Solitude: A Synchronicity, and a House Made of Doors

"The Hermit" card from The Rainbow Bridge Oracle by Lauren Raine

I seem to have become a Hermit these days,  because of Covid 19, but also I think because of  a kind of withdrawal from the busy world into my interior world.  Increasingly I feel a passage into the contemplative life.    Having said that,  it feels sometimes like I am often walking backwards, not going forward as I used to be, but instead walking backward through the doors of memory, which seem to shutter open at the oddest moments.  

Sometimes a memory from long ago will arise as I water the garden, or pull on the ugly, comfortable socks that only an old lady could love, and at that moment  I see things that happened that I was too "busy" to notice at the time,  bits of this life that seem to call for attention.  Some of those flashes of memory were  magical gifts, unseen help along the way, sometimes they were wounds that needed healing or integration but never really got it, and from this perspective farther up the trail, I even see now as gifts as well, gifts of experience that matured or deepened me.   In the end, I think gratitude is what we have to find for all of it, the whole story with all of its various colors and shapes.  

A line from a poem I wrote:    "Sometimes I can see the Pattern,  

                                                  Sometimes I am the Pattern" *

So here is just a small thread from that tapestry that has become "Lauren Raine", and I think it's about time I told it.  Because it really happened and I can prove it!

In the early 90's I was a professional Tarot reader,and I also was creating my own Tarot deck, which eventually became the Rainbow Bridge Oracle.  I used people I knew as the models for many of the cards, and with the Tarot card "The Hermit" (which I subtitled "Solitude") I used a photo of myself.  The card has always been important to me, as my own interpretation of "The Hermit" has to do with the journey through the dark - those dark nights of the soul, or those hard, painful experiences that test us in life's journey.  This image, of a figure in the darkness bearing a flame represents, like the old woman Hecate leading the maiden Persephone through Hades, a pathfinder illuminating the way through the dark tunnels into the living world . 

What I feel is important about this image is not only that we must make that dark journey seemingly in solitude and alone, but further, when we emerge, we need to share what has been learned with others, helping to light the paths of others  with the wisdom we have gained.  It is, in that sense, also about what Joan Halifax called the shamanic "Journey of the Wounded Healer".   My intention in creating the painting for the card was a call to the Querant to  help others with what you have gained, to "Become a light bearer".

After completely 5 or 6 of the paintings for the series, all of which were small paintings only 14" x 8",  I decided to make color xeroxes of them in order to make a presentation.  In 1993 color xeroxes were still pretty expensive and the technology was not as refined as it is now.  I was living more or less in the country and had to drive 20 miles to the nearest print shop.   Everything went fine until I  xeroxed "The Hermit" -  for some strange reason, the machine only copied a very small section of the painting.  I called the owner over and it did it again - although finally we were able to get it to xerox the entire painting.  

Much later I looked at what the machine had actually chosen to copy, and I was amazed:

* Excerpt from "A House of Doors" (1987)

To Hear the poem as spoken word performance:  
https://soundcloud.com/user-972033003/a-house-of-doors-1987

An onion,

that's it.  All those layers. 

Just when you think you can name yourself,

you discover new layers,

you’re forming a new skin,

a new ring.

But there's a core.

And where does that core start? 

This room I live in.

These walls.

They seem to be getting thin.

I can almost see through them today.

Sometimes I can see the Pattern,

Sometimes I am the Pattern.

Today I feel, I feel like a Chinese box,

one inside of another. 

I consider a state of grace:

I think

I think I may be the gate

that opens into another room

made of clouds

or sky

or something I can't name.

Sometimes, you open a door 

and you have to walk outside

into something tender,

like a touch on a winter night

into a quiet yard

because of a voice that you hear

    

     or a bell

     or a train

     pulling away somewhere.

Lauren Raine 1987

The Magician

"The Magician stands with his arm raised in the classic gesture of inspired invocation.  He draws the white light of universal energy (the Above) through his  skilled hand, his will, and then through his heart, to manifest on the physical plane (the Below).  As his creative energies manifest, they are broken into the "rainbow" components of the physical world in all of it’s lovely diversity.

