Festivals!

Starwood's Famous Bonfire

You know, back from Starwood, and now 4 days into Sirius Rising, I'm a tad overwhelmed, not to mention  covered with mud. After dancing around the famous, huge, Starwood Bonfire, and a few here at Sirius as well, listening to Harvey Wasserman, Margo Adler, Diana Paxson, and numerous other activists, dreamers, and creators ...............heck, words fail me, and my pagan heart gets its fix for the year.  I guess pictures, for the moment, will have to do.

I've had good response to my workshops, and feel like I'm learning some new approaches.  And so wonderful to see so many friends!

Glinda the Good Witch drops in for lunch

 Ok............now back to Oz!   More to follow..........

All Hail Bob, Reverend Ivan Stang, and the Church of the Subgenius.

Margo Adler

Harvey Wasserman

Jeff Rosenbaum

Going Green at Brushwood

Visitations, Mediums, and a Mythic Universe......

Luna Moth at my door

"I let my life be guided by a strange language that I call “signs”. I know that the world is talking to me, I need to listen to it, and if I do so I shall always be guided towards what is most intense, passionate and beautiful. Of course, it is not always easy.  If you trust life, life will trust you."

         Paolo Coelho

You know, sometimes the best, most profound  things can't be told, hence the origins of the word "mystery", which is from the Greek, a word identified with the Eleusinian Mysteries  meaning "that which cannot be spoken".  But this is a journal, and so I'll try.....perhaps that inability to express what I experience as a "mythic"  universe has to do with the coming together at times of so many different dimensions, multiple levels of synchronicity, metaphor, and perception.   See?  How do you talk about it  except through poetry, art, or metaphor?

"There's a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in." ~~~ Leonard Cohen

Once I got on the road synchronicities and insights  have flooded into my daily life - that's what happens when you enter "liminal zones", those places, times, and activities that are transitional, that put us into the creative space of becoming.  Travel can do that, art process and meditation can do it, and critical times in our lives can do it as well.  My wise friend Wendy talks about the "shamanic initiation", those events in our lives that "crack" us open, times that challenge our beliefs and assumptions.  Painful as those times are, they are also times when door open into new vistas of perception and possibility.

In Chautauqua county, my other life floods in, along with the rain and humidity I've missed in the desert.   Lilydale's and Brushwood's  energy is high, and there is  also such joyful elemental energy there, which you feel as soon as you arrive.  Joining a circle at Lilydale, I found my old sensitivity still present, if rusty, and was able to take several "messages"  as well as receiving significant information for myself from the facilitating medium, Stephanie.  She commented accurately on my bad ankle, saying that it was to make me "slow down"......and at a Sunday service, another medium singled me out (even though I was hiding in the back row) and told me I needed to "slow down" again. Hmm.......I need to think about that.

Stopped for several days to visit Wendy, a friend I met in 2003.  Wendy is a true Medium - her sensitivity began  at 4  when she suffered kidney failure and almost died.  She was also struck by lightning as a child.  She believes these two events brought about her sensitivity.  It  took her many years, and a painful childhood, to come to grips with those gifts.  Wendy amazes me, as she lives simultaneously in two or more worlds, all day long, every day - and it's difficult for people who aren't mediums themselves, or well educated in metaphysics and the "paranormal" to understand her.  She's a successful career woman, living in a town and profession where her gifts are completely unknown to her colleagues, and she's also a medium who sometimes chooses to do readings, helps with hauntings, is an artist, and for fun, goes ghost hunting with colleagues. 

I feel Wendy has helped me to understand my own perceptions  a great deal in the course of our conversations.  To work "inter-dimensionally", as mediums do, one must learn to think in,  as Wendy puts it, "Dream Time" terms, which includes thinking symbolically and without the construct of sequential time as we understand it "in the flesh".  For her, spirits are all around, familiar spirits come to help her or just to visit, people in need of help, people who want to contact someone (usually associated with someone close to her).  Sometimes she sages the room because she has energies she doesn't want there, or just doesn't have the time.

