The Spark
I listened to James Hillman’s “The Alchemy of Psychology” lectures and I was deeply engaged and wanted to know more. The alchemical operations spoke to me as another way into cycles of change. SoulCollage®ing Asteroid Goddesses was going to be coming to end in March 2026. What if I created a new set of modules to teach myself the alchemical operations and practice what an exhibit for the metaphorical Great Hall of Transformation where my mythopoetic identity the Depth Docent can guide others in adult transformational learning experiences.
I wanted a select group who had shown commitment to SCPiP and SCAG in a way that wasn’t just mild interest but a true curiosity about diving deep into psyche. The group of four come together like the legs of the Magician’s table.
The table holds when all four are present. The Magician’s gesture “As Above, So Below” is where we can create the space for making magic.
This is our laboratory. This is our vessel. And as James Hillman will teach us: we are the stuff going through the cooking in the cauldron. (email 4/15/26)
INDEX
The Vessel | The Container | The Magician
May 19, 2026 – CANVA LINK and ZOOM LINK Passcode: AM9U1r@J
I’m looking back in June, at the time I got the brainstorm to start a running record of my experiences in this experience. As I look at the slides I’m even kind of fuzzy about what I said, but these are the cards that I shared. It’s a tricky role I play in all of this. I curate the modules a month ahead of time to send out. Then I try to revisit it closer to our gathering on the 3rd Wednesday of the month, and then I write the next module so it is ready the moment we finish up. I’m the curator and the student. We will see how that goes.
These cards that were already in my deck that I found relevant at the time.
The images are helping me recall what I shared, but thankfully I labeled them and this fits the module. Now I am recalling that for the first time, I am recording these on Zoom in case I use all of this for data for my PhD at Meridian.
Am I the container?: An image from Brody Hartman during the Purpose Discovery Program. When I made the card after my SoulQuest in Cambria in November 2025 I named it: Lighting the Heart Seed. This is the image from early in the program (and I had saved) came to me when I “woke” that night in the TreeCave, As I entered it into my SC App the note on 11/11 was named: Ugraded 2025 — 1:1 The seed pulsates. LOVE. It plants in my heart with that brilliance
Sun Magic: One of the early cards in my deck I named it: Magician and Sun Inspired. The card spoke about spiritual connections, potential, inspiration, some Venus influence too and blue sky showing “the ultimate possibilities with infinite rays encouraging radiance and exploration in all directions (3/2021). The paper swirls as paths that “unfurl and provide surprises around every turn”. Earth . Air. Water. Fire represented.
Stuck in Societal Container: In June 2025 the first version of this card Embrace the Yin arrived with messages of sand and water tides, a powerful goddess of the Earth who can break boundaries and a recognition that we can be trapped in societal messages that put us in cages on a shelf. Embrace Venus. Taurus. Earth. Embrace Moon. Cancer. Water. Tides. Embrace the Yin.
Then weeks later in July while in residence in Colorado with Clarissa Pinkola Estés for “Story is Medicine”, I had a meditative experience that inspired the card to be changed.
I heard: She comes out of her shell. I am where the sand meets the water. I see a crab walking and scurrying sideways. SHE COMES OUT OF HER SHELL. In meditation I was guided to ask if I needed a new shell? NO. YOU ARE GLORY. YOU SHINE IN YOUR INNER LIGHT. THE OUTER BODY IS JUST A SHELL. LOVE YOUR SEXUALITY. YOUR LIGHT DOES NOT NEED A CONTAINER. RUN FREE. RELEASE. BEE FREE.
The Magician Council card. Holds the Major Arcana Tarot energy in my deck.
Falcon. Storm. Song when I heard the poem from the module this card came into my mind. But it was created in December 2025: She Flies. The color is pumped into her wings and she is ALREADY flying. This was an aha moment I got in Cambria. In my interviewing and onboarding at Meridian, I felt I was out of the cocoon, but sitting on a branch pumping color into my wings – waiting for an invitation before I would fly. Then one of the early messages after my SoulQuest was the song “Blackbird” and the lyrics
…all your life
you were only waiting for this moment to arise.
