"The Awakening" - Numina Masks in Willits!

I  feel so honored that ritualist, community organizer, and choreographer  Ann Waters, along with her collaborator Mana Youngbear, creator of  The Muse In Willits, and the wonderful dancers of the community of Willits, California, will be performing "The Awakening".  

They will give voice to Our Changing Earth with a mythic journey all can participate in. 

From the Announcement:

"The Awakening" is a dance theater event in our newly revived Little Lake Grange Hall. We will experience the story of our times and our changing Earth using  'Masks of the Numina',  dance, poetry and music.

Do you think our current cultural direction needs revision? 

Are you concerned about the extreme weather we have experienced in the last decade - Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, the Tsunamis, drought in the Midwest, GMO Labeling, Species Extinction, Plastic in the Oceans?

Would you like to go beyond your fears and find a place of peace and simple connectivity to nature? 

Join us. 

Local playwright Annie Waters has written this timely script with flowing renditions of poetry by Mana Youngbear, Lauren Raine, Marilyn Motherbear, Ilana Stein, the Grange Founders, and others. 

Many local dancers and speakers will bring their talents to the stage for this contemporary drama. The early Romans believed nature was inhabited and maintained by elemental forces they called the Numina. The mysterious forests, the generous orchards, the fields of grain, the healing springs each had an intelligent spirit, a Numen. Every Roman farm had a shrine dedicated to the spirit of place that lived there. Being in good relationship with the Numina, receiving their blessings and their wisdom was necessary for the health, prosperity, and spiritual well being of all who lived on the land.

As Rome grew storytellers began to give the Numina names, and the weavers of myth gave them faces, and temples were built for them. But their ancient origins were never forgotten, their primal grace always sought. Indeed - the “Spirit of Place” calls to us today. We experience it in our wisdom and concerns over the salmon, health of the ocean, hurricanes, summer heat and wild fires being experienced each year.  This unusual performance of Mask Art, Poetry and Dance presents the dilemma of our time in Classical Greco-Roman theater style. We will enjoy the enigmatic Masks of Ancient Numina (Spirit of Place) created by master mask artist Lauren Raine - as we face our fears, and find a key to re-visioning our collective future.

Newly installed theatrical lighting for the main stage at the Grange is being used for the very first time; we thank all of those who contributed to this great revival of our completely renovated Community Grange Hall.

Please join us for an evening of deepening and artistic vision.

Playing one weekend only- March 15 and 16th, 7pm
Little Lake Grange - 291 School St - Willits, CA 95490
Tickets $10 - available at Good's Stamp Shop
 and Grange Grains (Farmers Market)
General Seating. 

Call the Muse (707)  354-2475  for more information

 

On Gender Imbalance and Violence

"The dangers of being alone with men (or walking alone at night where groups of young men are) is never mentioned in sermons on Sunday morning. Or talked about in social studies. We just know to "be careful," that's all. It is tucked away on the underbelly of life. It is a taboo subject." 

Janie "Oquawka"Rezner, MA 
www.janierezner.com


When I was in Bali I visited the Temple of Hanuman, which had a forest full of grey monkeys.  It was not uncommon to see a family unit, the females often with an infant at her breast.  Once I bought a bunch of bananas, and began to distribute them.  Then a big monkey, clearly the "alpha male", sauntered up, looking every bit like a human bully,  bared his impressive fangs, and grabbed the entire bunch from me.  I wasn't about to argue, and I stood there watching as he ate all the bananas.  All the other monkeys gathered around him, hoping he'd drop one. I remember thinking  "I sure hope we can outgrow that one." 

In the wake of the tragedy in Colorado, my friend Janie, author and host of a radio show in California based on women's and environmental issues, sent me the article below. Last year my home town of Tucson saw the shooting of Gabrielle Gifford and the deaths that followed that rampage.

Why is it that pointing out gender imbalance, and inequity, is taken as a condemnation of all men? We all know the names of thousands of great men who have brought peace and love to the world. Addressing these issues is addressing human evolutionary issues. No doubt some find it controversial, but Janie is right: No one talks about it, and yet most young women, including the young woman I once was, live with the fear of rape and violent abuse. I felt this article was worth sharing.

The Overwhelming Maleness of Mass Homicide:

Why aren't we talking about the one thing mass murderers have in common? 

By Erika Christakis  July 24, 2012 

Accused movie-theater shooter James Holmes makes his first court appearance at the Arapahoe County courthouse on July 23, 2012 in Centennial, Colo.

There’s a predictable cycle of mourning and recrimination that follows a massacre like the shootings last week in Aurora, Colo. First come the calls for unity and flags flown at half-mast. Then the national fissures appear: the gun lobby stiffens its spine as gun-control advocates make their case. Psychologists parse the shooter’s background, looking for signs of mental illness or family disarray. Politicians point fingers about “society run amok” and “cultures of despair.”

