Image of the Week: It Did Not Fall
© D. Yael Bernhard
"It did not fall, because it was founded in rock . . . " Thus read the words that were printed on this Biblical illustration that I painted years ago. I don't remember exactly where the passage comes from . . . the beauty of spiritual literature is that it doesn't matter. The concept speaks to the human condition, and finds its roots in numerous traditions, no matter which root we choose to trace.
My approach to Biblical illustration has always been the same as my approach to illustrating folklore. By the time I had my first religious client, I had already illustrated several folktales for children, and several multicultural picture books. I had studied Jungian dream analysis and steeped myself in world mythology, which in many traditions overlaps with spiritual literature. These stories populated my imagination with images and symbols that were richly varied, yet universally human. I strove to mingle and weave these archetypes into my art.
Jung regarded a good myth as a collective dream – a story that a whole people has dreamed – and a good dream as an individually-experienced myth. As plasma is like sea water, the individual unconscious is an inseparable part of the ocean of primordial consciousness shared by all humans.
That's the ocean that splashes over the figure shown above, lashing its stormy waves against the still and silent rock. Neither wind nor rain, fire nor flood can move this unshakable presence. What better symbol for faith? No wonder God is likened to a rock in both Judaism and Christianity (see Isaiah 26:4). The Source of Life transcends time just as rocks appear unchanged within the lifespan of a human. What better symbol for Eternity?
Our ancient ancestors were at the mercy of fires, storms, and floods – and for all our technology, we are not so different today. We can predict, we can monitor, we can harmonize with the ecosystem or do things to destroy its fragile web – but we cannot control nature or the forces that breath life into it.
Here in the Catskill Mountains we had a snowstorm last week that dumped two feet of snow in the valley where I live, muffling a stream that just weeks earlier had flooded in a raging, deafening torrent that ripped away the surface of the road. As I write these words, gusts of wind whip through the trees, blowing snow about like white dust devils. These forces seem to rage around us with a will of their own, and there's nothing we can do to stop them.
Yet something internal remains steady within all this upheaval, like that rock so patiently enduring pelting rain and roaring wind. This is not a cold, unfeeling rock of inhuman hardness – on the contrary, it glows with warmth. This is a rock of stable calm. The image also relates to meditation, for did not the historical Buddha sit through every imaginable upheaval under the bodhi tree? The solid form of a rock can even symbolize the formless, unchanging awareness that underlies physical experience itself. Spiritual literature, after all, uses language to transcend language – and so too must the images that express it use form to transcend form.
Wishing you a week of steady inner calm, no matter what life throws at you.
D Yael Bernhard