Chapter 1: Cracking the Red Egg

[soliloquy id=”7368″]After a severe heart attack seven years ago and desperately depressed, something in me suggested I make some drawings. Although I had no experience in art, it did make sense that drawing could be therapeutic, and I was reminded of the drawings of Carl Jung and his patients. I found a computer program to help me draw, and over the next nine months a series of twenty-seven images presented themselves.

Nine months after completing the drawings, another voice within me suggested I go over the images and write about them for the next forty days. To my amazement, in going over the drawings one by one, a pattern of alchemical and spiritual transformation emerged .

The central image of the drawings it that of a red egg –- more than ten of the drawings had a red egg in them, and the final drawing was of a red egg with a spiral at the center of it.  Hmm.

After building a stone cave and then a labyrinth as a response to heart operations, it occurred to me that after this heart attack I now needed build a red stone meditation chamber in the shape of an egg— about 4 wide by 5 ½ feet tall — to be in. It also seemed to me that the Egg also needed to have its own secret garden to sit it, a kind of Stone Sanctuary.

Last winter — when it is course not a good idea to be building things outside with stone in Alaska — I started trying to understand the symbolism of the red egg. Why, of all symbols, had I chosen this one? Or, more appropriately, why had this symbol picked me?  I understood the idea of eggs as symbols of rebirth, and found that ancient civilizations also often began with egg mythology. Then, about three weeks into the search, an image from out of the blue (i.e., from the Internet) presented itself–- an icon of Mary Magdalene and the Red Egg.

[The original blog with the drawings: www.heartak.com]

Next: Mary Magdalene and the Red Egg