THREADS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN - some random notes

Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman
is sitting in her room,  and what ever she thinks about appears.
Thought-Woman, the spider
named things and as she named them they appeared.
She is sitting in her room thinking of a story now:

I'm telling you the story She is thinking. 3

 

Keresan Pueblo Proverb  (3)

Native stories don't end after two hours in a theatre, or when we turn off the electronic box. Like the Hands of Spider Woman, they keep spinning and evolving, generation into generation, from the waking world to the dreamtime. Storytelling, in native traditions, is more than a way to pass on history and religious beliefs to the next generation - it is also a ceremony that acts as a link between the mythical beings and the people themselves, whose ritual life is based on the mythic cycles. This is the same way sacred masks, throughout the world, are regarded and used - as doorways into the realms of the deities.

Spider Woman appears in stories throughout the Americas, indeed, throughout the world. My inspiration is derived from her potent presence in the Southwestern part of the United States, where I live, which includes the rich cultural traditions of the Pueblo Indians and
the Navajo. The Pueblo Indians refers to many native peoples living there, from northern New Mexico to the Hopi mesas of Arizona, with many unique cultural differences. These people are believed to be the descendants of the vanished Anasazi who built cities, cliff dwellings, and ceremonial centers throughout the area.

In Pueblo mythology Thought Woman, Sun Father, and Corn Mother are the most important deities. These primal deities are each powerful, but they are also interdependent. Thought Woman/Spider Woman is the creatrix of the universe, which she sometimes initiates alone, and sometimes in partnership with the Sun. The creative impulse is something Thought Woman passes on, originating from the Web's center a generative process continually expanding through her daughters, sons, and a non-human pantheon of relations as well.

There are also tales (among the Hopi) that say Spiderwoman, with Sun Father, fashioned the very first people (which also included two-legged people) from red clay. When ceramic artist Kathy Space and I began our community sculpture project in Midland, Michigan (2007), we conceived of “prayer ties” to unify a mosaic composed of casts of participants’ hands and faces. This variation on Spider Woman Web seemed like another “thread“ to envision the telling. A Web of minds and hands, made of red terra cotta clay. Terra. The good red earth, the color of life, of blood, of vitality.

A "Spider and Cross" symbol is found, ubiquituous, among the prehistoric Mississippian people thorughout the South and Midwest, and a Spider Woman, who is also a variation of Mother Earth, is found among the Maya.  The Navajo (who call themselves the “Dine” which means “the people”) revere Grandmother Spider Woman ('Na'ashje'ii sdfzq'q) because she taught them how to weave.

According to cultural anthropologist Carol Patterson-Rudolph,

"The Navajo have their own version of Spider Woman. As with all metaphors, Spider Woman is a bridge that allows a certain kind of knowledge to be transmitted from the mundane to the sacred dimension.........they believe that an individual must undergo an initiation before he or she can be fully receptive to this kind of knowledge. Thus, to the eyes of the uninitiated, Spider Woman appears merely as an insect, and her words go unheard. But to the initiated whose mind has been opened the voice of this tiny creature can be heard. This is the nature of wisdom, c0nveyed through the metaphor of Spider Woman. 1"

Spider Woman (who lives, the Navajo say, on Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly) is always available to help her descendants. She can best be heard in the wind (or on the transparent threads of synchronicities) - if one is quiet, and prepared to listen.

Navajo rugs often have Spiderwoman’s Cross woven into the pattern. The cross of Spider Woman, it seems to me, is another very important symbol for our time, because it represents balance - the union of the 4 directions or 4 elements. The fifth element is the unifying force, the mystery at the center. To “walk in beauty” is to be aware of a “moving point of balance” as we walk across the land, and walk through the circles of our lives and relationships.

Spider Woman has a way of getting around.

Although she can be found in the canyons and deserts and prairies and forests of the Americas (and stories about the Yellow Women, and “Born from the Water” and “Monster Slayer“, and Evil Katchina, and many others, are well worth the telling) - it seems her grandchildren traveled to many other places and times as well. Perhaps she was once Neith, the primal weaver of ancient Egypt. In Celtic lore she has her hand on the web of the Wyrd, and in India, there is the great Jewel Net of Indra, wherein each gem infinitely reflects every other gem. Among the Greeks she gave Theseus a thread to guide him through his labyrinth - a thread not unlike the same threads she casts to you, and to me, now and then, on our own heroes journeys.

And today? Well, there are many contemporary ways Spiderwoman makes herself known. Ecologists speak of the great Web of life, while physicists speak of entanglement theory. I like to think that the Internet is Spiderwoman's latest appearance. I have the feeling She’s working very hard now to make us pay attention.

