threads of the spiderwoman

Everyday Poetry II

2009-07-11T08:53:00.008-07:00

Now,
The Journey is the Reward

Cozad, Nebraska, September, 2005. While enroute to Arizona, stopping in a coffee shop, eating pie, and gazing out the window.

Everyday Poetry

2009-07-11T08:32:00.005-07:00

The Barbed Heart
Takes Refuge

In a hidden Grove
of Palos Verdes
Trees

(Tucson, 2009)

I was going through my files, and found my camera had captured many everyday poems, found beside the road.

Frank Polite 1936-2005

2009-07-08T07:55:00.013-07:00

to stagger ashore,
free, cured of use;
simply to be, itself, a green bottle,
a message delivered,
a sailor, like me

Today I looked up a poem by Frank Polite that I've been hauling around in my box of literary treasures for some 30 years. I met Frank at the Cafe Med in Berkeley back in 1975, and he gave me the poem in person, signed even. I've hauled out his little book, "Luna Pier" many times since......."Lantern", "The Last House on Luna Pier" are old friends, travelling companions he introduced me to that day. So I was sad to learn that he died in 2005, and I never knew.

What I remember, is vividly seeing his face over a cappuchino, while on the interstate from Michigan to Toledo in 2007. I saw the turnout for Luna Pier, mythical in my mind and heart now for decades, a misty place of silent blue herons, the wounded presence of Lake Goddess Erie. Did I turn off? No.......I knew that the Luna Pier Frank seeded my imagination with was something I would never want to change.

Frank's writings have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, The Nation, Yankee, Exquisite Corpse, The North American Review and Denver Quarterly. He lived in Ohio, and for more information or to purchase some of his books, visit: FALLEN CITY WRITERS.

THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES

The black butterflies of night
Clipped for sleep to nightshade and widowgrief,
Or in shaking luminous flight
On paired and silver wings, are rare,
And rarely seen by human sight.

Yet, they are there, surfacing
Out of range of neons and streetlights,
Preferring underleaf
And the dark offshores of air
To man and moth-maddening glare of things.
Tonight, As crisis after crisis
Cracks our skies like lightning,
I think of death,
Of different ways of dying,
And of Egypt and the myth
That once held black butterflies
Sacred to Isis.

They lived forever in flight
In her private groves, compelled like
Flickering minutes
Never to touch leaf nor stone,
Never to rest, except upon her nakedness
When she turned to love.
And here is death to be envied;
To be crushed to a personal breast
Between goddess
And whatever bird, beast, lover
Fell to her lips.
We are something else. . .

Myth and love will miss us
When the night is suddenly turned on,
Turned blank white,
And the black butterflies
Appear against that vellum sky
As far, flitting, burnt-out stars.

GOOD ADVICE

1

Do not rush to be disappointed with yourself.
Rather, make a world drag you to it
behind 24 mules of irrefutable proof, & you
still digging in your heels all the way
before you say, "I'm disappointed with myself."

2

Trust only inauspicious beginnings,
the modest seed. What comes
dancing toward you tossing flowers,
soon perishes.

3

It is the weed of life
that grips the garden to your need,
that roots you deep into its soil
which is immortal.

LUNA PIER

A sea change leans against the pier
in tumult. I know why I'm here.
Cold streams, contending with the warm
grip the rocks as never before
in my life, and hurl up salt at my door.
What drifts in now is mine, cut loose,
thrown overboard, or drowned:
a wooden spar, a beached bone, a yard
of torn sail like an indecipherable
parchment. Even a shoe drifts in, kicked
around out there God knows how long.

I listen now. I witness. I do not
touch or twist at the integrity of each
survival. It is enough to have arrived
at all, embodying sea changes;
to stagger ashore, free, cured of use;

simply to be, itself, a green bottle,
a message delivered,
a sailor, like me.

LANTERN

Next year I'm forty years old.
I don't know what hump I'm over.
To have made it this far, what
does that mean? Where am I?

Where have I been? Like you,
I've been places, New York, Asia,
Great fields uncut by wire
or river, mountains leaping up.

And O yes, oceans. I felt my way
deeply into each, into the mind
shafts permitted me, into
a flower (perfect on mescaline,

I laughed and wept for hours)
into the tenderness of people...
I've loved, worshipped stones,
written poems to moon and stars,

and depending on the deep and dark
of my downheartedness, I lit
a flame in my forehead like a toad,
imagining myself, at various

times, Lord of Earth, Light in
the forest, even...God.
Down the road with my lantern, I
lifted up the broken, the poor,

the ignorant, the hopeless, only
to come down to this: to be all of
them myself, at once. So what's
it all about? I don't ask anymore:

I am one with the insect and cloud.
I beg my life to lay me down at last
gently if possible, or fast, the way
a horse, plunging into darkness

kicks a stone out of its path.

Restoring the Balance - 2004

2009-07-01T06:50:00.040-07:00

Recently I was asked to submit an article about what I feel is the most significant ritual/theatre event I've ever done with the "Masks of the Goddess" collection. "Restoring the Balance" was performed in Tucson in 2004. I felt like publishing the revised article, with the photos, in my blog. I'd love comments, if there is anyone interested in the subject matter. And as always, I'm very grateful to the amazing beings who collaborated to make it happen.

Restoring the Balance

A Ritual Theatre Celebration of the Great Mother

O Great Mother Goddess,

we call on you now.
Rise up from your roots. Hear us, our voices of pathos.
See our dancing feet, how we beat out your rhythms.
With our hearts, we drum you back.
We are staggering toward you.
Will you run one hundred steps to us?
Will you spread your mantle of peace?

This is the sack of our offerings:
We give up our greed to feed the needy.
Here is our lust to restore compassion.
We release our hatred to stop the killing.
We forego our vengeance to discover balance.
We scorn our fears, to rebirth love.
We tread softly to bring back forests.

And Mother Answers:

No more no more no more!
I have sent you shining planets
to help you remember.
Mars and Venus beg you to reconcile.
From the depths of space, Sedna appears,
a planetary avatar to stop you in your tracks.
Time is ended, truth be told.
Release, forgive, restore.
Remember Me in all of My forms.
I will bring light to your shadows
and make you whole,
if you will call on Me.

Erica Swadley (2004)

In 2004, deep in the cold depths of space, a new planet was discovered beyond Pluto, which astronomers named “Sedna”. Why Sedna, I wondered? What meaning does the story of Sedna, Ocean Mother to the Inuit people of the Pacific Northwest have for us today?

My own mythic journey to Sedna began in January of 2004, when I had an exhibit of my masks at the Muse Community Arts Center in Tucson, Arizona. There I met Grey Eagle (Kenneth M. Jackson), a native American ceremonial storyteller living in Patagonia, Arizona. Grey Eagle told, and collected, stories from indigenous peoples around the world, including those of his native Northwest.

It is no small irony that the Inuit are among the first human populations to be displaced by global warming. As the western Arctic coastline recedes, they are losing their villages, while pollution and over-fishing has contributed to the loss of their livelihood. I felt honored when he offered me a version of Sedna, which he received from Inuit activists when he lived in Alaska.
Inspired by Grey Eagle’s gift, a group coalesced to create a performance for the Global Art Project, an international arts network founded by Katherine Josten MFA. Central to our ritual would be the story of Sedna.

The Story of Sedna

Sedna lived with her father by the cold northwestern sea. Fearful for her father’s welfare, she refused all offers of marriage until one day a handsome man came to woo her.
He promised Sedna a better life if she would marry him and he promised to send provisions to her father as well.

But Sedna’s new husband was really a raven, disguised as a man. Instead of a better life he took her to a desolate island. When Sedna’s father came at last seeking her, he was furious. Taking his daughter into his kayak, he paddled for the mainland.

But Raven, learning of her escape, caused a great storm. At last, Sedna’s father, overcome with terror, cast his daughter from the boat hoping to save his own life. Sedna clung to the side of the boat and would not let go, begging her father to save her. In desperation, he cut off his daughter’s fingers and hands with his knife.

And so Sedna sank into the ocean, and as she fell, her severed fingers became the fishes, the seals, and the whales. It’s said that Sedna still lives at the bottom of the cold Northern sea, in a house of bones, attended always by her undersea children.

As Grey Eagle wrote,

“Sedna is cold and naked. She is covered with a tangle of hair that she can't comb. And it’s also said that all the broken taboos, all of the sins of the people who live in the above world, also fall to the bottom of the sea, collecting on Sedna's body. When the accumulation is too great, Sedna sobs in pain. Then the sea creatures leave the shore, and gather to comfort her.”

When the “above world” no longer remembers the Ocean Mother's sacrifice, the Inuit believe they have fallen from grace, with dire consequences. Because as Sedna suffers, so must they.

Erica Swadley as "Sedna's Shaman"

Grey Eagle continued: “Then people know it's time to gather, time to publicly confess their broken taboos. The men, remembering the name of Sedna’s father, do a long dance of contrition. Slowly dancing, they sing a song of remorse for the sins done by man to women, to earth, and to her children. At last their shaman purifies herself to take the dangerous journey to the underwater world where Sedna lives. She gathers fine sand with which she lovingly cleanses the filth from Sedna’s body, and she combs her hair. And she offers Sedna prayers of respect and love she has brought with her.”

Rites of “at-one-ment” are necessary to reconcile the above and the below world.

“When Sedna is at last comforted, her sobbing is no longer heard in the waves. The sea animals end their vigil and offer themselves again as food. And the people are inspired to return Sedna’s gifts by making better life stories to live by.”

Myths are “life stories“, templates upon which religions and civilizations are built, and individual lives are imbued with meaning. How can we create “better life stories” for today, life stories that speak of inter-dependence instead of inter-conflict - life stories that can prepare us for a sustainable future? Because we are dancing the future into existence by the stories we tell.

Our stories collectively are our continually evolving cultural mythos, a mythos that crystallizes the ways we perceive ourselves within the living body of the world. Contemporary earth scientists have increasingly demonstrated that our planet is a vast ecological system. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, with the Gaia Hypothesis, proposed that the Earth is a self-regulating organism - alive, interdependent, and conscious - affirming the ancient wisdom of Inuit storytellers. The myth of Sedna remembers the need for reciprocity and accountability in our relationship to our Mother Earth, to Anima Mundi.

Restoring the Balance and the Divine Feminine

"Myth comes alive as it enters the cauldron of evolution,
itself drawing energy from the storytellers who shape it."

Elizabeth Fuller,
The Independent Eye Theatre

When I initially met with participants to plan our ritual, as in previous events, dancers used the the Masks of the Goddess collection as tools for invocation. As contemporary “Temple Masks”, the masks were charged with this intention.

At our first meeting, I put the masks in a circle, asking members to choose a mask that spoke to them. With drum and a guided meditation we shared a “shamanic journey”. Afterwards we discussed our experiences, and could determine which members of the group felt strongly called to “dance with a Goddess”.

Community Altar

Another way of looking at it might be to discover which masks “wanted to be activated”. In traditional cultures, tribes not only petition the Gods to speak, but sometimes the Gods themselves “express a desire to be present” in various oracular ways. In contemporary Santeria practice, for example, dancers “volunteer” to be possessed by the deities as a form of community blessing. Masks, dance, and ritual are thus viewed as co-creative, a means for the other worlds to briefly enter our own. Invisible hands, collaborating on the weaving of story and blessing.

Lastly, our invitation included the hope that diverse cross-cultural “faces of the Mother” would emphasize the universal significance of this event, and the universal need to heal the degradation of the feminine. Katherine Josten, who chose to dance the role of Sedna, is the founder of the Global Art Project, a network linking artists around the world. As we prepared our performance, Katherine observed that:

“The work of our group is not to re-enact the ancient goddess myths, but to take those myths to their next level of evolutionary unfolding. Artists are the myth makers. It is time for us to create the next chapter, to join the energies of Goddess and God. Time for a reconciliation of that which is within and without. The integration of male and female must occur in order to bring balance to the earth and human consciousness. A dialogue needs to occur so the pain of both may be brought to light and transmuted.”

Mana Youngbear as "Tara"

Katherine expressed reasons why we called our ritual "Restoring the Balance". Restoring balance to the divided human spirit is what the work of the Goddess is truly about now. The Great Mother has been banished from our world by a mythos that has taken away divinity from women and by extension, our cyclical, embodied existence within the world of nature. How can there ever be peace, when we are a humanity whose very psyche is divided against itself?

Kathy Huhtaluhta as "Corn Mother"

As our cast grew, Katherine Josten was joined by Erica Swadley as “Sedna’s Shaman”. Erica is a shamanic practitioner and therapist. Quynn Elizabeth, founder of the Institute for Shamanic Arts (and Earth Tribe TV) in Tucson danced Kali. White Tara from Tibet and Amaterasu Omikami from Japan were performed by dancer Mana Youngbear.

Artist Valerie James, who founded the Los Madres Project in Amado south of Tucson, invoked the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Cherokee Corn Mother, Selu, was performed by Kathi Huatahluhta, and Spider Woman was performed by Wiccan priestess and dancer Morgana Canady. Nations Hall became a theatre in the round, with a community altar/installation as part of the event. We were fortunate to be joined by Will Clipman, Jeff Greinke, and Alan and Audry Smith, as well as Saami chanter Kathi Huhtaluhta, who together composed music for each segment. Our storytellers were Paul Fisher and Sammi Alijagic.

A few weeks before our performance, we learned that a new planet had been discovered by NASA researchers beyond Pluto, which astronomers called “Sedna”. Although the planet was found in November of 2003 by astronomers David Rabinowitz, Chad Trujillo and colleagues, “Sedna” was publicly announced on March 15, 2004. For our cast, rehearsing our performance, this extraordinary synchronicity made us feel that we were, somehow, part of a larger telling.

Restoring the Balance was performed at Nations Hall Theatre in Tucson, Arizona on April 9th, 2004. We closed with Morgana Canady’s performance of Spider Woman. Standing at the circle’s center, she gradually wove a Web of cords with the audience. And for that brief moment over 300 people were joined by the strands they held.

Spider Woman (also called Thought Woman by Pueblo peoples) is a cosmology myth that is especially significant to me. It’s said that Spider Woman (also called Tse Che Nako, the Thought Woman) spun the world into being with the stories she imagined: a creative power she passed on to all of her descendants. Among the Navajo, to this day, a bit of spider web is rubbed into the palms of infant girls so they will become beautiful weavers.

Perhaps I've received a bit of this blessing as well, because since 2004 I've been inspired to spin webs myself. In 2007 I brought Spider Woman to Michigan as a Fellow at the Alden Dow Creativity Center at Northwood University, and in 2009 I have the privilege of being able to explore the theme further at the Henry Luce Center for the Arts at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. )

After our performance, biodegradable cords from the Web were distributed among members, and scattered throughout the desert, symbolically extending our Web, and its blessing, beyond our small community to a greater world. And as part of the Global Art Project (which partners groups and individuals) photographs, letters, and a video about “Restoring the Balance” were sent to AFEG-NEH-MABANG Dance, a dance group from Limbe, in Cameroon, Africa.