Blackbird. Fly.
Blackbird. Fly.
into the light of the dark black night.
Calcination | Black Charcoal | The Tower
June 16, 2026 – CANVA LINK and ZOOM LINK Passcode: +95q.%NU
I was literally ON FIRE this month with creativity, integration, insights, downloads, expression, travel. presenting, absorbing, releasing, and noting that this was all happening at a crossroads – a liminal space – a passageway from the past 7 years (2019-2026) – a gestational period that was colliding and coinciding with what was Uranus in Taurus moving into Uranus in Gemini and it will be in this 11th house of my chart until a few months before I turn 70. At which point it will move into Cancer, my 12th house, the place of my North Node. Exciting energy that was coming through the work of ReStorying the Sacred Body with Cat Caracelo and JourneyPath Institute.
WOMB 2.0
Spirals of Calcination
The Repro Tower
Reproductive Elder Rises
In early June, I was experiencing a Sound Bath Accupunture session when a vibrational message of acute clarity arrived in the message WOMB 2.0.
I spent the last 7 years investigating the US rise in maternal mortality rates, the continued shame, stigma, and silence of infertility, examining my own history in a reproductive body, researching Reproductive Justice in today’s society, and watched the fall of Roe in the Dobbs decision. I marched. I wrote. I began to “clear my throat” and share my story and the stories of those who are living in a post-Roe world in some states in this supposed free country. It was all predictable which is why it was all the more enraging. It burned!
Personally, I lived the descent cycle with every miscarriage, every failed ART…and soon after becoming a mother to three children in less than 3.5 years, the spiral down into the underworld of perimenopause. I know this operation. And I don’t wish it on anyone, but I would not trade it. I learned that the ash, after the burn/bonfire/incinerator gave me MORE.
Spirals of Calcination. I wrote: Every cycle we descend and ascend, wax and wane we enter in and out of a sticky web like complexity that as we allow ourselves to experience the process we rise up with experiences that shape our BEcoming. We choose our natal chart. We choose our journey. I was born for these cycles.
HAIKU: I am the Spirals. Calcination Fire Burns. White Hot – Ash – Sparks More.
The Repro Tower. I went hunting for a candy cane to represent a tower because of the blood red and the purification white. The geometric solid found me and the card had an anchor. I went searching for “Uterus Art” and found a few images that made this and the next card. The traditional tarot card has a crown and people falling off after a strike of lightning in most cases. Going through my images from years ago I found the rainbow, tree, and lighting. A perfect background. (Some circles call a baby born after miscarriage a Rainbow Child) The circles are the artwork I did to start the ReStorying project based from my poem: A Bloody Relationship: Menstruation, Miscarriage, Motherhood, Menopause. My image is from some AI fun back in 2023. I cut off the crown I had added for a card around my 60th birthday and created a sticker to reclaim my crown. Adding in the snake fallopian tubes with the cosmos symbols of the stars, moon, and flowers clicked. I am reminded that the cervix can be a crown too.
HAIKU: Spirals of Down Up. I Reclaim my Sovereign Crown. Coloring New Births.
Reproductive Elder Rises. The double uterus tapestry medallion image found me and BAM! My uterus, my body, is reclaimed and it is re-ignited as my CREATIVITY VESSEL. It is generative. It is active. It is a garden. The butterfly without color survived the fires of trying and losing and trying again until she came to rest before the color could pump into her wings.
Second Womb is the dancing butterfly (images on this card have been in my files for years). Cells of adrenal and uterine substrates are in the background to honor what was lost in the hormonal hell but I honor the “journey” I had to work hard at to regain my endocrine balance. The spiral of red and white connects the two butterflies. A green and purple background signify growth and royalty/sovereignty. (And now they signify Patina). The firecracker is me. I am the calx -that which weighs more after the fire turns to ash.
