For the better part of a week, a greenhouse sat in this collage and refused to leave, and I refused to understand why. I kept looking at it and thinking, that’s odd, that’s not right, a greenhouse doesn’t belong here. I wanted something that looked like the High Priestess without my having to argue for it, something more obviously mystical, more veiled. But the greenhouse stayed, patient in the way plants are patient, and eventually I stopped fighting it long enough to actually ask what it wanted to say.

A greenhouse is where things incubate. It’s where a seed becomes a seedling and a seedling becomes a plant tough enough to survive being put out into open ground. That is an initiation, structurally, exactly what this archetype has always been about, except I had been picturing initiation wrong. I kept assuming it had to happen in exposure, in some vulnerable, unprotected place where you prove yourself against the elements. The greenhouse said otherwise. It said initiation can happen inside a closed, comfortable, protective space, because the point was never to prove you could survive the elements unaided. The point is to become strong enough, in a held environment, that you’re ready when the glass finally comes down.

That reframe landed close to home. I’m in my own season of reconnecting to things that took a back seat for a decade, the artist, the shaman, the creator, the visionary, all the primordial versions of myself that got quieted while I tended everything else. A greenhouse felt exactly right for that kind of return: not a dramatic unveiling, but a private, protected place where something already alive gets to toughen up before it has to stand in the open. And if I’m honest, I’d love an actual greenhouse on my own property one day, so perhaps it was always going to find its way into this deck eventually.

The Floor of Assessment, Not Opposition

The greenhouse sits on black and white angular flooring, and the High Priestess herself was immediately present in that choice. She’s so often pictured enthroned between two pillars, one black, one white, holding the tension of what looks like opposition but is really just polarity in service of judgment, in the oldest sense of that word: the capacity to assess. Not to condemn, not to rank one side against the other, but to weigh, to discern, to know where you actually stand in a process. That felt true to where I am with this whole thread of new initiations. Not choosing a side between two opposites, but standing on a floor that lets me see both and take an honest measure of the middle. Duality, not polarity. The floor holds both colors without needing either one to win.

Four Flowers, Rising

Above the greenhouse floats a red rose, and red carries the sacred feminine for me the way it does across so much of Vedic and Hindu tradition, Durga’s red, the color of the mother throughout much of Indian devotional art. The rose is womb-shaped by nature already, so placing it there, hovering just above the incubating glass, was really just letting the symbol say what it already knows how to say. That’s the mother in me, the one who protects what’s still forming.

To the right, pink anemones, softer, more delicate, and this is where the High Priestess’s virginal aspect enters, not virginity in the narrow sexual sense we usually default to, but virgin as newness, as the spark before form, the spawning of an idea that hasn’t been touched by outcome yet. The greenhouse is the sacred soil underneath that meaning, the ground where a virginal idea gets to exist before the world gets a vote on it.

Above the red rose is a flower that reads to me as jack-in-the-pulpit, and it’s unmistakably phallic in its shape. That felt necessary rather than incidental. The High Priestess carries her own relationship to the sacred masculine too, her attractiveness, her provocative edge, the part of her that isn’t only receptive stillness. Columns are read this way constantly in Tarot and oracle imagery when she appears, some vertical, upright form standing in for that charge. This flower does the same work here.

And at the top, a white rose, reaching toward whatever sits above all of it. The High Priestess is traditionally lunar, moon-drenched, but the moon itself has never been my particular language. What I wanted instead was the wider idea of the celestial, that sense of being tethered to something higher than the garden, the greenhouse, even the rose beneath it. The white rose is that reach. Red below for the mother, white above for the source she answers to.

Thank you for being here on Substack. Thank you for walking alongside me. For those of you supporting my work more deeply, you will find in depth explorations of Vision, its attributes, and its iconography in the subscriber spaces.

I invite you to journey with me.

These meanings are mine alone, pulled from the same intuitive well that made the collage itself. Tarot, shadow work, myth, and mystery all have a hand in what emerges. This is the space that I love to play in as an Artist, the intuitive field an infinite pool.

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The Fool | The Focus: Liminality

A woman crosses more uncelebrated thresholds than almost any other figure I can think of. Puberty into womanhood. Junior high into high school, and then the bigger door of high school into college, if college is even the path chosen. College, or the choosing not to, into a first apartment, that first taste of an independent space that belongs to no parent. And later, marriage. Divorce. Widowhood. The quiet erosion of a life that no longer fits. Every one of these is a doorway, and almost none of them come with a ritual to mark the crossing. That absence is exactly why this archetype matters, and it’s exactly what I was working through when I built this collage.

In the Tarot, this figure is the Fool, card zero, the number that comes before counting even begins. She’s usually pictured mid-step, walking toward a cliff edge, unbothered by what should probably concern her. I used to read that image as naive. I read it differently now. Zero isn’t nothing. Zero is the egg. It’s the ouroboros, the serpent curled into its own circle with no beginning and no end. It’s the womb, and it’s the mitochondria humming away inside every cell of us, that ancient, inherited spark passed mother to daughter to daughter, carrying memory long before there’s language for it. Zero is the void, but not an empty one. It’s the field before form, the place of all awareness and every possibility not yet chosen, which means it’s also the place of creation and birth. That’s the entire skill set of this archetype: comfort with not knowing, not mastery over it.

Walking Into the Mist

The central figure in this piece is a woman with her back to the viewer, hood up against weather that isn’t quite rain and isn’t quite fog, walking directly into a mist that swallows the horizon. You can’t see her face. That was deliberate, even if I didn’t fully understand why until the piece was finished. A threshold isn’t something you walk through facing the camera. You walk through it with your back to everyone who might be watching, because no one else can cross it for you, and no one else can even really see what you’re stepping into. She’s not fleeing anything. She’s not being chased. She’s simply walking, at her own pace, into whatever is next.

That’s the heart of the archetype for me, not the loud, photographed thresholds, but the quiet ones. My own arrived wrapped around my fiftieth birthday, when something in me simply stopped caring how I was performing every role I’d been vigilant about for decades. I didn’t plan that release. It just arrived, the way this figure arrives at the edge of the mist, already walking before she’s decided exactly where she’s going.

The Mermaid and the Leopard Cub

To one side sits a mermaid, perched on a rock, looking off to the right, out into open space and awareness. I placed her there because she’s a misunderstood creature, mythic, half one thing and half another, belonging fully to neither the water nor the land. That’s a threshold body if there ever was one. She isn’t stranded. She’s positioned exactly where she needs to be, at the seam between two elements, looking outward rather than back.

At her feet is a baby leopard, also facing right, also looking in that same direction of unfolding awareness. I relate to the big cats, and there’s something about a cub specifically, not yet grown into its full power, that felt right here. It’s an animal already oriented toward the wild, toward instinct, even before it fully understands what that instinct will cost or require. In indigenous traditions across the world, the cat and the leopard specifically carry this exact charge: an animal that moves between the visible world and whatever is happening just outside the edge of sight, watching a corner of the room no one else notices. The mermaid and the cub, looking the same direction, felt like two versions of the same threshold intelligence, one mythic and aquatic, one embodied and predatory, both oriented toward what’s coming rather than what’s behind.

The Arches, the Sphinx, and the Mountain

Above all of that sits an old government building, heavy stone architecture in that Louis the Sixteenth style, with a row of great arches at its base that function like the passages under a bridge, openings that lead you through the structure and out into further space beyond it. Architecturally, an arch is one of the oldest threshold forms humans have built. You don’t stop at an arch. You pass beneath it into whatever waits on the other side. I liked placing something so formal, so institutional, directly above the woman walking into the mist, because it says something about how many of our thresholds are actually sanctioned by structures far older and far more rigid than we are, even the invisible ones.

In the upper left corner is the Sphinx, also looking to her right, holding that ancient guardian energy, the lioness aspect, protective and watchful over knowledge that isn’t meant to be handed out casually. The Sphinx has always stood at a threshold in the oldest sense, the one who poses the riddle you must answer correctly before you’re permitted to pass. She felt necessary here as the guardian of the ancient side of this crossing, holding the line between old world knowing and whatever modern shape a threshold takes now. And directly above her head, a mountain, snow-covered, the kind of landscape that shows up again and again across shamanic traditions as the place you climb when a rite of passage is required of you, the cold, the altitude, the tundra itself functioning as an initiation.

