Marga

The "Blog sphere" has been a continuing source of information and inspiration - recently I received a fascinating correspondence from Robur D'Amour, who shared with me his insights about "Marga", having read some of my own posts on synchronicity. Marga is a term I've not run across before, a concept that resonates deeply for me with what I've fancifully called "conversations with the world". Robur   kindly gave me permission to quote some of his insights.

"'Marga' is a term that means following a path of signs or symbols that lead a person to their spiritual self. Marga is a bit like finding one's way through a labyrinth, by reading signs that are given to you by the unconscious."

Jung believed that what mattered in life, to him, was to find his spiritual identity. He believed that a person could do this by leading what he termed a 'symbolic life'. Jung wrote:

“when people feel they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama... That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya (illusion) compared to that one thing, that your life is meaningful.”

I think that this idea is the same thing that Joseph Campbell, who was a great admirer of Jung, refers to as 'marga'. It's a way of living, without following any particular creed or any rules worked out and written down by someone else, other than paying attention to what is presented to you by Fate, the Goddess, God, or the unconscious. In The Hero's Journey (p45) Campbell writes:

"Adolf Bastian, a German anthropologist, has meant a great deal to me with just this main idea. The common themes that come out of the collective unconscious he calls elementary ideas.... In India, in art criticism, the elementary ideas are called 'marga', the path. Marga is from a root word 'mrg', which refers to the footprints left by an animal, and you follow that animal. The animal you are trying to follow is your own spiritual self. And the path is indicated by mythological images. Follow the tracks of the animal and you will be led to the animal's home. Who is the animal? The animal is the human spirit. So, following the elementary ideas, you are led to your own deepest spiritual source." 

A snippet of that piece can be read on Google books: The Hero's Journey (Marga).

In practical terms, this means paying attention to what we see in the world around ourselves, and in particular to symbols presented to us, in dreams and the things we come across in our daily lives. The symbols we see around us are presented to us by - Fate, the Goddess, God, the unconscious, or whatever name you like to give to the thing that we cannot see, but what determines 'what happens next'.

Following the links in a trail of symbols that are presented to us by the unconscious, amounts to finding one's way through a labyrinth, by reading the signs. Labyrinths and mazes were common features in Elizabethan gardens. 

"The marga (path of symbols) that I seem to have been unwittingly following is a very curious one.  I originally seemed to connect the word marga with Megara." he wrote, "Megara was popularised as the heroine in the Disney version of Hercules. It's 'only' a film for children, but it does, to some extent, bring the archetypes to life. Megara is a very vivid anima archetype."

I personally was somewhat amazed, speaking of my own "Marga", to read his comment that:

"Megara was originally a Greek word for a fissure in the ground used for sacred rites connected with beliefs about the underworld (the unconscious) and Persephone-Hecate."

In 1993 I began a novel (The Song of Medusa), which I wrote with artist Duncan Eagleson and which was inspired by the writings of  Riane Eisler.  It was based on the idea of an ancient shamanic priestess of an old-European, Earth Goddess culture. The priestess was called a "Singer", and she entered altered states of consciousness and prophesy by going into fissures or caves in the earth. The novel was about the conflict that happened as her world was shattered by the invasions of warlike, Indo-European tribes. As the little novel evolved, somehow, and surprising indeed to me, my own version of the myth of Persephone also evolved within the story, so much so that it became the novel's secondary theme. Learning about "MARGA" and "MEGARA" is a revelation for me. It seems, once again, that in the course of opening to the creative process, we do indeed open to the collective mind.

The Summer Solstice

I am a lover
Of the steady Earth
And of Her waters.
She says:

“Let the light be brilliant,
For those who will cherish color.”

What if there be no Heaven? She says:

“Touch my Breasts - the fields are golden.”
Her Songs are all of love, lifelong.
Every blue yonder,
Her brass harp rings.
Unlettered, in Her rivers
Our cherished sins
Drift voiceless in Her clouds.

She will rust us with blossom
She will forgive us
She will seal us
with Her seed.

Robin Williamson
("The Song of Mabon", 1985)

BRIDGIT

"God's abstention
is only from human dialects;
the holy voice utters its woe and glory
in myriad musics, in signs and portents.Our own words are for us to speak,
a way to ask and to answer."

.....Denise Levertov

There are some gifts that come to us
just once or twice in a lifetime,
gifts that cannot be named
beyond the simple act of gratitude.

