The President's Speech

 

"At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.  What we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.  Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

President Obama, Speech at U.A. (1-12-2011

Last night I saw the President give an extraordinary speech here in Tucson, with an astonishing 20,000 people turning out to hear it, that called for peace, reconciliation, and reason.  I read some cynical journalist comment that "it was mostly college students" - I respond, so very good to see that.  They are the ones inheriting the future.    He concluded by talking about the young girl (born on 9/11 and included in the book "Babies of Hope") who died - grieving for her and her parents, and making a plea for a better world for all children.  He was never more eloquent, and  I felt that this speech, and the extraordinary international response to this violence, ended with a important message for our world.  I also was delighted to see a Yaqui elder call on the Directions for healing and balance, honoring the first Americans, and cultural diversity. 

On a trajectory, I've seen the recent movie "The Kings Speech" twice, and love it.  Seeing this story of George the 6th, who was a stutterer,  struggling to serve his people with speeches that were so very difficult for him to perform on the terrifying brink of WWII,  I never before  understood the significance of the Royalty as the "voice of the people" in England.  There are scenes in that movie that will make you cry.  I understood the same thing last night when President Obama spoke.

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.