The Mage is an artist in every sense of the word, for his magic arises from a skilled and disciplined understanding of the tools he has to work with, his intention, and a  connection to the infinite realm from which all manifestations originate.  The Magician card urges you to remember that you are the artist - the  Mage - of your life, and now is exactly the time to manifest what you desire.  There are many talents and resources at your hand, and you may "invoke" your potential now through wise use of will, vision and inspiration."

I seem to be going through a process this summer.  A lot keeps bubbling up like lava from some fiery underground reserve, some primal source that urges me to create some new lands, and possibly level a few landscapes existing in the process!  So today I consulted my very own "Oracle", the Rainbow Bridge Oracle deck, which I finished some 10 years ago and mostly have ignored ever since.  What came up was "Meloncholy - the lessons of depression".  The solution?  "The Magician".  Wow.  Never let it be said we don't receive guidance when we ask for it!  WE are indeed the Magicians and Artists of our lives.

To view the entire deck:  THE RAINBOW BRIDGE ORACLE

Remembering......."The World is Always Talking to us"

  

"I let my life be guided by a strange language that I call “signs”. I know that the world is talking to me, I need to listen to it, and if I do so I shall always be guided towards what is most intense, passionate and beautiful. Of course, it is not always easy.  If you trust life, life will trust you."

        Paolo Coelho

My life these days is so preoccupied with mundane matters that my visioning self cries to be heard and known again.  I find it difficult to write as well, so I look back in the midst of the rediculous multi-tracking laundry list that my life currently seems to be.  Yes, I need to change this, no argument.  Not so easy to do sometimes.......

One thing I so often find my heart moving back to are the summers I spent at Brushwood and at Lilydale  in western New York state, the summers spent living in the woods at that campground, in a little trailer, nights illuminated mostly by campfires, oil lamps, and the sounds of drums.  I always was renewed in a deep way there, and the prospect of not being able to go this summer........ah,  I wish I could.  It will be a summer of Tucson's heat, monsoons, and time to create some art, but my heart has always remained in the East.  Always.

So, although the frenetic pace of my committments right now make my day very flat and "tone deaf", never the less I do not forget that World is always speaking to us, if we can but listen.  Soon, soon, let the Conversation be renewed.

Sometimes the best, most profound  things can't be told, hence the origins of the word "mystery", which is from the Greek, a word identified with the Eleusinian Mysteries  meaning "that which cannot be spoken".  But this is a journal, so I'll try.....perhaps that inability to express what I experience as a "mythic"  universe has to do with the coming together at times of so many different dimensions, multiple levels of synchronicity, metaphor, and perception.   See?  How do you talk about it  except through poetry, art, or metaphor?  Here is journal entry from one of those Summers, I felt like sharing it again.

"There's a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in." ~~~ Leonard Cohen

Journal Entry  July 17, 2013 

Once I got on the road synchronicities and insights  have flooded into my daily life - that's what happens when you enter "liminal zones", those places, times, and activities that are transitional, that put us into the creative space of becoming.  Travel can do that, art process and meditation can do it, and critical times in our lives can do it as well.  My wise friend Wendy talks about the "shamanic initiation", those events in our lives that "crack" us open, times that challenge our beliefs and assumptions.  Painful as those times are, they are also times when doors open into new vistas of perception and possibility.

In Chautauqua county, my other life floods in, along with the rain and humidity I've missed in the desert.   Lilydale's and Brushwood's  energy is high, and there is  also such joyful elemental energy there, which you feel as soon as you arrive.  Joining a circle at Lilydale, I found my old sensitivity still present, if rusty, and was able to take several "messages"  as well as receiving significant information for myself from the facilitating medium, Stephanie.  She commented accurately on my bad ankle, saying that it was to make me "slow down"......and at a Sunday service, another medium singled me out (even though I was hiding in the back row) and told me I needed to "slow down" again. Hmm.......I need to think about that.

