I love this door!
I know that the people who live here are ignited with passion.
The red is so vibrate and represents the fire element, but this door is balanced by all of the elements.
In a recent visit to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, I walked past Georgia O’Keeffe’s morning glories and edificial irises and stood mesmerized by a painting that was far more humble, far less glamorous. A wall with a door in it, an expanse of smooth brown adobe centered by a core of a rough black square of absolute negative space.
O’Keeffe liked to paint the same thing again and again, until she had penetrated it to its essence, unraveling the secret of her attraction. The flowers, the blowsy petunias and jimsonweed, were superseded by New York cityscapes and then by cow skulls and miscellaneous animal bones, surreally aloft over the clean blue skies and dry hills of New Mexico. This was the landscape that unlatched her heart, and it was during her time there in the 1930s that she began to obsess over the wall with a door in it, located in the courtyard of a tumbledown farmstead in Abiquiú, New Mexico. First she bought the house, for $10, a process that took a full decade, and then she set about documenting its enigmatic presence on canvas, creating almost 20 versions. “I’m always trying to paint that door – I never quite get it,” she announced. “It’s a curse the way I feel – I must continually go on with that door…it fascinates me.”
The attraction was a mystery, and yet walls and doors figure large in the story of O’Keeffe’s singular life. How do you make the most of what’s inside you, your talents and desires, when they slam you up against a wall of prejudice, of limiting beliefs about what a woman must be and an artist can do? She didn’t kick the door down – hardly her style – but instead set her considerable canniness and will at finding a new way through.
I see classic patterns, which generate archetypal sacred symbols in O’Keeffe’s work especially the door, the sacred center of her home. Though this dwelling may not be a publicly recognized sacred structure, it serves as the center for O’Keeffe.
Guided by her own intuitive response, almost possessed, O’Keeffe paints this archetypal symbol. The door represents the notion of metamorphosis and transition, a passage from one place to another, between different states, between lightness and darkness. The act of passing over the threshold signifies that one must leave behind materialism and personality to confront inner silence and meditation. It is abandoning the old and embracing the new.
Doors hold the essence of mystery, separating two distinct areas, keeping things apart. There is a barrier, a boundary, which must be negotiated, before the threshold can be crossed. The mysterious beyond is hidden from sight by the closed door, and some sort of action must be taken before the other side becomes visible and available to us. The closed door is full of potential, for anything might lie beyond, as yet unknown and unseen.
At the age of 96, Andy Warhol, another creator of a purely American vernacular, interviewed O’Keeffe. She told him about the landscape that she most cherished, her home and, the wild expanses of New Mexico. “I have lived up there at the end of the world by myself a long time. You walk around with your thing out in the field and nobody cares. It’s nice.”
From the beginning, New Mexico represented salvation, though not in the wooden sense of the hill-dominating crosses she so often painted. O’Keeffe’s salvation was earthy, even pagan, comprised of the cold water pleasure of working unceasingly at what you love, burning anxiety away beneath the desert sun.
Elegance shares a border with crankiness, independence with selfishness, and O’Keeffe was by no means a saint. But without O’Keeffe’s sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, exacting presence, chaos loomed. She made it happen, that simple door was anything but, and in painting it, she was opening a door to a new kind of American art, a new kind of woman’s life. “Making your unknown known is the most important thing,” she said, “and keeping the unknown always beyond you.”
In Feng Shui your front door represents your life purpose and or career. It’s important to have the five elements to balance the energy that goes into your space. This doorway has four of the five:
An easy solution would be to place two red flowering plants like a geraniums on either side of the front door.
Years ago while in Lyon, France, I stumbled onto what the locals told me was a “healing” well. It was named after my favorite medieval saint: Saint Guinefort.
In the thirteenth century, a Dominican friar, Etienne de Bourbon was preaching near Lyon, when he heard during confession that many of the local women had taken their children to Saint Guinefort. Etienne had never heard of this saint, and wanted to learn more, so he investigated.
Much to his surprise, he discovered that Saint Guinefort was actually a dog . . . a greyhound, in fact. As the hagiography of Guinefort goes, he was a dog on a large estate. One day, when his master and mistress had left the house, a snake entered into the castle and began to approach the baby’s cradle. Guinefort attacked and killed the snake, and was badly hurt himself in the fight. He stayed to guard the cradle, and so when the parents returned, they found the cradle knocked over, and both dog and cradle covered in blood. Assuming that Guinefort had attacked the baby, the lord killed him with his sword—only to find the baby safe and unharmed, and the corpse of the serpent torn to pieces. Realizing their error, they made a shrine for the unjustly slain Guinefort, and began to venerate it. Etienne was none too impressed with the locals’ veneration of a dog as a saint, so he made them destroy the shrine and burn the remains of Guinefort—but that apparently did not end the cult of St. Guinefort, because it survived all the way into the twentieth century. If this story seems familiar, it may be because a version of it is found in the Disney film, Lady and the Tramp.
