Chautauqua County revisited......

"Inspiration Stump" at Lilydale, New York - 

gathering spot for mediums at Spiritualist Church service.

"What is in my mind is a sort of Chautauqua - like the traveling tent-show Chautauqua’s that used to move across America, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster -paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply to dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale, and platitudes too often repeated.

There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and “best” was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for."

Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

I can't resist doing the "tourist thing", and sharing some photos, and one of my favorite quotes, about Chautauqua County, New York,, where I am at present. I've sent years visiting here, at Brushwood Folklore Center in Sherman where the big Pagan festivals are held in July (Sirius Rising & Starwood), at Lilydale, the oldest spiritualist community in the United States (150 years), and the Chautauqua Institute in Mayville on the great Lake Chautauqua.

The bad news is that it's been raining for pretty much the entire month of June, and my allergies are kicking up a storm as well as the Great Lakes. Who would have thought that my major battles at this point in my life are with microbes. Sometimes it's hard to maintain one's dignity when you are sneezing all the time, but I'll do my doddering best. Here is some of the beauty of the region.

Storms rolling in dramatically over the great Lake Goddess Erie.

Blue Heron rookery just south, near Pittsburgh.

This was a gift from my friend Wendy, who took me here. The Blue Heron has always been a guide, a messenger of beauty and inspiration to me. Imagine seeing hundreds of these solitary creatures in their nests in the trees!

A medium hangs out her sign in Lilydale.

Leolyn Woods - a rare old growth grove in Lilydale.

I love to walk in Leolyn Woods, and imagine what the entire rain forest of the East Coast must have been like before the coming of the European settlers. The deep presence of the great old trees here, maple and chestnut and oak .......they speak with such amazing voices.

Maplewood Hotel, at Lilydale

They say the Maplewood is haunted, but at Lilydale, where they have been "talking to the dead" for 150 years, as well as hosting runaway slaves, suffragettes, and many other progressives, a little haunting wouldn't be anything particularly interesting.

Chautauqua county in western New York has a peculiar kind of geomantic potency. Historically it has been called “the burned over zone”. Because so much religious fervor, utopian dreams, and spiritual experiment has occurred here in the past 150 years, from the Suffragettes and Lily Dale school for mediums, to the Shiloh Community and the origins of Mormonism in Joseph Smith's "visions".

For myself, if all goes well, and I can keep from sneezing and hacking long enough, I'll have another summer of my own kind of "visioning" here, and some good work will come of it. Currently I'm finishing my book on Spiderwoman, and working on a very challenging book about the "Masks of the Goddess". I think a lot these days about what making art means. I wrote this a year ago..........it seems worth copying here again.

You have to let it go, and not concern yourself with how many people care about what what you're doing, not care about how much money you make or don't make, not care about what any institution or magazine or even colleague thinks art "is". Ultimately, Art Making has to become your spiritual path, your meditation, your thread that weaves you into harmony and depth.

"The truest art I would strive for would be to give the page the same qualities as Earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence would teach this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life"

Gretel Ehrlich, "The Solace of Open Spaces"

Spider Woman & "Community Clay" in Michigan

Center Altar Piece, "Community Clay" 2008

  "In the beginning, there was darkness. Then Tawa the sun awoke, and with him, Spider Woman awoke from the great below. Waking, she saw how empty the world was, and she began to imagine things, and what she imagined came to be. Spider Woman spun a line to form the east, west, north, and south, and at the center, she spun stories then that wove in circles around each direction, and the lands began to arise from the stories she thought of. And from the moist warm new lands, she took clay, and made all kinds of people. To each she attached a thread of her web which came from the doorway at the top of her head. This thread was the gift of creative wisdom. And at last, she taught them how to weave." 

 Pueblo Creation Myth

It was my great delight and privilege to return to Midland to see "COMMUNITY CLAY" at the Creative Spirit Center, and to meet and talk with the Center's amazing Director, Sarah Gorman, as well as re-connecting with the wonderful ceramic artist Kathy Space, who I collaborated with last year when we created "Hands of the Spider Woman" at the Midland Center for the Arts as part of my fellowship with the Alden Dow Creativity Center.