Stopped for several days to visit Wendy, a friend I met in 2003.  Wendy is a true Medium - her sensitivity began  at 4  when she suffered kidney failure and almost died.  She was also struck by lightning as a child.  She believes these two events brought about her sensitivity.  It  took her many years, and a painful childhood, to come to grips with those gifts.  Wendy amazes me, as she lives simultaneously in two or more worlds, all day long, every day - and it's difficult for people who aren't mediums themselves, or well educated in metaphysics and the "paranormal" to understand her.  She's a successful career woman, living in a town and profession where her gifts are completely unknown to her colleagues, and she's also a medium who sometimes chooses to do readings, helps with hauntings, is an artist, and for fun, goes ghost hunting with colleagues. 

I feel Wendy has helped me to understand my own perceptions  a great deal in the course of our conversations.  To work "inter-dimensionally", as mediums do, one must learn to think in,  as Wendy puts it, "Dream Time" terms, which includes thinking symbolically and without the construct of sequential time as we understand it "in the flesh".  For her, spirits are all around, familiar spirits come to help her or just to visit, people in need of help, people who want to contact someone (usually associated with someone close to her).  Sometimes she sages the room because she has energies she doesn't want there, or just doesn't have the time.

She has a "ghost hunter" machine, a little machine that makes white noise.  I sat for half an hour with her while she asked questions, and hear the machine produce scratchy, sometimes lucid, responses, from what sounded like different voices trying to talk through a very bad phone connection.  I clearly heard "hello", "Wendy", and other short phrases.  I also smelled pipe smoke, and Wendy's face lit up.  "That's my Dad" she said.

This past Solstice there was a tragedy at Brushwood - a young woman had heart failure and died suddenly.  I remember seeing this young woman several times before the event, and being unable to stop looking at her for two reasons - she looked  very much like a very young version of my own daughter, very vulnerable, and she also "glowed" - there was a luminosity about her and I couldn't stop staring at her.  When I told Wendy about this sad event, she said that people who are dying always have a "glow" to them.  She said when she sees that in people, she knows they are getting ready to leave, because time, in the spirit world, does not have the same meaning it does here.  When I went to the area she died in, I did prayers to the Mother for her - and was surprised in my meditation there to clearly see the image of a tall woman taking the hand of a young person, and a sense of peace.  What I take from this, having talked with Wendy, is that I also saw this young woman as looking like my daughter because, perhaps, that energy of Mother, her own and the divine Mother, was what was needed to help her spirit.  I am no expert on this highly subjective experience.........

Spending time with Wendy can be intense!  I hope someday, perhaps when she retires, she'll become interested in perhaps living and working at Lilydale, because she's a powerful healer on a multitude of levels, a true shaman.   She gave me a great gift, which it's going to take me time to unfold, although my friend said that in the spirit world, it's "already done", because all time is happening at once.

We had been talking about the very convincing  documentary on Animal Planet about mermaids washing up with whales after the navy's horrific sonar testing.  It's a hoax, of course, although tragically the death of so many whales is not.  We were sitting at the table drinking coffee and Wendy's eyes misted.  She said "Excuse me, but someone is here, and I think it's important".  She said that a very tall, thin, very black man in a flat, disc like mask that was black with a white band across the eye holes and a red spot on the "forehead" was standing right behind me.  He put his hands on my shoulders (as a blessing?).  He told her he was something like "samarai" but it was a difficult accent for her to understand, and that he wanted me to help in some way.  He said that I would help to "revive Yemeja". 

Then Wendy said she perceived a large number of people, his tribe.  They were showing her images of the ocean, and offerings to the ocean, fruit, baskets, fish, and small white shells.  Tears were running down her face (Wendy says that when the energy is very intense this happens) and she said that he was thanking me.  Then they were gone.  Wendy said this was "high voltage", and for a while she continued to have tears in her eyes.  For myself, not perceiving this, I said that I was grateful, I thanked him and them, and said that I would do what I could to the best of my abilities.

I think this will unfold in the future, its meanings.  But I reflect that Yemaja, Mother Ocean, is an Orisha* originating in West Africa among the Yoruba people and perhaps others, is often shown as a black mermaid.  The destruction of intelligent life in the ocean, the whales, the dolphins, by navy sonar testing, is very real.  We are, indeed, killing Yemeja as well as the whales.   I am among many artists, mythologists, and activists who are trying to change consciousness about our living earth, to revive the sanctity that our ancestors once had.  Before it's too late.

