Doris Lessing and Synchronicity

"Past Desire, Hope or Time, I rest in You, a Seed" (November, 1993)

  November, for me, is the month of Going-Into-The-Dark,  of Gestation, Incubation, and spinning the Cocoon of winter, down there among the roots. One is not thinking now about whatever kind of winged creature may ultimately emerge in the Spring.  One just stops, and lets the cocoon develop.  At the Roots. 

I love November, although it is, for most, the least desireable of months. No brilliant chorales of leaves and apple harvests or pumpkins, and no Solstice Holy Days either, wreathes and lights and gifts, the beauty of deep snow.  Just the Ides of November, the intensity of increasing Darkness, the approach of winter.

 For me, it's that long awaited  time of inner quietude that the soul can receed into, like roots that go down into the dark dirt, like fallen leaves, brown and composting now, joining the secret life of the soil.

Having made this poetic introduction, I wanted to share again this reflection and story from a decade ago, which I re-membered as I lay in the dark in my blankets this morning.  I still think it was a great gift, a  page from my personal "book of common miracles".  Worth recalling, maybe worth re-telling as well.

November 29, 2011

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

Since I've been writing about Ursula Leguin in the previous post, I felt like re-reading what I wrote  on the occasion of finding a signed copy of "The Habit of Loving" by another author who has had profound influence on me, Doris Lessing.  I found the book, signed with a note from the author, in a pile of cast out books on the street, in  2007,  the same year Lessing received the Nobel Prize at the age of 88. __

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Since I tend to think of synchronicities as a form of grace and message, this was an important one that I've pondered on often.   I've been reflecting that the habit of loving is the only truly necessary habit to cultivate.  

We're often "tapped on the shoulder" by angels, and pre-occupied with daily concerns, we fail to notice miracles fluttering like their translucent wings under our very noses.

Ecologist and philosopher David Abram  has commented that perception is "a reciprocal phenomenon organized as much by the surrounding world as by oneself". He suggests that a two-way dynamic of energy exchange may be going on. In contrast to our idea of a non-living world we simply observe or act upon, Abram asserts 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".  Another way of putting it might be that we are "ensouled" in the whole world, a Conversant and Responsive World.

As writer Alice Walker has said, "the Universe responds."

Lessing's visionary books, most significantly her SHIKASTA series, have  inspired me for 30 years.  I continue to feel honored to have what is for me a talisman - infused with energy from the living hand of this prolific and visionary writer, who like Ursula Leguin, has been a "guide of soul" for me.  Looking backwards, I noticed this entry from my own blog in the winter of 2007:

"I've been depressed this winter, which led me to go into therapy to tell 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........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!" 

I reflect again, being at the end of my therapy, the message of the title of that little book.  The habit of loving, especially in the dark times of ones life, is a discipline to hold to.  A way to live.   

In her  Nobel  speech, Lessing remembers her life early life in Africa, in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia. She urges us to remember how precious the gifts of literacy really are, remembering how desperately important it is to those who live without schools, or books in her former homeland.  Here is the speech, from the Nobel Prize site.

And here's something she says about Story:

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

**© The Nobel Foundation 2007

Earth Speak: Envisioning a Conversant World

I was looking forward to presenting this at the Association for Women and Mythology Conference in New Mexico, but unfortunately I have had to cancel because of illness.  But I just felt like posting it again anyway................brings back the revelations of that wonderful trip!

Earth Speak Power Point presentation from Lauren Raine

Earth Speak 2019 presentation from Lauren Raine

Earth-speak:

Envisioning a Conversant World

By Lauren Raine MFA

""Speak to the Earth and it shall teach thee"

Job 12:8

In 2018 I attended a conference on sacred sites and dowsing at Pewsey, in Southern England, called the Gate Keepers Conference (1), an annual conference of dowsers, mythologists, and Earth mysteries researchers who have been investigating sacred sites throughout the United Kingdom, as well as intentional pilgrimage to them, for many years.  I also undertook my visit as a personal pilgrimage, visiting in the course of my time in the U.K. Avebury, Silbury Hill, Glastonbury, Arbor Low, and other sites.

 My introduction to this adventure took some fortitude.   After a 15-hour flight from Los Angeles, I waited in line 2 hours in Customs, then made my way to Paddington Station in London, then to Swindon by train, and finally to Avebury by bus.  By the time I stepped off the bus, I was, perhaps, in an altered state of consciousness from utter exhaustion.  I stepped from the bus to see, perfectly aligned with my sight, rising from the morning’s mist, the great prehistoric monument of Silbury Hill, the mysterious Omphalos of an ancient world. 

When I saw Silbury through the mist, what opened before me was a vision of a time when the entire landscape was the sacred body of the deity, a cyclical mythos of an animated Earth that ensouled and enlivened and enstoried every hill, spring, river and forest within a cosmology of conversant belonging.  I will never forget that moment of revelation.

