Wendell Barry

"There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

 ― Wendell Berry

“Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world.

Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?

 Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.”

― Wendell Berry

Fukushima, and the Pacific Ocean

What happened in Japan in 2011 is a continuing worldwide tragedy, and has been denied by the media.  I return from my trip to these articles forwarded by  Dr. Carol Wolman, a long time nuclear activist  in Northern California. 

Dear Friends,

The bad news continues- see headlines below.   I took part in a conference call with the director of Nuclear Affairs- Tom Cochran at National Resources Defense Fund (NRDC) yesterday.  I was asking him to support a call for making Fukushima declared an international catastrophe.  He declined, saying essentially that the discharge into the ocean will be diluted and won't affect us or the rest of the world- it's a Japanese problem.  I pointed out that the corium has hit the groundwater, so pollution of the ocean will increase- he ignored this.

Please continue circulating this petition  http://www.change.org/petitions/west-coast-senators-investigate-the-ongoing-danger-from-the-fukushima-nuclear-reactors .   We need to break through the denial of how serious this is.

Peace,
Carol Wolman

 please sign the petition to put pressure on our Senators.
http://www.change.org/petitions/west-coast-senators-investigate-the-ongoing-danger-from-the-fukushima-nuclear-reactors

 Here's the news:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/05/fukushima-leak-emergency_n_3707075.html

8-8 http://enenews.com/ktxl-sacramento-now-the-threat-of-radioactive-water-rushing-our-way-traces-of-radiation-found-in-area-fish-not-dangerous-expert-says-video

http://enenews.com/nuclear-official-radioactive-leaks-getting-out-of-control-and-creating-a-state-of-emergency-at-fukushima-emergency-is-accelerating-due-to-faster-than-expected-swelling-underground

8-9 http://enenews.com/top-official-the-current-situation-is-extremely-severe-at-fukushima-plan-to-reduce-contamination-flowing-into-ocean-relies-on-untested-methods-and-technologies-that-have-not-been-develop

8-10  http://enenews.com/tv-very-likely-that-some-of-the-melted-cores-have-moved-into-the-earth-at-fukushima-its-beyond-containment-right-now-video

Farewell to the East Coast.............

Well, hit the road today, leaving as I always seem to do from Lilydale first and last.  Now there's a sign you won't see everywhere..........but maybe it would be a much better world if you did.

I leave with great gratitude at the friendships I've revisited and new ones I've made, and the places I love that I also revisited, old friends that have given me new and sustainable courage.  I leave with much affirmation and encouragement to just keep on doing what i love to do - as Joseph Campbell famously said:  "Follow your Bliss, and doors will open where you don't expect them to."   And to quote from  a younger woman who was myself somewhere along the road:  "We live in a house of Doors".  

I was pleased with my show, which gave me a chance to share the original paintings from the  Rainbow Bridge Oracle as well as doing readings from the deck, something I haven't done in a while and find I still do well.  I was also pleased with the turnout my friend Berkanna got for showing "The World According to Monsanto".  There is some information to update on this issue, but don't have time to post right now. 

“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 

Perhaps I also always leave from Lilydale because I want to leave remembering that we're  provided with "invisible means of support".   It doesn't work in simple ways, and we don't always get what we "think we want", but I have always found that I get what I need, and synchronicities, dreams, and friends continually offer guidance along the way.

I don't know if there is a cure for evil such as the greed and destruction that drives a corporate monster like Monsanto.  But I do know that if we really understand, in our daily lives, how  intimately  connected we are to the vast multiplicity of life around us...........we would live with empathy, and act with empathy, because what we do to the earth and to all Her Beings,  is what we do to ourselves.  Ironically,  I believe that's the essence of what Jesus of Nazareth taught long before the church became the strange phenomenon it is now, long before doctrines about heaven and hell, being "saved", Christian soldiers, "God Fearing",  crusades, inquisitions, holy wars, and so on.  As I prepare to pass through the often scary "Bible belt" I find myself reflecting  on the loss of  Christianity's Gnostic beginnings.......well.   The origins of the U.S.A. included religious freedom, and the right to free speech, so in that spirit, my bumper stickers stay on the back of my car.  Including the one that says "God is Coming, and Boy Is She Pissed!".

