What Are You Seeing?

This is an unintentional SoulCollage® card I made yesterday called, “What Are You Seeing?” I was facilitating a casual card-making workshop with fellow Collagers. I admit that my mind was unfocused, still under a fog of sadness and anger in response to Sunday’s tragedy in Orlando.  An attempt to discuss Sunday’s events, as guidance for creating a SoulCollage® card, fell short and I respected everyone’s desire to simply “escape” this tragic news while in the safe and sacred space of our studio.

We put on some music we could sing to and went about the familiar habits of perusing images, cutting, pasting and gluing, chatting, sharing delicious sweets and laughter. I mindlessly went through my images, quietly just going through the motions, grateful for these ladies and the salve of SoulCollage®.

After 3 hours of shuffling images around in pretend productivity, this card materialized in a pile of images on the cutting mat in front of me. I began pasting and with each image I placed, I realized how much it addressed my state of disbelief and frustration with (what feels like chaos) everything happening out there, beyond my private world.

This card ended up with many little details that you can see and also are hidden. For example, the unexpected symbolic nature of the background image: the eyes just above the fire are carefully covering the graphic image of a bear carcass. Somehow I never noticed it before, but once I realized it was there I couldn’t “unsee” it and I didn’t want to see it in the card. I made the immediate decision to cover it up. When I placed the eyes over it, it covered the carnage in a way that I could still see the fire, which felt important to me. As soon as I glued those eyes down, layers of interpretation started seeping through in response to this act of intentional composition, even considering what I chose to cover it up with, a pair of expressive eyes.

At least for now, there is this knowledge in this card for the desire to not see something so upsetting–to cover up the unbearable, the tragic, the carnage. By my self or by others. Which begins to speak yet again to, what are we really seeing? Are we willing to or even able to see beyond what is presented to us? The rest of the composition and images speaks volumes in addressing these feelings inside me. It ended up being a very powerful card and the question, what are you seeing? repeatedly emerged as a deep and thoughtful challenge from the neter (or voice) within the card.

Should you ever need a prompt for a reading, or inspiration for a new card, look to what moves you beyond your personal world and ask yourself, what are you seeing? It won’t always be tragedy, and even then this question challenges you to look with “many eyes.”

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Have you made unintentional cards during such events (in the world community or personally), or do you prefer to delve deep into readings with your cards as guidance through emotional experiences? 

 

 

 

MH2016

15 Jun This entry was published on June 15, 2016 at 4:36 PM. It’s filed under SoulCollage® and tagged Orlando, SoulCollage, SoulCollage cards, soulcollage reading, tragedy. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.