As Grey Eagle wrote in 2004,

"We have heard this sacred story together. And now we can close with:
That’s the way it was.......and that’s the way it is."

AFTERWARD: The Surprising

To me, meaningful ritual is what anthropologist Victor Turner described as “communitas”: a conversation whose mythological roots go far back into the past, and forward into the imaginal future.

To enter fully into ritual space/time is to shift consciousness in order to enter the mythic realm. Masks aid the traveler because they are threshold tools, “limons”. In his article “Pilgrimages as Social Processes” (1971) Turner wrote that a “limen” or a “liminal state” is a doorway that enables actors and ritualists to enter the stage or sacred space as a pilgrimage center.

By entering the mythic realm, they find themselves in a fertile country wherein spirits may be encountered and transformations of all kinds are possible.

I remember a conversation I had with ritualist Ann Weller. In 2000, with her community in Willits, California, Anne created a Millenium ritual to symbolically transform the violence of the past century within the "cauldron of the Dark Goddess".

“I felt ridden by the Dark Goddess when I worked with her" she told me. "But found that the work was ultimately impersonal. I was a brief vessel for an immense archetypal intelligence manifesting within the drama we created. And yet, offering to embody the Dark Goddess did bring personal change. You can't work with sacred theatre and not be changed in some way."

Within the charged, sacred arena of ritual, traditional cultures believed deities could enter this dimension, blessing and communing with those present. Bearing this in mind, I personally like to imagine that a last blessing was given to those present in the form of inexplicable “spirit” photographs, documented by Tucson photographer Ann Beam. I know Ann, and have no doubt that her surprising photographs are authentic. To me, these images are a pentimento, a invisible layer to our collaboration.

For example, one of the photos of Erica Swadley, performing the role of Sedna’s Shaman, seems to have two distinctly separate faces. Quynn Elizabeth, invoking Kali within her dance, was the subject of the most dramatic photographs - in some, her back turned to the photographer, an inexplicable, goat-like form appears behind her.

I have since learned that in India, goats were traditionally sacrificed to Kali. A Hindu scholar I showed the photos to suggested that a “spirit goat” materialized in the photograph to symbolize our offering. We did not have a matephorical “goat” to offer the Goddess when we invoked Her, so one was, perhaps, ethereally provided for us.

I personally found that the “goat” photo reminded me of the ancient Hebrew ritual of the Scapegoat, a theme that seemed very appropriate.

When it was deemed necessary, the "Scapegoat" ritual was performed for the tribe. A litany of all the sins, troubles and sorrows of the people was recited, then metaphorically “laid” upon the back of a goat. The goat, a beast of great merit, was then released into the desert to symbolically bear these burdens away. A cleansing had occurred and a new cycle could begin. Not unlike the atonement rituals of the Inuit, the act of naming the sins and broken taboos helped the tribe to return to psychic and emotional balance.

In the modern world, we have generally lost meaningful ritual. We have few ways to collectively regain "attunement" to a greater continuity of being. We have no ritual cycle of prayers, dances and confessions to create purification. We have no tribal shamans to help us bear our “better life stories“ to the suffering Earth Mother, to Sedna in the World Below. There is no “goat” to symbolically carry our sorrows into the chaotic wilderness of the collective unconscious, to bear away our negativity into the desert so we can begin again. We scapegoat each other, we scapegoat women, we scapegoat the Earth without self-awareness.

I have no explanation for Anne’s photographs except what they mean to me, as co-creator of the event. I feel they are a blessing.

Lauren Raine
2004 (revised, 2009)

References:

Grey Eagle (Kenneth M. Jackson), (2004) “The Story of Sedna”, unpublished article.
See, Gordan Ekvall Tracy Memorial Award for Ethnic Performers (1995), (www.ethnicheritagecouncil.org/awards/tracieWinners.html)

Weller, A. (2001), excerpt from interview with Lauren Raine.

Fuller, E., The Independent Eye Theatre, www.independenteye.org.
Excerpts from interview with Lauren Raine, 2001

Beam, A., (2004), Photos are with permission of the artist.

Swadley, E. “Invocation of the Great Mother” 2004, hanumom@swadley.us.

Josten, K., MFA, Journal excerpt (2004). www.global-art.org

THE GLOBAL ART PROJECT, Tucson, Arizona 1997 to present. www.global-art.org

ALA MANKON CULTURAL AND DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATION, A.M.A.C.U.D.A. Traditional Dance Group AFEG-NEH-MABANG Dance, Limbe, Republic of Cameroon

Turner, V.W., Ph.D. (1975), DRAMAS, FIELDS AND METAPHORS – Symbolic Action in Human Society, Edition: 5, Cornell University Press, 354 pages, article on page 166

Smith, Alan and Audrey, Rainbow Didge (rainbowdidge.com)

Clipman, W. (www.willclipman.com)

Greinke, J., (www.jeffgreinke.com)

Huhtaluhta, K., Sami Records, (www.samirecords.com)

Quynn, E., The Institute for the Shamanic Arts and Earth Tribe TV (earthtribetv.org)

James, V., Las Madres Project, (www.lasmadresproject.org)

Youngbear, M., Willits Young Actors Theatre, (willitsyoungactorstheatre.org)

Twittering, frittering - a curmudgeon view

2009-06-30T17:40:00.010-07:00

"I would like to share a few thoughts with you
about an activity that clearly marks the end
of civilization as we know it: Twittering."

Mr. Modem (Richard Sherman)
From Smart Computing, August, 2009 Issue

We know the benefits, indeed the stupendous global transformation the Internet has brought. The entire World Wide Web, like the Akashic Record, at your very fingertips. The Greatest Library the World Has Ever Known.

So now I'm going to make a few ornery comments about the "down side" of the internet. I submit that I seem to become a Curmudgeon whenever it's about 115 outside. The solution is to spend as much time as possible in movie theatres and in libraries. As time goes by, I'm getting better at napping, eating breakfast and lunch, meditating and doing my homework in such environments. So while browsing in air conditioned splendor at the library, I ran across Mr. Modem's article about the new internet rage, "twittering". Mr. Modem goes on to note,

"Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a free service predicated on the question "What are you doing?" By composing short 140 character messages, you can share with the entire world that you are standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, eating a tuna sandwich, or watching your dog chase its tail. If compulsively posting such digital drivel is not enough of an incentive to get out of bed in the morning--which is, of course, another event you'll want to share with others--you can also follow the mundane activities of other peoples' uneventful lives--including celebrities. At no time in the history of interpersonal communication has the phrase "get a life" been more appropriate."

Like I said in my letter to him (below) I think this man is on to something.

Dear Mr. Modem:

I just ran across your article in SMART COMPUTING about the "Twitter" phenomenon. I want to tell you that I think you are a Prophet.

I love your call for articles about how the internet has changed in positive ways peoples lives, and look forward to reading some of the entries.

But lately I feel increasingly alienated by the diminishment of communicative skills because of the internet. Having ranted about how we're becoming a "face book world", I'm sure Twitter brings us one step closer to spitting not long words at each other but fast, efficient, pixels. Although I've given in and appear on Facebook now, to be honest, I find it depressing. I used to have friends I exchanged letters with, even phone calls. Now I have "friends" who share 10 word one-liners with me and 500 other "friends". This is about as satisfying to me as eating a plastic donut. On a good day, I get group emails of cute sayings, which make me feel that I am dear to someone on the list, along with, of course, 50 or so others......in my darker, paranoid moments, I worry that the world has become obese with fast food and fast talk, substitutes for something more nourishing.

Your funny article "Twittering or Frittering" in the August, 2009 Issue of Smart Computing made me laugh. But it also made me wonder if we can no longer distinguish the difference between Quantity and Quality.

The Peace Corps

2009-06-24T22:27:00.006-07:00

Village in Benin

I attended a Peace Corps recruitment gathering here in Tucson - really inspired me, although it also gave me much to think on before I submit my application. I would say that about 1/4 of the people at the meeting were over 50. First, let me say what I'm inwardly asking myself........here I am, about to take a grueling ESL teachers course before I leave for D.C. in August, and I'm beginning the almost as grueling application process for the P.C.

Am I out of my mind? Probably. You've heard of the "Mid-Life Crisis"? What would one call this?

I've been able to educate myself somewhat by a few fantastic blogs - one, Arabiandrum.org is a network for PC blogs throughout the world, and is excellent if you want to read the thoughts, struggles, and meanderings of volunteers. I've enjoyed reading many of them, although I have yet to find a blog by a volunteer over 30, which bothers me. Where are the grandmothers who look like Jane Goodall I saw tromping through the tundra in the recruitment video show? I await their (hopefully encouraging) words of insight.......

Here's another excellent source of information - a blog for the writings of present and past PC volunteers (Peace Corps Writers).

I confess, I have some real regrets that I did not take advantage of the opportunity to join the Peace Corps when I was younger. What I am concerned about is not so much whether they can use me, or whether I would find the experience rewarding, but whether it's something too strenuous for me. Living in an isolated village in Benin is out of the question. However, living in Roumania and teaching at the University (as some PC are), or having a small apartment in Morocco with electric and hopefully running water......would probably seem luxurious enough to me.

PC in Roumania

I'll be exploring this further. It seems very strange, to be opening this possibility, this door, after a lifetime in the arts, mysticism, mythology. And it is also a kind of circle, as I remember being a teenager in Kabul (where my father worked for U.S. A.I.D.) My first job, at the age of 16, was sorting mail for Peace Corps volunteers at their office in Kabul.

Am I nuts? At an age when so many people I meet are taking up golfing (and boring me to death with their stories about grandchildren and endless physical ailments)........I want to teach English in Mold0va? Work with children in Zambia?

Our Lady of the Saguaros

2009-06-18T08:04:00.014-07:00

There are unexpected poetics along the trail, Sanctuary for the asking, and sometimes the Goddess appears at unexpected moments.

I felt like sharing this Shrine, with its Madonna standing at a trail head (or, at the end of the trail, depending on your perspective) near A Mountain in Tucson. A Mountain (which might be more appropriately called "A Hill") is an extinct cinder cone that features a large "A" on it's pointy side. The "A" came to special prominence in 2003, when patriots painted it red, white and blue as George Bush prepared to invade Iraq, and anti-war protesters painted it green in the middle of the night. For about 6 months, you never knew what color the "A" would be, but eventually the patriots won and it remains a garish red, white and blue.

At any rate, there is a wonderful trail nearby that people like myself take early in the morning. It rises gradually among a grove of saguaros, and affords a wide view of Tucson, and the sunrise among the Catalina Mountains.

I don't actually know what the shrine is called, but I call it "Our Lady of the Saguaros". Because, as you walk up the hill, you pass chapparell, medicine plant, sage, and impressive Saguaros. Native people called them the "fingers of God", and indeed, they often do seem to be making Mudras, telling slow stories about time, heat and the desert, if one can only find the means to read the sign language they speak.

Right now, having bloomed white flowers in April and May, their tops are crowned with pear shaped fruits, which the birds are tearing open to eat. It's quite wonderful to see those red tops, and masses of finches and doves gathered on the tops of the desert trees, happily feasting.

Here's another little poetic.

A Barbed Heart I discovered taking refuge among the Palos Verdes, the "green trees" of the desert.

May all Barbed Hearts find refuge among green groves.

May we all find "Our Lady" (by whatever name) waiting for us at the end, or beginning, of the Trail.

Lithographs from the '80's

2009-06-17T09:09:00.014-07:00

"A House of Doors" (1986)

I found this portfolio recently...........a series of Lithographs I did in the mid 1980's. I find I still enjoy them. The entire collection was called "A HOUSE OF DOORS", and they were all photographic imagery collaged and worked on lithographic stones. The editions were about 10 each.

Some rooms diminish, some rooms compress.
Rooms can be tricky.
What I chiefly remember
are doors.

I live in a house of doors.

"Leda and the Swan" (1986)

"Day of Radience" (1986)

"When Rain Sang" (1985)

I Remember
White dresses I wore.
I can't remember the girl's name.

"Funny", she said
"How time takes the names out of things,
and bleaches the rest kind of transparent."

Funny. Chiefly,
I remember doors.

"Streetcar" (1986)

"Sybils" (1986)

Wonder Boys (and Girls)

2009-06-07T17:35:00.021-07:00

Last night I was watching one of my favorite films, Wonder Boys, based on the novel by Michael Chabon.

It stars Michael Douglas, who has left behind his roles as sex god and warrior cop, to become the rumpled, often stoned professor Grady Tripp, a novelist who teaches creative writing in Pittsburgh. Unable to finish his second novel, which has grown into a vast meandering tome of thousands of aimless pages, he is in the middle of a divorce, and is having an affair with with his boss's wife, who is also the Chancellor of the university. His chaotic life becomes further complicated by one of his talented, eccentric students, played by Tobey Maguire.

Towards the end of the movie, a car door flies open, and Professor Tripp's manuscript flies out, a white snowfall of typed pages, into the Allegheny river, hopelessly lost and fluttering nicely downstream. That part always gets me..........I usually rewind it. It's a moment of commedic loss, but also a kind of amazing grace. After that, everything else falls apart as the dishevelled professor ultimately finds his
way into a more authentic life.

I read a fabulous quote by Laurie Anderson recently in which she described herself as an "anthropologist" after a journalist asked her why she had chosen to work at MacDonald's and at an Amish farm. She explained that she was always trying to learn about new ways of living, new cultures, and found immersion the best way to keep her creativity and curiosity enlivened.

So.......I guess I'm leading up to something here. I'll indulge a ramble until I find my way.

I’m sitting at borders bookstore in Tucson, the only coffee shop I’ve found that does not have a piped in rock and roll station. I resent background noise, and find what is usually offered harsh, angry, ugly, screaming, painful, complaining, or hyperactive. These energies are constantly broadcast. Is there a restaurant or coffee shop that plays Gamelon, or Chopin or even "easy listening music" anymore? Nope. At any rate, you can think here. It is also beautifully air-conditioned, and since it’s 108 outside (a reasonably pleasant June day in Tucson)……….

Every time I come back to Tucson in high summer, my higher functioning seems to immediately cease. I become stressed, irritable, unable to think clearly, and I tend to enjoy venting as much road rage as I can get away with, probably because I lack both a radio and an air conditioner.

Good fore-giveness practice.

Listening to my coffee clutch pal rant this morning didn’t improve my mood. J. is a true contemplative, who meditates daily, has a PhD and lives a very simplified life in a van that runs on biodiesal. Which is probably uncomfortable in the summer, and may be why his usually fascinating discussions about religion were today punctuated with denunciations of what he considers the hypocrisy of just about everyone, from Muktananda’s sex addiction to Sai Baba being a pedophile to Joseph Smith’s 50 wives to what he considers the Dali lama’s fake smile. Whew. That was exhausting. I hope he feels better tomorrow. I've had such rants myself.

Good fore-giveness practice.

I’m about to take a 6 week intensive course that will end with me receiving an ESL teaching certificate. This will be grueling, and no doubt I'll be twice as old as everyone else there. I'm doing this because next year, Great Spirit willing, I want to do volunteer work, and this would be a useful skill to take to the table. I'm also unemployed now, so some means to earn income is a good idea. I'm even applying to the Peace Corps. I'm also considering asking Dana Dakin if she can use me in Ghana in some way – and I am also considering volunteer opportunities in Morocco and Nepal.