We are given a vision so bountiful
we can only gaze with eyes wide,
like a child in summer's first garden.

We reach our clumsy hands
toward that communionthat single perfection
and walk away speechless,
blessed.

And breathe,
in years to come,breathe,
breathe our hearts open
aching to tell it well

to sing it into every other heart
to dance it down,
into the hungry soil
to hold it before us:

that light,
that grace given
voiceless light

Lauren Raine (1999)

***********
Robin Williamson has inspired millions for many years - beginning in the 1960's with the INCREDIBLE STRING BAND. His "5 Denials on Merlin's Grave" is still one of the most beautiful ballad/poems I have ever heard: with his phrase

"Older Yet, and Lovelier Far, this Mystery:
and I will not forget"

He evoked a time of ancient magic, and sang me on my way on a wandering course that never really ended. I, like many, salute this great Bard.

Robin Williamson's site: http://www.pigswhiskermusic.co.uk/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5bo10takGE

A good bio from The Green Man Review:

http://www.greenmanreview.com/cd/cd_robin_williamson_omni.html

Carrizozo!

I wanted to share where I'll be this summer (July 1 through August 15) - a little town in central N.M., where I've been given the privilege of a residency with Gallery 408. I can't help but feel that this time, in the brilliant light of New Mexico, nestled between the great lava flow of the Valley of Fire and the mountains.........is going to be one of my most inspired times. I'm very grateful to Gallery 408 for offering me this opportunity. I'll also be offering a class at their studios in creating personal Icons and Reliquaries for those who may be interested. If any of you happen to be passing through while I'm there, please come by for a cup of coffee!

http://www.gallery408.com/air.php

http://www.gallery408.com/

I visited Carrizozo for the first time in early 2009, when the movie "The Book of Eli" was being shot on their main street, the very street that Gallery 208 is on. It was amazing ....... Carrizozo was converted to a post-Apocalypse wasteland. After the film was shot, this harsh veneer was peeled away to reveal the bright colors of New Mexico, and the opening of my friends' show, "The Return of the Mother" ..... This living metaphor so fascinated me that I wrote an article about it (I copy some text and images below).

But even after the show was over, I kept coming back, fascinated with this little town, and wanting to know more about the community, and the land. Now I've generously been given the opportunity.

Gallery 408 and the Studios on Twelfth Street
PO Box 853
Carrizozo, NM 88301
(575)648-2598
gallery408@tularosa.net

www.gallery408.com

Carrizozo is two hours South of Albuquerque. Drive South on I-25 to Hwy 380 East just 7 miles past Socorro at the San Antonio exit. Drive 65 miles east on Hwy 380 to Carrizozo. Turn South on Hwy 54 at the Crossroads, drive 4 blocks, turn left at Wells Fargo Bank building, drive 1 block to Twelfth Street, turn right and the Gallery will be on your right.

.......................................................................................................................

"The Return of the Mother", group show, May, 2009

May, 2009:

The entire set from "The Book of Eli" has been torn down, the gallery restored, and it looks as if the world that Hollywood created in this little town never was. I still can't get over the way this set has dissipated like a dream.

Corrisozo, N.M., set of "The Book of Eli", filming 3-2009. (Photo by Georgia Stacy)

To get here, one drives through vast reaches of blond Georgia O'Keefe landscapes with brooding blue mountains in the distance, and then the vast lava field called the "valley of fire". We were in time for the filming of a motion picture - the entire downtown had been converted to a vision of rusting automobiles, foam core burned out buildings, and sad little "cubby holes" where desperate children of the apocalypse lived. Dirty, dread-locked young people milled about, while armored cars raced up and down the street, and the sounds of "snipers" guns echoed in the crisp, windy New Mexico air.

It was fascinating to see this contemporary nightmare made so vivid that I could actually walk around in it. To read about the movie see THE BOOK OF ELI which describes it as:

"A post-apocalyptic Western, in which a lone man fights his way
across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind."

Like the "Road Warrior" of the '80's, our world has a fascination with images of a future in which all that remains of civilization is a grim landscape of chaotic violence. As we approach "2012" I personally believe we approach the next evolutionary step for humanity, wherein we must urgently protect, as an evolving global civilization, the universal life of our planet, of Gaia the Mother - or we may well face just such a future as The Book of Eli envisions. I am pleased (and amused) by the paradox of a show called The Return of the Mother rising from the ashes of this dark vision.

