Good News: Eco-Villages

I feel like it's very important to remember how very resilient the human spirit can be,  how possible it is for us to adapt, and how resilient nature can respond when we live in attunement, in "good relationship" with the earth. 

 In this time when it seems that the world is mired in war, greed and folly, as a counter, it's especially important to remember that  there is much that is hopeful.   I had fun archiving videos of the communities below, all of which have been around for a very long time, and a few of which I've been able to visit, if only briefly.  As one member of Findhorn,  who is interviewed below, comments, "sustainability won't work unless it's also fun".  Here are a few of the  hopeful experiments going on right now.  There is also a list of some of the world's ecovillages and ecocommunities  available through the Fellowship for Intentional Communities.  

One of my favorites is the Flying Fish Eco Village in Fiji .....I'd love to visit there! There is an annual Symposium on Intentional Communities (which I attended in the '90's), that is usually held at Twin Oaks Community in Virginia.  It's inexpensive to attend, and you can meet members of communities from all over the world.

Findhorn

Damanhur in Italy

Ecovillage at Ithaca, NY

Greater World Earthship Community, Taos, NM

The Farm, Tennessee
  The Sirius Community, Shutesbury, Mass.

Dance With Destiny Documentary

'The Prophetic Heart explores the true frontiers of consciousness, where past, present and future meld seamlessly into activist art, an inclusive pulsing web of which we are both but a single inextricable strand and one of the crucial conscious weavers. We learn that our work is not only to create a sustainable future, but to develop the presence and judgment necessary to discern what values and ways of being are truly worth sustaining. Even as we face political repression and wars, environmental destruction and a culture of distraction and denial, we are each being given an assignment and opportunity to create holistic alternatives. We see that our personal struggles are part of a shamanic process of falling apart and being remade, much as the tumultuous Earth Changes tell the story of a living planet restoring balance through dramatic transformation. We come away from watching this film not paralyzed with fear but called to attempt the so called “impossible”…to be an active part of the shift and cure.'

-Jesse Wolf Hardin  

 

Today is the Equinox, and my dreams continue to be about Balance, which is also what this sacred day is all about.  Balance of light and dark, conscious mind and shadow, above and below.  Syncronistically I am sending off today a Persephone mask that someone ordered - half light, half dark is her face.  There is a personal synchronicity in that as well concerning a dream I've been mulling over for more than a year now, but I'll have to wait a bit to write on that.  All things are woven..........

I was writing about Kali, the Dark Goddess, and the urgent need to wake up and shatter the "demons of delusion" in my previous post.  While searching for information about a true visionary I met, Jesse Wolf Hardin, I learned of an important new  film he participated in - Dance With Destiny, a documentary by (syncronistically again) Bruce Weaver.   Describing himself, the filmmaker comments that:

"At seventeen, in the U.S. armed forces, he found himself assigned to load nuclear weapons on B-52 bombers. Dressed in full chemical warfare gear on a training exercise, Bruce’s dreamscape images flooded to his mind in vivid detail. It was then the dream became all too real. Bruce left the Air Force, and began a life of earnest study of spirituality, mythology, and of ancient peoples.".

Among his travels, he spent time with Hopi elders exploring their prophecies, and was able to interview the Kogi ("Elder Brother") of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Columbia.   This is an important film, and rather than paraphrase, I copy from the website:

"This film will show that modernity’s problems are rooted in a host of unchecked “isms,” corporatism, statism, militarism, egoism, etc. Solutions will come not from rulers of vested systems, such as politicians or corporate directors. Only radical, heartfelt, internal revolutions of the spirit – which many of the interviewees in this film focus on -- can mend our souls and the web of life.   By combining deft reporting on a range of issues that contextualize the various interviews, Dance With Destiny shows how Mother Nature is paying humanity back for its hubris, excesses and neglects. In the tradition of Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of balance, the classic documentary by Godfrey Reggio, Dance With Destiny will probe the conceptual ties between manmade and natural phenomenon (koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word meaning "life of moral corruption and turmoil" or "life out of balance"). It will show, for example, how in unprecedented numbers and with unprecedented fervor, the scientific community is warning that the planet’s resources are being stretched to the point of collapse. 

