On the Persistence of Butterflies, and the Emanation of Beauty

                   

Beauty above me, 

Beauty below me,

Beauty before me,

Beauty behind me,

I walk in Beauty.

Navajo (Dine`) Prayer

I am approaching my 76th birthday next week.  Wow.  I've had a long life.  And for some reason, perhaps the threads of synchronicity Spider Woman has been throwing me lately, I've been thinking about Butterflies.    

I love the painting above (which I did not create).  I don't know how I found it, and I have not bee successful in finding out who the artist is, even when I did an image search.  I loved it enough that I even made my own version of the painting - and if I ever find the artist, I would hope she or he would not see this as plagerism, but rather deep appreciation.

An old woman is walking, just a silouette in the distance, her name and identity unknown.  Or perhaps, with the passage of time and her long life walk, names just aren't important to her anymore.  The road, I imagine, is dusty.   Her back is a bit bent..... she is tired, it's been a long walk.  But........she keeps on walking.  Maybe it's a pilgrimage to her, or maybe a mission.  Maybe getting somewhere isn't important any longer - its the walk itself that matters.  

But as she  walks butterflies emanate from her out into the world.  To do their work of bringing  Beauty.  And to do their work of Pollinating the future.  

As an artist,  I think this is the legacy many of us would like to leave behind us as we progress on our own, often dusty, often long, roads.  We want to think our work has  flown forth, to bloom as it will,  in other's  imaginations, in another time perhaps.  Looking again at the painting, I think maybe that old woman doesn't think about such things.  She just keeps on walking.   But in the end, no one could ask for more. 

Pollen:  agent of new life, new hope, transformation. 

My prayer:  May we have butterfly minds, pollinator hearts.

Peace March against the war in Iraq, San Francisco, 2003

Peace March against the war in Iraq, San Francisco, 2003

The ancient Greek word for "butterfly" is ψυχή (psȳchē), which means "soul" or "mind".  And I have often found them mysteriously "soulful", as they seem to flit in and out of mystery and of synchronicity.  The picture above, for example - it was from the San Francisco Chronicle at the time of the great peace march against the incipient Iraq war, and shows three friends with their "soul icons".   Me in the mask of Sophia, Alan Moore, founder of the Butterfly Gardeners Association with his sign, and Nicole, an artist who created "Cosmic Cash".  Note that her icon, also,  occurred in this synchronistic photo behind her.  

Transformers, pollinators .......... they begin their lives as caterpillars, build a crysalis and generate imaginal cells.   Imaginal cells (what a fantastic name) are cells in the evolution of a butterfly from caterpillar to winged butterfly that activate within the Crysalis, and the butterfly literally becomes mush as it is deconstructed and changed.   As the visionary psychologist  Anodea Judith explains it:

"When a caterpillar nears its transformation time, it begins to eat ravenously, consuming everything in sight. The caterpillar body then becomes heavy, outgrowing its own skin many times, until it is too bloated to move. Attaching to a branch (upside down, we might add, where everything is turned on its head) it forms a chrysalis—an enclosing shell that limits the caterpillar’s freedom for the duration of the transformation.....Tiny cells, that biologists actually call “imaginal cells,” begin to appear. These cells are wholly different from caterpillar cells, carrying different information, vibrating to a different frequency–the frequency of the emerging butterfly. At first, the caterpillar’s immune system perceives these new cells as enemies, and attacks them, much as new ideas in science, medicine, politics, and social behavior are viciously denounced by the powers now considered mainstream. But the imaginal cells are not deterred.  They continue to appear, in even greater numbers, recognizing each other, bonding together, until the new cells are numerous enough to organize into clumps. When enough cells have formed to make structures along the new organizational lines, the caterpillar’s immune system is overwhelmed. The caterpillar body then become a nutritious soup for the growth of the butterfly."

from Imaginal Cells and the Body Politic by Anodea Judith Ph.D.

Photo from: http://www.fishersville-umc.org/classes/nac/Pics/week0401.htm

If we can see that our thoughts participate in  pollinating the future, we can  perhaps find ways of living with simplicity and honor, even in a time so very out of balance.  Regardless of where one is, there is a profound need to "walk in Beauty".  To be "on the Pollen Path".  