Sarah with "Sarah"

"The Terra Cotta masks are made from volunteers who participated in the casting process during April, community members' hand models, and their thoughts on community will be part of the show. Facing Forward mentoring program participants will also add their masks to the exhibit during June. Space Studios is partnering with Creative Spirit Center to produce this exhibit. The inter-woven hands of community members symbolize a loom: an engine of interwoven and independent fibers, coming together in continually creative patterns of relationship. It is also a symbol of connection, collaboration, community, communion, sustainability and hope."  

Kathy Space (2008)

Kathy with "Kathy"

"Prayer Ties"

When participants were going through the casting process Sarah told me she asked them to each find his or her essential face, under the personae and daily identifications of our lives - the "face you wore before you were born". I loved also the living metaphor of the "thread" woven between the hands of all participants. At the center, were the hands of the Weaver, faceless. And the thread finally went through the door, disappearing into the greater community of being we all belong to. I cannot say well how grateful I am for the way they, and their community, have matured and realized the idea that began last year. Thank you....................

Right Wall with "Thread" leaving through the door.

This experience gives me further incentive to finish this summer my book "Hands of the Spider Woman", which I hope will be available to sell (as a hard cover book) in September. Here are, in closing, a few more thoughts about the creation myth of Spider Woman. In Pueblo Indian traditions, Spider Woman, who is also called "Thought Woman" (Tse Che Nako) or "Creation Thought Woman" - created the world by thinking of stories, and this is the same creative power she passed on to all of her descendants, each connected. Within these myths, Spider Woman is, in fact, Mother Earth. The Navajo revere Grandmother Spider Woman because she taught them the sacred art of weaving.

To this day, spider webs are rubbed into the hands of baby girls, so they will become good weavers. Navajo rugs often have Spiderwoman’s Cross woven into the pattern as a symbol of balance - the union of the 4 directions. The fifth direction is the unifying force at the center.

 To “walk in beauty” is to be aware of a “moving point of balance” as we walk through the circles of our lives and relationships. And Spider Woman has a way of getting around.

Ecologists speak of the great Web of life upon Gaia, the living Earth, while contemporary physicists speak of entanglement theory and demonstrate the possibility that everything, including water*, is responsive and participates in some form of consciousness. Quantum theory indeed suggests that we live in a thought universe, a universe that is ultimately a unified field. Which is a bit of what the Hopi have been saying for over 1,000 years. Personally, I have the feeling Spider Woman is working very hard now to make us pay attention. We’re all weavers as well, weaving the world into being with the stories we tell. 

Each of us is holding a thread, a lineage, that goes back in time and extends far into the future, a weave we participate in with our thoughts, our dreams, and the manifest creative work of our hands. I have found that Spider Woman delights in all things connected, co-creative, collaborative, cooperative, communicative - all those “co” words. And, personally, I kind of think Syncronicities, which fascinate me so much (as anyone who reads this blog can see).......are kind of Her way of saying "Hello".

Forgive me if I throw one more in. Here's what I looked up to see in downtown Midland as I parked to get a coffee before heading out to see the show on the walls of the Creative Spirit Center!  Honest, you can't make this up!

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*For fascinating reading, read "The Secret Life of Water", research of the Japanese scientist Emoto, who exposed water samples to different psychic environments, and then took photographs of the crystals each sample produced.

The Great Goddess Pomona and Abundance

I felt like sharing this mural, to be found in Pomona, California. I recently received some correspondance from the magnificent artist Kevin Stewart-Magee, who had a great deal to do with envisioning the mural, along with an impressive community of artists he helped facilitate in the project. Here's something I wrote in 2006 about it.

POMONA

Roman Goddess of Fruitfulness, Orchards, and Gardens

Pomona was the uniquely Roman goddess of fruit trees, gardens, and orchards, and her festival, which she shared with her husband Vertumnus, was always on August 13th. Pomona watches over and protects fruit trees and cares for their cultivation, and Her name is from the Latin pomum, fruit. "Pomme" is the French word for "apple".

