Last spring I wrote a grant entitled “Realizing Sophia.”  I didn’t get the grant but I did win the attention of some Lehigh campus organizations and they encouraged me to organize a series of visual art events while coordinating with the Women’s Studies department and Women’s Center programming.  Needless to say, it’s exciting and daunting all at the same time.  I was explaining this to one of my private students last week and I had no idea she had been a Women Studies concentration during her undergraduate career.  We got to talking a lot about what I have been working on and how I got there.  My work has been so much about conscious deconstruction and re-construction and she made the wonderful summation that Women Studies is virtually the same thing.  What a wonderful and natural fit it is to work with them!

So recently I met with Silagh of Arts Lehigh and we started to talk about what contemporary archetypes have been forming and how timeless ones evolve.  In the past few weeks while I think about what I’m doing with the campus and WHY, I had only then come up with the title of the campus events.  All summer I had called it the “archetypal image” but in really thinking about why archetypes are universal and timeless, I really had to acknowledge that they are timeless because they evolve but the core of them remains constant.  I love this dissection of relevance but not until today did it become apparent why doing this, all of this planning and coordinating, was important to campus.

I prefer to keep what happened confidential but it was a reminder of a place I was years ago and how terribly hopeless I felt as a human being.  I think it’s horrible what people can do to one another- without consequences.  And I think it’s even more horrible how it rips us to shreds and how that instills a momentum that allows one to doubt themselves.  It’s gross and disgusting but unfortunately it seems to be a reality.  Working with this person today reminded me what it is to blame yourself, hate yourself, neglect yourself, not recognize yourself.  Quite frankly, it has knocked me for a loop because it dredges all of that back up… a bit too close but an incredible thing is that, this conversation is evidence of that evolving archetype.  She and I had similar stories about whom we thought we were; how we never thought we would be in a situation like that; and how something like that happening to us, indicates how flawed we are.  I swear it was like looking at myself those years ago and quite frankly, is frighteningly haunting.  We are in two places of that archetype however… she in the beginning of finding her strength and me realizing its potential.

So what archetype am I talking about… I mentioned “Realizing Sophia” in the beginning of all of this.  Based on Gnostic theology, Sophia is mother to the “godhead.”  She falls to earth in search of her son.  As she travels through earth, she sees all the beauty but also harshness and despair.  In trying to find her son, she realizes that she in fact created him and if he created this, it only is an extension of her.  Sophia then realizes that if she were to change the flaws of earth, she would have to look within herself.  It is here and only here, change can happen and divinity created.

And WHY is this important… well, sometimes life is a classroom.  It’s great to pontificate our greatness through books, papers, lectures, and articles but it’s also important to develop and understand our humanity.  It’s relevance probably richer than an economics class.