The Virtues and Vices

"Generosity"

 
I'm in a show next week at Raices Teller Gallery, and the theme for the show is "Virtue and Vice".    According to the dictionary, the 4 traditional cardinal virtues are prudence, justice,  temperance, and fortitude, which are derived from Greek philosophy.   The Church added faith, hope, and charity.  The 7 Deadly Sins are Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Wrath, Greed, and Sloth.  If you want to know more about them in particular, there's a handy website called Deadly Sins.com, which informs me that "you probably commit some of them every day without thinking about the rich tradition of eternal damnation in which you're participating."*

That's enough to cause me to pause as I reach for that 4th chocolate chip cookie.

"There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil— a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome."  

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

But the show has me thinking about what virtue and vice actually mean to me.  Often without thinking about it, we predicate much of our judgement of others, and ourselves, on externalized and internalized ideas of what are virtues or vices. And virtues and vices vary from culture to culture and individual to individual in their importance or lack thereof.  And, unlike the world of  Jane Austen, so full of moral certainties which gave a comforting "backbone" to the lives of her characters, our is a time of tremendous confusion.  I've been thinking about what my own thoughts on virtue and vice are in these strange times, so forgive me if I ponder them for a little while.  

HONOR

Although it's not on the "big list" of Virtue, what I find myself thinking about a great deal is HONOR.  And it's diminutive expression, COURTESY.  Honor..........The circulation of goods in a local economy is obviously not the same as the massive, impersonal world of Wall Street. Capitalism as we experience it is based on manipulation of others, with little regard, if any, for the moral consequences.  In fact, people get advanced degrees in how to manipulate the market and people to buy things they don't really need.

When was the last time you saw something for sale for $1.00?
$5.00?  $10.00?  Long ago someone figured out that if something is priced at $1.99, people can be manipulated into buying something because is seems to be $1 and not what it really is, which is one penny short of $2.  So absolutely everything has a 99 on the end of it - this dishonesty and lack of respect for those who engage in the exchange of money for goods is written into virtually every mercantile exchange we make.  It's worth thinking about what that means in terms of the notion of honor, and business.

Here's something else we take for granted as "the way things are".  We have labor unions to protect the workers, to provide fair wages, pensions at retirement.  We have laws that protect against child labor, hours that are unfair, and that protect the environment.  All the way it should be - but very little is made in the U.S. anymore.  Every time you go into Walmart you are participating in a hypocrisy.  There's a chance that that tee shirt, or beaded bag, was made in a sweatshop by a 14 year girl working 13 hour days in an environment that spews toxins into the local river with impunity.  And we're paying for it big time.  I think of how many sad, impoverished,  abandoned down towns I've driven through, whether Herkimer, New York, or Beatrice, Nebraska, or Lordsburg, New Mexico......and on the outskirts of each, the Big Box stores. If money is the basis for what we value, and how we determine worth, then honor falls by the wayside, or moves to the outskirts of town, sucking up the prosperity that should be at the center, and giving little back.



Anyway, the hour is getting late, and I must ramble on virtue and vice later........


______________________
*  They have an excellent, updated section called "The People's Choice: Nominate a New Deadly Sin".  I admire them for their efforts to keep up with the times.

Evolutionary Humor

My friend Charlie comes up with some funny ones........

"Thrive" Movie

Here's an interesting movie that a friend recently passed on information to me about (thanks Joyce!).  I haven't seen it fully, so can't really comment about it, but plan on seeing it soon.

The author of the movie, Foster Gamble, begins his introduction with the question "What happened?  What can account for the staggering deprivation and suffering on this planet?"  ..... he has his own conclusions, and conversation, within the movie.  I can't help but add my own comment, which is to say, I do believe the first solution arises from a profound understanding of inter-dependency, that on virtually every level, socially, environmentally, psychically, energetically..........we are all related, and interdependant.  From that much can be accomplished.  If we can evolve to internalize such a basic truth.

Hands

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.

