Slide Show for The Masks of the Goddess Project

Linda Johnson as "Bridgit".  Photo by Thomas Lux
Photo Copyright Thomas Lux (2001)

 In December it will be my pleasure and privilege  to be  giving a talk about the 20 year "Masks of the Goddess Project" at the Temple of the Goddess in Glastonbury, England. This is the slide show that will accompany my talk, I'm rather pleased with it!  I plan on  ending the Project this coming year, and donating and selling the Collection - it's time to let them go to new Storytellers and Priestesses, to do their work in the world.

My gratitude, as always, to the many friends and colleagues who have used the masks and supported their travels, as they filled with Story, Energy, Love, and Reverence, becoming part of the unfolding story of the Great Mother as told by many minds, hearts, voices, dancers, and dreamers. 

No artist could ask for more.

https://www.slideshare.net/laurenraine/the-masks-of-the-goddess-collection-2018

The Masks of the Goddess Collection (2018) from Lauren Raine

Barbara Gregson's Book on Community Theatre Arts

Theater Artists Play is a new book by my friend and colleague Barbara Gregson, and for all those interested in Masks, Performance arts, Mime, Storytelling, and perhaps most importantly, creating meaningful and beautiful theatre with all kinds of people and all kinds of communities - this is a book well worth owning.   Barbara has worked with many communities to create theatre, including schools, senior centers, prisons, handicapped - you name it - in the course of her 40 year career.  She has more knowledge and energy about how to help people "tell their stories" than anyone I've met.

Bravo Barbara, for publishing this seminal book!

Theater Artists Play    is  available on Amazon and also from her Website.  If you order from her directly she will send it back signed.  Gregson Theater brings mime, acting, masks, performance/mask making, set design, playwriting and other theater arts training to individuals and organizations of all types from schools to prisons and nursing homes. 

Theater Artists Play is an inspirational guide to creating  your own theater work. The book is for all would-be, used-to-be and wanna-be actors, mimes, storytellers, dancers, musicians, writers, and those who want to heal and tell our stories through the magic of theatre arts.  

"The Circle Has No End" - video from 2001

"May this work we do in honor of our Great Mother
generate waves and waves of understanding, compassion,
 and pleasure through all the worlds.  So may it be!"

Macha Nightmare (2000)

I recently re-discovered and posted this video, created by Erin Stratte (Sacred Underground Productions) about the Masks of the Goddess communities I was privileged to co-create with, including Diane Darling, Macha Nightmare, Ann Waters, and many others.   Those were exciting and creative times, and I will always treasure the memories of the people I knew and worked with then.

Thank you to all, then, now and in the future, for bringing the Goddess back into the world! 

https://youtu.be/rGvuXLnhRlg

Interview with Coreopsis Magazine 2015

Vol 4 No. 1 Winter/Spring 2015

Earth Tales: The Challenge Ahead

http://coreopsis.org/

 

Interview: Lauren Raine – Visionary

Profiled Artist

http://coreopsis.org/interview-lauren-raine-visionary/

 

 

CJMT: What is the link to your site? Where can we see your work?

www.laurenraine.com as well as my blog

www.laurenraine.blogspot.com

CJMT: What do you want the world to know about your work?

 I guess I would feel that I’ve succeeded if in some small way my work helps in the greater work of bringing reverence to the Earth, and to the arising of the Divine Feminine.

 

CJMT: Who – or what – do you see as your main influences?

 Early on I became influenced by the writings of Kandinsky (“Concerning the Spiritual in Art”) and others, and rejected what I saw as an aesthetic that disregarded spirituality and mysticism as being outside of “high art”. I find it ironic that spirituality was a significant impulse in the early development of Modernism. Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, Anthroposophy, as well as Einstein’s new physics, enormously inspired the work of such innovators as Mondrian, Kupka, Kandinsky, Arthur Dove, and others.

Later I discovered Joan Halifax (“Journey of the Wounded Healer”), met Alex and Allyson Grey (“The Sacred Mirrors”) and others, and began to think of art process in new terms. Art for healing, art for transformation of consciousness, art as a bridge between dimensions. During the 80’s I was involved with a group called the Transformative Arts Movement, and I even wrote a book based on interviews I did with visionary artists.