Where the Traditions Meet

Each piece of this collage carries its own thread back to one of these three lenses. The woman in the mist and the arches beneath the old building are pure Fool energy, the doorway you pass beneath without stopping, zero as the field before form rather than as nothing at all. The Sphinx belongs to the oldest layer of the threshold story, the guardian who poses the riddle you must answer correctly before you’re permitted to pass, ancient knowledge standing watch over the crossing.

The mermaid and the leopard cub, both looking the same direction, felt more Gnostic to me as I worked, two creatures who belong fully to neither world they inhabit, oriented outward toward the awareness still unfolding rather than back toward what’s familiar. And the snow-covered mountain is the shamanic note in the piece, the tundra a body has to physically cross, the kind of landscape that shows up across indigenous traditions as the place a rite of passage actually happens, cold and altitude doing work that no ceremony indoors ever could.

Together they’re the same instruction arriving from four different directions: you don’t schedule a threshold. You recognize you’re already standing in one, and you keep walking.

Thank you for being here on Substack. Thank you for walking alongside me. For those of you supporting my work more deeply, you will find in depth explorations of Vision, its attributes, and its iconography in the subscriber spaces.

I invite you to journey with me.

These meanings are mine alone, pulled from the same intuitive well that made the collage itself. Tarot, shadow work, myth, and mystery all have a hand in what emerges. This is the space that I love to play in as an Artist, the intuitive field an infinite pool.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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This past two weeks I was away on vacation, at an art retreat, a personal art retreat where I was able to work from sunrise to sunset on various projects. It’s one I’ve been doing yearly, and in some ways it acts a little like a residency. There are other artists there, so there’s nice interaction, and I really enjoy that. But what I get out of it most is that it’s a dedicated space to get work done. It’s hotel service, all the food is on premises, so you have no reason to leave. There’s even a swimming pool.

You can literally stay on site, which lets you be uber focused. The studio space is open twenty four seven, so at any time of night you can go work, or work early. There’s an expectation to be an early riser, and many mornings I was the first one in the space working.

What I like to do is give myself time to experiment. I generally bring a few projects, some ideas that really need days to flesh out, because I might be staining, making different paints and inks, creating new color palettes, or experimenting with techniques on various types of paper and different kinds of glues.

It’s the kind of work where you want hours to let things dry, then rearrange them. A lot of it ends up being a boro style of collaging that I do, creating large panels. Much of it gets started there, not all finished, but it gets me moving in the right direction. So when I get back to my home studio, I have so much material to keep working with.

This week I wanted to share some images from what I was working on, some works in progress. I’m working primarily with inks on very thin papers, architectural tracing papers, vellums, and washi papers, kozo especially. This time I was really focused on creating my own inks using dyes, honing in on a particular color palette I love. The colors you’re seeing here are all custom, made through a lot of dyeing and staining. I’m using vintage Asian papers alongside my own hand scripted ones.

These pieces are designed to be large installations that hang freeform on the wall, not framed, although they could be. I’m creating them specifically not to be framed. The patterns in them feel very woodland, the striations of line remind me of dense forest, trees, a kind of minimal landscape connection. Very loose, but that’s the feeling running through many of them.

Enjoy.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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The Magician  |  Ancient Lore

There are two ways the past comes back to us. One is memory. You lived it, you were there, and something in your nervous system carries the trace of it forward until a smell or a song or a shift in the light pulls it back to the surface. That kind of remembering is the Memory Holder’s territory, and it is sacred work.

But there is a second way, stranger and older, and it does not ask permission from your biography. It arrives without ever having happened to you. You have never stood in that place, never sung that melody, never lit that fire, and still, something in you recognizes it completely. That is not memory. That is the old songs, singing themselves awake.

This archetype came to me almost embarrassingly simple, at first glance. A landscape, and a hummingbird. That was it. That was the whole collage. But the simplicity is the point, because this is not an archetype of accumulation. It doesn’t need layers of symbol stacked on top of each other to make its case. It needed almost nothing, and what little it needed, it needed exactly right.

The background is water, land, and low mountains far in the distance, rendered in a French blue-gray sky that softens into a salmon, buttery yellow right at the horizon line. The water below mirrors the sky above, but in reverse, so the whole scene folds in on itself, sky becoming water becoming sky again.

There is nothing else in the landscape. No structures, no other creatures, no clutter. It reads as barren at first look and then, the longer you sit with it, as unbelievably rich. Both things are true at once, and that contradiction is exactly the texture of this archetype. It appears empty. It is not empty. It is holding something you can’t immediately name.

The Liminal Creature

Into that landscape comes the hummingbird, wings spread wide, caught in that impossible mid-air hover that hummingbirds are known for, neither arriving nor leaving. Its coloring is a strange, gorgeous mix: deep purples and emerald greens, wings brushed with a pinky mauve, a belly the color of lilac, feathers moving through grays and browns and greens, a long dark beak. It doesn’t sit anywhere. It doesn’t land. It just holds itself, suspended, in the middle of that folding sky and water.

I think about hummingbirds the way I think about cats. Both are creatures that mysticism and literature keep returning to as beings who move easily between the seen and the unseen, who belong fully to this world and also, somehow, to whatever is just past it. They are threshold animals.

Not because they are especially mystical themselves, but because we have always sensed something in the way they move, quick, untraceable, here and then not, that mirrors how the old songs actually arrive in us. They don’t walk in. They flash in and hover, and then they’re gone again, and you’re left standing there with your whole nervous system rearranged.

Not Remembering. Knowing.

Here is the distinction I keep returning to, because I think it is the whole archetype in a single sentence: remembering is something we know happened to us, and then forgot. The Old Songs are something else entirely. They are a knowingness that comes in without ever having been lived. Not a memory, but a truth activated. Something stirs in the soul, and there is no event in this lifetime you can point to and say, there, that’s where I learned that. It didn’t come from an event. It came from somewhere older.

Jung would call this the collective unconscious, the layer of psyche that isn’t personal at all, the place where the soul exists outside the avatar, outside this one body and this one timeline, sitting instead in the wider field of consciousness. When the old songs stir, they are not rising up from your own buried history.

They are arriving from that field, the way a signal arrives from a radio station you didn’t know you were tuned to. This is why the experience so often comes with a kind of vertigo. You recognize something you have never touched. Your soul says, I know this, while your mind says, but you were never here.

I don’t think this is a rare experience. I think almost anyone who has been alive and paying attention for any real stretch of time has had it: a piece of music that undoes you for reasons you can’t explain, a landscape you’ve never visited that feels like coming home, a phrase in a language you don’t speak that lands in your chest before your mind translates it. Those are the old songs finding a crack to get through. The question the archetype poses isn’t whether this happens to us. It’s whether we remember that we’re allowed to call it back on purpose.

The Sun and the Siren

This archetype has a close relationship to the Joy Rememberer, and for a while I thought they might be the same thing wearing two faces. They’re not, and the difference matters. The Joy Rememberer is the black sun, the deep, grounded, almost stoic knowing that lives in the body, a sustaining certainty that doesn’t need proof, the kind of joy that simply feeds like sunlight feeds a field. It is still, in its own way, a form of remembering. It’s a knowing the body carries from having actually lived and breathed and continued on. It’s earned through duration.

The One Who Knows the Old Songs is the other current entirely. Where the Joy Rememberer’s knowing rises up through lived continuity, this archetype’s knowing arrives sideways, uninvited, from outside this lifetime altogether. Two different doorways into the same quantum field. One opens because you stayed present long enough to feel what was always true. The other opens because something ancient reached through the field and found you anyway, whether or not you were looking for it. Both are forms of remembering that are not memory. But one is grown, and the other is given.

Singing It Through

What do you do with a knowingness that didn’t come from your own history? You don’t analyze it into submission, and you don’t demand it explain its credentials. You let it move through you into form. That’s the whole practice, really. It could be a poem that arrives faster than you can write it down.

