Seamless Creativity

Untitled Lauren Raine  (1970)

"We slowly pull focus, lifting up and away from being embedded in our lives

 until we attain an overview.  This overview empowers us to make valid creative choices."

Julia Cameron, "THE ARTIST'S WAY"*

I have been thinking about the  trans-personal nature of creativity,  the way it can sometimes seem to express dimensions of perception that transcend time or even one's "individuality" as the vision or the poem dips its roots into the collective mind. 

I was recalling a group I used to belong to whose members were mostly practicing and  retired therapists. I often felt somewhat ill at ease in their company, being without the psychological vocabulary or training they possessed. In retrospect, sometimes I felt it was the way they, as therapists, tended to "pathologize" or generalize that  made me uncomfortable. It is, of course, understandable that they should do so, and that they might often  see  others through the lens of their training and practice a standard of mental health and normalcy. And yet..........something was missing for me. Perhaps what I missed was a  larger room, a room big enough for  the "Mystery".   At the time, I did not know how to articulate that.  

Untitled (1972)

There is a thin line between trans-personal, trans-formative, "non-ordinary states", and madness. Those separations, of course, can have something to do with the cultural matrix one is living in. But sometimes "madness" is also brilliant insight. Sometimes creativity arises  from a liminal zone that should not be "explained" too comprehensively or dismissed because it is outside of an "acceptable emotional or psychological spectrum". Just because we cannot see ultra-violet with our eyes does not mean it is not there. But we can imagine ultra-violet:  perhaps we could imagine what it sounds like, or how it tastes, or what it "feels" like. 

       

            Untitled Lauren Raine (1985)

Carl Jung, who formed the concepts of synchronicity and the collective unconscious, had "spirit guides" that he considered a source of  crucial insights. He described them as aspects of his  psyche which he could produce, but which could also produce themselves. Were they "Aspects" that had their own life? Or were they discrete entities themselves?  Among his "guides" were  the archetypal mentor figure Philemon, an ancient Vedic scholar, and Basilides,  an early Gnostic teacher in Alexandria., Egypt. Also one thing about Jung's background that is not well known is that his family was deeply interested in Spiritualism, and included members who were known locally as mediums. This would have pre-disposed Carl Jung to the possibility of "spirit guides" that could communicate with him and advise him.

untitled Lauren Raine (1985)

 "Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of sub-consciousness....I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness."........... Aaron Copeland

There is a continuing dialogue within the arts community about  artists as shamans. I both agree and disagree with this comparison. We are a culture that by and large has lost its shamans. I do not mean, of course,  to negate the work of  reclamation and innovation contemporary shamans, such as Sandra Ingerman (Soul Retrieval) or her mentor Michael Harner, who have studied universal traditions and evolved  new forms of contemporary shamanism, have contributed to today's world.

Artists have been marginalized and displaced in the contemporary world and seek meaningful identity and purpose in a society that at best patronizes them, and at worst disregards them altogether. How many times have people asked me what I do, and having told them that I am an artist, their response is "What's your real job?". I do not tell a lot of people I am an artist.  Claiming or seeking a meaningful identity as a contemporary Shaman in the arts is entirely understandable. 

Yet it is presumptuous for many artists to call themselves "shamans", thus co-opting a word and a primal practice associated with it that has a very long lineage indeed.

Traditional shamans, while their practices and symbol systems may vary widely, universally have a great deal of structure within which they work - they have cultural and tribal support within traditional systems that go back through many, many generations. They have  systems of "visioning" and healing, ordeals or initiations, rituals, and practices for cyclical auspicious occasions,  and means of psychic protection that have evolved for hundreds of years. They have visible and "invisible support" that provides a strong container within which their responsibilities and experiences are clear, honored, are  often hereditary, and they are generally expected to be mature and richly experienced before they can  begin practicing as shamanic healers. It is not a random, chaotic process at all (although certainly Heyoka or Trickster Shamans have their place in worldwide cultures). 

"In the case of the Sami, my Shaman teacher was trained in her culture for thirty-five years before she could practice hearing on people outside of her extended family. When I pondered this, given the fact that she was born into a prestigious lineage of Shamans and that her talents were obvious when she was a child, I wondered why she had to study for so long before treating those outside of her kin group............My Shaman teacher was not only a healer, but she was also a student of folklore. This is important, because she always insisted that the three principal sources of her shamanic knowledge were Sami folklore (tales, legends, and so forth); teachings from the ancestral lineage-from her father, who was her mentor, and from other ancestral spirits, who spoke to her from the spirit world; and teachings from spirit entities (what we might call "spirit aides" or "power animals."