-- David Whyte

from Everything is Waiting for You

©2003 Many Rivers Press

I've been in the studio making hands with roots again........I never seem to get tired of that image.  This excerpt from a poem came to mind.  Perhaps that's one of the meanings of my obsessive hands - the rootedness of our lives in all other lives, the past and present and future, poised in an open hand.  It seems a beginning place for me, an icon I need to begin the new year with, to help me remember that we live in a relational world, a "Conversation".

2012!......Spider Woman's Time

“What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a webbed vision? The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

Catherine Keller, Theologian, "From a Broken Web" (1987)

"We do not need to invent a ground of connectedness, but only to realize it.  Inter relatedness has been experientially grasped in myriad cultural contexts - yet the force of modernity continually denies and degrades it."


Charlene Spretnak, from The Politics of Women's Spirituality

Where will the "5th World" begin?  Will Spider Woman, called also Tse che Nako, "Thought Woman" in some Pueblo traditions - will She come again, to help humanity find our way once more into the Next World?

I believe so, truly I do.  It seems important to honor Spider Woman today, so I felt like sharing some little of what I know of Her again, on the advent of 2012, this great moment, this "Fifth World", this  New Age.  I feel her threads, brushing against my cheek, my hand, these days. 

As I sit in this internet cafe, the buzz of electronically connected and connecting people all around me with their laptops and devices....I can't help but feel that, ever inventive and working with the times, the World Wide Web....is Spider Woman's latest appearance.  She's weaving all around us, waking us up.

Pueblo mythology tells that when each of the 3 Hopi worlds ended, it was Spider Grandmother who led the people through the sipapu, through the kiva (or birth canal) into the next world, the "4th  world".  Now, according to the Hopi and Mayan calendars (and this is no coincidence, since they are related cultures)....the 4th World has ended.  The Fifth World is beginning.   With so many people tuned to the "2012" myth, which has reached almost archetypal proportions thanks to Hollywood, it seems strange that so few know of Spider Woman, the universal midwife.

But, that's kind of Her way.  She stays hidden, until people are ripe to listen.  She doesn't waste her time.  She comes when the time is right, the labor pangs have begun.

"It is through the poetry of myth, mask and metaphor Spider Woman comes alive. The rock surface of an ancient petroglyph site is merely a veil between the observer and the other transcendental realms; it becomes a portal through which to enter the world of Spider Woman. As others have written before me: "She is with me now as I tell you these stories."

 Carol Patterson-Rudolph, "On The Trail of Spider Woman" (1997)

As anthropologist Carol Patterson-Rudolph has written,  to the Navajo Spider Woman ((NA ASHJE’II ’ASDZÁÁ) represents an initiation into a mature, integrated way of being.  It could be said into a  more interconnected way of seeing, a "webbed vision". She is able to bridge the sacred and prosaic dimensions of life - but for those who are not ready, Grandmother Spider will remain invisible, just as invisible as her powerful but transparent threads, as insignificant as a tiny insect,  so small she can sit on a shoulder, or patiently wait in her web,  and never be seen.

And yet, for those with eyes to see, her Web is everywhere, and she will offer wisdom with a still, small voice, carried in   the breath of the wind.

Hopi legend tells that  each previous world was destroyed when humanity fell out of harmony with the divine plan.  Not unlike the Biblical Great Flood, in some versions of the legend, the world became, once again, full of chaos and war.  At last a terrible deluge destroyed everything, and only a few survived,  led  by Spider Woman to the next higher world, changing in many ways as they  as they emerged.  In the most prevalent  version of this story,  Spider Grandmother caused a hollow reed to  emerge into the Fourth World at the sipapu, the hole in the earth (I think of the Omphallos, the world navel of ancient Greece)  from which the people emerged as they climbed up the reed into this 4th world. 

The earliest "Spider Woman" image is found among the Mayans, and she is clearly also identified as Mother Earth.  Among the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest,  Grandmother Spiderwoman is also called "Thought Woman" ("Tse Che Nako"). She is a Creatrix deity as well, and can be  found among the Navajo, the Lakota, the Zuni, Hopi, Cherokee............she is ubiquitous.  Images of the  "Spider and Cross" are found everywhere among prehistoric peoples throughout the South and Midwest, the Mississippian mound builders.   

