MYTHIC IMAGINATION AND THE TOXICITIES OF CREEK
Madeline Rugh
holds a Ph.D. in Adult and Community Education and is a registered/board certified art therapist. For the past 30 years, Madeline has been a consultant, program developer, and educator specializing in the role of art and nature in health and wellness. Dr. Rugh developed and facilitates the SWAN program (Supporting Wellness through Art and Nature) with the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art in Shawnee, Oklahoma (www.mgmoa/SWAN). As an author, Dr. Rugh is a co-editor and contributor in two recent anthologies on the expressive art therapies and nature. Currently Madeline is a visiting associate professor with Pratt Institute Creative Arts Therapies graduate program serving as a thesis coordinator and summer faculty teaching Nature-Assisted Art Therapy.
Abstract
The following article and imagery represent the experience of dwelling over time, with an image that arose in response to a figure I noticed looking up at me from a biologically damaged stream during the solar eclipse of April 8, 2024. I sat with the drawing and the live video of the figure for over a year, concerned for the welfare of the water and not knowing what to do. Recently, I suddenly felt compelled to invite the figure in the image to guide me toward the creation of another artwork. What arose was a composite (collage) in which the figure was removed from my drawing of the toxic water and placed in a photograph of a clean clear mountain creek. The resulting piece became a visual prayer for the Creek Woman and the health of the water in which she shared her Being. The article also briefly covers, as context, the research of Emoto Masaru, the Sacred speech of Pat McCab, the historical antecedents of the Creeks given name, and mythological potentialities.
Key words: myth, imagination, water, toxic, sentience, art, listening
The creek
The image you are viewing in this essay and short video were originally created on the day and time of the total solar eclipse (April 8, 2024). During that spring, I was a participant in an international “Listening to River” practice and co-operative exploration of the animate nature of Water. The Devils Fork Creek, which runs behind my sister’s house in the Blue Ridge mountains of Western North Carolina, was the waterway I chose to work with and “listen” to.
It is a tributary of Mud Creek, part of the Mud Creek watershed. Devils Fork Creek along with her friend “Bat Creek” are known for being the main waterways that contribute to extensive flooding. It has also been noted that Devils fork, in particular, is labeled as an impaired stream due to the poor health of its biological community suffering significant degradation. As with other water ways in this country, farms that line her banks and routinely dump chemical pesticides into her waters along with oily runoff from the highway and the general behavior of throwing junk and animal viscera from deer hunting into the water certainly accounts for the major cause of her damage. However, after creating the artwork shared here, another aspect related to toxicity entered the picture. The possible role of human speech, naming, and manner of addressing the Creek as “nothing but” water vs a living aware life sustaining system. All life on Earth depends on the presence of healthy water. To address her as a lifeless substance may support at a foundational level some of the degradation we see. I explore this possibility in the remainder of this writing and in the imagery created.
Can creek speak?
In my communion and connection with Creek I wondered if giving her a name that conjures fear and contempt may have contributed in some subtle manner to her current toxic malaise?
As previously stated, the name of the Creek I am engaging with is called Devils Fork. The meaning of the word “Devils Fork” is significant. Historically, it refers to the fear of the “fork”, a helpful eating utensil. However, in the 15th century, the tines of the fork were considered by many as evil, a sign of the Devils pitchfork. The fork's resemblance to a trident, a common depiction of Satan in the Middle Ages, fueled fears and its association with evil.
In connection with name or word and sound is the research of Masaru Emoto, The Hidden Meanings in Water [1] suggesting that water remembers and responds to human language and intention. His experiments involved the freezing of water and photographing the crystals formed while exposing the water to various positive and negative emotions and words. His photos demonstrated that waters crystalline structures were highly distorted by negative attention from humans. Though his research has not been confirmed, the idea that water is a living being, possess memory and its own kind of consciousness persists.
During the 16th century, soon after the “fear of forks” was at play, was a well-known Swiss physician and alchemist, Paracelsus. He was famous for pioneering the use of chemicals in medicine, and (interestingly enough) establishing the field of toxicology. He is often called the "father of toxicology". He emphasized observation of nature and believed diseases were caused by external factors rather than imbalances within the body. He advocated and practiced skillful observation of nature and consulted with the “wise women” of his time. He spoke of water in relation to the so-called mythological beings called Undines. Undines were thought to be beautiful human-like spirits (elementals) that inhabited water. Paracelsus considered elementals to be nature-based intelligences, contributing to our understanding of the natural world and part of God’s good creation, rather than demons as was the consensus. He also noted that they were real but usually invisible due to our limited ability to sense them.