Situated just south of Avebury, Silbury Hill is Europe's tallest prehistoric structure.   Michael Dames, in his book THE SILBURY TREASURE (2) demonstrates persuasively that Silbury, like other "Neolithic Harvest Hills" associated with nearby henges and standing stones, literally represented the pregnant belly of the Great Mother, and was associated with a certain time of the agricultural year, in particular, the harvest of July/August. 

Silbury Hill is part of the great Avebury ceremonial complex, and has been excavated over the centuries, never once finding the “great chieftain’s treasure” which, Dames points out, it was assumed “must” be there.  We now know, at last, that its interior does not hold gold or the bones of a mythic hero king and his unfortunate slaves.  Rather, it simply holds grains, turf, and animal bones, with no evidence of human burial at its core.  Silbury is also surrounded by a henge or moat, once considerably deeper than it now is, and which would have been full of water, at least at certain times of the year.Dames points out that this henge actually forms the shape of a squatting or birthing woman in profile.     He likens the "Goddess form" of the henge to similar ubiquitous Goddess sculptures and sites associated with Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Brittany.........as far as the mysterious Temples of Malta, or the barely excavated stone circles of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.

Why has this interpretation of Silbury never been seen before?  Because, Dames points out, to do so one must make a kind of paradigm shift into an alternate view of his-story.  “Silbury “Michael Dames writes,

“Conveys a philosophy which is of exceptional relevance to the modern world.  Silbury has been reduced to an enigma because of the attempt to impress upon it concepts such as kingship, personal property, and individual male glory. Who put “King Sil” into Silbury?  We did, because we wanted him there - a superman chieftain with a super treasure and hundreds of slaves, so vain, so aggressive, so acquisitive, so preoccupied with eternal fame, that he could provide us with a monumental tomb and treasure.  All treasure finding attempts have failed because the builders belonged to a society for which such concepts had little importance, or even meaning.  And yet, since their compelling priorities are not entirely absent from our values, we can appreciate something of what the original Silsbury treasure was, especially since the future of our own civilization may give us urgency and humility to tender our investigation.” (3)

 

When I walked the Avebury complex, I experienced the intensification of life force vitality I have come to recognize in places of numinosity and telluric force.  There is no doubt in my mind (or body mind) that these sites marked places of intrinsic geomantic power, and that the placement of stones also served to intensify or channel the animating Earth energies present.   Sacred landscapes also augment their healing or consciousness elevating properties through the interaction of generations of people with the "spirit of the land” through what researchers such as Paul Deveraux (4) have termed "geomantic reciprocity".

 Geomantic reciprocity occurs as human beings bring intentionality and focus to a particular place, making it a holy or sacred place.  This  communion with place becomes more active as place itself accrues story or mythic power  in the memory of the people, and in the memory of the land.   Sacred places have both an innate and a developed capacity to bring about altered states of consciousness, especially if people come prepared within the open, liminal state of pilgrimage or ceremony.  And myth   is the language spoken to engage the numinous presence.

I also went to Glastonbury in Somerset as part of my journey to visit the famous Chalice Well.  Glastonbury is Avalon - the source of the Arthurian legends, the land of Merlin, Arthur and the Lady of the Lake.  Once the hill now called the Tor was surrounded by a lake.  During the Middle Ages Glastonbury was the home of the great Gothic Cathedral of Glastonbury and its community of monks, a place of universal pilgrimage.  The Cathedral was destroyed by Henry the VIII, and the Abbot executed, after the Abbot refused to leave the Catholic church.

Dowsers Caroline Hoare and Gary Biltcliffe (5) write of the “crossing of the Michael and Mary lines” at the Tor, a prominent point of interest to those investigating Earth energies.  The Tor also features a tower, once part of the destroyed Abbey, visible from miles away, that stands atop the famous hill.  They also speak of the more mutable “Dragon lines” of serpentine force that weave throughout this highly energized area.  Underground springs originate in the area of the Tor, springs that have been renowned for their healing powers since long before the advent of Christianity.   Now called the "Red Spring" and the "White Spring”, where these springs emerge, at an underground chamber and at the Chalice Well Garden, are still revered by pilgrims who come to them from around the world.   The red color found at the Chalice Well is from iron oxide deposited by the spring.  The White Spring deposits calcium, leaving a white residue.

 The Avalonian springs are famous as part of the ancient mythic landscape of Avalon…………. but in truth, there are hundreds if not thousands of once revered historical and prehistoric wells and springs throughout the UK, many of them still named for St. Brigit, the ancient Goddess of the Isles of Britannia.  The Chalice Garden, for me, is infused with presence, with the Goddess local  devotees call the Lady of Avalon. She is the Genus Loci of Avalon, what the Romans called Numina. (6)

The garden of the Chalice Well looked different, as the last time I had visited had been high summer.  It was deserted, and I was able to sit before the Well in meditation alone.   I took water from the springs to bring home, and then walked around.  What popped into my mind,  as if I heard it spoken, was odd - the words "Covenant Garden". When one is on a Pilgrimage, it is important to pay attention to whatever occurs, internally or externally.   As I walked among winters sleeping apple trees and bright red holly berries, I wondered:  what could "covenant garden" mean, and why had I thought of it? 