In Navajo rugs, “Spider Woman’s Cross” is a symbol of balance or completion.  To this day, a bit of spider web is rubbed into the palms of infant girls, so they will become a good weavers.  Spider Woman's threads weave from the center of life.  We are all Relations......."look" she seems to instruct, "see the pattern, see the threads, the symmetry.  Weave your lives from there."

In his book on Hopi religion,  John Loftin writes that:

 “Spider Woman was the first to weave. Her techniques and patterns have stood the test of time, or more properly, the test of timelessness – because they have always been present. It makes sense that one would follow the instructions of a deity who helped to form the underlying structure of the world in which one lives…..…..Weaving is not an act in which one creates something oneself – it is an act in which one uncovers a pattern that was already there.” 

Thought Woman as creatrix spins the world into being with what she imagines, with the stories she tells about the world, spun from her very substance, her silken threads that are invisible, yet stronger than steel.  Threads organize into patterns, ever expanding in complexity and scale. Tse Che Nako weaves,  sharing the creative power with all of her descendants. We are all "Spider Woman's hands",  weaving, bringing the imaginal, transparent web into being.  There is a contemporary Hopi prophecy circulating on the web these days that says "the time of the lone wolf is over."  I agree.  The esoteric knowledge of our inter-dependancy, and of our quontum creative power, is no longer hidden, it's right here, before our very eyes.  

Tse Che Nako, Thought-Woman,  The Spider
  is sitting in Her room now  thinking up a good story.
  I'm telling you the story  She is thinking."

Keresan Pueblo Proverb

A spiritual paradigm is founded upon mythic roots - the "warp and woof” from which ideas grow. Following the metaphor  Katherine Keller has provided in her book "From a Broken Web" - can we can find contemporary mythic models that allow us to envision our world as it really is – a shimmering web of interconnected relationships, an ecology of being. Can we find ways to "see the world with a webbed vision”?  Can we take Spider Woman's gift, and emerge collectively into the 5th World?

As we each  rub a bit of spider web into the palms of our hands at the New Year,  wishing all my friends strength, vision, and loving Relations. 

 "The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as "What stories do I want to live?"   Insofar as I'm non-dual with my narratives, that question is just as much, "What stories want to come to life through me?"  

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories"

References:


Loftin, John D. , Religion and Hopi Life, Second Edition, Indiana University Press, 2003
Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web (1989), Thames & Hudson
Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, On the Trail of Spiderwoman, 1997, Ancient City Press

Winter Poem

From "The winter of Listening"

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.

Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

. . . . . . . . . .

by David Whyte

Life Between Life - Michael Newton

 I woke up at around 5:00 this morning because I heard my cell phone ringing loudly.  Not fully awake, I lumbered around looking for the darn thing.  When I finally found it, it showed no history of any call whatsoever.  So, awake now, I crawled back into bed, and picked up the book I'd been reading the previous night, which I opened to a page about how spirit guides contact their embodied students.....and I couldn't help but think, "well, if you're going to call, can you please leave a message?"  That's one "wake up call" I'll remember!

"Journey of Souls"  by Michael Newton Ph.D. has been around since the 90's, and there are several other books he's written about his many years of research as well.  Dr. Newton began as a hypnotherapist, and as he recounts, stumbled on a patient who "re-membered", from a transpersonal state, being in the spirit realm, between lives on earth.  He, and his colleagues, have since worked with hundreds of people to explore the subject, and the "between life therapy" he's developed aims to help people understand better the "soul purposes" of why they incarnated.  Now retired, Dr. Newton has founded the Michael Newton Institute, which trains practitioners in past and between life therapy.

I confess, it's a strange book, written in such a dry, academic style, that I sometimes have to laugh, considering the vastness of the subject.  But impossible to put down.  And my own "wake up call" may very well be about getting back to work...........

https://youtu.be/Vk5bSG78pbQ