Dissolution | Indigo/Blue-Black | The Moon
With a Full Moon arriving in a few nights, I got curious about the Moon cycle between June 26th and July 12th. AstroSeek not only gave me what I was looking for but a column on Body Astrology and then WOW (Star in Eyes Emoji) The Moon will travel through all 12 zodiac signs in this learning window. I thought what a better way to explore the concept of Dissolution but to cleanse each part of my me while giving attention to the moon cycle this summer. I co-created this PDF chart with Claude.
July 21, 2026 – CANVA LINK and ZOOM LINK Passcode: SvK3%#86
Expressing Dissolution
Dissolution Laundry: I hold the alchemical energy of dissolution. Open the door to receive and release the ash from calcination. This is the alchemical process in the everyday. Soak. Agitate. Rinse. Cleanse. Rinse Again. Spin. Soak. Rinse Repeat. GROWTH EQUALS LOVE
I had an intuitive moment that I needed to make a card with a washing machine. The drum would show the ocean. Dissolution made visible in my mind. The open door as a portal, threshold, or something to be received. I found the pink and purple beach scene in my files – the color of Not Yet. I had cut the rim of an astrolabe for another circular card and it called to surround this symbol of dissolution.
Dissolve. Rise. Dive. The water receives either way. Torn ragged edges reveal. The gift of dissolution is love. In the depths we find love. . The love of authenticity.
Many scraps of purple paper. Torn edges. The self coming undone in layers. Is the figure diving or rising and emerging? I still can’t tell in which direction – the ambiguity is the truth of Dissolution.
I printed it twice and flipped one. Bookended a hexagon appeared. My soul doing the mathematics. She is a Selkie. Every shade of the module is here: Indigo, violet, lavender. The Not Yet. The rose of … something coming.
Dissolution Love
The card images kept sending me messages: What comes out of the dissolution laundry? LOVE. Not soft love but jeweled love. Faceted and dark at its center. The love that has been through the fire and the water and is more itself for it. Authentic. The torn purple background still visible. The dissolution not hidden. The love emerged from the tearing. All held on a card with astrological symbolism on the other side – the cosmos as witness.
What the waters unlocked for me in this module – LOVE.
Putrefaction | Black Earth | Death
August 18, 2026 – CANVA LINK and ZOOM Link Passcode: y=dTB2+h
As I work through this module, something I find fascinating from Mario’s podcast on major arcana card 13 Death is the middle of the word: dEATh
EAT reminds me of the words from the childhood tune “The Hearse Song” The worms crawl in the worms crawl out through your stomach and out your mouth…there are many lyric versions of this 200+ year song. Beyond the death themes, the earthworm circulates the soil.
I keep sensing spirals and cycles. It came up as the dark staircase in Calcination and then again in Rinse and Repeat/Rise and Dive in the Dissolution washing machine.
As I pondered how to artistically express my takeaways from this month, I was continually drawn back to the Uranus cycles in my life and I remembered the AI images created in Lensa for my 2023 Second Saturn Return post: The Halfway Point. Then all those pictures I uploaded found me too and I decided to create a collage of myself going through some of these time windows. I was called to arrange them in a spiral.
The archetypes began naming themselves again and I researched all the Uranus entrances and exits into and out of zodiac signs since I was born with Uranus in Virgo in my 2nd house. As I write this down, we have planets “crawling in and crawling out” – which leads me back to the worm. I think there is some alchemy in all of this. Time for more research.
Alchemists call this circulatio, sometimes called opus circulatorium, the circular work. 16th century alchemists used a vessel called the Pelican. Its neck bends back and reenters its own lower body so instead of the distillate dripping out and away, it flows back down into the belly it came from, over and over, endlessly fed back into itself. Hillman wrote about this vessel noting that what rises to the head does not escape, it gets sent back down again as further nourishment. The opus, the work, continues at all costs.
