Life is Brutiful, or Why I Write
Christy Higgins Photography: Georgia, 2017. Available as a print.
When I started writing my next blog series, “Good Girl, Bad Boy”, I wanted to take a closer look at how my inner Bad Boy (aka the animus) shows up in my relationships with men, but I couldn’t get there without turning it into a long read.
Since the material I am attempting to write about can be dense with symbolism, depth psychology concepts, and mythological interpretations that often require some defining and tying-in with my personal story and process, my essays tend to run long. I try to keep my posts to around 1200 words or less (6 minute read). This feels to me like the optimal amount of time to invest in a deep topic without risking giving online readers brain fade, causing them to give up before the end. To keep my essays in more digestible nibbles rather than long treatises, I think series are a good way to go, as I did with the topic of The Stone Witch.
THE STONE WITCH, 2021, by Christy Higgins, 12 1/4” x 21” x 1 1/2”, Mixed-media collage on wood box panel. Original art for sale and available as a print.
Writing about deep topics seems incompatible with today’s online audience; however, I’ve come around to thinking that’s a lazy conclusion. There are many fine examples of luxurious, deep reads online, but it’s also a question of keeping things accessible to the busy people of the Information Age. (I usually have many tabs with long articles open that I intend to read, but rarely can find the time.)
Like all things, my writing needs to find its balance between these two tensions. My posts will find their true audience, I tell myself, as my writing finds its gestalt. It may take me the rest of my life to happen upon that balance, but I don’t mind. These are among the things that I am here to work on.
And why do I write at all?
My writing isn’t an attempt to attract a large following, as valuable and validating as that may be in the social stratosphere and marketplace. Though material gain through my art and writing is an important component, I try to keep it a secondary concern.
I like and need money like everyone else, but it doesn’t motivate me when I’m existentially agitated (which I think maybe I have always been). I don’t know why I am wired this way, but I need to self-reflect and think about life’s big questions. I’m motivated by something from within that tells me I need to use my time here to experience, learn, heal, express, grow, integrate, become, and transcend. (I have a story to tell down the road about how I gave up my lucrative job in television in search of something more meaningful to me, which illustrates this perfectly.)
I’ve been journaling for decades, but I’ve only recently connected my natural propensity to ask probing questions about life, reality, and being human with the idea that my self-reflection and writing might be of some benefit to others. Especially to fellow journeymen seeking to heal souls—their own and others—and to learn about love.
Christy Higgins Photography: Attraction, 2021. Available as a print.
I’m not a trained Jungian analyst, nor do I have a degree in depth psychology, but that doesn’t stop me from engaging deeply in my own self-study, and feeling compelled to share what I’m learning, and also what I’m struggling to integrate.
It’s my longing for connection and relationship with others that motivates me to take risks as a person and as an artist, to reveal something from the interior, unseen spaces of mind and being that inform who I have been, who I am now, and who I am becoming.
Christy Higgins Photography: Archetype #3 - CACTUS (or Cactus at the Crossroads), Central Mexico, 2019. Available as a print.
I’ve got my road to travel in life, and you’ve got yours. Knowing that it’s not easy navigating what Lewis Hyde calls the “wayless way” or what Scott Peck M.D. called, “the road less traveled,” I decided that I would take my process of self-study and self-reflection to an online audience.
Through my artwork and writing (which are intricately related), I aim to see myself more clearly, so that I may present myself to you more clearly. And it is in that self-clarity that others may shine (or not) before us, at least unfettered by the projection of our fears and misperceptions.
The mystery of not knowing who we are becoming, yet somehow being guided by unknown possible futures, is the great unfolding that each of us gets to embody in our unique way, until our time is up and our story ends (that is, until another story begins.)
Life is, as this portmanteau sums up very nicely, brutiful; it’s fitting because life is both beautiful and brutal, exhilarating and terrifying, mundane and miraculous. Ultimately, life is a paradoxical mystery that I can’t help but feel fiercely drawn to trying to unpack. I know I never will, but I’m enjoying the process of healing my soul.
On any given day I may hate the process of healing—particularly when I’m living my shadow expression, in pain or confusion, or any of the other myriad negative experiences of life— but, on the whole, when I step back and look at my life through the lens of gratitude for the life I’ve been given, I’m often moved to tears by how beautiful it’s all been (even the hard parts; maybe, especially the hard parts).
My essays are field notes from the trenches and mountaintops of one human life. Writing is a part of my “process”, so to speak; it is the way that I recover myself. What you’re reading is a living, breathing report of where I am at the edge of my learning, growth, and healing as though this were an extension of my personal journal and inner work, but hopefully from an elevated level that allows self-love to replace self-pity (there’s a big difference). I’m using my life experience and self-study as a sounding board that may help you to see something relevant to your life if you choose to see it that way.
NIGHT VISION, 2024, by Christy Higgins. Available as a print.
As it turns out, revealing is an act of recovery. Through self-love we grow stronger and wiser, which first helps us to have the courage to reveal ourselves to ourselves, then, eventually, to others. When we own up to our humanity and claim our dark side alongside our light, the game changes. In that kind of self-love, the ego (which is the part of us that judges good from bad, right from wrong, and polarizes the human condition into categories) dissolves and you begin to perceive the world through the eyes of love, or non-dual perception, which does not put things in categories the way our logical minds like to do. I have an example to share with you from my own life about believing myself to be only good, and how that false belief shaped my relationships with boys and men.
I’ll get to that in my next posts, the “Good Girl, Bad Boy” series, which endeavors to explain non-dual perception through my life-long attraction to Bad Boys.