The Dark Side of the Light Chasers

I have resolved to chose a number of topics, and write short articles, as I've been invited to contribute articles to several on line magazines. I do not by any means consider myself a very good journalist, but I'm glad of the opportunity, and can use the discipline.

I made a committment to write in this blog, and whether it should be information or aesthetic resource, I haven't yet really determined. I am not uncomfortable, exactly, with the notion "personal", because, as a feminist, I've been saying that the personal is political for a good 30 years.

How can the personal not be spiritual, political, and what informs our aesthetics as well? As above, so below. I think what I am uncomfortable with is ironic: because of the often spiritual or metaphysical nature of my art work, I've become afraid to express the dark, the painful, the depressed, the "negative". Which of course only makes me want to do it more, the same way I used to end up dancing around with a lampshade on my head at formal occasions after a few rounds of tequila shots (in my much younger years). Make something taboo and watch how interesting it suddenly becomes.

Although I've read everything from Quantum Psychology to Peace Pilgrim's Memoirs and Caroline Myss "Anatomy of the Spirit", in reality, I am not a "positive" person by nature, and often have to work very hard to shift my consciousness away from habitual dark tracks. Sometimes, I don't want to. A good depression can inform one of authentic needs, a tantrum releases blocked or stagnant energy, getting pissed off is sometimes not only appropriate but absolutely necessary. In fact, with Cronehood, I've become outright irritable. And all of my pretty and charming masks have dissolved.

Don't get me wrong..........I absolutely agree with the necessity for positive thinking and affirmation. Equally, as someone who has suffered with depression, who wakes up remembering that thousands of species are passing out of existance every week, That all that cheery seasonal consumerism comes at the expense of the planet's health, as one who personally must deal, as most people must, with the suffering to be found in a hospital ..... I confess I have a horror of the "dark side of the light chasers" (this is the title of a book by psychologist Debbie Ford (1998). One of my favorite quotes is by (again) Ursula Leguin: "Light is the Left Hand of Darkness".

Sometimes the soul needs a wailing wall, and sometimes the spirit needs to ferment and incubate in its depressions, and sometimes the heart needs to tell its dark story in order to heal. Any actor knows that a full spectrum emotional affect is necessary to create a profound performance.
And those who are too preoccupied with their "purity" have a tendancy to project their shadows elsewhere..........

Spider Woman on the Road

Great Mother, Thank you for this day, My life, My strand on the Web, the Vibration it makes. Keep me in tune, in Harmony with Your Purpose. Let me serve. Xia, The Temple of the Goddess, Los Angeles

