I spent a while pondering whether my new red water-proof hiking poncho is a utensil or vessel? I decided that since I could get into it, it was a type of vessel, probably a Still. I suspect sweat is the condensate… it is so far the only red object I am taking with me.
“First there is the nigredo, the blackness, the ‘dark night of the soul’. Then the light enters the process bringing consciousness and enlightenment….this stage of the work is called the albedo. The redness follows; this redness is called the rubedo. In this redness there is a warmth and an emotional relationship to the contents of the unconscious (that) has entered the process. Redness is Eros, passion, and pneuma (spirit).”
Ann McCoy
“In the state of ‘whiteness’ one does not live in the true sense of the word. It is a sort of abstract, ideal state. In order to make it come alive it must have ‘blood’, it must have what the alchemists called the rubedo, the ‘redness’ of life. Only the experience of being can transform this ideal state into a fully human mode of existence. Blood alone can reanimate a glorious state of consciousness in which the last traces of blackness is dissolved, in which the devil no longer has an autonomous existence, but rejoins the profound unity of the psyche. Then the opus magnum is finished: the human soul is completely integrated.”
Carl Jung
The illustration on the stuff sack is rather disconcerting; a smiling hunch-back. More anon perhaps…