La Mariposa - the "Butterfly Woman" revisited

I've been invited to enter a show here in Tucson, and for some reason, immediately wanted to enter my "La Mariposa" above.  Perhaps it is because we are approaching spring.  

In her book “Women Who Run With The Wolves”, Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote that the Hopi “Butterfly Dancer”  must be old, because the work of pollinating the future is the work of age, of experience.  I never forgot this, and have made many “Butterfly Women” as I myself approach old age.  Without the grace of the pollinators there will be no future, whether we speak of next year’s crop, or the minds of the young.  It's a job for one who has lived through many cycles, and can seed and generate the future from a solid base.

"The (Hopi) butterfly dancer must be old because she represents the soul that is old …….Butterfly pollinates the souls of the earth. This is the translator of the instinctual, the fertilizing force, the mender, the rememberer of old ideas. She is La voz mitológica, the Mythic Voice."

The Mythic Voice.  How wonderful!  

I take the liberty of re-posting an article about exactly that from several years back...........

Butterfly Mind, Pollen Heart

 

Beauty above me, 

Beauty below me,

Beauty before me,

Beauty behind me,

I walk in Beauty.

Navajo (Dine`) Prayer

"Art is not a thing, it's a way of life" 

(seen on billboard  in La Verne, Ca. 2011)

It's May Day as I write, Beltane, although, considering the events in Japan, "May Day" may also mean a huge cry for planetary help.  

 I love the painting above, which I found in a magazine; I don't know who the artist is, but thank him or her often for this  "Butterfly Woman" from whom thoughts like butterflies emanate out into the world to do their work. Perhaps the artist will forgive me that I do not know his or her name........but be glad that the work has gone forth to do its work in my heart and imagination.  Pollen:  agent of new life, new hope, transformation. 

As we (well, some of us) wind our way to the May Pole, and plant that metaphor into the still fertile earth, weaving our dreams into the ribbons of this ancient ritual of fertility, perhaps I can find a way to image the celebration of love and hope with a vast, global cry for help that sounds like a beating heart beneath the surfaces of our lives, just beneath our feet.  As the drums and penny whistles sound, as we dance, may we all become Pollinators for our time, for the future.

Like the woman who walks above, this is my prayer:    May we have butterfly minds, pollinator hearts.

Peace March against the war in Iraq, San Francisco, 2003

  The ancient Greek word for "butterfly" is ψυχή (psȳchē), which means "soul" or "mind".  And I have often found them mysteriously "soulful", as they seem to flit in and out of mystery.  The picture above, for example - it was from the San Francisco Chronicle at the me of the great peace march against the incipient Iraq war, and shows three friends with their "soul icons" - me in the mask of Sophia, Alan Moore, founder of the Butterfly Gardeners Association, and Nicole, creator of "Cosmic Cash".  Note that her icon, also, has occurred in this synchronistic photo. 

Transformers, pollinators .......... they begin their lives as caterpillars, build a crysalis, and generate imaginal cells...........

"When a caterpillar nears its transformation time, it begins to eat ravenously, consuming everything in sight. The caterpillar body then becomes heavy, outgrowing its own skin many times, until it is too bloated to move. Attaching to a branch (upside down, we might add, where everything is turned on its head) it forms a chrysalis—an enclosing shell that limits the caterpillar’s freedom for the duration of the transformation.....Tiny cells, that biologists actually call “imaginal cells,” begin to appear. These cells are wholly different from caterpillar cells, carrying different information, vibrating to a different frequency–the frequency of the emerging butterfly. At first, the caterpillar’s immune system perceives these new cells as enemies, and attacks them, much as new ideas in science, medicine, politics, and social behavior are viciously denounced by the powers now considered mainstream. But the imaginal cells are not deterred.  They continue to appear, in even greater numbers, recognizing each other, bonding together, until the new cells are numerous enough to organize into clumps. When enough cells have formed to make structures along the new organizational lines, the caterpillar’s immune system is overwhelmed. The caterpillar body then become a nutritious soup for the growth of the butterfly."

from Imaginal Cells and the Body Politic by Anodea Judith Ph.D.

