Death spread the canvas of my life before him and started painting over it, sections of my entire existence reduced to original white; the nothingness before I was even an outline, anything, anyone. He slowly began covering over my senses, my thoughts, the hairs on my head, my strength and coordination, my memories, the views beyond my Paris courtyard window, my breath. Covid-19 was the paint on the tip of Death’s paintbrush that I can still hear the echo of in my cells three months and one inner revolution later. My physical vessel panicked, but the primordial female essence encased within it felt only boredom. Erasure is a common symptom of womanhood, even when people attempt to celebrate her because they don’t even know her! Before my body was invaded, I heard the hypnotizing whisper of intuition that I obeyed, commanding I turn down the vaccine’s penetration, because it seemed louder than the world’s screams of inverse instructions. I must have subconsciously preferred penetration from Death himself instead. Intuition, a feeling, woman’s invisible weapon, guided me into hell, lawless chaos, abandon, where the primal woman within us all hums. There she was, finally! This illness was the first gate opened to me during my journey of Self Realization and the awareness that I was half dead before I was even ill. After a month of art restoration, Death abandoned the project, or he might have been asked to stop by the “angels” I saw in my vision when my soul detached from my body, when I thought I would never return through life’s third dimensional hallway. Yes, the near-death experiences I’ve read about are true. I recall renowned psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s rhapsodical vision full of beings hovering above Earth after a heart attack that mystified him for the rest of his life, as well as writer and journalist, Anaïs Nin’s soul-body separation during a six-month abortion procedure that catapulted her into hovering realms of multidimensional color. Both of them survived, or should I say, all three of us did. We did more than survive, actually. We returned with psychic information, slanted purposes and the urge to mythologize our every mundane act of existence because we saw the grander notions of who we were with no choice but to soak life’s dry human standardizations, rationale and slavish humility with ideals. Anaïs describes this transition from life to death and back again best; her magnum opus -- her collection of journals -- precisely and poetically illustrates the black matter of deep feeling. She’s an expert documenter of all shades of pain that precede the portals of all wombs and tombs. When the tomb I was in miscarried, I suddenly re-emerged with the courage to embrace my personal hero myth, previously locked away in the dungeon of my unconscious. I used Anaïs and Jung as my hermaphroditic Virgil to lead me through the gates of this rebirth. However, Jung could only take me so far before he split off from Anaïs’ rib, the ultimate Woman. 

Almost immediately after I could walk again, I ran to a spiritual nursery, the palace of a Guru, an Ashram, with more kaleidoscopic art than any other in the world, peacocks and rows of flowers petaled with explosive geometric patterns. I was there to rebuild my physical and psychological foundations, but I felt that I was back beyond the firmament; it seemed unreal, like a mirage. Yet, the most colorful thing there was an American Brahmacharini -- a nun -- who covered her body with a bright yellow sari, painted a tilak on her forehead -- the uniform of her renunciation and celibacy -- and wore many rings that she claimed her omnipotent, male Guru manifested out of His empty palms in front of her eyes. I met her in my black Parisian threads that concealed my Jupiterian cleavage rather lazily, my bulbous lips painted red, with one of Anaïs Nin’s journals under my arm; a writer with a public legacy more salacious than Kim Kardashian and Lena Dunham combined. We bonded instantly, ancient sisters, for we seemed like two female nodes orbiting opposite poles of the same moon. It felt like a relief, a homecoming between us, like all trauma bonds, because we clearly both had something to heal. Our wounds, not unlike Anaïs’, have a similar basecoat; the absent father. At times, all three of our fathers quit being fathers, so we chased after them all our lives via our choices, lovers, wardrobes and Gods. Growing up, this nun read her father’s famous novel about a modern-day Messiah who quit that she eventually replaced with a Hindu holy text; the Bhagavad Gita. I snuck through hidden editions of my father’s Playboy collection until the Bible was thrust into my hands like an arranged marriage by my conservative southern society. As a young girl, Anaïs wrote her own letters to her estranged father until she created a book of worship by way of her journals, which she maintained throughout her life. 

