Venus Synchronicities.........

I'm still here in California. And strangely, I seem to be in the middle of a Syncronicity Cluster based on the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite/Venus.  I think, when this kind of thing keeps going on, one must pay attention.  

"Venus" by Lorraine Capparell 

I received a notice from artist Lorraine Capparell  about her beautiful sculpture Venus.  Oddly, I used another of her sculptures to illustrate the previous entry. 

I received a day later an order for an Aphrodite mask.  And a notice about a Circle Work workshop with Jalaja Bonheim, who wrote Aphrodite's Daughters, a wonderful book I revisited a few weeks ago when visiting my friend Joanne, who had it on her kitchen table because she is doing research with the book. (I also posted about her a month or so back)

 Then I received a notice about an Aphrodite Workshop occurring this coming weekend, sponsored by two women I know from Reclaiming - one is an acquaintance, Laurie Lovecraft (an appropriate name for a priestess of the Goddess of Love).  I'm tempted to brave the truly horrendous L.A. traffic to attend - Laurie and Tami's description of working with the heart to open the path to creativity, and to create beauty.......is  just the healing affirmation I may need.

And how terribly wounded Aphrodite is in our world.  As I write this, I reflect on how, a few days ago, I was lying on the bed in a motel room, flipping through the TV channels.  There were no less than 5 programs within that hour about young women, girlfriends,  wives  and an exotic dancer murdered by men.  A stranger from another culture would think that raping and killing young women was the national sport. 

In fact, now that I think about it, the need to destroy Aphrodite in every way is at the very heart of patriarchal culture.  Because a culture that values love, beauty, and Eros............is a culture that would not be able to make war, or guns, because it would be a culture with great reverence for life.

Here is a poem I wrote for Aphrodite in 1999:

APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN

Please allow me to take off my shoes,

this faux marble pose 

this modern, pragmatic mask.

Permit me my ruin.

Let us not consider this therapy

  or revolution

do not ask me to give you space

let us not discuss those who came before

and those who might follow.

Let us not talk of past lives.

I have fallen on hard times.

If you come to my temple

  just

let me make for you an ocean.

Half seen in the darkness

your body, a mystery

true, tangible, radiant,

lined with the rings of your life.

You are beautiful,

beautiful to be a man.

Darling, even in this era, I will not believe

that love is disposable,

that sex is safe

that lovers are trains, rolling past each other

to some certain station 

  I remember,

  I almost remember my river source

My skin forms the word anew,

  yes,

  enter me

  as if you were coming home

Telling the World With the Stories We Tell

"Story Teller"  by Lorraine Capparell

Lately I've felt at a loss for words.  So I felt like pulling up some worthy words by a few people I admire about how to manage life, art, and creating reality.  Spider Woman in Pueblo traditions is also called "Thought Woman", because she makes the world with the stories she tells about the world.   So do we...........

  

Spider and Cross, prehistoric Mississippian Culture ornament

"God needs us as much as we need God.  We need God because we are God's stories.  God needs us because we are God's way to make new kinds of stories."

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" 

 People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons.  From within. ”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

"Progress might have been alright once upon a time, but it has gone on for too long."

---Ogden Nash

"Stories are not abstractions from life but how we engage with it.  We make stories and those stories make us human.  We awaken into stories as we awaken into language, which is there before and after us.  The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as "What stories do I want to live?"   Insofar as I'm non-dual with my narratives, that question is just as much, 

"What stories want to come to life through me?"

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" 

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

"Our job was not to just re-tell the ancient  myths, but to re-invent them for today.  Artists are the myth makers."

Katherine Josten, The Global Art Project

 
"With every passing hour our solar system comes 43 thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in the Constellation of Hercules. And still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress."

---Ransom K. Ferm

"What's a day without a good rationalization?"

---Fred (Bartender at the Crystal Korner Bar, Madison, Wisconsin)

Crop Circle, Wiltshire,England, 2009

What Did You Do?

