Reflections on Violence

I'm facing one of those glorious sunrises Arizona is famous for.  Tonight the President will be speaking at my Alma Mater, the University of Arizona, and people are camped out in front of the stadium last night, waiting to get in.  Unless I stand in line all day, I probably won't be able to get a seat, but I'll watch on TV, and put another candle on the memorial shrine.

As I watch the lovely flickering of candle flames, I'll reflect on how many kind, compassionate, caring and gentle people there are everywhere.  Those who died will be buried, their families will continue to grieve.  Those who are wounded will heal the best they can.  Gabrielle will spend her energy trying to physically heal, re-learning, if she's lucky, how to walk, or feed herself (if she survives), and we will have lost her wise voice and advocacy.

In little more than a week, the media will forget all about the rampage.  Until the next time some crazy, homicidal young man, who's grown up on a steady diet of ubiquitous "might makes right" militaristic video games, movies, TV shows, and toy guns......goes to the corner gun shop and buys a sub machine gun and destroys the lives of another round of families, the peace of another community. And the truth is, if you live in Baghdad, or Juarez, or any number of other places that aren't as wealthy or high profile as Tucson, this kind of thing isn't really any big deal.  It happens all the time, and people try to live their lives in spite of it.

Such waste. 

Why is it always a "young man"?  I remember reading a sci-fi novel from the 70's that envisioned a planet where all the men had died, and the women had to reproduce by cloning.  They didn't want men to be re-introduced to their planet because they felt their "hormones" made them too dangerous to a peaceful civilization.

I think I once naively wondered if men, especially when they're young,  are doomed to violence because they have bad hormones, but a look at the many men who are the worlds great peacemakers consensus makers and teachers and humanitarians demonstrates that the argument I used to hear in the 50's that "biology is destiny" does not apply to men any more than it ever did for women.   But I do agree with Riane Eisler, who has written extensively that patriarchal values are a self-perpetuating mythos, glorification, and template of violence.  Without the evolution of what she called "partnership societies", we really don't have much of a global future at all.

Are women immune? Obviously not;  women are also capable of violence, and patriarchal thinking, whether as victim or perpetrator.   I look at Sarah Palin's popularity and see a "macho dude with breasts".......she's as patriarchal as they come, from her inflammatory images of Gifford and other democrats in gun sights, to forcing her daughter to have a child and marry against her will, to her derogatory comments about vegetarians (as if people who don't want to eat meat and shoot animals somehow aren't "manly" enough).  I might also add that this notion of "manliness" includes anti-intellectualism.**

I know, Sarah is too easy to lay blame on.  It's just that my  little corner of cultural transformation   has been about a rejection of militarism, and a concern with Earth-serving reconciliation  ("earth" derives from the same word roots as "hearth" and "heart".)  Were the societies Eisler wrote about, Minoan Crete, or Old Europe,  ideal societies?  I doubt it.  But it does look like all their art and ritual were not concerned with military conquests, sword waving kings,  and warrior gods wrathfully destroying the blasphemers.  Leaving them, presumably, a lot more time to trade, make art, value children, and work at improving the lives they had.

What kind of world would we have, if our "Department of Peace" was as big, and as focused on "technologies of peace"  as our "Department of Defense" is? (Do we even really have a "Department of Peace"?)  Tucson has an air force base, and a huge munitions manufacturer (Raytheon).  Big economics, the economics of war.  Tucson does have a Peace Center, which I imagine a lot of smaller cities don't.  It's been around for at least 20 years.  But it still hasn't managed to come up with enough money to rent an office.

**Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, in his brilliant book "Collapse", has pointed out that the cattle and dairy industry in, for example, Australia produces more environmentally destructive greenhouse gases through the emission of methane than the impact of all the motor vehicles in the country.  It's also worth mentioning that the  majority of rainforest cut down in Brazil is to produce grazing land for cattle.

Vigil Photos for Gabrielle and for Peace

I wanted to post these photos of the candlelight vigil for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the others who were killed and wounded.

Peace over the state flag.

