"To light a candle is to cast a shadow."
Ursula K. Leguin
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
"Everything is Alive"........
I woke up recently with the phrase "everything is alive" in my mind. To muse on that "threshold voice", I wanted to explore what "everything is alive" might mean, and this story from Alice Walker came to mind.
Catherine Keeler asked "How would we live if we saw the world with a 'webbed vision', meaning how would we live if we saw ourselves within a community, visible and invisible, of relationships with all kinds of living, responsive beings, including the food we eat, perhaps even the things we use and take for granted. As if it was all a kind of "great conversation", and creating "good relationship" was a primary concern. We would live so very differently...........
When did the world cease to be alive, and become a "thing"? When did plants, animals, and people become "things" or "resources" or "commodities" ? And how much of the conversation goes on without us realizing it, in spite of our objectification and de-humanization, all the time anyway?
I reflect on a little story of my own. At Christmas time a few years ago, because they were on sale, I bought a turkey and baked it. I felt rather silly, as I had no one to share this dinner with, being alone that Christmas day. I remember feeling rather sad about being alone, on Christmas day, with a baked turkey. I realized I had cranberry sauce, but no gravy, and so I decided to try to find some at the local Walgreens, the only place I knew would be open. As I went into the store, sitting on the sidewalk was a young man with a bottle of Windex offering to clean my windshield for some change.
Normally I'd provide some coins and move on, but the sight of this homeless young man, sitting there in the cold on Christmas Day, was just too much. I got to talking with him, and finding him intelligent, I asked him if he'd like some turkey, and we ended up sitting on the porch eating that turkey dinner together. I later paid him to do some odd jobs for me before he disappeared from that area, and I hope he found his way off the streets. Apparently, I didn't buy that turkey just for myself, although I thought I did. The universe responds.
The Universe Responds
by Alice Walker
A few years ago I wrote an essay called "Everything is a Human Being",
which explores to some extent the Native American view that all of
creation is of one substance and therefore deserving of the same
respect. In it I described the death of a snake that I caused, and
wrote of my remorse.That summer "my " land in the country crawled with snakes. There was always the large resident snake, whom my mother named "Susie", crawling about in the area that marks the entrance to my studio. But there were also lots of others wherever we looked. A black-and-white king snake appeared underneath the shower stall in the garden. A striped red-and-black one, very pretty, appeared near the pond. It now revealed the little hole in the ground in which it lived by lying half in and half out of it as it basked in the sun. Garden snakes crawled up and down the roads and paths. One day leaving my house with a box of books in his arms, my companion literally tripped over one of these.
We spoke to all of these snakes in friendly voices. They went their way, we went ours. After about a two week bloom of snakes, we seemed to have our usual number: just Susie and a couple of her children.
A few years later, I wrote an essay about a horse called Blue. It was about how humans treat horses and other animals; how hard it is for us to see them as the suffering, fully conscious, enslaved beings they are. After reading this essay in public only once, this is what happened. A white horse came and settled herself on the land. (Her owner, a neighbor, soon came to move her.) The two horses on the ranch across the road began to run up to their fence whenever I passed, leaning over it and making what sounded like joyful noises. They had never done this before (I checked with the human beings I lived with to be sure of this), and after a few more times of greeting me as if I'd done something especially nice for them, they stopped. Now, when I pass they look at me with the same reserve they did before. But there is still a spark of recognition.
What to make of this?
But what I'm also sharing with you is this thought: The Universe responds. What you ask of it, it gives.............I remember when I used to dismiss the bumper sticker "Pray for Peace". I realize now that I did not understand it, since I also did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world of our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine."**
** (From: "The Universe Responds: Or, How I learned We Can Have Peace on Earth",
Living by the Word, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, N.Y., N.Y., 1988.)
Friday, April 5, 2019
ANGELS IN NEBRASKA
In an article from his webzine "Warrior of the Light", Paolo Coelho wrote:
"I let my life be guided by a strange language that I call “signs”. I know that the world is talking to me, I need to listen to it, and if I do so I shall always be guided towards what is most intense, passionate and beautiful. Of course, it is not always easy."
I have also often found myself engaged in a "Great Conversation" that seems to be going on all around me, and occasionally I’m stunned to realize I wasn’t listening. Lately, grounded with so many duties and laundry lists, I feel like a virtual deaf mute.