I couldn't help but play with the images a bit myself.

The Goddess and the Book of Eli (1) (photo by Georgia Stacy)

Mount Shasta

Just returned from a brief visit to Mount Shasta in Northern California - the great dormant volcano that rises impossibly in the distance, dominating hundreds of miles with it's vast brooding presence. In the valley where I stopped to first view Shasta, a marker described many mysterious stone circles native peoples left on the plain. But I reflect that it is not so mysterious - standing before that awesome, snow clad Great One, ancient peoples must have had the impulse to leave some form of offering.

Shasta has long had a reputation as a spiritual center, and stories of ancient Atlaneans and Lemurians abound, as well as native lore. The community of Shasta City is full of artists, healers and metaphysical seekers.........having watched Sedona, America's "crystal capital", lose it's character and vitality from it's earlier, eccentric, mystical years (replaced now with tennis resorts and expensive spas)............it was great to see that Shasta City has not gone down the same path. I wished I could stay for longer.

Here's a photo of Shasta with one of the unusual clouds it generates. It is also a focus for speculation from people who are interested in UFO's.

And by the way, my friend Fahrusha reminds me that the annual MUFON conference is due to meet in Colorado. Whether you believe in UFO's or not, there is no doubt that this conference would be a lot of fun.

Spider Woman Speaks.......

It doesn't matter what you call me.
I've had a lot of names.
Bring your offerings if you wish.
I’ll give them to the Bird People,
to the Mouse People.

Listen,
I’ll tell you something.
Because you came here
with empty hands.
Your spirit has become woven into bad things.
It’ s time to weave a new story now.

Walk out into the desert
and sit beneath a cholla.
Notice the shapes of things:
A hawk against the sky,
the shape of the sky,
the shapes of shadows,
the shape
of your own shadows,

and cracks in the land
like a spider web,
full of light.

Take a deep breath
of the stories that live here.
Stories that wrap themselves
around old bones and pottery shards,
stories that howl at the moon,
fly with russet wings,
hide in the arroyo.
You say you can't see it.

Well, take a look around!

You don't need to climb a mountain
to get the big picture.
All of its snaking rivers

and twining roots
are inside of you.

All those threads

come right out of your hands
and out of your hearts
all those threads go on forever.

Into the Earth
and into each other,
into all your stories,
into everyone you'll ever know

into all those who came before you
and all those who will come after you

O, Mitakuye Oyasin.

Big Sur, Threads, and Syncronicities

The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, and not man apart

Robinson Jeffers, "The Answer"

I've just hit the road - a healing stop in the Sur, that magnificent stretch of California coastline beloved to Henry Miller and Robinson Jeffers. Beloved to me, tracing my personal Song Lines, winding slowly up that winding road, remembering some 50 years of such treks to family campgrounds and Love-ins and war protests, finally, motels, heaven help me, how decadent can one get . Now, just to sit by the deep blue ocean, listen to seagulls, be. Sitting by the beach, I got into a short conversation with a jade hunter (there's lots of deep green jade in the Sur), living in his old rv.........he told me about places to visit, and left me with a piece of jade for my medicine bag.

  This past morning, as I got into my car, I noticed the crystalline, shimmering threads of a spider web across the side mirror. Looking closely, I saw a tiny spider spinning her art on my mirror, the very one I use to see where I'm going (hopefully, even when I don't really have a clue). I gave Spider Woman my grateful thanks, and thanked her emissary for her artistry as well, carefully transferring the tiny spinner from mirror to finger to a leaf. A few minutes later, still packing, I saw a spider there again! This, I reasoned, is a persistent spider, and a worthy sign! Who says metaphors only occur in dreams or poetry? For me, perhaps because I"m a visual artist, this is the "conversation" I'm always having with World, or World is generously always having with me, if I have the occasional quietude to listen. After two weeks in L.A. ........oh, so much noise, so much human distraction, so much interference.............I always leave L.A. feeling like someone who has lost their sensory apparatus and must struggle forward half blind, feeling around in the conceptual dark. Anyway, I wanted to remember here another of those syncronistic threads that happened in 2007.........I was reminded because I just, serendipitously, followed up a link to a nature sanctuary and festival site that I never heard of before called Our Haven (www.ourhaven.info) and learned it is in a place called French Lick, Indiana. For those interested in synchronicity this is a good story, and I'm taking the liberty of copying from my 2007 entry. Who casts the threads? Or, do we just unconsciously follow them, occasionally waking up enough to notice the shimmering strands on the mirror? So, strange as it sounds, I'm sitting in a motel on the magnificent California coast, remembering a trip to Indiana 3 years ago............

