The E M E R G E N C E Backstory: everything changed when I stopped asking "what is the story?" and started asking "what can I give?"

Witness the Emergence Deck's connection with 8.8 & receive a soul-to-soul message, as the backstories of the deck emerge in real-time on Substack! 🦁

OK, so technically it’s August 9, but just for fun, take a deep breath, relax your jaw, and take a screen shot of the video below to receive a personal message. 📸

«View full screen with sound on for max wonder 👀»

What's your felt sense of what this art is mirroring back? 🪞

• Share in the comments if you're inspired, or if it's helpful in any way---

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(You have a 4% chance of drawing a lion, btw 🦁🦁🦁)

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Preface

The story unfolding below is the most honest articulation of what the EMERGENCE Deck, and the art within it, has represented on a personal level- yet even still, there is more to reveal.

What I find so interesting about this unfolding is, when I finally stopped “seeking” the story, and shifted my focus to asking what can I give in this moment? (which, at the time of this original publication, was the animated graphic listed above) -it was as though story I’d been looking for all along could finally begin to reveal.

I hope this article inspires new possibilities for creative emergence within you.

May it be of benefit!

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The Backstory

I’d been searching for years- traveling thousands of miles through mountains, deserts, and conference rooms, investing nearly all the savings I’d tucked away for a downpayment on a home, trying to “come up” with language that could describe the essence of the Emergence Oracle Deck.

What a comical display this must have been to Creative Intelligence!

On August 8, I thought I'd be publishing a timelapse art video that I had recently created about the Sumerian Goddess Inanna, and sharing how her archetypal energy has been supporting my healing and empowerment in profoundly impactful ways in recent years.

Yet, somewhere within the desire to share Inanna's story, along with sharing a digital copy of the Emergence deck that people could connect with over the Lion's Gate, the very story I'd been searching for began revealing.

As with the deck itself, that August 8 weekend, I simply desired to contribute something meaningful, and give it my whole-hearted best- Inspiration would guide the rest.

In essence, the very thing I’d been seeking arrived the moment I stopped looking for it, and started asking “what can I give?”

Somewhere along the way, I lost myself in the joy of the labor.

And the love of creation made all the difference.

It makes me think of a quote by artist Joseph Beuys, which I first heard referenced by a beloved professor Richard Yarde, whose watercolor paintings directly inspired my honeybee and ancestral healing mandalas:

“It’s not about knowing. It’s about giving.”

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The Emergence Deck’s connection with 8.8

Five years ago on 8.8, I was struck by a heartbreak that felt so powerful, it was as though my sense of “self” had been blasted into the farthest edges of the galaxy and shattered into billions of tiny particles.

(I like to think of it as Heartbreakthrough, a term I learned of years ago through Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch.)

Suddenly I found myself in a state the yogis call Samadhi. I had become one with everything- perfectly at peace, blissfully in union with what felt like the Source of all Creation. Or perhaps, I was simply disassociating in response to news that felt too unbearable to feel, and this happened to take me to an otherworldly experience of bliss and oneness.

Call it what you will, this experience fundamentally shook me to the core of my wiring - and when I came crashing back into the ordinary world, I was clear on my assignment: retrieve all the lost pieces. Paint yourself back into wholeness. Let love be the lighthouse that guides you.

As I made the commitment to embodying and becoming the love I had outsourced to the people around me, I realized I was also making the commitment to reclaim my relationship with creativity.

During my time in art school, artmaking seemed to instigate patterns of self-hatred and abuse. Yet it couldn’t have been more obvious how my relationship with creativity was asking to be reclaimed in its original essence: as a source of healing, and vehicle of uplifting and inspiring humanity.

As I made the commitment to loving myself back into wholeness, it soon became evident that for me, Art and Love were destined to become synonymous- and that the love I desperately sought in the external world was pointing me to the greater Love that longed to relate with me with the very depth and intimacy I craved in others.

On 8.8.2020 I walked through a threshold, and I never looked back.