Because the truth of Spiderwoman's Web is really very simple. All my efforts to make a more complex tale have failed, and I can summarize it like this:

We're woven into the world,
and the world is woven into us.

We’re weaving the world into being with the stories we tell, right now. 

A cultural paradigm is founded upon mythic roots - the "warp and woof"2 from which the ideas of a culture grow. So what are those threads? Do they show us how to “walk in beauty” as the Navajo teach? Because to "walk in beauty" is not just a personal practice. It's a blessing in motion for all our myriad relations. Each of us is holding a thread, a lineage, that goes back in time and extends far into the future, a weave we participate in with our thoughts, our dreams, and the manifest creative work of our hands. So perhaps the only real question is also an ethical question, as well as a creative one. “What are we weaving?”

I have found that Spiderwoman delights in all things connected, co-creative, collaborative, cooperative, communicative - all those “co” words. Warp and weft. May we all be conscious weavers, beautiful weavers. For our children, for all our relations, for the future.

My gratitude to:

The Aldon B. Dow Fellowship, The Puffin Foundation, Kathy and Steve Space and Space Studio, and you - for weaving this story with me.

Lauren Raine, 2007

Beauty is above me

Beauty is below me

Beauty is beside me

Beauty is before me

Beauty is behind me

 Dine Blessing Way Chant

1 Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, "On the Trail of Spiderwoman", 1997, Ancient City Press, p. 82

2 "warp and woof : the foundation or base of something." [ Old English owef "weave on" <>

3 Keresan Pueblo Creation Myth - Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, "On the Trail of Spiderwoman", Ibid.

Nesting

We're incubating the future
with the stories we weave.

So what are they?

The 6th Extinction - a voice

"In 1987, the last Dusky seaside sparrow disappeared from the earth. Imagine the people of Merrit Island, Florida, gathering to hold vigil on the marsh's edge each June 15, the anniversary of it's passing. Or imagine the citizens of San Francisco gathering in the spring, beneath rustling eucalyptus trees at the Presidio, to remember the Xerces blue butterfly. That was where the last one was seen, in 1941. Can you imagine the California condor, it's wings circling in the desert air? Can you hear a Mexican Grey wolf, howling in the night? Psychologists have not begun to ponder the emotional toll of the loss of our fellow life. Nor have theologians reckoned the spiritual impoverishment that extinction brings.

To forget what we had is to forget what we have lost.

And to forget what we have lost means never knowing what we had to begin with."

Mark Jerome Walters
THE NATURE CONSERVANCY, 1998

A Poem by David Whyte

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

David Whyte
From “The House of Belonging”

Brushwood Again

Frank Barney, who owns the Brushwood Folklore Center in New York with his wife Darlene Barney, has hosted the Starwood Festival, and the Sirius Rising Festival, along with many other events, for over 25 years. I’ve spent a few summers there myself, teaching workshops, as the “artist in residence“, or just helping out in general. It’s a home for me. We’ve dowsed wells and places for rituals, I planted a crabapple tree there when my marriage ended to symbolize new beginnings, I made a moss garden deep in the woods as a kind of elemental shrine, and I’ve danced around the Maypole and many bonfires. Just a few days ago I walked, with some 300 people, in and out of a labyrinth made of lumeria candles in the blue, misty twilight. It was truly a "living metaphor".

Frank and I also had a great conversation this past week, walking in the woods of Brushwood, and riding through the “village” that always seems to bubble magically out of the ground when the big festivals happen. I asked him what it was like to live with a particular place since childhood, to grow up within his environment of forests and meadows, as Brushwood is, and eventually become its caretaker and collaborator.

Frank had been answering my question, of course, which was “how do we speak with the Earth” in his own inimitable round about way. He was doing it literally, as we toured, looking at favorite trees, feeling the geomagnetic intensities of various places, the “green breath” of the forest.
“Most of the voices of nature are small and delicate,” he told me, “and can easily be silenced. They can be made invisible, or driven underground. And when that happens, people forget that they ever existed at all. Within a short time, they forget what it was like to live in such a rich chorus of voices, among so many stories, and they’re living without them in a world that has lost not only population, but mystery and vitality. An increasingly flat world with only human voices. “

“If you violate a person, be it a child or an adult, they shut up. You silence them. They withdraw - although, with human beings, the energy of that violence is likely to erupt in some future way. Places, like people and animals, also have voices. Violate a place, like putting a Wal-Mart parking lot over it, and all the voices that belong to that place leave.”