  September, 2007: The moon is full and the night is very hot, somewhere in Missouri. Cicadas drone their mating calls, an Indian summer chorus. I’m still allergic to everything, wondering if my dignity is forever gone along with the use of my nose. But Magic has been afoot. Quite often I don’t write or talk about days like this, because I doubt the intersections and weave that I see, worse, I'll try to figure out what it all "means".

When synchronicities chose me, or I blunder into them, they flurry about with such literary qualities that I sometimes think its like being inside a novel where the plot is about to become clear. I had my map on the motel bed, ready to open it yesterday a.m. I was thinking about two things. The first was the fact that I was 30 some miles from industrial Gary, Indiana, and the road was apparently flooded there. This could mean hours getting through Gary. And then there was Chicago. The prospect was not appealing. The other item on my mind were my friends Morgana and Phil, who live in Indianapolis. I glanced at my dog-eared map. Now the cover was page two of “Routes of Interest”, and my eye fell on “Indiana” (right in the center of the page, with “Louisiana” below it.) The authors suggested I take a scenic drive through West Baden and visit historic French Lick Springs. The prospect of possibly discovering a new hot spring seemed attractive, and I opened the map to find that I could head on down to Indianapolis, maybe see my friends, and take a hilly route to a possible soak, ending up on 64, which would eventually lead me to route 70. I decided a trip to Indianapolis was a good idea, and headed down the road, taking my bearings at Roseville. I would follow the “rose line”, a fanciful idea I played with as I toodled along in my little pink car. 

I wondered why the place was called French Lick. I later learned that the area, before it was settled by white people, had been an important migration route for buffalo because of salt licks in the area. The new settlers had followed the buffalo to the wells. The first Europeans to settle at French Lick were French Jesuit missionaries, and one of the first businesses established in the area was salt mining. “Routes of Interest” informed me that I could have a soak at the Pluto Baths for $20.00. This is no longer true - any soaking areas where the public might have once taken the curative waters are now replaced with expensive spas. I don’t know why they were called Pluto Waters either, but there on the ceiling of the French Lick Spa were huge, Rococo, paintings of Pluto, Persephone, Orpheus, Eurydice, Cerberus, and the Underworld.

I felt a bit like I was within a personal mythic event, because the myth of Persephone and Hades has been significant to me for many years - my little novel, THE SONG OF MEDUSA, was based on it. 

I have identified with the Persephone archetype strongly in my past - Jennifer Barker and Roger Woolger wrote eloquently about this in their 1989 book "The Goddess Within", a book that informed my interest in Goddess spirituality. It is interesting to note that Pluto means "wealth". The wealth of the below, the hidden, the depths of the earth. 

What the area meant to the native people who lived there, I do not know, although I’m sure it was, like all places where healing waters bubble out of the earth, a sacred, energized place. Maybe it was a place of pilgrimage, in the same way that people still go to the Chalice Well in Ireland. Maybe it was sacred because the buffalo went there. At any rate, my trip was spiritually blessed - Morgana gave me the 2nd degree Reiki initiation. Which I would not have achieved, had I not passed through Indianapolis because I wanted to avoid a flood in Gary. I learned from Phil that he went on his Vision Quest, preparatory to doing the Sun Dance this summer - at the state park in French Lick. So I left with a sense of adventure.

The heart of French Lick is the recently restored West Baden Springs, “The Carlsbad of America”. Although I couldn't afford to stay there, I stopped to admire this amazing architectural feat. I felt the ghosts of a more elegant time, come to "take the waters". This historic building was once called the “8th Wonder of the World” because it boasted the largest suspended glassed dome in the world, and hosted dignitaries such as Teddy Roosevelt. Restored only within the past year to its original turn of the century splendor, 6 stories of guest rooms, spas, restaurants, and bars encircle a huge sunlight center, with inlaid marble tiled floor, and art nouveau statues of the muses. 

Here’s the synchronicity that tops them all. After the stock market crash of 1929, the owners went bankrupt, and actually sold the famous resort to the Jesuits for a dollar. It was a Jesuit seminary until the 60's, when it was purchased by the Whitings of Midland, Michigan, and became a campus of Northwood University until 1983. After that the building sat desolate until it was restored just this year! Northwood, on whose campus I had just spent the summer as an Alden Dow Fellow, and done a community arts project at the Midland Arts Center called "Spider Woman's Hands". This had been their southern campus!