I looked on Google for flat disc masks such as a tribal shaman might wear, and found that there are indeed many such in Africa, although I have not found one such as Wendy described.  However, I did discover that there is an extensive group of people with a long cultural history called the "Songhai", which sounds quite similar to "Samarai", and some of their domain touched the western ocean on Africa's shores.

*Orisha are Spirits  of nature and are responsible for the rules which govern nature.  Orisha are anthropomorphized with human characteristics for the purpose of understanding their essence and being able to extrapolate psychological constructs.Orisha Worship came to the Americas with the African slave trade over a period of 400 years.   In addition the slaves blended their African practice with the Catholic religion to hide their overt practices from Europeans.  In this manner, the traditions of Lukumi and Santeria were born.

The Eagle Tree and other Magics

Yesterday I was in a parking lot when I saw a huge bird fly right across my line of vision, not 20 feet away.  It flew into a palm tree, where I was able to study it for about 10 minutes before it disappeared.  I thought it might be a golden eagle, but I suspect it was a  hawk of some kind.  While there are golden eagles here in Pima country, they are very rare, and especially rare in the city, although red tail hawks seem quite at home here, enjoying the selection of pigeons to hunt.  You can always tell when one is nearby, because all the smaller birds become very quiet or fly away.

But the experience of seeing that magnificent creature brought to mind  magic that happened in 2003, right around this time of year, that I never forgot, although I never told anyone.  To this day there is a certain small, stunted tree in downtown Tucson, in the proximity of where the former Muse Community Art Center once stood, that I will visit and salute when I happen to be in the area.
Specifically there is a branch on that tree, not far from the height of one's head, that I often find myself standing before, as if something invisible was there, regarding me with a fierce yellow eye.

I had moved into the now long gone Muse Community Arts Center, living in a little studio on the second floor there.  I had a show in their little gallery in process - a display of the Masks of the Goddess collection.  It was very early, just dawn, and I was walking with a cup of coffee in my hand a few blocks from the Muse.  I looked up at a this little tree for some reason and saw, not 12 feet from me, a gigantic bird sitting on it's limb, looking right at me,  I've seen hawks in central Tucson occasionally, but I've never seen a golden Eagle in Tucson, or for that matter, never in the wild either.
But that was what sat before me in that tree.  Far too big to be a hawk.  I stopped, afraid to move, and for a full minute or so I looked at the eagle, and the eagle looked at me.

Then the eagle spread its huge wings, rose into the morning sky, making that strange cry that raptors make...........and I stood in awe.

A few days later I found a note from Grey Eagle, a native American traditional Story Teller who had, by chance, seen my show.  He wrote that he wanted to meet with me to give me the Story of Sedna, which he had learned from the Inuit people when he lived in Alaska.  And that was the beginning of the best, and certainly most mystical, performance I ever produced, which was called "Restoring the Balance", and centered on the Story of Sedna.

I think this is what someone once called the "re-enchantment of the World".  Magic.......recently I was considering submitting  a possible paper to an academic conference on Magic.  But looking at their guidelines..........I imagine long papers on medieval alchemical symbology and the anthropology of magical rites in pre-colonial Borneo, or some such, and already I'm having a problem keeping my eyes open.  What is behind the  constructs of academia?  What is real magic?

I guess to me "magic" is about the great Web of interdependency and ecology that underlies, well, everything, the "entanglement" and "unified field" of a living universe  Synchronicity....... as Alice Walker put it, "the Universe Responds".

The Universe Responds
by Alice Walker

A few years ago I wrote an essay called "Everything is a Human Being", which explores to some extent the Naive American view that all of creation is of one substance and therefore deserving of the same respect. In it I described the death of a snake that I caused, and wrote of my remorse.

That summer, "my" land in the country crawled with snakes. There was always the large resident snake, whom my mother named "Susie", crawling about in the area that marks the entrance to my studio. But there were also lots of others wherever we looked. A black-and-white king snake appeared underneath the shower stall in the garden. A striped red-and-black one, very pretty, appeared near the pond. It now revealed the little hole in the ground in which it lived by lying half in and half out of it as it basked in the sun. Garden snakes crawled up and down the roads and paths. One day leaving my house with a box of books in his arms, my companion literally tripped over one of these.