It’s easy to imagine that the conditionings between the nun and I would begin tuning their instruments for a concert of respectful debate. My journey towards “Self-realization” through rebellion, my desires and psychotherapy contrasted, according to her, with the act of “God-realization” (as if they are different goals instead of different nouns) via total surrender to a Guru’s commands, renunciation of sex and abandonment of the outer world. The social politics that govern our womanhoods crescendoed; personal manifestos of liberation at gentle war with each other instead of with man’s law that the unconscious should be essentially exiled. The unconscious, the moon, where woman feeds and purges, is where she finds her true self, and I felt that this philosophy at the Ashram, like the Christian one, was asking me to renounce it. This nun soon suggested that I remove my profile picture of a nude painting of the Roman Goddess Diana to one less provocative, less honest, on a messaging app that I used to chat with her & other Bramachari. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy question to ask & it wasn’t easy to answer either, because I felt awkward at how silly it seemed that a body painted on paper could arouse or offend anyone. I briefly fell into the trap of thinking, “Is my path unholy, inferior, to these devotees?” “Should I censor this Goddess on my profile as she recommended and thus censor myself because perhaps there is something about me that’s wrong, too much, not enough?” These are questions only fit for a receptacle of neuroses. I was vulnerable post Covid and admit how seductive the perfume of the philosophies of the Bhagavad-Gita, the room full of Christian saint relics and the colorful tales of this living Guru were. Yet, I hesitated when this doula of my rebirth –the nun -- began echoing the control tactics of my western protestant past, when she started to temper the eruption of black from the canals of my subconscious; the temple I had survived in when Death was still painting. I couldn’t afford to cultivate that loss of self again, brought on by the hypnotizing masculine linearity trying to moralize my womanness or reason with love in lieu of finding reasons to love. This time I was heavily buffered by Anaïs’ diaries that asked nothing of me other than to understand myself as a woman, so I chose her verses to deliver me instead. 

I don’t blame this nun for her questions and objections, nor do I resent our differences because it is nuance that I crave. Rather, I call the masculine bastardization of religious texts that fail to liberate the female psyche, while forcing her to obey, to answer for this. These texts seem to have released arrows of revenge upon God, the parent that humans can’t cultivate within themselves, for abandoning them. Each testament, Old, New, Hindu or Islamic are fuming with rage over the separation of the human with the divine, so much so that religious dogmas and their followers destroy themselves by rejecting half of who they are (chaotic, primal, disorderly, wild, feminine), and are incidentally waging war with the senses. Sensations must be felt before they can be conquered. And to the naysayers, how do you defeat an enemy you don’t know? They preach that ultimate annihilation of the senses -- muting all feeling -- is the map to relocate God when God rests within the vibration of love, which we must feel. What ignorant instruction and underdeveloped intuition from the deep roots of the patriarchy. By extinguishing the senses through abstinence and celibacy, have religions been trying to find God or extinguish woman?

The result of this guidance on a collective level is the terrestrial and spiritual pollution we see before us. Suppression of anything mutates quietly into perversion eventually, and thus, we now behold a dry planet without feeling, water, nuance, species, where woman and earth are exploited because the feeling and intuition, have been objectified, overlooked, aborted. Had I ignored my intuition to get the vaccine early and avoided Death’s studio, I would still be crippled in unawareness. Had I not equipped myself with the sword of Nin’s prose before my illness, I would have redeveloped the same handicap afterwards, because Death missed a spot. The human seems in terror of his own ascension because to rise means one would have to fall in the first place into the ocean of his psyche that is partly unfit, unruly, obsessed, disorganized and perverted. The old Messiahs say to remain neutral, but this is impossible if one has experienced only one aspect of his or her being. Therefore, neutrality is quickly contaminated by duality, separation, from ignorance of the other half. 

This encouraged psychological bondage is more erotic than any of Anaïs’ affairs, even the one she had with her father, which she recounts in Incest with a Freudian honesty; a horrifying way to decapitate her wound, but conquer it she did nonetheless. The female character, her wars, her plights, her solutions, have been completely rejected and sterilized. As a result, the collective male perception of woman is incomplete, yet, in command of the female story as women try to adjust themselves to it. Women cannot liberate themselves if they don’t know themselves.

