BLACK LAKE

Inspiration:

Like most people, I seek out bodies of water – oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, even puddles.  Something about water has a way of moving us beyond ourselves.   One of my favorite artworks is MC Escher’s woodcut print “Puddle” which captures a small puddle on a forest path after a rainstorm, reflecting the cloudless evening sky and a full moon.  We are born out of the watery ocean of our mother’s womb.  It is no coincidence that the metaphor for our unconscious is water.  For we are anchored in the physical and energetic properties of water. Carl Jung said in one of his lectures that “Life inevitably leads down into reality. Life is of the nature of water: it always seeks the deepest place, which is always below in the darkness and heaviness of the earth.”

Black Lake is inspired by my own soul work and desire to connect to the metaphysical background of the world.  There are times when I have glimpses of just how alive the world is and how little I truly perceive of her great earth system.  Most of these occurrences have happened when I am living in the forest observing nature.  There is a pond in the forest right next to my outdoor alter that I go to every morning to great the day by honoring: “the Sun, who shines on us and gives us life. Water, who combines Sun and gives us life. The Green World, both big and small, that breathes in and out and gives us life. Earth, who expresses us out of her molten core and heart to give us life”.  The pond is a living pond.  Early in spring the wood frogs and peepers lay their eggs and sing their songs in the pond.  Dragonflies circle it.  Plants grow in and at the ponds edge.  The surface of the pond vibrates with what ever touches it.  Rain comes from the sky, insects and gases raise from the bottom, meeting the skin of the pound causing rippling patterns of concentric circles.   Reminding me of the megalithic stone circles and the symbols carved into Neo-lithic monuments.  I gaze into the ponds reflective surface, fall into a light trance, and ponder the different levels of reality reflected above, on and below it’s surface.  I feel a connection with other dimensions.

I have lived with a pond for more than a decade.  When I first arrived in the forest the pond’s surface was a watery brownish green.  Those were years of heavy, almost tropical rain and the pond would regularly overflow into its spillway.   Then came the year of the fires.  The air was overhung with smoke from the immense fires in the Northern Boreal Forest.  When the rain came, the water of the pond turned an orange red and stayed that way.  Last year, there was a historical drought.  When it finally rained a little, the pond turned black and stayed black until it iced over white.  Through its coloration, it was if the pond picked up the zeitgeist of the environment, just like our own unconscious.

There is another body of water that I contemplate.  During the winter, I live in a neighborhood called “Black Lake”.  The village’s namesake lake nearby in an abandoned asbestos mine.  The abandoned mine is enormous and has started to be recolonized by nature.  Every winter afternoon, I take a long walk with my dog part way around the lake, and observe the changes of color and textures on Black Lake’s surface.  I walk to the end of a road that has fallen into the lake.  Hundreds of feet down there is an orange cabin that was used to check trucks in and out of the mine.  It appears minuscule compared to the excavations.  Every time I marvel at the enormity of the environmental devastation surrounding the lake.

Yet, the lake still houses a spirit.  The land is very damaged and struggling to heal but the lake is brilliantly alive.  As the days get shorter the black surface of the lake eventually ices over and the surface gives way to crystalline white which reflects the grays, blues and pastel hues of afternoon sunsets.  During the spring, when the ice begins to thaw, surface of the lake begins to develop patterns that looks like eyes.  Hundreds of enormous eyes gazing into the sky.  Dark pupiled with the radiating, striated lines of a light-blue iris ringed by a circle, very similar to the concentric rings in the in the forest pond but frozen.  The ice melts and then in the late spring something extraordinary happens, the water of “Black Lake” turns a pure Caribbean blue.  So exceptional, that people come from far away to take selfies next to the water.  The water remains this tropical color until the weather starts to get chilly and turns black again.

Reflecting on the waters of the pond and Black Lake, I sense something vast and mysterious unfolding just beyond consciousness. I feel very small, but included, in awesomeness.