She has a "ghost hunter" machine, a little machine that makes white noise.  I sat for half an hour with her while she asked questions, and hear the machine produce scratchy, sometimes lucid, responses, from what sounded like different voices trying to talk through a very bad phone connection.  I clearly heard "hello", "Wendy", and other short phrases.  I also smelled pipe smoke, and Wendy's face lit up.  "That's my Dad" she said.

This past Solstice there was a tragedy at Brushwood - a young woman had heart failure and died suddenly.  I remember seeing this young woman several times before the event, and being unable to stop looking at her for two reasons - she looked  very much like a very young version of my own daughter, very vulnerable, and she also "glowed" - there was a luminosity about her and I couldn't stop staring at her.  When I told Wendy about this sad event, she said that people who are dying always have a "glow" to them.  She said when she sees that in people, she knows they are getting ready to leave, because time, in the spirit world, does not have the same meaning it does here.  When I went to the area she died in, I did prayers to the Mother for her - and was surprised in my meditation there to clearly see the image of a tall woman taking the hand of a young person, and a sense of peace.  What I take from this, having talked with Wendy, is that I also saw this young woman as looking like my daughter because, perhaps, that energy of Mother, her own and the divine Mother, was what was needed to help her spirit.  I am no expert on this highly subjective experience.........

Spending time with Wendy can be intense!  I hope someday, perhaps when she retires, she'll become interested in perhaps living and working at Lilydale, because she's a powerful healer on a multitude of levels, a true shaman.   She gave me a great gift, which it's going to take me time to unfold, although my friend said that in the spirit world, it's "already done", because all time is happening at once.

We had been talking about the very convincing  documentary on Animal Planet about mermaids washing up with whales after the navy's horrific sonar testing.  It's a hoax, of course, although tragically the death of so many whales is not.  We were sitting at the table drinking coffee and Wendy's eyes misted.  She said "Excuse me, but someone is here, and I think it's important".  She said that a very tall, thin, very black man in a flat, disc like mask that was black with a white band across the eye holes and a red spot on the "forehead" was standing right behind me.  He put his hands on my shoulders (as a blessing?).  He told her he was something like "samarai" but it was a difficult accent for her to understand, and that he wanted me to help in some way.  He said that I would help to "revive Yemeja". 

Then Wendy said she perceived a large number of people, his tribe.  They were showing her images of the ocean, and offerings to the ocean, fruit, baskets, fish, and small white shells.  Tears were running down her face (Wendy says that when the energy is very intense this happens) and she said that he was thanking me.  Then they were gone.  Wendy said this was "high voltage", and for a while she continued to have tears in her eyes.  For myself, not perceiving this, I said that I was grateful, I thanked him and them, and said that I would do what I could to the best of my abilities.

I think this will unfold in the future, its meanings.  But I reflect that Yemaja, Mother Ocean, is an Orisha* originating in West Africa among the Yoruba people and perhaps others, is often shown as a black mermaid.  The destruction of intelligent life in the ocean, the whales, the dolphins, by navy sonar testing, is very real.  We are, indeed, killing Yemeja as well as the whales.   I am among many artists, mythologists, and activists who are trying to change consciousness about our living earth, to revive the sanctity that our ancestors once had.  Before it's too late.

I looked on Google for flat disc masks such as a tribal shaman might wear, and found that there are indeed many such in Africa, although I have not found one such as Wendy described.  However, I did discover that there is an extensive group of people with a long cultural history called the "Songhai", which sounds quite similar to "Samarai", and some of their domain touched the western ocean on Africa's shores.

*Orisha are Spirits  of nature and are responsible for the rules which govern nature.  Orisha are anthropomorphized with human characteristics for the purpose of understanding their essence and being able to extrapolate psychological constructs.Orisha Worship came to the Americas with the African slave trade over a period of 400 years.   In addition the slaves blended their African practice with the Catholic religion to hide their overt practices from Europeans.  In this manner, the traditions of Lukumi and Santeria were born.