For myself, I began this trip feeling very unsure of where to go now, what to do, and I leave the adventure with all the answers I need - serve the Goddess, serve kindness, beauty, and "a webbed vision", and all I really need will be provided.  

As I was saying goodbye to the "stump cathedral" in Leolyn woods, I saw that people had left all kinds of offerings/mementos on the "stump", and I remembered something I've been carrying around in my purse since the trip began - a plastic replica of a sheaf of wheat.  Admittedly, not something all that impressive, but back in April I was looking all over the Internet and Michaels for plastic wheat, which I wanted to use for a Demeter mask.  I was not successful, and finally gave up on the idea of finishing the mask.  So, it was a funny thing to discover a plastic "wheat sheaf" on the ground at a rest stop in Flagstaff as I was headed east. No big deal - but I had to laugh, and say "thank you".   

Oh..........and watch out for those Dragons!

Danger on the Beach (thanks to Joyce Weiss)

Ravenwood Forest

"Root People" - water color by Valerianna Claff

Yellow spider on a very yellow flower

It was my pleasure to spend a few days with  Valerianna at her studio and home in Ravenwood Forest, in Chesterfield,  Western Massachusetts. Valerianna is an artist, a teacher, a sound healer, and a ceremonialist, and she is also, truly, the stewardess and friend of her forest home, which abounds with the numinous  presence of elemental beings.....as well as the physical presence of birds, deer, bear, and butterfly.  

It was good to meet an artist who speaks so  elequently about  the Numina,  the intelligence one feels emanating from the trees, the stones, the land.  An intelligence conversant and responsive to the artist  as she offers reciprocity and love with her art and her music.  I especially responded to her  recent series of  watercolors that envision the  luminous energy  felt within the forest, sensed but rarely seen, the living essence one feel is dancing somewhere in the distance, rising from the  forest floor or flickering among the dark branches of tree and root, enchanting and mysterious as the call of a songbird in the silent wood.

"Earthlight", watercolor on paper, 15in X 22in, VClaff 2013

To me, the artist captures beautifully that invisible, but potent, Numina, brilliant and intense, humming within the soil, perhaps rising at certain auspicious times,  distant luminosity.   Thank you for a magical weekend!  To learn more about the artist and her work, as well as her classes, visit her website:  www.ravenwoodforestarts.com

RavenWood Forest  - water color by Valerianna Claff

RavenWood Forest  - water color by Valerianna Claff

I especially responded to Valerianna's paintings of what she calls "Root People". She  says  she sees the trees often morphing into faces......something I often experience myself.  Faces in the stone, faces in the roots.    (As if the elemental beings  occasionally manifest a face, a human form, a voice,  just so we can know them, briefly, in our own terms.........)And perhaps, from those brief moments, the mythic world emerges, the Fey folk dance at twilight, the Green Man makes his play.  And at the roots live those beings, that wonder. 

"Root People" - water color by Valerianna Claff

I walked among the trees
I wore the mask of the deer
I am that laughing man
with eyes like leaves

You will feel my breath, warm at your neck.
I will rise in the grass, a vine caressing your foot.

I am the blue eye of a crocus
  opening in the snow
  a trickle of water, a calling bird,
  a shaft of light among the trees.

You will hear me singing
among the green groves of memory,
the shining leaves of tomorrow.

I'll come
with daisies in my hands,
we'll dance among the sycamores
once more

"GreenWood", watercolor on paper, 15in X 22in, VClaff 2013

 

Pasha investigates my car

Magical garden

"The World According to Monsanto" in Newburgh Tonight

 

I was invited to introduce THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MONSANTO by my friend Lisa Gervais of the Healing Arts Studio at 75 Broadway, in Newburgh, N.Y. because I shared the film with her last year.  I’d also very much like to thank  Chris and Paul of Newburgh Brewing for the  privilege.  The film will be shown at 88 Colden Street, in Newburgh, N.Y. at 6:30. 