We spoke to all of these snakes in friendly voices. They went their way, we went ours. After about a two week bloom of snakes, we seemed to have our usual number: just Susie and a couple of her children.

A few years later, I wrote an essay about a horse called Blue. It was about how humans treat horses and other animals; how hard it is for us to see them as the suffering, fully conscious, enslaved beings they are. After reading this essay in public only once, this is what happened. A white horse came and settled herself on the land. (Her owner, a neighbor, soon came to move her.) The two horses on the ranch across the road began to run up to their fence whenever I passed, leaning over it and making what sounded like joyful noises. They had never done this before (I checked with the human beings I lived with to be sure of this), and after a few more times of greeting me as if I'd done something especially nice for them, they stopped. Now, when I pass they look at me with the same reserve they did before. But there is still a spark of recognition.

What to make of this?

I think I am telling you that the animals of the planet are in desperate peril, and that they are fully aware of this. No less than human beings are doing in all parts of the world, they also are seeking sanctuary. But I am also telling you that we are connected to them at least as intimately as we are connected to trees. Without plant life human beings could not breathe. They are the lungs of our planet. Plants produce oxygen. Without free animal life I believe we will lose increasingly the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. "Magic", intuition, sheer astonishment at the forms the Universe devises in which to express life - to express itself - will no longer be able to breathe in us.

But what I'm also sharing with you is this thought: The Universe responds. What you ask of it, it gives. The military-industrial complex and its leaders and scientists have shown more faith in this reality than have those of us who do not believe in war and who want peace. They have asked the Earth for all its deadlier substances. They have been confident in their faith in hatred and war. The universe, ever responsive, the Earth, ever giving, has opened itself fully to their desires. Ironically, Black Elk (the Lakota shaman) and nuclear scientists can be viewed in much the same way: as men who prayed to the Universe for what they believed they needed and who received from it a sign reflective of their own hearts.

I remember when I used to dismiss the bumper sticker "Pray for Peace". I realize now that I did not understand it, since I also did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world of our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine.

(From: "The Universe Responds: Or, How I learned We Can Have Peace on Earth", Living by the Word, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, N.Y., N.Y., 1988.)

The Night Blooming Cereus.........an Encore Performance!

 .
I've had a bit of  magic happening right in my own back yard this Spring................my Night Blooming Cereus cactus less than a month ago decided to produce a spectacular 6 blooms (I took pictures and wrote about it).  This extraordinarily beautiful, and rare, flower usually blooms only once a year, and that at night (although if you get up early in the morning you can see them still).  The very delicate flowers close up and wilt in the heat of the day.  Normally, after a blooming cycle, the cactus produces a purple fruit, and doesn't do it's spectacular show again until next year.

To show my appreciation for the artistry of this fabulous cactus, I've been thanking it.  And to my amazement, it produced a whole new array of buds.  I've never seen anything like this.......and this morning I awoke to the beautiful blooms below!  I'm amazed, and feel very much like thanking the Devas of the Cereus for their generosity!

Magic.....

"The Magician Card" from Rainbow Bridge Oracle

"The object isn’t to make art,
 it’s to be in that wonderful state 
which makes art inevitable.” 

~Robert Henri

Sometimes I wake up  with a strange, often annoying,  song playing in my head.  Usually one that won't go away until I sit down and think about it.  In the past I' ve had songs from  the Beachboys, commercials, and Peter and Gordon.  Recently it's  Olivia Newton John - three days of:

"Got to believe we are Magic,  nothing can get in our way" 

So.........what could this mean?  Is there something  I need to pay attention to, mediate on, or do I just have a loose synapse stuck in the 70's somehow? Considering I just wrote about Monsanto as comparable to Voldemort,  perhaps one meaning is that we must not allow such corporate Black Magic to sap our hope.  We can create change. 

 The Dictionary defines magic as "the belief that  things, people or events can be affected through supernatural forces".  Starhawk defined magic as a verb,  proactive:

"the art of changing consciousness at will" 

Perhaps, viewed as a verb rather than a noun,  "Magic" is a way of  "changing consciousness at will" in order to more consciously and  creatively engage with the co-creative universe, with Flow*.  That's where we become "Sorcerors", seeking an active connection with  "Source".  