Photo from: http://www.fishersville-umc.org/classes/nac/Pics/week0401.htm

If we can see that our thoughts participate in  pollinating the future, we can  perhaps find ways of living with simplicity and honor, even in a time so very out of balance.  Regardless of where one is, there is a profound need to "walk in Beauty".  To be "on the Pollen Path".                                             

Without the grace of the pollinators, the butterflies and hummingbirds and bees, there will be no future.  This idea is fundamental to spiritual traditions of native peoples of the Southwest, including the Pueblo peoples, the Navajo and the Apache.  As shown above, when this young Apache woman came of age and entered into her fertile years, she was honored by the tribe with symbolic pollen.

 "The Pollen Path" is a healing and initiatory ceremony/concept among the Dine` that variously enacts a mythic journey, and demonstrates a cosmology of non-duality.  "Pollen Path" art and sand paintings often show the union of opposites, such as red sun and blue moon, as well as mandalas, the balance achieved within the circle.   In keeping with May Day, Psyche in Greek mythology was a beautiful girl who was loved by Eros, the god of Love. Here is "fertility", generation, pollination..........the union of soul/mind with love.

As I imagine a "pollen path" for our time,  and emanations of hope and beauty,  I reflect as well that some butterflies, like the Monarch or the Painted Lady, are migratory.  Monarch butterflies will migrate over very long distances, as amazingly frail as they seem.  Some travel from Mexico to the norther parts of the United States and into Canada, a distance of over 2,500 miles.

Lastly, a few thoughts from one of my favorite storytellers, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, on the work of the Butterfly Dancer.  May we all, women and men, young and old, become Butterfly Dancers this May Day.

  "The (Hopi) butterfly dancer must be old because she represents the soul that is old. She is wide of thigh and broad of rump because she carries so much. Her grey hair certifies that she need no longer observe taboos about touching others. She is allowed to touch everyone: boys, babies, men, women, girl children, the old, the ill, and the dead. The Butterfly Woman can touch everyone. It is her privilege to touch all, at last. This is her power. Hers is the body of La Mariposa, the butterfly."

"La Mariposa" from Women Who Run with The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Clarissa Pinkola Estes  tells the story of waiting to see the "Butterfly Dancer" at a ceremony.  Tourists, unused to Indian Time, wait throughout a long, hot, dusty day to see the dancer emerge, expecting, no doubt a slender, ephemeral Indian maiden, and they are no oubt they were shocked out of their patronizing cultural fantasy to see at last the grey haired  Dancer/Pollinator emerge, slow, not young, with her traditional tokens of empowerment.

"Her heavy body and her very skinny legs made her look like a hopping spider wrapped in a tamale. She hops on one foot and then on the other. She waves her feather fan to and fro. She is The Butterfly arrived to strengthen the weak. She is that which most think of as not strong: age, the butterfly, the feminine."

Because in the agricultural ritual these dances symbolize and invoke, call in, the forces that initiate the  vital work of pollination, this is no job for for an inexperienced girl, no trivial token flight for a  pretty child. It's a job for one who has lived through many cycles, and can seed and generate the future from a solid base.

"Butterfly Woman mends the erroneous idea that transformation is only for the tortured, the saintly, or only for the fabulously strong. The Self need not carry mountains to transform. A little is enough. A little goes a long way. A little changes much. The fertilizing force replaces the moving of mountains.

Butterfly Maiden pollinates the souls of the earth: It is easier that you think, she says. She is shaking her feather fan, and she’s hopping, for she is spilling spiritual pollen all over the people who are there, Native Americans, little children, visitors, everyone. This is the translator of the instinctual, the fertilizing force, the mender, the rememberer of old ideas. She is La voz mitológica."

"La voz mitológica". The mythic voice.  The Mythic Voice re-enchants the world around us, lending luminosity to each footstep, and pollinates, energizes, en-chants those who hear.   It is transparent, permeable.  And one way to walk the Pollen Path.

Pilgrims.........

My pilgrimages are among my most treasured times,  those times and places and synchronicities and numinous "conversations" that have occurred in the liminal time and place of intentional pilgrimage.** Truth be told, we are all Pilgrims.

PILGRIM

I bow to the lark
and its tiny lifted silhouette
fluttering  before infinity.