All of this, of course, scares the hell out of me. I've spent so much of my life alone in studios, within the self-absorbed life of an artist. What if I get malaria? What if all there is to eat is yams and overripe bananas, or worse, monkey jerky? What if they have a revolution, and no one believes my story that I’m really a Canadian (should I get maple leaf earrings and a matching hat?) What if I have to share a dorm room with a Baptist missionary who aggressively worries about my soul? What if there are really, really big spiders? Would that test my own faith?

What if I get to meet aids orphans, what if I get to teach girls how to read or draw, what if I fall in love with a whole village.……and never want to return to this life? What if ……….

You see, I’ve had this dream about joining the Peace Corps, and going to Africa, for 30 years. If it’s ever going to happen, now is the time to put it into motion. And perhaps, to be candidly honest, sometimes I am weary of living in a "facebook world", a world where friendship seems to mean you share one paragraph group emails with 500 people, a world I've become increasingly out of step with. I say this as I sit here surrounded by laptops and cellphones and earplugs. Everyone is going a thousand miles an hour. I can't touch anyone anymore at that speed.

In some ways, I'm not unlike Professor Tripp. My magnus opus could flutter into a river somewhere, on the Camino to Compostella maybe.........and I'm not sure I'd care all that much, or if anyone would notice for that matter either. Impermanance. I really don't know who I am anymore.

Which might not be such a bad thing. There's a big world out there.

The Questions of Maat

2009-05-28T10:56:00.032-07:00

"In Ancient Egypt, it was said that in the Underworld Maat waits before the door all souls must enter. She holds a scale and a feather. Maat weighs hearts, and none may pass until they have answered her questions, and their hearts are as light as the feather of truth. Can each answer "yes" ? How heavy is each heart? Because to dream a new life, to be born again, you must know the life you have lived, forgive and be forgiven." **

I want to say how touched I am by those who so kindly sent me their good wishes in comments for the last entry.

It's been said that we don't live our lives - life lives us.

Arriving at 60 is a tremendous passage for me. I remember meeting Dana Dakin, founder of Women's Trust in Ghana, who said that there were three life passages: first you learn, then you earn, and finally, you return the gifts you've gained to the future.

Certainly, I feel the "lightening" that comes with transit into my 6th decade. I have the urge to get rid of things that weigh me down, aren't relevant, demand my attention in some way. Old love letters that just make me sad, pretty dresses that no longer fit and probably never will, dusty boxes of mementoes, weary assumptions, heavy handed beliefs, habits of mind that once were useful, but now are boringly repetitious. I see that most of my assumptions are erroneous, block my vision, and are probably unfair to somebody, somewhere, including myself. Unused possessions require care, require storage, require energy, require memory. Time to light-en up.

A reporter once asked Pablo Picasso, at 90 or so, what he thought, after such a long and distinguished career, his greatest work was. He immediately replied "The next one."

I've been reading a wonderful book by Natalie Goldberg on writing and Zen, called "Writing Down the Bones". She tells of meeting the writer Meridel le Sueur. In her eighties, Meridel told her that she lived nowhere. She visited people and places, writing wherever she was. The elderly writer asked Natalie if she knew a place to purchase a used typewriter. When she is ready to leave, she said, she will give it away so she doesn't have to take it to her next destination.

Now that I understand. Why should one wish to lug a typewriter around, or a bulky suitcase, or for that matter, an old grudge, a worn out storyline, or an exhausted persona?

This is the lightening of the heart and mind called for when we reach the "Return" phase of our lives, whether that occurs at 30, or 80. The balance that the Goddess Maat demands when she weighs hearts at the passageway. Maat's name, literally, meant "truth" in ancient Egyptian. Her questions do not "damn" those who wait before the door....but without answering them, without finding the truth of one's life, no passage to other realms is possible. Maat's questions are the questions each soul must answer sooner or later. "Who have I not forgiven?" "What have I done that I cannot forgive myself for?" "What part of my life story have I not been able to forgive?" "What am I unable to let go of?"

I am always stunned by the wisdom found in language we so unconsciously take for granted every time we open our mouths. (and each language has its singular depths of meaning). In our English usage, to "fore-give" is to do just that - to give the energy forward. To the future, to the unknown, to new possibilities of good relationship and shining creativity, high adventure. As well as the evolution of wisdom and full circle compassion. When we don't fore-give, we're left dragging around psychic baggage, grey thought forms, stories told so many times they have lost any semblance to the truth.

I am not saying that fore-giveness is not a complex process. Sometimes it involves working through unconscious layers of experience, telling our story over and over until it can be seen, and sometimes we need help to do these things from wise or impartial listeners. But ultimately I believe fore-giveness comes from being able to gain a wider perspective, the Soul's perspective. Being able to see the broad weave of our lives, the ways we were challenged and deepened by our experiences, our betrayals, our failures, our losses, our ignorance.

I remember years ago there was a man I was attracted to. The eros of my experience fueled enormous creativity in me. His considerable talent inspired me as well. And because I had a lot of half-baked, naive ideas, and did not know how to confront him, he also had a lot of fun manipulating and humiliating me, probably, just because he could. I still cringe when I think about it. But until I was able to fore-give him and myself, I was unable to see the gifts in that experience. Had I not met him, I would not have created what I did. And I also probably would not have moved through naivete I had outgrown, and more importantly, a "victim" template I was deeply entrenched in. Ultimately, he empowered me. That's the paradox of Maat's Truth.

Raukkadessa is a Finnish term Kathy Huhtaluata uses in her Saami inspired music. It means, she told me, "beyond love". I find it profound - because even love, as we experience it, can be a veil, impenetrable in the present moment, and beyond is something beyond the pairs of opposites, beyond time itself. Beyond love is the the soul's love, the greater pattern.

A Buddhist once told me that we should cherish all sentient beings, because, from the perspective of reincarnation, any sentient being you meet has at one time or another been your mother, brother, lover, enemy, has been your food, or has devoured you.

One thing is certain. When we don't fore-give, we are unable to move fore-ward, because we are stuck in the past. And from my perspective, one of the wonderful things about having had the privilege of achieving the maturity of 60 years, is that one has the means and experience to finally know just that.

The rest is just practice. Carrying water, and chopping wood.

** This was from a 2002 performance I did with Dorit Bat Shalom, Mana Youngbear and Valerie James in Oakland. The actual questions of Maat are in various translations - we recited some of them in the background, in English and in Hebrew (since we lacked a native speaker of ancient Egyptian) while a dancer performed in the mask of Maat.

Farewell, at last, to the Faire

2009-05-24T08:59:00.020-07:00

On a more prosaic note, the California Renaissance Faire just finished, and for the first time in 30 years, I actually lost money on the show. When this happens, it's time to hang it up.

So, I guess I'm now unemployed.
Well, it is about time I do something else anyway........

I remember a lot of incarnations on the "circuit". From being a dancer in the early 70's, to a Tarot card reader at the N.Y. REnfair, to the mask empire I had for a while with three permanent booths in the 90's. I remember............so much.

My friend Joyce Weiss at the Arizona Renfair

I may very well be the first mask artist on the "circuit" to create pagan mythological masks. I'll say it here, and be done with it, but just about everyone who has ever worked for me or even with me now has a mask business, and usually it includes some design and certainly techniques gained from me. I've put "fairies', "butterfly masks", and "greenmen masks" on the map. I won't say that it hasn't pissed me off sometimes..........still, it's how it is in our world. And in the big picture, I'm glad that I not only shared the art, but helped people out.

One of many, many Green Men.

This was with my ex husband, Duncan Eagleson, a talented artist.

This is the "rock and roll" Green Man.

Hey, now that I think about it, I've helped to re-populate the world with GREEN MEN.
As professions go, one could do worse.

Me when I was younger and in love with Kerry McNeil, the Bagpiper from Glencoe. I wonder where he is now? Handsome and ornery as ever, no doubt.

One of the many mask makers I've taught is Peggy Linich and her Satori Masks...........and she recently not only thanked me, but called me a "master". Well, hey! I guess I am! A Master! What do you know!

Rob Fletcher in Maryland

Time has come for me to say thank you, forgive everyone including myself, and wish I could have all the many, many people I've loved and met and danced with on the road........together in a large room with lots of good food and wine for one last Huzzah!

Except for Internet sales, or if I have the chance again to make special masks for theatre and ritual, I think I won't make masks anymore. I did my best work with the MASKS OF THE GODDESS collection. My intention was to create a group of Temple Masks, and I did, and they served that function. To be honest, I just don't want to make commercial masks as primary income any more, not when I've had the experience of making masks that served so much more.

So, although there is no 0ne around to give me a gold watch, I herein declare myself:

RETIRED!

And ready for something new.................Huzzah! It was a wonderful adventure, and there were many, many good times. My love and gratitude to all my fellow gypsy travellers. And it's true what they say.....old Rennies never die, they just keep on rolling.

"Are you going to Scarborough Faire?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Remember me to one who lives there,
she once was a true love of mine."

Paleologic - Rafael Montanez Ortiz

2009-05-16T19:24:00.014-07:00

"We are the great work of art in progress. WE, ourselves."

Rafael Montanez Ortiz

I decided to post this interview and article I wrote about Rafael Ortiz (from an unpublished manuscript) because it is harmonious with the writings of David Abram in the previous Blog Entry. Rafael, although I am sure he does not know it, was an enormous catalyst and mentor to me as I floundered about trying to find a sense of purpose as an artist.

ART AND ALCHEMY

Rafael Montanez Ortiz has been a controversial artist since the early 1960's. His sculptural and video works, and documentations of his performances, are included in many collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Musee d'Art Moderni in Brussels.

He was the founder of the Museo del Barrio in New York City, and is also a writer and an educator. Dr. Ortiz has been a Professor of art at Rutgers University for over 30 years.

In the early '60's, Ortiz was known for his Deconstructed works. When he demolished a sofa in 1963 for his Archeological Finds series, the Art World became excited about "restructuring the ready-made" into something else. That was interesting stuff....but what was actually significant to Ortiz was the act of de-construction itself. The sculptures were artifacts, residue, archeological finds left behind by the release of force.

Ortiz came to believe that destructive energies could be released within the "appropriate arena" of art - it could be addressed as both an aesthetic and psychic process, an emotionally transformative means of revealing and exorcising the personal/collective shadow. In 1966, Ortiz attended the DESTRUCTION IN ART SYMPOSIUM (DIAS) in London. His first Piano Concert was at the request of the BBC. In "concert" with Anna Lockwood, a classical pianist, and film maker Harvey Matusow, they systematically "deconstructed" a piano. "Destruction has no place in society", Rafael Ortiz wrote, "It belongs to our dreams - it belongs to art."

When I read this, I thought of the Iroquois, who held a five-day midwinter festival called the "Feast of Dreams". Here members of the tribe brought their significant dreams to the Circle, to be shared and interpreted. If a dream expressed a "soul wish", the tribe endeavored to help the dreamer to work it through, by symbolically dramatizing it for them. In the 1960's, Ortiz became interested in the human potential movement, and studied Tantra, Sufism, and Bio-energetics. In 1978 he took a leave of absence to attend the Rocky Mountain Healing Arts Institute in Colorado. There he studied body-centered healing techniques, including re-birthing. He found that his studies of healing technology corresponded to a long interest in tribal shamanism and native spiritual traditions, wherein fasting, duration running, sleeplessness and physical ordeals were often used to seek vision, to enter what Ortiz calls the Dream. "And what is the Dream?" I asked. "The Dream" he responded, "is the original Art Process."

After returning from Colorado, Ortiz developed Physio-Psycho-Alchemy, his Inner Visioning performances. Each Performance begins with the participant lying on the floor, squeezing a large plastic ball between one's calves. The participant/performer is instructed by Ortiz to concentrate on breathing deeply, and applying continual muscular pressure on the ball. The body begins to arch involuntarily - it is as if one is pulled up from the center of the chest. This spontaneous flexing is a release of energy - what he calls physical and emotional "armoring". By maintaining pressure on the ball, a muscular tension develops which, in combination with concentration upon the breath, creates an altered state of consciousness, a trance state that is visionary, dreamlike, and often emotionally revealing as well.

I myself participated in only one performance. My body increasingly shook, and it was difficult to maintain the breath work. I experienced a gradual intensification of subtle movements of energy - at one point, I literally had the sensation of a "spinning wheel" concentrated in the region of my heart. It was as if a wheel revolved there, made of blue light, pulling me up from the chest without any effort on my part. Within the vortex were many incipient images. It is at this point that Ortiz invites the participant-artist to begin the Inner Visioning process, to pay attention to the images and sensations, memories and emotions that arise.

Participation in Physio-Psycho-Alchemy is an ongoing "work in progress". Some performers, in a kind of conscious, lucid dream, relive primal memories from childhood, or what they view as memories from past lives. Others, as visionary travelers, contact an inner landscape, a country where they encounter beings that converse with them, archetypal forms that illuminate and surprise. This is not something one has an interesting intellectual encounter with, like viewing an exhibit at a museum. Something to "get" and aesthetically move on. It is experienced on levels beyond and below intellect, and the artist/dreamer/performer is both Director and Actor, shaping his or her own performance.

Rafael Ortiz has also created a series of sculptures he calls Waxworks. He collected objects from acquaintances, which he then imbedded in wax, along with the stories about those objects which are written on clear acetate. The objects imbedded in the semi-transparent wax derive from events that had profound affect upon the lives of those they belonged to. The wax, thus, holds their actual experience, as well as their stories. "Wax is, for me, a Transformative medium. We talk about the moon waxing and waning, we talk about a wax museum...in other words, time and the history of time is held in this medium. It's transparent, but not as ephemeral as ice, which can turn to water and evaporate. Wax is a medium that is fluid, that can solidify and melt in the heat of life."

"The idea of putting objects into wax embodies the waxing and waning of time, and the embedded object is the Icon of experience. These are rituals that change us in some way, and my concern, again, is that art become a transformative process that is life-affirming, that moves one into an enhanced self-understanding." "The existential exchange between you and the object is the Context. So, here I have objects in the wax, and a story that goes with them, the Text, that also has gone into the wax, and also becomes part of the Object. And so there is a Text within the Object, and there is an Object within the Text. That's the transmutation, the invisible reality made visible." In his early work, Rafael Ortiz as performer released the Shadow, the unclaimed, in the arena of art. In later work, he invites us to experience themselves as visionaries within a conscious dreaming process, multi-dimensional creators beyond the "surfaces" of an imagined "objective" world. Waxworks is existential Alchemy, sculptures that are rites of passage, moving through both metaphor and time. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INTERVIEW WITH DR. RAFAEL MONTANEZ ORTIZ
August 15, 1988

Lauren: You have spent years studying native cultures and shamanism. Do you believe there is a relationship between what we call schizophrenia and shamanism? Joseph Campbell, among others, thought so.