I woke up this morning feeling very sorry for myself, as I often do, the "victim act" being my primary character flaw, a "weaving" of my mind that has depleted so much of my creative life force........then I remembered, again, that Spider Woman and the great Divine quite literally "dropped in" for a little wake up call not so very long ago in the form of a wonderful syncronicity. Flooded with that miraculous memory, I kicked myself in my metaphorical butt, dedicated some of my morning coffee as an offering to the rising sun and the great privilege of being alive another day, and here I sit to tell the tale. It's a long, barren stretch from Hatch to Deming. Vast treeless desert, blue shapes of jagged treeless mountains in the distance, fifty miles without even a gas station. Driving west, the setting sun is blinding, so I wear a baseball cap pulled down low over my sunglasses when the glare is especially brutal, just before the sun tips below the horizon. With that glare before me my mind wandered to an astrological consultation I had, on a whim, recently. The astrologer did something called astrocartography, and I was surprised with his accuracy. He pointed out that Indonesia was a well aspected place (Bali has indeed been a huge inspiration for me). And the places he mentioned on the east coast - are the very places I've been drawn to in heart, over and over again. It seems that Tucson and Phoenix are just about the most unauspicious places I could find to live. In the corner of the chart, he pencilled "born teacher". I was thinking idly of that, how aimless I feel about my goals these days, how out of touch with what I used to call "guidance". Specifically, I was thinking wistfully "they want me to teach", and wondering if I had anything worth teaching anyone. Suddenly a tiny spider dropped down on its web, right before my eyes in the glare of the setting sun, from the hood of the baseball cap. It startled me so that I swerved the car........then it dropped down onto my lap and disappeared! Syncronicities are like waking dreams, an engagement with the greater conversant intelligence we are a part of. I ponder them as I would ponder a dream. Because I dream so little, they are far more significant to me. I don't think this is difficult to interpret - I was thinking of teaching, and a spider dropped down literally before my eyes, weaving it's strand. When you're as stubbornly dense as I am, I suspect Spider Woman, who has a great sense of humor, needs to manifest in not so subtle ways! I'd call that a "Webbed Vision" in dynamic progress! (Well, I'll return to this a little later. The rock and roll noise level in this cafe is winning, and I am going to have to flee until I can find a place one can think in. I like Wi Fi, but forgot that there is nowhere left as far as I know in Tucson where one can drink coffee without being blasted with loud adolescent sex music. Did I say that?.......) Well, I was just packing up the computer, and would you believe, they switched the music to Christmas music by Frank Sinatra? So with pleasure and relief, I sit a bit longer and sip my delectable coffee. I note one more syncronicity. My motorhome is in a strange but very appreciated rv court in T or C - it is full of people over 50 who are basically amiable hermits, living frugal lives in their rv's or trailors. Most of them are sensitive souls, educated and full of stories about interesting lives. Joanne, next to me, was a professor somewhere in Maine, and her trailor is so full of books she can hardly move. When it's cold, she's like a hermit crab that never comes out of her shell. Down the way is Jeff, who organized the local poetry group, and has committed to writing a poem of the day. There's a new trailor on the other side of me, occupied by an elderly but spry man named Carl. We've been introduced, but that's about it. Yesterday, as I was packing my car, he spontaneously started telling me about his near death experiences, and the several times he has had what is called an "out of body experience". He said that when that happens, we instantly know that we are far more than physical, and all the fear of death disappears. I thanked him, took off on my long trip to Tucson, and Glenn. It was a surprising comfort from a stranger.

“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, Theologian

From a Broken Web

I want to thank those who left entries on this blog, again, for your wisdom.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Still from movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", 2007

I'd like to thank the kind people who responded to the previous post with sympathy and wisdom. I genuinely appreciate your generosity. It is so good to know that there are kindred souls literally all over the world.

I may not be able to be consistent with blog entries for a while, as the demands of my family's needs press me. My mother is 91, and my brother has lived with her as her caretaker. They have taken him to Phoenix, which is a 100 mile drive from Tucson, so the visits are long endeavors. I'm working to get the insurance necessary to bring him to Tucson. What the longer term prospects are for him, I don't know. Glenn has had a brain stem stroke, and the prospects aren't good - it is hard, with such, to know what kind of recovery he may make, if there is to be a recovery. This is something my mother and other brother will not, or cannot, contemplate, and so I am also isolated in this. As it is, Glenn may have "locked in" syndrome, which means, he can perceive, hear or perhaps see, and cannot communicate.

I have tried asking him to blink, or to move his feet, but am unable to determine whether he responds with volition or not. I do not know what kind of therapy he will get in Phoenix. I am overwhelmed, frankly, with this situation. These circumstances leave me mute..........I do not know how to ease my brother's suffering, I also do not know how to come to terms with the aspects of myself that are overwhelmed with the needs of my family and my own needs. I will do my best, and the best I can do ultimately is to be aware. I will try to not deplete myself with guilt or the other emotions that follow.

I'm in T or C for a few days, a friend from NY will be taking the studio I just finished, which leaves me with a wistful feeling. In my imagination it is full of paints and canvases ready to become interior universes...........well, someday I hope, and the best laid plans of mice and men, etc................ here is a quote by my favorite author (who has created many, many universes that I've come to visit and occasionally inhabit). I put it on the inside door, alongside a yin/yang symbol. It will be a blessing for the fecundity of the place. Sometimes, I wonder about my obsession with painting and renovating rundown storefronts and motorhomes and rooms and yards and circles of stones in woods ........ I think I'm always running around making studios, theatres, sacred places, shrines........making creative wombs for the Divine to manifest, even if I can't be there to see it happen. Making containers..............

