Undines

"Moon Pool" (1972) Illustration for Felicia Miller poem

A friend died almost exactly a year ago, and I remembered a poem that she bequeathed me.  We were collaborators during the 70's - I illustrated a collection of poems by her and others.  We  lost contact and reconnected again just 5 years ago when she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Felicia had tried to have a child for many years and could not, and I know that she felt the fertility drugs she took might have caused her disease.

For all those years before then, I carried around Felicia's poems, many of which I had illustrated - they became internalized in me, part of my inner language.  The one I share here is recent.

I've been thinking about the mythic mind, and archetypes we em-body (manifest) in our life stories unconsciously.  At the conference last week, a Jungian psychologist spoke about Jung's notion that the Archetypes have an independent existence;  they are collective intelligences that can manifest both within and through us. I know I often felt that sense when I worked with the Masks of the Goddess collection, particularly when aspected a Goddesses myself.   I don't know if I can explain that. What's "reasonable"?  Are we attracted to certain mythic beings and tales, identifying with them in the course of our lives, or are they already embedded within us, templates of who we already are and are continually becoming?  Is that too fanciful an idea?

 Felicia was a mermaid.   I never thought she was comfortable with this solid world.....she was too mutable a being.   I always seemed to meet her where there was water, and I remember well her sea shell necklaces.    She had an antique book illustrated by Arthur Rackham we used to pore over as young students, and 33 years later I was not surprised to hear passages from a book she was currently writing about a contemporary Ondine, a modern woman trying, unconsciously, to find her way back to the sea.  I am sad she never finished the book......it was beautiful.

There are many romantic stories and urban myths about artists who are discovered, their work living on, and that godawful  cliche I despise because idiotic people have said it to me so many times:  "you'll be famous when your're dead"......etc.   But I know well that there are so very many whose  work dies with them.  I know it only too well.  

One thread of the Ondine (Undine) legend is that in order to gain a human soul,  Ondine (a mermaid  living in the depths of the Danube River) must marry a human and bear a child.  I first heard some of this when I was given the Danish "Little Mermaid" as a child.  (I also couldn't understand why someone who was immortal and at home in the elemental would want a human soul in the first place - being a mermaid seemed so much better.) But according to the legend, mermaids did leave their native element to pursue a human embodiment, usually with a lot of suffering on on their part.  And, like the Selkies*  of Ireland, the sea  always called to them (should a Selkie find her sealskin, the urge to return will become irresistible).

According to Wikipedia, Undines  have beautiful voices, which are sometimes heard within the water.  One of the most famous versions of the German story was Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's novella Undine, which has also been staged as a ballet many times.

Poster for "Undine", the Royal Ballet (2000)

The Channel: Bloomington

Cold water burns my hands,
I dip and turn the paddle shaft.
A few boats pattern the river ahead,
Where green canopy grays the light.

I am in alone in Undine's pool.
Water is a stranger here,
changing blue, gold, clear.
Drifting leaves under glass:
friendless, they swirl by.

Riffles pour their endless lace;
faces glare from flowing beards,
Mock the poor rival lost
in blackened woods.
The changeling cannot read
the bookish rocks,
heaped and left to moss, or
ciphered fern and witchy branch.

" This way  See? Go there."
Foolish, she is frightened
by roots of upturned trees.
She flees too far, strays lost
into blind woods.

I reach and as I draw the blade,
My boat turns, and I look to see
Where glassy current
Shows the way:
a clear channel
and friends who wait below.

Felicia Miller

**  A wonderful movie about the Irish legend of the Selkies is THE SECRET OF ROAN INISH (1994)

The Hidden Sea

 

"The Hidden Sea" (2010)

Time does funny things in the desert.....sometimes it reveals an entire ocean, it's frozen tide pools and fossilized sea creatures, below, ebbing for a moment, it's currents.   I am always impressed by the notion that I walk on the bed of an ancient ocean.

One of the stories by Ursula K. Leguin I love is "The Masters".  In that tale a medieval astronomer, perhaps an astrologer or an alchemist,  is driven into hiding underground in mine shafts.  There, he discovers "the stars beneath".........the Hidden Sky. 

Here's The Hidden Sky: Fibonacci Movie from Cara Reichel on Vimeo, in conjunction with a 2010 play based upon Ursula Leguin's story.  It's so beautiful, I felt like looking at it again.

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The Hidden Sky:  Fibonacci Movie from Prospect Theater Company on Vimeo.