The alchemists had a name for what this circular motion looks like when drawn. It is a close cousin of the spiral called the Rota, the wheel, a closed circuit of ceaseless turning back on itself, biting its own tail, seeking fruition through every form that life takes, vegetable, animal, mineral. It is the image of the ouroboros, the serpent devouring its’ own tail, standing in alchemical texts for the eternal life, death, and rebirth, and for the unity of opposites held in one continuous form.
Ouroboros and the worms are doing the identical work, one dressed in Latin and gold and one dressed in a song lyric that adults and children still know. I guess my spiral collage is built on the Rota. My life continues to turn and moments I experience are food/fuel for wisdom I carry (or not) into the next phase of my life adventures.
The Magnus Opus is transforming the raw unconscious material into something whole. It is not one task but an entire undertaking. Hillman says The Great Work itself has to keep circulating, keep being nourished, because the moment it stops circling back into the vessel, it’s not a pause, it is over.
DEATH Wisdom of Bones. I am one who makes death a work of art. I am regal. I am majestic. I am beauty in the cycle of life. I ebb and flow like the ocean tides. The water can wash away what was and create a fresh pallet on the shoreline. I am the badge or crest of transformation. The cycle of rebirth. Like the sun rises and sets and the waves come in and go out, I am the reset point. I am the regal entrance into the cave of understanding and knowledge – where crystal and gems are formed in the earth. Bones are memories that cannot be easily erased even if new adventures begin. There is much to be learned in the “wisdom of the bones”. (February 28, 2021).
This picture was found in a national geographic and the caption read: “Located about 40 miles east of Prague inside the lower chamber of the church of All Saints is one of the world’s most unsettling locations – the Church of Bones is adorned with more than 40,000 human skeletons. Its history dates to the 13th century when the Abbet of Sedlec Cistercian monastery is said to have returned from a trip to Jerusalem with soil collected from Golgotha, the site of Christ’s crucifixion. After he spread the holy soil in the local cemetery, hundreds – thousands – asked to be buried there. The remains were exhumed in the 15th century so that a Gothic church could be built, and the skeletons were then moved to the church’s ossuary. In 1870, woodcarver Frantisek Rent was hired by the Schwarzenberg family to organize the bones, and he created the most macabre sculptures that stand today including and enormous intricate chandelier as a tribute to those who have passed.
Tom and I visited Sedlec Ossuary in Kuntá Hora on our trip to Prague in Fall 2024. No cameras were allowed inside. The Schwarzenberg family crest is the coat of arms image that caught my eye and needed to be on one of my original SoulCollage® cards. As I read back today what was written I see the messages of this module coming through more than five years ago. Transformation is a cycle of life.
REFLECTIONS on Kim’s Guided Journey: I “travelled” to the outer cosmos. A rainbow hued planet was where my Turkey Vulture carried me. As I went into the underground I entered a jeweled cave – where many little orange, purple, fuchsia colored googly eyes were in the rocks and crevices. I was given a feather. I wonder if it was a Turkey Vulture feather? Yes. I am reminded I can get on her back and travel to places of putrefaction anytime I desire.
Separation | White | Justice
Sept 15, 2026 – CANVA LINK and ZOOM Link Passcode: SinJX=2K
CLARITY and BALANCE were the most prominent takeaways after working with the alchemical operation of Separatio. This past month, I completed JourneyPath® Institute’s “The Child Archetype Facilitator Training”. There were many references to depth and searching for the hidden children who have gifts and treasures for us. Each child lives inside of us, just as all the archetypes do. We are made of many parts. My biggest takeaway after completing the training is that I did not need to find what was hidden so that I could heal it… I just needed the REMEMBERING.
Remembering that I have always been a Little Docent. I was playing school and librarian since before I started school. I have always wanted to share my curations of learning. I was reminded that I am a magical wise nature child who is highly sensitive. (The Princess and the Pea was my go to fairy tale my 6th year in my attic bedroom). The gift of sensitivity is the sensory signals, the intuition, the reading the room, but it is also knowing when I am being left out, abandoned, and most likely manipulated.