"To create difference - to establish strangeness - then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates and satisfies me as no other." ......Ursula K. Le Guin

I wanted to share something about an extraordinary book, and now a recent movie based upon the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby. This book would not have come to my attention had my brother's stroke not occurred. I take the liberty (and I sure hope I never get caught with all the liberties I take in this blog of copying the writings of others.......if I do, I hope there is some humanity in the publishing world that sees it is from admiration, and I am careful to give the credit due).........I take the liberty thus of copying below a review by Thomas Mallon, with links to the review. Also, should anyone want to purchase the book, here's how you can buy it from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Diving-Bell-Butterfly-Memoir-Death/dp/0375701214

"I can weep discreetly. People think my eye is watering."

Jean-Dominique Bauby

"I think you need to go into his world in order to get out of his world. And he said the only way he could escape his diving bell was through his imagination and his memory."

Julian Schnabel, Director The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

June 15, 1997

In the Blink of an Eye

---

After a devastating stroke, the author dictated this memoir using only his left eyelid

By THOMAS MALLON

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY By Jean-Dominique Bauby. Translated by Jeremy Leggatt. 132 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $20.

A year and a half ago, following a catastrophic stroke and weeks of deep coma in that same hospital, Jean-Dominique Bauby gradually ''surfaced'' into a new existence as a victim of ''locked-in syndrome,'' mentally alert but deprived of movement and speech. Just 44 years old, his body useless but still painful (''my hands, lying curled on the yellow sheets, are hurting, although I can't tell if they are burning hot or ice cold''), he was forced to recognize that his former life in Paris as the witty, high-living editor in chief of Elle magazine had become as unreachable as the books and trinkets across his hospital room, where he now lived ''like a hermit crab dug into his rock.''

His time ''as a perfectly functioning earthling'' ended, one might say, in the blink of an eye. But it was blinking -- that age-old image of heedless speed turned into literal, concentrated labor -- that saved Bauby from becoming just another object in the room. By moving his left eyelid in response to an alphabet rearranged according to the letters' frequency of use, Bauby managed to write a book as moving as Job's and as expansive, in its way, as any composed by the wheelchaired, boundless Stephen Hawking.

Jean-Dominique Bauby was the victim of a stroke that left his mind and one eye functioning -- enough to enable him to dictate "The Diving Suit and the Butterfly" to Claude Mendibil before dying of heart failure. (Jean-Louis Sieff)

''It is a simple enough system,'' he explains. ''You read off the alphabet . . . until, with a blink of my eye, I stop you at the letter to be noted. The maneuver is repeated for the letters that follow, so that fairly soon you have a whole word.'' Fairly soon! Less soon when the amanuensis anticipates and makes mistakes: ''One day when, attempting to ask for my glasses (lunettes), I was asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune).''

Bauby allows that his ''communication system disqualifies repartee,'' but it does beautiful service to all sorts of physical and emotional description. ''There comes a time,'' he explains, ''when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter,'' but in this strong, slim volume the author displays a writerly control equal to his honesty: ''One day . . . I can find it amusing, in my 45th year, to be cleaned up and turned over, to have my bottom wiped and swaddled like a newborn's. I even derive a guilty pleasure from this total lapse into infancy. But the next day, the same procedure seems to me unbearably sad, and a tear rolls down through the lather a nurse's aide spreads over my cheeks.'' There are scenes in Bauby's narrative -- his discovery, in a windowpane, that he is not just ''reduced to the existence of a jellyfish'' but ''also horrible to behold'' -- that one might be inclined to describe as unbearably sad, if ''unbearable,'' thanks to this book, were not a word one will never again use quite so loosely.