The Hidden Sky:  Fibonacci Movie from Cara Reichel on Vimeo.

The Habit of Loving

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. ___________________________________________________________

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

My Speech for Claremont

"What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a webbed vision? The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.” 


Catherine Keller, "From a Broken Web"

I wanted to write about the theology of community for the 7th Annual Conference on Pagan Studies at Claremont School of Theology (this coming weekend in Los Angeles, California) - to write about  our need to sanctify community,  human and planetary.  

Having been witness to the tragedy in my home town of Tucson, I' ve been almost unable to think in terms that are too abstract.  When confronted with the horror of violence, and the heavy pall of grief, the need to experience  inter-dependence, with-in our bodies and with-in the refuge of our imaginations -  is very real and immanent.   We want to know we are not alone, we want to support each other.

I was struck by  the  way "Together We Thrive" became a  theme echoed throughout Tucson, and headed healing activities, from the President's call for unity, to spontaneous Shrines created at  Gabrielle's Head Quarters and elsewhere that called for peace.

We urgently need pragmatic ways to create community in today's world.  Could a strong community  have prevented what happened?  Unbalanced individuals will always abound, and lethal weapons are readily available - the American gun culture will ensure this is not the last such event.  Yet even so, the failure of community speaks to this tragedy. 

If we weren't in so many ways a culture of "rugged individualism" where "good fences make good neighbors", and our technology increasingly allows us to insulate ourselves from the so-called "outside world" ... would this young man have received the attention, even healing, he needed before he erupted in catastrophic violence? 

"The Rugged Individualist" writes sociologist Philip Slater, "cheers when needy people are deprived of food, battered women are deprived of protection from brutal husbands, children are deprived of education, etc., because this is "getting government off our backs. "  

This kind of thinking fails in every way to communicate that we live within a vast web of human and environmental inter-dependency, a web that is also very intimate.  A successful adult is so because of parents, teachers, community resources, and distant ancestors  that enabled him or her to mature.  And without a sense of belonging and contributing to that continuum as it reaches into future generations,  human beings end up feeling alienated and ultimately without a sense of purpose. They feel disposable, and perceive others as equally disposible. 

Which is what an unsustainable consumer system, as a placebo for the pain of spiritual and communal isolation, feeds on.

In tribal societies, survival depended utterly on cooperation, as well as the collective ability to  adapt continually to new environmental challenges, be it drought, invaders, or the exhaustion of resources.  The mythic foundation of any tribe (or civilization) is the template upon which they stand;  a culture with a rigid mythos that cannot adapt and change is doomed to collapse. 

"We live in a world today in which the problems we face are all planetary..........." Philip Slater comments in his new book The Chrysalis Effect,  "the polarization and chaos we see in the world are the effect of a global cultural metamorphosis". 

We need a new mythology for the global tribe.  Renunciate theologies that teach us to renounce the world, the body, and relationships, either in service of some abstract "better place" (be it heaven, paradise, enlightenment or nirvana) or in reaction to teachings that degrade earthly life as "impure" or "unreality"..............will not help us, or those who must come after us.  If we're going to speak of "oneness", we need myths that include tremendous, creative diversity within that "oneness", that can include many gods and goddesses, many voices and languages, and many ways to the truth instead of simply eliminating the competition.  Further, our world myth can no longer be simply a human world myth - it must include many evolutions, many other beings within the intimacy of ecosystems.  If we're to survive into sustainability.

"The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic." wrote artist Rafael Montanez Ortiz.  "The problem we have with holism is that our reasoning is fragmentary, dissectionist, it removes us from relating things, it structures things in separate compartments in order  to "have control".  Ortiz maintains that if the logic of one's society is relational, you are in relation to all things, and thus, empathic to all things.   In earlier societies, the entire world was alive, entangled, conscious, animistic and full of Anima.  It's no coincidence that this "primitive"  worldview is very close to what science, from Gaia Theory to Quantum Entanglement, is discovering.

Last, myths, as in all tribal societies, become meaningful through embodiment, through actual experience - through ritual. And that's an endeavor the Pagan community is really good at, a skill we can offer that's tremendously needed.

Our brains aren't just in our skulls, but the entire body, which includes the aura and the etheric networks that exist between us and the rest of life.    Whether we're talking about a forest, or another person, abstractions can remove us from the  experience of communion, the immanent ability to sense what is going on.  Abstractions become what is going on.