I remembered the name of the English Goddess Coventina.  According to Wikipedia,

Coventina was a Romano-British goddess of wells and springs. She is known from multiple inscriptions found at a site in Northumberland County, an area surrounding a wellspring near Carrawburgh on Hadrian’s Wall. (7)

A Triple Goddess of wells and springs was certainly appropriate for the Chalice Springs  of Glastonbury.  Interestingly,  the word Covenant, like "coven", "convening",  etc.  refers to a gathering of people to reach a harmonious agreement, which can include an agreement that is holy in some way.   

Such musings then led me to imagine  the famous  "Ark of the Covenant", which was said to hold writings and objects of Biblical veneration, as well as containing  "God's sustenance for man" which was called Manna.   Manna was the food, variously described as different substances or grains, which was provided by God to feed the people.  "Manna" has also come to mean a kind of inherent numinous power that may be found in a place or an object.

 The Ark of the Covenant, described in the Book of Exodus, was a gold-covered wooden chest containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.  It also was supposed to contain “a golden jar holding manna, and Aaron's rod, which budded". (8)

Interesting:  holy food and a budding rod or tree.  The Garden is indeed a "harmonious agreement" between earthly beings of all kinds.  And "Manna" is the food provided by the Garden, which I view as the sustaining power of nature.  Aaron’s  "rod that blooms “could also be seen, from the viewpoint of a feminist mythologist like myself,  as a symbol originally belonging to the ancient Hebrew and Middle Eastern  Goddess Asherah, who was often  represented as a tree.  In the days of the Old Testament, She was an important deity, and was represented as a rod, or "Asherah pole”. (9)  The practice of carrying "Asherah poles" was apparently fairly common in the early days of the Semite tribes, although the Patriarchs later eliminated this custom, along with the Goddess, as the Hebrew deity became exclusively male. 

I reflected that a Garden represents a "Covenant” between human, animal, plant, soil, air, rain, water.......A successful garden is a harmonious Ecosystem in balance with all of its components.  A garden thrives through a network of inter-dependant relationships.  Trees communicate with each other through a vast underground weaving of roots and fungi.  The bees and other pollinators bring new life; the worms, microorganisms and other insects assist in the decay process.  And the birds assist in distributing seed as well.  Not to mention humans that may plant, sow, admire, and occasionally eat the stray apple or strawberry as well. 

 It could be said that a Garden is a "Covenant" achieved by many beings to reach a divine agreement.  THE GARDEN OF THE COVENANT.

As I was leaving the Chalice Garden, I saw a tiny metallic heart on the ground.  I was going to take it, but then it occurred to me that perhaps someone left it as a token or as an offering, and it wasn't right for me to take it.  I put it back on the ground and took a picture.  I was amazed to see that the camera showed light surrounding the little shape in the photo!  So I took two more, and they came out the same.   A Green Heart ……… 

Perhaps the Earth is Speaking to us all the time, we’ve just forgotten how to listen.  I believe there are ways to renew that conversation, to attune we once again to the voice of place, and hence, to see Place once again as sacred.  How might we live, how might we act, if we saw the world with such a vision, as both Covenant and Conversation?

"To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension.  In traditional bardic culture, every place had its legend and its own identity.... what endured was an ongoing conversation with the mythic landscape."

R. F. Foster (10)

In so many areas of the UK the 21st Century can seem like just another layer atop a pentimento of a much older landscape, one that proceeds our short view of history.   Of course, this is true everywhere, but it seems so much in evidence there.  That "pentimento" visible just below the surface is circular, serpentine, and full of standing stones, henges, magic wells, and ley lines.   What, as theologians and "geologians" for the future, might we recover, re-learn and re-invent from it?

With the evolution of monotheism and patriarchal religions that increasingly removed divinity from both nature and the body, and in the past century the rapid rise of industrialization, we have increasingly looked at the world from a "users" point of view.   Places with their unique qualities and beauties become "resources" instead of living lands.  Renunciate religions have also served to de-sacralize earthly experience, further complicating our crisis.   Yet every early culture has insisted that nature is full of intelligence and intelligences that inform, bless, heal, and communicate, often through the multi-dimensional language of myth and altered states of consciousness.   

Contemporary Gaia Theory, developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (10), proposes that the Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, responsive and evolving.  If one is sympathetic to Gaia Theory, and the innate interactive intelligence of ecosystems, it follows that everything living is responsive and conversant in some way, in ways both visible and invisible.  I believe we need to learn to "speak with the Earth" again, not in some abstract way, but intimately, beneath our well-rooted feet, in our creative hands entwined and webbed among a great planetary collaboration. The "Covenant" of the Garden.  

