VESTA ON ISIG MOUNTAIN

76K, 530 x 680, 1983? Erasable crayon, about 11x14", by Chris Wayan


Vesta are horned animal guardians of the northern lands, in Patricia McKillip's classic psychological fantasy THE RIDDLEMASTER OF HED. Becoming a vesta is an essential step of Morgon's quest--his transformation, and the greater ones that followed, had a dreamlike beauty that won the book enduring critical acclaim.

But such transformations had a private meaning for me; my own dreamwork had already begun letting me experience similar transformations. I merged with a wild creature or a tree, I became a spirit or a mountain. McKillip, though marketing her work as fantasy, was describing and clarifying my real shamanic experiences.

This picture was a first clumsy attempt to draw what the world looks like to me in spirit-mode: oddly geometric or schematic, webbed with lines of energy or binding... what witches and druids once called ley-lines. The ley of the land.

Me as a vesta, a deerlike creature, dwarfed by a huge mountain landscape, all rendered schematically, as ley-lines.
When I'm in my human body, I don't see like this--but over the years I've begun realizing I do feel living creatures like this. I mostly recognize people (and their pets) by their habitual moods and energy configurations, not their faces. I always thought I was just inept at drawing faces--it was only recently, when I took a drawing class, that I found I could do it just fine--if I ignored the distracting extra information I unconsciously rely on in daily life to recognize others. I had to look through the aura to see the face!

So in a way, this image shows you how I see the world normally--this way of seeing is superimposed on the ordinary world. And I'm unaware that others don't see it.


LISTS AND LINKS: One night I dreamed I was a vesta, not a man - deer dreams - Patricia McKillip - landscapes - mountains - crayons -

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