THE PLACE OF SHAMANISM IN ECOFEMINISM,  by Gloria Feman Orenstein

I was once privileged have a conversation with one of the founders of Eco-feminism,  Gloria Orenstein.**  Dr. Orenstein is a Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at USC in Los Angeles.  In the 80's she became friends with, and worked with,  a hereditary  Sami shaman.

I will  always remember the story she told me about the first time she went to visit her mentors' family in Finland. It was winter, very dark, and they had driven for many miles into the countryside, at last arriving at a house where she was given a room to sleep in. She said that she lay in bed wondering if she was crazy,  coming all the way from Los Angeles in the dead of winter. She tried to sleep but was disturbed by  voices speaking  outside the window. They seemed to be calling for  "Caffe, Caffe".  

In the morning she asked her hosts why people were outside in the freezing  night, asking for coffee!  They responded that this was a very good sign:  it meant she would receive help. It seems that in Sami land, like flowers and food offerings in Bali, or whiskey to the Orishas of Cuba, coffee was an offering acceptable to the spirit world.

'St. George and the Dragon" (1970)

Does the creation of truly visionary art make one a shaman? I do not believe so. However, art process - Flow - can be called shamanic within its healing and revelatory  capacity, the way it can reveal the seamlessness and timelessness  of our inner lives, and the way it can touch collective roots that extend far beyond our individual perception. There is a liminal dimension to the creative process one can hardly fail to notice.

Now in my 70's,  I am interested in the synapses and links as I review my long life. Going over some of my very old drawings, I was amazed to see within them a kind of "code" or touchstone that repeated over and over throughout the years. I  found the drawing above,  for example,  which I did when I was about 18 years of age,  of "St. George and the Dragon". I was copying part of the drawing from some old Masters photos - certainly the "St. George" with the sword was from some painting I must have been looking at.  At 18,  I knew nothing  about feminism, the Goddess,  or much about mythology either, although I had looked at various paintings depicting the slaying of dragons by St. George.

And yet I can read what became my life purpose, like hieroglyphics, in this little drawing, now, from the vantage point of age. 

Here is a divine female figure, which I symbolized with wings, who is naked and full breasted. She is no bound or chaste maiden in need of rescue from a dragon. She seems to have a snake around her waist and in her hand, she is turning away from the Hero, and appears to be falling.  As she falls she is merged with the rather tragic, sympathetic  looking figure of the dragon about to be slain by George (who looks nothing at all like a saint to me.  In fact, he looks kind of like my abusive boyfriend of the time.) This is a classic heroic tale - so why did I make "George" so un-noble?

Behind him is a barren, rocky land, in contrast to the depths below the dragon figure, with vegetation bubbling up from the dark earth, and even  something that looks like a dark moon shape as well.

The meanings I can now draw from these symbols represent many years of study and discussion and ritual and growth and collaboration with colleagues and mentors,  as we became feminists, and as we mutually evolved  Eco-feminism and Goddess theology. I have come to see over the years a new meaning of the myth of St. George and the Dragon:   wherein the "dragons" of the ancient pagan earth religions, and the sacred symbols of the ubiquitous snakes of the Goddess, were banished, slain, re-mythed and de-sacralized in the course of patriarchal religion and culture.

In 1970 Merlin Stone was researching and writing about the banished Goddess  and the development of patriarchal religions (her groundbreaking book When God Was A Woman was published in 1976**).  Around that time Marija Gimbutas was shaking up the archeological world with her vision of the World of the Goddess in prehistory.  But I was not exposed to these ideas until much later. Yet when I was, the work of the Goddess truly became my life work.

The drawing really is a kind of "future memory".

