May Day! (Beltaine)

Happy May Day to all!

Since Beltane (May 1) is an auspicious day, I can't resist a bit of his & herstory to honor the day, and a wide assortment of May Pole pictures. I'm also still on the road, so to honor the day in (alas) haste, I re-publish this post from last year.  Ah, the RITES OF SPRING!  Celebrated this Sunday at the very crack of dawn at the Renfair here in Los Angeles, with flower garlands for all.

The birth of spring on May Day in Elizabethan England would send villagers into the woods to collect flowers and boughs, and then they would wait for the sun to rise as it brought the fully opened year flowering into spring.  Earlier this year I found myself fascinated with the origins of the famous legend of "Lady Godiva" in Coventry, England.........with the kind help of Robur D'Amour last year, who wrote a fascinating article about Lady Godiva.   I learned that origins of this legend are probably to be found in the ride of the May Queen to the sacred tree (Maypole), the "coven tree". 

 He wrote:

"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. "

At any rate, before or in spite of the church's intervention, villagers celebrating the Rites of Spring throughout Merrie Old England and much of Europe would bear flowers, all the while capering around the new Maypole chosen for the celebration. Only unmarried girls would be allowed to plant the phallic Maypole into the fertile Earth........a lovely dance and ritual with ancient origins in pagan practices of sympathetic magic.   In other words, "the world is waking up and making love, so we too wake up and make love, and all will bear fruit".

The planting of the May Pole, and the union of the May Queen with the May King (or the Green Man) probably has its origins in very ancient traditions of the Sacred Marriage, going back as far as Sumeria and the marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi - or probably farther even than that, into unknown origins in prehistory.   In ancient times, the spring ritual union of the King with the priestess (representing the Earth Mother) was a very significant rite; in later times, even in Christian Europe, church morality may have been suspended for Beltane, as couples went out into the fields to participate in the worlds ripening fertility. 

This celebration of the fecundity of Spring no doubt made many of the early churchmen nervous. In the late 19th century,  May 1 became associated with the growing labor movement, and since then many countries have celebrated May Day as International Workers' Day.  In 1955, Pope Pius XII instituted May 1 as the "feast of St. Joseph the Worker" with the intention of emphasizing the spiritual aspect of labor.........I'm sure the advent of this secondary meaning to May Day came as a belated relief to the Catholic Church, along with Lady Godiva's famous ride becoming folk legend.

For myself, I think the re-sacralization of sexuality, in tandem with the blossoming of the world, that was the original meaning of May Day.....is a wonderful Holy Day, and am often surprised by how little people today know of it's origins.  

Traditionally, the Maypole was hung with garlands and streamers. Dancers took hold of the ends in a weaving courtship dance.

Boys would dance in one direction and the girls in another, and so flower-clad ribbons were woven around the pole in the form of a braid.  There might also be a procession led by Jack O' the Green (a variant of the Green Man), fantastically arrayed with flowers, leaves and ribbons, and followed by Morris Dancers with bells jangling on their ankles. Last, there would be the choosing of the May Queen.

In Europe, Flora was the Roman Goddess of Flowers and it’s not surprising that her festival was held on the first day of May. The May Dance festivals have many of their origins in the ancient “Feast of Flora”, the ecstatic Roman Rites of Spring.

Crowned with a garland, the May Queen, no matter how capricious, was to be obeyed throughout the day's celebrations, and everyone would vie for the honor of doing her homage.

Carolyn Myss

When I lived in Vermont in the early 80's, I became interested in energy work, and went to see a famous energy worker named Eleanor Moore, who lived in Peterborough, N.H.  I remember when I first called her to set up an appointment, there was a powerful scent of peppermint throughout my studio after I set down the phone........later she told me nonchalantly it was one of her guides, leaving herbs.  

Once I went to visit Eleanor, and a young woman was sitting in her conference room, her bald head wrapped in a scarf.  I sat there with her a long time, and finally Eleanor came in, and my appointment began.  I asked her who the woman was, and why she wanted me to hang with her, and she told me she had cancer, she  needed me to give her some extra energy, and didn't I see the blue light coming out of my forehead for her?  I had to answer that I did not, and forgot about it.  A year later I went to visit Eleanor again, and asked about the young woman.  Her response amazed me:  "Oh, that girl!" she said, "she just had to get even with her father, so she went and died!"

Eleanor's uncharacteristic lack of compassion surprised me, and at the time, I didn't have any understanding of either psychology, or energy medicine.  Years later, I discovered  Carolyn Myss and her book Anatomy of the Spirit , which helped me to heal from illness, and to release a life that ended with a divorce, in order to go forward into a new life.  Her way of  dealing with our "energy bank account", and our unconscious "shadow energies"  helped me to, as she puts it, to "pull my spirit back" from the past, in order to go forward.

