Essay

After a massive heart attack that damaged two-thirds of my heart and left me in a state of deep depression, I found myself drawing images that came to me, and over the course of nine months created forty images.

A year later I reviewed and wrote about each image one day at a time; out of that several art shows and a small book – Heart Attack and Soul – were developed. Unknowingly at the time, the images paralleled that of an alchemical transformation.

After the heart attack, I desperately needed a place to retreat to collect myself, and slowly built a cabin in a secluded area several hundred yards from our main house.  When I was working on the interior, I found myself methodically putting fractured stones together for inside walls of the cabin – it was only later that I realized I was putting parts of my fractured self together after the trauma of the heart attack.  Not unlike in the story of the Three Little Pigs, I was trying to create a stone house that could not be blown down.

…it was only later that I realized I was putting parts of my fractured self together after the trauma of the heart attack. 

Many of the images drawn after the heart attack somehow contained the image of a red egg: I felt I needed to create a three-dimensional egg, a red egg meditation chamber; it is essentially the center of the Stone Sanctuary. It has taken years to slowly build this out of red river stones, and it is still a work in progress as I seek out enough red stones to complete it.  

There have also been a number of other structures that have emerged – a sunken circle, a fire altar, a Fibonacci spiral, several large stone eggs, a driftwood and stone wall, a waterfall…. 

Most recently, I have been working on a sunken spiral labyrinth; it is forty feet wide and descends in five circuits (with stone walls) to four feet below the surface.  It will take several more years to complete.   Symbolically it is about - among other things -- the descent into the unconscious and renewal on the return.   It feels to me like a portal to the Underworld.

The work of Carl Jung has been integral to the understanding of the art and stone work, and as the stone work emerges on its own, his writing seems more on more on target.  In Man and His Symbols, he writes:

“The stone symbolized something permanent that can never be lost or dissolved, something eternal that some have compared to the mystical experience of God within one’s own soul…..  It symbolizes what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience, the experience of something eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels immortal and unalterable.” 

My wife and family live in a birch forest in the hills above Fairbanks, Alaska.   There is one road between us and the North Pole. It feels as if the archetypes and dream images come streaming down from the North – the daily experience of nature and wildness in Alaska is a profound gift and profound influence on the psyche.
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