"Skin Shedder Mandala" Lauren Raine (1985)

 *Cameron, Julia:  The Artist's Way:  A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity,  March 18, 2002, JP Tarcher/Putnam NYNY

**Ornstein, Gloria: "Synchronicity and The Shaman of Sami land" in Uncoiling the Snake:  Ancient Patterns in Contemporary Women's Lives (A Snakepower Reader). Edited by Vicki Noble. Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1993

**Stone, Merlin:  When God Was a Woman  265 pages, Hardcover, First published January 1, 1976 Harper & Row, NYNY  https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/30858

Lorraine Capparell: The Dream Becomes the Work

"THE DREAM BECOMES THE WORK "

An Interview with Lorraine Capparell

PREFACE:

It was my privilege, in the late 1980's, to share conversations about art, spirituality, and cultural transformation with some extraordinary artists in pursuit of a book I came to call SEEING IN A SACRED MANNER:  Conversations with Transformative Artists  (1.)

The book was meant to document the work of contemporary artists whose visionary work was influenced by their unique spiritual  insights and experiences.  Travelling across the country not long after graduate school, I met artists who defined their work as spiritual practice in New York City, in Arkansas, in California, and elsewhere.   Among them were  contemporary artists  Rafael Ortiz, Rachel Rosenthal, Alex and Allison Grey, Kathleen Holder, Beth Ames Swartz, and others.   Although I was not successful in finding a publisher for SEEING IN A SACRED MANNER as a book and ultimately moved on to other endeavors,  I did publish some of these interviews  (2.) so graciously granted me by these artists, in a number of art journals.

More than 30 years later, as artists continue to seek encouragement for the deeper matrices that drive them to create and seek purpose in their work, I believe these conversations about art and spirituality are more relevant than ever.   I take the opportunity in this paper to share the wisdom of these voices again.    Most  of them I have digitized and they can be viewed at: http://www.laurenraine.com/articles.html

Below is the interview I was fortunate to have with the  vibrant visionary artist Lorraine Capparell at her home in California so long ago.  It was a pleasure I  remember well.   She is as creative as ever, and although this interview is not about her current work, please visit her website to learn more about Lorraine's work:    http://www.skymuseum.com/

Lauren Raine

June, 2020

1.  http://www.laurenraine.com/seeing-in-a-sacred-manner.html

2.  http://www.laurenraine.com/articles.html

INTRODUCTION:

When I met Lorraine Capparell our interview,  it was at her home in Palo Alto, California, where she had developed a following as a sculptor, photographer, painter and free-lance graphic designer.  Originally from the East Coast, she studied art at Cornell University, and later at San Francisco State University.   At the time of our Interview, her solo exhibitions included "Hands", her extraordinary sculpture that was first shown at the San Jose Museum of Art in 1982, and "Hand Signals", a show of watercolors at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, New York in 1988.  Additionally, her work was published and written about in a number of contemporary publications, including the WomanSpirit Sourcebook, and Dreams are Wiser Than Men, edited by Richard Russo (North Atlantic Books, 1987). (3.)

Capparell practices Buddhist Vipassana meditation, and has twice travelled to South East Asia and Sri Lanka to study Buddhist and Hindu art and culture.  Vipassana is a meditative technique that teaches close attention to the breath to develop a profound internal stillness, the "spaciousness" below the chattering, reasoning mind, from which genuine creativity and receptivity may arise.  In a statement to her work, Capparell commented that  "Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form" .

This  quality of attention informs her art process as well as her life.  Remembering and recording dreams is an important daily activity as well, one that  provides her with a resource from which she draws inspiration, as well as solutions to creative problems encountered along the way.  Her dreams introduce her to imagery that is archetypal as well as intimately personal, and her dreams reveal their meanings as she actualizes them in her art.  Such was true of her amazing sculpture "Hands", which she saw fully realized within a dream two years before she completed. 

Interview with Lorraine Capparell

December 11, 1988

LR:      You said that you often receive ideas for your art through dreams?

LC:      It frees me to pursue the work.  I began using my dreams because of a "judge" I had inside, always questioning "what is this you're making, why are you making it, is it good enough?"  All of that stressful inner dialogue.

 If I get a powerful image from a dream, and make a sculpture of it, it's not a problem.  It is valid to me, because it already existed in some way within the dimension of dreams.

Sometimes I see them as finished pieces.  I saw "Hands" in a dream - I saw it vividly as a photograph in a book!  I dreamed that my father gave me an art history book:  I leafed through it and saw the piece.  "Hands" was written on the page, and it also said, curiously, that it was made by an artist other than myself.