“What I've been trying to do” he said, “for the past 30 years is to create a place that can facilitate communion with the Earth. By treating the land with respect, by acknowledging the presence of so many other intelligences, visible and invisible, that are evolving within the immanent cycles of life, right here, on the land. On this land, with all of its uniqueness.

And there are different ways we've accomplished that.

For example, because we didn't have much money, we couldn't do what many people do when they acquire a piece of land. Which is to come in with big machines that level and dominate the land, bulldoze it flat, force it to do what they want it do. We didn't have the financial means to do that, even if we wanted to, so Brushwood evolved gradually, organically, according to the dictates of the land, its contours and water ways and bumps and swamps and resources. And also its energy leys and vortices.

We bring people here who have an earth friendly ethos and mythos. They can feel safe here, they can interact and create and explore without ridicule or hostility. They come here to connect, to play, or to heal. They can do ritual, make things like art or theatre or music, wear masks or costumes, dance, have discussions, make love, get naked in the sun or rain if they like, the children can ride their bikes or play in the mud - they feel safe. So the Earth can speak through them in all the things that they say and do.

That’s how we talk with the Earth. We let the Earth talk through us.”

~My help is in the mountain~

Where I take myself to heal.

I find a rock with sun on it
And a stream where the water runs gentle
And the trees which one by one give me company -
And so I must stay for a time
Until I have grown from the rock
And the stream is running through me
And I cannot tell myself from one lone tree.

Then I will know that nothing touches me
Nor makes me run away.

My help is in the mountain
That I take away with me.

Earth cure me. Earth receive my woe.
Rock strengthen me. Rock receive my weakness.
Rain wash away my sadness.

Rain receive my doubt.
Sun make sweet my song.

~Nancy Wood~

Community Arts Project

Hands of the Spiderwoman
Weaving Ourselves Back into the Web

Spiderwoman is the mythic Weaver at the center of the Web of life among many Native American spiritual traditions, including the Hopi and the Navajo. We’re all Spiderwoman's grandchildren, weaving the future into the Web of life with the stories we tell, the links we name, and the works of our hands.

In collaboration with artist Kathy Space and Space Studios in Midland, Michigan, we'll be offering a workshop and exhibition based on this theme with community participants. We‘ll be casting our faces and hands to create a group ceramic sculpture, which will include “prayer ties” (in whatever way participants conceive of them) that serve as personal affirmations of our connection and committment to the Web of Life, and to the future.

After being exhibited in August at the Midland Arts Center, participants will be able to take their sculptures home.

Costs will include materials only.

2 sessions - July 30th 6:00 - 9:00
August 6th 6:00 to 9:00

For information: (989) 835-8244

SPACE STUDIO
16 N. Winding Drive, Midland, Michigan
www.spacestudios.net

Hands of the Spider Woman

I was hiking in the Superstitions, looking for petroglyphs I’d heard were to be found in the back country, in the folds and recesses of the mountain. It was a strenuous climb for me, and they weren’t easy to find, obscured by the terrain, and often well off the trail. It took a while to decide where to look.

The particular site I was seeking had been a special place to prehistoric Anasazi people, who had left layers of pictographs scattered throughout the entire area. I was thinking, as I searched for the traces and touchstones of these people, about what I knew of native mythology, and wondering what these artists from so long ago might have been communicating with their mysterious imagery. There was so much I wanted to learn about the traditions, histories, and stories of native Americans in the Southwest - among them the Hopi and the Pueblo peoples. And of course the Navajo, whose rugs and pottery fascinated me. In Arizona, where I live, a great deal of art, aesthetics, and architecture is inspired by indigenous cultures, but very few people actually take the time to learn very much about these diverse and ancient peoples. I was among them.

I was thinking about the mysterious figure of Spider Woman, also called “Thought Woman” by the Hopi. Spiderwoman is poised at the very center of the Web of life in many native American creation stories. Arriving from underground realms, she creates the world, and then passes the creative process on, forever offering her wisdom, and the sacred craft of weaving, to her grandchildren.

I’m not entirely sure I like to call Spiderwoman (who over the years has become my guide and muse and inspiration) a “metaphor”, or an “archetype”. Although I was thinking along those lines while I huffed up the mountain. The most profound meaning of Spiderwoman’s Web is as the universal symbol of planetary and spiritual ecology. Spiderwoman speaks in the wind, reminds us of who we are beneath the surface with her synchronicities and threads.

The web that Thought Woman sings or names into existence represents, to me , what quantum physicists call “Entanglement Theory” - the probability that everything, down to the most intangible dancing particles and waves - is “entangled“, is woven together, is one. All conscious in some fundamental essence, within a universe of unimaginable creativity.

