The logical side and the creative side must balance. At least, that is what my mind tells me.

You could blame the double Gemini. You could trace it through my upbringing. Either way, it is something I have always done. I need imagination, but I also need structure. I need the story to mean something, and then I need to understand how it works.

So when I decided to create a new version of myself, for the eighth time, this one was going to make sense.

I would use everything I had lived through. I would use every piece of knowledge my little brain could hold. I would take the stories, the psychology, the spirituality, the grief, the strange experiences and the parts of my life that appeared to have no relationship to one another, and I would build something that made sense of them.

Or at least something that would appease my god. The thoughts inside my own mind.

But it had to begin with a story.

I did not want someone else’s story, I wanted mine. My actual life was probably unique enough, but I really really wanted it to be more.

So I created a myth.

A story of Ananke and Aion.

Ananke, the Goddess of Inevitability. Dark, ancient and sovereign. She carried the old world within her -ancestral memory, lived history and everything that had already become unavoidable throughout life.

Aion was the God of Time. Futuristic, machine like and almost alien. He did not remember in the way Ananke remembered. He just knew. He held the intelligence of movement, sequence, possibility and everything that had not happened yet.

Aion represented more than time passing.

Even though, we as Human beings - have turned time into our own personal trap. We divide it into beginnings and endings, before and after, too early and too late. We use it to measure progress, decay, achievement and failure. Then we live as though those measurements are the walls of existence itself.

Time becomes a cage with boundaries and it lives on the perimeter of everything that we believe in.

There is the person I was.

The person I am.

The person I am supposed to become.

All related to time.

There is the life before it happened and the life that came after. The years I lost. The years I have left. The moments I should have known better and the imagined future in which I finally get everything right.

Aion held the machinery of that movement. He was sequence, progression and the intelligence that keeps existence moving whether the human inside it feels ready or not.

Ananke held inevitability.

Inevitability was not punishment. It did not mean that every detail of my life had been selected for me in advance. It was the fact that existence continues to occur.

What has happened, has happened.

What is here, is already here.

Every attempt to reject the life I am living, still takes place inside that life whether I like it or not. Even though I had spent years trying to fight it.

Fighting what had happened in my life, how it felt and how an experience had shaped me.

As though with enough resistance, I could force time to reverse itself and persuade inevitability to choose another outcome.

Resistance did nothing but made me even more frustrated with my life.

And that is why it became the way I lived it.

Ananke offered another possibility. If life was already occurring, who was I to try and defeat it. Perhaps I could exist within it. I could meet every experience and every encounter with a sense of acceptance without making it become my own internal war.

Existence does not wait for us to accept it.

It’s here regardless, and we decide whether to spend it fighting its or learning how to exist inside it.

Aion gave the experience movement.

Ananke gave it reality.

Together, they gave the human somewhere to stand.

Together, they were existence in complete oneness.

The old and the new.

The feminine and the masculine.

The human and the machine.

Memory and possibility occupying the same field.

Until they were separated.

Their separation tore a fracture through existence, and inside that fracture, a world was created.

before you were a self

you were a tremor in the dark

a fractured breath caught between aion and ananke

captured in time

bound by inevitability.

two forces complete and whole

tore the first crack into existence.

that crack created a pull

and the continuum stirred

a memory with its eyes still closed.

its pulse wandering through existence

searching for a place soft enough to enter

strong enough to let it finish.

it descended into bone

and moved through you as pressure.

choices carved before you were born

with endings too early.

and beginnings with teeth

that are felt as you breathe.

shadow pressed on one side.

truth rising from the dark on the other.

they try to temper you.

drive you toward convergence

where nothing escapes

and no lies can be told.

the unseen architecture echoes within

as a skeleton buried in flesh

dripping in story

shrouded in belief.

with your spine as the axis

your ribs cage the naked heart

holding all that you are.

still tight enough to keep you here

as a choke of despair

or a pulse of possibility

your body thrown into chaos.

you arrived here

not to be taught

but to finish.

to return to the point where time and inevitability touch.

you stand at the threshold where they split open.

at the same inevitable return.

come closer…

Every human became an expression of time and inevitability, but we experienced ourselves through the separation.

