From the Inside Out
THEY CALLED IT ...
PUPPY LOVE

FROM WRITER & NATURALIST HENRY BESTON (1888-1968)
Check Here to Read: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them [other animals] for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the sense we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of earth." Learn More about Henry Beston HERE

The alchemist predates the chemist by several hundred years, and not only ran the same risks in the lab, but also in the metaphorical lab of self-discovery and life transformations.

The Alchemists of old are famed for their efforts to change base metals into gold. Less known facts are their efforts to change life's dull and lusterless experiences into joyful and meaningful connections to the natural world. They found a rich metaphor of their material work that translated to personal transformation and growth.

What were the catalysts in those internal labs? What propelled these early scientists to embrace the unseen and recognize the parallels to their laboratory experiments?

I purport that the catalyst was their emotions. Why? Because that's where my own alchemical story begins. Let me start at the beginning — or maybe it's actually the middle, but eventually we'll get to the ending.

I was on the phone with my oldest son, Stacy. It was one of our regular conversations of late about how he was dealing with the upheavals of separating from his wife of 11 years and pending divorce. I had begun to experience some backlash from our conversations — some anger that was coming up as I relived my own separation and eventual divorce from his father more than 10 years previous. The similarities between the two events made it impossible not to relive it all.

The anger moved into sadness. I couldn't put my finger on the source of that sadness, but it was deep and blanketed my entire being. I tried to escape by watching TV, talking on the phone, e-mailing friends, eating, drinking, reading, etc. I didn't want to be under that blanket, or at least feel it's oppressive weight.

As I headed toward the refrigerator once again, I paused mid-step and said, 'Okay, stop running. If you don't get clarity on what this about, it will only come back another time in magnified proportions to better get your attention. This is big enough, and I will stop and see it now.'

I sat down with pen and paper and wrote and wrote until my hand was sore. Then I lay down and tried to dream a better dream. Then I got up and wrote some more. Nothing was breaking through. I was still angry and sad and at one point heard myself say, 'I hate myself' quickly followed by 'for letting him treat me…..'

I went back to sleep and tried dreaming it better. After sunrise a dream came to me — one full of symbols that I couldn't yet understand, but somehow penetrated a part of my psyche. There was the alchemy I practiced using pen and paper and fantasies of a different life, and there was the alchemy at work on me that I couldn't see, but nonetheless catalyzed an explosion of understanding that blew my old laboratory into oblivion.

After the last round of slumber, at the very moment between sleep and waking, it came to me in a flash of clarity. The blanket of sadness was incinerated in an instant and I was washed clean with the cool blue waters of joy and understanding. I knew my internal chemists were in love with me, and I was in love with me too.

The clarity that I reached showed me that all my efforts to discover the source of my pain were steeped in self-pity. I was a victim of my ex-husband's inability to love me and his repeated abandonment of me, and my devoted love for him. Poor me.

The lab exploded and the smoke cleared and there stood the man I had loved so dearly faithfully keeping his agreement to me. He spent his life with me to show me that I needed to release myself from the hooks of being abandoned by my father when I was still in the womb. He showed me that the self-hatred I carried, because I saw myself as unlovable if I couldn't keep my father, was a lie — a very destructive lie. He was my mirror, showing me these things through his own suffering. But I was afraid and unprepared to see my reflection. And now I can release him from that agreement to find his own way out of the lie that he is unlovable.

Why now? I ask myself. I had forgiven my father years ago for his abandonment of me. I had found a love for myself and appreciation for who I am. That work was done. But I still held the misperception of being a victim of my husband's behavior. My son's divorce allowed me to see that although the underlying need for the mirror of my husband was resolved, the re-creation of those underlying issues in my marriage were still real and active in my psyche. They were holding the old lies in place blocking the flow of energy toward a full life and uninhibited expression of love.

The alchemy of our lives finds us in a full range of experience and experiments. And emotions catalyze our responses to them. As I become familiar with the stages of alchemy through reading The Alchemical Woman, A Handbook for Everyday Soulwork, I gain awareness of, and can give name to the undercurrents of my ever-changing scenery. It makes me pause and drop into those undercurrents for closer examination, to find a more authentic expression of myself. And the more I allow myself the time and space to do that, the more I realize that it IS living. Without it, I am simply playing a part on a stage with as much substance and meaning as a puppet on a string.

The Alchemical Woman is me, and some days that's a ride in the park. Some days, it's a slide into hell. Each day is real and whole and I am present in all my glorious becoming.

~By Susan Forster, who has been in business since her 6th child turned 4 years old
with a degree in finance and a career as a financial planner. Her passion is art
and she is part of the team at Cultural Tapestries and feels that the world is ready
and waiting for the process of alchemy to help us all reach that openhearted
acceptance of one another in all our unique and beautiful forms.

THAILAND & BEYOND — Komar and Melamid, who were born in the former Soviet Union, both attended the Moscow Art School and the city's Stroganov Institute of Art & Design. In 1978, while they were both still in their thirties, Komar and Melamid made their way to the United States. There, the two artists' works replete with wry irony and humor won widespread acceptance, and in 1981 they became the first Russian artists to receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Later, the two started another project called "Elephant Art," whose unlikely genesis was the Thai government's 1990 restrictions on logging. Deforestation of the Thai countryside led to a ban on the logging of teak, an industry that once employed thousands of elephants. Although much needed, the ban left these elephants and their lifelong owners (mahouts) without a livelihood. Upon hearing of the situation in Southeast Asia, Komar & Melamid began their first collaboration with an elephant, Renee, at the Toledo Zoo in Ohio in 1995. It was here that Komar & Melamid developed their method of teaching elephants to paint. After working with elephants in States, Komar & Melamid then introduced the idea of teaching elephants how to paint to Asia and two years later founded the Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project (AEACP). Komar and Melamid opened the first "elephant art academy" in Lampang, Thailand, in 1998. Since then the two artists, together with the animals' handlers, have been teaching elephants how to paint. The results have been astonishing. In 2000, at a Christie's auction in New York, paintings by the academy's elephants fetched between $350 and $2,200. Hong, an 8 year old female with a very curious nature, learned how to paint flowers, then moved on to more advanced paintings. She now has two specialties — an elephant holding flowers with her trunk, and the Thai flag. In 2003 the AEACP brought elephant art to the shores of Japan. The wide-open spaces of Kawamura Memorial Museum housed pachyderm paintings aplenty — and it's fascinating how, like creations by human artists, each expresses the personality of its maker in an individualized artistic style. Kamsean, for example, a 5-year-old male at Maesa Elephant Camp in Chiang Mai, Thailand, clearly favors squiggly lines on his big white canvas; while his 4-year-old female co-habitant, Duanpen, took a brush and rhythmically beat it, filling her canvas with splotches. At the Kawamura exhibition, visitors can watch Terry, the 11-year-old elephant from Ichihara Elephant Kingdom in Chiba, Japan, in artistic action.

"It only takes from a few hours to a day to teach them," said Mia Fineman, an art historian whose book "When Elephants Paint: The Quest of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand" (at Amazon.com)is an illustrated history of the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project. MIA adds: "But the elephant has to want to learn. Elephants in captivity are definitely bored, but it's a matter of disposition, an innate proclivity. Some will do it and some won't." So, can elephants really paint? Komar and Melamid think so. "Who knows what will happen in five, ten, or 200 years from now on," says Komar with a mischievous smile. "In 200 years, elephants may be painting, while artists may be in zoos!"

VIDEO GALLERY: See Elephant Art Documentary Series HERE
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