It could be a piece of music that hums up out of nowhere and insists on being played. It could be the particular, wordless way you arrange a room, or the color you’re suddenly compelled to paint a wall, or a story that feels like it’s using you to tell itself rather than the other way around.

This is the soul singing, not remembering lyrics from somewhere, but singing something that was already whole. The old songs don’t need your permission yet require your awareness.

Thank you for being here on Substack. Thank you for walking alongside me. For those of you supporting my work more deeply, you will find in depth explorations of Vision, its attributes, and its iconography in the subscriber spaces.

I invite you to journey with me.

These meanings are mine alone, pulled from the same intuitive well that made the collage itself. Tarot, shadow work, myth, and mystery all have a hand in what emerges. This is the space that I love to play in as an Artist, the intuitive field an infinite pool.

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The Sun  |  The Focus: A Knowing That Feeds Life

We tend to think of joy as something loud. Elation, celebration, the burst of feeling good when something finally goes right. That is the version of joy we are sold, the one that gets photographed. But there is an older joy underneath that one, quieter and much harder to shake loose, and it doesn’t announce itself the way happiness does. It simply knows. It has already remembered what the elated version of joy is still hoping to find out.

This archetype came to me first through darkness, which surprised me. Not the golden disc we’re used to seeing in the tarot, radiant and outward-facing, but a black central sun. I kept thinking of the geophysicist Giuliano Conforto and others who have written, through peer-reviewed research, about the possibility that the core of our planet isn’t the molten iron we were taught in school, but something more magnetic, more mysterious, a dark sun humming at the center of the Earth. We are also living through a stretch of many eclipses right now, and that blacked-out disc kept surfacing for me too, the way ancient Egypt sometimes rendered the sun as a dark disc in eclipse, the way Isis herself moves through veiling and unveiling. All of that converged into the black sun that sits at the heart of this collage.

Running through the black sun is a stream of molten red, and I genuinely can’t separate what it is. It reads as lava and it reads as solar flare at the same time, and I’ve come to think that’s the point. Which comes first, the disturbance in the Earth or the disturbance in the sun, is exactly the question the Joy Rememberer holds. Earthquakes stir the land. Volcanoes answer. Solar flares reach the Earth and something shifts below the surface too. Inner and outer aren’t two different events here. They are the same event, wearing two different faces.

The Eye That Already Knows

At the center of the collage is a single human eye, quite large, unmistakably a woman’s eye, painted in blues and pinks and purples and lavender and green, with a green iris. It looks straight out. It doesn’t perform anything for the viewer. It is happy, but it is a stoic kind of happy, the kind that isn’t trying to convince anyone of anything. There’s a rainbow of color painted around it, and yet the eye itself stays grounded, almost neutral. Not good, not bad. Just present, in a good place.

That’s the distinction I keep circling. This isn’t the joy of elation. It’s the joy of knowing. A knowingness. The kind of grounded certainty the sun itself seems to carry as it rises every day regardless of what any of us are going through, feeding the plants, the animals, the whole of humanity, without needing anything back. That sustaining, unhurried quality is what I mean by remembering. The Joy Rememberer isn’t discovering joy for the first time. She’s recalling something she already knew, something that was never actually lost, only quieted.

The molten stream begins at the eyebrow and moves around the eye, down the cheek, before it splits the black sun open. So the disruption starts in her, in the body, in the seeing, and moves outward into the world, or maybe it moves the other way and I’m only telling it in the order I can understand it. Either way, the inside and the outside are not separate here. What happens in the Earth happens in her. What happens in her happens in the Earth.

Father Sun, Mother Earth, One Energy

There’s a cosmology underneath this image that I recognize from indigenous traditions around father sun and mother earth, and it’s less that they are two forces in relationship and more that they are the same energy showing up differently depending on where you’re standing. The earth manifests it one way. The sun manifests it another. But it’s one current, and the joy in this archetype comes from that current, from the nurturing of humanity that both of them are quietly, constantly doing.

In the tarot, the Sun almost always lands as a positive card. Whatever it’s echoing, whatever difficulty it’s confirming or growth it’s reinforcing, the Sun arrives to support the knowing that’s already underway. It doesn’t erase what came before it. It illuminates it. That’s what this archetype is doing too, moving us away from the binary of good and bad, right and wrong, and into something more neutral, more aware, a deep knowing that simply streams from the field of love, of joy, of harmony, whether or not anyone is watching.

Thank you for being here on Substack. Thank you for walking alongside me. For those of you supporting my work more deeply, you will find in depth explorations of Vision, its attributes, and its iconography in the subscriber spaces.

I invite you to journey with me.

These meanings are mine alone, pulled from the same intuitive well that made the collage itself. Tarot, shadow work, myth, and mystery all have a hand in what emerges. This is the space that I love to play in as an Artist, the intuitive field an infinite pool.

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Communal Compassion  |  The Focus: Holding Space Together

We are taught, almost from the beginning, to grieve alone. To man up, to woman up, to carry what hurts us quietly, privately, and to come through it on the other side without having asked anyone for help along the way. There is a strange badge of honor in this culture for getting through pain by yourself. We call it strength. We call it resilience. We call it mental health and well-being. I am not entirely sure what we call it, but I know we praise it, and I know it costs us something.

This archetype, the Grief Bearer, came to me through an image I did not expect. Two enormous polar bears, walking across a frozen tundra, and beside them, small in comparison, a white fox. The fox moves close to the bears. All three are hunting the same barren landscape for the same scarce food. And yet there is no violence in the image. There is only a kind of allowing between them, a shared presence in a place where nothing else grows. I don’t know what the fox is thinking. I don’t know if the bears see a meal or a companion. But what struck me was that in that emptiness, in that ice, something was being permitted to coexist.

The sky behind them holds a warm, pastel, salmon-blue color, the only softness in an otherwise frozen world. Everything else is barren ground and pale light. Just these three animals, present with each other in a landscape that offers nothing but scarcity. And it is in that scarcity, that starkness, that the compassion becomes visible. Because compassion is easy when there is enough. It is a different thing entirely when there is not.

Holding Space, and Forgetting to Hold It for Ourselves

The Grief Bearer is the one who holds space for others. Again and again, I keep landing on this: so many of us, especially those of us who feel deeply, who sense what others are carrying before they say a word, fall into believing that our strength is measured by how much we can hold for everyone else. We become so good at bearing other people’s grief that we forget, or convince ourselves we don’t need, to have our own grief held in return.

Empaths know this dichotomy intimately. You can spend a lifetime being the person others come to in their pain and quietly starve the part of yourself that also needs to be witnessed. That is not strength. That is an old wound wearing the costume of strength, and this culture rewards the costume.

What the polar bears and the fox showed me is a different way. Not grief carried alone, proven through solitary endurance, but grief allowed to move between us. Communal compassion. The permission to say, I am hurting, I am afraid, I am confused, and to have that met not with a fix, not with advice, but with presence. With someone simply staying close, the way the fox stays close to the bears, in a place with nothing else to offer but each other.

Coming Out of the Isolation

I think this archetype is surfacing so strongly right now because of where we’ve been. Coming out of 2020, everyone was locked into their own private grief. Social distancing did exactly what the name suggests. It scattered us into our separate rooms with our separate fears, and the pendulum swung as far as it could toward isolation.

Now, in 2026, I see that pendulum swinging back, hard, in the other direction. People are searching for small circles again, online and in their own neighborhoods, looking for others who understand what they’re carrying. There is a hunger for community, for someone to hear the story and offer their own story in return. Whether it comes from extreme mental health struggles or simply the exhaustion of having grieved so long without company, the movement is the same. We are trying to remember how to grieve together.

That is the medicine of this archetype. Not the absence of pain, and not a landscape suddenly made fertile. The tundra stays barren. The hunt stays real. But the bears and the fox are not alone in it. And maybe that is enough. Maybe the barren ground was never the problem. Maybe the aloneness was.

Thank you for being here on Substack. Thank you for walking alongside me. For those of you supporting my work more deeply, you will find in depth explorations of Vision, its attributes, and its iconography in the subscriber spaces.

I invite you to journey with me.