How do we regain our niche in that great “Covenant”?   One answer is through “re-mything” culture.  Myth is, and always has been, a way for human beings to become intimate with what is ultimately vast, deep, and mysterious. Our experience changes when Place becomes "you" or "Thou" instead of "it".    We can renew our conversation, and change our paradigm, by looking back as well as forward, to a time when "nature" was about relationship with the land.  Relationship  in which cultures, individuals and religions were profoundly embedded as both story and as living metaphor.   And some places were places of special power, places of pilgrimage.

References and Notes:

1.  The Gatekeeper Trust,  “Dreaming the Land – Working with the Consciousness of Nature", Annual Conference 2018,  Pewsey, Wiltshire, UK https://gatekeeper.org.uk/2018/05/dreaming-the-land-annual-conference-2018/

2.  Dames, Michael:  The Silbury Treasure:  The Great Goddess Rediscovered, 1976, Thames and Hudson, London

3.  Dames, Michael:  The Silbury Treasure:  The Great Goddess Rediscovered, 1976, Thames and Hudson, London, Page 76

4.  Deveraux, Paul:  Earthmind: Communicating with the Living World of Gaia,Paul Devereux; John Steele; David Kubrin, 1992, Inner Traditions, Vermont 

5.  Biltclilffe, Gary and Hoare, Caroline:  The Power of Centre, 2018, Sacred Lands Publishing, Dorset, UK 

6.  Cambridge English Dictionary (2019): 

   numen ^{/ (ˈnjuːmɛn) /, noun} plural -mina (-mɪnə)             (An ancient Roman religion) a deity or spirit presiding over a place,             a guiding principle, force, or spirit

7. Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia; “Coventina”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventina

8. Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia; “The Ark of the Covenant”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_of_the_Covenant

9. An Asherah pole was a sacred pole (or sometimes a tree) that was used in the worship of the Goddess Asherah. The Asherah pole was often mentioned in the Old Testament as one of the ways the Israelites sinned against their God by worshipping other gods.  The "Asherah pole" was mentioned in the Judeo/Christian Bible a number of times, including Exodus 34:13 (NIV): "Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles." The Israelites were commanded to destroy any Asherah pole they found - however, it seems that the custom, as well as the worship of Asherah, was absorbed and retained nevertheless by Israelites for a considerable time.  For more:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah_pole

10.   Foster, Roy F., Modern Ireland:  1600 - 1972, 1990, Penguin Books, N.Y

11.  Lovelock, James with Margulis, Lynn: 

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, 1979, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England.

Bee Messengers........a Synchronicity

I've been delighted by this synchronicity.

Above is a small swarm of bees that suddenly appeared on a sagebush literally by my front gate.  A swarm can be when a hive is disrupted, or when a new queen is born and part of the hive will leave with her to found a new hive, so the bee ball above has a queen inside, which all the workers are carefully keeping warm.  This is not a good time of year to swarm, and since the bees have been here for about 4 days, and it is winter without a lot of flowers to forage as well as going below freezing tonight, I am having a beekeeper come to relocate the swarm and queen, as there is a danger they will freeze.  

What a wonderful message they delivered me.  I'm going to thank the bees for many things, among them for raising my spirits.  Because just a few days ago I began work on a (not finished yet) mask for a woman who requested a BEE PRIESTESS mask, a mask for the MELISSAE, the ancient bee priestesses of Greece.    I've also been talking a lot about being  "pollinators" for culture..........how just like bees, we are all needed for the flowering of a better, more just, more inspired culture.  Especially now, which seems to be a mantra I hear from virtually everyone I know.  But it's a mantra that has to be recited over and over - we need to rise to the best of our abilities to counter the regression, ignorance, and hatread that has arisen.

Without the bees, no nourishment, no flowering.  Without creative and generous souls, the same.  Like the bees, we have a job to do.  And there are the bees by golly............

Bees have always been magical creatures throughout many cultures. Think of how our ancestors must have perceived them, and their miraculous honey, which would have been a great luxury.  In old England honey wine, Mead, was reserved as a special celebatory drink for special occasions - that's where the term "honey moon" came from, a month's supply of magical mead was given to the new couple to encourage love and fertility.

In ancient Greece there were the Mellisae, who no doubt were also bee keepers,  and many myths of the Goddess include bees, the Queen Bee, and the creation of honey.  Also the Semitic name "Deborah" or "Devorah" means "Bee", and its origins may also go back to a time when there were women who were Bee priestesses.  

Bronze Age Bee Goddess

Reciprocity, the sense of intimacy with all the other lives and evolutions and intrinsic Spirits of Place  all around us..........I loved the movie "THE SECRET  LIFE OF BEES", where Queen Latifah explains to her young apprentice that it's important to just love the bees.  That "everyone needs love".  As the founders of  Findhorn demonstrated - there's a conversation  going on all the time, or there should be.

