altering images of self

Eye of Flower:  Day 10

I take a lot of self-portraits. Over and over I point the lens of my camera in my direction.  I let the camera inform me of what's unfolding in my life.  Rarely do I take those images and alter them in any way.  I prefer to let them be what they were in the moment they happened. 

But in this mandala making process I'm reassembling reality.. looking through a lens of collage.  I love to collage.  Usually I collage with physical objects... pictures and words borrowed from magazines or printed out from online sources or generated from my own work - writing and photography that I blend with other pieces of creation to build a vision container.

This mandala building project is taking on a more surreal quality in some ways.  I'm moving in the dreaming allowing images to call out to be together.  This mandala gathers from 4 different images I took while in Phoenix in October.  I was teaching on the staff of Donna Eden's Energy Medicine Program.  Having taught in the Inaugural Year of the program and then moved on, it was interesting to return to explore my relationship with the Eden Energy Community and with myself as a teacher, mentor, ally, etc.

This image shows me the potency of dreaming a new world into being... the power of looking with a new sight... blossoming a new dream out of the cold stones.

That's what I see when I look at this image today... this image that grew itself. 

I'm grateful for the opportunity this trip back into the Eden Energy Program gave me to see where I am in relationship to energy and healing... and where I am being called in the future.