Someone left a card that said "And love will hold us together and give us shelter to weather the storm."

It was a beautiful and moving experience to see the altar made at her headquarters on Pima and Swan, which continues to grow. 

 

I was very struck by the many messages people left  about Peace.  Not just a blessing and prayer for Gabrielle and for the the others, but for our nation and our world.  I truly felt that.

And, perhaps because I'm an artist and always struck by the living metaphors all around us, as I walked back to my home, I passed by the building next door to Gifford's headquarters and the Altar, where many people had parked their cars. 

It's a medical plaza called THE HEART CENTER of Southern Arizona.

Deaths in Tucson

I'm very saddened by the shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Gifford, leaving her critically wounded, 6 people dead including a 9 year old girl ironically born on 9/11 and called one of the "Hope Babies".  14 others were wounded. There's no need to go into the details, as the news is international.

 

Gabrielle's office is just 3 blocks from where I live, and last night I placed a candle and flowers at a vigil held there for her (there were others, including where she is being treated at UMC hospital.) The intersection near her office was blocked off before the vigil, because a suspicious object, presumably a  bomb,  was reportedly found and defused. I heard this after I arrived, and don't know the details.....but if so, this gunman was not alone in his hate campaign, or there were people who took advantage of the tragedy to provoke further threat of violence. 

Tucson is fairly well known as a (sort of) liberal oasis in an otherwise conservative state with a lot of "cowboy" ethics still abounding. In Arizona, for example,  you can legally carry a handgun (in a holster).  I'm not going to write about that, or the mythos and insanity of the gun culture, because there's way too much to say. I do want to say that the last election was the ugliest, most irrational I have ever seen, with a kind of simplistic, violent propaganda focused  against Giffords, and Democrat Raul Grijalva, that I don't remember ever seeing before.  Even the most politically apathetic noticed it.   Some of the "allegations" on the internet or over TV were comparable to the insanity of calling President Obama a Muslim terrorist.  One example I found particularly disturbing were thousands of cardboard placards placed at intersections all over town with blurbs like "Giffords supports the Taliban". Just a few days ago, even though the election is well over, I noticed a placard near her headquarters that said: "Giffords took away my medicare".  For many this extraordinary hate campaign was very much on our minds as we lit our candles.

I try to keep my blog away from politics, but this, literally, hits home;  how much did this hateful propaganda have to do with the hate that fueled this violent act?  Forbes Magazine suggested this in an article posted today, in which the author notes that:

"On her Facebook page last spring, (Sarah) Palin posted a U.S. map with crosshairs of a rifle scope  over the districts repped by Giffords and 19 other Democrats.” ..................."should we pretend that the violent rhetoric of Palin and her followers is “just an overheated metaphor,” asks Huffington Post writer Marty Kaplan. How many times have we heard Jon Stewart and others speak out about how the GOP-Tea Party machine, with its angry bombast, pushes people? This “lock-and-load” mentality  is today’s U.S. politics–reptilian, raging, uncivil, unyielding and here, possibly murderous. UPDATE 1/9/2011: Even a senior Republican senator, speaking anonymously to Politico.com “in order to freely discuss the tragedy,” believes the Giffords shooting is a “cautionary tale.” “There is a need for some reflection here – what is too far now?” said the senator talking about inflammatory language and suggestions of violence in politics."

Forbes online magazine

 This is not only a political matter; it is also a spiritual matter.  The "altar" created for Giffords and all the others included prayers for peace,  a butterfly, a peace sign, and many, many candles with the image of the Virgin of Guadaloupe - people know that we must all hold reason, hold the peace, now, more than ever.

Rilke

 

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

Postscript on "Coventry"

"Spider Woman" -  Mississippian culture shell gorget

I'm not much of a dreamer - if I do remember a dream, it's a rare event, and I roll it around for years, because I figure if a dream is memorable, it's the psychic equivalent of my unconscious throwing a brick at me.  But perhaps because I'm a visual artist and close attention to symbolic language is intrinsic to art process, I've come to think of synchronicities as akin to "waking dreams", many layered and  mysterious. Art process is as seamless, I believe, as dreaming, and partakes of the same weave as the attention that enables us to experience synchronicity.