In the painting I did for the  "Magician" Card, from the Rainbow Bridge Oracle  (it's actually a portrait of my ex-husband, who is also an artist) the  Magician is, making the universal gesture of Invocation.  I never saw the classical Tarot card as about  "commanding", but rather, using skilled attention and the various tools available, he is opening himself, inviting, the cosmic White Light  to work through and with him in order to create, to manifest on the material plane.  

He draws the white light of universal energy ("the Above") through his hand, through his will and and his willingness to create (to "handle").  But the light must move through is heart, his desire, inspiration and passion, in order to  manifest on the physical plane ("the Below").  Tapping into "Source", his creative energies manifest and unfold, and are broken into the "rainbow" components of the physical world in all of it’s  diversity, it's vast spectrum of form and expression and evolution.  From the One, the Many.   The Mage is an artist in every sense of the word, for his magic arises from  understanding and respect for the tools he has to work with,  and a realization that ultimately all things are one, connected to the infinite realm from which all manifestations originate. 

The card, read in my own deck, urges the persons being divined to remember that they are artists - the  Magicians of their lives.  We each can  "invoke" our  potential through wise use of will, vision and inspiration.   Reversed, the card can indicate an inability to manifest (create)  due to any number of conditions, including lack of self-esteem, discipline, or necessary education.  The Querant may also be rendering his or her  "power" over to others, and the card may indicate the presence of an individual displaying an  egotistic abuse of  power, or an  urge to manipulate others, that lacks both spiritual understanding and contact.

"Sympathetic Magic" by Kathleen Holder

Perhaps this is a hopelessly idealistic thing to say, but ultimately, all enduring creativity has to come from love.  We become Sorcerors when we draw from the the Source.   I also love the word "enchantment", which comes from the Latin root word "chanter", to "chant" or to "sing".  Thus to  "en-chant" is to join with the chorus,  to  be "within the Song".

Everyone knows the magical word "Abracadabra", which stage magicians exclaim just before they pull a rabbit out of a hat.  But not everyone knows that (from Wikipedia)  variations on the word were used as a magical formula by the Gnostics of the sect of Basilides in invoking the aid of beneficent spirits against disease and misfortune. It is found on Abraxas stones which were worn as amulets.   Subsequently, its use spread beyond the Gnostics into popular usage.  Abracadabra is probably derived from the Hebrew or Aramaic language "Avra Kadavrai" (אברא כדברי) meaning "I will create as my words".

 "I've often heard words and songs as I work.  I felt an underlying pattern or rhythm.  I wanted to include that sensation, to make it part of the structure.  "Singing" seemed important.  The creation myth of the Australian Aborigines involves the idea of "singing the world into existence".  I wanted to feel a musical time in the work, as if I was walking and singing.  Again, here is that relationship between figure and land:  I saw rhythm reflecting consciousness walking across the land, the walk of consciousness.

Dreams frequently precede what happens in my work.  It's like what I was saying about the poem being not so much a reference, but a part of the work.  The dreams are a part of the work as well, there's no separation."

Caroline Beasley Baker, discussing her installation "A Magic Spell For The Far Journey" (1989)

The Feast of Samhain

 We just celebrated "The Feast of  Samhain' ( a table of 12, with the 13th seat, the Guest of Honor, reserved for the Beloved Dead)....... candlelit night of sharing stories of those who have passed away but are in our hearts.

 And of course I remember always the Spiral Dance, which I participated in a number of times in San Francisco, and brought to Tucson in 2000 with the help of Macha NightMare. I've copied a video of the Spiral Dance below from UTube) .  When one has danced the Spiral Dance with 2,000 people, and come face to face with each of them in the course of the dance, you leave changed.  

