Darkness And Beauty

Image by Audrey Remnev

When I comprehended my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and from it my phoenix ascended.” Jung, The red Book

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.” Alice Walker

Jung wrote a lot about confronting your “shadow,” your darkness, and how doing so confers another dimension to you. I am familiar with the struggle to create beauty and how impossible it was for me until I admitted into my consciousness certain anti social feelings I had, like stored up anger, for instance. There were fears, there were judgements against myself and others, there was envy and there were feelings of incapacity, there was even a feeling of superiority. Letting go of all that brought the war in myself to an end. I became a conduit for a certain kind of work, using my talents in service to the beauty I can serve.

A modest but important hand to the wheel of a better world.

Maybe that’s what is meant by the term “suffering artist.” Not suffering in the sense of starving and rejected by society, but suffering the confrontation with the deeper self, the atavistic self that is hidden from the world.

In my case, there were pent up energies that were joyous physical forces that could…