It will explore how media focuses on the political and diplomatic aspects of global warming while ignoring its impact on agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather. It will show how the coal and oil industry spend millions of dollars to plant public doubts about global warming’s role in recent natural disasters from tsunamis, hurricanes, abnormally massive rainfall, unprecedented wind storms and severe draughts. 

 

After two world wars left 100 million people dead, a new imperial war machine marches unchecked across the globe.**  As war marches on, new pandemics threaten vast populations..........Information is the currency of the age yet meaning and spiritual intelligence are scarce.  Millions awake daily to spiritual isolation as ubiquitous technology dulls human curiosity and powers of observation.

**I was impressed with this comment, in that, so shortly after the media announced the disaster proceeding in Japan, attention was quickly turned to a new war in Libya, once again creating a distraction from a much, much greater problem that no war can resolve.

***I also have to note that the one thing I see lacking in this film (having not seen it in it's entirety)..........is there are no voices of women.  This was disturbing to me.  I'm not going to negate this important documentary...........but I was saddened that, once again, women somehow aren't included.  I'm tired of this, the omission of women  (unless they are ornamental young women with sexual interest or value).  The unconscious assumption that women are invisible is a very important shadow that needs to be addressed as we speak of Restoring the Balance. 

Since I am (perhaps unfairly)  feeling that my otherwise brilliant colleagues here have, as usual, ignored women in collecting interviews with  spiritual leaders, I would like to add that recently the Dali Lama made a surprising comment that he felt the world will be saved by women. 

Kali Yuga

I love this painting I did for my (never published) Tarot deck, although most people I've shown it to ignore it as uncomfortable, unaesthetic, not "light".  But to me it perfectly embodies the card The Hanged Man, which to me always meant something like "enlightenment or deepening of self through suffering".  Here a soldier, exhausted by the horror of war, is beyond the masks of his circumstance, beyond pain and has had a breakthrough into another state of being.  I think I was originally inspired to create this image by Apocalypse Now, the Martin Sheen film about Vietnam.

I try to keep this blog positive, and inspiring.  But as the Equinox approaches, the Day of Balance, I find it hard, frankly, to find my own balance today.  A week ago, if Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis can be considered into the equation, the living Earth, whose very climate we are changing, suddenly shuddered and moaned, and a vast wave engulfed one of the most densely populated islands in the world.  And now, again, the unfathomable destruction of a nuclear disaster burns into the very ground and water and air of that beautiful country.  And this, like everything else, is not some isolated "incident" somewhere far away in the Pacific ocean.  Because the water, and the earth, and the air sustains all of us;  this "incident" affects all of us, and those who are yet unborn.  Another wake up call for a global humanity.  "Wake up!"  "Wake up!  The time is now!"

And what do I read about in the news this morning?  My own country, also suffering environmental degradation and a depression, bankrupt, with thousands of young veterans returning with no jobs and post-traumatic stress syndrome and no money to even re-integrate them back into society,  losing its schools, its daycare centers, its hospitals, and its forests..........is getting ready to engage in yet another civil war in yet another Middle Eastern country.  Just what we need.   More war.   A real survival logic.

It seems that the patriarchal mind has only one solution to all problems, whether global or local:  "If in doubt, go to war!  That will surely make everything better!"

I have been so confused by the strange passivity of our time - but I'm old Berkeley activist, now kind of beached on the shores of this desert town, growing old and caring for my very elderly mother, and often feeling that I'm useless.  It's very strange sometimes to be a true child of the 60's in today's world.  For example,  I remember marching against the Vietnam War in San Francisco with 300,000 people in 1970, and I remember sleeping in Golden Gate Park that night, with thousands of others in sleeping bags.  I remember marching again against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 in San Francisco, again with 300,000 people.  

What good did either war do?  We fought in Vietnam to "save the world from Communist China".  I find no small irony to consider that they now have most of our manufacturing, and subsidize current wars with their loans.  And what about Iraq?  So many lives........

And I remember, in 2009, marching with 300 people at the White House on the anniversary of the 2001 War (yes, ten years now) - and that time, the media followed our pitiful little group around and snickered at us, as if we were "kooks", as if the very idea of protesting war, and advocating for peace, was on the same level as people who believe in Atlantis or UFO's or burn bras (not that I haven't done all of that as well).  That shocked me.  Truly shocked me. 