Carolyn is a tough, passionate spiritual leader who isn't afraid to "tell it like it is", and I've been grateful to her ever since.  I'm still on the road, without much time to write, but wanted to share here a few of her brief talks for anyone who isn't familiar with Carolyn.  Among many other ideas, she coined the term "woundology", which is widely used now in spiritual and psychological  circles - a difficult insight that I had to look at for myself.  

As she recounts, in 1988 Myss had an experience that made her realize the power that lies in "being wounded". 

"One day, in passing, I introduced a friend of mine to two gentlemen I was talking with," says Myss. "Within two minutes, my friend managed to let these men know that she was an incest survivor. Her admission had nothing whatsoever to do with the conversation we'd been having, and in a flash I realized that she was using her wounds as leverage. She had gotten to the point that she defined herself by a negative experience." 

Once Myss became attuned to this phenomenon, which she called "woundology", she saw it everywhere.

"In workshops and in daily life I saw that, rather than working to get beyond their wounds, people were using them as social currency, they were confusing the therapeutic value of self-expression with permission to manipulate others with their wounds. Who would want to leave that behind? Health never commands so much clout!"

 At this point,  Myss began to realize that people did not always want to heal. Why People Don't Heal and How They Can shows how choosing to stay stuck in woundology often comes at a terrible price: the loss of health.

"We are given a finite amount of energy to run our physical bodies, our minds, and our emotions, as well as to manage our external environments, and when we choose to siphon off this energy to keep negative events in our histories alive, we are robbing that energy from our cell tissue, making ourselves vulnerable to the development of disease." 

Once this path is seen as the true energy debt that it is, choosing health means choosing to release the weight of the past. Too often, this is something that people just can't or won't do, because it can also be a life ploy that negotiates for them.  Myss also teaches that

"While the practice of woundology is a common source of illness, personal negativity is not always the cause; as contradictory as it seems, sometimes illness can be the answer to prayer. Our spiritual development is meant to culminate in an ability to see things impersonally, to recognize the greater meaning of life's challenges apart from the literal events.  To that end, illness can physically guide us onto a path of insight and learning upon which we would otherwise never have set foot. It is an unparallelled catalyst for expanding personal consciousness."

Earth Day

 We have a beautiful mother

Her green lap
immense
Her brown embrace
eternal
Her blue body
everything we know.

Alice Walker 

Here she is reading the poem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eghKzAvHxnI&feature=related 

I think it was Joanna Macy who coined the term "world as lover, world as self".  May that understanding reach our hearts as we celebrate, indeed, our Beautiful Mother. 

Feed and Plant and an Angel

Sparrows and juncos, all hungry
they too are planters of trees, spreading seeds
of favorites among fences.  On the earth
closed to us as a book we cannot

yet read, the seeds, the bulbs, the eggs
of the fervid green year await release
Over them on February's cold table I spread
a feast.  Wings rustle like summer leaves.

Marge Piercy, "Available Light"

I've been having tantrums lately, about feeling isolated and alienated and unsure of where to go or what to do.  I share these feelings, with an increased intensity and frequency, with many others these days.  The river is running very fast now.  The river is running like a torrent now.

I also tend to feel that tantrums, as long as they don't hurt anyone or become collectively a war or a riot.............can be very useful.  Children have tantrums;  eventually they exhaust themselves, and sometimes the tantrum's end is about learning new boundaries and maturity.  Tantrums for grownups can also not only vent, but reveal.  We spend so much time in our heads, in the "should be, used to be, would be, could be" realm of experience, which seems real at the time but usually isn't even mildly useful to the what is...... and meanwhile, as a wise angel who briefly turned up recently to set me straight said - "There's the NOW, patiently watching, saying 'well, are you done yet?"

Change is the only certainty.  The NOW is. 

So I had something happen magically, that was profound for me.  Sometimes when these things happen, it's easy to say to yourself, "well, that's silly", but as that Angel ("Angelos", from the Greek, originally meant "messenger") reminded me, "you listen, so you noticed."

I was facing a three day weekend at the Renfair in Los Angeles, selling my masks alone now, and early in the morning went to my car to open the door and hit the freeway, costume and lunch in hand.  Tucked into the handle of the door was a piece of dirty white paper.   When I pulled it out, I saw that it was folded into one of those paper airplanes that children make.  And when I unfolded it, I saw that it had two words, block printed in pencil in a childish hand, one on each side of the paper.  On one side it said "FEED", on the other "PLANT".

"Wow, that's really strange" I thought, and tossed it aside.  Why would some kid put it there?  And on I went to the Faire.