Rafael: Psychogists often view early religions, shamanism, as related to insanity, and that's incorrect. It is a logic process that is "paleological", meaning it is a predicative and sub-predicative association, allowing one to find the relationship between things which ordinarily you wouldn't find. Within the very powerful context of metaphor. You run fast, a deer runs fast, you're a deer. This is an issue of belief. That belief exists, in and out of trance. The trance is only the vehicle for further revelation.

Lauren: The shaman/visionary is not cast into what we might call the unconscious, but chooses to go there?

Rafael: He or she places themselves there for vision, but he or she is already there. In other words, Paleologic is operative as a culture process. Very much like the Senoi, who work with the dream and all of its contradictions on a daily basis, which psychoanalysis would call very neurotic, psychologically distorted, pathological. And that is ridiculous!

A culture that shares its dream daily moves Paleologic into a culture process, information that is exchanged between members of the community, and is valid and rational. It's not "we're all being crazy now". That's how we see it. Paleologic is a holistic kind of reasoning, the sense of oneself being part of the universe, and everything being a part of everything else. It's their sanity. When we feel that, and are then overwhelmed because of our own contradictions, submerged anger, and so on....then all these associations overwhelm us and we are "insane".

Lauren: And scared...

Rafael: Absolutely. These early cultures manage what our later "civilized” cultures cannot, which is being comfortable with a sense of one's place in the universe.

Lauren: Are you saying that much of what we now must examine concerns a return to the past?

Rafael: Yes. A return to something already accomplished thousands of years ago by native cultures of the world, something we buried in our most recent history.

Lauren: What exactly do you mean by "Paleologic"?

Rafael: You can break logic down into Platonic logic, which is ideal, Aristotelian logic, which is more practical, the logic of subject, and then Paleologic, the logic of predicate and sub-predicate association. Once you become ideal, you find things are not related, but are separated, ideally separated. At the Aristotelian level, the world is seen in an even more complicated way, everything breaks down.

In Paleologic there is the concept of holistically defined relationships between everything on all levels. The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic. The problem we have with holism is that our reasoning is fragmentary, it removes us from relating things, it structures things in separate compartments in order for us to "have control".

Lauren: And thus blinding us to the essential connections?

Rafael: Paleologic asserts that Spirit resides in all things. And thus we have a responsibility to all things because we're intertwined with them, and they to us. Paleologic cultures least objectify, we most objectify.

Lauren: In the book about your work, published by El Muse Del Barrio, there is a quote by you that struck me: "Destruction has no place in society - it belongs to our dreams, it belongs to art." How can destruction take place in our dreams and art, and not in our lives?

Rafael: Destruction, viewed from our cultural perspective, is the result of a sense of injustice, deprivations, a sense of disenfranchisement, whether coming from the real experience of being disenfranchised, or simply having a tantrum at not getting what you want, that is accumulated. Not everybody wants to become a boxer or a hockey player, which are outlets for that aggression to be released within an acceptable game structure.

Generally, there is no arena within which these forces can be released. Art, being available to everyone, is the perfect arena within which these rituals can occur to bridge gaps between one's conflicts, and one's having to be in the world in some humane way.

Lauren: How did you move from the De-construction Work you did in your youth, to the work you are now doing?

Rafael: For me, before one can appreciate a higher purpose, one has to integrate and resolve one's lower purposes.

Lauren: Which is what the De-construction work was about, ritualizing the tantrum or that collective force that is the root of destructive behavior?

Rafael: Yes, but it becomes re-integrated, evolving to where you are finally sacrificing subtle things, like your ego, your loyalty to an environment or worldview that keeps you from a holistic consciousness. Sacrificing objectification. Not to be entranced forever, to be "blissed out" in some self-indulgent ecstatic state, but to be appropriately connected with the life force in everything.

That's where my work Physio-Psycho-Alchemy begins: the work is then on a level wherein higher purposes can be addressed and accomplished. It's like a trip into Hell, moving in a spiral up to Heaven. But through the experience of your Hell, so you can be integrated and released. Thus, it doesn't become a service for holy wars.

There are many who want to move into their higher purpose, but deny, haven't resolved their lower purposes, their shadows. They assume they can simply discard it. These are the people who start a jihad.

Lauren: If we deny the shadow, we'll somehow project it outside of ourselves?

Rafael: Remember the movie, "Forbidden Planet"?

Lauren: Yes, their "id creature" destroyed their civilization. So, in order to integrate these internal forces, one must see it and be it?

Rafael: Or find a safe haven for it, and art is a haven, a solution.

Lauren: When did you first begin to explore some of these issues?

Rafael: Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had a concern for the visionary, asking how I could move that into art process. I read the DOORS OF PERCEPTION, I read about the Native American peyote ritual, and a number of other related books. That was when I began to seriously think about and explore what information was available about shamanic cultures. To see how I could reconnect from those cultures into my own contemporary art.

As it relates to my Inner Vision work, certainly then I recognized the importance of the vision quest. I saw it as an important part of the art process. I began to study the Sufis, Yoga, all those techniques in which one's own physiological potential can produce altered and heightened states of consciousness. That became, for me, part of my higher purpose; the idea of our having these abilities intrinsically within our own bodies - within the power of the breath, the nervous system, and the imagination.

Physio-Psycho-Alchemy is about releasing a muscular and skeletal hold that consciousness has on the body as it concerns itself with gravity. You can then begin to feel the power of the life force. It's like floating on the surface of a body of water that is in wave action; and as we give ourselves up to it, we gradually become conscious of the life force, we're letting it flow. That's one level. The breath moves us from an acid state. We release carbon dioxide, which is acid, and taking in more oxygen, we move to an alkaline state, which excites the central nervous system.

The central nervous system then begins to release information, imagery. So, as the body releases, the central nervous system sends energy and information. It's as if every cell in your body makes a phone call to you at the same time. At that point, you can feel a pull from the heart center, up to the center of the universe, and you go through that dance, feeling it pull you up without any effort. Then you're ready for the Inner Vision work.

At that point, the Inner Vision work becomes profound, and is in service of releasing the body to the innate life force, rather than distracting the participant from release, which can happen. That distraction is like being on a journey, and you stop at some curious, fascinating pebble along the way and stay there, instead of continuing on the road. The idea is to continue.

Often, I keep suggesting that the participant goes back to the release, the breath, the next level, in order to not become entranced by suddenly becoming aware of something he or she has never been conscious of before. It's important to combine releasing with the breath work, and experience a complete release before going on to the Inner Vision work. At the beginning of the work, you have to pay attention to where you conserve energy, where your "armor" is.

At the first level of the work, you're becoming conscious of how you hold your body. With breathing and muscular techniques, we learn how to "let go" of the body, and we don't see it as "losing control". With Physio-Psycho-Alchemy, you re-acquire the assurance that you are in complete control, you can give up the body to the nervous system: and as you give up the body, you begin to be conscious of it. There is an interdependency not unlike quantum mechanics. The more attention you pay to the particle, the less able you are to locate its position.

When you consciously "let go" of the body, you consciously "let go" of space and time.

Lauren: When I did my session with you, I experienced an intense shaking. What was that?

Rafael: The shaking is the release. What's shaking is your own armor, and that takes time to release in preparation for the deeper levels of the performance, the Inner Vision work. The average number of performances for a participant is about 12.

Lauren: I have to ask the question you so often receive. How is this art?

Rafael: How is this not art is really the question. Art is not something that is "in the eye of the beholder". That's like saying "life is in the eye of the beholder". Art is an inherent part of being itself. We can say that art is the imagination of form, and that within some greater metaphysic, it is the soul's imagination, encapsulating a history of being, that then seeks the flesh of matter to be. It's called incarnation.

In terms of art process, if you can understand that, see where it begins, you can certainly then envision the imagining itself, in your day to day life, as being works of art. Dreams, awake and asleep imagining. We are the art material, the great work of art in progress: we, ourselves.

Lauren: You have said that there is no separation between the dream and art. What is the dream?

Rafael: The dream is where the important formulations, solutions and relegations occur. It's the state within which the mythic potential that is ours unfolds, and teaches us. We've lost touch with that. Native cultures give integrity to that process.

Again, when I say native cultures, I mean the original cultures of the world, whether we talk about Sumerian, Celtic, Native American, the Mayan, the Hopi, the African shaman.....those cultures within which the dream was central to their evolutionary development.

Our civilization sees the dream as irrational. I remember actually reading once about some scientist trying to invent a pill that would eliminate the toxin secreted by some gland in the brain that would then eliminate dreaming! We want to eliminate it, because we are a culture that is still suffering from nightmares, in contrast to the Senoi in Malaysia, where there is no nightmare, it's all been integrated by the time one gets through adolescence.

Then, your dreams serve your highest creative potential. The dream is for counsel, whether it's finding solutions for an illness, or ways to engineer a bridge that has to be built. So, the dream becomes the original art process, the art process that is inherent to our being, our imagining, our creativity. We daydream, we sleep dream. That imagining is the original art within which we make this bridge.

Lauren: So our denial of the dream is one of the reasons you once referred to the modern world as "psychotic"?

Rafael: Yes. Unfortunately, a psychotic is the last to know his own psychosis. Until, as with us, it can unfold in some unbelievable catastrophe, such as a nuclear war or ecological disaster.

I was reading a newsletter recently that espoused the most insane notions of what our economy should be like. It was something that is published and distributed to people who are interested in investing in stocks, buying gold and that whole business. What it advocated, without any self-consciousness whatsoever, was the idea of an economy absolutely free of any control. Wherein there was no concern for the support of any persons in society, or for the planet for that matter.

Being your brother's keeper, humanism in such light is seen as witchcraft, subversive, un-American. That to me is psychosis.

Lauren: How do you work with a group in your performances?

Rafael: It is participatory within this idea that art is "actual". It's important for the audience to not be passive. To avoid an abstract/cognitive notion of involvement. The abstract/cognitive allows one to violate physical realities.

We can find all sorts of amazing rationalizations through abstracting that remove us from feeling, from empathy. For me, art that utilizes only cognitive ability is teaching us, at the mythic level, to shift away from the body as a complex sensory experience that can tell us when we've shifted away from higher purpose, from compassion.

Lauren: That shifts us away from realizing that the body is also an aspect of our spirit?

Rafael: The brain isn't just in our heads. The brain is the entire body, which includes the aura, all of the etheric networks that exist between us and all life. Whether we're talking about a forest, or another person, the abstract/cognitive removes us entirely from that experience of communion, the ability to sense what is going on. These abstractions become what is going on.

We can objectify at the drop of a hat. We have no problem making an object of anyone or anything. If the logic of a culture permits you to abstract to that extent, it then permits you to live without conscience. Whereas if you feel interrelated, you have the freedom of genuine conscience.

Lauren: Experiential conscience?

Rafael: Exactly. You feel what you do. This is the paleologic of native cultures. And the artist can reconnect with native cultures in forms, contents, materials, strategies, and metaphysics in a way that includes the present experience.

Lauren: Would you say that you, as an artist, are creating a new shamanic tradition?

Rafael: No, I don't want to presume so much about what is traditionally so brilliant and powerful. I would be happy if I could meet it halfway.

We're talking about a tradition that has grown over thousands and thousands of years. How old is contemporary art? It's a babe in the woods by comparison, in terms of understanding creative process, and how that process serves our relationship to each other, the planet, and the universe.

Within the participatory traditions in art, there is no passive audience. That's a recent idea, which is part of the compromise, the tears and breaks from arts original intentions. The ancient art process was a transformative process; it wasn't a show, it wasn't entertainment. Art becomes entertainment within a culture that objectifies. If one can enjoy that transformative experience, and certainly in early cultures it was enjoyed, you could perhaps say it was "entertaining". When you say entertainment now, what is meant is that it doesn't change you in any way, what it does is to help you to forget.

We need to see ourselves again as part of a brilliant, shimmering web of life. An artist at some point has to face that issue. Is the art connecting us and others in some way, or is the art disconnecting ourselves and others? I think it's not enough to just realign ourselves personally either - our art should also do that for others, and further, it must happen outside of the abstract.

It must be a process that in its form and content joins us with the life force in ourselves, and in others. And that's not going to be easy. But I do believe that secrets and solutions exist in native cultures of the world. They spent thousands of years uncovering those possibilities, and enough has survived through different traditions for artists to find more than enough inspiration.

copyright Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Ph.d., and Lauren Raine (1988)

Story, Songlines, and Wild Ethics

2009-05-15T19:22:00.016-07:00

I have taken the liberty of copying a wonderful article from Wild Ethics. It was so encouraging to discover these writings about Gaianism and a Conversant World.

David Abram – cultural ecologist, philosopher, and performance artist – is the founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. He is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Pantheon/Vintage), for which he received the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. An accomplished storyteller and sleight-of-hand magician who has lived and traded magic with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, David lectures and teaches widely on several continents.

An early version of this essay was published in Resurgence, issue 222, and another in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Taylor and Kaplan, ed., published by Continuum, 2005

Storytelling and Wonder: on the rejuvenation of oral culture

by David Abram, Ph.D.

In the prosperous land where I live, a mysterious task is underway to invigorate the minds of the populace, and to vitalize the spirits of our children. For a decade, now, parents, politicians, and educators of all forms have been raising funds to bring computers into every household in the realm, and into every classroom from kindergarten on up through college. With the new technology, it is hoped, children will learn to read much more efficiently, and will exercise their intelligence in rich new ways. Interacting with the wealth of information available on-line, children's minds will be able to develop and explore much more vigorously than was possible in earlier eras -- and so, it is hoped, they will be well prepared for the technological future.

How can any child resist such a glad initiative? Indeed, few adults can resist the dazzle of the digital screen, with its instantaneous access to everywhere, its treasure-trove of virtual amusements, and its swift capacity to locate any piece of knowledge we desire. And why should we resist? Digital technology is transforming every field of human endeavor, and it promises to broaden the capabilities of the human intellect far beyond its current reach. Small wonder that we wish to open and extend this powerful dream to all our children!

It is possible, however, that we are making a grave mistake in our rush to wire every classroom, and to bring our children online as soon as possible. Our excitement about the internet should not blind us to the fact that the astonishing linguistic and intellectual capacity of the human brain did not evolve in relation to the computer! Nor, of course, did it evolve in relation to the written word. Rather it evolved in relation to orally told stories. Indeed, we humans were telling each other stories for many, many millennia before we ever began writing our words down -- whether on the page or on the screen.

Spoken stories were the living encyclopedias of our oral ancestors, dynamic and lyrical compendiums of practical knowledge. Oral tales told on special occasions carried the secrets of how to orient in the local cosmos. Hidden in the magic adventures of their characters were precise instructions for the hunting of various animals, and for enacting the appropriate rituals of respect and gratitude if the hunt was successful, as well as specific insights regarding which plants were good to eat and which were poisonous, and how to prepare certain herbs to heal cramps, or sleeplessness, or a fever. The stories carried instructions about how to construct a winter shelter, and what to do during a drought, and -- more generally -- how to live well in this land without destroying the land's wild vitality.

