"Our Lady at the Roots"......a new Icon

 

Happy May Day!

 

Happy May Day to all!

Since Beltane (May 1) is an auspicious day with a truly ancient precedent, I can't resist a bit of his & herstory to honor the day, and a few May Pole pictures.   May the  RITES OF SPRING quicken the weary sap of all, may you find a bonfire to dance around, may the May Queen bless you!

The origins of the May Queen,  and agrarian celebration of the Rites of Spring throughout Merrie Old England and Europe are very ancient indeed, and probably go  back to the "sacred marriage", whereby a couple, representing the young Goddess and God, would make love in the fields, encouraging and participating in the fertility of the world. 

In villages throughout England, a procession would bear flowers, all the while capering around the new Maypole chosen for the celebration. Only unmarried girls would be allowed to plant the phallic Maypole into the fertile Earth........a lovely dance and ritual based upon pagan practices of sympathetic magic.   In other words, "the world is waking up and making love, so we too wake up and make love, and all will bear fruit".

The planting of the May Pole, and the union of the May Queen with the May King (or the Green Man) probably has its origins in very ancient traditions of the Sacred Marriage, going back as far as Sumeria and the marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi - or probably farther even than that, into unknown origins in prehistory.   In ancient times, the spring ritual union of the King with the priestess (representing the Earth Mother) was a very significant rite; in later times, even in Christian Europe, church morality may have been suspended for Beltane, as couples went out into the fields to participate in the ripening fertility.

This celebration of the fecundity of Spring no doubt made many of the early churchmen nervous. In the late 19th century,  May 1 became associated with the growing labor movement, and since then many countries have celebrated May Day as International Workers' Day.  In 1955, Pope Pius XII instituted May 1 as the "feast of St. Joseph the Worker" with the intention of emphasizing the spiritual aspect of labor.........I'm sure the advent of this secondary meaning to May Day came as a belated relief to the Catholic Church, bypassing the phenomenon of sexuality altogether.

For myself, I think the re-sacralization of sexuality, in tandem with the blossoming of the world, that was the original meaning of May Day.....is a wonderful Holy Day, and am often surprised by how few people today know of it's origins.  This  has to do with the de-sacralization of sexuality that has followed closely behind the monotheistic Judeo-Christian-Islamic God - who apparently does not approve of sex, or the raucous  turning of the natural year that becomes spring's fertility.   Not a bad argument for polytheism, where, when there is a multiplicity of Gods and Goddesses, things are a bit more tolerant, people could pick and choose their Deities.

Traditionally, the Maypole was hung with garlands and streamers. Dancers took hold of the ends in a weaving courtship dance.

Boys would dance in one direction and the girls in another, and so flower-clad ribbons were woven around the pole in the form of a braid. There might also be a procession led by Jack O' the Green (a variant of the Green Man), fantastically arrayed with flowers, leaves and ribbons, and followed by Morris Dancers with bells jangling on their ankles. Last, there would be the choosing of the May Queen.

 

  

Flora was the Roman Goddess of Flowers and it’s not surprising that her festival was held on the first day of May, which also has a lot to do with the May Day of European lore. The May Dance festivals of Europe have many of their origins in the ancient “Feast of Flora”, the ecstatic Roman Rites of Spring. 

"Whitman says, "And your very flesh shall be a great poem."............That is the message I'd like to offer on Beltane.  Our flesh is a symbol, a microcosm of the earth we inhabit. Our flesh is what connects us to the seasons; it is where we feel the cold of winter, and -- more and more in the Northern Hemisphere -- the warmth of the sun. It is in and through our flesh that we experience our emotions. We feel love in the flesh; anger in the flesh; exuberance in the flesh. The body is a treasure trove of sensation, and our sensations inform our temporal existence. Sensation may not be all of what life is, and the experiences of the flesh may be subjective and passing. But subjectivity and impermanence do not make a thing meaningless. Flowers bloom for but a short time, and when they do they are beautiful.  We bloom, too. 

