CHAPTER 1

New Resonances

Marion Woodman

Coming Home to Myself is a surprise child. Born of the insight of my friend andcolleague, Jill Mellick, and my growing curiosity as we revisioned my earlierwork, this little book has happened. Our editor, Mary Jane Ryan, dared theintuitive leap that is re-birthing my work in a distilled form.

I began writing my journal when I was twelve. I am still writing because I amcompelled to find meaning in my experience. In my late teens, I chose tosacrifice my beloved microscope for another kind of poetry, the poetry of word.Still, the scientist in me is always observing with a thinking heart, noting,comparing, articulating.

Twenty years ago, much to my surprise, people were interested in my thesis oneating disorders. Being an addict myself and profoundly introverted, I wasfearful of publication. With the encouragement of Inner City Books, the thesiswas revised and published as The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter.

Addiction to Perfection was my first attempt at writing a book. It came out ofan inner drive to understand the repetitive themes in the dreams of my addictedclients. I put rows of dreams on the floor of my studio, organized andreorganized them by theme. I marveled at the overwhelming power of theunconscious and, at the same time, the intensity of its drive toward healing.

One theme became clear as I began work on The Pregnant Virgin. The way tohealing an addiction lies in finding a connection between body and soul. Soulneeds body as much as body needs soul. Each is out of context without the other,an abandoned fragment of what it is. A great cherishing mother is often the linkthat manifests in dreams. Sometimes she appears as a striding Presence in thesky, sometimes as a bigger-than-life cleaning lady or a down-to-earth crone. Shehas many names: Buffalo Woman, Black Madonna, Isis, Anna, Tara. In the Bible sheis called Wisdom, translated from the Greek word, Sophia. Whatever her temporalform, she is divine; she understands our humanity and her love is fierce enoughto permeate flesh and bone. Her humor rips away veils of illusion. She is thecentral figure in Dancing in the Flames, (Shambhala, 1996) which I co-authoredwith my friend, Elinor Dickson.

As I watched the pregnant virgin coming to consciousness in dreams, I becameincreasingly alarmed by images of ravaged masculinity, masculinity andfemininity both being ravaged by patriarchy. Men and women who have worked hardto find a strong feminine standpoint in Being are now working hard to release amasculinity strong enough to partner the evolving virgin consciousness. Thistheme began by exploring the tragedy of perfection as Keats' "unravished bride"in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." So the process went on through The RavagedBridegroom, Conscious Femininity, and Leaving My Father's House.

One thing has been distilled in my consciousness. By whatever name we call thetwo magnets that create this balance of energies in our bodies and in ourplanet— Masculine/Feminine, Shiva/Shakti, Yang/Yin, Spirit/Soul,Transcendence/Immanence, Doing/Being, we are now responsible for making spacefor the healing of body, soul, and spirit. We are being directed in theevolutionary process by divine guides through our dreams, our symptoms, ourplanet. New values are emerging—feminine values and masculine values that arefree of patriarchal abuse. A totally new harmonic lies ahead in the newmillennium.

I write this down not because I am trying to sell my books, but because, as anintuitive, I tend to take too much for granted—I fail to fill in the facts thatwould make my thinking clear. As my husband says as he walks past my studiodoor, "You're not a born writer, Marion. Every time I walk by, you're gazing atthe trees. You think everything through and then you write down your conclusion.A born writer would keep writing the process down."

He is right. People who are not intuitive become frustrated trying to follow myunstated logic and sensation types throw up their hands or the book in alarmwhen they feel their body responding but not their mind. I try to put down thefacts, but I think in images, so when I try to explain, I end up in anotherimage, which only compounds the difficulty. Moreover, my mind is a tapestry ofthe many great writers whom I have studied all my life. Their imagery is thewarp and woof of my own thinking.

As a professor and practitioner of psychotherapy and the creative arts, Jill hasworked from my books for many years. As she says in her introduction, she hastaken my books and "has allowed the armature, the bones of the writing to showthrough the transparent skin of the prose and emphasized the closely interwovenrelationships between images or thoughts by reflecting their relationship intheir syntax." Her own book, The Natural Artistry of Dreams (Conari Press,1996), with its wealth of creative ideas for releasing the energy of dreamimagery, is a splendid companion text for this book.

Jill in Palo Alto, and I in London, Canada have put my writing under amicroscope to look at the fine tuning that has sometimes made meaning difficult.In reshaping it, allowing words more space, more time, more repetitions, we haveheard new resonances. We hope you, our readers, will also.

Jill calls our creations "adaptations." I call them "moments." We do not callthem poems. We both love poetry and we do not presume. We offer them withSophia's proverbial grain of salt. Too much of her salt makes...