It's 3:23 in the morning,
and I'm awake
because my great, great, grandchildren
 won't -let -me -sleep.
My great, great, grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do, while the planet was plundered?
what did you do, when the earth was unravelling?
surely you did something when the seasons started failing
as the mammals, reptiles, and birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew

Drew Dellinger

I suppose, because my brother's funeral is immanent, that explains the kind of universal grief I feel on this trip.  And it is shocking to see the drought in Califorina.  Grief  sits in my chest, and follows me up the road, the unwelcome rider.  In my experience,  grief is something we need to say hello to, something you have to open the door to, offer a cup of tea, and listen to the stories Grief has to tell.  One way or another, Grief needs to be grieved out until our hearts break open in the places they need to break open, and we can emotionally "breath" again, have responsive hearts.  I don't mean make a permanent place for grief, to make a state religion of it like Queen Victoria did for her lost Albert.........but I do not believe it is possible to go forward without allowing loss its place.

 I find I am not so much grieving for my brother, but for the loss of so much, the strange experience of not having a family anymore (which is something many elders have to come to terms with),   so many people I've known.  I return to familiar places, expecting to find somehow my former self, and she is gone, not there.   And most of all, I grieve and pray for every precious being, pristine ocean, seaweed, the pink ladies that come up every August, rain or dry, giving us so much generous grace.  Thirsty little deer, seeking a drink at a diminished lake.  The grey fox slipping into the compost pile.  Redwoods, each one  a cathedral, reaching into the sky.  Bees.  Blackberries, growing beside the road.

Drew Dellinger

A very Old Ocean Poem............

I found this poem I wrote when I was just 18.  I'm surprised at how it still rings true for me.  

 

OCEAN PIECE

Think of this song

this song in you

     what is it?

What is this music you are,

     think of this song in you

standing at the mouth

     mouth of the ocean at dark

into the darkness this song

     the ocean makes

this song 

it passes you, through you

it is not your own

you are a part of it

Travels on the Coast (2)

I am tired, I confess.  I am also, apparently, a homing pidgion.  

Driving north from San Diego, I was depressed by the terrible dryness of inland California, the drought evident everywhere. In fact, the right word would be sorrow, and a low, humming, underlying terror.  This is global warming, surely, this devestation of my homeland, this terrible drought.  So much is changing now.  

I didn’t want to complicate my state of mind by traffic in the Bay Area, so I attempted to bypass the whole mess in San Jose, only to become confused, and find myself headed straight for Berkeley during rush hour.  Naturally, I had to get off and get a coffee at Café Med on Telegraph.

Telegraph looked seedy and depressed, the Med was much as I remembered it, but dirtier, and yet, not the same at all because 40 years is a really long time.  All my friends are memories sitting at those marbletop tables, and memories, in the end, are poor companions.  Does anyone remember People’s Park, or Moe of Moe’s Books, or  the street artists of Telegraph?  I saw my first husband, Paul, sitting vividly in my imagination at the table at the top of the stairs with his camera bag, and his dogeared  notebook………but who knows where, or who, he is now.  This becomes a metaphysical exercise if I think about it too long...........
I left to begin the ordeal of nearly 2 hours trying to get out of the Bay Area.  

At last I found myself in Vallejo, and headed toward Napa, the Wine Country reviving my spirit, and found myself, homing pidgin again, on the road to Middletown and Harbin Hot Springs.  Lots of memories there as well, the Ancient Ways Gathering in the valley campground, and dreams, even a very  prophetic dream*  I had in 1999.  For all it’s being crowded,   it’s still a healing place, a place that would be favored by Sulis, Goddess of the waters and of the fires..

Walking heavily in my bathing suit, a little lame from a decade ago injury, short of breath, I try to remember the lithe woman I was 20  years ago.  I  suppose the many nudists here look at me in my bathing suit  (with a skirt yet) like a dinosaur emerging from the 1950’s.  Fine with me, in my old age, I like both bathing suits and nightgowns.   

The waters worked their magic, and I had the little heart shaped  pool to myself all morning (fear of old ladies in bathing suits with skirts?)  Hey, wish it would work  in parking lots as well.   I hope I am becoming, as Clarissa Pinkola Estes termed it, “a dangerous old woman”. Yes!  