 Rachel Rosenthal developed a form of contemporary “shamanic theatre” that I found profound. I saw her perform Pangaian Dreams in 1987, and every hair on my body stood up. Sometimes, like a Sami shaman making the “yoik” she would allow sounds to come through her that were absolutely electric, sounds and words that charged the room. The Earth Spirit Community’s Twilight Covening introduced me to participatory ritual theatre and I made the “Masks of the Goddess” collection for the Reclaiming Collective’s 20thAnnual Spiral Dance. I have great admiration for what these two groups have developed as ritual process.

 

CJMT: Much of what you do seems to tell a story – even the single, stand-alone pieces. Where do you think that comes from?

 The poet Muriel Rukeyser famously commented that “the Universe is made of stories, not atoms”.

 

I believe Native American mythology – and perhaps contemporary quantum physics – would agree with her. My patron Goddess is surely Spider Woman, the ubiquitous Weaver found throughout the Americas in one mysterious manifestation or another. Among the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest she was also called “Thought Woman” (Tse Che Nako). As a Creatrix she brought the world into being with the stories she told about it.

 

Myths and religions are stories, some more glorified, archetypal, literalized or contemporary than others. I think it is so important for artists of all kinds to recognize that we are weavers of the stories of our time, we are holding threads that recede behind us and extend beyond us into the future. We’re never weaving alone. So – what kind of stories are we shaping, collaborating with, how do we understand the gift of “telling the world” that Spider Woman has bestowed on us?

 

CJMT:  How would you describe your art…? (influences, history, school-of-art, your aesthetic) 

 

Perhaps “Cross disciplinary”? I seem to jump around a lot, from sculpture to ritual theatre to painting to…………….whatever seems to be the best medium of expression at the time. Different “languages”. I guess I could say that my art-making is my spiritual practice, whether it is done with community (as in theatre and ritual) or alone in my studio.

 

CJMT: What did you learn from working in theatre?

 

Being a visual artist is solitary, and I’ve always wanted art forms that were participatory, collaborative. Masks lead right into theatre, and questions about the traditional uses of masks as well. Masks are such metaphors – you can’t look at a mask, really look, without it suggesting some kind of being that wants to manifest through it. They are vessels for all kinds of stories.

 My colleagues (among them Macha Nightmare, Ann Waters, Mana Youngbear, Diane Darling) and I have developed some wonderful ways of working with masks and community theatre/ritual. In early Greek theatre a performance had three components – the musicians, the narrators or Chorus, and the masked performers, who would pantomime and dance the characters. We’ve often used that approach, particularly with a Theatre in the Round, a Circle.

 Because the masks are dedicated to the Goddess, we’ve brought neo-Pagan sensibilities to the ways we designed our performances. This can include creating a ritual entranceway so the audience enters a magical space, adding audience participatory components to the performances, calling the elemental Quarters and/or casting a Circle in theatrical ways, and concluding all performances with some kind of energy raising activity with the audience. In Wicca that’s called “raising the Cone of Power” and by so doing the blessing or overall intention is “released to do its work”, finishing with “de-vocation”, which is often a great conclusion with humor, or everyone gets up and dances, etc.

 

It’s actually very effective, and can be integrated as good theatre. For example, in “Restoring the Balance” (2004) we concluded with “Spider Woman”. While the music played and the narrators told the tale, “Spider Woman” wove invisible threads. With a rising crescendo of assistants, she wove a web with the entire audience. And indeed, for that moment of breathless intensity everyone in the theatre was literally connected, holding onto a thread “from the Great Web” with everyone else. The “Blessing” was experienced as part of the performance.

CJMT:  What would you like to say to other artists (of any genre)?

“Our job was not to just re-tell the ancient myths,

but to re-invent them for today. Artists are the myth makers.”

Katherine Josten,   The Global Art Project

 I agree entirely with Katherine Josten, who founded the Global Art Project in Tucson, Arizona – we are the myth makers of our time. So, what kind of myths are we disseminating? What are the new stories, how are the old stories still important – or not?

 We have become a global society, with a global crisis. I may sound like I’m preaching, but personally, I don’t want to experience any more art forms that are self-indulgent, nihilistic, violent forms that don’t further evolution into empathy in some way.

I’m not entirely comfortable when people speak of contemporary artists as “shamans” as I have too much respect for the long traditions of indigenous shamans, which have evolved within their particular cultures for thousands of years. But I do know artists can participate in healing and vision, and can find new contexts for creating new forms of what might be called contemporary shamanism.

