(23) Red Tears, Red Sea

Alchemists used the image of the Red Sea….
The Red Sea is the totality of the psyche, the agent of solutio that the ego must encounter on the way to individuation.

Edward Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche

It was January in Fairbanks, and I started feeling waves of sadness when my wife had to travel to the Lower 48 for six days. The weather in Fairbanks was typical for that time of year, with temperatures well below zero, and it was still dark most of the time. It felt like Hell had indeed frozen over.

When I started drawing, I started crying. I convinced myself that all was lost — that I had lost my health, my vitality, my identity, my future. It felt as if the waves of tears would never end.

When I made this drawing and the other drawings, I understood very little about the depths of alchemy; it had always seemed to me to be an obscure and confusing part of Jungian psychology.

I was drawing what wanted to be drawn, and I assumed at the time that the process of drawing was just a form of emotional release. Now, in reviewing these drawings more than a year later, I see another dimension to them. I am amazed at the many parallels there are between the content of these images and the process of alchemical transformation that Jung describes.

Perhaps there is something to the Spirit World after all.