Art Journal: The Fox and the Scrying Pool

Today's journal entry was a little difficult to tease out of my head. But it made it onto a page, simple as it is. A fox looking at itself in a pool.

I can't tell if there's a creativity blockage, energetic blockage, emotional blockage or what. It is difficult to tease images out of my mind right now. It's like my third eye is half-closed and sleepy. I'm half-closed for that matter, or rather I feel like a door that's half open? Is the door half-closed or half-open? Or...is the door at 50%?

Last week it was bears. This week it's foxes. Foxes are on my mind, but I have no songs for them.

For a long while, I had a totem animal of sorts that was an eagle. I don't know when it happened exactly, maybe sometime in the last year, this animal changed into a red fox. So, my personality has shifted from the eagle to the fox. How curious. I'm aware I rerolled my "character sheet" in this process of transforming myself, and maybe this is an expression of that.

Eagle is powerful, but too removed from the situation. Perhaps while on Earth that was necessary--to take the remote high view on a planet with a common view that was so close to the ground and heavy. Now, it seems, I am the fox. Fox is intelligent like Eagle, but on the ground and in the midst of things. Causing trouble, sometimes, but mostly watching and somehow managing to fade into background to observe. Only to spring back out again with a flash of passionate expression. And then fade away again.

So here in this sketch is Fox looking at itself in a pool and getting rained on by cherry blossom petals, which are really just the pool turning back into itself. And in the pool it sees its true self, which is sort of a fox and something more. As it usually goes.

That's all I could tease out. As I said, it's hard to pull anything out of myself right now. All my energy wants to suck itself inward like a neutron star. Yet I want to create and express myself! But my energy draws inward in a way that's a bit like a black hole. The energy goes in, and you cannot reach in there and pull it back out. Not right now. This will just have to do, then.

On another note, here's a song I unearthed out of my music folder. I have no idea where this song came from. Just that I've had it since 2005, and even then I don't know that it had a title. I think it did, and I think I've had it even longer than that year.

There's a whole playlist of lost songs that sound like this. All of them with the same general feel. I really should give my teenage self more credit for picking out common harmonics across songs from all sorts of backgrounds. Somehow, I located and put together every song I could think of that says, "romantically lilting fantasy music". Which is funny, because if I put that in a search engine these days, I get Celtic harp music coming out of my ears. I love a good harp, but this is what I think of when I think of those terms.

I have a memory, actually, of sitting in front of my computer for hours at a time with this song and others on repeat. I've applied a GUI skin on my media player and it looks like a steampunk porthole on an airship. I think it's the coolest freaking thing ever, especially since it has a rippling effect that goes along with the soundwaves for each song. And I sit there for hours and hours just listening and feeling the tug and pull of this type of music.

It's one of those deep pulls that comes from somewhere behind the heart rather than inside it. Somewhere deep down. Not quite homesickness. Sehnsucht. That's the word. Bless the Germans and their words representing deeply complex philosophical states of being.

Sehnsucht refers to a longing or yearning for that which has not yet been met. Sometimes translated as "a longing for I know not what".

This music produces that feeling in me. And now if I look at that fox a little bit, she looks a little like she's feeling sehnsucht.

I thank you for your time. Adiamas.

--Kyriel