Pomona was among the Numina, guardian spirits of Roman mythology, who watched over people, places, or homes. The Numina are, in essence, the holy spirits of place, from which the word "numinous" derives. Pomona protected and inspired the abundance of the fruitful gardens and orchards. She had her own priest in Rome, called the Flamen Pomonalis. A grove sacred to her was called the Pomonal, located not far from Ostia, the ancient port of Rome.

Pomona has a special personal significance to me, and I made a mask for this Goddess as a tribute, a history, out of the gratitude that is Her due, and perhaps, as a hopeful invocation as well. For She is truly one of the Goddesses of California, fruit basket to America. My family home is in Pomona, California, a town east of Los Angeles that once was the lovely citrus growing valley of Orange county. Now, and for many years, it's a prime example of urban destruction and despair. Long gone are the orange groves, replaced by freeways, smog, crime, and a deserted, almost derelict downtown. I have occasionally returned to Pomona to visit my brother, who still lives there, and always found it sad and depressing.

I was amazed, in 2005, to discover that an arts colony had moved into downtown Pomona, perhaps because it's one of the few places where rent is still inexpensive in Los Angeles. There are studios, galleries, and coffee houses where previously only empty storefronts, homeless people with their shopping carts, and drug dealers had been.

But I was absolutely stunned, while walking a street I long have regarded as a reflection of the awful waste of urban blight, to see none other than the Great Goddess Pomona Herself, in all Her glory and at least 3 stories high, blessing the land covering it again with beauty and hope. The mural, "Pomona Envisioning the Future," is the final piece of an extraordinary community art project led by artist Judy Chicago, and designed by muralist Kevin Stewart-Magee, in 2003. More than 35 artists and helpers and a year's effort was involved in the mural (shown in progress). The detail above (and I'm looking for a completed view) does not show the images of groves growing over composting heaps of industrial waste, or a circle of people sitting in council to the right of the painting, envisioning a new world, overseen and inspired by the numinous, purple clad, Roman Goddess.

Art, at it's best, can provide us with those lasting and illuminated moments of revelation that give us the strength to, indeed, envision a new, and better, future.

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

"Envisioning the Future: Pomona Arts Colony Project"

and "Envisioning the Future in Pomona"

Walt Whitman in New Mexico

O to speed to where there is space enough and air enough at last!

To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of nature!

To have the gag removed from ones mouth!

To have the feeling today or any day I am sufficient as I am!

To be lost if it must be so!

To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom!

Walt Whitman “Leaves of Grass”

Two days spent at Truth or Consequences New Mexico, at the River Bend Hot Springs, where I can sit to watch the Rio Grande flow before me (I can jump into the Rio Grande if I so desire), and I can pull out one of the 5 books on the bookshelf in the common kitchen area, Walt Whitman, and open it to read the above.

How unhappy I’ve been, for so long! To be lost if it must be so………….sounds good to me, as I sit by the river. The Rio Grande, the Big River. Last night I sat in a hot tub listening to the river go by (as, they say, Geronimo himself did in this very spot, an odd distinction) sat and watched the stars come out. To sit by the “big river” and watch the immensity of stars in a New Mexico sky, well, that gives one some perspective. How fortunate, how incredible, the miracle of being sentient! And then waking up this morning and discovering Walt Whitman’s long ecstatic celebration of body and nature.

I’m not sure at this moment in time I have any great and universal thing to say about art, the Goddess, or metaphysics. So I’ll just write about what’s on my mind as I toddle down the road right now, which is the healing of my body and spirit, and the need to just open to life. Rivers are fine with me, at this moment, all the identity or purpose I need.

I’m thinking right now of some dreams I had this winter. I don’t dream often, and so when I do dream, I consider it a significant “heads up” from the unconscious realms, and ponder them carefully. Not long ago I dreamed that I was drinking beer, and suddenly realized was full of bugs – it was infected. It was Mexican beer, and the label said “Rio Negro” – black river.

