Greg Braden and "The Science of Miracles"

"When we form heart-centered beliefs within our bodies, in the language of physics we're creating  the electrical and magnetic expression of them as waves of energy, which aren't confined to our hearts or limited by the physical barrier of our skin and bones.  So clearly we're "speaking" to the world around us in each moment of every day through a language that has no words:  the belief-waves of our hearts.

In addition to pumping the blood of life within our bodies, we may think of the heart as a belief-to-matter translator.  It converts the perceptions of our experiences, beliefs, and imagination into the coded language of waves that communicate with the world beyond our bodies.  Perhaps this is what philosopher and poet John Mackenzie meant when he stated, "The distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that can be finely maintained ... all existing thing are ... imaginary."

Gregg Braden

I enjoy the quote above by philosopher and New Mexico visionary Gregg Braden........except at the end of the last quote, I might change "imaginary" to "imaginal".   Because, as Braden himself so fully argues in his life work, that's really where we are collectively now - at the "imaginal threshold" of our species evolution. 

I began this journal almost 6 years ago, as a journal for the evolution of my project "Spider Woman's Hands", which I received a Fellowship at the Alden Dow Creativity Center in Midland, Michigan to pursue.  In 2009 I was resident artist at Wesley Theological in Washington, D.C., and continued the project.  My fascination with ubiquitous myths and symbols of Spider Woman, from the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, the Navajo weavers, the prehistoric Mississippian people, even the Maya......began with a deep realization of the significance of this metaphor of the Great Weaver for our time on multiple levels:  ecological, social, spiritual, and quantum.  We live in the participatory universe of Spider Woman, weavers and woven.  One of the names for Spider Woman among Pueblo peoples is Tse Che Nako, "Thought Woman", because She made the world with the stories she told about it.  There is a great Keresan Pueblo proverb that says,

"Tse Che Nako, Thought Woman, the Spider
is sitting in her room thinking up a good story.
I'm telling you the story she is thinking."*

Pueblo legends hold that it was Spider Woman who led the people through the cosmic Kiva at the end of each age into the new world.  According to their calendar, the 4th World is now ended, and we are entering the 5th World........and I believe that once again, it is Grandmother Spider Woman who is showing the Way, offering us the opportunity to pass through the Kiva, the Birth Canal, into a  new world, with the truth of  Her great Web at the very center.  We all know the Precipice we hang on as a common humanity.  Our technology and technological connectivity will either be the end of our evolutionary promise, or we will become a truly global humanity.  The new World, or "New Age", will be an age that puts into practice the great truth of  unity within the great co-creative diversity of life.  What I would like to pursue in future posts is not only how this is being demonstrated by science as well as metaphysics, but how we can, and are, putting the "New Paradigm of Connectivity" into pragmatic practice.  Because that's ultimately the good news we need.

As I return to  Spider Woman's Web, I find Greg Bradon, in  "The Science of Miracles", makes an eloquent discussion of how Quantum physics and metaphysics now agree on a "conversant world".

“The act of focusing our consciousness is an act of creation.

 Consciousness creates!” ~~~ Greg Braden

 http://youtu.be/otdAAm30lT0


** Patterson-Rudolph, Carol, " On the Trail of Spiderwoman" , 1997, Ancient City Press

Van Kedisi and "spirit of place"

Lulu and Lucy

I've had a lot of synchronicities for several years around Turkey, and last year  I was given two kittens, both white and each with odd eyes, one blue and one yellow.  Lulu and Lucy became my Muses, sometimes following me around the house talking to me in a mysterious cat language.  Then a well travelled friend of mine,  said  "Oh, Van Kedisi!".   Lulu and Lucy were Van Cats!
  And it turns out that's rather special - for  many people in the ancient land of Turkey or Anatolia,  they are very much the "spirit of place".

Lake Van (Turkish: Van Gölü, Armenian: Վանա լիճ Vana lich or Vana Lij, Kurdish: Gola Wanê ) is the largest lake in Turkey, located in the far east of the country in Van district. It seems that Van cats have a very ancient lineage indeed, as does the region, and are very much loved by Turks, Armenians, and Kurds, so much so that there are all kinds of legends about them, they are mascots for teams, there is a Van Kedisi research center in the capital of the Lake Van region, and even the government protects them. 

Not far from Lake Van is the excavation of Gobekli Tepe, a Neolithic site that is 12,000 years old, which I've been fascinated with.  Göbekli Tepe  means, literally, "Belly" or "Navel Mountain", and is composed of some 22 megalithic stone circles (only two have been excavated) which were intentionally buried 8,000 years ago, located 2500 feet above sea level at the top of a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. Artist and scholar Lydia Ruhle writes:

"Gobekli Tepe means "navel mountain" in Turkish.  It is on top of a hill that is the highest point on the windswept Urfa Plain, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This is the area where emmer wheat was domesticated and hunter gatherer cultures settled into agricultural communities. As early as 12,000 years ago, humans spent much time and effort to cut stone and create circular structures with twelve foot tall pillars with carvings of animals, vultures, snakes holding up a roof..........In 2006, I created a Goddess Icon Banner of  (a Sheela-na-gig image from the site) and named her Gobekli Tepe. She has been flying around the world ever since. My banner description states:

"Gobekli Tepe is a Neolithic Sheela-na-gig incised into stone on the floor of a rock cut temple which appeared to have ritual purposes.Two standing pillars with lions sculpted in relief protect one of the earliest known Sheelas. Gobekli Tepe, which means navel mountain, is in eastern Turkey near the source of the Euphrates River. Emmer wheat was domesticated in the area. All life comes from and returns to the mother".

 "Navel mountain and navel of the world" indeed.  I wrote  an article about Gobekli Tepe .........and I felt blessed to be given two magical cats, with such ancient origins, from that ancient part of the world where agriculture began, the "belly of the Goddess". 

