"Do Not Lose Heart"

A friend forwarded this beautiful article by Clarissa Pinkola Estes PhD, author of "Women Who Run With the Wolves".  Her comment about the tornado/water spout is poignant for me especially, since I have been having dreams of being at the center of a tornado, and able to see the "eye".  (And thanks once again to Joyce for her generosity).

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DO NOT LOSE HEART

By Clarissa Pinkola Estes 

Mis Estimados: Do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in the world right now...Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is - we were made for these times. 

Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement...I grew up on the Great lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind...Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold it's own, and to advance, regardless.

We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over brought down by naivete, by lack of love, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme. We have a history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially - we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection. Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered can be restored to life again.

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails. We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn't you say you were a believer? Didn't you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn't you ask for grace? Don't you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?

Understand the paradox: If you study the physics of a waterspout, you will see that the outer vortex whirls far more quickly than the inner one. To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it to swirl much less, to more evenly match the velocity of the inner core - till whatever has been lifted into such a vicious funnel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peaceable again. One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or desperation thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl.

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip towards an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take "everyone on Earth" to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

 

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these -- to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both, are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes ©2003 All rights reserved

 

Black Tara Revisited

I've been interested to notice that for the past 6 months or so, on the "stats" for this blog,  a two year old post about Black Tara, and another post about Kali get the most hits.  Why are people googling these aspects of the Dark Goddess so consistently? 

Ture, Dark Mother of Bones and Blood
Silent night and smoldering ruins
the Wheel always turning
Black heart center
of understanding.
Grant the art of Letting-go
in the still silence
of your dark smile
Om tare tuttare ture soha

Silverstar

The Tibetan Goddess Tara is celebrated with a long prayer called "The 21 Praises to Tara". The Goddess has 21 manifestations - peaceful and wrathful - all  expressions of divine mercy and wisdom. In the painting below, Green Tara is surrounded by smaller figures, each representing a different aspect of the Goddess (such as "White Tara", "Red Tara", etc.)Black Tara is a wrathful manifestation, identical in form and, probably  source, to Hindu Kali. Like Kali, she has a headdress of grinning skulls, like Kali, she is black, like Kali she has three eyes. Like many Tibetan deities in the wrathful aspect, she has the fangs of a tiger, symbolizing ferocity, a ferocious appetite to devour the demons of the mind. Her aura or halo is fiery, energetic, full of smoke symbolizing the transformation of fire.

Kali is the great Dark Mother of India. In Hindu mythology, when the world was being devoured by demons, there came a time when even the great Gods couldn't battle them. And so Durga manifested Kali the terrible, the "last ditch savioress". Kali is the One who brings the forest fire, levelling the ground so new growth can occur, the surgeon who cuts away morbid tissue so flesh can heal.

The icon of Kali, dancing on the prostrate body of Shiva, is a strange image to the western sensibility. Christian theology is dualistic, but Hinduism and Buddhism are not. In Bali, the curbs of Ubud are all painted like a checker board, black and white, as are the altar clothes. This is to remind those who walk down the street continuously of Sekala and Neskala, the continuing balance of Dark and Light, the yin/yang of life. Kali appears in Bali as the dreadful, fanged, bloodthirsty Rangda. Battles with her are always fought by the benign dragon, the Barong, in dreadful graveyards. But no one ultimately wins. Because the battle must continually be fought. And Rangda, work done, often then returns to the heaven realms, to become beautiful, peaceful Uma, wife of their version of Lord Shiva. Kali, whose name means "Time" (Kala) lives beyond form, beyond the pairs of opposites, the truth beyond the skeins of karma and time.

Tara has been my revered and mysterious divine teacher for many years. I won't presume to say I can understand a Goddess ......... they are archetypal, collective intelligences ..........but if I was going to make a tenuous statement, it would be when you call on a Goddess, She's not going to give you a polite reply that's been spell-checked. The ineffable work with us in the arena of energy, in the field of dreams and soul language.  But Black Tara,  Kali,  is so important to our time, dancing Her tough love, crimson lips full of that vast, vast laughter. 

