Sunday, January 30, 2022

"Sedna" and a syncronicity

 

"In the archaic universe all things are signs and signatures of each other. Inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly."
Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill
Every time I sit down to write, I always feel like it entails constructing articles complete with footnotes and addendum.......which is one of the reasons my articles have been not very inventive or prolific lately. Having said that, I'm going to loosen up, maybe make a few subjective statements and meandering surmises, and stop feeling I have to write as if I was defending my ideas at a podium.
Currently I belong to an online group that meets once a month to share and discuss synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences.  Because of that, I've been wanting to collate or review some of the many synchronicities I archived in this Blog.  Below is one from 2012 that involved a good friend of mine, the sculptor Georgia Stacy who lives in Nogal, New Mexico.  
Erica Swadley as "Sedna's Shaman" in Restoring the Balance (2004)

 In 2009 I sent out an email about an article to be published in   Coreopsis A Journal of Myth and Theatre    for their Summer/Autumn Issue of 2009.  The theme for that edition was  ironically themed "Mask, Mirror, and Muse".  My article was about my ritual theatre event/performance at the former Muse Community Arts Center:  "Restoring the Balance: the Mask of Sedna" .  

I'm proud of that article. Restoring the Balance was the last event I personally directed using the Masks of the Goddess collection, although they did travel to other producers.  It was also an event wholly infused with, for lack of a better word, a kind of numinous presence, and synchronicities abounded in it's production.  I even found myself after the event with spirit photographs!

Katherine Josten as "Sedna" 

I have always felt I had a responsibility to document and share the stories participants created, told, or re-told with the masks.  Not just the ever-evolving myths themselves, such as the "Story of Sedna", Inuit Mother Goddess of the Ocean,  but also the stories of the rituals, the performances, the insights that arose for those who were involved in the productions.  In the hope that those archives may inspire others to carry on the work.  These were collective re-mythings: prayers and celebrations of the multi-cultural Divine Feminine through the medium of story, performed within the liminal landscapes of ritual, theatre and sacred space.

As members of the neo-pagan Collective Reclaiming used to say when a Circle was cast for ritual work: 

"We are between the worlds now, and what happens between the worlds can change the world."  

To be "between the worlds" is to be in that zone between the secular and the sacred, a circular "wholly" place that is fertile and imaginally fluid. ("Imaginal cells" is the actual scientific term for the cells that are responsible for transforming a caterpillar, immersed in its chrysalis, into a butterfly. They are alchemic agents of biological change.)

"I think many artists feel they are weaving some form of energy into their work. It's what psychometrists see when they "read" objects. There is an aesthetic psychometry each person does as they look at a work of art. Artworks are like batteries - if we're receptive, they can charge us. My idea of reality is that there are many, many interpenetrating dimensions." .....Alex Grey

 "What happens between the worlds", fashioned with individual and collective intention, occuring with or without the form of conscious ritual or pilgrimage,  is a generative place, ripe with syncronicities, because therein the  boundaries lessen.

"Wind Borne" by Georgia Stacy
So, what this is leading to is an email I received, after forwarding my article about the Myth of Sedna, to Georgia in New Mexico. Recently, Georgia has begun to include whale flukes instead of wings in her wood sculptures. Here's a new piece from that series and an email she sent me back.

 Lauren, This is more than a coincidence. I was reading the "Inuit Imagination". When I came to the sculpture carved for Sedna, with a whale fluke, I cried for the second time. I cried the first time I heard the story, many years ago. But, the clincher...right before I turned on the computer to find your email, a friend called and wanted to read me the story of Sedna, because I had just finished a sculpture with bones for arms. Life is so interesting.

