Creative Healing
Bringing light to darker moods
The Earthsee project was born from the primordial broil known in alchemy as the Nigredo, the first of seven stages of transformation. I was on the midlife descent.
I had spent hours listening to Robert Moore, the neo-jungian therapist and author, and AI exhumations of Alan Watts, Carl Jung and others. Men talking about descent. These lectures were helpful—reassuring me that the anxiety, depression and fatigue I was experiencing were natural if not easy.
Reconciling onself with past mistakes, misperceptions, abuses of self and others, judgements, limitations, conditioning can be heavy, dark work. It helps to have light and space in which to do it.
Usrula K Le Guin’s Earthsea books jumped off the shelf. I had half read them as a child, and felt they were over my head. Indeed, Le Guin’s telling of the masculine journey, from boy to magician to archmage to elder, and the feminine, from priestess to woman to queen to elder, draws on her deep compassion for the human condition, and immersion in timeless wisdom.
The Earthsea books marry the archetypal dimension of myth and transformation with human detail—of life, character, setting. We inhabit an earlier, simpler world, where magic—deep interaction with the forces of nature—is part of the culture.
The Earthsee project invites you inside a story. Not a copy of Earthsea. There is no Sparrowhawk or Tenar in Earthsee. There is your story. Its plot is archetypal, universal. Its substance and detail are yours.
I call stepping into this mode mythic reframing.
Its first effect is to create space.
We have stepped into something. We take things in.
When we recognise ourselves in an Element, an archetype, a stage of transformation, we see our journey in mythic terms.
This is especially useful in times of personal struggle. Retelling that struggle—not a quiet, desperate grind through loss, grief, doubt or anxiety—but a heroic stand against mighty forces, ancestral curses, hungry ghosts and primordial dragons, honours and elevates our suffering.
Modern civilisation, now outdated, unsustainable, crumbling, is so lacking in aspects crucial to the human being—nature, nurture, support, belonging—that we each shoulder burdens of grief, guilt and shame at this lack.
Many of us don’t have a shoulder to cry on. So we find ways of coping. Resolve, survive another week, distract, medicate, avoid, carry on.
Painful aspects we push away from ourselves don’t sit inert in the cupboard. They pace back and forth in there, bitter and despairing, heaviness and negativity soaking our foundations.
We feel we must banish these parts in order to be accepted. In order to be the character we present to the world.
And the world is changing. It is being stripped back, down to the essential. Misalignments, glitches, breaks in the simplicity and purity of the essential pattern are revealed and come undone. Great parts of the pattern—perhaps all of it—have to be undone to fix the weave.
And we unravel with it—down to the essential.
Integrity means our part of the weave, our pattern, is whole and unbroken, and fits with the rest of the weave. It lines up. We align. We’re woven in, on pattern, harmoniously. We’re part of the music.
Achieving integrity means old school reunion. We stay in the room and hang out with our old friends. The ones we banished to our inner Camp X-Ray and tried to forget about. Shame, loss, betrayal, grief, sexuality, spirituality.
Integrating banished parts of ourselves is no longer the preserve of a spiritual pastime. It’s not special. It’s the new normal, necessary, needed for evolution.
The world around us, with its crumbling economies, ecologies, governments, societies, yells an accusation at humanity. See? Once again it’s this. Whether Atlantis and Lemuria or East and West or Left and Right, we just can’t do it. The Tower always collapses. People die. Books burn. We go back to square zero.
Standing at the end of the story, we must take stock, we must recapitulate the plots and subplots coming together. Is there resolution? Redemption?
Seeing our story in mythic terms gives it space and structure. Archetypes are large, expansive, dynamic. The Elements mark the four quarters of the universe. They interact and combine according to natural processes. There are maps, tools, signs, rites, rituals, words of wisdom.
This is not to say we indulge in cosplay. That would end up as an elaborate form of spiritual bypassing. Earthsee—as the name implies—is about seeing, not disguising or distracting from.
Seeing our midlife despair, anxiety and shame as noble honours our suffering and lifts us out of victimhood. We participate in the Great Work of humanity—to create a better and better accommodation for the soul in the body, in the family, in the village and on the planet.
Ursula K Le Guin had a rare talent among writers for drawing on indigenous and archetypal wisdom, to show us the simpler, kinder, more magical world we humans are designed for.
Take the first step towards mythic reframing. The Compass is a device for alchemical navigation. Decode your Archetype and Elements for free, with simple steps for rebalancing and regulation, and for deepening your mythic journey.