                                 

Without the grace of the pollinators, the butterflies and hummingbirds and bees, there will be no future.  This idea is fundamental to spiritual traditions of native peoples of the Southwest, including the Pueblo peoples, the Navajo and the Apache.  As shown above, when this young Apache woman came of age and entered into her fertile years, she was blessed by the tribe with symbolic pollen.  Imagine what it would be like if young women in our world were so honored.  

 "The Pollen Path" is a healing and initiatory ceremony/concept among the Dine` that variously enacts a mythic journey, and demonstrates a cosmology of non-duality.  "Pollen Path" art and sand paintings often show the union of opposites, such as red sun and blue moon, as well as the directions and associated stories, representing the cycles that form a whole.  

As I imagine the metaphor of a  "pollen path" for our time,  as I consider the "emanations of  beauty" in the painting at the top of this essay,  I reflect as well that some butterflies, like the Monarch or the Painted Lady, are migratory.  Monarch butterflies will migrate over very long distances, as amazingly frail as they seem.  Some travel from Mexico to the norther parts of the United States and into Canada, a distance of over 2,500 miles.  Tragically, because of climate change and loss of habitat, they are among the endangered species.  

Lastly, I always seem to return to one of my favorite storytellers, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, on the work of the Butterfly Dancer.  May we all, women and men, young and old, become Butterfly Dancers this May Day.

  "The (Hopi) butterfly dancer must be old because she represents the soul that is old. She is wide of thigh and broad of rump because she carries so much. Her grey hair certifies that she need no longer observe taboos about touching others. She is allowed to touch everyone: boys, babies, men, women, girl children, the old, the ill, and the dead. The Butterfly Woman can touch everyone. It is her privilege to touch all, at last. This is her power. Hers is the body of La Mariposa, the butterfly."

"La Mariposa" from Women Who Run with The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Clarissa Pinkola Estes  tells the story of waiting to see the "Butterfly Dancer" at a ceremony.  Tourists, unused to Indian Time, wait throughout a long, hot, dusty day to see the dancer emerge, expecting, no doubt a slender, ephemeral Indian maiden, and they are no oubt they were shocked out of their patronizing cultural fantasy to see at last the grey haired  Dancer/Pollinator emerge, slow, not young, with her traditional tokens of empowerment.

"Her heavy body and her very skinny legs made her look like a hopping spider wrapped in a tamale. She hops on one foot and then on the other. She waves her feather fan to and fro. She is The Butterfly arrived to strengthen the weak. She is that which most think of as not strong: age, the butterfly, the feminine."

Because in the agricultural ritual these dances symbolize and invoke, call in, the forces that initiate the  vital work of pollination, this is no job for for an inexperienced girl, no trivial token flight for a  pretty child. It's a job for one who has lived through many cycles, and can seed and generate the future from a solid base. Again, I take here the liberty of quoting Dr. Estes again:

"Butterfly Woman mends the erroneous idea that transformation is only for the tortured, the saintly, or only for the fabulously strong. The Self need not carry mountains to transform. A little is enough. A little goes a long way. A little changes much. The fertilizing force replaces the moving of mountains.

Butterfly Maiden pollinates the souls of the earth: It is easier that you think, she says. She is shaking her feather fan, and she’s hopping, for she is spilling spiritual pollen all over the people who are there, Native Americans, little children, visitors, everyone. This is the translator of the instinctual, the fertilizing force, the mender, the rememberer of old ideas. She is La voz mitológica."

"La voz mitológica". The mythic voice.  The voice that shows us the place where the Butterflies go, the voice that sings the threads of synchronicity as they weave into our lives and become visible.   The Mythic Voice re-enchants the world around us, lending luminosity to each footstep, and pollinates, energizes, en-chants those who hear.   

