Ritual of Abandonment

"Enormous suffering is an intrinsic possibility of every bond; we cannot refuse a relationship because it might bring pain. To reveal one's feeling is to say yes to oneself. Our ingenuousness deludes us into believing we have found a path that excludes this fracture, but in reality, when we have said yes to someone, we have said yes to both life and death." ---Aldo Carotenuto, Eros and Pathos "Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintigration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms we have loved." --- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces "When a myth is enacted in a ritual performance or, in more general, simpler and profaner fashion, when a fairytale is told, the healing factor within it acts on whoever has taken an interest in it and allowed himself to be moved by it in such a way that through this participation he will be brought into connection with an archetypal form of the situation and by this means enabled to put himself 'into order'." --- Emma Jung and M.L. Von Franz, The Grail Legend Two years ago, I fell in love. That's how this all began. I fell in love with someone I had never seen, never touched. Someone I only knew by communicating thru electronic mail and an occasional telephone call. And when I fell in love, I opened myself to a vast journey through an unchartered wilderness of emotions both light and dark. Ritual of Abandonment is my attempt to create signposts or roadmaps 
about my travels along the way. The images presented here are from a work that I view as a both a two-dimensional and virtual performance piece. Embedded within these images are present day fairytales of love and abandonment, written by a diverse group of people especially for this project. The text of each story is worked into each piece. All speak of the human situation of falling in love and thereby putting oneself at risk by allowing vulnerability to another person and address the emotions that can result from the loss of that person.