There's a great film called "The Shipping News" (with Kevin Spacey). Towards the end of the movie, a storm has destroyed his old family's house, a weary old house haunted with too many dark secrets, too much ancestral karma. Moored atop a crag, the house has been blown at last into the ocean below to vanish beneath the waves. Confronting the littered place where it once stood, Spacey (who has become a newspaper reporter) comments:

"Headline: House disappears in storm. The view is great."

 KALI

Kali is called "she who devours time".  Hindu  legend tells that Kali was so full of the rapture of battle that she destroyed all before her as she danced.  None could stop her,  so  Lord Shiva lay  down before her.  When Kali stepped on her husband's body  her madness ceased  and she stopped at last.  But there is a Tantric interpretation that the aroused Lord Shiva represents the  ecstasy of death,  and hence trans-form-ation.  Kali is  the destroyer of the illusions of time.

"Kali is the surgeon. She cuts away what has to go. I ask for that quality to come into me when I have to cut something out of my life; an addiction, or a relationship that no longer is about growth. And I ask it be done precisely, cutting away the dis-ease, malignancy, the aspects that no longer serve. That's what Kali is to me: the last resort savior. When the Gods couldn't kill the demonic forces that ravaged the Earth, they called on a woman's wrath.

We've all forgotten that the Goddess, the Divine, dwells within us. She dwells within us all the time, and not just when you wear a mask, or are in a workshop, or a ritual. In Tantric
philosophy, we're all considered emanations of the Gods and Goddesses - we are their
material aspects on this plane of existence. We're not bodies seeking the spirit, we're spirits  
seeking bodily experiences. Sacred performance, for me, is about remembering that. And remembering is truly a devotional practice. In Hindu traditions  everyone has a deity they focus on as their personal deity. In the West, as we reclaim forms of the Goddess for spiritual
practice, we need to create a relationship with the Goddess form we have chosen, in order to
manifest what we need for spiritual and emotional growth, to invoke the help of that Goddess. That practice is not just cerebral. We function out of our whole self, our bodies and spirits. The body-mind. That is the place we can re-member, the place we can communicate with the Goddess within ourselves.

Kali is so much about contemporary life. Women need to become angry now.  About the
women of Afghanistan, the meaningless wars, the destruction of our environment.  The demons  of insatiable greed that are devouring our planet. Those souls who await the future are being denied their birthright. Kali is the catalyst for saying "No more".She's the voice of women whose voices aren't being heard, the voice of women who need to open their mouths and speak for the first time. 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."Mothers aren't saying that. They're giving their children away, giving them away to war, giving them away by allowing our environment to be depleted, giving permission to the powers that be to destroy their future." 

Drissana Devananda (2001)

***I am embarrassed to find this worthy commentary about Kali in my files, and not the credits. I hope, should the author ever find me, he or she will accept my apology, and appreciation for the wise scholarship.

"Kali's black complexion symbolizes her all-embracing nature. Says the Mahanirvana Tantra: "Just as all colors disappear in black, so all names and forms disappear in her".Kali is free from the illusory covering, for she is beyond the all maya or "false consciousness." Her red lolling tongue indicates her omnivorous nature —her indiscriminate enjoyment of all the world's 'flavors'. Her sword is the destroyer of false consciousness.

Her three eyes represent past, present, and future, — the three modes of time — an attribute that lies in the very name Kali ('Kala' in Sanskrit means time). The eminent translator Sir John Woodroffe in Garland of Letters, writes, "Kali is so called because She devours Kala (Time) and then resumes Her own dark formlessness."Kali's proximity to cremation grounds where the five elements or "Pancha Mahabhuta" come together, and all worldly attachments are absolved, again point to the cycle of birth and death. "

Flashback to the 60's....

I looked up the word "Flashback" and no one seems to remember where it originally came from, but as it was used in the '60's it originally refered to "flashing back" to an acid trip.  Acid culture is long gone but thanks to Google one can revisit it through Google, the  Akashic Record, right here at my finger tips without the inconvenience of having to die or leave my body.  How great is that! So I was thinking about the 60's and I remembered  going to those cavernous auditoriums where  Cream and The Doors and Love  played, not to mention the Whiskey A Go Go and Love Ins.  I was so into being one of "Vito's dancers", before I was whisked off to college and the more serious clime of Berkeley, to the relief of my father.  Artist Vito Paulekas  was a catalyst for change in Los Angeles in the '60's.....he  probably coined the term "freak out"..........  