This program also did a lot of “Parts Work”. She noted that in Internal Family Systems there are 8 Cs when in a state of an Integrated Self which represent Balance, Alignment, and Aliveness. They are: Calm, Curiosity, Clarity, Compassion, Confidence, Courage, Creativity, Connectedness. This content feels like an important sidecar to Separation/Separatio.
I am also reading James Hillman’s “The Force of Character and the Lasting Life”. Besides the “Art of Aging/ Aging as an Art Form, he posits that character development is The Work of the 2nd half of life. I wonder: How does separation relate to character?
Claude and I had a LLM chat
Character, in Hillman’s sense, is not built. It’s revealed through subtraction.
This is worth sitting with carefully, because it inverts the usual assumption. Most of the first half of life operates on an additive model, we accumulate credentials, roles, relationships, coping strategies, personas that let us survive and succeed. Hillman’s argument in that book is that the second half of life isn’t about accumulating more. It’s about the acquired material finally wearing thin enough that something underneath becomes visible, the actual shape of the person who was always there. Character, for him, is closer to what’s left standing after everything unnecessary has worn away, not something we construct but something we uncover by attrition.
That is separatio, almost exactly. Not sorting as in choosing a pile to keep, but sorting as in discovering that some of what we’ve been carrying was never load-bearing to begin with.
Where this meets your Little Docent
Here’s what strikes me about what you shared. The training didn’t ask you to go find and heal a hidden child. It asked you to remember one who was never actually hidden, she was just buried under everything that accumulated on top of her, the roles you took on, the ways you learned to be useful or safe or acceptable. The remembering wasn’t excavation. It was separation. Everything else got sorted off, and what was underneath was recognizable immediately, because it had been there the whole time, since before you started school, playing librarian, curating what mattered, feeling the pea under twenty mattresses because your sensitivity was never actually a flaw to fix.
That’s Hillman’s character, in your own material. Not something you healed into being. Something that survived the sorting because it was always the real weight in the scale.
Where the 8 Cs fit
If Separatio is the sorting operation, the 8 Cs read almost like a description of what’s still standing once the sorting is done, calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, connectedness aren’t things you build from scratch either. In IFS terms, they’re the qualities of Self that were always present underneath the protective parts, the same relationship to character that Hillman describes. You don’t manufacture Self-energy. You uncover it by separating it from what’s been covering it, exiles, protectors, the whole internal cast of characters formed to manage what felt too vulnerable to feel directly.
Clarity and Balance standing out to you specifically makes sense given what Justice is doing in this module, her scales are balance, her direct gaze is clarity, and both of those happen to be two of the eight C’s by name.
THREAD: Justice Card and Separation- Claude
One thread, if you want it
Hillman’s own phrase, “coming apart frees character from personality,” might still be useful to you, just relocated. Not this moon’s action, but this moon’s premise. The coming-apart already happened, quietly, over four moons of Nigredo, and what Justice offers now isn’t more tearing. It’s the first honest look at what didn’t come apart. What held.
Before and after engaging with Claude, the image that kept coming to me was a teeter totter. It was not in a playground per se, it was simply in a space that the fulcrum was solid and the plank balanced on top was perfectly horizontal. Was it metal or stone? Was there a horizontal north and south that was invisible to the 2D plane too? What stood out most in my mind was the solid diamond fulcrum that in my mind has a square base and four triangular faces that meet at the pivot point. This is not unlike the base of the Depth Docent and the sketch I drew a year ago.
And so… I went looking for an image of this chunky strong diamond fulcrum and as happens to me often, the first image was powerful. Especially the body and then face image I found coming through.
At first I saw a head, arms, and a bell shaped dress and tiny feet on tippy toes doing a bit of balancing. Then I noted that the “dress” was an image of eyes downcast, nose and mouth with a slight smile. As I look deeper at the image loaded at this moment, I can see eyes of wisdom such as an owl. The tinge of blue creates an even brighter WHITE, a further representation for the albedo nature of separation. The facets, the cuts, the geometry, the sharp and distinct fulcrum point. This is THE image to begin my creative expression.