Such practical intelligence, intimately related to a particular place, is the hallmark of any oral culture. Continually tested in interaction with the living land, altering in tandem with subtle changes in the local earth, even today such living knowledge resists the fixity and permanence of the printed page. Because it is specific to the way things happen here, in this high desert -- or coastal estuary, or mountain valley -- this kind of intimate intelligence loses its meaning when abstracted from its terrain, and from the particular persons and practices that are a part of its terrain. Such place-specific savvy, which deepens its value when honed and tempered over the course of several generations, forfeits much of its power when uprooted from the soil of its home and carried -- via the printed page or the glowing screen – to other places. Such intelligence, properly speaking, is an attribute of the living land itself; it thrives only in the direct, face-to-face exchange between those who dwell and work in this place.

So much earthly savvy was carried in the old tales! And since, for our indigenous ancestors, there was no written medium in which to record and preserve the stories -- since there were no written books -- the surrounding landscape, itself, functioned as the primary mnemonic, or memory trigger, for preserving the oral tales. To this end, diverse animals common to the local earth figured as prominent characters within the oral stories -- whether as teachers or tricksters, as buffoons or as bearers of wisdom. Hence, a chance encounter with a particular creature as a tribesperson went about his daily business (an encounter with a coyote, perhaps, or a magpie) would likely stir the memory of one or another story in which that animal played a decisive role. Moreover, crucial events in the stories were commonly associated with particular sites in the local terrain where those events were assumed to have happened, and whenever one noticed that place in the course of one’s daily wanderings -- when one came upon that particular cluster of boulders, or that sharp bend in the river -- the encounter would spark the memory of the storied events that had unfolded there.

Thus, while the accumulated knowledge of our oral ancestors was carried in stories, the stories themselves were carried by the surrounding earth. The local landscape was alive with stories! Traveling through the terrain, one felt teachings and secrets sprouting from every nook and knoll, lurking under the rocks and waiting to swoop down from the trees. The wooden planks of one's old house would laugh and whine, now and then, when the wind leaned hard against them, and whispered wishes would pour from the windswept grasses. To the members of a traditionally oral culture, all things had the power of speech. . .

Indeed, when we consult indigenous, oral peoples from around the world, we commonly discover that for them there is no phenomenon -- no stone, no mountain, no human artifact -- that is definitively inert or inanimate. Each thing has its own spontaneity, its own interior animation, its own life! Rivers feel the presence of the fish that swim within them. A large boulder, its surface spreading with crinkly red and gray lichens, is able to influence the events around it, and even to influence the thoughts of those persons who lean against it -- lending their reflections a certain gravity, and a kind of stony wisdom. Particular fish, as well, are bearers of wisdom, gifting their insights to those who catch them. Everything is alive -- even the stories themselves are animate beings! Among the Cree of Manitoba, for instance, it is said that the stories, when they are not being told, live off in their own villages, where they go about their own lives. Every now and then, however, a story will leave its village and go hunting for a person to inhabit. That person will abruptly be possessed by the story, and soon will find herself telling the tale out into the world, singing it back into active circulation...

There is something about this storied way of speaking -- this acknowledgement of a world all alive, awake, and aware -- that brings us close to our senses, and to the palpable, sensuous world that materially surrounds us. Our animal senses know nothing of the objective, mechanical, quantifiable world to which most of our civilized discourse refers. Wild and gregarious organs, our senses spontaneously experience the world not as a conglomeration of inert objects but as a field of animate presences that actively call our attention, that grab our focus or capture our gaze. Whenever we slip beneath the abstract assumptions of the modern world, we find ourselves drawn into relationship with a diversity of beings as inscrutable and unfathomable as ourselves. Direct, sensory perception is inherently animistic, disclosing a world wherein every phenomenon has its own active agency and power.

When we speak of the earthly things around us as quantifiable objects or passive "natural resources," we contradict our spontaneous sensory experience of the world, and hence our senses begin to wither and grow dim. We find ourselves living more and more in our heads, adrift in a sea of abstractions, unable to feel at home in an objectified landscape that seems alien to our own dreams and emotions. But when we begin to tell stories, our imagination begins to flow out through our eyes and our ears to inhabit the breathing earth once again. Suddenly, the trees along the street are looking at us, and the clouds crouch low over the city as though they are trying to hatch something wondrous. We find ourselves back inside the same world that the squirrels and the spiders inhabit, along with the deer stealthily munching the last plants in our garden, and the wild geese honking overhead as they flap south for the winter. Linear time falls away, and we find ourselves held, once again, in the vast cycles of the cosmos -- the round dance of the seasons, the sun climbing out of the ground each morning and slipping down into the earth every evening, the opening and closing of the lunar eye whose full gaze attracts the tidal waters within and all around us.

For we are born of this animate earth, and our sensitive flesh is simply our part of the dreaming body of the world. However much we may obscure this ancestral affinity, we cannot erase it, and the persistance of the old stories is the continuance of a way of speaking that blesses the sentience of things, binding our thoughts back into the depths of an imagination much vaster than our own. To live in a storied world is to know that intelligence is not an exclusively human faculty located somewhere inside our skulls, but is rather a power of the animate earth itself, in which we humans, along with the hawks and the thrumming frogs, all participate. It is to know, further, that each land, each watershed, each community of plants and animals and soils, has its particular style of intelligence, its unique mind or imagination evident in the particular patterns that play out there, in the living stories that unfold in that valley, and that are told and retold by the people of that place. Each ecology has its own psyche, and the local people bind their imaginations to the psyche of the place by letting the land dream its tales through them.

Today, economic globalization is rapidly undermining rural economies and tearing apart rural communities. The spreading monoculture degrades both cultural diversity and biotic diversity, forcing the depletion of soils and the wreckage of innumerable ecosystems. As the civilization of total commerce muscles its way into every corner of the planet, countless species tumble helter skelter over the brink of extinction, while the biosphere itself shivers into a bone-rattling fever.

For like any living being, earth’s metabolism depends upon the integrated functioning of many different organs, or ecosystems. Just as the human body could not possibly maintain its health if the lungs were forced to behave like the stomach, or if the kidneys were forced to act like the ears or the soles of the feet, so the planetary metabolism is thrown into disarray when each region is compelled to behave like every other region – when diverse places and cultures are forced to operate according to a single, mechanical logic, as interchangeable parts of an undifferentiated, homogenous sphere.

In the face of the expanding monoculture and its technological imperatives, more and more people are coming each day to recognize the critical importance of revitalizing local, face-to-face community. They recognize their common embedment within the life of this breathing planet, yet they know that such unity arises only from a vital and thriving multiplicity. A reciprocal respect and interdependence between richly different cultures -- each a dynamic expression of the unique earthly place, or bioregion, that supports it – is far more sustainable than a homogenous, planetary civilization.

Many of us have already worked for several decades on ecological and bioregional initiatives aimed at renewing local economies and the conviviality of place-based communities. Yet far too little progress was made by the movements for local self-sufficiency and sustainability. To be sure, our efforts were hindered by the steady growth of an industrial economy powered by the profligate burning of fossil fuel. Yet our efficacy was also weakened by our inability to recognize the immense influence of everyday language. Our work was weakened, that is, by our inability to discern that the spreading technologization of everyday life in the modern world (including the growing ubiquity of automobiles and telephones, of televisions and, most recently, personal computers) had been accompanied by a steady transformation in language -- by an increasing abstractness and generality in daily discourse. Local vernaculars had fallen into disuse; local stories had been forgotten; the oral forms and traditions by which place-specific knowledge had once been preserved and disseminated were no longer operative.

We in the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE) now recognize that a rejuvenation of real, face-to-face community – and the sensorial attunement to the local earth that ensures the vitality and sustenance of such community – simply cannot happen without a rejuvenation of the layer of language that goes hand in hand with such attunement. It cannot happen without renewing that primary layer of language, and culture, that underlies all our more abstract and technological forms of discourse. A renewal of place-based community cannot happen without a renewal of oral culture.

But does such a revitalization of oral, storytelling culture entail that we must renounce reading and writing? Not at all! It entails only that we leave space in our days for an interchange with one another and with the earth that is not mediated by technology – neither by the television, nor the computer, nor even the printed page.

Among writers, for instance, it entails that we allow that there are certain stories that one might come upon that should not be written down -- stories that we instead begin to tell, with our own tongue, in the particular places where those stories live.

It entails that as parents we set aside, now and then, the storybooks that we read to our children in order to actually tell our children a story with the whole of our gesturing body – or better yet, that we draw our kids out of doors in order to improvise a tale about the wild wind that’s now blustering its way through these city streets, plucking the hats off people’s heads…

And among educators, it entails that we begin to rejuvenate the arts of telling, and of listening, in the context of the living landscape where our lessons happen. For too long we have incarcerated the potent magic of linguistic meaning within an exclusively human space of signs. Hence the land itself has fallen mute; it now seems little more than a passive backdrop for human affairs, or a storehouse of resources waiting to be mined for purely human purposes. Can we return to the local land an implicit sense of its own inherent meaningfulness, its own many-voiced eloquence? Not without renewing the sensory craft of listening, and the sensuous art of storytelling. Can we help our students to translate the quantified abstractions of science into the language of direct experience, so that those abstract insights begin to come alive in our felt encounters with the animate earth around us? Can we begin to affirm our own co-evolved, carnal embedment within this blooming, buzzing proliferation of life, stirring within us a new humility in the face of a world that we did not create – in the face of a world that created us? Most importantly, can we begin with our students to restore the health and integrity of the local earth? Not without restorying the local earth. For our senses have become exceedingly estranged from the earthly sensuous. The age-old reciprocity between the human animal and the animate earth has long been short-circuited by our increasing involvement with our own creations, our own human-made technologies. And yet a simple tale, well-told, can shatter the spell – whether for an hour, or a day, or even a lifetime. We cannot restore the land without restorying the land.

There is no need to give up reading, nor to discard our computers, as long as we recall that such mediated and technological forms of interchange inevitably remain rooted in the more primary world of direct experience. As long as we remember, that is, that our involvement with the printed page and the digital screen draws its basic sustenance from our more immediate, face-to-face encounter with the flesh of the real.

Each medium of communication organizes our awareness in a particular way, each engaging us in a particular form of community. Without here analyzing all the diverse media that exert their claims upon our attention, we can acknowledge some very general traits:

~ Literacy and literate discourse (the ways of speaking and thinking implicitly informed by books, newspapers, magazines, and other printed media) is inherently cosmopolitan, mingling insights drawn from diverse traditions and places. Reading is a wonderful form of experience, but it is necessarily abstract relative to our direct sensory encounters in the immediacy of our locale.

~ Computer literacy, and our engagement with the internet, brings us almost instantaneous information from around the world, empowering virtual interactions with people from vastly different cultures. Yet such digital engagements are even more disembodied and placeless than our involvement with printed books and magazines. Indeed cyberspace seems to have no location at all, unless the “place” that we encounter through the internet is, well, the planet itself, transmuted into a weightless field of information. In truth, our increasing participation with email, e-commerce, and electronic information involves us in a discourse that is inherently global and globalizing. (It is this computerized form of communication, of course, that has enabled the rapid globalization of the free-market economy).

~ Oral culture (the culture of face to face storytelling) is inherently local. Far more concrete than those other modes of discourse, genuinely oral culture binds us not only to our immediate human community, but to the more-than-human community – the particular ecology of animals, plants and earthly elements in which we materially participate. In contrast to more abstract forms of media, the primary medium of oral communication is the atmosphere itself. In other words the unseen air, which is subtly different in each terrain, and which binds our own breathing bodies to the metabolism of oak trees and hawks and the storm clouds gathering above the city, is the implicit intermediary in all oral communication. As the most ancient and longstanding form of human discourse, oral culture provides the necessary soil and support for those more abstract styles of communication and reflection.

The Alliance for Wild Ethics holds that the globalizing culture of the internet, and the cosmopolitan culture of books, are both dependent, for their integrity, upon the place-based, vernacular culture of face-to-face storytelling.

When oral culture degrades, then the literate mind loses its bearings, forgetting its ongoing debt to the body and the breathing earth. When stories are no longer being told in the woods or along the banks of rivers -- when the land is no longer being honored, ALOUD!, as an animate, expressive power – then the human senses lose their attunement to the surrounding terrain. We no longer feel the particular pulse of our place – we no longer hear, or respond to, the many-voiced eloquence of the land. Increasingly blind and deaf, increasingly impervious to the sensuous world, the technological mind begins to lay waste to the earth.

We can be ardent readers (and even writers) of books, and enthusiastic participants in the world wide web and the internet, while recognizing that these abstract and almost exclusively human layers of culture will never be sufficient unto themselves. Without rejecting these rich forms of communication, we can nonetheless discern, today, that the rejuvenation of oral culture is an ecological imperative.

A few personal notes as I enthusiastically read this article:

1 I am reminded here of the Australian Aboriginal ideas of the "Songlines", tracks in the land that bear the "stories of the land" and the ancestral beings.

2 Like Spider Woman (Keresan, "Tse Che Nako") as the Earth Mother/Creatrix, stories are spun into the world, and become the conversant world, from a kind of universal, ensouled, non-local imagination, a participatory kind of creative consciousness that includes, but is not exclusive to, us.

3 I am inspired to copy, in my next blog entry, an interview I did with Dr. Rafael Montanez Ortiz, philosopher and artist I was privileged to meet. He had much to say along these lines 20 years ago when the interview took place.

4 "Story" includes the Numina, the participation of the intelligences of Place, and in this respect, the author is saying that an oral tradition is a much richer tapestry of direct experience that includes body movement, sound, the environment, and the various psychic energy exchanges that go on in the prescence of such.

5 IMMANANCE - as opposed to the theological concept of "Transcendance"

6 Mitakuye Oyasin. "All my Relations", the traditional Lakota blessing.

New Work

2009-05-10T17:38:00.025-07:00

Returning 2009

I needed to do these pieces as "prayers" for my brother. They speak much better to me than words. I had all of these wonderful casts of hands, and also tiles I made that i imprinted words and letters into..........words, syllables, sentences are what we create the stories of our lives with......but before the words, are the feelings, the belonging, the response, the one who sees and experiences. Perhaps dying is shattering all those "vessels" of words and ideas and constructs (and terra cotta pottery shards imprinted with words seems like a good medium for that concept) that we have allowed to define who we are are. Perhaps, leaving all the words and vessels behind, at last, we fly.

"Form is empty, emptiness is form.
Likewise, sensation, discrimination,
conditioning, and awareness are empty.
In this way, Shariputra, all things are emptiness;
they are without defining characteristics;
they are not born, they do not cease"

THE HEART SUTRA

The Heart Sutra

Somewhere within the "hoop" of who we are, within the space between the child and the old man or woman, the beginning place and the ending place.........in the middle is the heart. I think that above all is where our "soul making" has gone on.

Holy Mother Take My Hand (2009)

I think this is my favorite. The Mother's Hand takes ours, and regardless of what artifice and awards and self-hate we have accumulated, as it dissolves in the greater being of Her compassion, we see that we are all just children. From that perspective, the place of the "rio grande", it is hard to conceive of not forgiving, and cherishing, everyone.

