This is one of 12 artifacts from season 3 of Labyrinth Library. This is an excerpted sample of the full artifact.
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Purpose:
to see your creative practice, your perspective, and your existence itself as a mirror for channeling and multiplying light, heat, radiance, energy in the world.
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Guiding Question:
if you allowed yourself and your work to become the mirror, how would it shift your process?
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Excerpt of Artifact (3 min)
Practice Guidelines
included in the full artifact
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hi friends, welcome to the second artifact of leo season, mirror.
as I was thinking about artifacts for leo, at first mirror felt a little too obvious, but then I heard this sentence in my head — that… the most boring thing you can do with a mirror is to judge yourself in it.
and so in this artifact, I like to take us from the surface layer of the mirror into deeper portals, possibilities, and prisms.
the way I think about mirror is that it is a way of being in relationship to light — to expanding visibility, to multiplying light, to seeing and being seen, to project the infinite power of the sun, and therefore, of creative energy.
shortly after deciding on this artifact, I came upon a quote by Edith Wharton, from her 1902 poem "Vesalius in Zante," about an anatomist (Andreas Vesalius) in his final days who is shipwrecked and dies on a Greek island, reflecting on his life.
"there are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
in a previous class I taught, Creative Systems, I talked about thinking of attention in terms of light. and so we can think of some digital spaces that harvest our attention with the algorithm, kind of like… human light farms. to be distracted is to chase flickers of light across the room.
when you spread light, it's less about seeking attention (therefore needing other people's light to shine on you) but instead to be the light, to reflect the light, to practice effortless radiance that we talked about in Throne Room. and to allow light to bounce off of you and cast shards of kaleidoscopic brilliance across the room.
where you put your attention is where and how you direct your light. how we work with the mirror is about how we focus and channel our light. leo energy is not about sucking the light from a room but about sharing the light, being in the abundance of light, because the sun itself is enormously powerful. there is more than enough light to go around.
what would it be like to operate, to exist as a mirror — in the practice of illumination?
PURPOSE
the purpose of this artifact is to see your creative practice, your perspective, and your existence itself as a mirror for channeling and multiplying light, heat, radiance, energy in the world.
GUIDING QUESTION
if you allowed yourself and your work to become the mirror, how would it shift your process?
as we explore what a mirror represents, I want to move us in this core pendulum swing — this journey from a mirror as a source of agony, self-fixation, judgment and scrutiny, into the mirror as expansive generosity, multiplication of light and possibility. let's explore each of these different relationships.
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This is an excerpt of this artifact.