Bone by bone
“Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered...”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
One of the highlights of my summer sojourn to Eastern Canada was being invited to the home studio of Clare Bridge. We instantly felt like kindred spirits and were astounded by how similar the qualities of our artistry are.
This photo is a casting of a coyote atlas bone Clare made as part of a necklace I bought and wear almost every day. I felt very much drawn to it as a talisman of my sojourn to dig deeper into my heritage by visiting graves of my ancestors and spending time exploring the land where they lived and died.
One of the interesting emergent phenomena arising from this 3 month sojourn has been the appearance of bone-like artifacts in my clay studio this fall. I became completely absorbed by sculpted forms with circles and soft undulating shapes that appear bone-like.
When I worked with my Embodied Imagination teacher on this mysterious emergence I experienced myself as not a ‘maker’ but a follower. I felt an intelligence/a knowing in the clay ~ if I slow down enough and listen closely from deep in my body ~ my hands follow the knowing with the clay. Clay already knows what shape it wants to be and through mutual communication, adapting, adjusting, refining, sensing, and feeling, an art(ifact) is brought into existence....
and, bone by bone this instinctual, feminine, passionately creative wild nature (of me) is re-membered and in service to clay.
The very next day…
You can imagine how enlivened I felt the day after I wrote the above text when I encountered this large bone, which might be an elk skull with the top atlas bone attached.
In the Cartesian worldview in which I was born and raised we have come to doubt experience, sensation and observation. As a phenomenologist (in training) I find myself resisting the habit of wanting to analyse, interpret and make sense of symbols, images and experiences. Yesterday, I wanted to look up “bones” to find from external sources what they symbolise/mean but when I worked on bones from an Embodied perspective I connected with an inner knowing that is far more insightful and profound. There is no ‘making sense’, no need for determining cause or reason with inner knowing…it just is.
I don’t know what this encounter today means but I do know that my body quickened when I saw its presence laying on the forest floor near the hide. And I do know with certainty that our bodies are part of the world and we are part of an ongoing interdependent process with the world that is full of magic.