We’ve been down this path so many times, yet we keep missing the elephant in the room: How many of the worst mass murderers in American history were women? None. This is not to suggest that women are never violent, and there are even the rare cases of female serial killers. But why aren’t we talking about the glaring reality that acts of mass murder (and, indeed, every single kind of violence) are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men? Pointing out that fact may seem politically incorrect or irrelevant, but our silence about the huge gender disparity of such violence may be costing lives.

Imagine for a moment if a deadly disease disproportionately affected men. Not a disease like prostate cancer that can only affect men, but a condition prevalent in the general population that was vastly more likely to strike men. Violence is such a condition: men are nine to 10 times more likely to commit homicide and more likely to be its victims. The numbers are sobering when we look at young men. In the U.S., for example, young white males (between ages 14 and 24) represent only 6% of the population, yet commit almost 17% of the murders. For young black males, the numbers are even more alarming (1.2% of the population accounting for 27% of all homicides). Together, these two groups of young men make up just 7% of the population and 45% of the homicides. And, overall, 90% of all violent offenders are male, as are nearly 80% of the victims.

We shouldn’t need Steven Pinker, one of the world’s leading psychologists and the author of the book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, to tell us the obvious: “Though the exact ratios vary, in every society, it is the males more than the females who play-fight, bully, fight for real, kill for real, rape, start wars and fight in wars.” The silence around the gendering of violence is as inexplicable as it is indefensible. Sex differences in other medical and social conditions — such as anorexia nervosa, lupus, migraines, depression and learning disabilities — are routinely analyzed along these lines.

For millennia, human society has struggled with what to do with young men’s violent tendencies. Many cultures stage elaborate initiation ceremonies, presided over by older men, which help channel youthful aggression into productive social roles. But in contemporary society, we have trouble talking about the obvious: the transition from boy to man is a risky endeavor, and there can be a lot of collateral damage.

(Skeptics will claim that the perpetrators of horrific acts like the Aurora shootings are such aberrations that we can hardly build public policy around their evil behavior. But it’s a mistake to view mass murderers as incomprehensible freaks of nature. For example, we know that the young men who go on murderous rampages are not always sociopathic monsters but, rather, sometimes more or less “regular” men who suffered from crushing depression and suicidal ideation.

No reasonable person can imagine how despair could possibly lead to premeditated mass homicide. However, the fact that depression is so frequently accompanied by violent rage in young men — a rage usually, but not solely, directed at themselves — is something we need to acknowledge and understand.

Our refusal to talk about violence as a public-health problem with known (or knowable) risk factors keeps us from helping the young men who are at most risk and, of course, their potential victims. When we view terrible events as random, we lose the ability to identify and treat potential problems, for example by finding better ways to intervene with young men during their vulnerable years. There is so much more we need to learn about how to prevent violence, but we could start with the sex difference that is staring us in the face.

Erika Christakis, M.P.H., M.Ed., is a Harvard College administrator who blogs at ErikaChristakis.com. The views expressed are solely her own.

Gun Violence in America II: Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care? Huffington Post

The Planetary Movement for Mother Earth

The article below comes from my friend  Janie Rezner , who has a radio program called Women's Voices with KXCI in Northern California. On April 18th, her guest was Dr. Claudia von Werlhoof, from Germany.* I feel that Dr. von Werlhoof's call, and the work of Dr. Rosalie Bertell, is very important. I am no conspiracy theorist - but I must add that it's interesting how much dis-information has been devoted to these women. I take the liberty of publishing Dr. Claudia von Werlhof's call for the creation of the “Planetary Movement for Mother Earth”, which was presented May 29th, 2010 at the International Goddess-Congress on  “Spirituality and Politics” at the Castle Hambach, Germany.

“We have discovered that the military in the east and west has developed technologies which could attack the planet and transform it into a weapon itself! This technological process is by no means controlled by the public. Moreover, these technologies can be used everywhere on the planet as “plasma weapons, weather war and geo-engineering“ (See, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, "Planet Earth:  The Latest Weapon of War"). Not only do they multiply already existing atomic and other technological and climatic dangers to an unimaginable extent, but they also can endanger the existence of Mother Earth as a whole!  We rise up against these idea of making war!

We must act now, if we and our children are to have a future worthy of the name. We demand that these technologies finally be discussed in public, examined by independent scientists and their use or the experimentation with them be forbidden as long as they are threatening life on Earth and the Earth itself (or are against the ENMOD Convention adopted by the UN General Assembly 1976 – which prohibits modifications of the environment). Until now a public discussion of these dangers has not occurred. On the contrary, any attempts of this kind have been actively impeded. If the activities of installations like HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) in Alaska, in Siberian Nishni Novgorod, in Norwegian Tromsö and in Puerto Rico are only harmless, why is no one allowed to know what they are really doing?

We want these technological developments exposed and examined everywhere, by climate and environmental conferences, by environmental organizations and in general by all social movements, by the scientific community and by politicians. Even the “World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth“ in Cochabamba, Bolivia in April 2010 with 40.000 participants from all over the world did not have any discussion of these new military technologies on their agenda! It seems that up to now no one can or wants to make an estimate of the  contribution of these experiments to global warming, the climate crisis and other already existing ecological damages.