As I was setting up in the blissful quiet before the stampede of merrymakers,  a participant, dressed in a nobleman's costume, with a great burgundy  hat against and a white head of hair, came by and we had one of those brief conversations that can seem divinely channelled.  He affirmed the value of my work,  and the continuity we participate in as creators, whether we remember that or not.   All the people who interact with my masks, all the people who now make masks and wear them.   I needed to hear that.  And   he also reminded me of the inevitability of change, the suffering that comes from not accepting the "what is" of the moment.  Tantrums we can have, or very real grief - but we still have to get up, open up, learn,  grow, and deal.


I have a wrapped quartz crystal - on the first day I gave an extra mask to a man who didn't have much money and wanted one for his partner.  He came back later and presented me with the crystal, which he had mined himself in Arkansas. What a splendid gift!  My angelic friend (I don't know his name) immediately noticed my crystal, and said it was to help me.  So the conversation led into the morning's synchronicity, my little "paper airplane".  I think, had I not encountered this person, I would have completely forgotten about it.

He commented that it was "Written in the hand of a child learning his or her letters, in pencil.  Basic.  Not like the abstractions we "adults" make.  Like the work of real farmers is basic, the ground that supports us.  Without their labor, without the alchemy and generosity of the land and the farmers, none of this" (he made an expansive gesture indicating the vast urban complex called Los Angeles we were standing more or less in the center of) "none of this would exist.  The farmers and land sustain it all.  All the "higher" sophistication of our civilization falls apart when the land fails to care for us, and the true farmers, not those chemical factories, but true farmers..........aren't understood."

I might add that I thought it was Earth Day, and I'd somehow forgotten. I was wrong, but I think that gives further weight to his observation. "Feed and Plant is a profound message for all of us.  Especially now."  And then we shook hands, wished each other a great day, and parted ways.  My energy had completely changed, and I stood there with my mouth open.

"FEED" and "PLANT".   All of my  alienation, loneliness, lack of purpose, all those grand complexities...... if Angels deliver the occasional message in the form of  grubby paper planes, and then send an occasional human representative just to make sure attention is paid - well. that's otherwise called Grace.   I may not be a farmer, but we can all be farmers, literally by planting and growing even if it's a window box, getting our hands in the Earth, connecting with the alchemy and gift of the Earth.  As a universal message, it should be Earth Day everyday.

We all can, and do, "plant".  As an artist, I can plant beauty, inspiration, I can encourage others to do the same.  I can recognize the "trees" I'm planting, and have planted,  in my life.  Feed yourself and others with what sustains and nourishes.  Plant seeds that will feed the future, plant seeds that will grow into trees.  It doesn't need to be complicated at all.  Even sparrows do it.

Dutch Wind Sculptor Creates New Form of Life!

I have to thank my friend Charlie Spillar for this BBC Video about the Dutch sculptor Theo Jansen and his "Strandbeests". 

The man is pure genius, and I'm in awe of his vision!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSKyHmjyrkA

Mything Links

Kathleen Jenks MYTHING LINKS

I'd like to introduce Kathleen Jenks wonderful Mything Links site, and I'm touched that she chose to open her Spring Equinox page with one of my favorite poems, based upon the Celtic Goddess the Morrigan, warrior Goddess, bringer of Justice, and also the one who  remembers those who have fallen, bearing the brave away to the Summer Land.

http://www.mythinglinks.org/springequinox2000~Sapling.html 

 I think, re-imagining that poem, that true justice has to be circular and gestalt: founded on the empathy that arises from experiencing "both sides now".

Loneliness in America?

Americans' circle of close confidants has shrunk dramatically in the past two decades and the number of people who say they have no one with whom to discuss important matters has more than doubled, according to a new study by sociologists at the University of Arizona. "The evidence shows that Americans have fewer confidants" said Lynn Smith-Lovin, one of the study's authors. "This change indicates something that's not good for our society. Ties with a close network of people create a safety net. These ties also lead to civic engagement and local political action."

The study compared data from 1985 and 2004 and found that the number of people with whom Americans can discuss matters important to them dropped by nearly one-third, from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Researchers also found that the number of people who said they had no one with whom to discuss such matters more than doubled, to nearly 25 percent. The survey found that both family and non-family connections dropped, with the greatest loss in non-family connections.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Loneliness-Is-Getting-Rampant-in-America-27518.shtml 

The problem with an art and spiritual blog, which I guess this is, is that I feel reluctant to write about anything "personal", even though I'm a believer in the notion that the "personal is political". And spiritual.  I think, for this post, I'll step outside of my own taboo.

Yesterday I saw something that happens everyday, but it stayed with me.

I'm staying near the Renfair in Los Angeles, working at the show. It's not like the old days, when we were an "encampment" that lived and worked together for months.........this show people turn up, or their employees turn up, do the weekend show, and go home. .