LR:  You saw what later became your Sculpture "Hands" in a book within your dream?

LC:  Yes.  That's why it's been such a joy to see the piece published, the most recent publication being in the Woman Spirit Sourcebook.  I saw it in the dream as a picture in a book, went through the process of making it, and now at last see it published in an actual book!

LR" Do you think dreams can be prophetic?

LC:  Yes, if you put the energy into manifesting them, if you make the dream a reality not only in the world, but in your consciousness.  What's a dream?  It's all intricately intertwined.  We first have to think of something in order to create it on the physical plane.  If you have a dream, your subconscious or super conscious is planting something in your mind, which you can then manifest.

Sometimes, when I'm working, before I go to sleep I'll suggest to myself that I would like to dream a creative solution to a problem.  For example, I was trying to figure out how to glaze "Hands".  So I asked my dreams to show me the ways.  In fact, I finally stopped working on the piece because of a dream.  Each torso is separate, and was glazed individually in an electric kiln.  I airbrushed and fired each torso about six times, and was planning to do a last bit of firing the next day.  That night I dreamt one of the torsos blew up!  I was so upset by this dream that I decided it was over, I wouldn't glaze any further.

LR:  The dream not only inspired the work, but also told you when to stop?

LC:  Yes.  I saw it shattering in the dream, which was  actually  a real possibility.  I had fired the torsos so many times, and they are large irregular shapes.  But you can be at the end of a long process and not know when to stop.  The dream told me it was time to stop.

LR:  In "Hands" each figure has three faces.  Did you relate that to the three aspects of the Goddess (Mother, Maiden and Crone), or Trinities such as Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu?

LC:  No, not really.  I had heard of the three faces of Eve, and the myth of Janus.  That was about it.  Of course, in the process of working, I learned a lot more.

LR:  Yet "Hands", along with the sculptural installation you created which you titled "The Three Ages of Women",   are very closely related to the symbols associated with the Goddess.  It's interesting that you saw the image in your dream in a "history book".  The re-emergence and re-discovery of the Goddess in the Women's Spirituality movement, along with the work of Marija Gimbutas (4) is also about the surfacing of "buried history".  You also mentioned that you saw the sculpture rising out of the Earth?

LC:      I dreamt the entire image just once.  What I saw in the book was a photograph of the piece.  But n dreams you can look, it's a photograph, and you look again, and it comes alive.  So I also saw it emerging wet, as if it came from within the Earth.

LR:  When did you have this dream?

LC:  In 1980.   It was my first major sculpture.  I worked on "Hands" for two years.  I haven't sold it, because I feel it needs a special environment.  It could be a fountain - I've thought of plumbing it so that water will come out horizontally, at the waist level of the figures, flowing over the platform.  I would like to make it active, make it wet.

Each time I've exhibited it I've also created a ritual for it, or one was created by others.  When I showed it in 1982 at the San Jose Museum of Art I asked two dancers to design something for it.  I also asked the women who posed for "Hands" to do a ritual, and we choreographed a simple circular ritual, our hands pushing and joining to music.  I have a videotape of that.

LR:  The hands in the sculpture, in gesture and placement, resemble flames.  Did you realize that?

LC:  Yes.  I found out that that position, the gesture of pushing forward, is equated in Tai Chi with the hexagram for fire.  So I learned the gesture related to fire, and I glazed it as fire.  The open hand is also a gesture of Buddha.

"Hands" also has to do with the possibility of enlightenment, because it rises from the Earth, from the dark, moving through the flame of the senses, the flame of physical life, of passion and transformation.

LR:  And the gesture itself - are the women pushing out?

LC:  Pushing forward.  Pushing out, to me, is about exclusion.  Pushing forward is dynamic growth.  In Tai Chi you push and then bring back.

LR:  How did your sculptural group "The Three Ages of Women" come about?

LC:  It began as a possible commission for a woman who had a home in Big Sur, with a beautiful Pacific view.  She wanted a column to hold up the branch of a tree.  I began designing columns based on Greek columns.  From my reading about Ionic columns I learned there were certain shapes that were considered masculine and certain shapes that were feminine, and I created a number of designs based on the classic feminine styles.

I made studies, and sent them to Big Sur.  She eventually decided she didn't want to continue with the project, but by that time I was so turned on by the idea I kept going anyway.  I chose three different shapes that I particularly liked, and made 26" models of them.