We are a body full of color and fragrance. We are a cycle of life unto ourselves, and we have good cause to celebrate our body -- our flesh -- for we have no knowledge of what is to come beyond this moment, this life, this body. We are here, alive, and we can, on the day and in the season of Beltane, choose to celebrate the life that we are living. We can choose to honor our flesh, and honor the flesh of others.  (What a world we would live in if the flesh was not seen as evil, but rather a manifestation of something holy and worthy of respect. I wonder if violence would be so commonplace if we recognized the flesh as sacred.)

Love the body you are in! Love your flesh! Celebrate this High Day with a fullness of being!!"

 Teo Bishop on Beltane, 5-1-2013

"Our Lady of the Shards"..............Remembering Buried Lives

"The Memory Keeper" and "Our Lady of the Forgotten Midwives" (2019)

For quite a long time now I go into the studio faithfully just about every day, and I sit there, sometimes I fool around on the computer, mostly I look at all the terrifying blank white  canvases or the neatly stacked bags of clay or the big pile of leather I have next to the plaster casts of faces, also neatly stacked and displayed on a shelf ...... then I go get some coffee, pat the cats, pull some weeds,  check my email,  and somehow, the day is pretty much gone and I haven't done anything.  I wish I could say that I am an engine of new ideas and creativity these days, but I am not.  I am, perhaps, dormant, incubational, etc.  More of my own words coming back to haunt me.  

"Our Lady of the Shards" (2013)

So, at least,  I can look back at this rather huge body of work(s) that surround me (and if I were wealthy I would have a gallery again, where I and others would have  badly needed space to share our art, and we could do the teaching and community  creation that an arts district provides)..... but, I don't live in a place where art districts are much valued, except by real estate developers.   Tucson's so called "Art and Warehouse District", having once been lively, should now be called the "Fancy Wine Bar and Pretentious Restaurant" district, most of the galleries being now extinct.  Well.  If wishes were fishes.................

The Memory Keeper I (2018)

I don't know about other artists, but I always have about 3 to 5 series of works going at a time, and can't really say where one series ends and another begins.  Sometimes they begin with me just playing with a shape or a color, and the work itself tells me where it wants to go.  Magical, that experience of "Flow".  Stories themselves don't have an end, they just find new expressions -  they become a "trilogy", or a side character demands attention because it has developed a voice, or there is an undiscovered country beyond the borders that has sent out an exploration party, etc.  That is true in other art forms as well.

"The Weaver" (2018)

The Bone Goddess (2018)

I really love my continuing  series of ceramic ICONS "Our Lady of the Shards"  that evolved when I found myself staring at a pile of  beautiful shards of broken pots from the Clay Coop where I sometimes work.  They were half buried in the mound of recycled clay, and I thought of  how archeologists might feel, sorting through the buried fragments  of lives and cultures  long lost, long buried, long forgotten.  Piecing shards together like a jigsaw puzzle to find the stories and see again the hands that made those artifacts?   How would it be, to see the faces of the forgotten rising from the buried past?  And, for me,  particularly the voices of the women, silenced in the long advance of "his-story" - the forgotten Midwives who brought our ancestors into the world, the Wise Women and the Weavers and Spinners of lives, the Goddesses cast aside in patriarchal monotheism?   The  tangible and communicative Spirits of Place, the "Numina", rising from the buried places, from the dry and broken soil of desert arroyos where they continue to sustain us,  or revealed by a storm or a sudden flood.  The Memory Keepers who keep the essential and sustaining stories, the "Water from Another Time"  that generates and informs the present?  Whether buried intentionally or not, these faces rise from the dreaming Earth, from the clay and the stone,  their eyes opening as they wake again. 

"Hecate" (2019)

What might they look like?  What might they tell us as we plunge into a future that seems so  uncertain in the face of ecological and social crisis?   I have been making works about "surfacing" for a long time.   Along with my colleagues I reflect that some of us are  "spiritual archeologists".  Faces, Myths, Presence:  surfacing from among the shards.  