As an eco-feminist and a researcher I came across the existence of these new technologies only through an international discussion of the thesis regarding some possible artificial triggers of the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010. When I mentioned this outrageous suspicion in an interview about “the crisis“ in the Austrian daily “Der Standard“ in February, a personal campaign against me was started by my own department at the university and practically all Austrian print media. The aggressors claimed I supported an unscientific and absurd “conspiracy theory”, and that I therefore was mentally disturbed.  The topic was obviously not supposed to be discussed or even to be researched.

During the following turbulent weeks I continued my own research on the question of what had really happened in Haiti. I examined the research of the internationally highly praised American natural scientist, Dr. Rosalie Bertell (Laureate of the Right Livelihood Award, 1986) (see, Bertell, "Background on the HAARP Project (1996), and her practically unknown book. Upon reading her book I started to understand the whole dimension of the technological “innovations” mentioned above. Bertell has extensively traced the history of the development of new military technologies since the Second World War.

Using Nikolas Tesla’s ideas the military experimented with electromagnetic waves and their artificial creation. Furthermore the military used these waves in unnaturally high intensities. By an installation of huge antennas or transmission towers these waves are focused in different frequencies and “shot” into the layers of the ionosphere where they may cause “cuts” or “holes” in the atmosphere (which is not just “air”, but a form of “matter” that holds together protecting the Earth) in order to make the transport of rockets and space travel possible. Another function of the “ionospheric heater” consists of producing a “plasma“ by heating the layers of the atmosphere and make them compress and curve into “lenses” in order to use them like a mirror for projecting the waves back anywhere on the Earth and beneath its surface. In addition to the already dangerously huge ozone hole, thunder-storms, droughts, abnormal hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes can be the destructive consequences of the application of these technologies, as Dr. Bertell has commented. Furthermore there are related dangers because of the repercussions of intentional and unintentional interferences of waves, reactions of the magnetic field of the earth and turbulences in the atmospheric belts around the planet. What has been happening with regard to the new technologies within the last 10 years and what is planned for the future, we do not know, since Bertell’s book ends with the year 2000.


Bertell’s book is needed as a source of information for the “Planetary Movement for Mother Earth” and the public in general. This book contains the most serious possible research on this topic worldwide.  The “Military Alchemists” –as I call them– in east and west, in Russia, America and Europe must be stopped from going forward with their plans, doing whatever they want and consciously putting at risk life on, below and above the surface of the planet and even the planet itself, without assuming any responsibility for ourselves as civilians, the animal and the plant world, the climate and our Mother Earth.

We do not know enough about the delicate blue heaven above and the corresponding hidden worlds below the surface of the Earth.  Military powers seem to believe that the whole planet and all its “parts” - as they perceive them - are under their control.  Thus, we call for an alternative science, one which works with and for nature, the planet, Mother Earth and not against.  The military represents just the tip of the iceberg as it attempts to transform the planet itself into a giant weapon, or has already succeeded in doing  so! These experiments are not carried out during wartime or in the laboratory only, no, we - literally the whole human, animal and plant race – have been in a very real everyday state of war for a long period of time already.

Worldwide we – women and men - are calling for action against this obvious threat. Our Planetary Movement for Mother Earth is an answer to this form of globalization of militarism.

A new planetary civilization has to arise that respects and celebrates the variety of life on this wonderful, beautiful and friendly planet. There must be no appropriation, transformation and destruction of life. Instead, we call for a deep interconnectedness with our Mother Earth – which was our original relationship with Her and should be our normal attitude towards Her again. A loving relationship with Mother Earth is our only choice. 

To sign: If you want to join the Planetary Movement, write to: Prof. Dr. Claudia von Werlhof,
(mail: Claudia.Von-Werlhof@uibk.ac.at)  The MatriaVal-review will continuously report about the Movement.

*Janie Rezner's interview can be downloaded at:
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/51153

**Below is the first of 3 lectures by Dr. Bertell, in (I believe) 2000.  In the first, she describes the "layers of our sky", the Earth's skin, and how military interests since the 1950's, without the global public's consent or even knowledge, have experimented with, for example, exploding nuclear bombs in the Van Allen belts. 

(Note:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKVAnPRV99s&NR=1 is an audio video of Dr. Bertell's lecture.)
 





(2) Bertell, Rosalie. Planet Earth. The Latest Weapon of War. London: 2000.
(3) Projektgruppe “Zivilisationskritik”. Aufbruch aus dem Patriarchat-Wege in eine neue Zivilisation? Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2009;
Von Werlhof,Claudia: West-End. Köln: PapyRossa, 2010
---.Vom Diesseits der Utopie zum Jenseits der Gewalt, Freiburg: Centaurus, 2010
---.Über die Liebe zum Gras an der Autobahn. Rüsselsheim: Christel Göttert, 2010