In a dark time the eye begins to see...

Theodore Roethke, North American Sequence, 1964 

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(28) The Eye of Ra   It was hard to look past the problems with my heart. My initial "eye-dea" when I started this drawing was to feature a heart in the pupil of an eye. As has happened with all of these images, though, the drawing took on a life of its own. My wife tells me that it looks like the Eye of Ra, and that we should carefully avoid having the Eye of God look directly at us. In ancient Egypt, the Eye of Ra was depicted as the eye of a peregrine falcon -- a symbol both of safety and of protection, and an image of a powerful destructive force linked with the fierce heat of the sun. Humanity was born of the tears of Ra:                                               Some kind of bird's eye had clearly been drawn. It evoked in me an intense feeling that I was being scrutinized by some Being from another world. Is my Unconscious serving up a pun here – alluding, perhaps, to a "Close Encounter of the Bird Kind?" Or is this drawing about consciousness, about opening one's Eye to the World?   March 13, 2007   .