Where I'll Be This Summer

My schedule so far - and I'm so grateful to those who so kindly allow me to participate in these wonderful events:

July 9-15:  STARWOOD FESTIVAL, Wisteria, Pomeroy, Ohio

"The Mythic Mask:  Sacred Masks for Personal and Community Ritual" 


For Information:   http://www.rosencomet.com/starwood/
 
July 16-21:  SIRIUS RISING FESTIVAL
Brushwood Folklore, Sherman, New York

"Masks and Personal Transformation"

For Information:  http://www.brushwood.com/sirius.html

"

August 3 (Saturday):   
RAVENWOOD FOREST,
Shutesbury, Massachusetts

A one-day workshop for women on The Masks of the Goddess. 

For information:  http://ravenwoodforest.blogspot.com/









 

August 9, 10, 11:  THE STUDIO ON BROADWAY,   Newburgh, New York

For Information:   http://www.thestudiosat75broadway.com/

Show of art from 

THE RAINBOW BRIDGE ORACLE,
readings and discussion about the evolution of the deck.  

Also, a presentation and discussion
 (Sunday, 3/11) of the film 

The World According to Monsanto.)

August 27 - October 4:    HENRY LUCE CENTER FOR THE ARTS AND RELIGION GALLERY, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C.   

 For information:  https://www.wesleyseminary.edu/LCAR/Gallery/Exhibitions

"Our Lady of Perpetual Exhaustion":  Group Show

September 6, 7, 8:  GODDESS SPIRIT RISING International Conference, 

Malibu, California. 

 For information:  http://conference.goddessspiritrising.com/

Travels Part Two

Super Full Moon reflected in pond at Brushwood on Solstice night

to know the composing of the thread
inside the spider's body
first atoms of the web
visible tomorrow

to feel the fiery future
of every matchstick in the kitchen

Nothing can be done
but by inches.  I write out my life
hour by hour, word by word
imagining the existence
of something uncreated
this poem
our lives

from "Incipience", by Adrienne Rich

 I don't know why I urgently wanted to excerpt from this 1972 poem by Adrienne Rich, except that I did.  It seems to me that traveling partakes of something this poem speaks about,  life lived between "points of departure and arrival", lived by  increments, mile by mile receding and proceeding. 

Stopping for a few weeks now.  The  familiar forest, the cluttered common studio, even the moss garden I made deep in the woods to honor a lightning struck patriarch of an old-growth maple tree, even that remains much the same after 7 years of snow, melt, rain, spring and falls.........I reflect on how we exist in a different frame of time than does the land.  Max, not even born to Teresa when I made that moss garden is now 7, tall and bright and talkative.  Frank, who suffers from Parkinsons, is no longer talkative, and every word he speaks he strains to produce and others strain to hear or comprehend - I remember our conversations in previous years......and I turn away, disturbed, a little ashamed,  not knowing what he thinks behind those tired eyes, not knowing how to communicate anymore.  Here is one who should not be left mute in old age. 

"Stump Service" in Leolyn Wood, Lilydale Spiritualist Community

Travelogue  #2:

I was happy to arrive at Lilydale Spiritualist Village in Chautaqua County, New York, several days before the Summer Solstice, where I stayed for a few days.  I immediately went to walk in Leolyn Woods, an Old Growth Grove that has been preserved there, and is an important place for their "stump services" during the summer season of Lilydale.  For me, it's the true Temple,  the tall trees and deep silence of the wood demonstrating what the entire east coast was once like before it was mostly deforested.  The trees have potency, presencee - it reminds me of the feeling I've had when I was in Muir woods, or among the Sequoias in California.  To walk in an ancient grove like that, feeling keenly the elemental powers, the breath of the world being made there, the trees silent with generations of prayers invested in them.    


Lilydale, like Brushwood Folklore Center in nearby Sherman, is a kind of home to me, and both places embody the unique qualities of Chautauqua County.  I'm not alone in feeling the "burned over zone" is another Vortex area, but fortunately, it's a pretty well kept secret!