 

"Kali is so much about contemporary life.  Women need to become angry. About the women of Afghanistan, the meaningless wars, the destruction of our environment.  The demons of insatiable greed that are devouring our planet. Those who await the future are being denied their birthright. Kali is the catalyst for saying "No more".  It's time to embrace the sword of Kali and cut away the delusions that are destroying our world. Kali is the ferocious mother who says "get away from my children, or I'll kill you."  

Drissana Devananda

Kali Yantra

It's the time of the Dark Goddess.  The Kali Yuga.   It's the time of Kali, the one who breaks through the illusion, the one who shatters the delusions, the psychic surgeon who ends denial, the Mother of those who are Yet to Come.   

If our evolving global civilization has currently had amnesia about the continuity and interdependency of life, and does not practice the Lakota ideal  of acting for "7 generations" - Kali's dance will re-mind us.  I believe that this "shadow work" is what is going on very much right now, individually, and collectively, and I hope my friends who may read this, and other thoughts in the future, will not be alarmed if my focus is on the Dark Goddess for a while.  I believe it's Her time, and She may just very well be, as Kali was in Hindu mythology, the last ditch savior.  

The Dark Goddess is about restoring the balance, the integral force of true maturation.

"The Dark Goddess, who is found in many cultures by many names, is not aspected lightly.  Working with Her calls forth one's internal capacity for psychic empowerment. I found myself wanting to slide away when it brought my own way of being to the surface."

Ann Waters

In Hindu mythology, there came a time when the world was being destroyed by demons, and the Gods waged a great war against them, all to no avail.  Finally, the great Goddess Durga manifested from her being the terrible Goddess Kali, and Kali was the only one who was able to overcome the demons, and save the world.  In many iconic Hindu images Kali is shown with a necklace of severed heads, a tounge protruding in laughter or in battle lust.  In her rage she could not be stopped, and so her consort, Lord Shiva, lay down before her, and it was only then, when she realized it was his body she danced upon, that she ceased her dance of destruction.  

Kali is a complex Goddess, worshipped widely in India, and very important to Bengalese tantra. To Westerners, she is strange Icon - but upon reflection, Kali represent to her followers the Primal Mother, who gives life and takes it back as well.   Her name means both "black", "dark", and "formless", as well as "Time". In the Mahanirvana-tantra, Kali is one of the epithets for the primordial sakti, and in one ancient  passage the God Shiva praises her thus**:

"At the dissolution of things, it is Kala [Time] Who will devour all, and by reason of this He is called Mahakala [an epithet of Lord Shiva], and since Thou devourest Mahakala Himself, it is Thou who art the Supreme Primordial Kalika. Because Thou devourest Kala, Thou art Kali, the original form of all things, and because Thou art the Origin of and devourest all things Thou art called the Adya [primordial Kali]. Resuming after Dissolution Thine own form, dark and formless, Thou alone remainest as One ineffable and inconceivable. Though having a form, yet art Thou formless; though Thyself without beginning, multiform by the power of Maya, Thou art the Beginning of all, Creatrix, Protectress, and Destructress that Thou art"

KALI

Once upon a time the world became overpopulated by demons.
They filled the world with their copious greed,
and reproduced themselves endlessly.
They had become, in other words,

full of themselves.

They consumed the light of day, they soiled the air
they ate the trees, they swallowed the waters
they devoured the lands with their insatiable greed


Until there were no more things of beauty made,
or new dreams dreamed, or children born.


The unborn ones called to me
The ones yet to come.

The time had come
to say Enough.
And No More.


I, I am the Goddess of No More

I, I  am the shadow of all those
who cannot remember

how to say enough
and No More

I, I am the Mother
of those
who are yet to come


Jai Ma
Kali Ma

Lauren Raine (Performance, 1999)

  **http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali

A House of Doors

"A House of Doors" (1987)

To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you
Put down the weight 
of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation.
Everything is waiting for you.