Burned Forest, Terrible Beauty near Nogal, N.M.

"There’s another emotion associated with art, which is not of the beautiful but of the sublime. What we call monsters can be experienced as sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain them.....Another mode of the sublime is of prodigious energy, force, and power."

Joseph Campbell

 My friend artist  Georgia Stacy took these photos of the burned forest near Nogal, New Mexico.   It threatened her home in June, and she was evacuated for a while.    Georgia is so attuned to the "spirits of the land" around her, and she said that, as terrible as it was, she had a sense that there was something necessary, something about balance, in this.  The photo above, brilliant green of new life through the charred branches, speaks volumes. We spoke of the erry beauty of these images, and how she saw houses in charred ruin, with signs that say "no trespassing" and "private property" lying among the ashes.

That speaks as well.

All photos copyright Georgia Stacy 2012

The Universe Responds

"I the Song, I walk here"

Native American chant

I've always loved this poem..........I ran across it a long time ago while studying traditions of some of the Plains Indians.  To sing or chant is to become  entrained with others, with the environment, with one's footsteps.  Deity for these people was neither a "He" or a "She", but a Song to become harmonized with, to feel beneath your feet.

 Max Weber once commented that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." **   A mechanistic view of the world does not animate it, nor allow us to participate within it. A mechanistic worldview leaves us isolated from the world, and ultimately, from each other as well.  If we lived within an "in-chanted" world, how differently might we live?

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The Universe Responds

by Alice Walker

A few years ago I wrote an essay called "Everything is a Human Being", which explores to some extent the Naive American view that all of creation is of one substance and therefore deserving of the same respect. In it I described the death of a snake that I caused, and wrote of my remorse.

That summer, "my" land in the country crawled with snakes. There was always the large resident snake, whom my mother named "Susie", crawling about in the area that marks the entrance to my studio. But there were also lots of others wherever we looked. A black-and-white king snake appeared underneath the shower stall in the garden. A striped red-and-black one, very pretty, appeared near the pond. It now revealed the little hole in the ground in which it lived by lying half in and half out of it as it basked in the sun. Garden snakes crawled up and down the roads and paths. One day leaving my house with a box of books in his arms, my companion literally tripped over one of these.

We spoke to all of these snakes in friendly voices. They went their way, we went ours. After about a two week bloom of snakes, we seemed to have our usual number: just Susie and a couple of her children.

A few years later, I wrote an essay about a horse called Blue. It was about how humans treat horses and other animals; how hard it is for us to see them as the suffering, fully conscious, enslaved beings they are. After reading this essay in public only once, this is what happened. A white horse came and settled herself on the land. (Her owner, a neighbor, soon came to move her.) The two horses on the ranch across the road began to run up to their fence whenever I passed, leaning over it and making what sounded like joyful noises. They had never done this before (I checked with the human beings I lived with to be sure of this), and after a few more times of greeting me as if I'd done something especially nice for them, they stopped. Now, when I pass they look at me with the same reserve they did before. But there is still a spark of recognition.

What to make of this?

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I think I am telling you that the animals of the planet are in desperate peril, and that they are fully aware of this. No less than human beings are doing in all parts of the world, they also are seeking sanctuary. But I am also telling you that we are connected to them at least as intimately as we are connected to trees. Without plant life human beings could not breathe. They are the lungs of our planet. Plants produce oxygen. Without free animal life I believe we will lose increasingly the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. "Magic", intuition, sheer astonishment at the forms the Universe devises in which to express life - to express itself - will no longer be able to breathe in us.

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But what I'm also sharing with you is this thought: The Universe responds. What you ask of it, it gives. The military-industrial complex and its leaders and scientists have shown more faith in this reality than have those of us who do not believe in war and who want peace. They have asked the Earth for all its deadlier substances. They have been confident in their faith in hatred and war. The universe, ever responsive, the Earth, ever giving, has opened itself fully to their desires. Ironically, Black Elk (the Lakota shaman) and nuclear scientists can be viewed in much the same way: as men who prayed to the Universe for what they believed they needed and who received from it a sign reflective of their own hearts.