These meanings are mine alone, pulled from the same intuitive well that made the collage itself. Tarot, shadow work, myth, and mystery all have a hand in what emerges. This is the space that I love to play in as an Artist, the intuitive field an infinite pool.

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When I was a little girl, I became obsessed with a question that nobody seemed to want to answer directly. It had to do with Eve, and with the nature of being a woman asking for knowledge.

Here’s what I kept turning over in my mind: We are told that Adam was given the task to name everything in the garden. Naming is an act of knowing. It’s how we individuate, how we claim consciousness. That’s the work Jung speaks of. That’s what it means to be human.

But then Eve, curious in the same way, drawn to the same knowledge, is cursed for it. The snake on the tree, the one that tempted her to want to know more, becomes the thing she is hanged by. She is suspended by the very seeking that Adam was praised for.

And then I grew older and learned about strange fruit. About bodies hung from trees in the Deep South. About the way that hunger for freedom, for knowing, for claiming one’s own body and mind has been answered with suspension, with punishment, with the weight of systems that say: this knowledge is not for you.

The hanged energy became real to me then. Not as punishment, but as a particular kind of crucible. A place where you are held in tension. Where you cannot move as you did before. Where your perspective is completely inverted.

But what if that inversion is not a curse? What if it is exactly the vantage point you need?

I found a photograph by Irving Penn from 1966. It’s a woman, and she is wearing the garden itself. Her skirt is made of hedgerow leaves, that biodynamically diverse ecosystem that holds everything together. At her waist, containing her, is a basket like the ones you carry when you’re foraging. The kind of basket that holds fruit, sustenance, abundance. It’s her corset, in a way. A holding. A structure.

But around her neck, spilling across her decollete, surrounding her head entirely, is a cornucopia of fruit. Abundance overflowing. She cannot contain it. It pours down onto her like a benediction or a burden, depending on how you look at it.

Her head is thrown back. Her hands are raised. And this is the part that stopped me: she is not surrendering as a victim. She is surrendering as someone who has decided, in this moment, that she does not have to be controlled by any of this. Not the basket, not the abundance, not the role. It is her fate, perhaps, in this moment. And she meets it with a kind of defiant acceptance. I don’t have to fight this right now. This is what it is. And I am still here.

To her left, wings. The wings of an angel. And the angel’s legs overlap her, embrace her from within the frame. She is not being rescued. She is being transformed. She becomes, in that moment, both woman and angel. Protected. Nurtured. Held by something larger than the hanging itself.

To her right, coiled around her hip, a snake. Its head is thrown back in the same gesture as hers, as if it too has been caught in something it didn’t fully understand. The snake that was cast as villain in the story becomes, here, a companion in the inversion. A friend to the hanged woman. And we know what snakes are in many traditions: the ouroboros, the rising kundalini, enlightenment itself. The very thing she was cursed for seeking.

Everything coexists in a field of deep red. Hell’s fire, maybe. Damnation, if you’re reading the biblical story as it was written. But also the color of life, of blood, of vitality, of the wound itself.

And this is when I understood what the wounded healer actually is.

She is not a woman who has been broken and then fixed. She is a woman who has been broken and then learned to live in it. Her wounds are not separate from her healing. They are the same thing. She wounds herself through the act of seeking knowledge, through refusing to be contained, through insisting on her own consciousness. And in that wound, she becomes capable of healing others in a way that someone untouched could never be.

She is the nurturer to her family, her spouse, her children, her parents, her community. She is the crone and the maiden and the mother all at once. She carries all the roles, all the versions of woman. And every single one of them is informed by the wound. By the hanging. By the inversion that let her see differently.

She is the adept healer because she has had to heal herself. She has sat with her own loneliness and learned its language. She has befriended the snake. She has worn the angel’s wings. She has let the abundance pour over her without drowning. And now when someone comes to her wounded, she doesn’t offer false comfort. She offers presence. She offers the knowing that comes from having been suspended exactly where they are.

The Hanged Woman is not right or wrong. She is not good or bad. She is perspective itself. She is the moment when you are turned upside down and finally, finally see clearly.

The collage came together because I needed to look at Eve differently. I needed to befriend the snake. I needed to understand that the wound and the healing are not opposites.

Thank you for being here on Substack. Thank you for walking alongside me. For those of you supporting my work more deeply, you will find in depth explorations of Vision, its attributes, and its iconography in the subscriber spaces.

I invite you to journey with me.

These meanings are mine alone, pulled from the same intuitive well that made the collage itself. Tarot, shadow work, myth, and mystery all have a hand in what emerges. This is the space that I love to play in as an Artist, the intuitive field an infinite pool.

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A number of years ago, I had a dream that stayed with me. I was in a Mayan temple, descending a long staircase that went deeper and deeper underground. As I walked down in my human form, I felt my body begin to shift and transform. I was shapeshifting.

I could feel the sensation of it moving through me, and when I looked down at the steps, I saw a shiny black paw continuing to descend. I had become a jaguar, that dark, powerful cat that moves through the jungle with such grace and knowing.

When I reached the bottom of that very long staircase, my paw touched sandy ground. And there, before me, was a monstrously large clamshell. In a bed of ground cinnabar, that deep red dust, lay a huge luminous pearl. It glowed like a scrying ball. When I looked into it, my face was reflected back, but it was no longer human. It was a jaguar’s face, with emerald green eyes staring back at me.

That dream has never left me. It became a map of something I needed to understand about my own journey, about the shapeshifting that happens when we listen to the voices of those who came before us.

My grandmother was a Native American. She comes to me now, in these later years, more clearly than ever. She comes as a raven. A huge, beautiful, strong black raven. And I feel her presence not as someone directing my choices, but as someone standing beside me, neutral, loving, present.

This is what the Ancestral Voice is. Not a voice that tells you what to do. A voice that is there, holding space, answering the deeper questions that no one else can answer, because the ancestors know the terrain of your soul in a way that living people cannot.

The ancestors sit in a unique place of neutrality. They have walked the earth. They have made their choices, lived their consequences, loved and lost. And now they stand beside us not to impose their will, but to guide us toward our own fulfillment.

They want us to live our dreams. They want us to become fully ourselves. And they give us the space to make our own decisions, knowing that those decisions are not right or wrong. They are simply the path we are meant to walk.

This is the energy of the Hierophant when understood as Ancestral Voice. Not doctrine. Not control. But a strong, neutral presence. A teacher who stands in wisdom without imposing it. A guide who knows the old ways and holds them, ready to share them if you ask, but never forcing.

This is Wuji, that tai chi concept of neutral stance. It looks still, but it is ready to move in any direction needed. It is strong. It is determined. And it is free.

The Native American Woman in Ceremonial Regalia

This is my grandmother. She stands at the center of this archetype, facing away from us, her back to the viewer. She wears the full ceremonial dress of her people, vibrant with the colors of life itself: greens and reds and whites and yellows. She is not merely dressed.

She is embodied in her lineage, in the traditions that made her who she is. And she is ever present. Not controlling. But there. Always there. This is the ancestor as a living presence, not a memory, not a ghost, but a real force that continues to move through our lives, shaping us, guiding us, holding us.

The Circular Eagle Feathers with Turkey Tail

Attached to her back is a massive circular piece, like a dream catcher, flat and radiating outward. The eagle feathers extend from a center point outward in all directions, creating a pattern almost like a turkey tail. These are the feathers of the sky beings, the ones who see from above, who carry messages between the world above and the world below.

They represent the connection to something larger than ourselves, the connection to the divine, to the spiritual realms that the ancestors now inhabit. They are protection. They are blessing. They are a reminder that we are held by forces greater than ourselves. And they are carried by the grandmother herself, part of her presence, part of what she brings into the world.

The Black Jaguar

Facing toward us, mirroring my grandmother’s stance, is the black jaguar that I became in that dream. This is the shapeshifter within the archetype. This is the power that comes when we listen to ancestral wisdom. We become something more than ourselves. We access a strength, a grace, a knowing that belongs to lineages that are much older than our individual lives.

The jaguar is stealth and power combined. It is the animal that moves through darkness and sees clearly. It knows the jungle. It knows the hidden places. And it moves with absolute certainty.