   

Some of my own butterflies

Portfolio: "A Work in Progress" .... a Presentation at 2022 Pagan Studies Conference

I was embarroused to see that I never shared on this Blog the Presentation I was honored to give at the Conference on Current Pagan Studies ** (via Zoom) in January of this year.  Their Theme for 2022 was "Pagans and Creativity" so I offered a presentation on my own 50 years of being an artist, with (obviously visible) Pagan roots and Pagan iconography even in the very beginning.  It seems Gaia and Myth and the Goddess have been with me almost as soon as I could pick up a crayon, and it't been so ever since.  

https://www.slideshare.net/laurenraine/lauren-raine-portfolio-a-work-in-progress

Lauren raine portfolio a work in progress from Lauren Raine

** There will be another Conference this year January 14- 15, 2023

For information on the upcoming Conference:  https://www.paganconference.com/

"Our Lady of the Shards"..............Remembering Buried Lives

"The Memory Keeper" and "Our Lady of the Forgotten Midwives" (2019)

For quite a long time now I go into the studio faithfully just about every day, and I sit there, sometimes I fool around on the computer, mostly I look at all the terrifying blank white  canvases or the neatly stacked bags of clay or the big pile of leather I have next to the plaster casts of faces, also neatly stacked and displayed on a shelf ...... then I go get some coffee, pat the cats, pull some weeds,  check my email,  and somehow, the day is pretty much gone and I haven't done anything.  I wish I could say that I am an engine of new ideas and creativity these days, but I am not.  I am, perhaps, dormant, incubational, etc.  More of my own words coming back to haunt me.  

"Our Lady of the Shards" (2013)

So, at least,  I can look back at this rather huge body of work(s) that surround me (and if I were wealthy I would have a gallery again, where I and others would have  badly needed space to share our art, and we could do the teaching and community  creation that an arts district provides)..... but, I don't live in a place where art districts are much valued, except by real estate developers.   Tucson's so called "Art and Warehouse District", having once been lively, should now be called the "Fancy Wine Bar and Pretentious Restaurant" district, most of the galleries being now extinct.  Well.  If wishes were fishes.................

The Memory Keeper I (2018)

I don't know about other artists, but I always have about 3 to 5 series of works going at a time, and can't really say where one series ends and another begins.  Sometimes they begin with me just playing with a shape or a color, and the work itself tells me where it wants to go.  Magical, that experience of "Flow".  Stories themselves don't have an end, they just find new expressions -  they become a "trilogy", or a side character demands attention because it has developed a voice, or there is an undiscovered country beyond the borders that has sent out an exploration party, etc.  That is true in other art forms as well.

"The Weaver" (2018)

The Bone Goddess (2018)

I really love my continuing  series of ceramic ICONS "Our Lady of the Shards"  that evolved when I found myself staring at a pile of  beautiful shards of broken pots from the Clay Coop where I sometimes work.  They were half buried in the mound of recycled clay, and I thought of  how archeologists might feel, sorting through the buried fragments  of lives and cultures  long lost, long buried, long forgotten.  Piecing shards together like a jigsaw puzzle to find the stories and see again the hands that made those artifacts?   How would it be, to see the faces of the forgotten rising from the buried past?  And, for me,  particularly the voices of the women, silenced in the long advance of "his-story" - the forgotten Midwives who brought our ancestors into the world, the Wise Women and the Weavers and Spinners of lives, the Goddesses cast aside in patriarchal monotheism?   The  tangible and communicative Spirits of Place, the "Numina", rising from the buried places, from the dry and broken soil of desert arroyos where they continue to sustain us,  or revealed by a storm or a sudden flood.  The Memory Keepers who keep the essential and sustaining stories, the "Water from Another Time"  that generates and informs the present?  Whether buried intentionally or not, these faces rise from the dreaming Earth, from the clay and the stone,  their eyes opening as they wake again. 

"Hecate" (2019)

What might they look like?  What might they tell us as we plunge into a future that seems so  uncertain in the face of ecological and social crisis?   I have been making works about "surfacing" for a long time.   Along with my colleagues I reflect that some of us are  "spiritual archeologists".  Faces, Myths, Presence:  surfacing from among the shards.  

"The Black Madonna" (2019)

 

"Our Lady of the Waters" (2014)

"The Human Heart"........a poem by Campbell McGrath

"The Heart Sutra" (2009)

THE HUMAN HEART

We construct it from tin and ambergris and clay,
ochre, graph paper,
a funnel of ghosts, whirlpool
in a downspout full of midsummer rain.

It is, for all its freedom and obstinacy,
an artifact of human agency
in its maverick intricacy,
its chaos reflected 
in earthly circumstance.