I later met a woman who is interested in the Goddess, and she arranged for us to install some sculpture in the yard of a woman who is a psychologist.  She  was planning a weekend retreat for women, and she wanted to exhibit sculpture as a part of it.  When I showed her pictures of my columns, she said "Those are the three ages of women, didn't you know that?"  I said "No, tell me about it!"

That was how I learned about the Maiden, the Matron, and the Crone.  That sort of thing seems to happen a lot.  I'll work on an image, especially if it comes from a dream, and later find out is connected to something.

LR:  You often access your art form your dreams, but your art also allows you to access meaning and symbolism - while you didn't dream the columns, it wasn't until later you learned what they represented.

LC:  Right.

LR:  Why do you call the Circle of five figures in the installation the "Temple of the Crones"?

LC: Actually, it's a Temple to the wisdom of old age.  The gate is formed by the Maiden and the Matron columns, each standing opposite the other.  You progress through the stages of Maiden and Matron in order to enter the Circle of Crones.

When I showed it, I asked Chloe Scott, a dancer in her 60's, if she would choreograph something for the "Three Ages of Women".  She has a troupe of women dancers called Dymaxion, who have been working together for years.   Her performance began with the Maidens running into the space, very sprightly.  The more sedate Matrons then entered, rounded up the Maidens, and brought them back.  Then Chloe entered alone, in order to dance the Crone's Dance - it was slow and stately.  Finally she led the group into the Temple, and they performed a ritual of hands crossing, based on my sculpture "Hands".

You see, as I worked on the piece I realized we are lacking in reverence for elders, particularly for elder women.  We don't honor the Crone, the "Saga".  I made five Crones in a circle, representing five wise old women.  The circle represents the wisdom of old age, and in particular, the wisdom of mature womanhood.

LR:   Do you keep a record of your dreams as a resource?

LC:   I keep a dream journal.  I have volumes of dreams from over the years!  Periodically I'll go through them.

I'm currently working on a series of ceramic figures; gold leafed, enclosed or framed in boxes.  I ran across the image of a torso in a box in one of my dream journals, and I began to work on the idea, and did two or three of them.

About that time I was rejected from an art gallery.  They rejected a piece called "Dream Shower" and "Hands" because of nudity.  So I began using classical paintings as a basis for the figures I put in the boxes.  I used Titian,  Raphael's "Three Graces", Ingre…..I made sculptures from the paintings because I wanted to validate my use of the body.  I was reacting to being rejected!  Hey look, nudity occurs in the classics!

I showed them to a friend, who said "Oh, those are Hindu temple pieces!  Don't you see that?"  Well, no, I didn't.  Sometimes I feel I'm blindly manifesting these things, and have no idea of where they come from or what they are.  I just like them.  So now I think of them as "Temple pieces", and I want to display them in that context.  I'm to show them in February, 1989, in conjunction with the Women's Caucus for the Arts.  I want to place them at different levels, all these niches, to suggest an altar.

My friend Rhodessa Jones is an actress.  One of her characters she calls "Lily Overstreet".  She and I planned to do collaboration - I would create a room or sculpture, and she would do a performance.  She wanted a table to put things on, so I decided to make the table actually her - her figure is the base of the table.  The "Lily Table".  The set will also include a giant bed shaped like a hand, which also might represent the "Hand of the Mother".

I seem to pursue the hand image again and again and again.  In the last year I've done a series of watercolors I call "Hand Signals".  They are different hand gestures; some are mudras, like the mudras for wakefulness and fearlessness. 

LR:   You mentioned that you make yourself do at least one painting each day?

LC:  It's a good way to access your unconscious, to get ideas.  Some days I don't know what to do for my daily painting - so I'll paint my dreams, or mandalas, whatever comes to mind, because there is a void to fill.  "Hand Signals" came from my daily painting practice.  I ran out of ideas, and felt like tracing my hand, but it seemed too plebian.  I finally gave in, and that led me to the idea of gesture as a window to a scene.

This became a series.  I would never have hit on those ideas otherwise.  I did about 70 paintings, and now have a show of them.

LR:  What kind of intention do you think you have in your work?