 

I’d like to quote from a 1989 interview I did with the early performance artist, Rafael Montanez Ortiz. In the 80’s he studied energy healing, as well as working with some native shamans in the U.S. and South America. Raphael was also a great influence for me. In the conversation I recorded and transcribed, we were talking about what an “art of empathy” might be, and he spoke about his studies in native Shamanism:

 

“You feel what you do……….Within the participatory traditions found in (indigenous) art, there is no passive audience. That’s a recent idea, which is part of the compromise, the tears and breaks from art’s original intentions. Ancient art process was a transformative process; it wasn’t a show, it wasn’t entertainment.  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 us and others? I think it is not enough to just realign ourselves personally either – as we evolve, our art should also do that for others, and further 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.” (1989)

 

CJMT:  Do you feel that the questions of the spirit influence what you do?

 

I think Spirit influences much of what I do, and I’m not alone in that by any means! There’s a many-layered conversation going on all the time when you open creative channels.

 

Working in the collective process of ritual theatre is always amazing. When you make a strong, vibrant container with performance that is alive and meaningful for the participants, then dreams and synchronicities abound, the “container” of the developing work becomes charged. “If you build it, they will come”.

 

I remember in Joseph Campbell’s “Power of Myth” interviews with Bill Moyers, he spoke about “invisible means of support”. I think we’re supported by quite mysterious sources all the time, and when an artist finds her or his “burning point”, or for that matter a group shares it, doors do seem to open where we did not think they would. 

CJMT:  Would you like to tackle your relationship to the fines artes?

 

Oh, I get a headache when I think about “the art world”! But I did get an MFA, I have been a part of it, and I’m probably unfair in my allergic reaction. It’s just that I think the premise of the “art world”, as it reflects capitalism, is way off from the original functions of art.

 

Of course artists need to be supported by their communities. But when art becomes an “investment” and value is determined as a financial commodity (witness some of those Sotheby Parke Bernet auctions) you enter into a form of “soul loss”. Within this construct there is no acknowledgement of the transformative dimension of art. The conversation is corrupted. People are taught to appreciate a work of art because it is hanging in a museum, or worse, it is “worth millions”.

 

I always cringe inwardly when I hear someone talk about a painting they have in terms of what they paid for it, or what they hope it may be “worth”. The real “worth” should be what pleasure, insight, meaning, and questions they derive from being in the presence of a work of art, from being able to live with it in some way.

 

I had a real revelation in Bali, where they really don’t have an understanding of what we call “being an artist” at all, let alone the rather “macho” myth of the alienated “great artist”. When I lived there, I found that virtually everyone made some kind of art, whether dance, offerings, music, etc., and virtually all of it was “dedicated to the Gods”. It all had a ceremonial/ritual purpose. Art to the Balinese is a way to pray.

They obviously make many things for money, including masks. But the “special masks”, the sacred masks, are kept in the Temples, commissioned and repaired by traditional Brahman mask makers. They are not made available for tourists except as they may be seen in performances of the traditional dramas such as the battle between light and dark represented by the dragon/lion Barong and the witch Rangda; after such uses they are “purified” with holy water before being returned to the Temple.

 

This revelation became an inspiration to create a contemporary, multi-cultural collection of “Temple Masks”.

 

That’s how I conceived of “The Masks of the Goddess” – as special masks dedicated to the Divine Feminine throughout world mythologies. 

 

CJMT:  A Couple of technical questions: 

a)   What is the process you undergo in creating a mask?

 

For the face masks I find a person with a face I like. Then I take a plaster impregnated bandage cast that becomes a plaster positive cast, and then I form the mask over that cast with a thin, flexible leather. The technique is very similar to the old Italian “del Arte” mask technique.

 

b)    How did you find *your* media and materials in the very beginning?

 

I’d like to think the masks found me. But I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that in the very beginning I started making masks because I was broke. I was a jeweler at the Renaissance Faires and business was bad, so I started making masks hoping they would sell better. They did, and very soon they began to introduce me to a whole new world.

 

CJMT: What do you think the state of visionary art is today? 

 

There are some great visionary artists out there. Film in particular, with special effects technology, is quite astounding. Think about AVATAR – what an incredible feat, to create an entire cosmos in that way. The Life of Pi – astounding.

 

Ritual Theatre is an art form that is literally “visionary”, and I wish it was more widely experienced in mature, effective ways for audiences other than groups that are generally esoteric. As Americans, many feel we’ve lost our rituals by and large, or the ones we have don’t have much energy left in them. People are hungry for potent events that offer rites of passage, mythic enactment and immersion, and shared transpersonal, visionary experiences. It’s really a very ancient human heritage continually renewed.