As I see my 6th decade leering at me from just over the hill, I've been working this past winter to make way for a new weaving. I've been depressed, and an effort to help my emotionally troubled brothers has proven both futile and toxic. Constant contact with their habit of negative thinking and addiction has reinforced these qualities in me - after all, we come from the same roots. Drinking “Rio Negro” beer. Taking in Rio Negro spirits. In the name of love or duty, by force of habit, constantly taking in familial negativity and fear, generating it myself and infecting others..........sound familiar? Well, that's what therapy does.......helps a person like me to begin to do some unravelling as well as weaving.

That dream informed many of the choices I am now making, choices to change my circumstance and notions of responsibilities to my family and to myself. And so here I go, in search of a new home. It's a lonely feeling, but it's what it is.

Dreams are so fascinating. Not long after the “Rio Negro” dream, I had another vivid dream.

I’ve watched a lot of tv this winter, and find I'm very out of touch with whatever popular culture is. One program that I watched is called “Lost” – an interesting premise for a TV show about a group of people who are wrecked on a mysterious island with all kinds of psychic as well as physical anomalies. Sadly the show fails to do much with its fascinating premise and very engaging cast (it just falls back to formula violence every single time). Never the less, some of the characters in the show lingered in my imagination, even after I decided it wasn't good for me to watch the darn thing. My favorite character was “John”, a 50 something man who is a kind of explorer and mystic. As the drama unfolds, many of his mystical explorations – and his presumptions - lead him and others into both danger and madness. But there is also an earnestness and candor about this character, a kind of “faith”, that made him my favorite in the show.

In my most recent dream “John” was growing fins on his arms!

I'm no expert on dreams, and admit that my discipline of recording, remembering and deciphering dreams has been long remiss. Still, I have had many times when they were valuable to me, and even occasionally prophetic. Dreams are read, of course, in very subjective ways, like an internal (and increasingly responsive) language of hieroglyphs that one must develop a relationship with.

Using Jungian reasoning, I think John represents an “animus” figure. And the good news is, he’s growing fins, he’s learning to swim, he’s gaining the means to see into the watery depths of our mutual psyche……….an inner empowerment I find hopeful indeed!

I sit here before the Rio Grande, the Big River - with its flash and dazzle, its eddies and swirls, its depths and sparkles and kingfishers and swallows sweeping over it in search of tasty bugs……….I sit here and laugh. I laugh, the river laughs with me.

It’s enough. It’s more than enough. I let Walt Whitman speak the words today, and I, like him, celebrate the gift. Sometimes its good to be "lost".

“All truths wait in all things,

they neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

they do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon to be born

the insignificant is as big to me as any

(what is more or less than a touch?)

I believe a leaf of grass is no less

than the journey work of the stars.”

Angels in Nebraska - Part 2.

I have noticed, in fact, it's become obvious over the years, that we live in a world of everyday miracles. In an earlier BLOG entry (March 2008) I was awed to find, right on the street near where I lived, an autographed copy of a book by Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing - perhaps one of the most magical entries in my "Book of Common Miracles". Where does magic really begin, and when and where are the "Mythic Times", if not here, and now? So as I prepare to toddle down the road again, I want to put this on my blog as well, something that happened in 2005 as well.

In May of 2005 I began the long trip from Arizona to Connecticut for a residency at IPark Artists Enclave; I have been privileged to participate in two residencies there, and I will always be grateful to Ralph, Joanne, and the staff of Ipark for their generosity, support of the environment, and the arts.

It takes me about 5 long days to cross this enormous country. After a pleasant night among the pines in Flagstaff, I stopped at a rest stop in New Mexico, squatting on the ground and enjoying the view. Dusting off my skirt, I noticed a pair of fancy pliers literally at my feet. They seemed a useful find, so I picked them up and put them in my car. By the time I reached Missouri, I decided to take a detour to Nebraska, to find the graves of my grandfather and grandmother in Dewitt, a small village in the prairie near Beatrice. When my beloved grandmother, Glen, died in 1966, my family lived overseas, and my father flew alone back to the U.S. to return her body to Nebraska.