I promise myself
to the mountain
and to the foundation
from which my future comes.
I make my vow to the stream
flowing beneath,
and to the water falling
toward all thirst, and

I pledge myself
to the sea
to which it goes
and to the mercy
of my disappearance

and though I may be
left alone or abandoned by
the unyielding present

or orphaned in some far
unspoken place, I will speak
with a voice of loyalty

and faith
to the far shore
where everything
turns to arrival

- excerpt from "Pilgrim" by David Whyte

 Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors,
and keeps on walking,
because of a church

that stands
somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him
as if he were dead.

And another man,
who remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children
have to go far out into the world
toward that same church,
which he forgot.

― Rainer Maria Rilke

Shrine at The White Spring, Glastonbury

The Chalice Well, Glastonbury

**In his seventh volume of poetry, David Whyte looks at the great questions of human life through the eyes of the pilgrim: someone passing through relatively quickly, someone dependent on friendship, hospitality and help from friends and strangers alike, someone for whom the nature of the destination changes step by step as it approaches, and someone who is subject to the vagaries of wind and weather along the way.

Numina - New Power Point Presentation

Testing out a new power point presentation of  last year's work - the "Numina" series of masks and The Awakening in Willits.  Great job, Annie and Mana!

http://www.slideshare.net/laurenraine/numina-masks-for-the-elemental-powers-2014

Numina - "Masks for the Elemental Powers" 2014 from laurenraine

A Hawk and the Great Mother

INVOCATION OF THE GREAT MOTHER
 
by Erica Swadley

O Great Mother Goddess, we call on you now.

We invite your presence.
Surround and encompass us.
Rise up from your roots.
Hear us, our our voices of pathos.
See our dancing feet, how we beat out your rhythms. 
With our hearts, we drum you back.
We are staggering toward you.

Will you run one hundred steps to us?
Will you spread your mantle of peace?

This is the sack of our offerings:

We give up our greed to feed the needy.
Here is our lust to restore compassion.
We release our hatred to stop the killing.
We forego our vengeance to discover balance.
We scorn our fears, to rebirth love.
We tread softly to bring back forests. 

And Mother Answers:

No more no more no more!

I have sent you shining planets to help you remember.

Mars and Venus beg you to reconcile.
From the depths of space, Sedna appears,
a planetary avatar to stop you in your tracks.
Time is ended, truth be told.

Release, forgive, restore.
Remember Me in all of My forms.
I will bring light to your shadows 

and make you whole, 
if you will call on Me.

                   April, 2004


Yesterday I had a new picture windows put into the living room, and I sat admiring them this morning.  Then I found myself thinking about the poem above, and "Restoring the Balance", the performance shaman Erica Swadley wrote her Invocation for, almost 10 years ago, and decided I would offer it again with some new work on the Equinox. 

Then a very large bird flew, wham, into my new window.  Not just any bird, but a red wing hawk.  

Fortunately, it flew off again, hopefully not hurt.  But the "Message" is well taken.  Wake up!  Pay attention! See!  Get the Big Picture!    New windows give better vision, the ability to see through them more clearly.  And no creature sees better, and has a bigger view, than a hawk or an eagle. 

I know I often write about the Dark Goddess, the One who can help us to see, integrate, and understand our shadows, but I do this because I feel, personally and collectively (along with theologian Andrew Harvey and shaman Erica Swadley) it is so very important to invoke Her help now.

  "It's quite clear that humanity  can only be transfigured by a totally shocking revelation of its shadow side. And this is what we're living through, these shadow sides exploding in every direction because we have done nothing but betray the sacred in us."

........... Andrew Harvey

The "shadow side" Harvey speaks of is revealed in contradictions, in paradox often.  Just this morning I was also thinking about a personal revelation along these lines.   So much of the work I do, outside of my commercial masks, are really Shrines to Gaia. Over and over I feel compelled to make torsos and hands with roots and leaves.   My versions of the Black Madonna, of the creative, sacred Mother inside all  of nature's manifestations. And yet, as important as these images are to me, I tend to be apologetic about my work, not believing in myself often.

I recently had someone ask about purchasing a  "Gaia" piece,   someone I admire, who wanted to know if the humidity of a bathroom would affect it.  I had to wonder:  do I project so little sense of the worth of my  work that it has no more meaning than "bathroom decor"? Is that my shadow?  And if so, by failing to respect the impulses that become my art, am I disrespecting what is sacred to me?   What does this reveal about the loss of a sense of the sacred we're all, myself well included,  completely unconscious of?  