Our Mother Earth, with all of Her infinitely complex eco-systems, has spent millions of years evolving the systems that sustain us.  With unthinkable naiveté and  arrogance, multi-national corporate entities are altering the genetic basis of food that we eat with no understanding of the long range consequences, to our bodies, and to the body of the Earth.  Furthermore, as this film and the “Monsanto Protection Act” demonstrates, not only is the health of future generations in grave danger, but so is the future of  Democracy; we are very close to being a “corporateacracy”, with no real choice about what we eat, think, or know.  This is a very important film.

The World According to Monsanto
 (Re-posted from previous article)

The passing of the "Monsanto Protection Act" is something all Americans should be aware of, it's long term consequences and its implications.   Having watched the documentary "The World According to Monsanto", I believe everyone needs to see this film.  

We hear a French scientist reporting that the universally used weedkiller Roundup "provokes  cell division leading to the formation of cancer".  We also learn about the almost complete  loss of independent farms and  biodiversity in Paraguay, and that 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.  As a result, they are falling deeper and deeper into debt, and losing their 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 past decade years was "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter", both about a "Dark Lord" intent on sacrificing everything in the pursuit of power.  The profit driven  soul-lessness of corporate entities such as Monsanto reflect that mythic struggle, 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.

Show at Newburgh Healing Arts Center, & Film "The World According to Monsanto" this Weekend

 

I'm delighted to be able to share the paintings from my Rainbow Bridge Oracle, as well as some of the "NUMINA - Masks for the Elemental Powers" collection at the Studio at 75 Broadway in Newburgh, New York this weekend.

Tomorrow, August 9th,  I will be reading from my Deck at the Gallery.  The Opening and Reception is from 6:00 to 8:00 on Saturday, August 10th, and will be followed by a performance of masks in the upstairs Gallery.  If you are in the area, please come join Lisa Gervais, Holly Boughton-McPhee,  and myself for a lovely evening!

 

 

Born innocent, one
- that’s I- strives hard to become
an adult, no longer childish,
worldly-wise in one’s art, one’s love,
one’s life…

Then discovers:
that no one ever becomes an adult,
becomes either delightfully childlike
or pitifully juvenile…

Discovers:
one’s art to be outside the art game
one’s faith outside the religious game
one’s love outside the sex game

Discovers:
one’s own little song and dares to sing it
in all variations, unsuited as it may be
for mass communication…

For perhaps here and there
someone will hear it
and listen and know
and say

Ah! Yes!

Frederick Franck
Art as a Way: A Return to the Spiritual Roots

On Sunday, August 11 at  6:30 at Newburgh Brewing, 88 Colden Street, Newburgh, N.Y. 12550,  we will be introducing the documentary THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MONSANTO,  a 2008 film directed by Marie-Monique Robin. Originally released in French as Le monde selon Monsanto, the film is based on Robin's three-year long investigation into the corporate practices around the world of the United States multinational corporation, Monsanto. The World According to Monsanto is also a book written by Marie-Monique Robin, winner of the Rachel Carson Prize (a Norwegian prize for female environmentalists), which has been translated into many languages.

 *** And if you can't be there, you can see the film for free at:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-monsanto/

Going Back to Familiar Places...............

The Hidden Sky

Tom Wolfe said "you can't go home again".   Having spent yesterday chilling out in the Tuxedo Motel, and spending the day with ghosts from the years I lived in New York state, and the summers I did the Renaissance Faire,  I agree and don't agree.  It can hurt to visit places so full of memories, but the only refuge is to cherish them, to keep saying "thank you - it was great!" while I look for the shapes, tastes, and colors of those days in my memory box.
 
So many memories.......maybe that's what love is.  The perfume that lingers, the threads that weave between the empty spaces where a face, a voice, a name used to be.

Raukkadesa. 

Sterling Forest, near N.Y. Renaissance Festival,  Tuxedo, New York

Pavement,  Woodstock, New York

my "moss garden", Brushwood

Lightening struck tree

my Moss Garden, deep woods, Brushwood Folklore Center