"The Black Madonna" (2019)

 

"Our Lady of the Waters" (2014)

She Who Hears the Cries of the World

Mana Youngbear as "White Tara" in Restoring the Balance (2004)

SOUND POEM BY LAUREN RAINE (2019)

to listen:  

    https://soundcloud.com/user-972033003/white-tara-by-lauren-raine

White Tara is the manifestation of complete Compassion, She is the Bodlhissatva who will assist the suffering of the world, assist us to move through the suffering to love, and the reealization that we are not alone, that we all belong to the great Circle.  Quon Yin, Tara, Mother Mary.............. all manifestations or archetypes of the Divine Mother, and the expansion of unconditional compassion and love.  I wrote this spoken word poem in 1997, when I was going through  loss of a home/dream/community that eventually led me to create a new life on the other side of the continent.  

I reflect, as I try to recall the experience from which this poem arose, that the opening of the heart that grief and loss can bring can also be a path into profound evolutionary change, but in my experience, to grow one must first go through it, one must experience the pain and the loss.

Which is something very fearful to do, and can take a long time to do.  Because the heart does not know or reason in sequential time like the intellect does! Having just lost a beloved cat, I am experiencing this right now.  The emotional body, it seems to me, suffers all the losses at once as each loss arises.  And the heart also partakes in a greater  Mystery that somehow knows all beings are One, remembering all experiences of  love and belonging within the Circle dance of life.  Grief can be a great teacher.

 "I went to meet that savage creature I have run from,  lifetime after lifetime,

 the shape within the shadows, huge, a creature of smoke and bared fangs. "

This line arose from a dream I had many times, in which I was being pursued by a vampire.  Always it almost got me, or was a shadowy presence just behind me, and I would wake up. I suppose Jungians would call this the "denial of the shadow" or some such.    I was always too afraid to confront the creature that pursued me in those dreams, because I was sure it would kill me.  Finally I had a dream in which I became tired of running, and a I stopped to face the pursuing monster.   And when, at last, the horror embraced me it turned into a young boy,  vulnerable, with tears in his eyes. 

   

Saraswati Synchronicity (and a poem)

I've been having a lot of synchronicities lately, and sometimes I feel like my guides or higher self or even the pixies are trying to tell me something.  Sometimes, as anyone who studies synchronicities knows, they are rather funny, sometimes they are very helpful, and sometimes they seem like a riddle I need time to figure out, if I ever do.

I recently purchased a book by Bernard Beitman MD on synchronicity called Connecting with Coincidence - the New Science for Using Synchronicity and Serendipity in Your Life.    I learned about the book from a Blog I follow on Synchronicity and Consciousness by Trish and Rob MacGregor - I have, over the years, shared some of my synchronicities with them.  I am somewhat embarroused to say that when I encounter a new non-fiction book, I often will open it at random, reading parts before I commit to reading the book from the beginning.  Which is exactly what I did with this book, opening to a section called "Internet Angels".   

The first sentence I read was "Raine believed an outside agency was helping her to find what she needed.  Her need was helping to create the response shee sought from someone tuned to wanting to share and help." 

I thought "Huh, someone with the same name as me."  I read on, and then realized that it was me!

"Author Lauren Raine wrote, 'I've often had the experience, especially with the Internet, of having information I needed come to me.  I even am not surprised any more, having faith in some kind of invisible means of support.  I remember in 2000 when I was working on descriptions of Goddesses for my book, receiving several emails out of the blue, from someone I didn't know, that discussed eloquently the Goddess Saraswati.  Which was information I needed.  I still have no idea of who that person was who sent me those articles, or why, or even where they got my email address from.' " (page 139)

I had completely forgotten about that, but it's true that often I received help with my Goddess projects that did seem to come from "an invisible means of support".  I must have emailed the story to the MacGregors,  and they shared it with Dr. Beitman.  But what are the odds of  opening my new book to the exact place where my own 20 year old story of synchronicity is?

So, I have been thinking about it ever since, and felt like sharing it here. Specifically I've been thinking about Saraswati,  Her presence in Bali which I strongly felt when I was there, the masks I've made for Her over the years, and what gifts the Goddess brings to those who ask.