Maplewood Hotel in Lilydale

Lilydale is, for anyone who hasn't heard of it, the oldest and largest Spiritualist community in the U.S.  For many summers people have come to this charming town, with it's haunted hotels that boast large paintings presumably manifested by spirits, the Grove with its Stump Services where the mediums come and give impromptu readings, and the beautiful Healing Temple where you can experience hands on healing.   Lilydale offers many workshops, from mediumship development to native American sweat lodges, and many Circles one can join to receive and learn how to share messages from the Spirit World.  Not to mention the crew from "Ghost Hunters", SyFy's long running reality show, who also show up yearly.  Apparently, they feel very comfortable with the mediums.

It's easy for people who know nothing about the beliefs and practices of Spiritualism to call it "Sillydale", but  if you've ever spent time at Lilydale and felt the uplifting energy of the place, you would leave with a different mind.  For myself, I'm hoping I will have time this summer to work with several of the mediums here I respect.

Circle on Lake Cassadega

Memorial stones in Leolyn Wood

Registered medium's home and sign

Stones at pet cemetary

The Stump at Stump Service

And here's a few photos from the beautiful Summer Solstice, which featured a Full Moon this year, in fact, the Moon was its closest to the earth. Real magic.   And with the odd eclectic nature of this rural area, just over the hill the nearest neighbors are an Amish family, their buggy visible from the road when one drives by.   How strange drumbeats in the woods must seem to them.........or maybe not.  Different worlds coexisting here.

Well, it's 115 degrees in Tucson right now, which, no matter how used one is to it, horrifying.  I'm very glad to be here in the green conversation of the Northeast.

Drums in the Woods and dancing the Spiral Dance

Travel Notes

"A girl, my lord, in a flattop ford" forever checks out the lonely hitch hiker in Winslow, Arizona

Travel notes #1:

From the Grand Canyon and Sedona, where I visit my friend Linda and view the Grand Canyon over lunch at Mary Coulter's famous Bright Angel Lodge.  To be honest, there is really no way you can describe the Grand Canyon.  It is so huge, so vast, so amazing, that you can only look down into its depth in utter wonder. 

Stopped in Winslow, forever immortalized by Jackson Brown.  His youthful self stands forever on the corner there, lonely in bronze, always waiting with 7 women on his mind.  

Went to  see another one of Mary Coulter's hotels (the woman architect who was a colleague of Frank Lloyd Wright and built the beautiful hotels visitors to the Grand Canyon stayed at on their pilgrimages West.)  La Posada was her favorite.  Sadly this amazing building sat vacant for over 40 years, until it was bought by an artist couple in the early 90's, who restored it, brought it back to life.

It is also Tina's studio, and her surrealistic paintings are well worth seeing as well.  

No such trip in the dry vastness en route to Gallup should be without a visit to Meteor Crater, the best preserved meteor impact crater in the world, or at least, so they tell us.  And it's indeed a humbling sight to see, and to touch as well, that heavy stone from outer space.  Our tour guide had lived there, beside the crater, for 15 years...............one of the "care takers" of that great hole in the ground.  I wondered what it was like, to be a caretaker for something like that.  He loved it there; each place has its voice, it's "numina".  But it would not be my place, I think...................

To Nogal Canyon, my friend Georgia's handmade Earth Ship house, and a visit to Carrizozo in New Mexico. We visit an artist's home in Lincoln, out in the middle of nowhere really, beautiful place to dream and make.  

  A visit to another tiny village along a dusty road, we visit a lovely garden that is an Iris and Lily farm, and the beautiful Sanctuary of San Patricio, where I walk the Labyrinth.  There is no one there but us, we walk unhindered, make a lunch, all the doors are open, we look in the quiet rooms and think what a wonderful place to have a retreat it would be, sit and meditate in the old chapel.   There is a big feather found on the Labyrinth path, which I take as a gift, a "magic spell for the far journey", and that feather travels with me now, east. 