A more recent scientist and biologist Stephen Harding wrote in Water Gaia: Towards a Scientific phenomenology of Water [2], understandings of water from the Hindu Vedas perspective. They spoke of water as deeply maternal, as an archetypally feminine element. In modern depth psychology, water represents the vastness of the unconscious psyche from which great insight and healing can emerge. Harding further states that Water is alive, full of meaning and personality – a dream image (imaginal), a non-human intelligence of tumbling water molecules welcoming us into its living depths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeeAMNxuqio
I invite to you listen to this very brief video clip from “Uplift” with Pat McCab (of Navajo and Lakota Lineage) [3]. She speaks of her experience talking with Water which is Sacred. She shares the understanding that Water is Life, and the deeper more wonder-filled significance, that Water is Alive and listening to us. She tells us about praying to Water and how the goodness of those prayers are shared through the cycles of evaporation into the clouds, streaming on the Winds, everywhere around our Mother planet.
These few vignettes regarding Water are meant to contextualize my own experiences. In addition to art making, this kind of research (searching again, looking again) is part of the way I listen to the Beings of this Living World. In this case I am “drawing” from Emoto’s and McCab’s sensitive and Sacred orientation to the Spirit of Water, her capacity to receive and remember. Incidentally, as I walked along “Devils Creek” I listened and heard the name “Wolf Creek”. Though there are no longer grey wolves in this area as they were hunted to extinction, I think Creek remembers them and would prefer that name which is how I addressed her thereafter.
Figure 1: Creek Woman Spirit
Figure 3: Prayer for Creek Woman Spirit
Figure 4: Close up of Prayer for Creek Woman
Mythic Imagination
After being present to various aspects of the “Other-than-human” world I frequently make images as a way of listening that often reveals elements of the experience or qualities of the natural Being that escaped my limited cognitive attentional faculties, allowing the imagination and the imaginal to take precedence. Using art media is synergistic with the language of nature, colors, shapes, textures, movements, lines, sounds, etc.
The first image “Creek Woman Spirit” (Figure 1) was created after directly seeing the watery form in the Creek and videotaping it (Figure 2). As I studied the image in the water and the emerging image in the drawing I noticed the following visual communications; The Creek spirit looks female to me. She has only one eye open and barely open at that. She looks drowsy or drugged. Her coloring is pallid – yellow greens like a healing bruise. I ask myself if maybe a Creek Woman’s colors could have a different sensibility or significance to Creek, but then I consider that she is working through me, messaging me through art, and thus the possible meaning of the colors looking sick might be the message. As noted above, this Creek is deeply damaged through toxic chemicals from farm run off and highway debris. I have noticed that people routinely dump all manner of objects into Creek, as if her living waters were a place for garbage. Our actions curse the Water and yet she does her best to keep flowing and is home to very small fishes and Muskrat. We can now begin to wonder at the significance of Wolf Creeks’ reputation for flooding human habitations in this region.
Returning to the image. She has mud hair piled up on her head, or is that a tumor? Pointing to more effects of ill health. I noticed when in direct visual contact with this portion of Creek as well as reviewing the video, that the water shimmers, looks almost gelatinous. The shifting creek bed has sparkling sand from the indigenous mica infused rock here in the mountains. I begin to see stars and the cosmos, a nebula. This is especially interesting given I am witnessing this water phenomenon during the full solar eclipse. I wonder if this might be a kind of cosmological threshold which made her presence (perhaps as an Undine) visible to me?
Everything about this kind of art based listening I call “Imaginal Tracking “an expression of our mythic imagination following the movements and expressions of the more-than-human world with wonder, speculation, consideration, and contemplation. Working within and with the Imaginal Realm, like the water spirit, is working with the non-material but real. The organ of such spiritual perception is the heart.