I was looking for a post office, which I found.  There was a long line, and a nice looking gentleman, with a badge that said "Allesandro" was the "maitre'd" of the operation.  In the section between the postal tellers and the long  line was an older woman in a wheelchair.......I could see that she often came to the post office because she knew everyone's names, and in that unfortunate and busy place, she was trying to engage the tellers and Allesandro with conversation by asking a lot of questions about mailing options, asking where the bathroom was, and making some personal comments in the hope of response.  The people in line were annoyed because she was taking up time, and space, and the tellers smirked.  Finally she apologized, and told everyone she was "under the influence of legal drugs", meaning I assume painkillers, and away she rolled, looking embarrassed, down the street.

I didn't think she seemed like a crazy person............on the contrary, she had an intelligent face and a pleasant voice.  She was just desperately lonely, and here was a place with people who were "familiar", and where the hum of  activity was going on.  She was like a stray dog, hoping for a scrap of affection or attention in a place where she surely wasn't going to get it.

Did I do anything?  No, but I sympathized.   I have a better social mask than her, and I have legs and a car, so I'm better off.  I can go look at stuff and talk to myself (quietly) at the library, or a mall, or at the beach if I so choose.    I'm here for a month, and well stocked with books.  I am resigned to the idea that other than on the phone, I'll pretty much not talk to anyone.   And because everyone I know is so busy, I'm reluctant to call anyone anyway.  No one has time anymore, do they?

Besides talking to customers, and telephones, I won't lose my vocal cords, however.  There will be a thousand ritualistic interactions with tellers that will go, as regular as clockwork: 

"How are you?  Find everything you were looking for?  Have a great day!"

and I will answer in the same ritualistic ways "Fine!  Yes!  Thankyou!".  

Once or twice, being ornery and  infantile, I've responded with things like "no, I was looking for enlightenment" or, "well, actually I have been having an out of body experience" .... but all that does is throw an uncomfortable cog into the machine which pisses them off.  O brave new world.

Out of the same kind of lapsed memory the poor woman in the post office has (I bet she once lived in a small town where everyone knew the postmaster)......I still go to coffee shops, and sit there with a cappuchino looking for a receptive face.  But I think that avenue to conversation closed long ago, with the advent of wifi.  I'm used to being invisible, which isn't such a bad thing at times.  Should I be embarrassed to even be sharing these thoughts?  Probably.  I'm a mask maker.  I should know better.

So how do you meet anyone in America?  Well, I guess most people do it through family and work.  People like the Post Office lady have fallen through the cracks, and are very difficult to see - am I the only one who saw her?

I don't think people still have cocktail parties or dinner parties or bars where you can hear each other over the pa system, but I could be wrong about that.   My work puts me on the road often, or in a studio alone.  Although I meet lots of people on my travels, it's rare to find people with time to engage in social ways, and when I'm in a situation like my LA show, I don't try anymore.  Yesterday I met to give some money I owed to a nice lady who lives here, has worked for me for 4 years, and it would never in a million years occur to her to invite me to her family's home for dinner.  Her daughter, who also worked for me, came with her, and in the course of our meeting she was texting somebody, which left no doubt in my mind about how uninteresting I was to her.    My former apprentice has had a mask business, thanks to me, for 7 years, and she's never found time to have a visit with me for longer than an hour, although she comes to Arizona every year.   I just lent some masks to a former colleague for a ritual event up north - she found time to write me an email thank you.  Would she find time to call me personally?  Nope, and I wouldn't expect it.   

I don't blame people, they don't have the lens that I have. I think if you asked the people I mention above what they think of me, at least two of them would say they love me.   They don't feel themselves becoming invisible, perhaps, not yet.   I wonder if I'm the only person who feels this way, sometimes?  Is it a failure on my part?  Probably. 


I once had a Facebook account, but I closed it.  The idea of having 500 "friends" I couldn't talk to or touch in any personal way, with whom I could only have the most trivial exchanges of superficial information..............got to me.  There were people there I once slept with, or gave birth to, or ate meals with, or they stayed in my house, or they own art I made.  Now our exchanges are limited to 6 words, with an "LOL" on the end.  We've already done away with the use of paragraphs (except, thankfully, in the eloquent world of blogs!).

And I still don't know what "LOL" means anyway.  I'm a complete anachronism.   I'm probably one of only maybe 5 people in the entire world who think Facebook is scary.  For some it's spiders, for me, Facebook.

 I know, I know, this is indulgent.  I should meditate, workout, take a long walk,  look up "meetup.com". You're a Lightworker, Lauren, buck up here, think Positive and Manifest, etc.

Meanwhile,  sometimes, the mask slips off, and I wonder.  Am I really any different than that lady in the Post Office? We're all in this together.        

I should have asked her  to have lunch with me.  But, I suspect, if I had, she would have looked at me with something akin to terror or suspician, and refused. Maybe I should have tried anyway.