The Emerald Eyes

When I looked into that pearl in the dream, the jaguar’s eyes were emerald green. This green is the color of the heart, of growth, of the living world. These eyes see with the wisdom of the ancestors, but they see with compassion. They see what is true without judgment.

Emerald green is the color of renewal, of the forest, of life continuing. It is the color that reminds us that even as we honor the dead, we are living beings, rooted in this earth, meant to grow.

The Eagle Feathers on the Jaguar’s Ears

On either side of the jaguar’s head, where the ears would be, are eagle feathers. This is the deep connectivity between the cat and the bird. Between the earthly power of the jaguar and the spiritual sight of the eagle. This is the integration of animal wisdom, of different ways of knowing. The cat knows the ground, the darkness, the hidden.

The bird knows the sky, the light, the overview. Together, they represent a complete vision. This is what happens when we listen to ancestors. We gain access to multiple ways of knowing. We become less fragmented. We become whole.

The Raven as Grandmother

My grandmother comes to me as a raven. A huge, beautiful, strong black raven. The raven is a messenger. It carries information between worlds. It is intelligent beyond measure. It sees into shadows and brings light back. In many indigenous traditions, the raven is the keeper of mysteries, the one who speaks truth, the one who knows what others have forgotten.

When my grandmother appears as a raven, she is telling me that she is still here, still communicating, still part of the ongoing conversation of my life. The raven does not judge. It simply observes and speaks.

The Leopard Paw at the Base

At the base of this entire image is a huge leopard paw, prominent and powerful, stepping forward as if pressing into the earth. The leopard is my animal. I have always connected to leopard as cat, to the jaguar, to the spotted grace and power of these beings.

This paw is a mark. It is a seal. It is a reminder that all of this ancestral wisdom, all of this guidance, all of this presence, comes with power. The ancestors are not weak. They are not fading voices. They are strong. They are present. They have walked the earth and they know its terrain. This paw is a stamp that says: we are here. We are real. We are powerful. And we are yours.

The Leopard paw also represents the Hierophant in its purest form. The Hierophant is a strong teacher. The Hierophant is present.

The Hierophant stands in authority not through domination, but through wisdom earned through living. This paw is that presence made visible.

The Emerald Stone and the Emerald Drop

Hanging from the crest of the grandmother’s shoulders, just beneath the jaguar’s head, is a large emerald with an emerald drop suspended from it. This is the pearl from my dream, transformed into the stone itself.

Emerald is the stone of the heart. It is the akashic record of the heart’s wisdom. In crystal language, emerald holds the knowledge of what it means to love without losing yourself. It is the stone of compassion rooted in clarity.

But there is something more. Stones and crystals are like vast Akashic records. Each stone holds the memory of the earth. Each crystal carries information that was formed over eons. And they are all connected through a kind of mycelial network, the way trees and plants are connected underground, sharing information, sharing nutrients, sharing life itself. When you hold an emerald, you are not holding an object. You are holding a library. You are holding a connection to something ancient and alive.

The emerald drop that hangs from the larger stone is like the pearl in the clamshell from my dream. It is luminous. It contains within itself the light of something seen, something known, something that reflects back to you the truth of who you are. This is what the ancestors do. They reflect back to us our own potential. They show us, in the mirror of their presence, who we are capable of becoming.

The Vibrant Colors

The dress is alive with color. Greens and reds and whites and yellows. These are not pale or subtle. They are vibrant. They are alive. Green is growth and heart. Red is passion and life force. White is clarity and purity. Yellow is illumination and joy. Together, they create a presence that cannot be ignored.

The ancestors do not fade. They do not become ghosts that whisper in shadows. They are vibrant. They are alive in the ongoing life of those they love. They are present in color and movement and breath.

The Dance

All of this, the grandmother and the jaguar and the raven and the emerald, all of it is happening in a dance. Not a celebration, though celebration is there. But a dance that is designed to transform. A dance like the whirling dervish, a trance state where the boundaries between self and other, between living and ancestral, between human and animal, begin to dissolve.

This is how the ancestors work. Not through direct command, but through a kind of entertainment. You move with them. You match their rhythm. And in that matching, you begin to shift. You begin to become something more. You begin to access the power that has always been yours, the power that belongs to your lineage.

The Neutrality

The Hierophant, when understood as Ancestral Voice, is neutral. The ancestors do not judge your choices. They do not say you are right or wrong. They stand in a place of acceptance and love. They want you to fulfill your goals and your dreams. They want you to live fully. And they give you the freedom to do that, even when they might have chosen differently in your position.

This is mature love. This is the wisdom of someone who has lived long enough to understand that life is not about right and wrong. It is about becoming who you are meant to become.

This neutrality is not weakness. It is Wuji. It is a strong stance, grounded and present, ready to support you in any direction you move. It is the stance of someone who knows themselves so well that they do not need to defend or control. They simply stand. They simply witness. They simply love.

Thank you for being here on Substack. Thank you for walking alongside me. For those of you supporting my work more deeply, you will find in depth explorations of Vision, its attributes, and its iconography in the subscriber spaces.

I invite you to journey with me.

These meanings are mine alone, pulled from the same intuitive well that made the collage itself. Tarot, shadow work, myth, and mystery all have a hand in what emerges. This is the space that I love to play in as an Artist, the intuitive field an infinite pool.

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This archetype took me weeks to develop. I had preconceived notions about what the Shaman should look like: an owl, definitely an owl, Siberian tundra, the whole thing crystallized in my mind before I even began. I actually created Archetypes nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two before I could come back to eighteen! That’s how stuck I was.

What I finally understood was that I was controlling the image. My left brain was in the way. The whole point of intuitive collage, of moving through archetypes, is to let the left brain step aside so something new can surface from the right brain. We have to get out of our own way. So I let go. I cleared everything and started fresh. And what emerged was nothing like what I expected, and everything like what needed to happen.

The Shaman is the one who walks between worlds. She is both the fierce indigenous power and the soft, radiant feminine. She is the bridge between seen and unseen, between heaven and earth. When I finally stopped trying to make her an Owl, and let her emerge, indigenous and sacred all at once, she became real.

The White Temple

When I found this image, I knew immediately. A large wooden temple, painted entirely white, open to the landscape, almost pagoda-like. It’s not enclosed. It’s not hidden. It stands in the world, breathing with it. This temple represents the connection between the seen and unseen realms. It’s the structure, the sacred container through which everything else moves. The Shaman needs this kind of architecture within her: something solid enough to hold the work, open enough to let the mysteries pass through.

The Mountain Peak

I positioned a snow-capped mountain apex so that it appears through the temple, visible from the open sides. That peak, that reach toward the heavens, is the connection to the unseen realms. It’s the apogee, the highest point where the material world touches what lies beyond.

For the Shaman, traversing between worlds is not metaphorical. It’s actual navigation. The mountain peak is that threshold, that place where the two worlds meet and the journey between them becomes possible.

The Feminine Figure in Red Velvet

This was the one I struggled with. A woman in a long, beautiful red velvet dress, adorned but not excessively. Her skin gleaming. Her hair high and regal, like a crown. She is the soft sacred feminine, the part of the Shaman that I have not always been comfortable claiming in myself. I celebrate it when I see other women embody it, but allowing it as my own has been harder.

She floats in the landscape, touching neither earth nor heaven exclusively, but moving through both. She is the bridge. The red is powerful. It’s not apologetic or diminished. It’s alive, commanding, sensual, and absolutely true. She became the aspect of the Shaman that remembers her own radiance, her own authority, her own feminine power.

The Indigenous Man with the Leopard

At the feet of this radiant woman crouches an indigenous man, his body covered entirely with painted leopard spots, his face painted, cloaked in an actual leopard skin with the head and teeth extended. This is the masculine aspect of the Shaman: the raw, primal power, the intensity, the warrior energy that knows how to survive, to hunt, to track, to move in the dark and find what is hidden.

I have always been comfortable with this energy in myself. It’s the part that gets things done. But what moves me most is that it’s not separated from the feminine. They are not in opposition. They exist together and inform each other.

