Magic.....

"The Magician Card" from Rainbow Bridge Oracle

"The object isn’t to make art,
 it’s to be in that wonderful state 
which makes art inevitable.” 

~Robert Henri

Sometimes I wake up  with a strange, often annoying,  song playing in my head.  Usually one that won't go away until I sit down and think about it.  In the past I' ve had songs from  the Beachboys, commercials, and Peter and Gordon.  Recently it's  Olivia Newton John - three days of:

"Got to believe we are Magic,  nothing can get in our way" 

So.........what could this mean?  Is there something  I need to pay attention to, mediate on, or do I just have a loose synapse stuck in the 70's somehow? Considering I just wrote about Monsanto as comparable to Voldemort,  perhaps one meaning is that we must not allow such corporate Black Magic to sap our hope.  We can create change. 

 The Dictionary defines magic as "the belief that  things, people or events can be affected through supernatural forces".  Starhawk defined magic as a verb,  proactive:

"the art of changing consciousness at will" 

Perhaps, viewed as a verb rather than a noun,  "Magic" is a way of  "changing consciousness at will" in order to more consciously and  creatively engage with the co-creative universe, with Flow*.  That's where we become "Sorcerors", seeking an active connection with  "Source".  

In the painting I did for the  "Magician" Card, from the Rainbow Bridge Oracle  (it's actually a portrait of my ex-husband, who is also an artist) the  Magician is, making the universal gesture of Invocation.  I never saw the classical Tarot card as about  "commanding", but rather, using skilled attention and the various tools available, he is opening himself, inviting, the cosmic White Light  to work through and with him in order to create, to manifest on the material plane.  

He draws the white light of universal energy ("the Above") through his hand, through his will and and his willingness to create (to "handle").  But the light must move through is heart, his desire, inspiration and passion, in order to  manifest on the physical plane ("the Below").  Tapping into "Source", his creative energies manifest and unfold, and are broken into the "rainbow" components of the physical world in all of it’s  diversity, it's vast spectrum of form and expression and evolution.  From the One, the Many.   The Mage is an artist in every sense of the word, for his magic arises from  understanding and respect for the tools he has to work with,  and a realization that ultimately all things are one, connected to the infinite realm from which all manifestations originate. 

The card, read in my own deck, urges the persons being divined to remember that they are artists - the  Magicians of their lives.  We each can  "invoke" our  potential through wise use of will, vision and inspiration.   Reversed, the card can indicate an inability to manifest (create)  due to any number of conditions, including lack of self-esteem, discipline, or necessary education.  The Querant may also be rendering his or her  "power" over to others, and the card may indicate the presence of an individual displaying an  egotistic abuse of  power, or an  urge to manipulate others, that lacks both spiritual understanding and contact.

"Sympathetic Magic" by Kathleen Holder

Perhaps this is a hopelessly idealistic thing to say, but ultimately, all enduring creativity has to come from love.  We become Sorcerors when we draw from the the Source.   I also love the word "enchantment", which comes from the Latin root word "chanter", to "chant" or to "sing".  Thus to  "en-chant" is to join with the chorus,  to  be "within the Song".

Everyone knows the magical word "Abracadabra", which stage magicians exclaim just before they pull a rabbit out of a hat.  But not everyone knows that (from Wikipedia)  variations on the word were used as a magical formula by the Gnostics of the sect of Basilides in invoking the aid of beneficent spirits against disease and misfortune. It is found on Abraxas stones which were worn as amulets.   Subsequently, its use spread beyond the Gnostics into popular usage.  Abracadabra is probably derived from the Hebrew or Aramaic language "Avra Kadavrai" (אברא כדברי) meaning "I will create as my words".

 "I've often heard words and songs as I work.  I felt an underlying pattern or rhythm.  I wanted to include that sensation, to make it part of the structure.  "Singing" seemed important.  The creation myth of the Australian Aborigines involves the idea of "singing the world into existence".  I wanted to feel a musical time in the work, as if I was walking and singing.  Again, here is that relationship between figure and land:  I saw rhythm reflecting consciousness walking across the land, the walk of consciousness.

Dreams frequently precede what happens in my work.  It's like what I was saying about the poem being not so much a reference, but a part of the work.  The dreams are a part of the work as well, there's no separation."

Caroline Beasley Baker, discussing her installation "A Magic Spell For The Far Journey" (1989)

The World According to Monsanto: A Terrifying Look

 

They say that all evil really needs is enough good people who say nothing, and I think the amazing passivity with which Americans are allowing Monsanto to change, own, and modify our food source is terrifying.    I posted previously about the "Monsanto Protection Act" that was just passed, and feel, in good conscience, that I need to post further for the benefit of any who may not know.  Below  is the   documentary "The World According to Monsanto".   Having watched it, I BELIEVE EVERYONE NEEDS TO SEE THIS FILM.  This is truly monumental, and frightening, whether we're hearing a French scientist report that the universally used weedkiller Roundup "provokes the cell division leading to the formation of cancer", to the almost complete  loss of independent farms and  biodiversity in Uruguay.   