I floated on my back, allowing the water to take me where it will.  And with a view of the sky, tree tops, birds and bees above me, just as the previous night I saw a vast ceiling of stars glittering between dark branches, so I floated away a stress and sadness.  As I let go of “direction”, the currents floated me around the pool, , occasionally bumping into the sides, different views, sometimes returning to the same sky view but with a different slant of sunlight, a different bird, a new cloud making itself.  Until finally I came to  stillness in the center of the pool.  

And somehow, I felt that my question, “what do I do now?”  had been answered.  If indeed I had a question.  Or perhaps the question and the answer both occurred in the process of floating.  Let go, the Circle is always there, the truth is viewed from all sides, and ultimately, we all return to the Center.  Trust.

I am a great devotee of hot springs, of the generous Numina who keep the hot waters for all of us.  I don’t dream much anymore, but  I did  dream last night.  Hotsprings, I have noticed, are great places for dreaming,.  I was buying a green dress, and it had a beautiful, layered, billowing skirt down to the ankles.  I felt that I “couldn’t pass it up” as it was “only $45.00”.  But I wasn’t sure I could fit into it, it would need some adjustment, and I hadn’t had a chance to try it on before I woke up.  A good color, the color of healing, of  the Fey, of  the green growing Earth, a good dress to try on now. 

Travels on the Coast (1)

"Dragon Tree Deva" (2014)

The Botanical Garden at Carlsbad

(with many thanks to my friend Joanne for taking me there).............and I find very, very sexy flowers, Agaves with Attitude, and quite a few emergent Devas of the Garden........... 

The whole portfolio of images is available as a slide show at: 

 http://s27.photobucket.com/user/laurenraine9/slideshow/Carlsbad%20Botanical%20Garden?sort=3

Corn Mother Mask

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

Marilou Awiakta

"Native American Indian legends tell of The Corn Mother sacrificing herself so that her people could have life. According to her instructions, in one legend, she was to be killed, her dead body dismembered, strun among the fields and planted.  In harvest ceremony after harvest ceremony the last sheaf of corn was gathered together and dressed in women’s clothing.  This Corn Mother doll was referred to as The Old Woman, The Old Grandmother, Old Wife or even The Great Mother. To assure a plentiful harvest The Old Corn Mother was given to a family for safe keeping until the next growing season began and the cycle of birth, growth, death and rebirth continued. As I looked further into what I had learned about the archetype of the old woman, I realized that the power of the “Old Woman” is her ability to embrace change, her willingness to give birth to her Old Self, to make friends with her death and trust in rebirth."

Sondra Fields

http://cornmother.com/About_Sondra.html

Painting Courtesy http://www.returnofthecornmothers.com/

I recently made a new Corn Mother mask, which I'm taking with me on my travels (my brother's funeral in California, then a trip up the coast).  She wanted to come with me, and I will be taking the masks to show my friends Mana and Annie in Willits, to receive a blessing for it.  The story of the previous Corn Mother mask was quite wonderful, and although I've shared it before, I felt like re-posting it here.  Corn Mother is the Sustainer of the Americas, sacred in virtually all native American traditions.  I hope this mask will find new Dancers to share Her ever evolving stories.

"And where corn is the Corn-Mother is also.‘This thing they call corn is I'."
Marilou Awiakta

Corn Mother has many names, and among the Cherokee she is called "Selu".  

The story is that Selu fed her family with delicious grain, but no one knew where it came from.  Finally her sons saw her shaking corn from her body, discovering her secret.  They had witnessed a mystery they could not understand. Being young, fearful, and ignorant, they resolved to kill their mother, calling her a witch, and  making  disastrous assumptions about her power. Knowing she could not  give them wisdom, nor teach them the ways of nature, Selu told them to bury her body in the earth.  Thus, She is born again each year, nourishing her children in a continuing act of sacrifice.  Selu does not punish - in loving generosity, She offers her children a chance to return to good relationship.  

My own relationship with Selu began in 2002.  

I had given masks to choreographer Mana Youngbear to work with in a ritual performance she was organizing at the Black Box Theatre in Oakland.  I was living in Arizona at the time, and I didn't know what her program was going to be, but I looked forward to returning to California to attend the performance. 