Animals have been the spiritual companions of humans since the beginning of recorded time. The earliest indication of the spiritual significance of the human-animal relationship can be found in the 20,000 year-old cave wall painting of Cro-Magnon people.
In many if not most cultures, animals have served a variety of spiritual functions: They have acted as guardians and shamans, and have appeared in images of an afterlife. Many ancient creation myths depict God with a dog.
That animals touch us in a deep and meaningful place is not a new phenomenon, but one that pervades the history of the human-animal relationship. Throughout history, they have offered us something fundamental: a direct and immediate sense of both joy and love. We recognize that animals seem to feel more intensely and purely than we do. I know I yearn to express myself with such abandon and integrity.
In having a relationship with our animals we can recover that which is true within us and, and through the discovery of that truth, find our spiritual direction. Simply, animals teach us about love: how to love, how to enjoy being loved, and how loving generates more love.
They teach us the language of the spirit. Animals can’t “talk” to us, yet they communicate with us and commune with us in a language that does not require words, rather feelings. They help us to understand that words can be limiting. Animals offer the unique opportunity to transcend the boundaries of our human perspectives; they allow us to stretch our consciousness toward an understanding that enables us to grow beyond our narrow viewpoint.
I see animals as the spiritual guardians or keepers on the planet. They never lose their awareness of themselves as spirit and their innate connection to all of life. Of all species, humans appear to need the most education to master their existence. Humans, unlike most animals, struggle with their analytical complexity and fail to see or even acknowledge themselves as spiritual beings.
I think Will Rogers sums up my feelings perfectly when he said, “If there are no dogs in heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” Indeed and some day, I look forward to meeting St. Guinefort.
“We cannot, today, recreate the original ‘wilderness man’ in shape, form and habitat. But we can recover him, because he exists in us. He is the foundation in spirit or psyche on which we build, and we are not complete until we have recovered him.” Laurens van der Post
It seems most of the men I know are watching reality shows like, “Survivor” or “Survivor Man,” programs about living and existing with no food, no shelter and no fresh water. I would rather watch paint dry than watch something like this, but it occurs to me that there is something missing out of these men’s lives, something primal, perhaps it’s an initiation experience, an ancient ritual no longer present in our modern world.
Many traditional cultures escorted their young men into the world of adulthood and the sacred through an elaborate series of rituals. These rituals occurred in space set apart from the rest of the community and took place over many weeks or months. Preparation for initiation was often extensive and included witnessing the ongoing life of the people and observing the qualities displayed by men of spirit. Underneath and holding up this initiatory process was a deep and abiding relationship to nature and the spirits of the place. This passage was also rooted in a nearly endless succession of generations that had come to learn the necessity of such a transition.
The awareness for this is essentially universal: a process of intense focus, communal reflection and immersion in the natural and supernatural worlds must shape a man’s soul. In other words, to become a man, certain gateways needed to be crossed in order for that territory to be fully embedded within the man.
An additional value of initiation for modern men concerns the need to reestablish a link with the wild. Some say this constitutes a regression to the past, while others see it as an opportunity to sanction a letting go of restraint. While these two options are intriguing, they are nonetheless far from what is being advocated. Thoreau said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” It is precisely this wildness that we are in search of, one that fosters an authenticity that is most like nature. The depth of conditioning that we are shaped by is immense and the levels of crippling self-consciousness that results depletes a man until he lives a life, as Thoreau also said, “of quiet desperation.” The world is in great need of men who live genuinely and who are willing to stand outside of consensus reality and speak words of truth.
Initiation experiences are archetypal as well as deeply spiritual. They have been a part of the human journey for thousands of years and act as a rite of passage. This experience represents a very specific archetypal journey meant to challenge you to discover unknown power with in you. Extreme conditions are either chosen – as in going on a Walk About when a young Aboriginal man comes of age, or presented to you through unseen life events such as illness, accidents, family death, divorce or any other life circumstance that starts a person on this extraordinary experience. As is often the case today, most people do not even recognize that they are on an initiatory experience, as it is a spiritual journey hidden within the chaos of ordinary life. In fact, chaos is required for our lives to unfold.
These reality shows demand that the people confront their own weaknesses or be consumed by them. You can only come to believe in the power of your spirit – and the Spirit – by needing that power yourself to survive. Then you can speak about that power with respect and reverence, and the Spirit will assist you because you understand how to pray with humility.
Maybe these reality shows are worth seeing. Well, if you’re a man anyway.