 "If you go deep enough into yourself, you find yourself in a noisy place with a lot of other people.  And if you draw symbols from there, you plug into a collective form of consciousness." (Alex Grey)

"Universal Mind Lattice" Alex Grey

 Synchronicities are threads from the loom of Spider Woman, woven into a vast pattern; but they can also be funny, and deeply personal as well.  I often feel compelled to write about them, without necessarily understanding them, just as with dreams, their "meanings".  In the course of blogging this past year, I've been fortunate to meet others who've inspired and contributed to my appreciation of this phenomenon, among them the Macgregors,  authors of the book The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, and  Robur D'Amour, author of two blogs, who wrote recently wrote two fascinating articles about Lady Godiva and the Grail).

I've been exploring the weird synchronicity of finding myself singing a 60's song about Lady Godiva    in several posts the past month, and its led me down a mythic and her-storic trail to the Great Goddess,  submerged and re-emerging into our world now.  Perhaps most personally, the threads of this synchronicity have helped me to rekindle my passion for my work with the Divine Feminine, re-energizing me as I flounder around these days.

I have often thought that the Goddess, by whatever name, has always been with me,  my particular work.  I remember when I was a little girl, the first paintings I ever did were of the bull dancers of ancient Knossos, and their  snake entwined  Goddess.  Memories from past lives?  The Collective Unconscious?  Or just an encounter with a National Geographic?   I still have no idea why I just had to do those paintings, but I've been true to the impulse ever since, painting many, many Goddesses.  And I wonder what  my teacher in the '50's   thought of  an 8 year old's renderings of a bare-breasted woman. 

Minoan Snake Goddess
from Knossos, Crete, c. 1600 BCE

So, as a postscript to my mythic, synchronistic wanderings, and following the logic that synchronicities can be followed as one might a dream,  I have to add this as the "grand finale".  It was sent very kindly  by Robur, who has been writing about the Grail, on New Year's Day:  a blurb from a British paper announcing that the Holy Grail is to be found in Coventry!


I'll take that as most auspicious!  Again, pursuing this as interpreting a dream, I remember that "Coventry" means in the dictionary "banishment". 



What is the Holy Grail?  To many feminist writers, the Grail is equated with the womb, a primal symbol, of course, of the the Great Mother.  In the Christian/Judea/Islamic traditions we have inherited, God does not have a womb.  How has or could culture be different, when the Deity or deities do have a womb?

"Womb symbols" abound throughout ancient mythologies - one prevalent in England during early Christianity is the Celtic "cauldron of Cerridwen" .  In the legend of the Grail, this generative symbol is transformed into the "cup of Christ". Riane Eisler, in her famous book "The Chalice and the Blade", used the symbol of the Grail, or Chalice, as a symbol for the Goddess, displaced, demeaned, and devalued gradually throughout patriarchal history.

The Grail Legend is the story of a great quest to find the missing cup, the cup that "heals all wounds".  One famous variation is the story of the Fisher King, in which all the great knights fail to find the cup needed to heal the wounded King.  Ultimately, it is only an open hearted fool, an innocent, who is able to find the Grail, and thus bring healing to the King.  To bring healing to the King is to bring healing to the whole country.  A wonderful contemporary version of this myth is "The Fisher King", with Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges (1991)

Exploring the meaning of all of these threads of synchronicities for myself,  based upon learning about Lady Godiva and her ride through Coventry in the Middle Ages, I would have to say they all lead me back to "the return of the Goddess", once the May Queen of the "coven tree (coven-tree)", then "banished (Coventry) ", now returning, with all the healing power of the Grail, to a world in the midst of  transformation. 


And at last, for me,  all Goddesses become one Goddess:  the primal Goddess, Gaia, Mother Earth.