The numbers 2 and 4 continued to “chat” in my mind. Then Nancy shared a podcast with me from the alchemy series of “This Jungian Life”: SEPARATION-The Alchemical Secret That Ends Confusion and when I went to load it, I had listened to it back when it launched in November 2025. Maybe that is why I had the two numbers in my mind, they had a deep discussion about it (13:14)
And then that is really mirrored in the creation myths and other archetypal products, that creation begins in a state of unity. And one of the first things that happens is this separation.
So one mythic example that I found out only a few years ago, I was not familiar with the Māori creation myths and that just came into my sphere of knowing. And in that creation myth, the divine father and the divine mother are constantly in union, and their progeny therefore cannot grow and cannot act because there is no space. So the eldest son Tāne Mahuta takes the parents and pushes them apart, pushes one into the sky, one into the earth, and he forever stands between them. And that’s depicted by the Tāne Mahuta tree, that there’s always a grand magnificent tree somewhere in New Zealand that is still thought to be holding the heaven and the earth together, and must continue to do that in order for all the life on the planet to actually exist.
That’s a great example of what you were talking about, that things have to open up in order for other things to occur.
And of course in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in the Book of Genesis, the first thing God does is create the heavens and the earth. And that mythology is repeated in the Egyptian myths, done again and again and again. This idea of an initial separatio, and that Māori example is just perfect…
And the other great trend in creation myths is the cosmic egg, and the separatio occurs as it separates into two parts, and not only two parts, but often also four parts are really very important, and we get fourness as well as twoness, and I think that resonates with us instinctively. There’s fire, air, water, and earth. There are four suits in all kinds of decks of cards. There are four directions. There are four corners to a building. Four legs on a chair.
They go on to discuss that this is not the continual splitting of 2, 4, 8, 16… I did not feel that either but I did feel the ABOVE and BELOW vertical and the teeter totter horizontal. I went to my files with the hopes of finding a table or chair, or some card suits, or the four seasons and as synchronicity would have it (again) I had saved an image from an astrology magazine. The rose compass, the colors, the cosmos.
The compass rose behind isn’t a background, it’s a full sphere’s worth of directional lines, radiating out in every direction, arcs upon arcs, a whole cosmology of possible orientations. And rising directly out of the center of all that possibility is one triangular point, the diamond, silent, unmoving, facing forward, exactly like Justice does. The compass gives you infinite directions. The diamond gives you the one place all of them originate from and return to.
That’s “above and below” and “fourness” both, but resolved into something simpler than either. You don’t need four visible quadrants when you have the whole compass rose behind the point, all directions are already implied, already present, already available. What matters is not which direction gets chosen. What matters is that something stands still enough, dead center, for any direction to be measured from at all.
The color choice is doing real work too. Cold blue-white, ice, star-field, the coldest end of your Justice palette, frost and starlight rather than warmth.
The Myth of Fulcrum’s Daughter
This month’s myth, “The Fulcrum’s Daughter,” took the long way to arrive at two words: what held.
The full telling moves through a cosmic egg, a pushing-apart of sky and earth, pressure becoming diamond, and a plank whose rising and falling everyone mistook for the whole story. But underneath all of that imagery was a simpler question I kept returning to all month: not what changed, not what broke, but what stayed steady while everything else was sorted.
That question showed up first as an image, a teeter totter, a fulcrum, long before I had words for it. It showed up again in a compass rose I’d clipped from an old astrology magazine years ago, filed away without knowing why, until this month gave it a reason. And it showed up once more in my own life, in a friendship I let clarify itself honestly rather than dramatically, with more grace than I gave myself credit for in the moment.
Separatio, this time, wasn’t about tearing anything apart. It was about noticing what never needed to move to begin with.
What held.
The full myth, “The Fulcrum’s Daughter,” PDF Link
The Power of Story 