New Work for July.........

An onion,

All those layers.

just when you think you can name yourself,
you discover new layers,
you’re forming a new skin,

a new ring.

But there's a core.

And where does that core start?

"Sow" , clay mosaic (2016)

What's been so fun about being in the ceramic studio all summer (in spite of the hot kilns) is that I don't know what I'm doing.  I let the clay kind of tell me what to do, and it's such a great Conversation!  Plus, I've been able to re-connect joyfully with "Flow", meaning, I look at the piece (or lump of clay) and I see what it can become, a picture comes into my mind of where to go next.

It's also been very liberating to kind of disassociate myself from the internal critic and "art world".......I'm letting myself just make what I enjoy, and not worrying about whether it's "good" by anyone's standards.  

"Sow" (2016)

"Reliquary for a Lost Forest" (2016)

"Quan Yin"

Spring at Santa Fe Dam, a Preserve in Los Angeles

Finally processed these photos from May..........this is actually the park, near Azusa and right in the heart of Los Angeles, where the California Renaissance Faire is held.

Remembering Avebury

“The ancient Greeks spoke of the "genus loci," or spirit of a place. They sited a shrine to honor the Earth Goddess Gaia in Delphi in Greece because the unique personality or spirit of that place was divined to be especially suited to Gaia residing there. Understanding the forces that drew the early Greeks to reach that decision may well be a concept that is at the very root of developing sustainable human societies and creating programs that maximize the unique values of each destination.” 

James  Swan, "Sacred Places"

Five years ago, in July, I took my credit cards and did something I always wanted to do, make my Pilgrimage to Glastonbury, Avebury, the Goddess Conference, and the mystical Arthurian landscape of the sacred springs and the Chalice Well.  It was well worth the expense, and my only regret ever since is that I've not been able to afford going back.  I felt like looking again at that time, and sharing some of the notes and images I brought back with me......I'm working hard in the studio these days, but my heart seems to be across the sea.  And I do hope I can walk among the "speaking stones" of Avebury again.

July 24, 2011

Going to Avebury was a process, because it represented an intention, long nurtured, of making a personal pilgrimage to this ancient sacred landscape.  So it could be said that the intention preceded me, one of Spider Woman’s threads, across the Atlantic.  Going to a Pilgrimage, even if only half realized, I venture to suggest there are stages of opening, of preparation, necessary.  Entering “mythic mind and space” is part of entering sacred space of any kind – it’s entering that dimension wherein the mind is prepared for the possibility that here the land speaks, the oracle resides, the fey are, and the ancestral spirits listen.

 

 Among the Lakota, preparation for any kind of spiritual activity, and many communal activities that involve consensus as well, must include cleansing activities – a fast, and a sweat lodge, for example.  This “purification” is found throughout virtually all spiritual traditions.   So following this logic, I’m not surprised I became sick almost as soon as I got off the plane, with three days of fever.  It certainly served to detox me from the stress and negative, fearful atmospheres I’ve been dealing with for months.



 It was with an exhausted body and an open mind I got off the bus at the village of Avesbury, and immediately walked, delighted, across the street and between two great stones that seemed for the entire world like a bright doorway to me.  I later learned that they’ve been dubbed the “Adam & Eve” stones, presumably because they represent polarities of male and female to some group that works with them.

You don't have to be long at Avesbury, or the area in general, to realize it is a pilgrimage point and magnet for many people, among them spiritual seekers, crop circle researchers, druids and witches, and a lot of others who have many different ideas of what is going on, some of it fascinating, some pretty fanciful. 

So I tried to keep myself open to my own experience, without superimposing projections on the landscape.

There is brightness there, it emanates from the land.  Local dowsers tell me it’s a “time vortex”, and hence that explains the continual conversation of so many magnificent crop circles that have occurred near Avebury, or Silbury Hill.   Quite a few studies of electromagnetic anomalies, brain waves, and other phenomena have been done in the area, and within crop circles that have occurred in the area as well. (There was a crop circle that occurred the morning I visited, July 18th, although I did not see it – it was closer to Silbury Hill, about a mile away.)

I proceeded to the stone the pair seemed to frame, and sat at its base, warmed by the stone’s presence.  I was becoming euphoric, and sheep wandering throughout with their soothing cries, and their curious-cautious eyes were good companions, a counter-point to the solemnity of the stones.

Then up the side of the great circular “henge”, attracted by wildflowers on its crest, and the naïve hope of seeing, in the fields below and beyond, a crop circle, or maybe Silbury Hill (wrong direction).  But what I looked on were just corn fields.  Rather fancifully, I felt I had, in some way, entered the “Gate”, and could now walk the Circle that is Avebury.