In India farmers are being driven to suicide because they can no longer, due the fact that Monsanto completely controls the cotton seed market,  afford to plant their traditional crops (Monsanto and the Seeds of Suicide)........(see also "The World According to Monsanto" below to understand the problem).  As a result, they are falling deeper and deeper into debt, losing their lands, and being displaced from traditional homelands.  

 

In North America as well,  Indiana farmer Troy Rouse talks about being sued by Monsanto and the "gene police" phenomenon.  (Consider:  if you grow organic or conventional,  and your neighbor grows Monsanto, the two will  inevitably cross and you will be legally liable to be sued by Monsanto when they field test your seeds.)  Further, seed crops are being designed to be sterile, so that future planting must be purchased anew from the corporation.    What this could mean is that essential crops could be potentially controlled by a corporate entity demanding a tax which it can determine at will.   They're doing this in India now.

We need to educate ourselves as to what lobbyists are accomplishing - it is frightening indeed to allow Monsanto to control  food production, as well as unleashing biologically modified crops with very little testing, and certainly no long term understanding of what the consequences of such tampering could mean.

As a mythologist,  I cannot help but reflect that the two most popular Epics of the 20 years was "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter", both about a "Dark Lord" intent on sacrificing everything in the pursuit of power.  When I think of forces in the world like the arrogance and soul-lessness of Monsanto, I think of these films, reflecting the shadow of our crucial time.

 "Monsanto's talk of ‘technology' tries to hide its real objectives of control  where genetic engineering is a means to control seed.  These are the promises Monsanto India's website makes, alongside pictures of smiling, prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra. This is a desperate attempt by Monsanto and its PR machinery to delink the epidemic of farmers' suicides in India from the company's growing control over cotton seed supply - 95 per cent of India's cotton seed is now controlled by Monsanto."......GMOs are failing to control pests and weeds, and have instead led to the emergence of superpests and superweeds.   The highest acreage of Bt cotton is in Maharashtra and this is also where the highest farmer suicides are. Suicides increased after Bt cotton was introduced - Monsanto's royalty extraction, and the high costs of seed and chemicals have created a debt trap.  As Monsanto's profits grow, farmers' debt grows........Monsanto's seeds are seeds of suicide."

The ultimate seeds of suicide is Monsanto's patented technology to create sterile seeds. (Called "Terminator technology" by the media, sterile seed technology is a type of Gene Use Restriction Technology, GRUT, in which seed produced by a crop will not grow - crops will not produce viable offspring seeds or will produce viable seeds with specific genes switched off.) The Convention on Biological Diversity has banned its use, otherwise Monsanto would be collecting even higher profits from seed............ A Monsanto representative admitted that they were "the patient's diagnostician and physician all in one" in writing the patents on life-forms, from micro-organisms to plants, in the TRIPS' agreement of WTO. Stopping farmers from saving seeds and exercising their seed sovereignty was the main objective." 

Read More:

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/16674-focus-monsanto-and-the-seeds-of-suicide

Thanks to Janie Rezner for article.

 

The Gospel of Thomas the Twin (Revisited)

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save 
you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring
forth will destroy you." 
   
 The Gospel of Thomas (Nag Hammadi)
  

"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas 

Yesterday I received several emails  that were classic fundamentalist  "Hate Mail".......... you know, the "rightous" would be saved, and the "un-rightous" (me) were (and they always are so gleeful about the idea) to be tortured eternally in the fiery realm of Hell (to read about the origins of "Hell", or "Hella", underworld Goddess visit this post) unless I was "saved".  I deleted them immediately, as shocked as one might be to suddenly see a scorpion crawl out from under your morning coffee cup.

And yet, it also made me sad.   Even in the contemporary Bible, there are inspired early teachings of non-violence like  "love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, do unto others".........etc.  I am saddened when I consider that the early teachings of Christianity, focused around an inspired Teacher, who taught voluntary simplicity and  lived in austere poverty,  teaching in parks or by the wayside for free, sleeping in a bed if it was offered or on the ground if not.   A Teacher who was a revolutionary for his time and, like most revolutionaries,  was persecuted by the establishment of his time and killed for his dangerous ideas.  Whose teachings included the importance of realizing that we are all, ultimately, "twins"..............to think that these origins should have come  to be associated with such hateful drivel.  Which might be laughable, except for all the "god fearing" suffering it engenders,  the Inquisitions, the "holy wars", the use of "God" to justify just about anything..........  I am always amazed at how few people actually take the time to research, even just a little, the historical origins and the mythic landscape from which Christianity grew out of. 