.  

A final note here (I'm in 2010 again, and getting ready to drive to San Francisco)...........when I returned to Tucson that fall, within about two weeks I received a mask order from a woman living in French Lick, Indiana. Honest.

                     Syncronicities are Spider Woman's way of saying "hello"

Pomona revisited..........

I've been in Pomona, California, dealing with family issues and money issues........exhausting. So, needing sustanance, I went to visit the Goddess of abundance, who makes her blessing for all to see, and strangely rarely noticed, in the half abandoned mall of the town named in her honor. I felt like sharing this community painting, which is really a kind of blessing, and a prayer. 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. The detail above 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 future. Hats off, and heartfelt gratitude, to the artists and community who brought the Goddess to downtown Pomona.

Here's a writeup about the mural from www.pomonaenvisionsthefuture.com

Pomona Envisions the Future is a mural created through a community-based project named Envisioning the Future (E.T.F), which took place in the Pomona Arts Colony from 2002 to 2004 and included over 80 artists. The mural is 140' x 42' acrylic on prepared concrete substrate on the west side of the Union Block building. It consists of four walls at right angles to each other.

The Envisioning the Future project was lead by artist Judy Chicago, photographer Donald Woodman and Cal Poly Pomona. The mural was painted by lead artist and mural project facilitator Kevin Stewart-Magee, and Envisioning the Future artists/participants Lief Frederick, Sandra Gallegos, Cori Griffin-Ruiz, Rupert Hernandez, Lynne Kumra, Yolanda Londono, Amy Runyen, Chris Toovey, Mary Kay Wilson, Erin Campbell, Athena Hahn, Joy McAllister and Fred Stewart-Magee. Artists Magu (Gilbert Luján) and Judy Baca consulted on the project. Cheryl Bookout was the Envisioning the Future project coordinator.

It depicts the history of the City of Pomona from its pre-European past, through its agricultural and industrial ages into its bright future which restores the land in balance with humans. The mural was restored and finally finished in 2008 with funds from the City of Pomona Board of Parking Place Commissioners. A bronze plaque from the Downtown Pomona Owners Association was added on October 4, 2008 at the re-dedication ceremony. The mural is located at the intersection of Thomas and Second Streets in downtown Pomona, California in the Pomona Arts Colony.

Tongva Indian prepares food

It begins by depicting the pre-European landscape with the indigenous Tongva people in the dark sepia color palette. The image of a by-gone natural open landscape rounds the corner and transitions into the historic past of rolling hills and open land erased and replaced by the familiar citrus groves established by the first European settlers.

Early Hispanic farm laborers working the fields

The color palette remains a restrained monochromatic blue-green. This is atypical of the traditional portrait of time as depicted in the multitudes of idyllic brightly colored packing house labels. Instead the muted colors signal the coming Industrial Revolution and environmental dark days to come. At the reveal wall recesses to the main wall the decline of the citrus industry is represented by dead citrus trees that stop abruptly with the landscape at the twenty-four foot figure of the Goddess Pomona. Pomona, originally the Roman Goddess of orchards, was selected as the name for the city in the late 1800s.

The Goddess's arms are outstretched as doves leave her hands in flight towards a hopeful future. The background behind the goddess figure is turbulent, murky and orangey-brown. The landscape turns to a congested urban-suburban sprawl of industrial pollution and over crowded housing tracts. As the narrative moves along to the right, mountains and blue sky emerge from the bleak present and the misty outskirts of a glowing city at the portal of a new age. In the foreground is a school of the future.

Students are seated on a luminous ring or "learning circle" which hovers over serene and lush rolling hills in an environment that has been restored to near primordial conditions. In the distance is a vision which is millions of years away from the actual event, the galaxy Andromeda is seen in the morning sky as it approaches our own Milky Way.

Throughout the mural along the bottom is an undulating wave representing subterranean strata. The wave contains artifacts and objects that represent the ages up to a time where the human species has achieved balanced health and harmony, with a vision of the future which encompasses the universe.

Last, let me share another one of the gifts of the Goddess........the astounding Jacaranda tree, which blooms wholly purple in May, dropping it's lavender snow everywhere among the unheeding smog and traffic............ever generous. Pomona, casting her purple blessings.