One year later
After an extended time (one year) of sitting with the image and periodically reviewing the video I am inviting her spirit to participate in shifting the drawing to more fully embrace its meaning and message. The next image (Figure 3) represents the results. This composite collage utilizes a photograph copied through “Pexels” (an online free photo site) and a portion of my original drawing of Creek Woman Spirit. The photo from “Pexel” shows a clear cold mountain stream with smoothed stones and pebbles surrounded by rich evergreens creating dark shadowed reflections near the shoreline. As soon as I saw this image I knew it was the one I needed to work with though I didn’t yet know why. I removed Creek Woman from a copy of my drawing seeking her place within the borrowed photograph. As I move her form around the mountain river, it comes to me that this image is forming a prayer for the wellbeing of Creek Woman Spirit. This idea arises before I have listened to Pat McCab’s beautiful story of listening to Water [3].
As I work, the first thing I notice is the need for Creek Woman to be integrated into the new riverbed using the pebbles and stones. I have a second copy made of the mountain river photograph and cut out stones and pebbles. Her mud topknot then becomes a beautiful stone Cairn. Through the action of my hands, there seems to be more life-giving movements beginning to happen, curves and connections between Creek Woman and this new river bed; Plant like spirals, eddies of water. In the “Pexels” photo there appears to be a sacred circle to her right…I add more stones to it for emphasis. Circles are an ancient and cross-cultural healing form, an unusual feature of this photo I didn’t consciously notice at first glance. Though this is relevant to the human being, maybe it is also relevant to the Waters within us and around us. Perhaps then, the healing is about both the damaged Water and about our damaged consciousness?
I find myself making spirals and curves or arcs to the right of her head and one open eye. The arcs move toward the large stone circle and beyond, I imagine these arcs carrying each small vibrational wave deep into the image toward the distant mountain. I listen to the narration inside my heart tell me that in addition to the chemical toxic damage to her Waters, this spirit has had her natural ability and purpose (maybe this is an Undine?) to influence protect and nourish the Creek water, Creek bed and Creek creatures compromised as well. This is something very unexpected that surprises me. I continue to make small arcs across the page following her guidance, they are barely visible camouflaged with riverbed pebbles. They are like beams of information she is sending to this different body of water. Maybe practicing now in the imaginal realm what has been lost in the damaged water she currently inhabits.
I feel almost finished. Not wanting to do too much as it is a healing image and change should happen slowly. But I am called to add just a little more substance to the one open eye. It appears every so slightly stronger, deeper and brighter. After turning off the desk light, I walk away but notice Wolf Creek Woman is nearly invisible in the image, as if she is already sinking deeply into this restoring environment. She seems to be “fragmenting” in a good way, dissolving back into her invisibility as clear clean water (close up - figure 4), perhaps remembering she is elixir of Life.
For me, this expressive work has become a visual prayer for Creek Woman, whether she is an Undine or the Spirit of Water I don’t know but this process with this animate Being taught me more about listening and gratitude for our kinship with all life. The water in my body resonates with the water of Creek and we are all “swimming” in Imagination and thus we can attune together. I notice I am offering greater attention and kindness to the glass of water on my desk as I drink clean water so easily acquired in our society.
At this juncture, I feel moved to laminate the image and take it to Creek and lay it in Her water working from Emoto’s perspective [1] regarding the responsiveness of water to thought and emotion and McCab’s [3] beautiful act of prayer. This is a memory of how things can be when she is healthy and maybe it will lift her spirits a little and maybe it will send molecules of wholeness (from Stephan Harding) [2], downstream to the Mud river for whom she is a tributary, to the French Broad River, To the Tennessee River, To the Ohio River, to the Mississippi River and on to the ocean and the Gulf of Mexico in desperate need of healing.
References
- Emoto, M. (2004). The hidden messages in water. Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words Publishing.
- Harding, S. (2019). Water Gaia: Towards a scientific phenomenology of water. In I. Stefanovic (ed), The Wonder of water (pp.5–15). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- McCab, P. (2017) Speaking to the Water https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeeAMNxuqio
- Xandra, L. (May 17, 2018). Paracelsus’ Water Woman https://ofmermaidsandmyrmidons.com/paracelsus/
Reference for citations
Rugh, M. (2025). Mythic imagination and the toxicities of creek. Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 6(2). [open access internet journal]. – URL: http://ecopoiesis.ru (d/m/y)