As the primary religion in the U.S., Mexico, and South America, with a new Pope ensconced in magnificence in the Vatican.......it is a strange evolution.  Thinking of these things, I felt like pulling up a little article I wrote in 2011 to meditate on again........

Looking at Christianity from its Gnostic origins, then, what exactly does it mean to "be saved"?  Saved from what?  I am certain that "hell" and "brimstone" did not come along for a very, very long time after Jeshua of Nazarath gave his teachings in a olive grove.

  The Gospel of Thomas 
 

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you."

The first quote above,  from the Gospel of Thomas (found in 1945 with the Nag Hammadi Gospels, which were very early writings from the advent of  Christianity and apparently hidden because they were considered heretical)......came into my mind yesterday.  I have not thought of this beautiful quote for many years.  When I began my "vision quest", shortly after graduate school,  to learn about art and spirituality I wrote this quote into the margins of notebooks.  The second quote also, I feel, contributes to these reflections.
According to Wikipedia, the introduction to the Gospel of Thomas states that "These are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down." Didymus (Greek) and Thomas (Aramaic) both mean "twin".   Some scholars have pointed out that there was a widespread tradition in early church documents, as well as some surviving Christian traditions, that Jesus had a twin brother, by the name of Didymos Judas Thomas, but most feel this is unlikely.   My sense is that the meaning of "twin" can be understood, from the vantage point of the early Gnostic Christianity, as a metaphor.  All are  "twins" of the great teacher, with the same potentiality and the same  origin - this idea, of course, along with most of the Gnostic sects,  would have been highly heretical as the church became an institution and developed the latter idea of Jesus as divine savior, with it's hierarchy .

"Gnosis (from one of the Greek words for knowledge γνῶσις) is the spiritual knowledge of a saint or  mystically enlightened human being. Within the cultures of the term's provenance (Byzantine and Hellenic) Gnosis was a knowledge or insight into the infinite, divine and uncreated in all rather than knowledge strictly into the finite, natural or material world. Gnosis is a transcendental as well as mature understanding. "  Wikipedia

I've been thinking a great deal about what Jung termed "Shadow".  I believe this  saying from the Gospel of Thomas  is significant to an understanding of this concept.  I carried it about as an encouragement to be an artist, to affirm deeply the life-affirming creative impulse. But one does not have to be a professional artist to "bring forth that which is within".  It is interesting that in his book THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS:  The Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus***, Jean-Yves Leloup refers often, in his translation of the parables of Jeshua,  to the "divine seed - in other words, the creative code", implying a fundamental creative source and/or creative destiny at the root of all spiritual growth.

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you."

We are all creative, in fact, the need to create may be our most profound human drive, right up there with sex and reproduction (which, if you think about it, is all about creation as well).  We come into the world with this energy, this drive, some even say we each come into the world with a creative destiny, a "soul purpose".  We are channels and depositories of creative energy, and through expression of creative energy we are affirmed, healed, we learn, we connect with the world and each other, and we're inspired.  It's the life force.  An individual's unique integrity, personal truth, is also deeply connected to the creative force.

"If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

Creative energy denied becomes toxic, stagnant, destructive. I believe Jesus was truly revolutionary in this profound statement. To live without responding to one's authentic creative impulse and innermost truth is to live with despair that can become carcinogenic, a breeding ground of physical,emotional and psychic disease and destructive social harm. When we deny our authentic expression, when we lie, we do a great disservice to ourselves.

"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven."

This also is a revolutionary statement for the time Jesus lived in, and a revolutionary statement for our time. To "do what you hate" is to live a hateful life, without personal integrity.

"For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered." 

Here the Gospel of the Twin is saying that we live in a Quantum universe.Nothing is really hidden. What is denied (or unconscious) will still manifest, what is seemingly hidden from ourselves or others is nevertheless perceived on unconscious levels.  We're all connected, integral, telepathic.   All things manifest through the creative potential we possess  - we are all creative and collectively co-creative.  But those forces are neutral - they can manifest as positive or negative, consciously or unconsciously.   We need to take responsibility for the font of creative force that each of us is.