Georgia
Why this confluence of syncronicities?  I personally, having worked for years with myths as an artist, and with Collaborators who are "activating" the myths through art and drama - I personally believe that the archetypes are alive in our collective consciousness, within the "dream body" of humanity. The story of Sedna is a very important story for our time.  It is about the suffering and sacrifice of the  Sustaining Mother, what happens when Mother Earth is disregarded and abused,  and the rites of at-one-ment the Inuit did to regain balance and good relationship with Her. It recognizes the interdependency of all beings, and the need for honor, and Balance.   It is also about the suffering of women at the hands of men, the imbalance that occurs when the feminine is not honored, and what must arise in order to restore the Balance
It's about exactly what we lack in our industrialized, climate imperiled  time: a deep ecological understanding of reciprocity with the living Earth and all the mutually inter-dependant beings we share our lives with.    The "Story of Sedna" is an old myth that belongs to an indigenous people most Americans have never heard of - yet it is a myth that has universal and contemporary significance.  The telling that occured in our event was ripe with synchronicity because it was a story that needed to be told again. 
SEDNA https://terragenesis.fandom.com/wiki/Sedna

 Interestingly (synchronistically)  "Restoring the Balance" was produced at All Nations Hall at the Muse Community Arts Center  on April 9th, 2004.  I did not know it at the time, but just a few weeks before that NASA announced the discovery of a new planet beyond Pluto which astronomers named "Sedna".  *  (I learned about the new planet shortly after the event.  It seemed, to my personal poetics, like a synchronistic and grand metaphor for the concerns of our time, and I thought of my fascination with another indigenous Goddess, the "midwife of the New Era", Spider Woman.**)

When we step inside the magic Circle "between the worlds", when we enter the "fissures", we find we are not alone. Here's another quote from Alex Grey, in an interview I did with him and Allyson in 1989: 

"If you reach down far enough, we're all made up of the same archetypes. Joseph Campbell talked about what he called "core myths". As did Jung. If you go deep enough into yourself, you find yourself in a noisy place with a lot of other people. And if you draw symbols from there, you plug into a collective form of consciousness." 
Well, back to the studio now, and hopefully, the Cracks will continue to open, even if I'll never understand why.
"There's a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in." 
 .....Leonard Cohen
Painting by Tyler Gore

* "March 15, 2004: NASA-funded researchers have discovered the most distant object orbiting the sun. It's a mysterious planet-like body three times farther from Earth than Pluto.

 "The sun appears so small from that distance that you could completely block it out with the head of a pin," said Dr. Mike Brown, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, Calif., associate professor of planetary astronomy and leader of the research team. The object, called Sedna for the Inuit goddess of the ocean, is 13 billion kilometers away. Sedna will come closer to Earth in the years ahead, but even at closest approach, about 72 years from now, Sedna is very far away. Then it will begin its 10,500-year trip back to the far reaches of the solar system. "The last time Sedna was this close to the sun, Earth was just coming out of the last ice age. The next time it comes back, the world might again be a completely different place," Brown said.

Mysterious Sedna: Astronomers have discovered a mysterious planet-like body in the distant reaches of the solar system.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/16mar_sedna

** In some Pueblo mythologies Spider Woman (Tse Che Nako, the Thought Woman) is a Creatrix Goddess.  She also is a Midwife to each new Age.  

"The end of the Hopi calendar, and entry into the "5th World", is thus also about the "Return of Spider Woman", the cosmic weaver who is also, in the Pueblo mythological universe, the midwife who guides the "new people" through the Sipapu (or birth canal) in the sacred Kiva, offering a thread (or a ladder) to rise up into each "New World"...... I reflect that in the Circles I've participated in, there are 5 directions: North, South, East, West, and Center. The Center is that which unites everything, the breathe, the dark space, ecological interdependency, the Web.  Integral."

The Spiritual Significance of 2012,  12/7/2012

"Every atom of your body is connected to every other atom in the universe, as it exchanges energy and information with the vacuum"...Nassim Haramein

Saturday, January 29, 2022

The Women are Coming!

