Jacob Morena, the inventor of Psychodrama, described a “surplus reality,” where much of the deep work takes place. By surplus, he meant that the enactments occur anywhere the imagination invents, in fantasy, on strange unearthly worlds, as symbolic representations, in the personal past, in a multi-generational past, often with archetypal echoes. Anywhere necessary. Anywhere the heart spirals. As in any creative and spontaneous art, we are drawn by a neuro-gravitational pull towards the place we need to go and to the action that needs to be taken.

On stage, Pain and Self-Deception and Abnormal Personas can be encountered even in the darkest of landscapes without retraumatizing the protagonist only if there is a loving group of participants; they must be prepared to enter without judgment, remaining compassionate, open and curious. They must hold the worst experiences in a light and benevolent embrace.

I think of this when I listen to some on social media discussing politics and religion. It is as if we have been transported to the fairy-time of Hansen and Gretel. But the audiences are strange witnesses. For a bit of addictive candied adrenalin, they seem to become like vulnerable children in the Black Forest who are inexplicably cheering on the murderous impulses of child-devouring witches. This is the antithesis of the community we need if we are to confront what is True and to recognize what is Beautiful.

In this painting I imagine our Inspired Self as a creature of the forest watching over the child in all of us. What is this Inspired wolfish presence? It can only be described indirectly perhaps, so I will give you a metaphor that has come to me while sitting on my porch observing the seasons. For a time, a very long exhausting time, I was lost in all the thick trees filled with tiny bird desires and squirrel energies, aromas and sensations, colorful preoccupations of my inner world, layers of growth blocking out layers, all my fears and sadness, lusts and angry impulses. All beautiful, spiritual in their way, I guess, but limited.

But Winter revealed another perception. The distant mountains have always been there, but largely unseen, revealed only in glimpses, until the leaves dropped, and a quieter stillness arrived. I suspect this change of season happens to many of us in older years, as we discern this mountain that has always been there but has been often lost in the background, Or it can happen another way. This knowledge of our True Self occurs  through hard emotional work, a spiritual journey that we take up because it is the only way to survive our traumas and addictions.

Knowing that the mountain spaciousness is a constant…,this is really an entrance into another world, where I can watch over my own child, however lost or bewildered, and more readily “be” in any season more fully.