Raised in what she refers to as ‘backwoods hill country,’ Florence is born out of wedlock, an ‘illegitimate’ child in a strictly fundamentalist religious setting. Growing up in this environment has devastating consequences for the young Florence. As a child, Florence lives in a small, three-room house where four people share one bed. She is poor and uneducated. Family life centers around chores and church, a rural way of life characteristic of the time and not unique to her family. Florence shows an early interest in art but is reprimanded for ‘drawing’ and ‘wasting paper.’ This lack of support left an unmet desire to create, which continues to survive many years of hardship – cooking, scrubbing on a washboard after hauling water up from a distant well, caring for younger siblings, picking cotton from dawn to dusk, and chopping wood. Florence begins this kind of work at the age of 8. The work continues well into the middle years of her life.
At the age of 12, Florence discovers the circumstances of her birth and in shame quits school. Two years later, she is unexpectedly taken to the church to marry a man she has never met. The marriage is fraught with difficulty, violence, and abuse, with Florence solely responsible for maintaining the household and working for food and money. Divorce is a sin in her fundamentalist religion. Having nowhere to turn and no conceivable escape eventually leads Florence to a nervous breakdown.
It is during her hospitilization at an asylum (as it was called at that time) that the presence of trees make themselves known, coming to her aid. On the day she enters the institution, she finds a sheet of notebook paper to draw a few trees which grow outside the window, somehow gaining comfort, even though she is deeply fearful of what would become of her. Soon after making the sketch of trees, she has a ‘vision,’ which occurs in full consciousnes. She remains aware of her setting and her self, marking the vision as shamanic in nature. She is witness to a great tree that has been horribly mangled as if by a tornado. Twisted and broken branches dangle, and the trunk is stripped of its bark. Her inner eye continues to travel down the trunk and enters the earth.
She travels deep into the soil through layers of sand, rock, and mud, seeing the roots of the great tree winding all the way down. She arrives at an aquifer, an underground lake of enormous proportion. The trees roots lay gently in the water, drawing sustenance for the injured body. The vision left Florence feeling a sense of wonder, peace, and comfort; removing her fear, she knew all would be well. (Rugh 1990)
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Listening to Florence recount this event, I had many questions. Is this an example of metaphor only? Is the tree just her mangled self-esteem? The water, only thirst-quenching biology? Or is it conceivable that she was drawn (no pun intended) to the awareness of the trees by the trees themselves? Did the trees come to her aid at a time of complete surrender and utter unknown?
The tree is an ancient and essential being throughout human history. In shamanism and other indigenous knowledge systems, the tree is the bridge between ordinary reality and transpersonal realms. Within the Western hermetic tradition, the tree of life reflects alchemical change, regeneration, self-healing, self-understanding, and self-transformation (Metzner 1987, p.249). The tree is also called the Axis Mundi, the world tree. Florence’s lower world journey has all the markings of a shamanic flight coming in contact with a spirit being, the tree, who guided and instructed her on her condition and what she could anticipate. It was a healing journey.
From a shamanic perspective, the trees are not just her trees, not just the output of a panicked little ego. They are guides in the imaginal landscape and they use ‘metaphor and symbol as a way of quickening the connection between the individual and the imaginal, sharing values and wisdom, not of our own making, not of the ego but of the soul’ (Watkins 1984, p.99). So the tree is a symbol and a metaphor. It is also the physical tree outside the hospital and the spirit tree inside the vision landscape. The images have multiple points of origin within Florence – from the ego, and, deeper still, from the Soul Self, that self to which the Wind spoke in me so many years ago.
Throughout the decade of my work with Florence and her art making, the tree featured prominently. Early in our time together, I asked Florence and other art group participants to visually respond to the question, ‘If you were a natural object or element, what would you be?’ Florence produced a small painting of a tree stump with a few trailing flowers (Figure 7.1). She stated, ‘At the time I made this I was feeling pretty low and came up with the idea that I was an old stump but could still support a beautiful flower.’
Four years and 150 works of art later, Florence created another painting of trees that she called ‘Oklahoma Paradise’ (Plate 9 in center section). It is a spring scene of fertility with flowering and budding trees and water flowing abundantly through the center. Florence pointed out, ‘The trees are whole and complete, no broken branches or stumps. It shows nature’s abundance, so full of life.’ Until this moment, when trees appeared in her artwork, they always had sawed off or broken limbs. Now, with the assistance of the creative process and
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her allies in nature, Florence had transformed the pain of her early life experi-ences.
For Florence, nature, trees, water, and animals are not just ‘pretty pictures,’
they are emissaries that acknowledge and celebrate the healing changes in her life. Florence realizes that through nature she can have direct communion with God, with Spirit…a dramatic and courageous revelation for a woman raised and still living in an extremely conservative religious community. Put in shamanic terms, Florence uses art to enter into relationship with nature and the imaginal.
She continues her creative efforts to this day despite significant losses in vision and hearing. Making art allows her to interact with images that teach and heal.
Nature and identity: shapeshifting through disability
The experience of disability late in life greatly amplifies lost value and meaning.
As discussed earlier, our society’s dominant values hold little significant place for aged individuals and even less for aged persons with a physical or psycho-logical challenge. Unlike a healthy older adult, persons with illness will most likely be subject to programs and therapeutic interventions that are largely biomedical in orientation. The biomedical framework views aging as a disease needing medical and professional intervention. It does not address the role of personal meaning in health and healing.
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Figure 7.1 Stump as Self
The experience of disability in particular, but also aging in general, might be viewed as a form of ‘shapeshifting.’ In shamanic practice shapeshifting is trans-formation accomplished through merging with the consciousness of another life form or element of nature. It is used to gain understanding and information about the life form and also from the life form directed to whatever issue the par-ticipant is focused on. It is also a form of communion with all of life, with all that is sacred.
The capacity for shapeshifting is related to surrendering our rigid sense of self, our ego. Art critic Suzi Gablik (1991) refers to the role of art in discovering our ecological identity as ‘sacred ego-deconstruction,’ which is an excellent phrase for the experience of disability in old age when our identity or sense of self is definitely ‘up for grabs.’ Mental health practitioners in the aging field give considerable attention to the need for maintaining a sense of personal continuity amidst the losses and radical changes associated with aging. While this may be important and necessary, what is the nature of the self that is to continue? This question is yet to be asked by gerontologists, which indicates the blind operation of the separatist paradigm. Is this an attempt to maintain continuity for that distinct and separate ego-self? I think that it is. The artwork and stories of the elders have guided me to this conclusion.
Asking who we are when our bodies change drastically and we can no longer participate in our lives in familiar ways or when our minds no longer remember familiar faces, we stand at the threshold of transformation. We have begun our
‘sacred ego-deconstruction,’ shapeshifting into our true larger and deeper self.
When we see only the pain and suffering of the disability or illness, when we see only the bent and crippled body, we turn away from the threshold of shapeshifting and close the door to deeper, more meaningful possibilities. Ray Stauffer, an Iowa elder, will be our guide through that transformative doorway of disability and into a landscape where self and nature become one.
Eye of the eagle, eye of the storm: who am I?
This story takes place at an adult day health center in Iowa, which services the needs of disabled older adults who might otherwise be placed in a nursing home. I am developing an art program as part of research grant from the National Institute of Aging. The artwork discussed and illustrated represents a time frame of one and one-half years. It is only a small portion of Ray Stauffer’s total work produced.
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