The diving bell of Bauby's title is his corporeal trap, the butterfly his imagination: ''There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas's court.'' Childhood fantasies of war heroism alternate with elaborate dreams of cooking, in which his pantry is a previous lifetime's memories of smells, tastes and textures: ''You can sit down to a meal at any hour, with no fuss or ceremony. If it's a restaurant, no need to call ahead. . . . The boeuf bourguignon is tender, the boeuf en gelee translucent, the apricot pie possesses just the requisite tartness.'' It's as if he'd reversed the most famous moment in Proust and used memory to bring back the madeleine..........

The author cultivates strong feelings, especially anger, to keep his spirit from atrophying along with his limbs. But despite occasional sarcastic eruptions, the book's tone, in Jeremy Leggatt's translation, is dominated by a sweet, even humorous, lyricism. Bauby notes with pleasure how, in his reordered alphabet, ''T and U, the tender components of tu . . . have not been separated,'' and he recounts his practical distribution of all the prayers coming his way: ''A woman I know enlisted a Cameroon holy man to procure me the goodwill of Africa's gods: I have assigned him my right eye. For my hearing problems I rely on the relationship between my devout mother-in-law and the monks of a Bordeaux brotherhood.''

to read the full review

Waiting Rooms

Things have changed. My brother has had a devastating stroke, and has been lying in the Tucson Medical Center on life support for the past week. He is paralyzed - it seems that he can hear…….that he can respond by blinking his eyes, and possibly he has some control over his feet. It is terrible to imagine what he is experiencing, if he is fully conscious. I think of a book called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. A week or so ago I was finishing off my studio and ordering paint. Now my day begins with going to the Intensive Care Unit to visit Glenn, dealing with insurance, then driving around Tucson unsure of where to go or what to do next. It’s strange. Yesterday I found myself at the Friends Meeting House downtown, talking to the woman there, but mostly just wanting to hang in the peaceful white room with the good energy, where they all meet to be silent together.

Here’s the deal. If grief teaches anything, and it is a GREAT TEACHER if you can stick around long enough to do some listening instead of running off in constant search of relief of the pain……(which is ok also)…….if grief teaches anything, it is that it levels away all the crap, and shows, unequivocally, that we really are one. One. One being, one world, one family, one humanity, one sorrow and story and beginning and ending. Energy that is consciousness moving in and out of form. Which is no consolation at all, when one is dealing with our individual lives, and all of the pain associated with simply being another finite animal on the breast of Mother Earth.

Glenn and I have been at conflict since we were very young, sibling rivalry that never resolved, just hardened and became more and more habitual. The truth is, he was the sensitive middle child, and became the family scapegoat, sustaining the brunt of my father’s abuse, and later, my mother’s dependency. As time went by, perhaps the only way he could survive at all was to wrap a thick, hostile wall around his psyche, with a huge “keep out” sign on the door. Every so often, he peeked out, but as the years went by, less so, and I never knew how to reach him. His anger and cynicism and the deeper depression was something I fled from, and in the past few years, absorbed and reflected in myself as well. Grief has a way of cracking the shell. All these years, trying to run away from my family, trying to sever the “ties”, and here I am. I don’t know how to help him. I sense that he’s getting ready to leave, and why should he want to stay in the body, with such a life?

Yesterday I sat by his bed and had a picture come into my mind – he was standing before me in his ridiculous hospital gown, waving at all the plastic tubes and bottles that are attached to his body, jumping up and down, as if to gesture “no more, no more, stop it”. But that could be my imagination as much as an actual psychic event………..I have, to be honest, no confidence anymore in my psychic abilities, especially where the concerns are personal. What is so terrible about this is of course the feeling of helplessness, that there is nothing I can do to make Glenn better, or to free him from his pain. I cannot speak for the desires of another, but I know that if this happened to me, I would want the plugs pulled, and release from a life that is no longer worth living.

Is this appropriate for me to put this entry into this Blog? I don't know. But it's the truth of my life at this moment. May the light of Grace come to Glenn.

I remember the good times, brother, we've travelled together in this family, seen some things together. I love you. I don't know what to do.