Its appetites mirrored by a hungry world
like the lights of the casino
in the coyote's eye. Old
as the odor of almonds in the hills around Solano,

filigreed and chancelled with flavor of blood oranges,
fashioned from moonlight,
yarn, nacre, cordite,
shaped and assembled valve by valve, flange by flange,

and finished with the carnal fire of interstellar dust.
We build the human heart
and lock it in its chest

and hope that what we have made can save us.


Campbell McGrath

"A House of Doors"............Lithographs from the 80's

"Leda and the Swan" (1985)

Another artifact from the recent excavation of my life as an artist (where have I been?  How did I get here?) ........this portfolio of  Lithographs I did in the mid 1980's. I remember how much I loved being in the litho room, grinding the big stones.  The images were mostly drawn a collection of old photographs of my family I found, my mother as a child, my grandmother I never knew..........they haunted me, these people and that brief moment caught in black and white and then gone, lost, relics, artifacts, stories, mysteries.   The entire collection was called "A HOUSE OF DOORS"  and I wrote a poem that went with them, that eventually became a performance piece.  I worked so hard on them............and only showed them once.  

"A House of Doors" (1985)

"Day of Radience" (1985)

"Some rooms diminish, some rooms compress

Rooms can be tricky.

What I chiefly remember are doors

I live in a house of doors."

"Icarus Had a Sister" (1985)

"Persistence of Memory" (1985)

"Dream II" (1985)

"Dream" (1985)

"Winter's Dream" (1985)

"Ancestral Visitation" (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)

Midwives

Ancestral Midwives (2013)

I was thinking of my friend Lorie, who provided the hands for this sculpture.  Lorie retired just a few years ago from a long career as a midwife in Pittsburgh, and when I asked to cast her hands she assumed this pose, which she told me is a hand gesture used to symbolize midwifery.   To have spent so many years bringing new life into the world! 

New Old Work........

Persephone

Last spring I began a series of 4 masks, inspired by a friend who wished to use them for a ritual theatre process based upon the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece.  We don't know exactly what occured in the Mysteries, because participants were forbidden to tell what occured - "Mystery" derives from a work that means "that which cannot be spoken".  But the  Eleusinian Mysteries  combined spirit of place and mythic enactment to transform pilgrims as they  enacted the death/rebirth cycle of nature, based upon the Triple Goddess Demeter/Persephone/Hecate  for almost 2,500 years, and probably longer, as, like many places of pilgrimage today, the origins go back far into prehistory. 

I wanted to try to make the masks look old, and tried to imagine what they might have looked like as painted Greek masks..........these don't really look much like ancient Greek masks at all, but I like them anyway.  They were recently used by a ritualist in California, so they have some energy instilled in them and I hope they'll "travel" to others who might want to use them to explore these important myths.
 

Demeter

Hades

Hecate

I've written quite often about Hecate, the Underworld Goddess who bears two Torches to assist Persephone, and the immature unconscious parts of all of us, through the Underworld to mature empowerment - here's a recent post.

Hecate

Persephone

Here's another recent variation..............Demeter aren't done yet.  But I had fun making the masks look "bronze".  I like the idea of these masks, and the other sculptures that seem related, really looking sculptural, with a heavy, strong, dark,  metal presence. 

Black Madonna

Here's an other theme that keeps arising, and it's good to come back to these images, play with them again.  The Primal Black Madonna, Earth Mother, Gaia, the Source that sustains us all.

Transformer:  Yin and Yang

I love these paper casts of a dead snake that I found years ago and made a plaster cast of.  Snakes were very sacred in ancient times as a symbol of the renewal of life because the snake sheds its skin.  Snakes also represented the serpentine movements of nature, the spiral of the Goddess that moves through nature's cycles, through life/death/rebirth again and again.  The Snake is identified with Demeter and Persephone, and in ancient Egypt the word for snake or cobra was the same as the word for female deity.

I did this "Skin Shedder Mandala" back in 1986, when I was studying "The Spiral Dance" by Starhawk as a graduate student at the U.A.  A lot of people found it dark or grim............but I still love it.  

The Black Madonna (2013)

Black Madonna earlier version...............