"Gaia" (1986)

1-1-11

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all 

Paul Simon

 As the last day of 2010 opens cold and coffee steaming, surrounded by people at table staring into little silver boxes,  I think how utterly amazing it is to be alive in this time.  These are the days of signs and wonders. 

The greatest library the world has ever known is literally, right now, at my fingertips, and if I can bear to search for it, and open my mind to this web of many other minds, I can learn about almost anything that is available to be learned about, be it art, turnips,  quantum physics or Terry Pratchett's Rim World (where I like to go when it all gets too much).  I can walk into incredible visions and astounding worlds of the imagination, in full color and even in "3-D", by just walking into a movie theatre, and I can talk to someone in Bali, or India, or Helsinki instantaneously.  

For most of human history, getting enough to eat to make it through the winter has been the very first priority - now,  I can eat anything I want and far more than I need, if I so desire, whenever I want.  Exotic fruits like papayas and pineapples in the midst of winter, frozen deserts in the midst of summer, fish that come from Iceland, apples that come from New Zealand, cakes that come from Denmark.   If my teeth fall out and I have the money (that's the catch 22), I can replace them with new ones, instead of spending the rest of my days resigned to soup.

I remember Martin Luthor King, and I'm glad I've lived to see a President whose father came from Africa, and  a First Lady who is black and beautiful. I remember two teachers who told me "there had never been any great women artists" as a justification for assuming women just didn't have what it took........well, so much for that one.  I'm glad the idea pissed me off.  Go Judy Chicago, and all your brilliant colleagues!  

Physicists sound more and more like metaphysicists, and telescopes can take pictures of galaxies exploding.  I can even put on my pentacle necklace (the neat one with the onyx beads) and no one is automatically going to assume I sacrifice goats to the devil.  I can buy a computer that fits in my pocket, and hold a library of books in my Kindle.  Not to mention velcro.

I can fly through the air higher than any eagle, and look down on the tops of clouds, and cross an ocean in a day. 

How amazing to be alive!   Wow!

 "We currently live at the confluence of prophecies, making the first decade of the 21st Century an important time to be alive. We have Edgar Cayce’s warning of the repetition of destructive cycles; we have Nostradamus’ quatrains echoing paragraphs in the biblical Book of Revelations which in turn coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar......Where does this leave 2012? Will it, won’t it? If enough people share the same dream, a critical mass will create that reality. Humans are gifted dreamers, but even so we often lack the confidence to believe we are powerful creation machines.....Interestingly, at times when humanity approaches a crossroads, ‘outside’ guidance is made available in unusual ways."

Freddy Silva 

And yet.....the human condition remains. Through grace and chance, I have the great privilege of sitting in this coffee shop, literate, and well fed, and able to enjoy these wonders.  Millions of other human beings also alive do not. And yet.......and it is no secret, except perhaps among those many who are either too desperately disenfranchised to know or care, or those who choose to bury their heads in the sand like ostriches (ostriches actually have much better survival skills than, say, followers of Sarah Palin, and I think they are unfairly discriminated against) that our civilization is not really sustainable, we possess weapons of unimaginable destructiveness, and we are profoundly impacting the balance of planetary life.  

We're at an evolutionary crossroads. 

"I want to  live in full possession of the knowledge that the Imagination lies at the center of reality.....the Imagination never stops. Every idol must be transformed into an icon, that we may see the light shining through it."

Tom Cheetham

I don't know what to think of the 2012 business - I tend to feel that it's already here, that I've been within the change for the short decades of my life span, which isn't really very much time at all, not if you consider that it's taken (if those who believe in Atlantis are right) at least 10,000 years to get where we currently are technologically.   If you don't  believe in Atlantis, it's an even more accelerated picture.  We're not the first culture that has the potential to collapse, not the first that has the potential to exhaust ts environment to the point of insustainability, not the first that has faced an evolutionary crisis - but we are by far the biggest.

I don't have answers to much of anything anymore.  But I do think the time of the imaginal, individually and collectively, has come upon us, the Era of the Butterfly.   (In Ancient Greece a word for 'butterfly' was 'soul'.** )   We're in profound transformation as a global Being.