Death/Rebirth

This is the sacred origin and meaning of Hallowed Evening. Spirits, coming close to this world to join the feast, sometimes like to play tricks, hence, "trick or treat"..........it's not good, of course, to fail to leave a place at the table, and a little single malt,  for Uncle Angus on such a high holy day! And of course, the "Witch and her broom". The Broom is associated with many folk traditions of "sweeping away the old bad energies" - purification rituals for the home and Hearth (Heart). Traditionally this was the time to celebrate the "Witch's New Year", the last of three Celtic Harvest Festivals before going into the dark of Winter.   It is the closing of the old year,  a time to honor the ancestors, the harvest, and the gifts of the year past.  When I lay out the Feast, I always imagine ancient  communities laying out the last fresh apples, the treasured honey mead reserved only for special occasions, and toasts raised  to the invisible ones,  their plates heaped high as well. Inherent in this celebration was a profound respect for the Spiral wheel of the year,  cycling the natural cycles of death and re-birth.

Here is my gratitude to the year that is soon to pass away, and to all of those who have passed away from my life as well, people who have gifted me and created with me and loved me, and I them.  Blessed Be!

Sometimes we don't realize, because things manifest through time, the ways that our wishes have often been granted.  Thinking of the Spiral Dance, and Reclaiming, I remember another one of those stories of Grace and Magic, and want to tell it, although, as all true stories are, it's part of a much larger story that is woven into the fabric of my life, and lots of other lives.  I think when we tell  these stories we get a glimpse of how seamless "reality" really is.  And Magic is always afoot, although I don't believe it has anything to do with wands.  I think it's much more about Weaving and being Woven.

"Gaia" (1986)

When I was in graduate school, I began reading "The Spiral Dance" by Starhawk.  It was such a revelation, the way she spoke about the Goddess, and a theology of Immanence.  It became the central inspiration for one of my shows while in Grad school.  When I graduated I went to live in New York, and married, and then in 1997 got divorced.  My ex and I were very involved with the Pagan community on the East Coast, and when we divorced I felt like I lost my community.  With the bitterness that often accompanies a divorce, I decided I was done with the pagans, and spiritual things in general, and I also decided I would leave the East Coast and live somewhere else.  In those days I was doing Renaissance Faires, so I just packed up my van and became a nomad.

I had a booth in the fall of that year at the Maryland Renaissance Faire, and I happened to hear of a holistic health practitioner who also did shamanic work and "soul retrievals" in the area.  I figured it couldn't hurt, so I made an appointment.  We lay down on the floor, he "journeyed" for me, and "blew my soul pieces" back into my chest.  I didn't know what to think, but as he described his impressions, among them he told me that there were two things that would show me that the struggles of my divorce, and my old life, were over.  One was a magenta flower, a Cosmos.  The other was a little terra cotta female figure, like an angel or something.

In November I packed up and went to Arizona to spend the winter in my trailer at the Renaissance Faire there.  By March I was really wondering where to go next.  I had recently discovered the Internet, so I looked up just about everything I was interested in - Goddess, ritual, mask theatre, transpersonal psychology, etc.  Every single time it came up Berkeley, Marin Country, or San Francisco!   The clincher was when I was looking for the email for something called the Center for Symbolic Studies near New Paltz, New York.  I knew Stephen and Robin Larsen, and wanted to get a recommendation from them. Up came the Center for Symbolic Studies in Berkeley, California!  And the Center was the creation of a Jungian psychologist named Robert H. Hopcke  who had just written a book called There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives!

Well, that was enough for me, so I packed up the van when the show ended, cat in the back, and headed west to California, back to the Berkeley I remembered so well but hadn't seen in over 20 years.  I decided I would sleep in my van if I had to, until I could find a place to stay (and fortunately for me, I had no idea of how hard it can be to find a place to stay in Berkeley now.....)

Arriving finally, I looked around for a familiar landmark, and found the Cafe Mediterranean.  I didn't know anyone anymore in Berkeley, but for old times sake I parked the van nearby and went in for my first Cappachino since the 70's.  As I stood in line, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said "Are you Lauren Raine?"  It was my old friend Joji!  I couldn't believe it.  He bought me a cup of coffee, asked me where I was staying, I told him I had just arrived and planned on moving back to Berkeley, and he invited to stay at his house where he had an extra room. Voila - I didn't have to sleep in my car for even one night!

Judy Foster

And when I went to his house that evening, in his living room was a big, framed close-up photograph of a magenta Cosmos.