Prayers for the Dying: Reliquary

This Reliquary has two potent symbols of transformation and rebirth to me - a feather left behind from the flight of a Phoenix, and the skin of a snake, eternal symbol of natures death/birth cycle. In the end, I think that's what we leave behind........artifacts, cast off skins, and stories that are containers for the imaginations of those left behind. But like these symbols, the end is also illusive.

Dream Weaver 2009

Somehow this image is very important to me. We ourselves are the great work of art in progress, and we ourselves are all connected to the Web of being. These are Spider Woman's hands, the Dream Weaver, weaving a new dream in the silence, the dark, the depths of our innermost being.

Here are some verses from the Weaver Song performed every year at the Spiral Dance Ritual.

No one knows why we are born

A web is made, a web is torn

But love is the home that we come from

and at the core we all are one

Of life's Spring may we drink deep

and awake to dream and die to sleep

and dreaming weave another form

a shining thread of life reborn

Weaver, Weaver, weave our thread

whole and strong into your Web

Healer, Healer, heal our pain

in love may we return again

~~~Starhawk

Doris Lessing Revisited

2009-05-07T11:08:00.009-07:00

Writers are often asked "How do you write?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?" Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration. If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

Doris Lessing,

Nobel Prize Speech, 2007

I felt like re-reading an excerpt I wrote about a year and a half ago, on the occasion of finding a signed copy of "The Habit of Loving" by one of my favorite authors, Doris Lessing, lying at my feet, on the street, in downtown Tucson. I've been reflecting that the habit of loving is ultimately the only truly necessary habit to cultivate, in order to lead a creative life. And for sheer pleasure, I'm going to copy below her entire acceptance speech, which she gave after receiving the Prize at the age of 88.
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My friend Rose says that I should write a book about syncronicity - I think if I did, I would call it the "Book of Common Miracles", or perhaps, just "Grace". Because I've often felt there is a Conversation going on that, in a quantum sense, once we notice, becomes continually more animated. In other words, we're often "tapped on the shoulder" by angels, and pre-occupied with daily concerns, we fail to notice miracles fluttering like their translucent wings under our very noses. I'm glad the angelic realms seem to include a good sense of humor.

Ecologist, magician, and philosopher David Abram (http://www.wildethics.org) has commented that perception is "a reciprocal phenomenon organized as much by the surrounding world as by oneself".* He suggests that a two-way dynamic of intention, or energy exchange, may be going on. In contrast to our idea of a non-living world we simply observe or act upon, Abram further comments that "the psyche is a property of the ecosystem as a whole", suggesting that we move beyond the notion that "one's mind is nothing other than the body itself".* Another way of putting it might be that we are "ensouled" in the whole world, a Conversant World. As writer Alice Walker has often said, "the Universe responds."

So the story I would like to tell concerns one of my favorite writers, a woman whose visionary books, most significantly SHIKASTA, have informed and inspired me for 35 years, Doris Lessing. The excerpt above is from her 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature speech, which she received at the age of 88. The visual is her personal note and autograph, found on the back cover of a paperback I found lying on the sidewalk at my feet, a pile of discarded books just a few blocks from where I live in downtown Tucson, Arizona. To me, it's a talisman - infused with energy from the living hand of this prolific and visionary writer, whose long and enduring gift she has never failed.

I've been very depressed this winter, which led me to go into therapy to tell and reveal to myself, some of the stories of my personal life, and hopefully untangle them so I can move through the bardo of transition I've been mired in. I do not like the cynicism and bitterness that post-menopausally "haunts" me.......the Habit of Loving is the discipline from which creativity arises, and without it's hopeful window, the river dries up. I've been blessed to find a wise counselor to listen to me. And in the "unmasking process" (as she puts it) I've often felt like a ghost within the "legend" of my former self.......therapy is rather a painful process! And I've had plenty of doubts as to whether being an artist matters anymore.

So when I found"The Habit of Loving" at my feet while strolling down a residential street near where I live I picked it up with pleasure. To find a personal autograph on the inside (dated 1982) by the author........is pure magic. Personal magic - because if it was by Stephen King, or any of the thousands of authors I don't know or don't care about, it wouldn't mean a thing to me. But this is a talisman, as if, in some wonderful way, a creative spark was passed on to me from someone I who has spoken to me with her words for many long years, informing me within her worlds. And a reminder to not only respect, but CHERISH the gifts of creativity and expression we're given. It's too easy to forget - they are high privilege.

In her speech, Lessing remembers her life early life in Africa, in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia. She urges us to remember how precious the gifts of literacy really are. Here is something she has to say about Story I love:

"We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill.

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative."**

*"The Perceptual Implications of Gaia", David Abram, THE ECOLOGIST (1985)

**© The Nobel Foundation 2007
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I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in 1956, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.

This is north-west Zimbabwe early in the 80s, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa", as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like every other built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books or Biros. In the library there are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or titles like Weekend in Paris and Felicity Finds Love.

There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The headmaster has embezzled the school funds and is suspended. My friend doesn't have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from him when he is paid and will probably never pay it back. The pupils range from six to 26, because some who did not get schooling as children are here to make it up. Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can't study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they set off for school and when they get back.

As I sit with my friend in his room, people shyly drop in, and everyone begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London," one man says. "They taught us to read but we have no books." Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books. I was there some days. The dust blew. The pumps had broken and the women were having to fetch water from the river. Another idealistic teacher from England was rather ill after seeing what this "school" was like.

The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens. The children here have a visit from some well-known person every week: these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils; a visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.

As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: "Please send us books." But there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.

Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty? I do my best. They are polite.

I'm sure that some of them will one day win prizes. Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. "You know how it is," one of the teachers says. "A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used." Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men's libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.

We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.

Not long ago, a friend in Zimbabwe told me about a village where the people had not eaten for three days, but they were still talking about books and how to get them, about education.

I belong to an organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grassroots. They told me that the villages, unlike what is reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey to discover what people in Zimbabwe wanted to read, and found the results were the same as those of a Swedish survey I had not known about. People want to read the same kind of books that people in Europe want to read - novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective stories, plays, and do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account. All of Shakespeare too. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a set book, like The Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular simply because it just happens to be there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons, is the most popular of all novels.

Our organisation was helped from the very start by Norway, and then by Sweden. Without this kind of support our supplies of books would have dried up. We got books from wherever we could. Remember, a good paperback from England costs a month's wages in Zimbabwe: that was before Mugabe's reign of terror. Now, with inflation, it would cost several years' wages. But having taken a box of books out to a village - and remember there is a terrible shortage of petrol - I can tell you that the box was greeted with tears. The library may be a plank on bricks under a tree. And within a week there will be literacy classes - people who can read teaching those who can't, citizenship classes - and in one remote village, since there were no novels written in the Tonga language, a couple of lads sat down to write novels in Tonga. There are six or so main languages in Zimbabwe and there are novels in all of them: violent, incestuous, full of crime and murder.

It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe's regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.

This links up improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls - Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.

Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. "I shall be a writer too," they say, "because I've the same kind of house you were in."

But here is the difficulty. Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.

I have been looking at the speeches by some of the recent Nobel prizewinners. Take last year's winner, the magnificent Orhan Pamuk. He said his father had 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition. Take VS Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write, and when he got to England he would visit the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition. Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes; taught by that wonderfully brave, bold mind. In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the tradition.

I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well-cared-for huts of the better off. There was a school, but like the one I have described. He found a discarded children's encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.

On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites - the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe, not easily, not under Mugabe.

All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to becoming writers. I would say learning to read from the printed labels on jam jars and discarded encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education beyond them, living in huts with many children - an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.

Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than 100 years before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations, the transition was made from these stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books.

Books were literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book quite another. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.

Here I am talking about books never written, writers who could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.

Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration." If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire: "Is she good-looking?" If this is a man: "Charismatic? Handsome?" We joke, but it is not a joke.

This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of hype begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening. He, she, is flattered, pleased. But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me."

Some much-publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: "Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don't let it go."

My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa that I can revive and look at whenever I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading across the sky at evening? How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the pale grassy banks of the Zambesi, the water dark and glossy, with all the birds of Africa darting about? Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars?

There are other memories too. A young African man, 18 perhaps, in tears, standing in what he hopes will be his "library". A visiting American, seeing that his library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young man had taken each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. "But," we say, "these books were sent to be read, surely?" "No," he replies, "they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?"

I have seen a teacher in a school where there were no textbooks, not even a chalk for the blackboard. He taught his class of six- to 18-year-olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting: "Two times two is ... " and so on. I have seen a girl - perhaps not more than 20, also lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros - teach the ABC by scratching the letters in the dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.

I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.

The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn out of a book. She is reading Anna Karenina. She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman's headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines of people, all thirsty, but he doesn't have enough water for them. He is angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds.

This man is curious. He says to the young woman: "What are you reading?"

"It is about Russia," says the girl.

"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.

The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity, though her eyes are red from dust. "I was best in the class. My teacher said I was best."

The young woman resumes her reading: she wants to get to the end of the paragraph.

The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother says: "Fanta makes them thirsty."

The Indian knows he shouldn't do this, but he reaches down to a great plastic container beside him, behind the counter, and pours out two plastic mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is she.

Now she hands over to him a plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman and the children watch him closely so that he doesn't spill any.

She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly but the paragraph fascinates her and she reads it again.

"Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same time visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man she cared for, Varenka looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a smile that said too much."

This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies of magazines, some pages of newspapers, girls in bikinis.

It is time for her to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off back along the four miles to her village. Outside, the lines of waiting women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it will cost this girl, going back home with the two clinging children. He would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really understand it.

Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenina stuck here on this counter in a remote Indian store? It is like this.

A certain high official, United Nations, as it happens, bought a copy of this novel in the bookshop when he set out on his journeys to cross several oceans and seas. On the plane, settled in his business-class seat, he tore the book into three parts. When he was settled, his seatbelt tight, he said aloud to whomever could hear: "I always do this when I've a long trip. You don't want to have to hold up some heavy great book." The novel was a paperback, but, true, it is a long book. When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the airhostess, and sent it back to his secretary, who was travelling in the cheaper seats.

Meanwhile, down in the Indian store, the young woman is holding on to the counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans, since she is a modern woman, but over them she has put on the heavy woollen skirt, part of traditional garb of her people: her children can easily cling on to it, the thick folds. She sends a thankful look at the Indian, who she knows likes her and is sorry for her, and she steps out into the blowing clouds. The children have gone past crying, and their throats are full of dust anyway.

This is hard, oh yes, it is hard, this stepping, one foot after another, through the dust that lays in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard, hard - but she is used to hardship, is she not? Her mind is on the story she has been reading. She is thinking: "She is just like me, in her white headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry him. (She has not finished more than that one paragraph). Yes, and a man will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the children, yes, he will love me and look after me."

She thinks. My teacher said there was a library there, bigger than the supermarket, a big building, and it is full of books. The young woman is smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school. My children will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers - my teacher told me I could be a teacher. They will live far from here, earning money. They will live near the big library and enjoy a good life.

You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store? It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it. On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she would give her children once home, and drink a little herself. On she goes, through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.

We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.

Prayers for the Dying

2009-05-05T06:44:00.021-07:00

My brother was a Buddhist, with interests in other religions as well. I am pleased to have found some beautiful prayers for him. I also remembered a poem I wrote a very long time ago, around the time the singer Tim Buckley died. I include it just because it seems strange thing to recall it, after all these years....Tim's exquisite music and vision was a part of the youth Glenn and I shared as well.

When my time has come and
impermanence and death
have caught up with me,
when the breath ceases
and body and mind
go their separate ways
may I not experience delusion,
attachment and clinging,
but remain in the natural state
of ultimate reality.

Longchenpa Rabjampa

Now when the bardo of dying dawns upon me,