Yellow Leaf Press

Since I seem to be on a roll these days with the sheer delight of making (and finishing books that have been long in the process), I've decided to inaugurate (the timing seems good as well) YELLOW LEAF PRESS.

YELLOW LEAF will produce (along with Blurb.com) my 4 books - THE MASKS OF THE GODDESS, THE ARTIST'S ORACULAR COOKBOOK, A HOUSE OF DOORS, and SPIDER WOMAN'S HANDS. I hope that in the future I will be able to facilitate, design, or produce through my very humble publishing empire unique, beautiful limited edition books for other artists, poets, and innovators.

Even a decade ago the technology did not exist for people like myself to get their work published ....I know from experience, having had literary agents and submitted many proposals for books to publishing houses.........that it was a very daunting, and disheartening, process.

What I enjoy about the technology that is allowing artists to create professional, beautifully illustrated books through self-publishing is, well, that they can. We can publish on an individual order basis, rather than having to make a huge outlay for a quantity of books. We can market ourselves to our clients, collectors, and at the events we attend, as well as to bookstores and museum shops.

The disadvantages are obvious - the books are more expensive than a commercially printed book would be, and would not generally have the distribution of a commercially printed book.

Which is why they are unique, limited edition, special collectors books.

A House of Doors ~ open poems~

The deep parts of my life
pour onward,
as if the river shores
were opening out.

It seems as if things
are more like me now

that I can see farther into paintings

I feel closer
to what language can't reach.

Rainer Maria Rilke

















I feel enormously grateful to have finished  my 5th book, A HOUSE OF DOORS - my little collection of poems that span 40 years.   (update -  I have just made an EBook edition:  cost: $1.00)  (http://store.blurb.com/ebooks/360737-a-house-of-doors-open-poems)

Most of these poems are mine, but also included are "found poems", the collection of poetry by Joanna Brouk and Felicia Miller, with the illustrations I did for them back in the early '70's when we were young artists in Berkeley.

I have never been a prolific poet by any means...........I am a visual person first and foremost in my communicating and thinking processes. All of the poetry  worth sharing I put into this little book, and I'm well pleased, as I was to finally complete the MASKS OF THE GODDESS book. Honoring the Past, the Muse, the Friends, the Communities, Myself, and the Divine is what this 6 month writing project has been about, and with this book, I feel free to move on and give my attention to new projects.

 FOR THREE WEEKS

the cool moon
bound by occult cords
moves

through the houses
of memory and sleep

distills night in a bowl

But on the night 
of the full moon
what is mirrored

in a still pool?


Felicia Miller (1972)

AMAZONS IV.

At the river's edge

I laid my armor down

laid down my sword and bow

untied my hair

this I did for you

I approached you

lying in the grass

at the river's edge

your body brown

graceful as a tree

unshod

you waited for me

I approached you

with desire

O my enemy

Lauren Raine (1975)

                                                            light
                                                            light
                                                            light of morning

                                                            the fairest light,
                                                            the fairest light
                                                            has come
                                                            softly
                                                            gently
                                                            I feel its coming

                                                            night has given
                                                            night has given
                                                            a place to morning

                                                            breath returns
                                                            and moistens the grass
                                                            the bird's feather

                                                            no longer do I hide
                                                            no longer do I hide
                                                            gone into darkness

                                                            light has come

                                                          Joanna Brouk (1972)


  (5/2009)  As a footnote, because I published those poems on my website in 2006, Felicia found me on the Web, which resulted in us corresponding, and my finally going to Puerto Rico this August to meet her in person again. She's still a mermaid spinning stories about Undine, still the soul I remember well, still beautiful.)

(5/15/2015)  As a footnote to this footnote, I did indeed meet my friend Felicia again, near water as always (in Puerto Rico).  Felicia passed away  in 2010. I've written about her, and our meetings, in this Blog.   And I found Joanna again, in San Diego, in 2011, still beautiful, still making music and poetry, still a friend.  In fact here I sit at her kitchen table, visiting for the weekend.  Below is a pastel I did of her back in 1976.)