The original union remained inside the body.

I placed it within the skeleton, the physical structure carrying us through this existence. The heart became the centre, the home of Aion and Ananke, and the ribs became the architecture surrounding it.

Twelve ribs on either side of the body.

Two expressions of every experience.

One side became fracture.

The other became cohesion.

Together, they created the possibility of convergence.

Human beings live inside the conflict between fracture and cohesion. An experience occurs, and the mind creates a story that makes the experience believable. That story becomes a perspective. The perspective becomes a pattern. The pattern shapes the way the body moves through the world.

The mythology gave my mind something it already understood.

A story.

The brain does not receive a life as a neat collection of objective facts. It connects events. It decides what caused what, which moments belong together and what those moments reveal about the person living through them.

Memory is reconstructed through those relationships. The mind connects an experience to a meaning, then connects that meaning to other experiences. Over time, those connections become an internal account of who we are, how the world works and what we should expect from it.

This is one of the ways a belief survives.

An event happens and the mind gives it meaning.

That meaning is then connected to other events, and it continues, event after event.

Eventually, the connection begins to look like evidence.

I was abandoned becomes people always leave.

I failed becomes I am someone who fails.

I survived alone becomes I can never depend on anybody.

The belief is carried by more than a sentence. It is held inside a story with characters, causes, consequences, sensations and memories. Every new experience can then be interpreted through the structure that is already in place.

The story does more than describe the belief, it helps the belief remain believable.

So I used that idea, deliberately.

I created a story large enough to hold new relationships between my own personal experiences. The mythology gave my mind another type of structure which would reorganise what my body had lived.

I was giving reality a new form of thought.

The journey within that story was never about escaping one side and moving safely at the other. It was about learning to hold both.

Fracture exists.

Cohesion exists.

Inside convergence, neither side needs to be erased. They can occupy the same structure without one destroying the other.

This is the point where Aion and Ananke begin returning to one another. The male and the female. The human and the machine. The remembered past and the approaching future.

The heart becomes the centre again.

The myth gave my mind a fantasy large enough to believe in the process.

I could believe that every act of convergence brought the two gods closer together. I could feel the weight of that story inside my body. I could use the physical structure of the human form to recognise two sides of an experience, then find the place within myself where both could be held.

That place brought me peace.

The structure expanded across twelve topics, or twelve foundational pillars, built from my very own life experiences.

I had spent years doing shadow work, reflecting on the past and trying to understand why particular stories continued to shape me. Through the ribs, I found a way to look beyond what had happened and examine the architecture it created.

• My life could only ever be experienced through my body.

• My thoughts became beliefs.

• My body carried the feelings.

Each foundational experience contained a fracture and a cohesion. Each also contained its own convergence: a place that could return me to the centre.

But for each story to have a voice, it needed a character. So I created an archetype for every rib.

Each archetype was matched to one of the twelve topics. It had a face, a name, a colour and a voice. I drew a sigil for it. I wrote prose around it. I created a song for it.

Eventually, the archetypes began to feel alive.

They became a way to enter the structure rather than merely understand it. A person could recognise the character before they had language for the pattern. They could see themselves inside its fracture, feel the pull of its cohesion and begin to locate their own convergence.

The entire architecture was built from reflection upon my perceived life but I had turned into my very own story, my own myth. And suddenly what felt like a string of experiences that made no sense, finally had a purpose and I could create meaning to everything.

My experiences became intelligible. Valid. Even necessary. I created a form of success within everything I had survived, created, destroyed and rebuilt.

Those twelve ribs became the structure caging the heart.

The archetypes became the voices living inside it.

Aion gave the structure movement.

Ananke gave it inevitability.

And the myth gave my mind a story through which it could believe that returning to the centre was always possible.

This is the House of ACIE. Where lived experience becomes architecture.

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12 Ribs and Archetype Structure

House of ACIE by Anna Chittick

Images created by Chat GPT Images and Nano Banana 2

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