I remember when I used to dismiss the bumper sticker "Pray for Peace". I realize now that I did not understand it, since I also did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world of our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine.

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(From: "The Universe Responds: Or, How I learned We Can Have Peace on Earth", Living by the Word, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, N.Y., N.Y., 1988.)

Hot Springs Satori?

Well, in the existential department, I'm looking for direction again, so I guess I'll need to be a bit self-absorbed for a while.  In pursuit of this, on the 4th of July I went to my favorite funky hot springs  in Safford, AZ, and had the whole place to myself.  I sat in the water watching the moon and an art project called "Numinous" plopped into my mind, numbered and indented as if it was neatly typewritten in academic Proposal format!  It included 3 different components.  (I didn't see any footnotes, however.) This doesn't happen to me very often when I'm blissfully bathing in hot water under the moon.


Well, actually, come to think of it, it sometimes does.  I'm a double Leo, I live in the desert, and I used to be a fire dancer.  Fire, fire, fire, love the stuff, except when it involves forests.  And yet, it seems that water is the element that provides refuge for my soul, the creative "spring".

I remember a vivid dream I had  in 1998 at Harbin Hot Springs about being given an antique typewriter that was buried in the ground.  As I dusted the dirt off of it it began to type by itself, spewing forth pages and pages of stories about Goddesses. Then the pages turned into pictures, and the pictures turned into a long line of women, dressed in beautiful costumes.  Women of all colors, black, blue, white, red, and yellow, stood before me like a luminous, expectant  rainbow.  Not long after I returned to my studio in Berkeley, I was invited to attend  a meeting to plan the upcoming Spiral Dance in San Francisco. That year the theme was diversity, and the group wanted masks to celebrate the Goddess.  And so I began work that summer on a series of  masks.  At the  Spiral Dance that October my dream came true.  Twenty-five women in a rainbow of colors formed a masked procession.  The dream proceeded the creation and event.....and I think, when we engage with the mythic or archetypal realm, many people find what is circular and seamless.......***

Last year I went to the Holy Wells in Glastonbury, and participated in a Waters of the World Ceremony at the Temple of the Goddess.  Now that was true magic.......This year I've had to stay  closer to home, so I settled for "The Essence of Tranquility" hot springs, one of the better kept secrets of eastern Arizona.   And, because it was the 4th of July, no one was there so I had the whole place to myself!

I've been rolling the ideas that "arrived" around in my head ever since.  "Numinous"....and I plan on researching the word a bit more in a future entry.  Here's what I scratched on to a piece of damp paper..........the first time I've had a  vision that was so academic...........although, it's really a variation on what I've always done since the day I first walked into a stone chamber with a ley crossing in Putney, Vermont, in the summer of  1982, thanks to master dowser Sig Lonegren.  I felt vibrant energy there, I watched my divining rod "helicopter", and I've been asking myself ever since:  "How do we speak to the Earth?  How does the Earth speak to us?" 

So, please forgive me, friends, if I try to get a handle on this...........

Numinous 

Component 1)  Masks.  In traditional societies masks are "Liminal Tools".  Traditionally they were perceived as being mediation tools between shamanic states, or different dimensions of being.  A mask might allow spirits to participate, communicate, even prophesize and heal.  They can be seen in this respect as a way to permit "numina" or the spirits of place to to communicate through the medium of the mask, and the one who wears the mask. 


Component 2) Story.   What might the spirit of a place, the "genius loci"  say?  How would "place" speak to participants?  Perhaps, though visioning exercises, art process, meditation, creating handmade books, masks, or shrines that "engage and invite the numinous"?

Component 3) Vision. How might Numina be  "personified" or "voiced"  in contemporary terms, even as they are now "dis-placed"? *

* "Indigenous people have always known corn metaphorically in two or more of the four senses,  mother, enabler, transformer, healer; that I use throughout this weaving.  Although early  European settlers took the grain only, there is evidence in America today that the Corn-Mother  has taken barriers of culture and language in stride and intimated her spirit to those who will  listen, even if they don't know her story or call her by name."