I know there are many here who have experienced, and helped to create, rituals that were profoundly transformative.  My experiences of the Spiral Dance with Reclaiming, or with the Earth Spirit Community's Twilight Covening, or the Lighting of the Labyrinth at Sirius Rising......will always energize me when I remember them, no matter what.  Within those magical circles, I entered mythic time and mythic space, experienced, as Joseph Campbell put it, the "Thou" realm of existence.  That  does not end when you leave the circle.


In 2004, I directed "Restoring the Balance", a non-denominational event devoted to cross-cultural stories of the Great Mother.  Our cast wished to dramatize the need for healing the Earth Mother.  We chose as our centerpiece the Inuit legend of Sedna, and the rituals of atonement and reciprocity the Inuit perform with their shaman when they believe they have fallen from balance with the life giving Ocean Mother.   Artist Katherine Josten (founder of the Global Art Project) danced the role of  Sedna, and observed that:

"The work of our group is not to re-enact the ancient goddess myths, but to take those myths to their next level of evolutionary unfolding.  The integration of male and female must occur in order to bring balance to the earth and holism to human consciousness. A dialogue needs to occur so the pain of both may be brought to light and transmuted."

In my own rituals, I've felt that Grandmother Spider Woman has given me the compulsion to  weave webs, from simple rituals in which we tied threads, naming what we were re-connecting with in our intentions, to dancer Morgana Canady weaving a web as "Spider Woman" in a theatrical performance with 300 people.  In this instance, biodegradable cords from “Spider Woman’s Web” were later distributed among cast members, and scattered throughout the desert, symbolically extending our web.  As part of the Global Art Project as well, an exchange was made with the AFEG-NEH-MABANG Traditional Dance Company, in Cameroon, a part of the weaving.

 Among the Navajo, infant girls often have a bit of spider web rubbed into their hands so they will become good weavers.  May we all now rub a bit of spider web into our hands..........and, like Penelope, may we all now see "with a web on our faces".

Mythic Journeys

"Every life is a story and a story can change the world"

I saw a movie last night that I felt like sharing, MYTHIC JOURNEYS created by Steven and Whitney Boe.  Joseph Campbell would have loved this movie, and so did I.

A Grove of Green Men

 

The Green Man

I walked among the trees
I wore the mask of the deer

(remember me, try to remember)

I am that laughing man
with eyes like leaves

When you think that winter

will never end

I will come. 

You'll  feel my breath, warm at your neck.
I will rise in the grass, a vine caressing your foot.

I am the blue eye

   of a crocus
  opening in the snow

  a trickle of water,

  a calling bird,
  a shaft of light

  among the trees.

You will hear me singing
among the green groves of memory,
the shining leaves of tomorrow.

I'll come with daisies in my hands,

we'll dance among the sycamores
once more

(1997)

I'm not sure why, but I've felt a compulsion lately to make Green Men masks.  I've made, probably, thousands of Green Men masks in the past 30 years.  I guess that's my claim to fame - I've helped to populate the world with masked Green Men.  It's a messy job, but someone had to do it.  Some of my masks have been copied so many times by other mask makers that I'm practically generic.

The Green Man is such a potent, positive symbol of the renewal of life.  In the company of the Green Man ** one finds the male as healer and renewer, instead of warrior............and a pretty darn good symbol for our time as well.  May we all find ways to dance with the Green Man!

 The Green Man by sculptor Toin Adams

The President's Speech

 

"At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.  What we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.  Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

President Obama, Speech at U.A. (1-12-2011

Last night I saw the President give an extraordinary speech here in Tucson, with an astonishing 20,000 people turning out to hear it, that called for peace, reconciliation, and reason.  I read some cynical journalist comment that "it was mostly college students" - I respond, so very good to see that.  They are the ones inheriting the future.    He concluded by talking about the young girl (born on 9/11 and included in the book "Babies of Hope") who died - grieving for her and her parents, and making a plea for a better world for all children.  He was never more eloquent, and  I felt that this speech, and the extraordinary international response to this violence, ended with a important message for our world.  I also was delighted to see a Yaqui elder call on the Directions for healing and balance, honoring the first Americans, and cultural diversity. 

On a trajectory, I've seen the recent movie "The Kings Speech" twice, and love it.  Seeing this story of George the 6th, who was a stutterer,  struggling to serve his people with speeches that were so very difficult for him to perform on the terrifying brink of WWII,  I never before  understood the significance of the Royalty as the "voice of the people" in England.  There are scenes in that movie that will make you cry.  I understood the same thing last night when President Obama spoke.