In New England there has long been a tradition called  "Telling the Bees", in which a death in a family farm, or among beekeepers,  is "told to the bees" so they will not be upset by the loss, or can participate, perhaps, in the remembrance, a folk custom that remembers as well that bees are "part of the family".

Well, I'm going back to work on that mask.

A Circular, Literary Synchronicity

from Catalog, Aldon B. Dow Fellowship, 2007

"No one can  tell the difference between the true azure and blue mud anymore."

I haven't been writing much, because, to tell the truth, I've been depressed.   I've become virtually  invisible.  As an aging person, an artist, someone living in 2016, a strange time and place to find yourself embodied.  Strange indeed.

I tend to feel that, along with the end of art districts to gentrification, and art to photo shop and commodification, I have become a dinosaur, with no outlet or interest any more for my antediluvian  creativity, which endlessly bubbles up anyway.  Do we make art just for ourselves?  Well, yes and no.  Art is a Conversation, and a conversation should not always be about talking with yourself.   I guess I'll have to make my own retrospective one of these days, since there is no institution that will do it........although I'm not sure anyone would notice.   But I would dearly love to put together just one more grand catalog, and have it sitting on a table along with the wine and cheese................I always loved openings.

I share this sense of uselessness with many others, but it doesn't help "my depression".   I go to bed with the darn thing at night, and damn, there it is in the morning, casting its pall over the  rising day.  I've been so depressed that among other things I have been on the verge of deleting this Blog several times, wondering what is the point, I haven't a thing to say anymore.......but then I look at some of the posts and realize that some of them are pretty good.  I might even trace myself back to some point of self-realization  in the process of reviewing them,  if I have the energy to pursue the threads of my own journey again.

So the story of this synchronicity may take a while to circle into..........but synchronicities are like that, aren't they?  Circular, Webbed, ever expanding if  one keeps looking.  Perhaps, that is the way, as the Romans would say, "the Gods speak".  the  Goddesses.

With a "webbed vision".

I decided to let myself rant, or try to write about it, to see if it helps to at least concretize the depression,  give it words, give it a shape,  give it a name, and see it that helps to tame the beast.  Yes, even as I wrote,  all the cliches of contemporary society come rushing into my mind like a torrent of mediocre shame,  buzzwords and New Age positivity.  In an extroverted world so relentlessly devoted to accomplishment, achievement, and above all, Goddess help us,  commerce, depression has no place at the table.

(I would like to note, for the record, that spiders have been doing strange things around me again........little ones crawling across my pillow, the computer, threads suddenly arresting my attention as they connect this with that.)

So a story, and a quote,  from my favorite author, Ursula Leguin, came to mind, from "The Farthest Shore".  It was about a world that was losing its life force vitality, its "soul", and the travels of  the Archmage Ged to find the source of this  malady.  On an island once famous for the dyers who created beautiful colors into silk fabric, Ged finds himself in a dispirited pub, where the locals are lamenting the loss of artistry and prosperity.  "They can't tell the difference between the True Azure and blue mud anymore"  says one ill tempered local to Ged.

I've always remembered that passage, and on my grim days, sometimes feel that the same malady has  befallen us, in the Era of Cheap, Era of Walmart, Era of Disposibility.  So I decided to google "True Azure and blue mud" just to see if I had the quote right.  And guess what came up?

Me!  Only it took a while to figure that out.  The page Google landed me on  (posted in 2007) seemed so aligned with what I believed and envisioned that I felt inspired by it, applauding the author for being a kindred soul.  Until I realized that,  actually, it was a uncredited total plagiarism of my own 2007 post as I pursued my project "Spider Woman's Hands" as a fellow of the Alden Dow Creativity Center.  I saw that the blog person, whoever it was, had posted verbatim many pages of my Blog, all without crediting me.  Here's the link to, well, me again, without my name attached:  http://animabrat.blogspot.com/2007/06/shadow-work.html  Did this blogger want to appear as if she/he were me?  Or, as they say, is imitation the highest form of flattery?  Considering how dreadful the rest of the blog is, probably just as well that my name isn't there.

But then I started to read what I had written, almost 10 years ago.  And realized, along the way, that I LIKE MYSELF.  It's not bad, and I understand something true from it, something that pulled me from the abyss of my depression, gave me the insight I needed.  A "hello" from a younger self.

And I like the idea I had, 10 years ago, of creating a Society for people who have fallen through the cracks.  Out of the Loop.  Aging Invisibles.  The Loopy People.  I haven't found them yet, but maybe it's really time to start looking.

In the end, I have to thank (Spider Woman, of course) and the unknown plagiarist for helping me to re-connect to myself.  Thank you.  Who is the weaver, after all?

SHADOW WORK
June 19, 2007

I'm having a problem working. I suppose that's part of the process. You can't ask a question, a real question, without the universe, so to speak, providing both polarities. Or at least, so it is for me.

"Hello", my demons leer at me, gathering at the door. "Before you get 0n this Unity idea again, allow me to point out the dragon guarding the treasure at the heart of the mountain." By the age of 57, you can have a lot of dragons, a lot of unravelling of heartache and disillusionment to.