The Flowers at the Leopard’s Mouth

From the mouth of the fierce leopard, reminiscent of Mahakala masks, in this case there are flowers hang from the clenched teeth. A purple flower. A peachy pink rose. An offering. A softening. The fierce power is not separate from tenderness. The Shaman understands that the greatest force can coexist with the greatest beauty.

The leopard’s mouth, with all its teeth and power, gives forth flowers. That is the integration. That is the wholeness. That is what the Shaman carries: all of it, simultaneously. The ability to be fierce and soft, ancient and present, wild and rooted, masculine and feminine, warrior and priestess, all at once.

When this collage was complete, I could sat with it, and felt into it. The landscape began to make sense: Tibetan and Siberian coming together, the indigenous cultures, the shamanic practices, the memory held not only in words but in the body, in the land, in the continuous act of remembrance. The Memory Holder is the one who carries what must not be forgotten.

The Shaman is the one who knows where to find it, how to speak to it, how to bring it forward into the world so that we can remember ourselves again.

Thank you for being here on Substack. Thank you for walking alongside me. For those of you supporting my work more deeply, you will find in depth explorations of Vision, its attributes, and its iconography in the subscriber spaces.

I invite you to journey with me.

These meanings are mine alone, pulled from the same intuitive well that made the collage itself. Tarot, shadow work, myth, and mystery all have a hand in what emerges. This is the space that I love to play in as an Artist, the intuitive field an infinite pool.

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There is a mirror function at the heart of this archetype, and it cuts both ways. Until we look at our reflection, we cannot see ourselves. We walk around with paint on our nose, with accumulated patterns we’ve never named, with the small accumulated debris of being alive.

The Witness is the part of us that finally stops and looks. She is the capacity to see, to truly see, not the illusion we prefer but the actual state of things. And sometimes what she reflects back is surprising. Sometimes it is unwelcome. But it is always true.

This internal mirror is not passive observation. It is the most active form of presence. To witness is to allow yourself to be changed by what you see. The Witness does not turn away from the barren landscape, from the suffocating grip of the digital web, from the slow erasure of the sacred in the spaces we inhabit.

She looks directly. And in looking, she becomes a vessel for truth. She holds what she sees without flinching, without numbing, without the mercy of denial. This is the practice: to see, and to let the seeing remake you.

But there is something else happening in this collage, something that matters deeply. Gaia herself is the Witness. The Great Mother is looking back at us. She sees what we have become, what we are doing, how we are consuming both the earth and ourselves through the endless glow of the screen. And she is not turning away either.

She is allowing herself to be present to it, to be represented in it, to show us what we look like when we are in it but not of it. She is the mirror reflecting back to us our own capacity for witness. Until we see ourselves as she sees us, we cannot change. That is the work of this archetype: to be seen, and in being seen, to learn how to see.

THE BARREN LANDSCAPE

A tree stands in a landscape barely thriving. Its branches are mostly dead, with only sparse leaves struggling to continue producing. The water at the edge is slow, murky, barely moving. The entire scene speaks to a world that is depleted, used up, no longer maintained as sacred. This is what we have done to the places we inhabit. Not through malice, but through forgetting.

Through treating the earth as a resource to be extracted rather than a living being to be in relationship with. The barren tree is not dead yet. It is still trying. And that trying, that refusal to completely give up, is both heartbreaking and the only hope we have.

THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

Beside the barren natural world stands a city. Concrete buildings stack upon each other, apartment upon apartment, level upon level. An older couple stands at the street corner, preparing to cross.

Overhead, a light pole holds multiple signs: Do Not Walk. One Way. Taxi Only. No Parking. And one street direction sign, barely hanging on, falling off the pole. Park Avenue crosses East Fifty Seventh Street. These are the coordinates of human architecture, of the systems we have built to manage and control our own existence.

Neither the natural world nor the urban world is being cared for in any real way. Both are in the same state of gray, of lifelessness, of being maintained only by the momentum of habit. The couple walks forward anyway. We always do.

THE COLOR PALETTE

Gray, black, white. Photographs in monochrome, drained of the vitality that color carries. And then, a yellowish tone in the sky, almost doomsday in its quality. This is what happens when the data takes over. The fiber optics that carry all our information, all our connection, all our doom scrolling, they have stolen the color from the world. What color remains is the purple and blue luminescence of the digital itself, the only thing in the entire scene that glows. The data is alive. The world is not. This inversion is the heart of the sickness we are living through.

THE BLACK MADONNA

She emerges from the barren landscape and the suffocating city. She is nude from the breast up, her body dark and photo-sensitized, almost glowing against the gray. She is the Creatrix. She is Gaia. She is the Great Mother who birthed all of this, who continues to exist even as she is being consumed. But she is not alone.

Coiled around her head, her neck, pouring down her decollete, between her breasts, is fiber optic light. It moves like data, like information, like the endless stream of images and words and numbers that keep us tethered to the digital.

The light is beautiful. The light is strangling her. And she allows it. She does not resist. She allows herself to be represented in this state, to show us what it looks like when the Mother is consumed by our own making, when she is in it but not of it.

Like Lucy in the film, becoming one with the morphogenic fluid of pure data. The Mother is still vibrant, still here, still looking out. But she is being woven through with something that was never hers to carry.

THE BLACK DUCK

On the left side of the Mother, a black duck floats northward. Small, distinct, moving with purpose through the murky water. Birds are the ones who move between realms, who are neither fully of the earth nor fully of the sky. They are mystical travelers, boundary crossers, the ones who know how to exist in multiple dimensions at once.

The duck represents what is still possible: the freedom to move, the capacity to witness from the threshold, to be in the world of data and concrete and depletion without being consumed by it. The duck is not drowning in the murky water. It is moving through it. It knows something we have forgotten: that there are other ways to be present.

THE MIRROR FUNCTION

Until you look at your reflection, you cannot see yourself. You might have paint on your nose and walk around for hours without knowing. You might carry patterns, wounds, accumulated debris that you have never named because you have never taken the time to truly look. The Witness is the practice of looking. Not the quick glance, not the avoidance of what is uncomfortable, but the sustained, tender gaze that says: I will see you. I will see myself. And in seeing, I will be changed.

The mirror in this collage is not the Black Madonna alone. She is the mirror. But we are also the mirror, reflecting back to ourselves what we have become. Gaia is witnessing us. But we must witness ourselves. We must be the internal witness to our own complicity, our own consumption, our own forgetting. Only then can we choose differently.

Thank you for being here on Substack. Thank you for walking alongside me. For those of you supporting my work more deeply, you will find in depth explorations of Vision, its attributes, and its iconography in the subscriber spaces.

I invite you to journey with me.

These meanings are mine alone, pulled from the same intuitive well that made the collage itself. Tarot, shadow work, myth, and mystery all have a hand in what emerges. This is the space that I love to play in as an Artist, the intuitive field an infinite pool.

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My latest body of work has been inspired by Japanese cocoon sacks known as Mayubukuro, large washi paper bags once used to store and transport silkworm cocoons during Japan’s silk industry.

The first time I encountered one of these bags and carefully unfolded it, I was astonished by their scale. These objects are enormous, nearly five feet in length, and possess a quiet elegance that immediately captured my imagination.

Their construction is deceptively simple. A large rectangle with the lower corners folded back at 45-degree angles. Yet that single design decision transforms the form completely. At such a monumental scale, the shape becomes both sculptural and poetic.

This work also grows out of my long-standing fascination with post-consumer materials and the belief that discarded objects still hold creative potential. I have often been drawn to the philosophy found in Arte Povera, the idea that meaningful art can emerge from humble, overlooked, or discarded materials. There is something compelling to me about creating artwork from things considered worthless, and even more intriguing when the finished piece retains traces of its former life.

For these works, I began with large gel prints measuring 24 x 30 inches that had been sitting in my studio without a clear destination. Printed on glassine-style papers and architectural drawing papers, they became the perfect starting point. I combined them with repurposed craft bags and other discarded materials, using these humble substrates as the foundation for larger compositions.

Onto these surfaces I layered my gel prints, intuitive scripting, and expressive brushwork inspired by the spirit of Sumi painting. The result is a series of expansive pieces that explore scale, gesture, material history, and transformation.