Saraswati is the Hindu Goddess of Art, Language, Communication, Knowledge, Learning,  and creative Inspiration.  She is often portrayed with instruments in her hands, demonstrating the tools of art and expression.  In India the Goddess is sometimes invoked at the birth of a child,  and a bit of honey is placed on the infant's tongue so he or she will be "blessed with good speech".  When I was in Bali (which is also when I wrote the below poem)  I understood that Saraswati was very important to the Balinese people.  I remember once seeing a flock of geese making their way up a street,  with a whole line of mopeds behind them.  When I asked a Balinese friend why no one moved them out of the way, she responded:  "Sacred to Saraswati".  That was apparently answer enough.

According to Wikipedia, Saraswati is:

"Originally associated with the great river known as Saraswati..........(the name) also means "she who has water"  and  "she who possesses speech". It is also a Sanskrit composite word of surasa-vati (सरसु+अति) which means "one with plenty of water".  The word Saraswati appears both as a reference to a river and as a significant deity in the Rigveda. In initial passages, the word refers to the Sarasvati River .................the Rigveda describes Saraswati as the best of mothers, of rivers, of goddesses."

".......Her importance grows in Vedas composed after Rigveda and in Brahmanas, and the word evolves in its meaning from "waters that purify", to "that which purifies", to "vach (speech) that purifies", to "knowledge that purifies", and ultimately into a spiritual concept of a goddess that embodies knowledge, arts, music, melody, muse, language, rhetoric, eloquence, creative work and anything whose flow purifies the essence and self of a person. In Upanishads and Dharma Sastras, Saraswati is invoked to remind the reader to meditate on virtue, virtuous emoluments, the meaning and the very essence of one's activity, one's action."

I can't help but think that that provides an excellent description of "Sacred Arts",  which might be viewed (also, along with geese or swans) as "Sacred to Saraswati".  I reflect also that what profoundly impressed me when I was in Bali was the presence, and practice, of art absolutely everywhere, within everyone's lives.  Not in any western sense - all arts there were done as a religious offering, as communal and devotional. Everyone is engaged in some way, whether that is participating in the music or masked dramas, as dancers, making the elaborate offerings for rituals and celebrations, painting.......the making of art is everywhere, a part of daily life.  The Balinese have no idea of the "great alienated artist" and they have no discourse about the "meaning of art".   I remember again what a revelation that was to me,  and that also later inspired me to offer my masks as "Temple Masks for the Goddess"  when I returned from Bali. 

One other word about the "River Saraswati":  there is no actual Saraswati River  in India - the great purifying river of Saraswati is rather a spiritual or metaphorical river that sustains the soul rather than the body.  To bathe in, or seek pilgrimage to, the river Saraswati (like the pilgrimages made to the actual river Ganges) is to be purified, to be given highest inspiration and vision, and to join with the great beauty and mystery of life.  So it seems to me. 

The poem below I wrote when I was in Bali, actually, when I stood looking across a valley at the great volcano Kintamani.  A body of water was beneath it.  For a long time I used a false Balinese name as the author, because it has a Balinese "voice".  But it came from my heart, and my response to this "Land of Saraswati".

Love is Saraswati's river

flowing through our lands.

She will feed the rice fields,

She will accept our woven offerings.

She will bear our ashes

and the fires of Kintamani

to the sea.

Formless, she neither takes nor gives;

we impose these significances

upon the flowers we cast in her.

From birth to death,

Saraswati's river sustains us to the sea.

                                        (2000) 

"The Forest Man" - Real Green Men for the 21st Century

"The Green Man" from 1997 Rites of Spring ritual 

The Green Man is an almost universal archetype of the renewal of life in the spring, and it is, of course, beloved by contemporary neo-Pagans as well, symbolizing manhood as re-newer and re-generator instead of as "warrior", which so often becomes authoritarian  destroyer in a patriarchal, dominator, "alpha male"  based culture (and this includes "dominating" nature, instead of working with nature).  

The Green Man, by whatever name, is so very important for our time, and in considering this, I went looking for "living Green Men".  And boy (excuse the pun) did I find them!  What I learned gave me extraordinary hope, and a vision of the power of the Green Man (and Green Women as well) to bring rebirth to the land and  to the future, if we, as a global humanity,  can only listen to what these contemporary Green Men have dedicated their lives to.