I think about my dismay this summer when I saw the porta potties lined up  just across from the entrance (and exit) to the Labyrinth and Ancestor Mound at Sirius Rising last year.  Leaving the Labyrinth (Center) ritual, it was what one saw coming out of the Labyrinth.  My  comments about it  got me in hot water with the community who put the ritual on, many of whom I otherwise admire.  But they did not see, or appreciate, my (quite literal)  point of view. .............What does it mean, viewed symbolically, about what me and my well meaning friends and colleagues are unconsciously responding to?

"I will bring light to your shadows
and make you whole 
if you call on me.

 The Dark Goddess, whether we call Her the Black Madonna, the hidden Magdalene, Kali, Black Tara,  or Sedna, is so much more than an idea, an archetype.  She is an active force in the world, an archetypal  intelligence working in the world through the minds of those who open to Her.   She can Restore the Balance, she can dance with us as we achieve an ever moving point of balance.

As my friend, Ann Weller, commented in 2000 after invoking the Dark Goddess for a healing ritual event for her community:

"The Dark Goddess serves the future. Her work is evolution in its fullest sense.

The Dark Goddess, who is found in many cultures by many names, is not aspected lightly.  Working with Her calls forth one's internal capacity for psychic empowerment, a transformative energy not easy to encompass. The work was larger than my concerns, and ultimately impersonal.  I was a brief vessel for an immense archetypal intelligence manifesting itself within the ritual drama we created."

So, I ponder all of this, this beautiful and important poem that Erica gifted us with 10 years ago, and share also an article by Andrew Harvey that is related.  As we move closer to the Equinox, may we find many ways and paths to Restoring the Balance.

"Black Madonna" by Therese Desjardin

BLACK MADONNA RETURNS
by  Andrew Harvey

The entire world is now going through a massive crucifixion on all levels.  It's going through an environmental crucifixion. Hundreds of species are vanishing every month. It's going through a personal crucifixion. There are two billion people living on less than a dollar a day. It's going through a crucifixion of all the patriarchal systems. Look at Enron and what it has
shown us about Corporate America. Look at the Catholic Church's scandals of pedophilia and what it shows us about authority. Look at the growing disillusionment with politicians of all kinds. All of the systems are  being exposed as illusory and fantasy-ridden, as deeply corrupt and exploitative.

There's another kind of crucifixion going on: crucifixion of purpose and hope. Everybody is totally bewildered. They know that the world is potentially on the brink of  apocalypse. There's a tremendous danger that as people wake up to the horror of what is going on, they will run into political extremism or into fundamentalism of one kind or another.

So it's extremely important that the wisdom of the 'dark night of the soul' gets across, because if people understand the necessity for this crucifixion, and understand that it's preparing a resurrection and empowerment, then they will be prepared to go through it without too much fear, trusting in the logic of the divine transformation.

The Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths shared with me his experience of the dark night of the soul. He said he was sitting outside his hut one day when he felt as if a hand hit him on the right side of his being. He had suffered a massive heart attack that destroyed what he described as his patriarchal mind and gave him access to a much deeper elaboration of
Oneness with all things.  

 He said, "It's a very strange thing, but when I thought of surrendering to the Mother I of course thought of Mary--I often say the 'Hail Mary'--but it was Mary as the Black Madonna that came into my mind. She is the mother of the earth as well as heaven, of the body as well as the soul, the mother of the subconscious, the hidden, of all those powers that the
'masculine' mind represses; the Mother of the sacred darkness. In Her the Western Christian vision of the Divine Mother and the Eastern one merge and meet; you can think of her as both Mary and Kali, both preserver and destroyer. From that time on, I have turned to Her again and again.  

Invoking Her strength and grace, I find, makes the 'birth' go so much faster and more cleanly."

The power that is doing this to us is coming towards us simultaneously with terrifying destruction and extreme grace and prosperity. The destruction is, in fact, a form of that extreme grace. It's quite clear that humanity is now terminally ill, and can only be transfigured by a totally shocking revelation of its shadow side. And this is what we're living
through, these shadow sides exploding in every direction because we have done nothing but betray the sacred in us.