  And I'm having fun making these variations on the Torso .................... I guess the next one is a "copper patina" effect.  Good to be in the studio again, having my discussions, in the symbol language of art I think, with the Dark Goddesses of  Winter....................

Cast of sculpture from IPark in 2005

Raukkadesa

Out beyond ideas
of wrong doing and right doing,
there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down
in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language
- even the phrase "each other" -
do not make any sense.

From The Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks.

When you do a lot of driving, without a radio or tape player, you either find yourself becoming very, very bored, or you make a meditation of it.  I guess, being such a nomad over the years, driving has become my form of meditation, and I do some of my best thinking with the white line unrolling before me.  It's a good metaphor, isn't it?   

I found the word "raukkadessa"  often popped into my  mind this summer, and I've made notes for an entry that never seems to be able to be finished.  "Raukkadessa" is a shamanic  concept, one that I was introduced to in 2004 by singer and songwriter Kathi Huhtaluhta.   The word came from a song on her album  Beyond Love  (Sami Records, 2004).  Kathi  lived in Finland,   where she studied "Yoik" traditions of Sami chanting.  But she also became very influenced by Sami folklore and spirituality while there.

Kathy told me her song, Raukkadessa, derived from a word she learned  which meant "beyond love".  Meaning, beyond the pairs of opposites, beyond loss, conflict,  history, the constructs of personality and culture, beyond even our temporal experience of love (or hate)....."there is a field". 

And perhaps the purposes of that  exchange, or that experience, are unintelligible in temporal terms, lie beneath, or above, the surfaces of our lives............I don't know.   I think of my friends song, of  "Raukkadesa", and sometimes it  has helped me to let go of anger, regret, blame or loss, and accept the mysteries of my life, to appreciate, if not always understand, the evolutionary pattern.  

I remember an artist  I met in California who told me, quite seriously, that she believed she had been collaborating creatively with a man in New Jersey for 40 years.  She said she had never met him, and probably never would.  

I've often found that people have given me gifts that take time and maturity to understand. 
Recently I had a month of conflict with a roommate, which was, of course, very uncomfortable, and full of the judgemental polarization of "she's wrong, she's crazy" etc.  It was exhausting. As it turned out, she really did need her own space, and we were a poor match as roommates.  But for me, she provided me with some important growth and self-understanding, because I had to come to grips with ways that I was being unsympathetic, judgemental, possessive about the space, and unkind to someone who, I began to realize, was quite fragile.  After all the blustering, I had to take a look at that very uncomfortable place of  remorse for my behavior.  When I finally got it, I decided I needed to do what I could to put things right, and I helped her in various ways to find a new place.  Ultimately, we parted in a friendly manner.  And I have some satisfaction that it was a win-win situation in the end.  A gift.

What we call "forgiveness", I find, mostly has to do with forgiving myself.  It's much easier to forgive others.  The word "fore-give" means to give the energy forward, to not constrict oneself in time and place.   At some moments, one sees that what happened was a  node in the Web, and they were there, co-creators,  all the time.  The threads others wove for and with me become an important motif in the tapestry of my life.  But the pattern is only visible with an overview, if it's ever consciously visible at all.     I don't like the term "guidance", I prefer the word "Conversation".   Beyond the immediacies of our  sequential lives, "there is a field"  where the Conversation goes on within the  stories of our lives. 

 I STOOD POISED UPON THE EDGE OF TOWN,
AND HEARD THE BLUE STARS  SINGING

Weary ideas rise and fall
into blessed exhaustion.
I touch that essence,
that blood-red honey wine,
this strange distillation.

I entered a lucid dream,
I found a lucid life.

Through my open window, I see
a black, far horizon,
and I hear the blue stars singing
memories of memories

I wish I could tell you
what I have seen
in the homelands.

Perhaps, in that country,
we are of each other at last......
You take my hand, we walk together
in that green and splendid
meadow.
I offer you a glass,
you raise your cup to mine
a butterfly rises between us,
flies into the morning
from the other side
of forever.

Through an open window,
I hear the stars singing.......
But I write this in a small, dark room
here, and now,
wishing I could be young again,
wishing I could feel
something other than foolish.

I will always remember you
between
always between

(2002)