  Everything is Waiting for You
  by David Whyte

"For My Father and Time" (1987)

A HOUSE OF DOORS

He opened the door, and walked outside.
It was summer, I remember cicadas
scratching through a hole in space
and a hole in the door
where a man used to be.

The house I live in
has many rooms.
I recall white rooms,
and a grey room
wallpapered with old letters.

Some rooms are tombs for the heart
full of damp bones
and useless ornaments.

I remember a pink room
that pressed me until I couldn't breathe
and a yellow room
big enough to hold the sky
or a troupe of elephants
dancing on a thimble.

Some rooms diminish
some rooms compress.
Rooms can be tricky.

What I chiefly remember
are doors.

I live in a house of doors.

"Persistence of Memory" (1987)

II.

She stood at the door
and walked outside:
it was Spring,
I remember lilacs
opening through a window
framed in lavender light
and a window opening into space
where a girl in a white dress used to be.

A white dress,
flying like a flag,
a white dress
opening like a morning glory.

"A House of Doors III" (1987)

 III.

When I opened the door
I saw her sitting there
the girl with the Kodak smile.

The sign on the door said 1969
it was February in Berkeley.
Plum trees were red in the rain,
steam rose from an espresso machine
and smoke rises from the girl
who listens to the boyfriend
whose name I don’t remember

cigarette in hand
orchestrating
she listens
she knows the punch line.

I closed the door
and the girl slipped away behind me,
riding a train I could see in perspective,
riding to a vanishing point.

I remember
names.

"When The Rain Was Singing" (1989)

VI.

An onion, that's it.

All those layers
just when you think
you can name yourself,
you discover new layers,
you’re forming a new skin,
a new ring.

But there's a core.
And where does that core start?

V.

This room I live in
these walls
they seem to be getting thin.
I can almost see through them today.

Today I feel,
I feel like a Chinese box
one inside another.

I consider a state of grace:

I think
I think I may be the gate

that opens into another room
made of clouds, or sky
I think about clouds today,
about the tops of clouds.

I remember white dresses I wore.
I remember doors.
I can't remember the girl's name.

IV.

"Funny", she said,
"how time takes the names out of things,
and bleaches the rest kind of transparent."

Funny.
Chiefly,
I remember doors.

Sometimes, you open a door,
any door
and you have to walk outside

into something tender
like a touch on a winter night
into a quiet yard
because of a voice you hear

or a bell
or a train
pulling away somewhere.

 

Sandra Ingerman on Healing for Japan

 Icon by Betsy Porter

 I've been following the shamanic work of Sandra  Ingerman since I read her book Soul Retrieval.    I have greatly admired her "Medicine for the Earth" work.  I felt like copying here a recent article Sandra sent out in response to the events in Japan.   As the Equinox approaches, I feel that Restoring the Balance, on every level, is of the essence.

 

"Our hearts expand as we embrace the enormity of all the pain being suffered by the people and all living beings in Japan who have been impacted by the earthquake and the tsunami.  When we feel that our hearts are breaking as we watch levels of suffering in actuality our hearts are expanding allowing us to be stronger and deeper channels of love and light.

Let us journey transcending our egos and experience the vastness of our spiritual light and love. In this way we become beacons of light and love for all of life in Japan.  Let us expand our individual aura and become one with a spiritual pulsation and frequency to transform the radiation that is moving into the atmosphere.  Move out of a place of pity for the suffering you see and focus on the strong spirit of the people, all of life, and the land itself. In this way you project strength which leads to a foundation of support for all in need.

Let us sing songs of love and healing to the earth, the waters of the world, the air, and to the element of fire. Go outside and sing!  

There is an extreme level of panic that is being "blasted" into the collective over the fear of radiation moving through our atmosphere.   It is crucial right now that you do the spiritual work you have been practicing over the years. Take the time to find your center. Go out and spend time in nature to center and refocus. Breathe deeply and remember that you are spiritual light and have all the tools and internal spiritual wisdom to guide you during this time.

As a global community we do have great power as we work together spiritually. Let us project a vision of healing and peace. Project a vision of cooling for the nuclear reactors and further disaster being avoided.  Do your transfiguration practice daily and throughout the day and experience yourself as divine light. Divine light has the power to transmute and transform all energies into healing energies. For thousands of years mystics and spiritual healers throughout the world have been using this way of working to transmute toxins and illness. Let us carry on the work that has shown itself to have so much potential for healing.