Several weeks before her event, I attended an unrelated event at the Ritual Center in Oakland, founded by Matthew Fox.   A guided meditation by a woman minister was central to this ritual event, which was dedicated to the return of the Divine Feminine.  The meditation was about the need to heal the damage done to the feminine in the past, and she spoke of the Inquisition, the Burning Times.  As I sat on the floor in a darkened room with some 300 people, I could hear the sound of many people weeping. 

 And yet I  found myself absorbed by a vision. When I closed my eyes I immediately saw a Native American woman dancing. I opened my eyes, and closed my eyes again, and still she danced before me.  Dressed in a traditional fringed costume, she had ears of multi-colored corn in her hands as she danced, and this vision continued until the end of the meditation.  

It was so vivid that when I returned to my studio, I decided to make a mask for Corn Mother.  I bought an ear of corn, cast it so I could duplicate it in leather, and made a mask with corn on each side of the face.  

I had been reading about Black Elk, the great Lakota shaman. As a young boy, he foresaw the destruction of his people, what he called the "hoop" of the Lakota nation. But he also prophesied a "hoop of the nations": a great circle, composed of many interlocking circles, that would someday come to be. A "Rainbow Tribe".  So I painted a rainbow on the mask's forehead, because the children of America are now of all colors. 

"When I held up an ear of calico corn we would think about this wisdom of the Corn Mother. How the different kernels are ranged around the cob, no one more important than the other. How each kernel respects the space of those on either side, yet remains itself - red, black, white, yellow or combinations of those colors. How the Corn-Mother, in Her physical being, exemplifies unity in diversity." ..........Cherokee poet Marilou Awiakta

Just before her performance, I spoke with Mana, and learned there was one dancer in Manna's cast who had no mask, Christy.  Christy had felt inspired to dance "Green Corn Woman" because of her deep affinity with the Corn Mother, and had created her costume for the performance.   Now it seemed she had her mask.  

Here is the story Christy told me when we finally met, and the new mask was delivered.

Christy Salo as "Green Corn Woman" 

Cornmother's Gift
by Christy Salo
(2002)

I made a bouquet of corn for Manna's wedding, with a necklace of rainbow beads I bought at a garage sale. I later used this same bouquet I to dance Green Corn Woman. Manna is part Cherokee, and when she cast her show, she asked if I wanted to dance Corn Mother. We didn't have a mask for her, but I was inspired to dance anyway. 

I knew very little about the Native American Corn Mother, about Selu, who is Cornmother to the Cherokee.  I planned on doing some research. Along the way, I remember stopping at a used bookstore. Opening a rather esoteric book at random, I discovered I was looking at an article about the Corn Maiden. I was further stunned to find it illustrated by Vera Louise Drysdale. Vera was my friend, years ago, when I lived in Sedona.

And so, without any further urging, I was ready to begin. The feeling of familiarity continued as I created a costume. I was looking for materials I would need, and within a few days, Manna left a message. "Christy" she said, "There is a Hopi woman visiting Isis Oasis Retreat Center, and you need to meet her! She gave me some 300 year old corn meal to give to you!"

Once again, I felt Selu encouraging me! I thought about what She meant to me personally. To me, Selu is about the wealth that comes from the work of forgiveness. How can we be fed and sustained, how can we create peace, if we cannot practice the lessons of forgiveness, if we cannot learn tolerance and compassion for our differences? That is the beginning place for the cooperation we will need in order to evolve into a global family. In America, we have mixed bloodlines, "rainbow blood". Especially as Americans, our challenge is to understand our true relationship to each other. I've always conceived of the Rainbow as actually being a circle. Half of the rainbow disappears into the ground, into an underworld realm, where it exists beneath the Earth, hidden, but present. Like the Corn Mother. Aren't we all Her children? Perhaps, what she gives us now is the means to seed a rainbow vision.

We received the new mask at the time of the lunar eclipse, in May of 2002, and decided it was an auspicious time to consecrate it with our dried corn. As we did, a flash of light went off in the room! At first we thought it was a light bulb that blew out. But no electric lights had been turned on in that room. We looked at each other amazed, and felt the presence of Corn Mother.

References:

http://www.returnofthecornmothers.com/

Marilu Awiakta  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilou_Awiakta

• Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1993. A blend of story, essay, and poetry.