Pachamama

POEM TO PACHAMAMA

Santa Tierra, Pachamama, giver of beauties
gentle as raindrops or the claws of tigers,
red as the eyes of ancient tortoises,
redolent as coffees in the damp cool night,
round as ferns glowing green in dark forest,
thunderous as moth wings, rainbows, still pools…

You crack open our hearts
with feather-soft fingers,
flood us loose from our fears with such force
we can only be healed of our bitter tears.

we feed you, Pachamama,
our shell shards and offerings,
nestle down in your warm sands
to nurture our new becoming
the whispering lullabies of Mama Cocha.

we dream lavender and roses, 

sunlight fluttering on leaves,
lightning rippling on violet hills.
we wrap our roots deep in your fiery heart,
open owl eyes within your dark womb,
to radiant crystals, gushing fountains,
sweet-grass and sage, swift merlins, yellow lotus,
the crawling glory of beetles.
You are blood and bone of all, Nuestra Mama,
birther and healer, bringer of death,
we cherish you, Nuestra Amada,
as saguaro cherishes water,
as aspen cherishes sunlight,
as the dying cherish mercy;

and we bless you, Sagrada Mama,
in our hearts, our words, our deeds;
we aid your precious children,
and we grow your sacred seeds.


~Leslie Morris Britt ©2009
http://wildreiki.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/shamanic-gifts-of-power-poem-to-mother-earth/

 Judy Chicago "The Birth Project"

We have a beautiful mother
Her hills
are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
hills.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her oceans
are wombs
Her wombs
oceans.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her teeth
the white stones
at the edge
of the water
the summer
grasses
her plentiful
hair.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her green lap
immense
Her brown embrace
eternal

Her blue body
everything we know.

Alice Walker

Midwifery

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:

The Great Goddess Pomona and Abundance

I felt like sharing this mural, to be found in Pomona, California. I recently received some correspondance from the magnificent artist Kevin Stewart-Magee, who had a great deal to do with envisioning the mural, along with an impressive community of artists he helped facilitate in the project. 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, blessing the land covering it again with beauty and hope. The mural, "Pomona Envisioning the Future," is the final piece of an extraordinary community art project led by artist Judy Chicago, and designed by muralist Kevin Stewart-Magee, in 2003. More than 35 artists and helpers and a year's effort was involved in the mural (shown in progress). The detail above (and I'm looking for a completed view) 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, and better, future.

Hats off, and heartfelt gratitude, to the artists and community who brought the Goddess to downtown Pomona. For more information about their project, visit:

"Envisioning the Future: Pomona Arts Colony Project"

and "Envisioning the Future in Pomona"