The conversation seems to become most lively when I'm in movement. Between destinations lies a mythic land of flight and migration, a free range in the "Bardo" of transit, where I occasionally meet Angels of the Flux pointing the way. I'm getting ready to hit the road to go to California briefly, and already feel the longing to just be in motion........ and perhaps, those Angels, will speak to me again.
JOURNAL ENTRY, September 3, 2005.
Stopped in Cozad, Nebraska, home of the Robert Henri Museum.
When I was getting my MFA, I had to study, among others, the work of Robert Henri and the "Ash Can School" of painting, which he founded. It was called the "Ash Can School" because Henri and collegues were tired of the romanticized, dreamy landscapes of their time, and instead took to painting realistic scenes of urban life in New York and elsewhere, which was a great innovation.
The Cozad Museum has some beautiful paintings of the tall grass prairies of Nebraska by a local artist, and a few reproductions of Henri's "Ash Can School" paintings. They don't have any of the originals. Henri's father, it seems, actually was the founder of Cozad, but it appears that he had to leave rather suddenly with his sons and wife when he "accidentally" shot a man in a heated argument. He took his family to New York, changed his name, started the first casino in Atlantic City, and his talented son went on to study art and become famous. The boy never returned to Nebraska, although he did go on to live and work in Ireland, New York, and Paris. Cozad is proud of him anyway.
I continue to fret about my commitment to art. My life seems like a tapestry, on my good days, the threads finally woven with some skill into a colorful tapestry, I see that I have achieved some small bit of mastery. And then there are days when so much precious life seems wasted, lost, too many disappointments and wrong decisions and wrong turns. Those are days that are about emptying out, discovering things that once seemed so opaque are now, well, transparent. Unimportant. What really matters? What am I supposed to do now?
So here I sit, with a very nice cup of coffee and a sandwich at the Busy Bee Diner, where I have a front row center seat for the First Bank and Trust Company of Cozad.
That got my attention.
TUCSON SCULPTURE FESTIVAL! I'll be there!
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Thursday, March 28, 2019
More New Masks for my Upcoming Show
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| BRIDGIT |
I've been busy indeed getting ready for my show in May, including finally finishing a new version of my Book about the Masks of the Goddess Project.
It is fun to have a chance to practice my mastery of my art.........I have not made many masks in the past few years, mostly because since I stopped doing the shows and "being out there" there have been few requests for masks. But this is what I am good at, and it has been a great privilege for me to make these Goddess masks for others to use.
I remember when I first started learning about the "Temple Mask" traditions of Bali, and started working with Ida Bagus Anom in Mas, which is near Ubud. I was so inspired with the idea of sacred masks, masks that were used to "in-voke" the Gods, masks that were the "special masks" that were kept in the Temples, anointed and cleansed with holy water by the Balians, and maintained and created by a class of mask makers............it seemed so familiar to me, that concept. Perhaps I once lived in a culture like Bali where masks were sacred, in some other lifetime............
So when I returned to the U.S., the idea of making a collection of "Temple Masks" devoted to the Divine Feminine made sense to me. And then my opportunity came along with an invitation to create masks for the Invocation of the Goddess at the 20th Annual Spiral Dance in San Francisco. It seems fitting indeed that the Project should end in San Francisco as well, 20 years later. And I am ....... happy to realize that the masks did fulfill that dream, and I have this chance to close with honor for the many people I've been privileged to share them with.
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| INANNA |
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| CERES/DEMETER |
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| ISIS |
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| HECATE |
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| ERESHKIGAL |
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| BAST |
Monday, March 25, 2019
New Documentary about Ursula Leguin.....and more.......
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| "Earthsea" Map of the Legendary Land by Ursula Le Guin |
"To light a candle is to cast a shadow."
A recent documentary about her life is just released: https://vimeo.com/268831999
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin Official Trailer from Arwen Curry on Vimeo.
Ursula LeGuin Quotations:
• We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
• There are no right answers to wrong questions.
• It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.
• The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.
• The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerant uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
• I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
• Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
• If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
• What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
with thanks to About.com (http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/ursula_leguin.htm)
And here is a video by an artist who also, like me, has visited the world of the Kesh, and knows what it is like, I think, to be Always Coming Home.
Kesh from Vanessa Renwick on Vimeo.
Thursday, March 21, 2019
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