Learn to read the omens that nature will continue to show to help guide you.  We must learn to honor the rite of passage and initiation that humankind is going through. We are experiencing levels of death on many levels. Death is not an end but rather is a transition. 

In the Bible it says that without a vision the people will perish. We are the dreamers of our world.  We need to be able to hold a vision that the collective can move towards as the old is dismembered. Reflect on the vision you want to be projecting into the world right now and make changes to your vision to lead to a desired outcome. Engage your imagination in a focused way. Project the best for all of life.

Build up your spiritual muscles!  Let us together hold the planet in love.

The media moves on after covering environmental, political, and economic events. People and all of life are still suffering the effects of the earthquake in Haiti and in New Zealand, the oil spill in the Gulf, the floods in Australia, the extreme weather in the U.S.  just to name a few. 

We are one collective. We are not separate cultures, separate countries. We are going through an initiation together. Let us do our work and live our lives in a good way. That is how we can be in service to the whole.

During the equinox remember the wonderful memories and dreams for your life and for the life of the planet. Project beauty into the collective.

 

Plant seeds of love and beauty and inspiration in your inner garden so that they grow, blossom, and bear fruit here in our earth garden. 

From "A Message Regarding Recent Events" by Sandra Ingerman, www.SandraIngerman.com | P.O. Box 4757 | Santa Fe | NM | 87502.

"Earth Icon IIV", Lauren Raine (2010)

Persephone

I realized that the Persephone page on my website is broken, and needs to be fixed.  But then I realized that this time of the approaching Equinox is Persephone's time - a time of of light and dark in balance, of rebirth.   And so I re-print the broken page here.

PERSEPHONE

She usually calls for me in winter,
But this year, I did not hear
Until the earth was in bud.
It seemed strange
To turn toward that dark stare
To go down
When life was already celebrating
A return.

          But when the Dark Goddess

demands a descent
You must go.
You must go down
To open more, pried open in your most closed places.
To let the darkness that lives there
Spill out onto the floor at your feet
Like blood,
And you must grieve
The loss of the hurt
You held so dear,
Before you can join the flowers.

Marilyn Owen

(copyright M. Owen)

PERSEPHONE'S FEAST DAY

When all the names are gone
when there is nothing left
for memory to feed upon

Perhaps all the wastes
of love and time
ferment their healing,
here, in these nigrado depths,
becoming at last albedo

a white lily,

a crocus arising, new
life in the barren place
the medicine.

There is no valor in this

rooting among decomposing fragments
of so many lives.

I offer now bread,
red fruit, red wine
to Life

To the beautiful and strong,

those who speak and those who dance.

And to the inarticulate and the broken,

to those who are lost, to the hungry,

and to the fallen. To every

transparent lover

wandering these gray bardos

in their solitude:

Come to the table, all.

Here is a rich conversation
harvested from the last living garden.
A dappled pear, an apple, a pomegranate.
A butterfly in its chrysalis, winged, moist,
the slow rebirth of color
deep in the depths of this dream

The wheat has new life in it yet
The blessing will still be given


Lauren Raine (2005)

Old Photos

 Griffith Park, 1928

Girl and Horse, 1928

by Margaret Atwood

You are younger than I am, you are
Someone I never knew,
you stand under a tree,
your face half-shadowed,
Holding the horse by its bridle.

Why do you smile? Can’t you
See the apple blossoms falling around
You, snow, sun, snow,
listen, the tree dries
and is being burnt, the wind

Is bending your body,
your face ripples like water
Where did you go?

But no, you stand there
exactly the same,
you can’t hear me,

forty years ago you were caught by light
And fixed in that secret place
where we live, where we believe
nothing can change, grow older.

(On the other side
of the picture, the instant
is over, the shadow
of the tree has moved.

You wave,

then turn and ride
out of sight through the vanished
orchard, still smiling
as though you do not notice)

old photos,

escaping a tin box:

stories with wings

 butterflies, or white moths

fluttering at the glass

lighter than air, these memories

quietly,
through 

an open window

(2011)