Masaru Emoto, the scientist who has devoted his career to studying the ways water is affected by the psychic environment, has shown that our thoughts may actually have the power to influence the way water crystallizes with his process of high speed photography. “Water”, he writes, “exposed to the words “thank you” form beautiful crystals when frozen. But water exposed to abuse often results in broken or deformed crystals.”1

And as she named them, they appeared.
She is sitting and thinking about this story now
And that’s why I'm telling it to you.1

What’s a word, if not a thought that has been crystallized? Spiderwoman was “on my mind“ as I walked. Or, perhaps, Spider Woman judged me ripe enough to turn her attention my way.

The famous lost Dutchman took his secret gold to his grave, but the Superstitions hide other kinds of secrets. Eventually, out of breath and already sunburned, I found what I was looking for. Near a welcome and rare spring, with layers of petroglyphs on adjacent rocks. Combined with natural beauty and a sense of potent geomantic energy, it was a place that seemed infused with numinous power. And scattered throughout like a motif or underlying texture there were hands, painted or incised on the rocks.

(the weft)

Hands among hunters and big horned mountain sheep, near metate holes that once ground blue corn or mesquite, protecting solarized shamans in their ecstasy, touched odd shapes and circles, or seemed to hold snakes and spirals that wound and curled like water or wind from fingertips. Shadow hands scratched into the rocks, weaving the stories as they were being told. There was a presence in those ubiquitous hands that absorbed my imagination. As if, for that quiet, illuminated moment, I saw them become fully fleshed, emerging from beneath the transparent, dreaming surface of the canyon. Numinous.

(the warp)

It occurred to me I was looking at Spider Woman’s many hands, appearing on the canvas of another time. From the wise storytellers of the desert, to the great webs of planetary ecology, quantum physics, and even the internet - Grandmother Spiderwoman was reaching out to teach her grandchildren how to weave .

Beauty is above me
Beauty is below me
Beauty is beside me
Beauty is before me

Navajo Blessing Way Chant

The origin of the word “religion” comes from a word that meant “to link back“ (religios), which bears (again) the metaphor of weaving. In Eastern traditions, each verse of a tantra (meaning a spiritual practice) is called a sutra, which means “a thread”. So perhaps the real meaning of a religious experience concerns “linking back”, re-membering a greater tapestry of being beyond the narrow viewpoint of individualism.

At that thought, being an artist and mythologist, I had to pull out my sketchbook and attempt to turn my revelation into something I could take back with me, something I might be able to share. An icon that could be enshrined as a symbol of planetary ecology. I imagined a shrine that would frame an elegant Web of concentric circles of relationship and co-creation.

It occurred to me then that a spider web represented the quintessential symbol of interconnectedness - but perhaps a loom was an even better iconic image for Spider Woman/Thought Woman.

A loom: an engine of interwoven and interdependent fibers, coming together in continually creative patterns of relationship. A loom meant the active art of weaving. The pattern was always changing. There was a vertical and a horizontal, a warp and weft, light and dark, yin and yang - the dynamic exchange of polarities to create something new. The weaver’s thoughts and hands manifesting, undoing, creating, unraveling. My imagination took off.

Navajo story tellers say that Spiderwoman is best heard in the lonely wind, and that with practice, you can hear her whispering in your ear. As I drew a lovely spider web, and then a complex woven pattern …………..something like that happened. It sounded like a kind-hearted chuckle.

So I went a step farther with my logic. Even the Web (or Loom) of Life is still a pretty abstract idea. I think our task, as artists and mythmakers, may be to move increasingly away from abstractions, because abstractions move us increasingly away from being truly within the world. We need to find practical ways to experientially know that we are embedded and embodied within the immanent sanctity of our Earth. Myths that speak, in our hour of evolutionary crisis, not about how to manage, use, abstract or renounce the world - but how to join it.

Hands. Spiderwoman’s hands. Collaboratively weaving. My hands. Your hands. Our hands.

And that’s what I drew in my sketchbook, and then I had to leave, because I was afraid I might not make it back to the trailhead before it got dark. But I realized something important as I managed my way down the trail and into a magnificent Arizona sunset.

I had been given a Blessing. And blessings, like all things that have to do with Spiderwoman, are circular. You don't get to keep them.

Sooner or later, you have to pass them on.

1 The Navajo also symbolize her with a cross, representing wholeness within the 4 directions.
2 Carol Patterson-Rudolph, “On the Trail of Spiderwoman”, Ancient City Press, 1997