When we used to cast a circle in Reclaiming, we closed with "And now we are between the worlds, and what happens between the worlds can change the world."  Between the worlds is another order of being, an imaginal order that we enclosed by casting a circle, which we entered through a “doorway”, leaving behind the mundane world.  I think places of potency, Avebury, were enclosures and temples for “places between the worlds”, points of heightened earth energies, marked reverently by their stone monuments and avenues, places where celebrants could attune.  Places to contact the ancestors, the devas, places to heal, communicate, conceive, receive an oracle,  retrieve a soul, pray for rain or celebrate an auspicious day between the moon and the stars and the wheel of the year.  This was where the Great Mother spoke and the gods made their play.

Photo by www.adlag.com

I found that they are also ripe with synchronicity – that’s what places of heightened energy do, they “connect” and weave.  I had put on my Spider Woman necklace that morning, a Navajo piece that shows Grandmother Spider Woman weaving.  As soon as I  came off the Henge, I went into a little shop, where I  got into conversation with an elderly local, who told me he had seen a fabulous crop circle with his own eyes, and pulled out a polaroid of  the famous “Spider Web Circle” (of 1994),  proudly informing me that he had taken the photo himself.  He told me  it was “just over there, on the other side of the Henge.”  Just over by the fields and vista I had been  attracted to!


Circles within Circles……………

Avebury only has a hundred or so of its original 600 plus stones.  Most of these have been broken down and used by farmers to build houses and barns – the church has not been kind to the stones either, with various ministers admonishing their congregation to pull down  the “devil tracks” .

I found myself, walking that wide circle,  ecstatic, my heart chakra open, feeling “turned on” with that visceral deep eros of nature, of Gaia.  The following day, I was “stoned", spaced out, open.  I didn’t much want to return to “human time”, and I’m convinced if I had been able to sleep there, the dreams would have been vivid.   Avebury affected me in subtle ways, an effect that continues.

Sometimes language bears in its fossil rock
things once commonly known, now information
available to us only as tourists
as here poke through the earth
through the welter of houses from the last thousand years
through country roads, prim churches, blowzy pubs,
through male and female stones, the huge breast
called Silbury Hill, vast and cumbersome
works of a people whose will slumbers
in the stone circles, rows, wordless
as the thoughts of the sheep that graze.


Yet that will is potent, not with the dumb ferocity
and shapeliness of mountains, not with the bodily
eloquence of frightened or curious sheep.
Here are erected runes of language partly designed
to be read by clouds or goddesses, left for us
too carefully wrought to be ignored.
Sometimes with my hands on the warm/cold stone
I almost think I hear it in my bones.


Marge Piercy

More on "Flow" - the Multiplicity of Creative People

“If there is one word that makes creative people different from others,

 it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of "Flow:  The Psychology of Optimal Experience"

I wrote recently about "inviting flow" as I gave myself the gift of the month of June to go into the clay studio and work without constraints or even ideas about what that work might be.  I've not been disappointed in the process, which continues, because ceramics takes patience, and each piece, as its developing, always seems to mention another piece as a kind of "P.S. This Too" afterthought.  I guess that is to me true happiness....because it removes you from the mundane time stream and puts you into the creative stream, which is perhaps not apart from timeless. 

Somewhere in the course of the flow-stream I ran across these interesting videos and articles about the "multi-dimensionality" of creativity, something that has always been obvious to me (except when I was judging myself as having a bad, life-long case of ADD - I actually was tested once, and it was determined that I was off the charts).  But since that time I've come to accept the multiplicity of my interests and ways of self expression as just being about the diversity of my creativity, the diversity of my being.  Which I have noticed I share with many, many others.  Ultimately, bringing together phrases and means from different internal languages (or disciplines) to say what I have to say, just in different ways.  The song has different voices, and perhaps the greatest experience is when the Song sings you.  Those are the best of all creative times.
 

"I, the Song, I walk here."

..........Lakota poem

Anyway,  I believe this multiplicity of expression  is true of most, if not all, people who are able to contact and  unleash their creativity.  I've never liked the popular  idea that "creative people" are somehow so rare and different (and perhaps suspect as well). They are rare and different only because the inherant creativity, the life force itself, has not been been so discouraged, pounded out of, negated, humiliated, dis-empowered, exhausted, compromised, co-opted, stolen..........away.  Or denied.  I guess, in essence, I believe the nature of divinity, by any name, is creativity and co-creativity.  This is the basis of the metaphor of the Pueblo  Spider Woman, Tse Che Nako, also called  Thought Woman.  Like the spider, the Creatrix weaves the world into being with her own substance, the stories and words and songs she makes about the world, and this is the gift she endows all Her Relations with as well, to "create the world with the stories that are told".   At the center of the Great Web,  Grandmother Spider Woman is connected to all things, all beings, all stories.