Below is a wonderful documentary that I ran across almost by accident, about a man in India who single handedly, and with extraordinary dedication, planted a thriving forest, beginning his work in 1979.  His story began my search for other "Forest Men".   To watch and listen is to be not only inspired, but to feel hope.  Because I believe that this is what the future civilization will have to look like, these technologies of love, sustainability, Earth based science and spirituality, along with new and old ways for human beings to cooperate and get along with each other.  I believe, instead of vast space stations and digital robots and endless wars, the future will have to look more like a forest, or a garden, if there is to be a future civilization at all.  

And the message Jadav Payeng (and the others I have, through the grace of UTube, been able to share here) carries is that renewal can happen when humans become stewards of the land, and let Nature do what nature does, assisting in simple ways, like planting trees, or allowing environmental diversity to be protected enough to return. These regenerated forests and deserts truly offer us hope.

I am reminded of a book by Alan Weisman called THE WORLD WITHOUT US, in which the author researched areas around the world that had become abandoned or off limits to people, like the neutral or demilitarized zone between North and South Korea - and the extraordinary renewal that took place in such environments. There was also a 2008 television documentary called "Life After People" that explored the same theme.

Since, as I mentioned in the previous post, I can't think of what to say of late, I will let these people speak on this Blog instead. They are true Green Men.

Jadav Payeng, Majuli Island, India

 https://youtu.be/HkZDSqyE1do

Hugh Wilson, Hinewai Nature Reserve, New Zealand

https://youtu.be/3VZSJKbzyMc

David Bamberger, Selah Preserve, Texas

https://youtu.be/ZSPkcpGmflE

David Milarch, Redwood Forests of California and Oregon

https://youtu.be/wW9w6eCQQkU

John D. Liu*,  Re-greening the desert

https://youtu.be/IDgDWbQtlKI

* (for a documentary by John D. Liu, see also

 "Hope in a Changing Climate"     (https://youtu.be/bLdNhZ6kAzo)

 

 And, of course, Tucson's own 

Brad Lancaster:  Water Harvesting in Arizona

https://youtu.be/KcAMXm9zITg

The Old Dog Still Knaws at the Art World

Only a half bottle of Pino Grigio could make me come up with a title like that, but so I did as I am trying to kick start myself into writing something new.  Because lately I've been feeling like I have nothing else to say, I just keep going around in circles with the same themes, twitching them here and there, adding to, "maturing" them perhaps.  And I'm not just talking about masks or painting.  I reflect that  most of us incarnating on this planet  are not master multi-tasker souls (science seems to be indicating that always "multi tasking" isn't so effective anyway)...... I believe we are beings who have certain themes that inform our lives and for better or worse, we keep developing those themes throughout.  

I love the face of the painting above  because of the rather honest way I painted my own face, with an expression of  irony, touched with melancholy,  rather than serene sanctity, which is something alas I rarely achieve.  That expression no longer exists in the painting, as I felt obliged to sanitize it (it is, after all, dedicated to Gaia) by making the face less harsh and more serene and  divine in expression. 

Ok, also more boring, to tell you the truth, and I suspect that had I left it alone Gaia would not have minded. I know that the Great Mother  is full of contradictions and irony, love and conflict,  dark and light, as She has pursued Her vast planetary experiment  which includes us, Her most troublesome children (well, judging from their sudden demise, I suspect she didn't like the dinosaurs all that much either.  I occasionally feel we are headed in the same direction.)   She would not be offended by my  human contradictions and ambiguities.  I think.  I hope.

"The Green Man" (2021)

Lately I've been trying to learn how to paint again, and it's like "painting 101", I don't feel sure at all about the process, but that's  exciting too. It's a privilege when one has moments of "beginner's mind".   One of my roadblocks is that I sometimes find that I'm still, after all these years, carrying around the "art world", heaven's help me.   I don't need to impress them (whoever "they" are) or myself, I just  need to mentally shut up and enter the magic of  "Flow" and just make stuff.  Which is where it all began when I was discovering crayons on the sidewalk in front of my house at 7 (there was a certain shade of turquoise blue that to this day I remember with abject delight.)   