The project also embodies the Japanese concept of Mottainai, the belief that nothing of value should be wasted. It is a philosophy that resonates deeply with my practice and my ongoing interest in finding beauty, usefulness, and meaning in what others might overlook.

Another motivation behind this work has been a desire to move beyond traditional presentation methods. Much of my gel printing has been done on paper, which often requires expensive framing and rigid supports. I wanted to work outside the square boundaries of canvas and wood panel, allowing the work to become more flexible, expansive, and immediate.

These Mayubukuro-inspired forms have opened a new direction in my studio practice, one that I suspect I will continue exploring for some time.

If you are interested in learning more about gel printing, be sure to check out my bestselling book, Gel Plate Printing for Mixed Media Art. Whether you are completely new to the process or looking to expand your techniques, the book offers a comprehensive introduction to this versatile medium.

You can also find me on YouTube at Robyn McClendon, where I share tutorials, studio explorations, art journaling techniques, bookmaking projects, and creative inspiration from my own artistic practice.

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The Perceiver | The Focus: Receptivity

Up to this point in the archetype series, I have been looking inward. I have been asking: what do I embody? What rises from within me as these archetypal energies? The work has been introspective, reflective, drawn from my own lived experience and what I sense moving through my own being.

But the Listener presented me with something different. The Listener exists outside of me. She is not a part I need to reclaim. She is a presence I need to recognize. She is someone else holding space in such a way that transformation becomes possible.

For three years, I have been working with a teacher who calls himself a perceiver. He comes from the Toltec traditions, and together we practice energy work, the magical passes, dream work, and recapitulation. Recapitulation is the practice of returning to past memories and retrieving your scattered energy from them, using everything available to you as fuel for transformation. It is a practice of radical honesty and presence.

What strikes me about this teacher is not what he does, but how he listens while he does it. He holds a space that is simultaneously strong and open. His presence is clear, protective, uncluttered. Yet within that clarity, there is room for everything.

I have watched him work with men operating from ego, and I have seen him neutralize their defensiveness without losing his own power. I have watched him work with softness, with vulnerability, and he meets it without diminishment. I have watched women come to him offering from a place of manipulation or control, and he somehow manages all of it with an intelligence that is neither harsh nor permissive.

His listening is not passive. It is active, perceptive, held. It is the kind of listening that creates safety not through agreement, but through genuine witnessing. When you are truly heard, you become available to yourself in ways you were not before. You can look at what you have been avoiding. You can feel what you have been numbing. You can begin to reclaim the energy you scattered across your own history.

The Listener is an archetype of radical receptivity. She receives without needing to fill the space. She perceives without needing to analyze. She holds without needing to control. She understands that sometimes the greatest gift is simply to be present to what is true in another person. Not to fix it. Not to manage it. Not to make it smaller or larger than it is. Just to see it. To hear it. To acknowledge that it exists.

This is different work than what I do as the Visionary or the Oracle. Those archetypes bring something forth. They generate, they initiate, they reach toward what is emerging. The Listener does something equally essential. She clears the path by not cluttering it. She creates the conditions for transformation by refusing to impose her own narrative onto what is unfolding. She trusts the process of becoming more than the need for control.

In the Toltec teachings, this work is about bridging the dream and the waking. It is about moving between the sleeping dream and the waking dream until the boundary between them becomes transparent. That bridge is not built through force or will. It is built through presence. Through the capacity to pay attention. Through the willingness to see what is actually here rather than what we expect or want to be here. The Listener holds that bridge. She is the stable ground on which the crossing becomes possible.

What I realized, working with my teacher, is that receptivity is not weakness. It is not passivity. It is a form of power that most of us have never seen embodied clearly. Power that does not need to announce itself. Strength that does not need to prove itself. Authority that comes from deep self-knowledge and the refusal to use another person’s vulnerability as a weapon or an opportunity.

The Listener knows that what someone reveals in your presence is sacred. It is a gift. And the way you receive that gift determines whether they can ever fully trust themselves again.

So this collage is not a portrait of me looking inward. It is a portrait of what I have come to deeply appreciate outside of myself. It is a reflection of the teacher I work with, and it is also a mirror showing me what becomes possible when someone truly listens. It is an invitation to consider: who in your life holds this space for you? And perhaps more importantly: who are you becoming, in spaces where you are truly heard?

THE GENTLEMAN ON THE BENCH: STILLNESS AND EASE

He sits on a bench, relaxed and composed. There is no tension in his posture, no performance in his presence. Behind him, ivy grows up an old wall, suggesting time, patience, the way things grow and integrate slowly. He is at ease in his own being. This is not the ease of someone who has avoided difficulty. This is the ease of someone who has moved through difficulty and come out the other side, carrying it without being burdened by it. His ease is earned. It is grounded in thousands of hours of practice, of showing up, of being present to what is true. When you sit across from someone who carries this kind of ease, you begin to relax your own grip on control. You begin to believe that it is safe to simply be.

THE GLASSES: PERCEPTION AND SIGHT

He holds his reading glasses folded in his hands. The glasses are not on his face, but they are present, available, an instrument of perception that can be brought into focus whenever needed. The glasses speak to the capacity to perceive clearly. To see what is actually there beneath the surface. To read the fine print of what someone is really saying beneath their words. In the Toltec tradition, the perceiver is one who sees through illusion. Who recognizes the dream. Who understands that what we call reality is a construction we have agreed upon. The glasses remind us that perception is a tool. We can use it to see through clarity or through fog. The Listener uses her perception not to judge or analyze, but to understand. To recognize patterns. To see where energy is stuck and where it is flowing.

THE WATCH: BRIDGING TIME AND DREAM

On his wrist sits a prominent watch. Time. The measure of waking reality. And yet, the work we do together is precisely about transcending the linear grip of time. About moving between the sleeping dream, where time dissolves, and the waking dream, where we navigate the world of consequence and sequence. Quantum physicists speak of the bridge between the quantum field, where possibility is infinite and unmeasured, and the classical field, where things have already collapsed into form.

That bridge is built on what moves across it: emotion. The movement of feeling from the potential realm into the manifest realm. The watch on his wrist is not there to remind us that time is passing. It is there to remind us that the Listener holds both. She is comfortable in clock time and in dream time simultaneously. She can help you navigate the bridge between them without losing your footing on either side.

THE WORD DREAM: AT THE CENTER OF HIS HANDS

The word dream sits at the base of his hands, on his lap, in the space where the work happens. For the Toltec, dreaming is not about what happens while you sleep. Dreaming is about the quality of consciousness you bring to your waking life. It is about recognizing that you are dreaming even while you are awake. That what you perceive is a construction. That you have more agency than you think in how you navigate that dream.

Recapitulation, the practice we do together, is the act of reaching back into the memories where you left pieces of yourself and retrieving that energy. You do this by moving through the memory again, but this time, with full consciousness. With the knowledge that you were always more capable than you believed. That you always had more power than you gave yourself credit for. The word dream at the center reminds us that everything we do together is about waking up within the dream we are already living.

THE DAISY-EYE FLOWER WITH FALLING PETALS: TEARS AS ALCHEMY

Where his face would be, there is instead a daisy that looks like an eye. A neon pink and orange bloom, bright and alive, with white petals and white lower lashes. And from the center, white petals are falling. These are tears. But not tears of sorrow. These are tears of release. Of alchemical transformation. In alchemy, salt is one of the primary elements. The minerals in tears, the salts that form when emotion is released through the body, are part of the sacred chemistry of transformation. When you cry in the presence of the Listener, something happens beyond the emotional release.

There is a cellular shift. A consolidation. The grief you have been holding in your body begins to move. To clear. To make space for what comes next. The Listener understands this. She knows that tears are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of movement. Of the body beginning to reclaim itself.

The brightness of the flower, the neon pink and orange, tells us this is not dark work. This is joyful work. This is the joy of finally releasing what you have been carrying. The alchemist in the room knows how to work with this. How to hold space while transformation happens.

