I am eternally grateful to Kathleen Agius (https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.agius.9) for her artistry and that it lives in my world.
When I share my beautiful “Fragile Please Touch Me” Teraphim with the circle, I feel the ancients holding her with me. This tool, I explain, comes from a time when our Goddesses where close enough to touch. When we built forms we could hold on to when the shit got real! Something power-filled to walk with us as we stretched open in a thousand directions to allow our daughter’s birth through us. Our Goddesses were for support, like we were as women to each other, like we can be now if we let go of our shields and use our swords with respect and tender loving care.
Artifacts are those things that embody what you are investing your whole self into. They are the shapes and vessels to pour oneself into, that maybe others may share, or maybe we get to really anchor our self into a moment for future application.
A telling part of an artefact is time… when I build something, and I don’t really consider myself an artist, so I don’t often call it sculpture, but once built, do I find that it becomes something I reach for, when I am doing the work. For emotional work, is work, and every field of work has its tools.
You know, when we realized we are now in the realms of “Knowledge Workers” where a lot of our day is spent digging a hole in data not the earth, we recognized that we needed to be with this type of workflow differently than you do when you are digging a hole. I feel the same about the emotional workings that many of us do, whether by our self or working with another, there is a whole lot of digging that can be going on, and a lot of “work” that is real and good and the whole we are after has a different expression… but perhaps we have yet to acknowledge the process that we are utilizing, like we have with “knowledge workers”… I bring this up, because I feel we were building emotional tools, physical ones, like sigils but in 3D form, back in the days of the Venus of Willendorf. We called them Goddesses and Gods, but for me, they are applications of the human experience, and can be held in a form.
These tools, these artifacts are often unique unto the practitioner, depending on the language they are using, the flavours and colours that are their style. For me the exciting bit is when we have the impetus to make the tool, sometimes with absolutely no idea what it is for, and the trust it takes to make something for as yet to be experienced intent… well perhaps I am an artist, for that is the artists edge, to just begin, allow through what will be made today, through you.
What artifacts have you built? How do they assist you to do the work?
Living Circles 