I'm going to get a glass of whine, and write. I suppose I need to vent. From this Saturnine point of view, I might as well take a look at the down side of the Web. The Information Highway, the Internet, all this electronic and media connectivity. Are we better off, now that we can "connect" so quickly? (as I write, a tiny spider drops onto my laptop. There She is, reminding me that it's all very relative. And there are bridges over every abyss.)

Well, of course. The Internet is the greatest library ever made, and best of all, it's available to everyone.  Yet how has it also redefined communication? Is it possible that we are also becoming so over stimulated, so "busy", that we can no longer tell the difference between real intimacy, conversation, communion - and superficial or even just  imagined "connections" with others?

I don't hate email, but I try not to take it seriously. Once upon a time, I lived in a world where people wrote letters. It was personal. You had pen pals.  When I put up my website more than 10 years ago, I had this perspective - it was about making friends, having my own cyberspace gallery, not so much about business. I used to receive notes from people. I even had a guest book, and met a few real friends this way.

Then the guestbook began filling up with spam, even pornographic spam. And notes between friends became group emails, then increasingly impersonal things, like political information, or, of course, announcements of openings, books, shows, etc. for me to circulate. And those little chain mail prayers and uplifting stories you have to pass on to "10 more people" in order to benefit from whatever kind of  grace so doing so would accrue, all the while being information gathering devices for spam companies.  And now there is Facebook and Myspace, where people I once knew well, people I once slept with or cried with or marched with or created with.........stream by so fast, reduced to a multitude of nano-seconds.  Images and brief glimpses into their lives that are vaguely unsatisfying. 

They depress me sometimes.

Realizing that people receive hundreds of emails to read and process,  I share less and less these days. On my not reasonable days (like today), I feel the whole world has ADD  and can't tell the difference between a poignant moment of real human contact and a sitcom. Between, as my favorite author Ursula Leguin wrote, "blue mud and the true azure".

Everyone is so very, very busy.

Or maybe the "pace" of our "lifestyles" has continually become more intense, and I'm just one of those who falling through the crevices of modernity.

Could it be possible there are other people like me, fraying, unraveling, beginning to say strange things to electronic answering machine menus that get longer and longer and more labyrinthine........lingering for meaningful conversations at checkout counters........mumbling Rilke or Lessing while ordering coffee at Starbucks drive thru......are they quietly wondering if they really are becoming invisible, and they do these things just to test the waters?

If that's so, maybe we can find each other, start a secret society maybe.

We'll become people who have fallen outside of the loop. Loopy people. We'll have a drink and some of those long, long soul satisfying conversations that went out with the '90's and the invention of laptops and cellphones.

Our membership will include people who were geeks but they reinvented ourselves to become something else, and are now regressing back to our earlier geek template because we're in various stages of breakdown, confusion, exhaustion, overweight, or just waiting for rebirth while still inhabiting a body - all ages, sexes, races and economic backgrounds welcome.

We can have comfortable camp outs (in places like the Berkshires in July, when there are fireflies, and with hot showers and barbecues).......or go to Sumatra economy class and stay in a home stay for $3.50 a night, and drink rice wine and bat at mosquitoes and talk about art, or crumbling temples, or Hindu mythology, or lost loves, or spiritual ecology, or petroglyphs, and live in ways that are frugal.

We will talk at length.  Leisurely, encircled conversations that wind and spiral around themselves, with memories that are really stories with no particular beginning, and no particular end, and all the lovelier for a little embellishment.  Our conversations will no doubt intertwine, with threads from each woven into the fabric of others, so that sometimes it is not clear if the colors are distinct.  That's fine.

We might burn little oil lamps to read cheap paperback books by, and fall asleep without clocks or cell phones or bras. We would allow each other our delights, and our melancholies.  Exaltations and Maudlins are welcome as well.

I won't apologize for "creating my own reality" in ways that leave me sad or discouraged sometimes.   If any other aging geek in the bunch has a rough time of it, I won't promise I can make things better, or even that I'll always be able to listen. But I won't expect them to apologize either. And we'll never, ever talk about "money" or  our various bodily complaints, unless it's absolutely necessary.

We might, however, remember people we've loved, loved in all of its forms and fashions, Agape, Eros, hot or cool, and how privileged we were to have loved them, more so, if they loved us back, for whatever moment or place or time. We might contemplate the real value of things, sweet things, hard things, natural things, vivid things, sad things, but all valuable things because they opened our hearts, and made us not only feel alive, but be alive.  The threads in the tapestry that you notice, that stand out in the warp.

We might write poems no one else will ever hear, and it doesn't matter. We might remember the remarkable lives of a beloved father, or an eccentric aunt who ran a boarding house in the Great Depression.    If we're feeling risque, we might talk about Dionysus and the mysterious Eros of nature.  We might remember  more personal examples worth sharing.  We might talk about books. We might talk about Georgia O'Keefe and Stieglitz, or read from Walt Whitman. We might talk about jazz, we might listen to jazz.  