"If you bring forth that which is within you it will save you.

  If you do not bring forth that which is within you, it will destroy you."

...........the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

I have no doubts about how privileged I am, always have been, to be free to create and explore.  And that privilege began with education and parents that encouraged me.  It is always sad to me when I encounter so very many people who denigate their own creativity and imagining powers.   Anyway, interesting articles...........

“Photography, painting or poetry – those are just extensions of me,

 how I perceive things, they are my way of communicating.” 

 Viggo Mortensen, Actor, Artist, Writer, Activist

From The Complex Personality of Creative People

https://vimeo.com/81254512

~http://developingmultipletalents.com/interested-many-things-creative-multitalented/

Reliquary for a Lost Forest

"Reliquary for a Lost Forest" (2016)

I seem to be making Reliquaries, containers for Artifacts that emanate and remember what is sacred.  Traditionally, in the Church, these contained the bones of saints - this practise of creating vessels for some part of the body of a saint is found among the Buddhists as well.  The idea is that these bones still are imbued with the power and holiness of those they once belonged to.

My bones seem to be the Bones of the Earth, the places that need to be cherished and remembered........and grieved at their loss as well.   So many of them keep arising from the "speaking clay".

"Rain Shrine" (2014)

Listening to the Clay.........

I noted earlier that I was "inviting flow", and behold, the floodgates have opened!  I joined my friend Maxine's Tucson Clay Co-op, and in the intense heat of June here, I get up at 4:30 in the morning and am in the clay studio, gloriously alone, by 5:00.  The hours pass, and the joy is of course the way the clay tells me what to do - it's always intuitive, and ideas flow in like the monsoon floods.  Who would think that I'd enjoy the hot, hot summer so much!

No pictures yet of new work, all of which is in various stages of glazing and bisquing, but I'm working on several Quan Yin mosaics, and two Green Men, one for the Clay Coop.  Having a lot of fun with my box of antique Afghani fabric presses, like the one here.  Before fabric came in from more industrialized Russia and Pakistan, they hand printed their fabric with beautiful hand carved wood fabric presses, which imprint beautifully on clay as well.  There is something so wonderful about being able to carry on the artistry of these unknown carvers, here and how.  The one on the right is my favorite (I used some low fire glazes to achieve the color)....the "raining Zinnia", although to me it looks also like a Chakra, or some manifestation of the Divine imbuing the blessings of rain.

The blessings of rain are not taken lightly here in the desert!

Maybe I love the image so much also because, many years ago when I was getting divorced and preparing to leave my home in the East Coast, and I was very unsure of what to do with my life or even where to go,  I had a dream in which an eagle flew me west, over the great landscapes, and I was dropping Zinnia seeds as we flew.  I've often thought of that dream since........we drop our seeds, the seeds of the flowering of our creativity and our lives, and never know where they will take root.  So let them be seeds of the Beauty Way.



I continue making my various shrines, like the "Shrine for the Ancient Midwives" (2014).........but I seem to be making containers, Reliquaries.  A reliquary was a Container for some kind of sacred artifact, usually, in the middle ages, the bones of a saint.  But I find I am interested in making Reliquaries for the Bones of the Earth and the Past,  a Reliquary for a Lost Forest, a Reliquary for the Flight of a Phoenix, a Reliquary for the Essence of Avalon............

It's so great to have the channels of my creativity open again....................

When Mud Woman Begins

by  Nora Naranjo-Morse


Electricity

down my arm 
through this clay 
forming into 
spirit shapes

of men
women 
and children 

I have seen 
somewhere before.

Electricity
surging upward 
as I mix 
                                                      
                                                        this mud 
                                                        like my mother
                                                        as her mother did 
                                                        with small brown feet.

                                                        Folding into this earth
                                                        a decision of 
                                                        joyful play, 
                                                        transcending expectations 
                                                       of fear
                                                        failure 
                                                       or perfection.

                                                      Creating spirits
                                                      calling invitations 
                                                      of celebration. 

                                                      What occurs 
                                                       in completed form, 
                                                       bright and bold, 
                                                       is motion 
                                                      from our mother's skin.