LC:  The first time I displayed "Hands" I received a letter from a docent, who said that she loved going to the room it was in, just to sit during her lunch hour.  I couldn't have asked for more!  I would like the work to evoke serenity, contemplation about your place in life.

In the 70's I remember talking with a  friend, a discussion about  what art meant to us.  I decided I wanted my art to be essentially religious, which then provoked an argument, because that word is so loaded.  "Religious"  meant dogma of some kind - but at that point in my development I didn't know any other word to use.

Now I can say that I want my art to convey something that is archetypal, something that transcends everyday life.  I would like to point to the unity  we all belong to, and perhaps thus provoke others to work on their awareness of that as well.

Although, in truth, it doesn't ever start out that way.   With an intention or a purpose.   If I have an original idea I just let it grow in myself and in the art process.  I don't have an goal.  I didn't begin with a specific idea when I made the columns for the "Three Ages of Women" or the framed figures I'm working on now.

LR:  And yet you did make what became a Temple, and altarpieces for contemplation.  What is a sacred space or a religious object - or for that matter, what is a myth, a ritual?  Aren't they really objects or spaces or stories or images to……………..

LC:  Trigger something!  You can't call it religion - what it's about is working on your awareness.

As an artist, I work on something I may not be clear about, I just work on it, and in the process go through every imaginable state of liking and hating and doubting and desiring, but there is a bonus.  My artwork allows me to learn along the way.  I learn by trying to make these pieces real, trying to make them tangible and physical.  I haven't always understood them, but along the way I learn their meanings.

LR:  Sometimes the inspiration precedes the comprehension?

LC:  They unfold. 

In other words, don't stop!  There is an opportunity to learn more, always.  Any time you work, you're actually working on yourself as well.

REFERENCES:

3.  https://www.amazon.com/Dreams-Are-Wiser-Than-Men/dp/0938190946

"Edited by Richard A. Russo, this anthology of essays, poems, and short stories recounts dreams, analyzes dreams, and celebrates dreams. Dreams, like human experience, have intrinsic value apart from any interpretation we make of them. Instead of asking what dreams can do for us, ask how we may honor the dream."

4.  https://www.belili.org/marija/aboutmarija.html

"Agricultural people's beliefs concerning sterility and fertility, the fragility of life and the constant threat of destruction, and the periodic need to renew the generative processes of nature are among the most enduring. They live on in the present... The Goddess-centered religion existed for a very long time... leaving an indelible imprint on the Western psyche." -- Marija Gimbutas

Creativity and Divinity........Reflections

One of the things I have been thinking about is what kind of world would it be if our value system revolved around Creativity and Co-operation, instead of power, money, and dominance.  What kind of world..............Well, a world that could endure and be sustainable, among other things.  A world children could grow to their potential in.  A world where the resources of the collective and the planet went to something other than war and violence.  

Creativity.  Personally, my notion of a Deity, or Deities, is that She is an artist.  And a Mother.  That is a very different way of looking at the Divine from a great deal of what I see often.    We all have instrinsic expressive and communicative gifts in life, which I think come down to the same thing:    One is the eternal, seamless creative and receptive source, the other the mortal (and hence not immortal)  means.  When we are creating, the Divine expresses through each of us, whether we're making a mathematical theorem or a new recipe for lemon cake.  We're engaged in the Long Dance.

How can anyone look at an orchid, shamelessly pretending, in the hope of being pollinated, that it is a bevy of  magenta tipped butterflies in flight......without seeing the Goddess/God  at Her easel?  Without appreciating, indeed being in awe, of  the gorgeous humor, and creative intelligence, behind all things visible?  How miraculous is a spider in its perfect web?  The extraordinary way in which a sage plant knows exactly when to send up purple flowers, along with every other sage plant in the garden?  I do not believe any gardener who loves his or her work could fail to see that "nature" is both intelligent, responsive to love and appreciation, and communicative.  It's not a human language, but language it is.  

When I was a kid in a long-ago confusing Bible classes, I had an early  "ah-ha" experience. In fact, that might have been at the root of what became my personal quest in life.  I was told, over and over, that "God loves us".  Yet  I could not understand how this  "God" that was so often described to me as we plowed through the Book, could be so cruel if He really "loved us".  He seemed a God of terrible vengence and capricious cruelty.   Even now, I shudder to think of children, like the child I was,  internalizing some of these stories as "divinely inspired". How about this, for example, from the Holy Book?

