With four planets in Libra (Sun, Saturn, Mercury and Venus) my mind and experience is centered on relationships. This astrological concentration is highlighted this week by the full moon in Aries (Tuesday the 11th) and the ongoing transit of Uranus through Aries, who’s opposing energies really light up the ongoing tension between our need for radical, individual freedom and our longing for and commitment to our relationships.
As this topic of Self and Other has been meandering through my awareness this living inquiry has been fed by two things: 1) collaborating on a art show and 2) reading Joanna Macy’s, Coming Back To Life and Lynne McTaggert’s book The Bond.
The journey of collaborating on 15 art pieces with another distinct, creative and strong individual (both of us are Aries) has been a phenomenal workshop on these themes of self, other and creativity. In the end we thankfully found our collaborating groove but it took us many uncomfortable stages before we got there. There is an art to collaboration. Libra in fact, ruled by Venus, rules both art and relationship highlighting that relationship is in face a creative process.
Through the foibles of our creative process together I have discovered that there are three different dances that appear in the creative process of relationship:
1) The Power-Over paradigm – One with rigid structures and one in a collapse
There are times when one individual’s sense of self collapses into the “leadership” of the other. This leads to a total loss of self for one and a sense that the “leader” is driving the process. I’ve noticed that we switch off being the pushy “leader” and the overwhelmed, small “follower.” Akin to the dominator-victim dance. Not pretty. You can get some art made in this paradigm but there is no relationship and no magic. This isn’t collaboration.
2) Chaos – no differentiation
There are also moments when we are both collapsed. Neither of us hold on to the direction, guidance or creative spirit within us and we are both in a collapsed state of trying to please the other. When BOTH individuals in a relationship focus their attention on the other, we lose our footing in the self and it all gets very cloudy. We made our worst art at these moments. Both thinking, “what color would they like?” “I wonder if she is going to like this?” PUKE! This lead to our greatest finding:
Co-dependency makes bad art.
3) The Power-Against paradigm – Two rigid individuals battling for control. Two defended individuals protecting their points of view or armoring against perceived threat. Two equally strong-willed, rigid organizations battling for control and power. No art gets made in this dance.
Joanna Macy, in her book Coming Back to Life, highlights the extraordinary time we are living in – a time of limitless information and power – a time of profound creative potential as well as vast destructive dimensions. It is a time when we must learn the art of relationship and how to create WITH life rather than dominate it.
McTaggert writes:
“The competitive impulse that is now a major part of our self-definition and that forms the undercurrent of all our lives is the same mindset that has created every one of the large global crisis now threatening to destroy us. If we can recover wholeness in our relationships, in my view, we will begin to heal our world.”
Both Macy and McTaggert ground their call for a new imagination of relationship in the emerging field of new science. What we now know about life and the laws of nature is taking us rapidly into a new way of seeing, and rendering our old paradigms obsolete.
A new dance is needed. And a new dance only comes from a new imagination, from practicing new forms of creativity and collaboration – from trying to make art together, fumbling, collapsing and trying to dance again, and again in better and better harmony.
We must let go of our old paradigms of our essential separateness, which lead to isolation and competitiveness. From the point of view of systems theory, the study of deep ecology, and the essential laws of nature, the power-over paradigm is according to Macy, “both inaccurate and dysfunctional.”
On the other hand, Macy writes:
“Living systems evolve in variety, resilience, and intelligence; they do this not by erecting walls of defense and closing off from their environment, but by opening more widely to the currents of matter-energy and information. They integrate and differentiate through constant interaction, spinning more intricate connection and more flexible strategies. For this they require not invulnerability, but increasing responsiveness.” THAT IS CREATIVITY!
While it is important that we recognize that all of life is made up of relationships, it is also important to catch the importance of diversity in Macy’s and McTaggert’s understanding of natural laws. We must all BE who we are, SHOW up with the particular information that flows through our distinct perceptual beings and bring it into the creative dance. That is how we evolve, that is how we make art, that is how we dance the beautiful dance of relationship.
Image: Praying Together, Ink Drawing by Laura Tabet