We have lacerated the sacred in others. We have betrayed the sacred in an orgy of fundamentalism. We have brutalized the sacred in nature. We are now terminally destructive.

So only an almost terminal destruction that reveals to us the full extent of our responsibility in this destruction can wake us up. And that is what is happening, and it will get worse. It's bound to get worse. But it is only being done to us for our own redemption.

Those who turn to the Mother in total faith, those who turn to the Black Madonna in total admiration, those who realize the mercy behind the violence will be given extraordinary protection, strength, and revelation. They will be empowered in the core of themselves to become what everybody who has a heart and a mind must now become--a spiritual
revolutionary devoting their entire life and all their resources to the preservation of the planet.

Finding the Black Madonna, in whatever form you want to find her, realizing the massive task that she's doing and turning to her for protection is now crucial to the preservation of the planet. It's extremely important that people really come to understand the feminine and turn towards it, because it's our betrayal of the feminine in ourselves and in the divine that has led to this crisis.

Copyright Andrew Harvey 2004--All Rights Reserved

 ***Footnote:

I've found it interesting that one of the most consistently read of my blog posts has to do with "Black Tara" (2010).  Truly a Tibetan manifestation of the Dark Goddess, I often wonder why so many are curious or responsive to this Goddess.

Spider Woman's Hands.......

  "What is the new mythology to be,
   the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?"

 Joseph Campbell

I've recently been reviewing several of the projects I' ve been doing in the past 10 years (Spider Woman's Hands, Numina, The Masks of the Goddess) and felt like taking another look at "where I've been" as I try to figure out where to "go from here".    Although, "coming" and "going" are increasingly a strange idea to me.   The whole process of  examining my bodies of work is like, in retrospect, reviewing my dreams, my meditations, and  reminds me, again, of how seamless everything is, the vast and yet intimate Web interpenetrating all.  I hear Grandmother Spider Woman chuckling, the vibration carried on some near strand.  Perhaps some other weaver draws it slowly into a warp, somewhere, some when.............

All of the work I've done with Grandmother Spider Woman has been fraught with synchronicity, I feel like adding here.  So much so that I never feel that far away from Her reminders, Her guidance and humor, and I've written about them quite often.  One of my favorite synchronicities occured in 2008, when returning from the second show of "Spider Woman's Hands" at the Creative Spirit Center in Midland, Michigan, I decided to take a detour to visit Paducah, Kentucky.  Just outside of Paducah I discovered a prehistoric Mississippian Mound, and it was there that I discovered just how ubiquitous the image of Spider and Cross was throughout that ancient world (the Gorget below, with Spider, Cross and Hands, is from that culture.  I had no idea........ the story is in a post from September 2008. 

Perhaps the best synchronicities are visual.  At Wickliffe Mound on that occasion I took a picture of an ancient gourd in their museum - developing it later, I was stunned to see that reflections from the floor had created an overlay of.........strands............that seemed to recede into infinity. 

Here's another of those "Spider Woman" synchronicities, caught on my camera.  This occurred when I stopped to get some coffee earlier that summer, en route to the Creative Spirit Center in Midland to see the show, which was a wall of "Icons" created by participants, each hand holding a "thread" that passed on to each other participant, and finally disappeared through the door and into "forever". I had to laugh when I saw where I had parked!

Below is a brief article I wrote about my 2004 to 2008  project about the ubiquitous "Legend of the Spider Woman".   I have always felt Her hand in my life.

 SPIDER WOMAN’S HANDS

A Metaphor for Our Time 

By Lauren Raine MFA    (www.laurenraine.com)

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

Catherine Keller, Theologian, From a Broken Web (1989) 

Years ago I was enjoying a panoramic view of the Sonoran desert.   I happened to be sitting near a spider web, stretched between two dry branches.  I realized, by shifting my point of view, I could view the entire landscape through the web’s intricate, transparent pattern…..a  landscape  seen through the ineffable strands of an almost invisible web.  

What might our experience be, what kind of culture might we create, what would our priorities be, if, as Catherine Keller writes, we "saw the world with a Webbed Vision"? 