"And  the Lord spake unto Moses, saying "Avenge the children of Israel"..............and Moses said unto them, "Have ye saved all the women alive?.......Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.  But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."   

  Num. XXXI, 1-18

I remember reading this, and trying to fathom how the noble Moses, made so visible by Charleton Heston delivering the 10 Commandments......could be involved in what was actually being described here.  

All those women, old ladies, babies  and little boys hacked up with swords,  the little girls carried off to be raped, sanctified by "God" and His prophet.   How could I reconcile this horror?   Other options were needed.  And I never failed to try to find them in future years.  I am fortunate that I've come up with some pretty good answers.

And how sad, and conflicting, that a fragmented history of the bloody genocide practiced in ancient battles, fought beneath the banner of a tribal war god sometimes called Yahwah........should appear within the same book as  "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you" (Luke 6:27). 

Or, and this passage, a favorite of mine, which is not from the Bible at all, but rather from the long hidden and lost  Nag Hammedi Gospels, attributed to Jesus from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (the Twin)*** :

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you,  what you do not bring forth will destroy you." 

There it is!  The Divine Creative Force, expressing in everything and everyone. Early Christians called it "gnosis", knowledge of God within.   Joseph Campbell called it your personal  "bliss"......... it's the joy of creation,  and if we bring it forth, it energizes and informs and expands our lives and our vision, a ripple that spreads out not only from our lives but in a circle to the lives of many others.  If not expressed or known, the same reservoir of energy contracts, turns self-destructive, dark, stagnant.  Maybe, that's even one of the places tumors can come from. 

Be that as it may, I think it's so important to not "give your power away" as the popular saying goes, alhtough it can take time and the growth of self-awareness  to learn how not to do  that.  It's important to appreciate, in fact thoroughly enjoy,  the gifts that life has put on your banquet plate.

There's a wonderful passage in the ancient Sumarian stories of the goddess Inanna where she goes to visit Enki, the head of the Gods.  In a celebratory mood, he calls forth some heavenly beer, and the two get drunk together.   Enki gives Inanna many empowerments or gifts (called a "me") -  from the art of sexual seduction to the governing of cities to the making of cheese. At an event I attended in the 90's I saw this  cycle was enacted in participatory ritual theatre.  As  Enki offered each "me" (I always found that word for gift or power interesting), Starhawk, who led the group  in the role of Inanna, said loudly with conviction and gusto:  "I'll take it!"

Inanna with lion, ancient Sumarian tablet

We so often are afraid to say "I'll take it!"    Life continually gives us opportunities, afirmations, passions for making and creating, for "bringing forth that which is within".  But we are "embarroused", we decline because we think we're not "worthy", we don't want to seem "selfish".  And before you know it, the opportunities are gone, the well has dried up, passion has become something else.  

There are so many forces that discourage both creativity and talent  - one does not necessarily get love or acceptance for being "gifted".   I think of my own family, and the kind of "dumbing down" or "becoming invisible" dynamics I had to do in order to avoid my fathers abuse, or to be  tolerated by my envious brothers, who felt that any form of success on my part somehow diminished them. It was a way to survive as a child  that became a great disadvantage as an adult.   I still can witness myself going into  "invisibility" mode when encountering a field of competition or jealousy.

I've seen this operate in groups as well, groups that do not know how to facilitate or address this unconscious collective shadow aspect (a friend who prefers to remain anonymous calls it the "mediocrity prerequisite" for membership).    I do not mean to sound harsh, but many people live in toxic spheres where they are being energetically rewarded for being stupid, uncreative, or a "victim", and punished for not being so.  For not using their divine "Me"'s.   And I guarantee that if you live that way long enough, you will forget your "me"'s and begin to  demand the same currency from others.   It can take a long time to heal.........

Well.........I am grateful indeed to know so many  inspiring people  who are busy expressing the Divine Creative Force  joyfully - may we all, like Inanna, loudly proclaim:  "I'll take it!"

Here is an old interview with my favorite writer, Ursula Kroeber Leguin, on writing and creativity.  Indeed,  Leguin is one who held out both hands in her extraordinary creative life to "take it".  

"I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy."          (Ursula K. LeGuin)

 https://youtu.be/M73cyc9lhhI