Truth or Consequences on Halloween

It's been a strange few weeks, since I moved to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I will be in and out of Tucson, but I've rented a small studio here, and have bought "Lucy" to an old trailor park with a 1940's bathhouse (T or C is famous for its hotsprings), just a few blocks from the peaceful Rio Grande. Since I've been here I've kind of lost my sense of time.......what locals refer to as the "New Mexico Effect". Land of Enchantment indeed.

Here's something wonderful that is happening very soon:


Festival of the Cranes, at the Bosque del Apache wetlands. This is where the migrating cranes come.............so wonderful! An event attended by thousands, and drawing many artists as well.

I can't believe that I'm living now beside the RIO GRANDE ("Great River"), in TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES. There's some kind of metaphor in there. As the painter Alex Grey said to me a long time ago, "I don't know why I do these things. There's an internal logic that doesn't necessarily reveal itself at the time".

Here I am........I think, to heal, and to open. And that is what this place of ancient hotsprings is admirably suited for.

Legend has it that before the Europeans came, this place was sacred to a number of native peoples, and they had an agreement to cease all traditional feuds and warfare when here so that all could enjoy the healing waters. Geronimo came here. When the white settlers came they actually filled in the hot springs (I'm not sure why, but it certainly says something interesting about our cultural heritage). They were not opened again until decades later, when the "wild west" was much tamer, and "taking the waters" became popular, and the railroads made "New Mexico Hot Springs" (which later became T or C because of the game show host) accessible. There are many old bathhouses, some of them crumbling, from the 1930's and 1940's. There is also a building with the legend "Magnolia Ellis" on it, currently occupied by a chiropractor. Apparently Magnolia was a famous energy healer and medical intuitive who practiced here in the 50's. They say people would wait to see her in a long line whenever she was open.

My mind clears in the extraordinary brilliant high desert light of New Mexico, my spirit clears beside the peaceful river, my body eases in the hot waters that come right up out of the Earth here. The urge to paint, to just immerse myself in vision, is so strong here. Theres a community here of artists and mystics as well, living simple and frugal lives to pursue their spiritual and creative means..........I am surprised at not only their friendliness and the clear openess in the eyes I look into here, but their sophistication as well. I've heard some potent poetry at the (only) poetry group's meetings on Sunday at the (only) coffee shop, which is also a used bookstore. The same coffee shop I bought a copy of the Nag Hammadi Library from (a steal at $4.50).

This community, because of its isolation, poverty, and because, I believe, the spirit of place as well, fosters a feeling of fellowship and mutual concern. What use competition or judgement here? There's nothing much to compete for, no one to impress! I guess I've spent so much time in Brushwood because I crave the same small community good heartedness. I've been here barely 2 weeks, and already have a short stack of books people have given me, food, and (of course) lots of helpful advice.

The Universe provides.

I think of a movie I saw a while back called "Off the Map". It's about, well, a group of people who live "off the grid" in New Mexico, and the way the land itself changes them. I can't help but feel that Spider Woman is alive and well here..........after all, the logo of the state is Spider Woman's Solar Cross.

I finished finally the hopefully last edition of my "Masks of the Goddess" book, a rather massive undertaking. It features many beautiful photographs by Thomas Lux and Peter Hughes. Its available to view on http://www.blurb.com/books/400085.

I realize now that I've been so obsessed with finishing this book before Samhain because it was Samhain of 1999 when I began the project, and first saw that miraculous procession of living Goddesses emerge from the darkness of Ft. Mason Center for the Invocation of the Goddess at the Spiral Dance. That will always be one of the most wonderful moments of my life. Finishing the book is really my way of honoring the Goddesses, and the many people, as I now conclude and document my 7 year project. May this book keep the inspiration alive, and do justice to the privilege I was given.

This is what I found on the grid in the front of my motorhome, when I parked Lucy. I will take this as a little blessing for, once again, my new life.