We might ask what god a gamelan is speaking about, or is it a river, or is the god or the river, or both, speaking through the musicians?

We might come up with reasons why Beethoven wrote the "Ode to Joy", we might toast to every beach and river and forest we had the privilege and pleasure of walking in, being submerged by,  and talking to. 

We might.

A Little Sychronicity............

My previous post was a little meditation on the "Ode to Joy",  and I made a comment about a scene from the movie "Immortal Beloved" that has always brought that wonderful piece of music utterly alive for me:

"There the boy  floats on his back  gazing up at that vast starry sky, and  it seems that the stars themselves come down to join him, and he is ever expanding with them, vast, and free, and one of them.  I could  never forget that image...............the stars within the music, ever expanding in a great ripple. "

So when I walked outside the following morning  (I have a paved porch) I found a series of "ripples" on the floor, composed of perfect semi-circles made of a line of dirt.  I know the image above is hardly an impressive image, but the circles are  inexplicable.............I can't figure out how they were made, as we had no wind or rain to make them, and I've never seen the phenomenon before.

But they did make me laugh, feeling that, symbolically speaking, they were a reminder to remember those ripples, that "Ode to Joy" we participate in, and generate.  And I thank the "Powers that Be" for the reminder.............

A Hawk and the Great Mother

INVOCATION OF THE GREAT MOTHER
 
by Erica Swadley

O Great Mother Goddess, we call on you now.

We invite your presence.
Surround and encompass us.
Rise up from your roots.
Hear us, our our voices of pathos.
See our dancing feet, how we beat out your rhythms. 
With our hearts, we drum you back.
We are staggering toward you.

Will you run one hundred steps to us?
Will you spread your mantle of peace?

This is the sack of our offerings:

We give up our greed to feed the needy.
Here is our lust to restore compassion.
We release our hatred to stop the killing.
We forego our vengeance to discover balance.
We scorn our fears, to rebirth love.
We tread softly to bring back forests. 

And Mother Answers:

No more no more no more!

I have sent you shining planets to help you remember.

Mars and Venus beg you to reconcile.
From the depths of space, Sedna appears,
a planetary avatar to stop you in your tracks.
Time is ended, truth be told.

Release, forgive, restore.
Remember Me in all of My forms.
I will bring light to your shadows 

and make you whole, 
if you will call on Me.

                   April, 2004


Yesterday I had a new picture windows put into the living room, and I sat admiring them this morning.  Then I found myself thinking about the poem above, and "Restoring the Balance", the performance shaman Erica Swadley wrote her Invocation for, almost 10 years ago, and decided I would offer it again with some new work on the Equinox. 

Then a very large bird flew, wham, into my new window.  Not just any bird, but a red wing hawk.  

Fortunately, it flew off again, hopefully not hurt.  But the "Message" is well taken.  Wake up!  Pay attention! See!  Get the Big Picture!    New windows give better vision, the ability to see through them more clearly.  And no creature sees better, and has a bigger view, than a hawk or an eagle. 

I know I often write about the Dark Goddess, the One who can help us to see, integrate, and understand our shadows, but I do this because I feel, personally and collectively (along with theologian Andrew Harvey and shaman Erica Swadley) it is so very important to invoke Her help now.

  "It's quite clear that humanity  can only be transfigured by a totally shocking revelation of its shadow side. And this is what we're living through, these shadow sides exploding in every direction because we have done nothing but betray the sacred in us."

........... Andrew Harvey

The "shadow side" Harvey speaks of is revealed in contradictions, in paradox often.  Just this morning I was also thinking about a personal revelation along these lines.   So much of the work I do, outside of my commercial masks, are really Shrines to Gaia. Over and over I feel compelled to make torsos and hands with roots and leaves.   My versions of the Black Madonna, of the creative, sacred Mother inside all  of nature's manifestations. And yet, as important as these images are to me, I tend to be apologetic about my work, not believing in myself often.

I recently had someone ask about purchasing a  "Gaia" piece,   someone I admire, who wanted to know if the humidity of a bathroom would affect it.  I had to wonder:  do I project so little sense of the worth of my  work that it has no more meaning than "bathroom decor"? Is that my shadow?  And if so, by failing to respect the impulses that become my art, am I disrespecting what is sacred to me?   What does this reveal about the loss of a sense of the sacred we're all, myself well included,  completely unconscious of?  

I think about my dismay this summer when I saw the porta potties lined up  just across from the entrance (and exit) to the Labyrinth and Ancestor Mound at Sirius Rising last year.  Leaving the Labyrinth (Center) ritual, it was what one saw coming out of the Labyrinth.  My  comments about it  got me in hot water with the community who put the ritual on, many of whom I otherwise admire.  But they did not see, or appreciate, my (quite literal)  point of view. .............What does it mean, viewed symbolically, about what me and my well meaning friends and colleagues are unconsciously responding to?

