Nigredo
Blackfly
Everything is sticky with honeydew falling
Blackfly crust like thick scabs on weakened shoots
And the honeysuckle’s golden buds are crawling.
Hades tightly grips my ankle: he’s hauling
Me down. The underworld enters my Soul
Everything’s sticky with honeydew falling.
All is black, rotten, aphids in cahoots
With the Nigredo. Me, myself, and I, are in a hole.
Blackfly crust like thick scabs on weakened shoots
Ahead of me, I hear my lover, Death, calling,
I am a weed pulled out from the roots,
And the honeysuckle’s golden buds are crawling.
19th May 25
I wrote this a year past May during the first part of a course on the Magnum Opus – a course on alchemy - which I completed this summer. I had been fascinated by the subject ever since I read Marie-Louise von Franz’s Alchemy, An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology and ploughed through Jung’s Alchemical Studies back in the 1980s. The images fascinated me and as a visual artist I had experience of how external processes affect inner processing, and vice versa. They work together. Many of my paintings from that time were influenced by my reading.
When I began the course, I wanted more than the feeling of resonating with alchemy – I wanted to understand it a little better. We began with the Nigredo. It’s an experiential course, and through a process of reflection we were guided into this phase. In the traditional practice of Alchemy, the Nigredo period is the time of materials being broken down into a black substance – putrefying or decomposing. Jung understood it as a metaphor for the breaking down of the ego, where wholeness requires the death of the outgrown beliefs, identities and complexes that have become limiting to us. Alchemists would take great care with the setting up of the Work, but they did not control it – rather they tended the fire, keeping it from going out, or from getting too hot. And so it is with working alongside with anyone on their individuation process – there is no question of controlling it, but only of tending it. Meanwhile, the last few years had certainly broken down my sense of identity – including my vocation as an artist, as I made the shift from making art to focusing on Jungian life coaching, first as a coach and then also as a facilitator on the Jung Platform course.
A literal blackening occurred a month after beginning the course on the Nigredo. I’d forgotten to put the glass recycling bin out and when I heard the bin lorry leaving, I chased after it trying to wheel the bin along with me. I tripped – a comedy prat fall, and the binman and I laughed about it. He informed me that I reminded him of a teacher he’d had, and added, “She was mad too!” then helpfully emptied the bin. It wasn’t till later that the slight pain in my big toe became noticeable. I had a blackened toenail. Regrowth is taking a while – the distorted black nail fell off after ten months, and what was beneath it did not look healthy, so I’d to have it dressed by a nurse. The new nail is growing in, and hopefully by its second anniversary in February, it will look normal again.
The next synchronicity was in that May a plague of blackfly collected on the elder just outside our back door and in front of the decking. The first indication that something was wrong was that the outdoor table and chairs were horribly sticky and needed to be wiped down every day. Then I noticed the thick coating of flies covering the elder’s green shoots. They moved on to my beloved yellow honeysuckle, which darkened and shrivelled, that year’s blossoms ruined.
I sent away for ladybird larvae. They arrived in a tub full of shredded paper and food that looked like fine sawdust. We had to get them out before the food was consumed or they’d eat each other. Each one was the size of a full stop. We put them into tiny envelopes and stapled the envelopes to the leaves of the elder. Then it rained heavily, and I assumed they’d all been washed away. Sometime later I saw a very peculiar little bug on my outdoor table. I googled it and discovered it was a bigger ladybird larva. They had survived! They ate all of the black fly, and this year, the honeysuckle was again a healthy golden yellow.
Composting was a physical version of the Nigredo that I freely chose to do around the beginning of this period. I got intrigued by the miracle of rotten vegetation, paper and soil turning slowly into beautiful, sweet-smelling compost given time and heat. It takes so much time, and so does the shift inside. And yet, looking back I can see that much of what was raw and rotten back then, is now more integrated and is nourishing my life. Meanwhile, I have a new pile of compost in the making, and there’s always more prima materia that will take its own time to be broken down and transformed.
All three processes of blackening, breaking down and transforming took time, as does inner transformation. But when we willingly embrace the process rather than resisting, the shift can be awe inspiring. Witnessing this is a great joy as a facilitator and coach.
Comments