 

*** Leloup, Jean-Yves, THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS:  The Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus, 1986, Inner Traditions Publishing

The Monsanto Protection Act: Stop Corporatocracy

Tell President Obama to veto the Monsanto Protection Act! 

 http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/stop_the_monsanto_protection_act_seize_congress/?akid=786.58016.f5OhzF&rd=1&t=1 

Last week Congress succeeded in passing Section 735, aka the Monsanto Protection Act, in the Continuing Resolution spending bill - HR 933. Once again, Monsanto and the biotech industry have used their lobbying power to undermine your basic rights.
The consequences of this for the future of our food and planet are profound, and what is equally disturbing is the fact this this bill gives further truth to the fact that we are no longer a government "by the people".  We are, as the important film ETHOS demonstrated recently, a CORPORATOCRACY.  Shall we allow Monsanto to so blatently demonstrate that we no longer have any control over our food, or our government?  Shall we so passively render over the hope of democracy, as well as protection, not for the profits of Monsanto, but for future generations?

We need you to sign a petition to President Obama and tell him to veto HR 933 and the Monsanto Protection Act. With the Senate passage of the Monsanto Protection Act, biotech lobbyists are one step closer to making sure that their new GMO crops can evade any serious scientific or regulatory review.  This dangerous provision, the Monsanto Protection Act, strips judges of their constitutional mandate to protect consumer and farmer rights and the environment, while opening up the floodgates for the planting of new untested genetically engineered crops, endangering farmers, citizens and the environment.  

We are asking that you sign the petition here and then call President Obama and demand that he veto HR 933. Join us in putting a stop to the Monsanto Protection Act!

 http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/stop_the_monsanto_protection_act_seize_congress/?akid=786.58016.f5OhzF&rd=1&t=1

"Corporations are artificial constructions..........you might say they are monsters trying to devour as much profit as possible at anyone's expense." 

 Howard Zinn

 Download the movie:   https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ethos-the-Movie/115151175221520

A Crack in the Earth on Navajo Lands

 

I can't help but think of Pueblo stories that the new world is born from underground...........here's an interesting phenomenon happening in Northern Arizona on Navajo lands my friend Fahrusha passed on to me.  Doing what little further research I could, I learned that the crack has been forming slowly, and people living nearby have been aware of it for many years.  

March 19, LUEPP, Ariz. – A crack in the earth has been forming on Navajo lands, and no one seems to know why.  Just east of  Flagstaff on Luepp Rd and about one mile west of the  Leupp gas station.  (Photo and article courtesy The Navajo Post )

I can not imagine what is (slowly) emerging from this mysterious crack in the earth, perhaps a new age, perhaps a new Grand Canyon, perhaps the birth of new Mountain Gods,  but thinking of  Navajo lands, I remembered their beautiful "Blessing Way", and found the lovely video below to share.

"In the house made of dawn
in the house made of evening twilight,
in beauty may I walk,
with beauty above me, I walk
with beauty all around me, I walk
with beauty it is finished."

Matthew Fox on Art........

Fabric arts Holy Book, Bath Cathedral, Bath, England (artist unknown)

"Art is the only language we have for awe....what artists are here to do is teach us to behold being, to go into grief, and show us the intrinsic power of creativity.  Art is not for art's sake, it's for creativity's sake, which is for evolution's sake."

 Matthew Fox,

 CREATION SPIRITUALITY

Thinking about painting, I found myself bringing some of my favorite quotes into the  studio.  Friends along the way..........

"The Spiritual Energy System" by Alex Grey

"If you reach down far enough, we're all made up of the same archetypes.  If you go deep enough into yourself, you find yourself in a noisy place with a lot of other people. And if you draw symbols from there, you plug into a collective form of consciousness."

~Alex Grey, 
"The Sacred Mirrors"

“I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.

The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” 

~Robert Henri

"Buttermere Lake" by William Turner

 “The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life............Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are."

 Gretel Erlich, 
THE SOLACE OF OPEN SPACES

Frieda Kahlo, "Sun and Life"

“O tell us, Poet, what you do?

 I praise. 

 But the dark, the deadly, the desperate ways, how do you endure them- how bear them? 

 I praise."

Padraic Colum

A Barbed Heart Finds Refuge Among the Palos Verdes ( found 2008)

"Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.” 

~Neil Gaiman

Solstice Celebration, Willits (2012)

“We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.” 

~Albert Einstein

Self Portrait with Green Heart (2009)

‎





   “A piece of art is never a finished work. It   
     answers a question which has been      
     asked,  and asks a new question.”

     ~Robert Engman

 

 

Happy Spring Equinox!

SPRING

The Big Thaw

starts with a trickle

water running through silence

as innocous as breath

a slight relaxation

at the corners of your mouth.

Just when winter has become

habit, an old coat

with a touch

the sun peels back

the emerging mud

shiny as new skin

or primed canvas.

On which your foot leaves a signature.

You notice

a blade of grass

green

defiantly green.

Inhale, you take your coat off

a crocus opens

in the blue iris

of someone's glance.

 Vermont, 1982