 

I was thinking of a ritual I experienced with the Earth Spirit Community years ago close to Samhain, All Souls Day. We processed in the twilight through a field with candles into the ritual hall, accompanied by the distant sound of drums.

The final segment of the ritual involved everyone being seated on the cold floor, in a large dark room, and blindfolded. For what seemed like forever we heard distant voices, people brushed by us, hands moved us around, strange music was heard. It was powerfully disorienting, suggestive, and frightening. Then at last our blindfolds were removed, and we found ourselves in a room beautifully illuminated with candles. In the center of the room was a woman in white, surrounded with light, flowers, fruits, water – the Goddess herself, the “return of the light”. Finally, as we left we were greeted by figures with mirrors for faces: we beheld our own reflections.

 

I’ll tell you, you felt that experience! We had truly been “between the worlds”. When we left the ritual and gathered for food and drink, every one of us felt love for each other and joy for being alive.

 

CJMT:  Any final words? 

 

Here’s a quote I love:

 

“Stories are not abstractions from life but how we engage with it. We make stories and those stories make us human. We awaken into stories as we awaken into language, which is there before and after us. The question is not so much “What do I learn from stories” as it is “What stories do I want to live?” Insofar as I’m non-dual with my narratives, that question is just as much, “What stories want to come to life through me?“

David R. Loy, “The World is Made of Stories



Stop Telling Women to Smile

 

http://www.stoptellingwomentosmile.com/

Here's a wonderful series of posters created by artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh that ring true.  Remember the song "Give Me The Night" (Give me the silvered streets............)?  A young woman's urban  experience is a very different experience from that of a young man.  For one thing, it's scary to walk the streets at night, full of menacing men, fear of rape.  In the daytime, young women are often subject to harassment, and a different kind of predatory attention that, instead of innocent flirtation, often veils a hostile undertone.  I remember it well, the fear and the sense of  psychic, and sometimes physical,  invasion.  Being old has it's perks, and one is that I'm invisible to men, which I thoroughly enjoy.

Stop Telling Women to Smile is an art series by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh. The work attempts to address gender based street harassment by placing drawn portraits of women, composed with captions that speak directly to offenders, outside in public spaces. Tatyan Falalizadeh is an illustrator/painter based in Brooklyn, mostly known for her oil paintings. Having recently branched out into public art as a muralist, STWTS was born out of the idea that street art can be an impactful tool for tackling street harassment.   STWTS started in Brooklyn in the fall of 2012. It is an on-going, travelling series and will gradually include many cities and many women participants.  Street harassment is a serious issue that affects women world wide. This project takes women’s voices, and faces, and puts them in the street - creating a bold presence for women in an environment where they are so often made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe. 

 

 

Envisioning the Future Again

"Pomona Envisioning the Future", mural in Pomona, California (2003)

I've written about this mural before, which I see every spring when I'm in California,  but returning inspired from the Conference on Women and Mythology (see previous post) I cannot fail to see the synchronicity of the situation.  Truly, this painting, made by a community of 80 people,  embodies the essence of the conference I just attended......it is both a  prayer and an affirmation.   So once again, I'd like to share this remarkable work of art.  The Goddess works in mysterious ways.

Pomona Envisions the Future was created through Envisioning the Future (E.T.F), which took place in the Pomona Arts Colony from 2002 to 2004 and included over 80 artists. 

Pomona was the uniquely Roman goddess of fruit trees, gardens, and  orchards, and her festival, which she shared with her husband Vertumnus, was always on August 13th. Pomona protects and brings forth fruit trees, and Her name is from the Latin pomum, fruit. ("Pomme" is the French word for "apple").  Pomona was among the Numina, guardian spirits of place in  Roman mythology.  "Numinous", the sense of the unique spirit of a place, derives from this term.  A grove sacred to her was called the Pomonal, located not far from Ostia, the ancient port of Rome. Although California's name itself derives from the name of an Amazon queen, "Califa", I would also say that Pomona is truly one of the patron goddesses of the state, which is the fruit basket of America. ("Califa"  may also derive originally from the name of Kali.  Since California has been such a huge agent for change in the world, seems kind of appropriate.........)