THE THREE HORSES IN PASTURE: FREEDOM, INTUITION, AND HEALING

At the base of the collage, three horses stand in open pasture. Free. Strong. Intuitive. Available. The Listener carries the energy of the horse. Free in her own being. Not bound by others’ narratives or expectations. Spending time in open spaces, in nature, in the forest, in fields where the horizon is wide and the air is clear. Horses are sensitive beings. They feel the emotional field of a space immediately. They respond to authenticity and flee from inauthenticity. They have the capacity to heal because they are so finely tuned to what is true. When a horse is present to you, something in your nervous system shifts.

You cannot lie to a horse. And so the Listener, carrying the horse energy, creates a space where lying becomes unnecessary. Where you can simply be what you are. The three horses suggest abundance. There are enough resources. There is enough space. There is enough freedom for all of us to be fully ourselves without diminishing anyone else.

THE WALL WITH IVY: TIME, INTEGRATION, AND PATIENT GROWTH

Behind him, an old wall with ivy growing up its face. This is not a wall meant to divide. This is a wall meant to hold. To provide structure against which living things can grow and climb. The ivy speaks to the passage of time. To the slow, patient integration of what has happened. To the way that old structures become part of the living landscape when we let them.

The Listener understands that growth cannot be rushed. That integration requires time. That the most solid things are often those that have been rooted for decades or centuries. She is not in a hurry. She knows that the real work happens in the spaces between the words. In the silence. In the patience of one season following another.

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The gift of silence, this has been an amazing week for me because as I practiced from last week, and the idea of resetting my internal clock I was able to notice something.

The sound of silence and how loud it was!

The external world just became so much more quiet throughout the days, as I sat reading for a couple of hours or moving through the house, with the sound of a CD or album playing in the background, so there was sound, but.

There was also an internal harmony that was being created by not having electronics on, in or around my personal space, I created a wider separation that was noticeable.

Things got so quiet, that it became loud, it stunned me when I realized what I was experiencing. The quiet was immensely loud, that really struck me because it’s the first time in quite a long time that the silence was so loud!

It hit me that the silence is not regulated solely by noise levels, because clearly I’m listening to music or the various other external sounds going on, but more assuredly it has to do with the frequency and rate of the sound.

The rate, the pace of, and the kind of information that’s coming in, to include disruptions, resulting from every ping on our phone notifying us of an email, voicemail, or post upload on one of our favorite apps…Instagram X, or Facebook.

This acts as an interrupter. I remember reading about behavioral studies on rodents, and scientists using bells to train particular responses!

It’s really something to think about and gave me pause!

I must say that I’m thankful for these revelations and relishing in this slower more quieter movement of my time, for me it’s been a long time since I’ve really experienced energy around me this way.

and soooo.

I invite you to just observe silence this week, really kind of nestle into the quiet and the emptiness created by conscious decision making, that aligns with your personal desires.

What starts coming up?

I’ve noticed that my own internal dialogue and conversations, deepens in the things I’m thinking about. The visual dialogues, have definitely expanded and become more harmonizing even around methodologies and techniques.

Time, silence and pace seems to be making room for more contemplation on the relationship of my personal storyline, to the images that want to surface from my visual dialogues in my art.

I’m really interested in hearing what comes up for all of you. Please comment and share! Let me know what’s going on what’s resonating and surfacing for you and yeah, let’s just continue in the gift of silence.

xx Robyn

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The Seer | The Focus: Body, Mind, and Spirit

She does not belong to one tradition. She never has. She is the one who knows how to pull from the forest and the grave, from the kitchen and the cosmos, from the ancestors and the earth beneath your feet. She is the Oracle, and her work has always moved across three levels at once: body, mind, and spirit.

This intuitive collage draws from many wells. From Jungian psychology and the deep architecture of the psyche. From the Tarot and its ancient symbolic language. From the Gnostic gospels and the wisdom of Sophia, the divine feminine at the heart of all knowing. And from the indigenous traditions that have carried this work longest and most honestly: the root worker, the green witch, the herbalist, the shaman, the healer-seer who has always understood that the land itself is alive and speaking.

The Oracle is not one thing. That is precisely her power. She works at the material level, in the world as it is, tending to the physical body, mixing remedies, reading signs, meeting people in the reality they are actually living.

She works at the emotional level, because so much of what needs healing lives there, in the places we have not been able to name yet, in the grief that has no story attached to it, in the wound that never got witnessed. And she works at the spiritual level, that deep, quiet place where she is in conversation with the ancestors, with the land, with the animal guides that have always traveled beside her.

Her oracular nature is not a gift she chose. It is a function she was born into, one that older cultures understood as sacred and necessary. The seer, the shaman, the wise woman at the edge of the village. These were not outsiders. They were the ones the community came to when ordinary knowing was not enough. The Oracle has always existed at that threshold, between the seen and the unseen, between the living and the dead, between what is and what is trying to become.

What makes this collage rich, and what makes this archetype so layered, is that she has not been untouched by history. She carries the forest and she carries the city. She holds the ancient and she has had to negotiate with the modern.

Colonization moved through her world and required a certain conformity of her, a bending, an integration of outside structures into the container of her practice, just enough to survive, just enough to continue doing the work that she has done for ages. That is not a defeat. That is a particular kind of endurance and intelligence. The Oracle adapts without losing the root.

And the root is everything. The root is where she goes when she needs to know. Into the mycelial network beneath the soil, into the mitochondrial memory of her lineage, into the plant world that has been her partner and her teacher. She is an herbalist not only in the practical sense but in the spiritual one. She understands that plants carry intelligence, that the land communicates, that healing is always a conversation between the one who seeks and the world that responds.

She is the one who shows up when you have run out of ordinary answers. She is the one who holds the map that was never written down. She pulls from nature, from the city, from the grave, from the kitchen, and she makes from all of it something that can actually help. That is the Oracle. That has always been the Oracle.

The Symbolic Language of This Collage

The Forest - The Living Field

The rich, dense forest behind her is not backdrop. It is her primary relationship. She is of the forest. It is where her knowledge lives, where her teachers grow, where the old agreements between the human and the more-than-human world are still honored.

The Water - Flow and Vision

The lake and the water running at the base of her skirt speak to the oracular tradition itself. Water has always been the medium of vision, of reflection, of what lies beneath the surface. She stands where the land meets the water. That threshold is where she works.

The Twisted Root - The Deep Network

The great knotted root is the anchor of this image. It speaks to her ability to go deep, into the root system of the plant world, into the mycelial network that connects all living things, into the ancestral memory carried in the body. The twist in the root tells us this is not a simple or straight path. It is one that has survived pressure, drought, and time.

The Pink Rose at the Yoni - Fertility, Healing, and the Cosmic Womb

The large pink rose placed at the center of her body is one of the most charged symbols in this collage. The rose is the flower of the heart, of healing, of the deep feminine essence. Positioned here, it connects the physical womb to the cosmic womb, to the ouroboros, to Sophia and the Gnostic understanding of the divine feminine as the source and the return of all creation. She is fertile not only biologically but spiritually. She generates.

The Colonial City - Conformity and Endurance

The colonial-style city sitting at her skirt is a deliberate and honest inclusion. It represents the historical reality that the Oracle’s practice did not exist in a protected bubble. Colonization moved through her world. She was required to integrate, to conform in certain ways, to make her work legible or invisible enough to survive.

The city is there not as a celebration but as an acknowledgment. She carried it so she could continue to carry everything else.

Thank you for being here on Substack. Thank you for walking alongside me. For those of you supporting my work more deeply, you will find in depth explorations of Vision, its attributes, and its iconography in the subscriber spaces.

I invite you to journey with me.

These meanings are mine alone, pulled from the same intuitive well that made the collage itself. Tarot, shadow work, myth, and mystery all have a hand in what emerges. This is the space that I love to play in as an Artist, the intuitive field an infinite pool.

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The Philosopher as Hermit embodies the sacred feminine path of contemplation within the Mistress of the Rings series. Rooted in the cosmology of Sophia, Jungian individuation, and the wisdom traditions of early matristic cultures, she represents the cyclical rhythm of withdrawal and renewal.

Through the natural processes of the body, particularly the re…

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