 

 

 I offer my gratitude to the Goddess as She manifest here, ubiquitous, Our Virgin of Guadeloupe, the Catholic Madonna standing in her Vesica Piscis, the Lady so many millions make pilgrimage to, who is also the most ancient Aztec Earth Mother  Tonantzin, finding another form to manifest, just as she has done for 35,000 years, ever since people began to paint her vulva along with mammoths and cave bears.  All return to the Mother, even if they don't know it!  But, of course, I keep these thoughts to myself, and keep on driving.


A check in with the UFO Research Center and Museum in Roswell, where I buy a bumper sticker, and regret that I won't be there this year to hear Stan Friedman and colleagues discuss the Roswell Incident, as they have been doing together for some 40 years.  Then the long, hot drive through the Bible Belt, strange billboards warning me that I better get "saved" before it's too late and their "Merciful God" will gleefully impose an eternity of very painful torture on me because I don't believe in him and him alone.  Hmm.  This contradiction should be obvious to even the most devout, but, apparently not. I keep these thoughts to myself as well. Oklahoma with its terrifying storm fronts, now there is a not-so-merciful God I definitely believe in, and fortunately can drive away from.   Kansas, a night spent at a nameless rest area somewhere in Missouri. 

Here I am, on this Life Loop, following the lovely touchstones of my herstory,  reclaiming little bits of memory, people, all the stories that each Place holds that become me.  At last, I wake up to suddenly realize how GREEN everything suddenly is - the trees are tall, there is a green carpet underfoot, there is even a robin warbling and hopping.  

The terrain has changed, I'm going East, the spirit of Water makes her presence felt again.  

I have a synchronicity to note as well (since this is a journal)...........an aquaintance I haven't heard from in years writes to tell me about an amazing, bright and talkative little boy she met in Brooklyn this summer while she was doing face painting at an outdoor festival.  She painted his face, and was amazed at how charming he was, and got to talking with his father as well.  She mentioned that she had done the New York Renaissance Faire, and he mentioned that his wife's mother had done it for a while as well.    She realized, in the course of speaking with him, that she was painting my grandson's face..........which is kind of amazing, since my daughter and I have been out of touch for 6 years now (the reasons aren't necessary to go into here).  

What are the odds?  Once more, I'm blessed to remember that, no matter what goes on on the surfaces of our lives, we're all really connected, a part of each other, at the roots.  

So, on to the summer's adventure!

The Summer Solstice

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

 

“Make of yourself a light,” 

said the Buddha,
before he died.

I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.

An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire –
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something  of inexplicable value.

Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

~ Mary Oliver ~

I woke early, on this longest day:

the light rose among
 the green conversation 
of  trees, a fading star, exultant starlings,
  two grey squirrels 
performing their morning ritual

greeting the only God 
they know,

the Sun

6/2013 

Masks for Tara?

 

 I am writing from a coffee shop somewhere just past Wichita, Kansas, on my way back to New York and Vermont.  So much I want to share...........wonderful photos of the Grand Canyon, places I've been, alas, no time.  But I do see an email from Prema Dasara, and the possibility opening again of doing a series of masks for her "21 Praises to Tara".  I wrote about this in 2010, and did create two models, but the timing wasn't right for the project.




Prema Dasara has traveled throughout the world, creating devotional dances based upon the Tibetan Prayer, the "21 Praises to Tara".  It was my privilege to attend one of her teachings in Portland (hosted by Goddess dancer Lena Grace  and her husband Jack).  Prema and her students are bringing the Blessings of Tara to many places with their prayers that are  mandala dances devoted to the 21 different aspects of the Divine Tara. It's powerful work, and I have admired Prema for many years.

As I noted in my previous post, there are potent synchronicities for me about going back to Vermont, back to New York, back to visit my friend Jewell at "The Source".  It was with Jewell, doing energy work in 1997,  that White Tara  manifested so strongly in my spirit, imagination, art, and dreams.  So, whether this opportunity materializes or not, this is wonderful.   How wonderful that this thread should suddenly re-weave itself into this journey................a circle!