"Having had inexplicable experiences myself and studied many that have happened to others.....I have no doubt that we are ALL involved in the development of human consciousness and the incredible transition now taking place throughout humanity. This I am actually convinced is the case and similar processes are underway throughout all our activities on this planet. A new and very different human condition is forming before our very eyes. As it happens I am not talking about the 2012 Mayan Prophecy but in many ways I could just as easily be doing so. Unprecedented changes are coming."

Colin Andrews 

**Butterflies change from caterpillar to chrysalis to winged beings, and in many ancient paintings,  a small butterfly was often portrayed escaping from the mouth of the newly dead, symbolizing this transformation.  Plus, and (possibly important to them as well) the butterfly was the shape of the double ax, a symbol of the Great Goddess. 

Holle, Hell, Holy

At the beginning of December, I wrote about synchronicities in the form of songs or phrases one can find oneself singing or thinking about, without any apparent reason for it.  Often they can be quite funny and ridiculously banal.  I had found myself singing (actually, I still am, darn it) a sixties song called "Lady Godiva" - and came to the conclusion that this unlikely song, lodged somewhere in the convoluted  recesses of my unconscious and choosing to erupt with annoying frequency had something to do with "Lady God" and "Deva" - the Goddess and the divine.  


Since then, I've thought deeply about how I've been losing touch with my spiritual life.  I've been passionate about the healing of the collective human psyche by "the return of the Goddess" for pretty much the past 35 years.....and possibly before that, but I lacked the literacy to conceptualize these ideas.  I feel, the more I meditate on my "waking dream",  the Goddesses are drawing me back into the rejuvenating, healing landscape of mythic mind and mythic time.


I'm grateful to Robur, a cyberspace friend who is very knowledgeable about gardens, myth and magic, and writes two fascinating blogs that explore these themes : http://roburdamour.blogspot.com.  His comments about "Lady Godiva" revealed a lot I didn't know about the legend, and helped  to further inform meanings of  my own  "synchro" language.  

Here's Roburs  article about Lady Godiva: 

http://weavingandmagic.blogspot.com/2011/01/lady-godiva-and-her-priest-king.html 
  

Lady Godiva  rode through the streets of Coventry.   "Coventry" , I learned, is a fitting metaphor for "Lady God"'s ride, in that the dictionary defines the  word "Coventry" as:

"the state of being banished or ostracized (excluded from society by general consent); ie,  "the association should get rid of its elderly members--not by euthanasia, of course, but by Coventry"**

Thus, "coventry" is the opposite of "coven", "covenant", or "to convene", which means to bring together.....a fitting term for what happened in the course of the Church and the Middle Ages to the former Goddess as May Queen.  And although the contemporary dictionary meaning of "Coventry" has come to mean banishment,  perhaps a more ancient layer to understanding the origins of the town's original name also comes from Robur, who writes that

"The official etymology of Coventry is that it means Cofa's tree. A tree owned by Mr Cofa!  A very early spelling, 1050, is Couaentree.  I found, by chance, a reference to Coventry as bring a rebus for 'a coven round a tree'. Well, it is undeniably a rebus. But that doesn't mean anything conclusive.  There was a widespread practise for dancing round a tree on May Eve, which is the maypole. Perhaps there really was a tree, that was used for festivities."

"The story that Lady Godiva was protesting against taxes is untrue.  Apparently, at the time the procession dates from, Coventry was a village, and there were no taxes.  The procession is actually a May-Eve fertility procession, many of which are found across Europe. There is even one at Southam, just a few miles from Coventry, which is no longer celebrated.  What happened at Coventry, was that there was a Benedictine monastery there. The Christian monks did not approve of people watching the fertility procession, and so put some 'spin' on the procession, and invented this story about taxes. "

 The 1966 pop song  by Peter and Gordon (lodged in my brain until further notice or I finally get it, apparently)  is about "Lady Godiva" becoming a porn star, thus trivializing the story of Lady's Godiva's ride and turning the Lady into a kind of prostitute -  which has so often been  done to the Goddess in the course of patriarchal mythology, and continues well into the present.

