Recently I was given the assignment to create something that expresses my worldview. I made a collage. With a black marker, I drew a snake eating its own tail on poster board then proceeded to wallpaper the space within the circle and outside of it with images cut from magazines. I was fully aware that my “worldview” was being dictated by images already printed in media, but was surprised to find an interesting and valuable outcome none the less.
In the bottom right of the collage I pasted a photo taken from a W Magazine fashion spread of Bruce Willis and his new wife, Emma Hemming. This powerful image initially seemed to depict the kind of partnership relationship I seek in my life. It’s an easy first assumption.
But after setting the collage up at home for a few days, I began to look at it more closely, meditate on it, discovering newer and deeper contexts. The image of the couple so forcefully entwined, staring into each other’s eyes, holding closely together, both powerful and powerless in each other’s presence, began to inspire a question.
Could this image represent my relationship with the Divine?
The worldly issue of putting gender on God might present itself on the surface, but looking closer reveals the symbiotic creativity and love between the two beings. The passion and acceptance. The mutual respect and intertwining nature of the Creator and the Created.
If this image can represent my relationship with the Divine, and I think it does, it can also be a representation of the Divine: the feminine and masculine aspects of Unity. Similar to the concept of Yin and Yang: two elements that are necessary to each other, not in opposition to each other. The one can only exist in relation to the other.
(PHOTO: Steven Klein, W Magazine, July 2009)
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