Marilou Awiakta

***Artist Lorraine Chapparell's amazing "Hands" sculpture also had its inception in a dream in which she saw the piece in an art history book, complete with its title "Hands".  "The dreams are easy; it's bringing them to physical fruition that takes time." she said about the almost 10 tears between the dream and creating the sculpture.

Images are copyright Lorraine Capparell (www.skymuseum.com)

"A Blessing Way" Synchronicity

In the house made of dawn
in the house made of evening twilight,
in beauty may I walk,
with beauty above me, beauty below me

I walk with beauty all around me,

I walk with beauty it is finished.
 

.......Navajo (Dine) chant

 The Navajo word for sand-paintings means "place where the gods come and go." 
Sand-painting has been used for centuries in religious rituals and healing ceremonies performed by Navajo medicine men.  A sand-painting is made  in the ceremonial hogan and destroyed at the end of the ritual, in much the same way that Tibetan sand paintings are also destroyed.  In order to preserve this  tradition in the 1940's, Navajos began to create permanent sand-paintings, changing the design slightly to protect the religious significance when these paintings were shown publicly.
 

I've been feeling very unsure, this summer, about where to go from here.  I putter around the house, take care of my mother's needs, and spend a lot of time looking back, since I don't know what is foreward. 

Yesterday I was listening to the Ode to Joy, of all things, pondering The Question, when I felt something crawling around my mouth.  Wiping my mouth with my hand, I found a tiny spider, which quickly disappeared when I set her down on the table.  I've had many strange synchronicities with Spiders, and tend to think of them as Spider Woman's little reminders.  Perhaps the meaning of this is to speak - and indeed, I've been thinking that the next step for me is to teach and share whatever bits of wisdom and experience I may have.

I turned to the very beginning of this Blog, which was the day I began my cross country trip  to pursue my Spider Woman Project.   I found this little article I had written just prior to leaving for Michigan (I began my Community Arts Project "Spider Woman's Hands" in Midland, Michigan with a fellowship from the Alden B. Dow Creativity  Center.  Midland is the home of Dow Chemical.  It was a strange place to end up weaving a "Web of All Life" ritual art project..........but, maybe not........)

Friday, June 1, 2007

If synchronicity can be the touch of the Spiderwoman, if a synchronicity or two could be touchstones along the path,  I'm off to a good start as I pack my car. Just two days ago I was helping Randy Ford to move.  I was reading that morning about Spiderwoman as She occurs in Navajo mythology, reading as well some of their beautiful chants that are used by Singers in various curing ceremonies. Randy needed boxes, and so I went to U haul to purchase a few. Standing in line, I saw I was behind a couple with a little girl.  They were heading for Window Rock, Arizona, and I could hear that they were speaking in Navajo.

"As opposed to the other Navajo [Diné] Chant Ways, which are used to effect a cure of a problem, the Blessingway [Hózhó jí] is used to bless the "one sung over," to ensure good luck, good health and blessings for all. It is sometimes referred to by English speaking Diné as being "for good hope." The name of the rite, Hózhó jí, is translated as Blessingway, but that is certainly not an exact translation. In the Navajo language (diné bizaad) the term encompasses everything that is interpreted as good - as opposed to evil, favorable for man. It encompasses such words as beauty, harmony, success, perfection, well-being, ordered, ideal. The intent of this rite is to ensure a good result at any stage of life, and therefore the translation of Blessingway.”
 

So, let the journey begin as a "Blessing Way".



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Post Script in the Now:   I remember that when I got back to Tucson at the end of that summer,  as I headed for my house, car still packed, I had a very sudden need to go to the bathroom and stopped at the nearest convenience store.  A young woman was standing by the entrance when I came out, and she begged me for a ride.  Of course I took her, and on the way to where she was going, she told me she was Navajo from Northern Arizona, and she wanted to go home.  It's not that common to meed Navajo people in Tucson.  That kind of "wrapped" the trip for me.  A ritual, a Blessing.