Circle of people envisioning the future

Pomona,  east of Los Angeles, was once was the citrus growing valley of Orange county. For many years it became a prime example of urban degredation - long gone are the orange groves, replaced by freeways, smog, crime, and a  derelict downtown.  But in 2005 I was stunned to see the Great Goddess Herself, at least 3 stories high, invoking change once again.

The painting depicts  Pomona from pre-European times, through Spanish settlement, the agricultural and industrial ages,  into a bright future which restores the land in balance with humans. One detail shows future  groves growing over composting heaps of industrial waste, and finally,  a circle of multi-cultural people sitting in council and learning to the right of the painting, envisioning a new world,  which is  overseen and inspired by the purple clad, numinous Roman Goddess.  

It begins by depicting the pre-European landscape with the indigenous Tongva people in a sepia color palette. The image of a by-gone open landscape rounds the corner and transitions into the historic past of rolling hills and open land erased and replaced by the familiar citrus groves established by the first European settlers.

"The color palette remains a restrained monochromatic blue-green. The muted colors signal the coming Industrial Revolution and environmental "dark days" to come. The decline of the citrus industry is represented by dead citrus trees that stop abruptly with the landscape at the twenty-four foot figure of the Goddess Pomona.  The Goddess's arms are outstretched as doves leave her hands in flight towards a hopeful future.

Early farm laborers

The background behind the Goddess figure is turbulent and murky.  Landscape turns to a congested sprawl of industrial pollution and over-crowded housing tracts. As the narrative moves to the right, mountains and blue sky re-emerge from a bleak present moment, revealing the misty outskirts of a glowing city at the very portal of a new age. In the foreground is a school of the future.

Students are seated on a luminous ring or "learning circle" which hovers over serene and lush rolling hills in an environment that has been restored. In the distance is a vision which is millions of years away from the actual event, the galaxy Andromeda  seen in the morning sky as it approaches our own Milky Way.  Throughout the mural along the bottom is an undulating wave representing subterranean strata. The wave contains artifacts and objects that represent the ages up to a time where the human species has finally achieved balanced health and harmony, along with a wholistic vision of the future which encompasses the universe."

**The Envisioning the Future project was lead by artist Judy Chicago, photographer Donald Woodman and Cal Poly Pomona. The mural was painted by lead artist and mural project facilitator Kevin Stewart-Magee, and Envisioning the Future artists/participants Lief Frederick, Sandra Gallegos, Cori Griffin-Ruiz, Rupert Hernandez, Lynne Kumra, Yolanda Londono, Amy Runyen, Chris Toovey, Mary Kay Wilson, Erin Campbell, Athena Hahn, Joy McAllister and Fred Stewart-Magee. Artists Magu (Gilbert Luján) and Judy Baca consulted on the project. The mural is located at the intersection of Thomas and Second Streets in downtown Pomona, California in the Pomona Arts Colony.

Pomona revisited..........

I've been in Pomona, California, dealing with family issues and money issues........exhausting. So, needing sustanance, I went to visit the Goddess of abundance, who makes her blessing for all to see, and strangely rarely noticed, in the half abandoned mall of the town named in her honor. I felt like sharing this community painting, which is really a kind of blessing, and a prayer. Here's something I wrote in 2006 about it.

POMONA

Roman Goddess of Fruitfulness, Orchards, and Gardens

Pomona was the uniquely Roman goddess of fruit trees, gardens, and orchards, and her festival, which she shared with her husband Vertumnus, was always on August 13th. Pomona watches over and protects fruit trees and cares for their cultivation, and Her name is from the Latin pomum, fruit. "Pomme" is the French word for "apple".Pomona was among the Numina, guardian spirits of Roman mythology, who watched over people, places, or homes. The Numina are, in essence, the holy spirits of place, from which the word "numinous" derives. Pomona protected and inspired the abundance of the fruitful gardens and orchards. She had her own priest in Rome, called the Flamen Pomonalis. A grove sacred to her was called the Pomonal, located not far from Ostia, the ancient port of Rome.

Pomona has a special personal significance to me, and I made a mask for this Goddess as a tribute, a history, out of the gratitude that is Her due, and perhaps, as a hopeful invocation as well. For She is truly one of the Goddesses of California, fruit basket to America. My family home is in Pomona, California, a town east of Los Angeles that once was the lovely citrus growing valley of Orange county. Now, and for many years, it's a prime example of urban destruction and despair. Long gone are the orange groves, replaced by freeways, smog, crime, and a deserted, almost derelict downtown. I have occasionally returned to Pomona to visit my brother, who still lives there, and always found it sad and depressing.