When, two months later, I found a room to rent with Judy Foster, the first thing I encountered when I walked into her house was an altar with a terra cotta angel.  And as it turned out, Judy was one of the founders of Reclaiming and the Spiral Dance, and a close friend of Starhawk.   The universe put me exactly where I needed to go.   Thank you Judy.........you are missed.

Magic....

"Magic" painting by Rob Schouten

 "If you do not believe in magic, your life will not be magical.  Magic like the power of Stonehenge is part of the unknowable - that which you cannot describe, but which exists and makes your life extraordinary.  It is that mysterious and intriguing part of your spiritual life.  Magic is what we are all looking for, but if you try to hold it and name it and describe it, you will lose it.  You must talk around magic, describe what led you there, and give thanks for that part of the universe that is unknowable and full of color and strength and magic.  Out of relationship comes magic.  Out of the friction of forgetting and remembering comes magic.  Out of the mists of dawn and the mysteries of creation comes the magic that we call life.  Out of your passion for existence comes magic."

The Power Deck by Lynn V. Andrews   
with paintings by visionary artist Rob Schouten. 

 
Recently I've had a (bevy? myriad? cluster?) of synchronicities around "magic".  Last night I found myself telling a friend to see a movie called "The Color of Magic".  In my last email with Prema Dasara  she closed by saying "magic sometimes happens".

I have always prayed to  Tara when I'm in trouble.  How I "met" Tara is a magical story.  So, prior to my surgery in early November to remove a tumor, I prayed to Tara.  The day before going to the hospital, I was delighted to receive an email from Prema Dasara.  More than a year and a half ago we had discussed making masks for her Mandala Dance, "The 21 Praises to Tara".  She was inquiring if I still wanted to make them. I took this as great encouragement  before I went "under".  All is well now, and I feel I kind of have a promise to fulfill to Tara, although, unfortunately, Prema  has had to put her project off because of health problems.



Prema Dasara and "The 21 Praises to Tara" Mandala Blessing Dances

But the idea came to me - why not do a second collection of my own  Masks of the Goddess?  Ever since 2008, when  the masks were sold at a Benefit Auction, many people have contacted me wanting to use them for events, rituals, dances.   I have thought about creating another collection,  in new ways and forms, to be held in trust for those wishing to use them "in a sacred manner."I do not believe I have the energy to create community events myself anymore, but there are many who would use them to do so.


As I rolled this around in my mind yesterday, I thought I'd pull a card from one of my decks - and behold, up came "Stonehenge and Magic".   Ancient monuments, the womb of the Great Mother, seem to be what I write a lot about these days..........and what happens in the womb?  Well, things get incubated prior to being born.  Or re-born.

I love what Lynn Andrews wrote about magic above.  Perhaps magic is like the Dark Matter that surrounds and penetrates everything, the infinite backdrop upon which we're all unknowing organizing our lives, filling out our weekly calendars. Synchronicities, like dreams, are sometimes hard to understand. But......I think I'll initiate the birth of a new collection of masks.  It won't be the same as the old project, because I'm not the same.  But I'm going to trust in a bit of Magic.



My project (1998-2008) "The Masks of the Goddess"

Doris Lessing & my "Book of Common Miracles"

"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

My friend Rose says that I should compile a little book about syncronicities. I think, if I did, I would call it the "Book of Common Miracles", or perhaps, "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 our daily concerns, fail to notice little miracles fluttering under our very noses.

Ecologist David Abram commented that perception is:  "a reciprocal phenomenon organized as much by the surrounding world as by oneself" and suggested 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, he went on to say 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".* 

A Conversant World. Or as writer Alice Walker has often said, "the Universe responds."

So the story I would like to tell today concerns one of my 5 favorite writers, a woman whose visionary books, most significantly SHIKASTA, has informed and inspired me since the mid '70's, 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 tremendously admire. 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 acceptance speech, Lessing remembers her life early life in Africa, in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, as well as her life in England. And she urges us to remember how precious knowledge, and the gifts of literacy, really are.

"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.

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 poor girl (in Zimbabwe) 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.

© The Nobel Foundation 2007

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