30 Days of Art: Day 8

The Middle Passage - Part 2

I returned to my watercolor pencils to complete this project.  I love the steady darkness of the pencil -- I can't get that tone from graphite or anything else I have in my goody bag.  It's been fun learning to handle watercolor; even as I make lots of mistakes, I'm really learning how to play with tone, depth, etc.  I look forward to becoming more comfortable with it.

The subject matter of this piece is drawn from Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Este's story of The Stolen Mother Moon.  I set out the first part in my previous post, so now I want to pick up where I left off.

The Mother Moon comes down to earth in order to discover who or what is killing the humans on the days when she fails to shine her light from the night sky.  Alas, on her arrival she is immediately attacked by The Evil Ones:

And the Mother Moon sank, exhausted into the mud, and as she did her head fell onto her breast and her hood fell back over her hair and all became darkness again.  And the vile things that love the dark came to then with a kind of whisper chatter:  “We’ll get her now! We’ll kill her. Yes, we’ll kill her.”

They gathered around the Moon Mother snarling and kicking and grasping, and they drove her into the ground.  They.  Who hated.  Humans.

The Mother Moon is down, and all seems lost as The Evil Ones get exactly what they were looking for:

At last, no more light shown across those dark waters.

And the one who gave light—and even more: the one who shone done on mothers nursing their babies; the one who made sleeping women kiss their lovers backs; the one who put words into the dreams of poets.  That one was pushed deep into the mud.  For the evil ones didn’t care about mothers or babies.  They didn’t care about lovers or poets.

And the Moon Mother let one last ray of light zigzag over the waters before she disappeared completely.  And the evil ones rolled a great boulder over her grave and danced a crazy dance on top of it.

So then, on nights there was no light to guide.

And so many people became lost; and so many children became orphaned; and so many people suffered.

Finally, when the Mother Moon failed to shine her light for many days on end the villagers who relied on the light of the moon to guide their journey set out to find her.  They found her buried under the great big boulder, and they immediately set about to free her.  And in so doing, they learned their own lessons:

The light rose up, lighting their faces first from beneath and then straight on and then finally from the top as the Moon Mother escaped from her prison and climbed the dark staircase back to the sky where now, on most nights, she travels across the sky with her hood turned down and with her light radiant everywhere. 

And on those few, now predictable nights, when she veils herself in grey and does not shine, travelers have learned to stay by the hearth and wait until she shows the way again.

When the moon is not in the sky, I feel her absence and I think of this story.  Thank goodness for the full moon!