I will abandon grasping, yearning and attachment,
Enter undistracted into a clear awareness of the teaching,
And eject my consciousness into the space of unborn awareness;
As I leave this compound body of flesh and blood
I will know it to be a transitory illusion.

Tibetan BOOK OF THE DEAD
(Padmasambhava)

Form is empty, emptiness is form.
Likewise, sensation, discrimination,
conditioning, and awareness are empty.
In this way, Shariputra, all things are emptiness;
they are without defining characteristics;

they are not born, they do not cease
THE HEART SUTRA

I invite you to enter
into Sacred Time and Space,
into a way of seeing broad and spacious.
See this Day, from the time you arose this morning
until you sleep this evening, as one Ceremony,
divided into small and familiar rituals,

your Heart as the Altar.
You, part of the Cycles of Light and Darkness.
Now begin to see your Life,
from the moment of your Conception
until the time of your Death
as one long, continuous Ceremony,
filled with many rituals,
some familiar, some unknown and challenging.
Your Home and all Your Relations, the Altar.
You, part of many Seasons and Cycles.
Now see this Ceremony of your Life
as part of a much larger Ceremony that extends
Seven Generations into the Past and Seven into the Future,
made up of many Births and Deaths.
This beautiful spinning Earth the Altar.
You, part of the great Ebb and Flow.
Now, if You will, imagine this larger Ceremony
to be but one part of a Ceremony so grand,
so magnificent as to be hardly comprehensible,
a vast Ceremonial Circle, with
Circles of Dancing Light,
and You,

a Dancer on the Altar that is the Universe,
where Time is Eternal.

Sedonia Cahill

On the day I die, when I'm being carried
toward the grave, don't weep. Don't say,
He's gone! He's gone.

Death has nothing
to do with going away. The sun sets and the moon sets,

but they're not gone. Death is a coming together.
The tomb looks like a prison,but it's really release into union.
The human seed goes down in the ground
like a bucket into the well where Joseph is.

It grows and comes up full of some unimagined beauty.

Your mouth closes here and opens with a shout of joy there.

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am sunlight on ripened grain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there. I did not die.

Mary Elizabeth Frye

BIND the sick man to Heaven, for from Earth he is being torn away!
Of the brave man who was so strong, his strength has departed.
Of the righteous servant, the force does not return,
In his bodily frame he lies dangerously ill.
But Ishtar,
who in her dwelling is grieved
descends from her mountain unvisited of men.
To the door of the sick man she comes.
The sick man listens!
Who is there? Who comes?
It is Ishtar, daughter of the Moon!
Like pure silver may his garment be shining white!
Like brass may he be radiant!
To the Sun may he ascend!

(Assyrian prayer for the dying)

O nobly born
The time may soon come

for you to seek new levels of reality.
You may soon be face to face with the Clear Light.
You may soon experience it in its truth.
The state in which all things are like the void and the cloudless sky,
And the naked spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum;
At this moment, know yourself and abide in that state.

Concentrate on the unity of all living beings.
Hold onto the Clear Light.
Use it to attain understanding and love.
Remember the unity of all living things.
Remember the bliss of the Clear Light.

O nobly born
Try to reach the experience of the Clear Light.
The Light. The Radiance. Join it.
It is part of you.

Your own consciousness, inseparable from the body of radiance

has no birth, nor death.
It is the immutable light.

O nobly born
The Radiant Energy of the Seed
From which come all living forms,
Shoots forth and strikes against you
With a light so brilliant you will scarcely be able to look at it.
Do not be frightened.
This is the Source
Ever manifesting in different forms.
Accept it. Merge with it.
Let it flow through you.
Fuse in the Halo of Rainbow Light

O nobly born
You are joining into the fluid unity of life.
Flow with it. Feel the pulse of the sun's heart.
Do not fear the ecstasy.
Do not resist the flow.
Let your heart burst in love for all life.

Do not try to hold to your old bodily fears.
Float in the Rainbow Sea.

COCOONS
(for Tim Buckley)

Once I watched pollen

take to the air, the fragrance

of lemon trees flowering in Ojai;

I admired patterns of water

running across rocks,

I made songs about the ocean's exaltation.

Now, both pollen and promise -

I am. I know
the life of lemon trees,

the water runs in me.

What I have most cherished

has fallen from my hands

Fortune, ambition, and chance

are songs I left behind me.

I have left the pain of slow decay

to become something
less than light

Lauren Raine (1975)

interim

2009-05-03T20:54:00.007-07:00

Dream Weaver, 2009

It's kind of ironic that today I finally moved into my studio, and I'll have to vacate it at the end of the month. I took the studio back in November, and then my brother had his stroke, and I've had to spend much of my winter in Tucson. I rented it to a friend from New York, who lived in it for the past 4 months. Now it looks like I'll have to summer in Tucson, leaving for D.C. in August. I've not really had a chance to get to know this town, to feel a part of it, before it's time to leave again. Will I be back? I don't know. So I went into the studio today, and kind of wandered around, making tea and unsure of how to inhabit it. I finished one of my "hands" pieces..........I would like to make a series of such "tiles" someday.

The fact of the matter is that my winter has been spent going back and forth between Tucson, and I've accomplished little in my creative life except many questions about what I can, should, or want to do in the future. My brother suffered a massive stroke in November, and has been sustained by breathing machines and feeding machines in a vegetative state since then. I am suspended in a kind of "bardo" with him - I so often wished I could help him in his unhappy life, and was impotent to do so. Now I can't even help him to die, thanks to the obscenity of a technology that keeps people alive whose spirits have left. This is truly what I feel about my brother. He's not there.

My mother and other brother want me to live at home with them and become my mothers caretaker, a job I've on and off tried to fulfill for years now, a familial cord that has kept me for years in a situation I find depressing, lonely, and never somehow able to transcend. My creativity dries up in Tucson like water on the hot pavement, and it never seems to matter how many affirmations or churches or meetings I go to. Without my creativity, what am I? Living with people who do not have the means to value my creative life, I soon, even now and after all these years, doubt its worth myself. Self pity? I don't know.

At any rate, this has been the winter of waiting for my poor brother to die. There is no grace in this, only the awful impersonal gray halls of hospitals and nursing homes, and denial which seems to me to be endemic to our world. My mother and surviving brother, David, are unable to talk about the prospect of Glenn dying - it is as if it is something that "cannot be spoken" or it will break the spell of imagining that he is somehow going to get well. What a strange culture America is, that cannot speak about death until it suddenly is no longer possible to avoid the truth of it. Could I pull the plug, if I had the power? I do not know. I pray that he is not conscious, not able to perceive himself paralyzed within a body that will never be able to function again. I have been able to get Glenn into a hospice program, and have found a social worker and a minister to offer help and comfort to my mother when the time comes.

Me? I would be false if I didn't say I wish I could just stay in my studio for a while and see what emerges, or get in my car and drive east, watching the world green again, thinking of the emergence of life, instead of all this death. At this moment, I have neither spiritual insight, or artistic meaning and expression to draw from this that will somehow give the situation energy, transcendance, meaning. It's what it is, and sometimes, as the poet says (Robin Williamson) "A stone is just a stone."

I seem to have pulled my "Butterfly" book out - a fantastic coffee table book by photographer Thomas Marent. It's the truth of all of this, transformation and waiting rooms and passages. If I allow any anger in this, the awful stuck ignorance of my family, and a society that denies the passages of life..........causes so much more suffering than is necessary.

The butterfly, it seems to me, is the true symbol for all of this.

Arab Woman Talking (and dancing)

2009-05-02T11:44:00.008-07:00

Photo by Baskar Banerji

In 2006 when I was in Berkeley preparing masks for the Spiral Dance, i met Lana Nassar, and enjoyed long talks with this inspiring sacred dancer, visionary, and truly compassionate artist in Cafe Trieste. We spoke about the Sacred Feminine as she manifests throughout the Middle East. Since that time Lana has taken her performance "Arab Woman Talking" to not only California, but to Boston and Virginia. Lana was born in Jordan, and has a home in both the U.S. and her native Middle East. Remembering her recently, I am pleased to include the following article she sent me in my book "The Masks of the Goddess". (It's also my intention soon to write about the meanings of sacred dance, which Lana embodies. For those interested, also read about Prema Dasara and the 21 Praises to Tara.)

For information about Lana's play "Arab Woman Talking", her dance performances, as well as tours she leads to the Middle East, visit her website: www.LanaNasser.com.

When we remember the sacred feminine, it remembers itself. The Goddess lives through us and is brought into the world through our creative expression.

From a young age, I knew that when I danced I connected with something much larger than myself. I did not know what it was and had no name for it. I was never officially trained as a dancer, I grew up in Jordan and simply watched my mother and followed suite. At sixteen, I came to the US and learnt new dances. I studied psychology and consciousness, and I danced. With time, dance became my spiritual practice; it opened me to new ways of expression and set me on my path.

For a long time, I had reservations about the term ‘belly dance’: it was a Western term used to describe a dance I simply knew as raqs; I felt objectified and exotic-ized by it. But I also had reservations about my womanhood and my power. I revisited the "belly" during my graduate research-through indirect means. I was writing my thesis on the jinn, fire spirits from Arabic lore, accredited for inspiring poets, but also blamed for possession. Spirit is said to dwell "in the belly". I learned that when blocked, creativity caused depression, but dance could release it. I learned about ritual dances of healing. “Dance du ventre” is ancient; the belly is the seat of passion and fear. The womb: the creative center.

I "delved into the belly" to discover the Goddess. I experienced her through my body - a most ecstatic feeling! I danced with her stories, from tales of Inanna and Isis, to Al-Lat, Ishtar, and Aphrodite. In the process I gained insight into myself as well as my relationships; and I began to dialogue with dreams - with my personal myths.

At that time I had a dream in which an old woman handed me a scarf. I was going to wrap it around my hips, but she stopped me, saying: "Tie it around your head." I realize this dream mirrored my waking questions about academia or art. I did not know which career to choose. I danced the dream to explore its meaning, and this led to my first solo piece. I continued to perform at schools, museums, and conferences for the study of Dreams. With time “Arab Woman Talking” was born, my one-woman show, a synthesis of both my research and artistic expression, providing me a platform on which to reconcile dual aspects of myself: mind and body, masculine and feminine. By performing I discovered my own story.

I began giving workshops, sharing my process of working with symbols from both myths and dreams. My methods developed though personal exploration, as well as from teachers who inspired me. They were women who embodied this sacred energy: artists and educators, drummers and dreamers, my own mother. I worked with women from diverse backgrounds, young and old. When we danced together, all barriers dissolved, and we spoke a common language. To witnessing the Goddess awaken always rewarded me.

As I continued to explore lore of the Goddess, I learned about the Shekinah-Sakina. Sakina literally means "indwelling". I had never heard of her before, although she was the feminine divine in both Judaism and Islam. To me, discovering the Sakina felt like coming home. I remember reading a quote by an Israili artist, Dorit Bat Shalom, who wrote that the Sakina hadDorit Bat Shalom, who wrote that the Sakina had been driven out of the holy land.....and that there could be no lasting peace without Her. I felt this to be true.
In a dream, I heard:

"Travel around the world and teach about the Goddess"

- and that dream inspired a vision of dancing barefoot - around the world - for peace. I imagined dancing with other women at special places, celebrating the Goddess, celebrating the earth.

That's where my concept for the “Journey to Jordan” emerged, and I scheduled my first trip this coming spring. I hope it will extend to other countries and sacred sites, connecting people, creating harmony, restoring balance.

Lana Nasser, 2007

Veils

2009-04-25T05:49:00.006-07:00

Photo of Istalif area by Shumsa (2007)

I seem to be awfully dry in the area of writing interesting items in my blog these days. The truth is, it's a difficult time. Much of my time is spent in Tucson being a support to my family, which is exhausting. Sometimes I find myself up late at night surfing the internet, looking at volunteer opportunities overseas........something I've dreamed of for a long time, and there certainly are many excellent opportunities. I'm considering taking an ESL certificate with the University of Arizona this summer. Perhaps that's what inspired me to pull up this story from my archives.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Istalif, outside of Kabul, was famous for its blue glass artisans. Maybe it still is. I don’t know – my memories are of bulky azure glasses, and thick strands of cerulean beads that jingled on the camel harnesses, and occasionally the wrists, of nomadic Kootchi women passing through Kabul, where I lived as a teenager, in caravans. In the late spring, waters rushed down in cold, lively streams from fierce mountains still snow-clad. An exclusive restaurant catering to foreigners afforded a high, grand view of it all with coffee and croissants.

Debbie Simon (my best friend) and I were, like all 16 year olds, eager to get away from the boring conversations of our elders. Dressed in our French coats, our high black boots and mod turtlenecks, with adolescent stealth we escaped the tabled terraces for a while, to walk below on grey granite boulders that overlooked a stream of cold spring water.We were young, fashionable, and elated with the prospect of leaving Afghanistan.

Debbie’s father worked for the Embassy, mine was with AID, both had completed their assignments, and we were going back to the states at last.To the Rolling Stones and boys and beaches and college. As we talked excitedly, not so far away was a familiar sight – a group of local women doing laundry by the stream. Seeing us approach, they had dropped their chadoris over their faces, and now resembled a collection of multi-colored tents huddled among the grey rocks.

I didn’t notice when one “tent” disengaged from the rest and quietly approached us.But we grew silent as she stood, silently, before us, her face hidden under layers of pleated cloth, an opaque net before her eyes.Hands emerged from the chador to lift it above her face, and before us stood a girl of 16 or 17.

Black eyes lined in kohl shone with humor.She smiled shyly at each of us as she lifted her veil, dropped it before her face again, turned and walked back to the group of veiled women as Debbie and I stood silently on our rock by the stream.

I don't know why she approached us. Perhaps she just wanted to let us know that she also was young and pretty, reminding us of our common youth, and yet living in worlds so far apart. I never forgot that moment, anyway - it was a gift.

archetypes

2009-04-23T14:06:00.023-07:00

A month or so ago, my therapist, Jeaneen, asked me what archetype I thought my mother was. I couldn't answer, any more than I could have said which archetypes informed who or what my own life stories have been. So I put the question off for "later examination".

Yesterday I was looking at a photo I had placed on my altar, next to the photo of my brother. And I realized suddenly (actually, while at the riverbend hotsprings, which is a good place to get great ideas while inconveniently wet).........that a syncronicity had supplied the answer to my "for later examination" question. Sometimes, things work that way, once you begin to notice. Reviewing much of the stories in this blog, I see that I'm always recording and wondering at such phenomenon. The mythic dimension leaking through..........

The photo was taken in 2004 at the opening to an exhibit of my masks (which I shared with artist Catherine Nash MFA). Valerie James, an artist who lives in Amado, took the photo randomly. I kept it around because it's the most recent photo I have of my mom and me together...the last photo I have of her when she was fully here, fully cognizant, to be exact. And now Jeaneen's question is also within the frame of this photo, as well, perhaps, within the frame of having placed it upon an altar and thus imbuing it with sacred attention ..... at any rate, a serendipitous truth emerges that answers the question about archetypes.

My mother has the "Corn Mother" mask above her. That archetype of unconditional, self-sacrificing, idealized motherly love, devoted to the nurturance of her children without any limitations - is the very truth of what my mother has devoted herself to, both consciously and unconsciously, with its bright and "shadow" sides. She has lived the story of Selu. And for me, the picture could not be more appropriate. Above me, Spider Woman, the weaver, higher Self, the artist and divine co-creator, dedication to a vision of ecology, my most tangible mythos of deity. And beside me, Butterfly Woman, my personal "life story" archetype. "La Mariposa" is a story I wrote more than 15 years ago. And here in this photo........is one more living metaphor, one more poem about our journey together.

The Goddess and the "Book of Eli" once more......

2009-04-19T19:31:00.003-07:00

I can't resist showing some of the art from "The Return of the Mother"show which went up in Carrizozo, New Mexico this month. These photos were forwarded by my friend Georgia Stacy, who is one of the shows organizers. The entire set from "The Book of Eli" has been torn down, the gallery restored, and it looks as if the world that Hollywood created in this little town never was. I still can't get over the syncronicity and hopeful paradox of having a dark, patriarchal, post-apocalyptic vision arise, and then dissipate like a dream, replaced with beautiful affirmations of the "return of the Goddess"........

Just for contrast, I copied the earlier post below as well.

THE GODDESS AND THE BOOK OF ELI

The Goddess and the Book of Eli (1) (photo by Georgia Stacy)

Corrisozo, N.M., set of "The Book of Eli", filming 3-2009. (Photo by Georgia Stacy)