"I will bring light to your shadows
and make you whole 
if you call on me.

 The Dark Goddess, whether we call Her the Black Madonna, the hidden Magdalene, Kali, Black Tara,  or Sedna, is so much more than an idea, an archetype.  She is an active force in the world, an archetypal  intelligence working in the world through the minds of those who open to Her.   She can Restore the Balance, she can dance with us as we achieve an ever moving point of balance.

As my friend, Ann Weller, commented in 2000 after invoking the Dark Goddess for a healing ritual event for her community:

"The Dark Goddess serves the future. Her work is evolution in its fullest sense.

The Dark Goddess, who is found in many cultures by many names, is not aspected lightly.  Working with Her calls forth one's internal capacity for psychic empowerment, a transformative energy not easy to encompass. The work was larger than my concerns, and ultimately impersonal.  I was a brief vessel for an immense archetypal intelligence manifesting itself within the ritual drama we created."

So, I ponder all of this, this beautiful and important poem that Erica gifted us with 10 years ago, and share also an article by Andrew Harvey that is related.  As we move closer to the Equinox, may we find many ways and paths to Restoring the Balance.

"Black Madonna" by Therese Desjardin

BLACK MADONNA RETURNS
by  Andrew Harvey

The entire world is now going through a massive crucifixion on all levels.  It's going through an environmental crucifixion. Hundreds of species are vanishing every month. It's going through a personal crucifixion. There are two billion people living on less than a dollar a day. It's going through a crucifixion of all the patriarchal systems. Look at Enron and what it has
shown us about Corporate America. Look at the Catholic Church's scandals of pedophilia and what it shows us about authority. Look at the growing disillusionment with politicians of all kinds. All of the systems are  being exposed as illusory and fantasy-ridden, as deeply corrupt and exploitative.

There's another kind of crucifixion going on: crucifixion of purpose and hope. Everybody is totally bewildered. They know that the world is potentially on the brink of  apocalypse. There's a tremendous danger that as people wake up to the horror of what is going on, they will run into political extremism or into fundamentalism of one kind or another.

So it's extremely important that the wisdom of the 'dark night of the soul' gets across, because if people understand the necessity for this crucifixion, and understand that it's preparing a resurrection and empowerment, then they will be prepared to go through it without too much fear, trusting in the logic of the divine transformation.

The Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths shared with me his experience of the dark night of the soul. He said he was sitting outside his hut one day when he felt as if a hand hit him on the right side of his being. He had suffered a massive heart attack that destroyed what he described as his patriarchal mind and gave him access to a much deeper elaboration of
Oneness with all things.  

 He said, "It's a very strange thing, but when I thought of surrendering to the Mother I of course thought of Mary--I often say the 'Hail Mary'--but it was Mary as the Black Madonna that came into my mind. She is the mother of the earth as well as heaven, of the body as well as the soul, the mother of the subconscious, the hidden, of all those powers that the
'masculine' mind represses; the Mother of the sacred darkness. In Her the Western Christian vision of the Divine Mother and the Eastern one merge and meet; you can think of her as both Mary and Kali, both preserver and destroyer. From that time on, I have turned to Her again and again.  

Invoking Her strength and grace, I find, makes the 'birth' go so much faster and more cleanly."

The power that is doing this to us is coming towards us simultaneously with terrifying destruction and extreme grace and prosperity. The destruction is, in fact, a form of that extreme grace. It's quite clear that humanity is now terminally ill, and can only be transfigured by a totally shocking revelation of its shadow side. And this is what we're living
through, these shadow sides exploding in every direction because we have done nothing but betray the sacred in us.

We have lacerated the sacred in others. We have betrayed the sacred in an orgy of fundamentalism. We have brutalized the sacred in nature. We are now terminally destructive.

So only an almost terminal destruction that reveals to us the full extent of our responsibility in this destruction can wake us up. And that is what is happening, and it will get worse. It's bound to get worse. But it is only being done to us for our own redemption.

Those who turn to the Mother in total faith, those who turn to the Black Madonna in total admiration, those who realize the mercy behind the violence will be given extraordinary protection, strength, and revelation. They will be empowered in the core of themselves to become what everybody who has a heart and a mind must now become--a spiritual
revolutionary devoting their entire life and all their resources to the preservation of the planet.

Finding the Black Madonna, in whatever form you want to find her, realizing the massive task that she's doing and turning to her for protection is now crucial to the preservation of the planet. It's extremely important that people really come to understand the feminine and turn towards it, because it's our betrayal of the feminine in ourselves and in the divine that has led to this crisis.

Copyright Andrew Harvey 2004--All Rights Reserved

 ***Footnote:

I've found it interesting that one of the most consistently read of my blog posts has to do with "Black Tara" (2010).  Truly a Tibetan manifestation of the Dark Goddess, I often wonder why so many are curious or responsive to this Goddess.