Perhaps the World Wide Web is Spider Woman's latest appearance. Pueblo mythology tells that when each of the 3 previous worlds ended, it was Spider Woman who led the people through the sipapu, the kiva (or birth canal) into the next world.  As such She is the divine Midwife for each new age.............and perhaps now we can understand how Her message is necessary for this, the "5th Age", to manifest.   With so many people interested in the “2012 prophecy”, which reached epic proportions through Hollywood, it seems strange that so few know of Spider Woman, the midwife/creatrix, who plays a key role in this metaphor for our time.   She's increasingly making visible the connections, the strands of the Web of life, whether we speak of an evolving global human culture, ecology, quantum physics, or synchronicity and integral psychology.  “Spider Woman’s Hands” was my contemporary exploration of this myth. 

 " The new myth coming into being through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and the ecological movement suggests that we are participants in a great cosmic web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field.  It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other. In our essence, we are one."

Anne Baring

In Pueblo mythology, Spider Woman is also called Tse Che Nako, Thought Woman. Thought Woman creates the world with what she imagines, weaves with the stories she tells.  We also participate in this imaginal power.   

"The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as "What stories do I want to live?"    ……… David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories"

Navajo rugs often have “Spiderwoman’s Cross” woven into the pattern.  The cross of Spider Woman represents balance - the union of the 4 directions.  Spider Woman is at the Center:  the 5^th direction is a hologram, reflecting every other strand.   The ancient Maya used stones called ‘spiders’ to map the four cardinal directions required for ceremonies, and artists of the prehistoric Mississippian culture often depicted a spider on shell gorgets with a cross on its back.  Among the Osage, special women had a spider symbol tattooed on their hands, also with a cross at its center.  And among the Navajo, to this day, a bit of Spider Web is rubbed into the hands of female  infants, so they "will become good weavers".  Sacred and ubiquitous is the web, warp, and woof of Spider Woman, who it may be said has many names in many places and times. 

As anthropologist Carol Patterson-Rudolph has written, to the Navajo,   Grandmother Spider Woman ((NA ASHJE’II ’ASDZÁÁ) represents initiation into a mature way of being.  The "Web" becomes visible within an integral, relational paradigm:   a "webbed vision".   Spider Woman thus is a bridge between the mundane, mythic, and sacred dimensions of life.  Like a spider web, her transparent, circular strands exist on multiple levels of meaning.   

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

“Spider Woman was the first to weave. Her techniques and patterns have stood the test of time, or more properly, the test of timelessness.…..…..Weaving is not an act in which one creates something oneself – it is an act in which one uncovers a pattern that was already there.”

I believe Spider Woman has  profound meaning for our time,  offering a "Webbed Vision" in a world that urgently needs to see  life as a shimmering web of  relational interdependency and fundamental unity.   My own need to  need to explore and "re-member" over the years became public web-weaving rituals, the creation of many  masks, with the hope of collaboration,  for ritualists and theatre, community art projects, and sculptures.  In  2007 I received an Alden B. Dow Fellowship which allowed me to create a community art project called “Spider Woman’s Hands” in Michigan,  and in 2009 I created “Weavers” for Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.  

 

 “Tse Che Nako, Thought-Woman, the Spider
 is sitting in her room thinking up a story now
I'm telling you the story she is thinking. “ 

Keresan Pueblo saying

 May we all rub a bit of Spider Web into the palms of our hands. 

Spider Woman's Hands

View more presentations from laurenraine.

    References:

    Loftin, John D., Religion and Hopi Life, Second Edition, Indiana University Press

    Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web (1989), Thames & Hudson

    Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, On the Trail of Spiderwoman, 1997, Ancient City Press

    Franke, Judith   A., The Gift of Spider Woman,  Dickson Mounds Museum, THE LIVING MUSEUM         …volume 61, No. 2, 1999

Alice Walker "Beauty in Truth"

 

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365171000/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=pbsofficial&utm_campaign=americanmasters

It's wonderful that you can stream PBS films from the internet (see the link above)........just wanted to share this wonderful film about Alice Walker, which can be viewed online.

AMERICAN MASTERS

Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth. Full Film

"Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth" is the first film biography of writer and activist Alice Walker. Most famous for her seminal novel "The Color Purple" for which she won a Pulitzer Prize, Walker was raised in poverty in the rural South during the violent and seismic social changes of mid-20th century America. Women, poverty and civil rights became the inherent themes in her writing.