Last, and thanks once more to Robur's scholarship, I've also become fascinated with a bit of information he passed on  about another  "Godiva Procession" that occurred close to Coventry in a town called  Southam, in which, according to Robert Graves (The White Goddess) two figures, one black and one white, were carried, symbolizing Holda and Hel.  I was struck to imagine the May Queen, riding to the Maypole or World Tree, accompanied by effigies representing the Nordic/Germanic Goddess as  both Life and Death.
  
Holle is very much associated with Yule, and with the hearth and home, especially in the winter.  But she is known throughout northern Europe, an ancient goddess that predates the advent of Christianity. ** Also known as Holda or Hulda, and she is a  triple goddess,  embodying the passages of life.  In some myths, she is "the ash girl", her face half black with soot and half white.  This comes from a story of how in order to marry the God of Winter she had to come to him neither naked nor clothed, and neither in light or darkness.  As the Mother goddess, she protected the forest and was often shown among trees.  Holle in old age  is Winter's Queen, and Mother Holda is the source of  "Mother Goose"  legends, because the snow flies when the she shakes the feathers from her down bed.  In Holland, they still says that 'Dame Holle is shaking her bed'. 

"Frau Holle, as she is known in Germany, was called The Queen of the Witches. The brothers Grimm tell a story of step-sisters who both go to visit Frau Holle in the 'nether realms'. They begin their journey to her by falling in a well............Holle's name is linguistically related to the word Halja, which means "covering", and is the ancient Teutonic name for Hel, the Norse land of the dead. Holle is sometimes called the Queen of the Dead, and resides in the 'nether' regions. She possibly lent her name to the country Holland, 'the land of Holle', which is also called the Netherlands because many parts of the country are below sea-level."   

Sandra Kleinschmitt

So in this long journey to Lady Godiva's ride and a silly song playing mysteriously over and over in my mind,  I find at last my way to Goddess, to the May Queen, and to the netherworld of (wholly and holy) Holle as well, who is both light and dark, young and old, light and shadow.

And who is Hel, the ashy side of Holle's face?  Besides being the origin of the word people use daily as a swear word, and millions of Christians have a mighty fear of going to, without knowing anything about where the concept originated from?  People no longer remember that once "go to Hell" meant to die.

"Hel" by Susan Seddon Boulet


I take the liberty of copying a wonderful description from Rowen Saille of the Order of the White Moon,

"Hel (Hell)  has been used by the early  church as a scare tactic to frighten the masses into “righteous” acts. To get the real story, we have to go back to the early Nordic people and look this death Goddess in the face. 

Hel is cast into the netherworld and becomes the ruler of that underworld to which souls who have not died in battle will depart. As thanks for making Her ruler of the netherworld, Hel makes a gift to Odin. She gives him two ravens, Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory). Ravens are messengers between this realm and the next, opening pathways to death’s realm.

Her realm is named for her, Hel or Helheim. Because She accepts all to Helheim, she also becomes the judge to determine the fate of each soul in the afterlife. The evil dead are banished to a realm of icy cold (a fate that the Nordic people found much worse in telling than a lake of fire). Unlike the Judeo-Christian concept, Helheim also served as the shelter and gathering place of souls to be reincarnated. Hel watches over those who died peacefully of old age or illness. She cares for children and women who die in childbirth. She guides those souls who do not choose the path of war through the circle of death to rebirth."

 Johannes Gehrts

"Hel governs the world beyond that of the living. In magic, she makes thin the veil between worlds. Seidhr [SAY-theer] or Nordic shamans call upon Her protection and wear the helkappe, a magic mask, to render them invisible and enable them to pass through the gateway into the realm of death and spirit."

 ..................................

** For anyone who may wonder where the "flying broomsticks" of witches (or Harry Potter) comes from, Dame Holda may be the source.  Because of her association with the hearth and home, the Broom was both symbol and magical tool.  Folk traditions of "sweeping away evil from the hearth" are very ancient throughout Europe.