I was amazed, in 2005, to discover that an arts colony had moved into downtown Pomona, perhaps because it's one of the few places where rent is still inexpensive in Los Angeles. There are studios, galleries, and coffee houses where previously only empty storefronts, homeless people with their shopping carts, and drug dealers had been.

But I was absolutely stunned while walking a street I long have regarded as a reflection of the awful waste of urban blight, to see none other than the Great Goddess Pomona Herself, in all Her glory and at least 3 stories high. The detail above does not show the images of groves growing over composting heaps of industrial waste, or a circle of people sitting in council to the right of the painting, envisioning a new world, overseen and inspired by the numinous, purple clad, Roman Goddess. Art, at it's best, can provide us with those lasting and illuminated moments of revelation that give us the strength to, indeed, envision a new future. Hats off, and heartfelt gratitude, to the artists and community who brought the Goddess to downtown Pomona.

Here's a writeup about the mural from www.pomonaenvisionsthefuture.com

Pomona Envisions the Future is a mural created through a community-based project named Envisioning the Future (E.T.F), which took place in the Pomona Arts Colony from 2002 to 2004 and included over 80 artists. The mural is 140' x 42' acrylic on prepared concrete substrate on the west side of the Union Block building. It consists of four walls at right angles to each other.

The Envisioning the Future project was lead by artist Judy Chicago, photographer Donald Woodman and Cal Poly Pomona. The mural was painted by lead artist and mural project facilitator Kevin Stewart-Magee, and Envisioning the Future artists/participants Lief Frederick, Sandra Gallegos, Cori Griffin-Ruiz, Rupert Hernandez, Lynne Kumra, Yolanda Londono, Amy Runyen, Chris Toovey, Mary Kay Wilson, Erin Campbell, Athena Hahn, Joy McAllister and Fred Stewart-Magee. Artists Magu (Gilbert Luján) and Judy Baca consulted on the project. Cheryl Bookout was the Envisioning the Future project coordinator.

It depicts the history of the City of Pomona from its pre-European past, through its agricultural and industrial ages into its bright future which restores the land in balance with humans. The mural was restored and finally finished in 2008 with funds from the City of Pomona Board of Parking Place Commissioners. A bronze plaque from the Downtown Pomona Owners Association was added on October 4, 2008 at the re-dedication ceremony. The mural is located at the intersection of Thomas and Second Streets in downtown Pomona, California in the Pomona Arts Colony.

Tongva Indian prepares food

It begins by depicting the pre-European landscape with the indigenous Tongva people in the dark sepia color palette. The image of a by-gone natural open landscape rounds the corner and transitions into the historic past of rolling hills and open land erased and replaced by the familiar citrus groves established by the first European settlers.

Early Hispanic farm laborers working the fields

The color palette remains a restrained monochromatic blue-green. This is atypical of the traditional portrait of time as depicted in the multitudes of idyllic brightly colored packing house labels. Instead the muted colors signal the coming Industrial Revolution and environmental dark days to come. At the reveal wall recesses to the main wall the decline of the citrus industry is represented by dead citrus trees that stop abruptly with the landscape at the twenty-four foot figure of the Goddess Pomona. Pomona, originally the Roman Goddess of orchards, was selected as the name for the city in the late 1800s.

The Goddess's arms are outstretched as doves leave her hands in flight towards a hopeful future. The background behind the goddess figure is turbulent, murky and orangey-brown. The landscape turns to a congested urban-suburban sprawl of industrial pollution and over crowded housing tracts. As the narrative moves along to the right, mountains and blue sky emerge from the bleak present and the misty outskirts of a glowing city at the portal of a new age. In the foreground is a school of the future.

Students are seated on a luminous ring or "learning circle" which hovers over serene and lush rolling hills in an environment that has been restored to near primordial conditions. In the distance is a vision which is millions of years away from the actual event, the galaxy Andromeda is seen in the morning sky as it approaches our own Milky Way.

Throughout the mural along the bottom is an undulating wave representing subterranean strata. The wave contains artifacts and objects that represent the ages up to a time where the human species has achieved balanced health and harmony, with a vision of the future which encompasses the universe.

Last, let me share another one of the gifts of the Goddess........the astounding Jacaranda tree, which blooms wholly purple in May, dropping it's lavender snow everywhere among the unheeding smog and traffic............ever generous. Pomona, casting her purple blessings.