I had a wonderful 4 day adventure into the "outback" of New Mexico, visiting a group of women artists who will be putting on a group show in Carrizozo, New Mexico called "The Return of the Mother". It will be opening on April 11th at Gallery 408 in Carrizozo. It was such a pleasure to meet these amazing women, among them sculptor Georgia Stacy, and fabric artist Karen Smith, who is creating a Sanctuary for the Divine Feminine called Kindred Spirits Sanctuary in the mountains of her beautiful home (she also has a labyrinth!).

"The Black Madonna and the Book of Eli"
(composite photo with G. Stacy)

Inanna Champagne had been invited to speak to groups in the area about her work, and I was also invited to bring along my dvd about the Masks of the Goddess project. As we sat having coffee in prior to departure, Inanna and I both noticed that (this is the honest to goodness truth!) a tiny spider had slowly come down on its thread to hang eye level between us. We observed it move up a bit, and then down a bit, and then up a bit......back and forth for over an hour. At last, when we were ready to leave, I took it by the thread and placed the latest envoy of Spider Woman on my altar. We felt well aspected and blessed on our journey, and indeed, so we were! I may talk about a "webbed vision" in the abstract, but when these kinds of little syncronicities happen, well........the mystery of the divine has a great sense of humor. And our lives are always full of everyday Milagros.

Arriving at Carrizozo, which is a small town in central New Mexico, one drives through vast reaches of blond Georgia O'Keefe landscapes with brooding blue mountains in the distance. We saw that we were in time for the town's major attraction - the filming of a motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Denzel Washington. An entire downtown street (where the Gallery my friends' show will be) had been converted into a post-apocalyptic, "Road Warrior" type set, complete with rusting automobiles, foam core burned out buildings, and sad little "cubby holes" where, presumably, desperate children of the apocalypse lived. Dirty, dread-locked young people (extras) milled about, while armored cars raced up and down the street, and the sounds of "snipers" guns echoed in the crisp, windy New Mexico air.

Joyce, a local visionary, was our tour guide. She had been there since the beginning of the town's transformation, watching the sets being built over facades of the existing buildings. They took 2 months to create, and next week it will all come down, revealing again the gallery where "The Return of the Mother" will be in April, after the foam core and plaster is peeled away.

There is a splendid metaphor in here! It was weird to see this contemporary nightmare made so vivid that I could actually walk around in it. Life and art are sometimes seamless.

To read about the movie see THE BOOK OF ELI . I don't think they have a trailer yet......... Try also this link: Book of Eli, which describes the movie as:

"A post-apocalyptic Western, in which a lone man fights his way across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind."

It's interesting that there are two post apocalyptic movies scheduled for release ( the other is The Road, with Viggo Mortenson) within the next year. Like the "Road Warrior" of the '80's, our world has a fascination with images of a future in which all that remains of our civilization is a grim landscape of warlords shooting it out with each other, grimly pre-occupied with power, guns, and unceasing violence. That's the mythos of a dominator, hierarchy culture.

Yet in reality, many people right here in New Mexico live in a world of enormous cooperation and generosity. That is also a part of the human spirit, the future's challenge and potential. I know many, many communities all over this country who participate in a "webbed" life-serving consciousness, envisioning sustainable futures. Cooperation, negotiation, and a collective means is actually the basis of any civilization.

We are capable of enormous violence, yes. Perhaps, the ultimate violence. But we are also capable of enormous, vast, cooperation. As we approach 2012, we approach the next evolutionary step for humanity, wherein we must understand and participate in the larger life of our planet, of Gaia the Mother, or we will face the possibility of extinction.

I am saddened to think so many are conditioned by the media to think that a violent world is our only possibility. How poorly what Gloria Steinam has called the "Cult of Masculinity" prepares us for the real challenges of the future. Because our survival can only be achieved through cooperation. But I doubt we'll see a movie about the "end of days" wherein heroic people get together to vision quest where the best place is to settle might be, or gather to share their food supplies, or figure out a way to dig a new community well, or for that matter, hold healing rituals and prayer circles. And yet, that is what people do together, all over the place.

So, I am pleased (and amused) by the synchronicity of a show called The Return of the Great Mother rising from the ashes of the movie set, a bright alternative to the current paradigm's dark vision. Georgia saw a Goddess shape in one of her photos of the Book of Eli set, and I couldn't help but play with the images myself a bit. Artists are myth makers.

We're weaving the future with the stories we tell. So what are they?

Links to Myth and Culture

2009-04-10T10:25:00.012-07:00

This is the terrace at the old restaurant, beautiful and delapidated, at the lodge at Elephant Butte Dam. I love to hang out there. When I paint again, I want to paint some of these amazing "portals". In the winter you can sit on these terraces, and view the whole vast expanse of the lake, and not hear a human voice, only the cries of raptors and water birds circling miles away.

Today I got "buzzed" by a peregrine falcon that circled me and then later, by an amazing and rare yellow butterfly. I will consider this a good sign to seek, get the big picture, and keep being willing to change.

And the Butte sits with intense prescence, sentinal of the lake. New Mexico is a mysterious place, another country, with a very different time sense. The solace of open spaces.

I wanted to put on my blog some of the MYTH RESOURCES I am aware of, to refresh my memory as much as to share with any who may be interested. I am a long time disciple of Joseph Campbell, whose "Hero With A Thousand Faces" and his 1987 interviews with Bill Moyers (The Power of Myth) set me on my own vision quest.

* Mythic Passages
* Mything Links
* Cultural Mythology: American Notions of Self & Country
* Imaginal Institute- Ideas Like Rabbits
* Mythic Rhythm
* MythNow Blog- Joseph Campbell Foundation
* Mythopoetics in Culture
* The Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts
* Pacifica Graduate School
* The Journal of Mythic Arts
* The World Cafe
* Parabola Magazine
* Institute for Cultural Change

I'll get the links to these on the blog soon - but here they are for the Googling. And a few I've missed of course.

Midwifery

2009-04-07T08:36:00.010-07:00

Ancestral Midwifery 2009

This is a recent piece, actually cast from the hands of Lori, who I met last summer at Brushwood during the festivals. She is a midwife at the Midwife Center for Birth & Women's Health in Pittsburgh, Pa. Syncronistically, she was the second midwife I met last year who had impact on me, the first being Ilana, who I met in my Kripalu workshop. The gesture was Lori's, the piece evolved on its own. Birth canal.

A few people have commented that the piece is disturbingly visceral - well, I don't know how to respond to that. We are numbed daily with the media's gruesome "entertainments" , and the daily body count in Iraq, or Cleveland, or Darfur. (It says something about popular culture that Hanibal the cannibal has become a cultural movie icon, and sex seems to be endlessly associated with vampires).

And yet, the suggestion of a BIRTH CANAL makes viewers squeamish. Some have commented that it seems uncomfortably sexual. But where else, exactly, does birth come from? Except for the immaculate conception, most of us enter the embodied state in pain, blood, sweat, viscera. Giving birth is one of the most excruciating experiences a woman can have, and also the most ecstatic. I wonder if some of the reaction to this piece has to do with some deeply embedded cultural/religious associations with birth...........I think about the mythos that imposed an "immaculate conception" on Christianity, or the long, involved taboos found in earlier Jewish traditions in which women are considered "unclean" after giving birth, and have to go through long periods of "purification". If so, then the piece has succeeded, and I should figure out a way to make it much more disturbing!

Judy Chicago, from "The Birth Project"

Anyway, I reflect on the synchronicity of meeting two midwives who affected me deeply within a few months. I have often felt that certain archetypes rise up from the "collective unconscious", bubbling up from some non-local ground of being - perhaps, artists, shamans, and madmen notice them, bubbling into the universal dream. We are surely "midwiving" a new world, a new paradigm.

Personally, because syncronicities are something I think about, perhaps I am also "midwiving" my own life in some ways. Truth is, I'm ambivalent about about many things that once were so clear, if not outright assumptions. It think it was Plato who said "the more I know, the more I realize I don't know".

I would like to introduce here a related work by an emerging young artist, Tabor of New York City.

Untitled, 2009

Diving into abstract expressionism with unbridled passion, Tabor is notable for the energetic gestures of his paintings. Notice the use of very bold brush strokes to create an obscured "vestica piscis" form upon a vivid yellow ground......suggesting, perhaps, the emergence of diverse life forms from the black depths of a metaphorical "birth canal".

Here's a view of the artist's studio with the work in progress:

And the artist at home with his favorite model, Shari, his mother. Tabor (who just turned 2 and happens to be my grandson) is well on his way to a successful career in the arts.

The artist at work:

praises for the world

2009-03-24T07:43:00.007-07:00

my religion is rain
my religion is stone
my religion reveals itself to me
in sweaty epiphanies

every leaf, every river,
every animal,
your body

(drew dellinger)

Eureka! I Found it.............that poem by Drew Dellinger that I first saw on Jennifer Berezon's DVD PRAISES FOR THE WORLD. This wonderful DVD, which I bought after seeing her perform last year at Kripalu, is of a ritual performance in Oakland that featured the poet Drew Delinger, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Joanna Macy, and many others, all within the container of Jennifer's devotional song.

Mr. Dellinger's poem has haunted me, especially after I wore the DVD out by playing it over and over again. So here, with the miracle of blogging, is a link to a UTube video in which he recites it live, and I invite anyone reading this to listen, and to listen to the music of Jennifer Berezon as well. For my own pleasure, I copy the poem below.

Having a show up currently called "Earth Shrines and Reliquaries", as Earth Day approaches, I want to share the work of these artists.

hymn to the sacred body of the universe

(drew dellinger)

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

for one instant
to dwell in the presence of the galaxies
for one instant
to live in the truth of the heart
the poet says this entire traveling cosmos is
“the secret One slowly growing a body”

two eagles are mating—
clasping each other’s claws
and turning cartwheels in the sky
grasses are blooming
grandfathers dying
consciousness blinking on and off
all of this is happening at once
all of this, vibrating into existence
out of nothingness

every particle
foaming into existence
transcribing the ineffable

arising and passing away
arising and passing away
23 trillion times per second—
when Buddha saw that,
he smiled

16 million tons of rain are falling every second
on the planet
an ocean
perpetually falling
and every drop
is your body
every motion, every feather, every thought
is your body
time
is your body,
and the infinite
curled inside like
invisible rainbows folded into light

every word of every tongue is love
telling a story to her own ears

let our lives be incense
burning
like a hymn to the sacred
body of the universe
my religion is rain
my religion is stone
my religion reveals itself to me in
sweaty epiphanies

every leaf, every river,
every animal,
your body
every creature trapped in the gears
of corporate nightmares
every species made extinct
was once
your body

10 million people are dreaming
that they’re flying
junipers and violets are blossoming
stars exploding and being born
god
is having
déjà vu
I am one
elaborate
crush
we cry petals
as the void
is singing

you are the dark
that holds the stars
in intimate
distance

that spun the whirling,
whirling,
world
into existence

let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

Equinox Reflections

2009-03-20T14:15:00.013-07:00

The Big Thaw

starts with a trickle

water running through silence

as innocous as breath, a slight relaxation

at corners of the mouth.

Just when winter has become a habit,

an old coat the sun peels off with a touch.

Your foot leaves a signature in new mud,

shiny as a new skin

or fresh, primed canvas.

You notice a blade of grass:

green, defiantly green.

Inhale, you take your coat off

a crocus opens

in the blue iris

of someone's glance.

Vermont, 1982

Somehow the Spring Equinox has arrived, this winter, as other winters, has been survived, the drumbeat of Mother Earth beneath feet bared is quickening, the hum of life vibrates, the budding of trees is again a cyclical magic. If I still lived in Vermont, I would be hearing the sounds of snow melting in little trickles, a kind of underground, unconscious energy reflected in the eyes I look into. I've pulled up a poem I wrote when I did live in Vermont. Vermont is a place, with it's turning wheel of seasons, that I have always held close to my heart.

So I took the day off. I remember many times when the Equinox was celebrated with large groups of people, in rituals many of which I organized or hosted or collaborated on. Now, I live very quietly indeed in a little town that (at night) really does seem to fall off the edge of the world into some starry pool of the galaxy......and I must celebrate the Equinox alone. It's been a hard winter, a winter of composting so many layers of the lives I've had. So what calls now, what weaving to begin or join if I can, as the world wakes up? What is needed, what is possible?

Here, on this auspicious day, I offer a prayer for my brother, Glenn Greene Pillsbury. Thank you for what you've taught me Glenn, for travelling down the roadways of this life with me in the ways that we have. May you forgive me for all the ways that I failed you, did not understand, was unkind, understood so little. May you be truly at peace now, healed, reborn. It is strange to be thinking of death on the first day of Spring, but that is what is. Death and Life are always joined, yin and yang, Persephone's journey.

Last year it was my privilege to teach a 5 day class at Kripalu, and in the class was Ilana Stein, a professional midwife from NY. Ilana had a serious illness, and was thin from chemo, but luminous in the work we shared. When we tranced to begin our mask work, she had a vision of a white Goddess who came to her, dancing before her in gestures of "gathering" and "offering", an infinity sign. Ilana made a wonderful mask to wear in honor of that vision, and, syncronistically, another member of the group, who was a professional ballarina, had brought a white dancing dress with her. She spontaneously offered it to Ilana..........and it fit her perfectly! Ilana passed away in September - but I have always felt that her poem, and vision, was an extraordinary gift to all of us present. I copy it again below.

Gather and Offer
by Ilana Stein

Gather towards the North
Gather towards the South
Gather towards the East
Gather Above, gather below and gather the great Mystery

Gather what you’ve studied
Gather what you’ve learned
Gather how you’ve lived, and gather what you’ve earned.
Gather what you’ve loved and gather what you’ve lost.
Gather what you’ve soiled and gather what it’s cost
Gather what you’ve wasted and gather what you’ve saved
Gather what you’ve shopped for and gather what you’ve tasted

Gather who your friends are and gather how they’ve cared
Gather your relations and gather how you’ve fared
Then Gather birth and celebrate, gather death and cry
Gather hope, regret and longing and gather up the why

Gather up the waiting, gather struggles, gather challenges.
Gather all the goals you’ve met and gather up the bravery
Gather faceless fear and all the broken promises.
Gather yesterday today, and gather time tomorrow

Gather what you’ve ruined and gather when you’ve failed.
Gather up the personal and gather up the frail
Gather up the culture and gather up the myths
Gather all the songs you’ve sung, and all expressive art
Gather dances gather dreams and gather up your heart

Gather in the garden and gather at the beach.
Gather on the mountain and gather what’s in reach
Gather in the workplace, and gather on the roads
Gather in the home you’ve made and gather all you kin
Gather your impatience, your frustration and your greed.
Gather up the words you’ve said and gather what you need.

Gather up your journey and all the time you’ve spent
Gather up your courage and walk inside your tent.
Gather up your secrets and and gather up your wisdom
Gather what you’ve forgotten
Gather what you’ve meant.
Gather faith and Reverence

Gather truth and and gather lies,
Gather secrets great and small
Gather wisdom of the ages and wrap them in your shawl
Gather sickness, Gather health gather tenderness and rage
Gather all your stories and gather on the stage

Gather up your gatherings, and stir the basket’s bounty
Gather all remaining threads and search across the county
Look out among the human beings, look out among relations

Then offer up your gatherings to all nations and creations

Offer to your children and offer to your kin
Offer to the hungry, to the needy and the grim
Offer to the blessed and offer to the prim
Offer to the kings and queens the princess and princesses
Offer to the beggars, paupers, jesters and priestesses

Offer to the little birds the chipmunks and the deer
Offer to the badger, mole, the frogs, and yes the bear
Offer to the green spring shoots, the white and yellow crocus
Offer to the budding trees the bushes and the rushes

Offer to the sand and mud the concrete and the buildings
Offer to the cook and maid the seamstress and the butler
Offer to the farmers - offer to the farm
Offer to the doctors and offer for no harm

Offer to the visionaries offer to the artists
Offer to the frightened, offer to the scared
Offer to the endangered and to the unprepared
Offer to the hurting, offer to be healed,
Offer to your neighbor and offer to the field

Offer grace and offer peace offer possibility
Offer privilege trust and faith
Offer gratitude amazement wonderment and awe
Offer loving kindness, compassion, joy and love

Offer up your story, offer honor and integrity
Offer for community Offer your vulnerability

Offer what you’ve learned and offer what you have
offer what you know
Offer what you’ve shared
Offer both your ears, your shoulders and your tears
Offer all you’ve gathered, offer all your cares

You’ve gathered through the springtime,
the summer and the fall.
And you’ve offered season’s greetings without going to the mall.

Now rest and build your strength up.

Cycle with the moon.

Cycle through the mystery time.

Close your eyes and sleep.

Dream the dreams of where you’ve been.
Dream of where you’re going –

dream the dream that dreamers dream.

Then gather.

(2008)