Anaïs Nin is the balm that integrated herself for over 60 years within the cosmic fortress of her private diaries that served as an anchor to fight the internal battle of woman during an epoch of thick patriarchal pollution. The psychological and poetic revelations of her experience in which she faced and transcribed abortion, incest, infidelity, self-suppression, lust, mania, idealizations and boundless love are equal in horror and beauty to the manuals of war, rape, power, suppression, slavery and rational love that we see expressed without filter in the Bible and other religious texts. Nin’s diaries prescribe the opposite remedy compared to these various biblical canons; face your desires and get to know your senses intimately. She nursed us with her “sins,” because true understanding will never fornicate with perfection and detachment alone. It is through the telescope of Anaïs’ generous hand and porous spirit that we all can find woman, water, a true baptism. When a woman reads Anaïs, there is no more mirage because the thirst of the body has been quenched and the desert of woman’s soul has been fertilized. It is only then, with empowerment through honest, unfiltered representation, that women can self-realize and find long-awaited balance. 

Women should create a personal religion of their own reflecting the yin, chaotic, creative, embodied essence with Anaïs Nin as a Messiah and her diaries as scripture; an honest life of a self-realized woman, the first and most precise of our kind that we know of.  She wrote to the rhythm of a heartbeat and thus uploaded a bible for women, for the Anima within all men, in this epoch of our planet’s rebirth. Nin, more than any other female writer, explored the uncharted unconscious, which is still premature from lack of nourishment and attention, and she survived! Anaïs’ work is niche now, just as Jesus’ was, just as Socrates’ was, like all liberators, but she won’t always be as the conscious currents continue to recalibrate in woman’s favor. She was gracefully rooted in sexuality, in direct contact with the capricious unconscious,--which has been a mystery to man and woman until her Psalms were written--and in utter rebellion of her limits. Men, women, and non-binaries, hear and see differently. Nin offered women a full ballad with lyrics dedicated to the life of a real Goddess on Earth. Not a picture, not a fictional tale, not an idealization, but a full life with a voice in first person. Her work has the capacity to unleash the repressed female voice and to make Goddesses out of those who have the courage to integrate their shadows and deny their denials. In September of 1943 in her journal Mirages she wrote, “I see women, women, women, tragedy in women. I am touched by their plight. I think of their inarticulateness. May each one find herself in all these women and be helped...You cannot quench a woman’s strength with laws, curse it with solitude or abandon. It must be dealt with. It is the woman’s revolution, the flower of revolt and injustice.” 

Through Anaïs, the woman became real, and so did I. The sweet, American nun believes that I can’t see God standing before me as her Guru. I believe that she can’t see the Goddess, equal in power to him, within herself. Our unique paths on the desperate hunt for the ultimate love frequency have nothing and everything to do with this. If I were to literally & hypothetically free my face and she, her body, then I wonder if we would need to ask anything of each other at all. If our patriarchs had chased after a Goddess this fervently, would her and I even need to amicably debate each other’s female expression at all? The female story has the potential to expand beyond the over worn extremes of the female archetype; the Nun and the Whore, the veiled woman and the nude woman, the wife and the mistress, the stay-at-home mom and the working mom, myself and the Bramacharini, all pitted against each other as if they, we, don’t mirror one another, as if we aren’t more complicated than this. We also have the opportunity to revolve the female plot, personal and fictional, beyond this question: Does the woman dive into the man or should she let man dive into her? We need a new storyline, a new main character, a new path, so that the woman can learn to finally live.

Kendall Lane is an Artist, Astro-counselor and Content Creator living in Paris. She links works of art from museums she visits around the world with a patient's natal chart to help narrate subconscious patterning in a personalised reading or within group containers. Her training is in Evolutionary Astrology, Human Behavioral Counseling, Art History and Broadcast and Digital Media. Website: artofthepsyche.com. Her commissions & offerings can be found on Instagram: @kipplane and Tiktok: @artofthepsyche.