I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
Because you're mine, I walk the line.
I Walk the Line, Johnny Cash
This is a Soul Collage card, made around 2011, I think, when I was still making them and just beginning to think they were more, maybe even art. It was made post-heart attack, after my father's death, when I had found a certain peace with a road ahead and walking it alone. I was married, not unhappily but not happily either.
According to Seena Frost, the woman who created and trademarked the concept, they are "a creative and satisfying collage process. You make your own deck of cards - each collage card representing one aspect of your personality or Soul. Use the collage cards intuitively to answer life's questions and participate in self-discovery. Joyfully deepen your understanding of the relationships between your personality parts, you and your family/community/world, and you and your dreams, symbols, and Spirit." They are definitely works of the unconscious and while they may represent parts of my personality or Soul, they also are art, and perhaps even prophecy. You can use the cards as a kind of Tarot, not so much foretelling a future as revealing the forces within you being called on either positively or negatively. They are kind of a wisdom school, part magic and part psychology as all good wisdom schools are. I came to find though, the cards themselves can be a kind of oracle. One card actually predicted my coming heart attack a month before I had it. Another, Wolf of my Heart, predicted the man who would come into my life who would encourage me on the path hinted by this card, I Walk the Line, made a year after.
Of course when I made the card, it made perfect sense the road the color of fire and blood, a little arterial, the ocean, actually a Santa Barbara Beach, reflecting a hope that I would end up in a way where I started, by the water. The planet, I was never sure of, maybe a new world, certainly a distant future, definitely an adventure. The angel, isn't so much hubris as it is reflective of a certain alienation that was always mine, but so much more so after the heart attack. That she is black and white against such a vivid background only amplifies the difference. I see her as becoming, not quite giving up flight, not quite embracing the earth. She is nearly grounded, but not quite, nearly of this world but not completely. This was how I felt, how I still sometimes feel although that is changing. I am coloring myself in, letting life paint me, and not the cool blues I prefer but vivid oranges and reds, fierce yellows, the colors of ocean sunrises and sunsets, of flesh and blood.
When I rediscovered it the other day, it struck me that this is exactly what happened to me when I left Sacramento and flew to the Virgin Islands and completely new life. I suppose you could say, what I did with the body I now repeated with my heart, or the physical healing was now echoed by an emotional one. It's not Google Maps, exact location, possible routs, and estimated time of arrival (as well as traffic conditions), but it's eerily exact. The unconscious loves its symbols and prefers a more sphinx-like approach to prophecy. I find I like that a little better than a psychic's predictions. I like the frisson of realization, that look back that Machado talks of, the one that reveals the path we've made by walking. It makes me wonder what card I might make now, for what is to ahead and I think I might almost be ready to find out.
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