                                                      I smile  momentarily satisfied 
                                                      with my play. 
                                                      Electricity, 
                                                      generated from star colors 
                                                      far from home, 
                                                      entering

                                                     through my feet 
                                                     blessing my hands 

                                                     and opening my heart.


                                    From Mud Woman, Poems from the Clay
                                    University of Arizona Press 

                                    © 1992 Nora Naranjo-Morse

Art and Myth Making

 "Myth is a living force, like the telluric powers that stream through the Earth.  It is this mythic vision, looking for the ‘long story,’ the timeless tale, that helps us approach the deep mysteries because it insists that  these are  the stories we really live by, rather than the one we like to think we are living.  And moreover,"mythic vision" helps us  decide if our myths are working for or against us. ’' .........Phil Cousineau

Sometimes it occurs to me that I speak a language not many people speak, a language I think was  once spoken more widely in my circle, my world, and now I hear so rarely.  And like any traveller in a foreign land, there is such a delight when one meets a fellow country person who speaks your language, your mother tongue.  Because one has become accustomed to not speaking, to being silent, to nodding politely, knowing that the words forming in your mouth cannot emerge.  

The language of art, not always of course, but often, is like the mother tongue of those who explore the language of dreams, is mythic, multi-layered, inter-dimensional, and, as Phil Cousineau comments in the brief essay I take the liberty of copying below, a language that "resembles the god Proteus in the Odyssey, a shape-shifting creature who knows the secret that the lost Greek sailors long to hear—the way home.  But they must learn how to get a grip on him, if only for one slippery moment, so he might surrender his hidden wisdom."

Artists of all kinds, in my humble opinion, are floundering around for identity in a world that stupidly, blindly, dangerously defines value and success according to the $ in front of it.  Artists are spoken of as "emerging", kind of like a stock portfolio, and artists are often called "artist entrepreneurs" (which is not to say that some entrepreneurial skills aren't helpful).  But they  do not realize or value the deeper function, which is that  they are translators, the ones who can venture into that liminal realm and return to tell the tale of what was seen to the benefit of the tribe.  They might find themselves empowered if they allow themselves to view their work as a kind of sacred task, myth makers of their time.     Then they can see that they have their creative, intuitive hands in the ever evolving loom of Spider Woman, weaving and unravelling brightly colored threads, finding ways to communicate the story even as the story continually reveals itself to them, and through them, to others.  

 
 On Myth and Mythmaking

 excerpt from book by  Phil Cousineau

 Once and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in Our Lives (2001)


I was raised on the knee of Homer, which is an Old World way to describe growing up on stories as old as stone and timeless as dreams.  So I see myth everywhere, probably because I am looking for what my American Indian friends call “the long story,” the timeless aspect of everything I encounter.  I know the usual places to look for it, such as in the splendor of classic literature or the wisdom stories of primal people.  

I want to explore the aspect of myth that most fascinates me: its ‘once and future’ nature.  Myths are stories that evoke the eternal because they explore the timeless concerns of human beings—birth, death, time, good and evil, creativity and destruction.  Myth resembles the god Proteus in the Odyssey, a shape-shifting creature who knows the secret that the lost Greek sailors long to hear—the way home.  But they must learn how to get a grip on him, if only for one slippery moment, so he might surrender his hidden wisdom.

This is what I call ‘mythic vision.’  The colorful and soulful images that pervade myth allow us to step back from our experience so that we might look closer at our personal situations and see if we can catch a glimpse of the bigger picture, the human condition. 

 But this takes practice, much like a poet or a painter must commit to a life of deep attention and even reverence for the multitude of meaning around us.  An artist friend of mine calls this ‘pulling the moment,’ a way of looking deeper into experiences that inspire him.  In the writing classes I teach, I refer to this mystery as the difference between the ‘overstory,’ which is the visible plot, and the ‘understory,’ which is the invisible movement of the soul of the main characters.   In this sense myth is a living force, like the telluric powers that stream through the Earth.  It is this mythic vision, looking for the ‘long story,’ the timeless tale, that helps us approach the deep mysteries because it insists that  there are  the stories we really live by, rather than the one we like to think we are living, and moreover, ("mythic vision" helps us)  decide if our myths are working for or against us. 


If we don’t become aware of both our personal myths and the cultural myths that act upon us like gravitational forces, we risk being wholly overpowered and controlled by them.  As the maverick philosopher Sam Keen has written in Your Mythic Journey, ‘We need to reinvent them from time to time. . . .  The stories we tell of ourselves determine who we become, who we are, what we believe.’'