Sublimatio

I built these stilts a few days ago using leftover pieces of wood from a "summertime fun time outdoor sun canopy" I intended to build in our front yard but never did. I built a privacy fence instead. And so. Stilts.

According to Stilts, by S. Carl Hirsch (with illustrations by Betty Fraser), "in the Mexican state of Yucatan, some temple decorations of the ancient Mayan Indians were discovered only a few years ago. Clearly depicted were men on stilts who took part in religious ceremonies and dances. These stilt-dancers were supposed to bring good luck."

It makes sense that stiltwalkers are meant to bring good luck. I mean, the act itself is an embodiment of trust in the phenomenal world, and therefore a gamble. Walking on high-ish stilts, even for a short jaunt down the sidewalk, always triggers something in my mind-body. Something that says, and this is what life is - a protracted stiltwalk that can't go on forever and never even promised to. And while you're up here what are you gonna do? Enjoy the ride? The scenery? Try and stand still to make it last? See how fast you can go? Or just maybe focus, focus, and stare at the ground? What are you gonna do, stiltwalker? Huh? What'cha gonna do?

The alchemical process reflected in stiltwalking is sublimatio, the separation of purity and impurity, and the "lifting up" of that which is of value from that which is base. (And for those of you who want to go a step deeper into this, it's worth noting that polarized, binaried dualities like this are, in themselves, base and useless at a certain level of psychic reality.) Ascension: We are lucky, I believe, to have this experience. And we're luckier still to be able to come back down to the soft earth, who's eager to hold us & sometimes knock us around for the short time we're here...

And maybe the Mayans were getting at this very fact. And maybe they're right to enact, physically, the sublimation they wanted to see happen in their own psyches and communities. Maybe that's a lesson we could all benefit from: There's value in enactment of myth. Joseph Campbell says that's all a ritual is - an enactment of a particular myth. Plain and simple.