I waste  precious creative energy  because sometimes the  Fine Arts Realm  seems to be frowning over my shoulder,  critiquing me as I go.    I find myself tormenting myself with voices of "art world  failure syndrome"  -  that I have failed to become a really good artist, that I have failed to make really meaningful "statements",  that my work is too pretty, or spiritual, or not "relevant",  that I should, should, should......... damn.   I wonder how many others have such  familiar demons troubling their sleep?   Why do I continue to torture myself by reading Art in America, etc., feeling left out of those august ranks?  Why not just cancel the subscription and end the pain?  

Why not instead just re-read Tom Wolfe's  The Painted Word and feel smug and self-satisfied that I am not "conceptual" or even "virtual" (there was no such thing as "virtual"  when he wrote the book anyway)? 

I am not even sure I understand the language  any more......artist's statements are becoming very esoteric.  How is the below for mind bending?  Here is the Abstract  from a treatise on contemporary painting that came my way.  I have not read the article, being unable to fathom the introduction itself.  

"The artistic notion of the 'death' of painting needs little introduction. It has shaped the course of twentieth century art, and affected the lives and practices of millions of artists in fundamental ways, but the model of the human mind upon which it implicitly rests is no longer considered to have useful relevance in the twenty-first century. Cognitive science and evolutionary psychology have concluded that the mind is not a blank slate but content-rich at birth, and as such humans bear an array of innate expectations of reality and non-reality, many of which apply as much to the artform of painting as they do other cultural behaviours and expressions such as religion or music. This eclectic and creative thesis takes in a diverse series of case studies tracing the prehistory of painting in light of these cognitive propensities, from the beginnings of human culture in Southern Africa to abstract designs and hand-prints in the Palaeolithic caves, from Bushman rock art depicting swift-people to the reported experiences of painters living today, to uncover a perennial and foundational function for painting which cannot die: the ubiquitous sensation of an 'otherworld' beyond the surface of the canvas or rock face. This simultaneously new and ancestral approach to painting demands a rehabilitation of the medium as both a humanising self-expression and as beyond-the-self exploration in a modern art context increasingly estranged from the wider world. Painting as 'Liminal Contact' seeks to abandon artistic ideologies and limiting art theories of what is possible in favour of a direct image-based communion with human nature. "

What?   I didn't even know that painting was dead.  Yet this author does seem to offer hope, suggesting that painting as "liminal contact" can be a "direct image-based communion with human nature".  I will endeavor to read on.  

Although I am not sure I really want to have "communion with human nature".  I think I would prefer some communion with animals, or plants, or, sometimes, just about anything that gets me free of the chaos of human nature.  But I will endeavor to read on.

  

Recently I saw a notice for submissions to a Women's Show.   On the application it said:  "Open to all CIS women, Transwomen, female identified, and Non-Binary".  Whew.  Pretty much includes any one who has  felt "womanly" at any time, including those who wish to opt out of the whole thing by being non-binary  (womxn is the new word, so as to not be exclusionary).   "Woman (Womxn)"   has ceased to be biology and has become a mutable identity choice. 

What is going to happen to Judy Chicago's Dinner Party or Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues now? (Are all those vaginal images now politically incorrect or exclusionary?  Or will they just be archived as curious remnants of another time?)  And I have indeed become a dinosaur wandering about in a brave new  incomprehensible  art world. 

So what is left to me?  Freedom.  To just keep creating.  And if that  Great Monolith  of the Art World still tsk's at my ineptitude within my mind, I will politely ask it to leave and bother someone younger and more urban.    I am determined to  locate again that child with the luscious blue crayon.  I would like to make the work often a devotional activity.  And above all to, as the Navajo say, to try to  "Walk in Beauty".  That is what I would like to affirm now.   

That, and, the great lesson of Impermanence.

"Form Is Empty, Empty Is Form" (2008)