandala sketch, which I’m loosely calling “The Night Flower” mandala, the past several weeks, maybe even months, would be a gloriously growing pile of slightly flat productivity. And the flatness makes sense. I've been running Goab shifts around the clock, with no Perilin to reclaim the ground at night.
What I find interesting (and what I'm still sitting with) is that I started making mandalas as a really straight forward design project. A product of sorts that I could share outwardly. And technically, that's still true. But there is something about the way a mandala functions that keeps pulling it out of that category and slowing down its arrival in the studio/website environment.
The Neverending Story works the way it works because you can zoom in on any part of it and find a complete story nested inside the whole. Perilin and Goab, taken alone, is a full story of creation and destruction and the necessity of both. And it is, in turn, just one piece of a much larger unfolding pattern. Iterative. Folding inward and outward at every scale.
That is, I'm noticing, how my creativity often works. It's the structure I keep returning to without planning to. The mandalas, which started as mostly aesthetic, somewhat meditative, keep becoming something else — like mirrors I didn't intend to make, reflecting back something I needed to see. And in that way, they’re not unlike my oracle deck.
The Night Forest showed up this week because the Night Forest needed to show up. It grew organically, without a plan. Apparently, my work knew, and as it happens, I'm just catching up.