No one had visited those graves in 40 years, my own father, Kent, having passed away in 1976. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to pay my respects at last, to see as an adult the country she filled my imagination with. All I had was a child's memory of driving across the midwest with my family in the '50's, and endless Black-eyed Susans dancing and hissing in the hot prairie winds.

Dewitt is a village of maybe 4,000 people. It is still prosperous, thanks to a tool and die factory that has been successful since the 1920's. Petersen Manufacturing is particularly known for its founder's invention, the Vise-Grip Wrench. Which is why it's called the Vise-Grip Corporaton. 

When I found the old graveyard, I planted some flowers, said what I had to say to my grandmother's spirit and drove on, feeling very glad I made the trip.

After arriving in Connecticut, I cleaned out my car, and there were the pliers I found at my feet in the red dirt of western New Mexico. Stamped on the side was the legend:

"Vise-Grip: The Original"

ANGELS IN NEBRASKA & other conversations...

 
Getting ready to drive across the country again (which is a meditation retreat for people like me with ADD), I felt the urge to share two magical stories from my 2005 crossing. I've become very fond, by the way, of the prairie state of Nebraska, and the winding river Platte.

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In an article from his webzine "Warrior of the Light", Paolo Coelho wrote:

"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."

I also so often find myself engaged in what I call the "Great Conversation", and it's not easy to explain what I mean sometimes, even to myself. Perhaps, living a mythic life is often a matter of aesthetic choice.

The conversation seems to become most lively when I'm in movement, whether walking, crossing a trail, or a stateline, or an ocean. Like many Americans, I've been blessed and cursed with restlessness and rootlessness. Between destinations lies a mythic land of flight and migration, a free range for the imagination in the "Bardo" of transit. Perhaps travelling has become my way of meditating, certainly I seem to find so many of my answers, and questions, on the road. Well, the metaphor is an obvious one.

JOURNAL ENTRY, September 3, 2005.

Stopped in Cozad, Nebraska, home of the Robert Henri Museum. The Museum has some beautiful paintings of the tall grass prairies by a local artist, and a few reproductions of Henri's "Ash Can School" paintings. They don't have any of the originals. Henri's father, it seems, founded Cozad, but had to leave rather sudddenly with his sons and wife when he "accidentally" shot a man in a heated argument. He went to New York, changed his name, started the first casino in Atlantic City, and his son went on to study art and become famous. The boy never felt the need to return to Nebraska, although he did live in Ireland, New York, and Paris. Cozad is proud of him anyway.

I'm not entirely sure what kind of legacy this artist will leave. My life seems like a tapestry, on my good days, the threads finally woven with some skill into a colorful tapestry, I see that my hands have achieved degrees of mastery. And then there are days when so much precious life seems wasted, lost, too many disappointments and wrong decisions. That's what menopause, whether you're a woman or a man, seems to be about. An emptying out, discovering things that once seemed so opaque are now, well, transparent. Unimportant. What really matters? What are you living for, what do you serve?

So here I sit, with a very nice cup of coffee and a sandwich at the Busy Bee Diner, where I have a front row center seat for the First Bank & Trust Company of Cozad.

That got my attention.

Gathering and Offering, 2.

One last story from the Kripalu workshop. I was fortunate to meet in the class Dana Dakin, founder of the Women's Trust in Ghana. If any are reading this, I urge you to be inspired by visiting their website, and reading in particular "Dana's Story".  I take the liberty of quoting from her writing...........it was so inspiring to me to hear her story.

"Twenty-three years ago, while living in San Francisco, I met a woman named Olga Murray celebrating her sixtieth birthday. To mark the occasion, she was heading off to Nepal to start an orphanage. Her vision, courage, and determination left an indelible mark on me. In 2003, the orphanage and Olga were still going strong and I turned sixty.

Based on the adage that life is lived in thirds, the first third you learn, the second third you earn, and the final third you return, and with Olga as a role model, I decided to greet the youth of old age with my own way to give back."
Dana Dakin, The Women's Trust (Ghana)