Truly, so much change in my lifetime!  This is what the "Return of the Goddess" means to me, the Arising of the feminine in every aspect of life from so many millenia of enslavement.  This will and is changing the values and paradigm of a world that is in desperate need to deconstruct the death dealing values of patriarchy.  Gives me hope indeed.

 https://youtu.be/tUujjBqpxOg

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Loss of an Animal Friend

 


My friend Mr.  Grey (the Guard Kitty).  We miss you so much, Mr. Grey.  

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Imagining Beauty ~ Traveling the Path of the Heart by Patricia Ballentine

https://youtu.be/AQCjxi2buUc


I wanted to share the beautiful video Presentation (with her permission) that Priestess and Artist Patricia Ballentine gave at the 18th Conference on Current Pagan Studies that she gave just this past weekend.  The Theme was "Visions of Imagination and Creativity" and Patricia's video about the creation of her Labyrinth was my favorite presentation, both a sharing of the creative journey, and a meditation on finding the pathway to the Heartland.   Thank you Patricia for all that you bring to a world thirsty for what you offer.  To learn more about her work, visit her Blog THE CREATIVE FLAME



Imagining Beauty: Traveling the Path of the Heart


"Imagination can raise us up or tear us down. It is something we all have and use every day. When we anticipate a next step we are imagining what an outcome may be. When we resist taking an action we may be imagining that the future will look like the past. The challenge is to imagine the higher turn rather than being held back by imagining the worst as we take each step on the winding path of life. THAT is the greatest magic! 

In 2021 I created a 14' x 14' hand painted and stitched portable canvas labyrinth. The intention was to create something that would serve as a tool to bridge generations, weave inter-tradition communications, and support community building. I didn't realize how deeply the creative process would take me into my inner multi-generational work. From the spark of inspiration to the final steps of completion and consecration I gained clarity into my vision of, and devotion to the path of Beauty. 
 
This video steps the viewer through the process from the spark of inspiration to completion and consecration, revealing the call to Beauty."

Sunday, January 2, 2022

Requiem: Art for the Sixth Extinction

                                                                                  




Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.   
Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you, I
bend down my strange face to yours 
in farewell.

Anne Sexton, "All My Pretty Ones"


Xerces Blue Butterfly.  Became extinct in 1945, one of the first American
butterflies to become extinct from habitat loss caused by urban development.


I just applied for a Puffin Grant to do a Shrine for the 6th Extinction as part of Dia de Los Muertes next fall.  I hope I will be able to do it..................it has been in my mind for a long time.



 

"We have been raised to think that our body ended here, with this bag of skin, or with our possessions or education or house.  Now we begin to realize that our body is the world."
Joanna Macy 



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 unraveling?

Drew Dellinger, Hieroglyphic Stairway



                                                               

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Paintings from "Shamanic" Series


A long time ago I had a dream about a man who offered me fire.   In fact, I had the dream twice, and although I never fully understood it, I remember the dream still.   It is a beautiful metaphor for love, for courtship, for sacred sexuality, for a longing I must have felt then for being offered all of those things.

I rediscovered this painting in the process of looking through my files (I seem to be engaged very much in contemplation of my life these days).  I always loved it, never showed it, don't remember anyone ever saying anything about it to me, and finally it was destroyed, as so many of my paintings were.  It is hard to have opportunities to share paintings, and it is hard to store paintings, especially when they come off the canvases.  I am sad that it's lost, but glad that I have the image still.

I remember when I painted it, during a magnificent, magical residency at the (now defunct) Cummington Community, in Western Massachusetts, not far from where Emily Dickenson lived.  It was 1989, and I was reading Journey of the Wounded Healer by Joan Halifax, and was very much thinking about the way shamans and healers find their callings.  All of the paintings I did then were based on the concept of the Shamanic journey, and on my dreams.  The painting below was called "Fire Heart".  Now that I think about it, all of the paintings were also about Fire.  Which has always been my friend, and my Element.