Mana Youngbear performing White Tara at "Restoring the Balance",
the Muse Community Arts Center, Tucson, AZ (2004)
Voice of "The Charge of the Goddess": Olympia Dukakis
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
"She Who Hears the Cries of the World" by Jennifer Berezan
Thursday, June 20, 2024
The Summer Solstice 2024
SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD
Denise Levertov
Sunday, June 16, 2024
Gloria's Call - A Wonderful Video about the Very Wonderful Gloria Orenstein
While my life has had its challenging moments and I have traversed many a dark woods in my quest for knowledge, I am fulfilled by the wondrous journeys I have made to the realms of the Marvelous, the Magical, the Great Goddess and the Shamanic Mysteries, and I will be forever grateful to the teachers who inspired me and to the feminist activists on whose strong shoulders we now stand as we welcome new generations of visionaries expanding our feminist legacy into the new millennium.
-Gloria Feman Orenstein
It was my pleasure to meet Gloria Feman Orenstein when I was pursuing a book on spiritual art and the Goddess in 1989. She very generously agreed to meet with me, and I remember sitting in a cafe in Venice California, not far from the beach, utterly enthralled by the power of her personality, and the stories she told me about her journeys into Samiland, shamanism, and ecofeminism, as well as her scholarly insights into surrealism, magic, and feminism in contemporary art. Much later, she kindly let me post an important article of hers about Shamanism on this Blog.
Gloria F. Orenstein is Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California. Her areas of research have ranged from Surrealism, contemporary feminist literature and the arts to Ecofeminism and Shamanism.
Her first book The Theater Of The Marvelous: Surrealism And The Contemporary Stage paved the way for her pioneering work on The Women of Surrealism. Leonora Carrington had been a friend and remained a major source of her inspiration in research and scholarship since 1971. Her book The Reflowering Of The Goddess offers a feminist analysis of the movement in the contemporary arts that reclaimed the Goddess as the symbol of a paradigm shift toward a more gynocentric mythos and ethos as women artists forged a link to the pre-patriarchal civilization of the ancient Goddess cultures, referencing them as their source of spiritual inspiration.
Gloria's Call is an award winning 2019 film by Cheri Gaulke and Colleagues. Director Cheri Gaulke was presented, among other awards, with the "Women Transforming Media" Award for her film.
"Blending animation, interviews and a trippy soundscape, this is a fitting look at the life of radical academic and writer Gloria Feman Orenstein’s serendipitous life. She vividly conjures an alternative history of art, surrealism and eco-feminism in the 20th century, with lively anecdotes about Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim and Jane Graverol, to name a few."
~Eileen Arandiga, Canadian International Documentary Festival
https://youtu.be/mLhY9pGFjFQ?si=8AE7oiCTvxqhXlxD
Monday, June 10, 2024
A Poem by May Sarton
Now I Become Myself
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
‘Hurry, you will be dead before-’
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
May Sarton
Sunday, June 9, 2024
My Interview on LITTLE GIFTS Podcast
"A Mask for Talking to the Ancestors" (2024) |
Very pleased with this conversation I had in LITTLE GIFTS Podcast in May, with the wonderful grandmother and granddaughter team of the extraordinary artist Sue Ellen Parkinson and her amazing granddaughter Savannah Wonderwheel.
We talked about, well, what I mostly talk about: the Goddess, masks, magic, and healing in a difficult world. And I love that the conversation spans generations! Thank you to both of them!
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2J1rqRrdqoGptj7PwjzOag
"A Mask for Shattering Old Paradigms" (2024) |
"A Mask for the Crossing of Dimensions" (2022) |
"A Mask for Chaos and Order" (2024) |
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Sherry Glaser takes on Gaia
I've posted this before, but this brilliant comedic voice never grows old, nor especially does the message she makes. Sherry Glaser lets Gaia tell it like it is:
https://youtu.be/xkztSqqBSO4?si=84P-UtYB6gNuh2o_
Tuesday, May 21, 2024
A Blessing by Mary Oliver
Photo by Theresa Barney |
I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you're in it all the same.So why not get started immediately.I mean, belonging to it.And to write music or poems about.
Bless the feet that take you to and fro.Bless the eyes and the listening ears.Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.Bless touching.You could live a hundred years, it's happened.Or not.I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,none of which, I think, I ever wasted.Do you need a prod?Do you need a little darkness to get you going?Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,he had a lifetime.~Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
............ Mary Oliver