Mandorla Rising

‘Live in the layers not in the litter.’ —Stanley Kunitz, The Layers

As a body of work, Mandorla Rising is a celebration of my creative process. It is an honoring of myself and the ‘3rd body’ I co-created with Daniel Deardorff in beloved life-partnership for fourteen years and a tribute to, and expansion of, our deeply fruitful collaborations in myth, music and ritual. As it turns out, it is also much more.

This culminating work toward my Poetics of Imagination M.A. has literally become a mandorla within which transformation has become possible, tangible and perhaps, inevitable. Of course, change is inevitable. But this project has taught me new ways to coax, invite, collaborate, listen, savor, negotiate, shape-shift and rest in the slipstream of change, as it aligns with time–past, present and future–holographically and accessibly, within and without me.

The ritual intention with which I held and lived into this project, day by day, seems to have allowed it to hold and live into me. I first sensed this experience of reciprocity and mystery as I studied the Greek Muses (Module 2, December 2020). As I explored their relationships to creativity, memory, the earth and chaos, it became clear that the ancient symbol and ‘container’ of the mandorla, as Deardorff taught it, might indeed be akin to or even actually be the portal through which creativity emanates. As if enchanted, I followed the Muses’ lead and discovered an entirely new interest, an unexpected passion for creating layered schematic illustrations (on the online platform Canva). I wrote and tested prototypes for creativity workshops as part of a much larger emerging project, perhaps to become a book, entitled ‘Muses in the Mandorla.’

When it came time to choose a dissertation focus, the Muses were patient with me. All inevitabilities led to the current one: that I follow Daniel Deardorff’s teachings about the mandorla and dive deeply, for the second time, into the dense, fertile, feral and formidable terrain of his book, The Other Within. Practical concerns aligned as well; a new publisher for a 3rd edition of the book had come forward and it behooved me to re-acquaint myself thoroughly with the book’s contents in preparation for representing it–and Daniel–with fidelity. But more compelling and liberating was the sense of wonder I had about what revisiting the book would reveal now that I had spent a year studying myth with other teachers. (See Project Background & Research).

Fortunately, amidst my rather grand scope of project potentials, my dissertation supervisor Dr. Tracey Warr wisely held me to a different trajectory: with her encouragement I risked using this intensive four-month period to focus on my own creative work in relation to Daniel’s work, yes, but not ‘in its shadow.’ What a fabulous geis and assignment.

Far from living in my beloved’s shadow during his lifetime (though his presence cast a large one), I relished dancing with him as true equals in wildness and tenderness, continually amazed at the uncompromising quality and certainty of our love. Yet his flight out of this world had taken place in shadows before dawn. Landscapes I found myself in, at least internally, were sketched in fire-flicker hues more reminiscent of a shamanic journey that a garden stroll, more slant in filtered light of tenuous not-knowing than courageously striding like horses on a moor. Daniel’s departure meant something vanished. The whole Living World here felt it and held vigil. Until, in late May, like the jacket in my poem, something inside all of us started to sing.

My voice has returned. The work emerging is now fresh and quite distinct in risk and process than my prior work. It is far less linear, more visceral, less cerebral. The ‘container’ of this year at–and not actually at–Dartington has blessed me with studio time in community, with an emphasis on praxis in equal measure to analysis, with an ‘audience’ of peers deeply attuned to interiority and far from the public stage. Thank goodness for you all!

From grayscale and sepia layers of mourning into sun-dappled jewel-tone landscapes of late spring and high summer in the sparkling (and too climate-chaos hot) Pacific Northwest has come this splendid adventure. I have found myself daily singing with the robins and squirrels, hearing the implicate wishes of many non-human ‘others’ who live here, and heeding their requests.

One day the abandoned strip of blackberry-invaded rocks against the studio wall insisted I reclaim soil from brambles and make a garden. As I worked the ground, unearthing buckets of ancient, petrified wood, it told me it wanted to be mandorla.

And so, mandorlas returned to the center where they always are and began to emerge at every turn in my life and this project. Mandorla Rising has become a vessel beyond my imagining. I am grateful to share it with you from its many sides.

—Judith-Kate Friedman