Akdamar Island and the Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Mount Süphan  is in background.

It's interesting to look for information about Van cats on the internet, and learn of all the peoples who claim them.....almost like living "numina", they truly belong to a Place, and are loved because they are magical, living embodiments of that Place by the peoples who call it home or homeland.  Perhaps for me too, my magical "muses" give me a bit of a sense of belonging to the Homeland of the Goddess, that place of ancient origins;  when I see their topaz and sky blue eyes looking at me, I  remember. 

And Lake Van...........how wonderful it would be to go there and see the Van Kedisi, along with everything else. 

Apparently Van Kedisi are related to, and sometimes confused with, "Turkish Angora" (or Ankara) cats.  A great site with lots of information about Van cats was Turkish Angora Cat (from which I also borrowed some of the photographs here).  http://www.turkishangoracat.org/arastirma.aspx?arastirmaId=2


It's been really interesting  to see how passionate different groups in the area are about the cats.  For example, from the Turkish Angora Cat website:

"About 2 years ago, a disagreement between municipalities of Van and Ankara occurred. And it still continues.  Ankara city proudly displayed their logo with odd-eyes “a smiling Turkish Angora’’. This was very insulting for Van municipality and Van cat lovers, as every folk knows that odd eyed cat is a Van, not Angora! Certainly, a problem arose because both of cities see ‘’their’’ cats in very identical ways. Maybe white odd-eyed cat has deep roots in Turkish culture in general? Although both Van and Angora are thought to be odd-eyed white cats, Van municipality feels that Ankara city has no right to claim different eyes for ‘’their’’ Angoras."  

What Lucy thinks about it all.......

Beltane - Happy May Day!

Happy May Day to all!

Since Beltane (May 1) is an auspicious day with a truly ancient precedent, I can't resist a bit of his & herstory to honor the day, and a few May Pole pictures.   May the  RITES OF SPRING quicken the weary sap of all, may you find a bonfire to dance around, may the May Queen bless you!

The birth of spring on May Day in Elizabethan England would send villagers into the woods to collect flowers and boughs, and then they would wait for the sun to rise as it brought the fully opened year flowering into spring.   A few years back  I was fascinated with the origins of the famous legend of "Lady Godiva" in Coventry, England.........with the kind help of scholar and gardener  Robur D'Amour, who wrote a fascinating article about Lady Godiva,    I learned that origins of this legend are probably to be found in the ancient pagan  ride of the May Queen to the sacred tree ( the Maypole), the "coven tree". 

 He wrote:

"The official etymology of Coventry is that it means Cofa's tree. A tree owned by Mr Cofa!  A very early spelling, 1050, is Couaentree.  I found, by chance, a reference to Coventry as bring a rebus for 'a coven round a tree'. Well, it is undeniably a rebus. But that doesn't mean anything conclusive.  There was a widespread practise for dancing round a tree on May Eve, which is the maypole. Perhaps there really was a tree that was used for festivities."

"The story that Lady Godiva was protesting against taxes is untrue.  Apparently, at the time the procession dates from, Coventry was a village, and there were no taxes.  The procession is actually a May-Eve fertility procession, many of which are found across Europe. There is even one at Southam,  a few miles from Coventry, which is no longer celebrated.  What happened at Coventry, was that there was a Benedictine monastery there. The Christian monks did not approve of people watching the fertility procession, and so put some 'spin' on the procession, and invented this story about taxes. "

The origins of the May Queen, the young Goddess, and agrarian celebration of the Rites of Spring throughout Merrie Old England and Europe are very ancient indeed, and probably go  back to the "sacred marriage", whereby a couple, representing the young Goddess and God, would make love in the fields, encouraging and participating in the fertility of the world. 

In villages throughout England, a procession would bear flowers, all the while capering around the new Maypole chosen for the celebration. Only unmarried girls would be allowed to plant the phallic Maypole into the fertile Earth........a lovely dance and ritual based upon pagan practices of sympathetic magic.   In other words, "the world is waking up and making love, so we too wake up and make love, and all will bear fruit".

The planting of the May Pole, and the union of the May Queen with the May King (or the Green Man) probably has its origins in very ancient traditions of the Sacred Marriage, going back as far as Sumeria and the marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi - or probably farther even than that, into unknown origins in prehistory.   In ancient times, the spring ritual union of the King with the priestess (representing the Earth Mother) was a very significant rite; in later times, even in Christian Europe, church morality may have been suspended for Beltane, as couples went out into the fields to participate in the ripening fertility.

This celebration of the fecundity of Spring no doubt made many of the early churchmen nervous. In the late 19th century,  May 1 became associated with the growing labor movement, and since then many countries have celebrated May Day as International Workers' Day.  In 1955, Pope Pius XII instituted May 1 as the "feast of St. Joseph the Worker" with the intention of emphasizing the spiritual aspect of labor.........I'm sure the advent of this secondary meaning to May Day came as a belated relief to the Catholic Church, along with Lady Godiva's famous ride becoming folk legend.

For myself, I think the re-sacralization of sexuality, in tandem with the blossoming of the world, that was the original meaning of May Day.....is a wonderful Holy Day, and am often surprised by how little people today know of it's origins.  This  has to do with the de-sacralization of sexuality that has followed closely behind the monotheistic Judeo-Christian-Islamic God - it seems the One God does not approve of sex, or the raucous  turning of the natural year that becomes spring's fertility.   Not a bad argument for polytheism, where, when there is a multiplicity of Gods and Goddesses, things are a bit more tolerant.

Traditionally, the Maypole was hung with garlands and streamers. Dancers took hold of the ends in a weaving courtship dance.

Boys would dance in one direction and the girls in another, and so flower-clad ribbons were woven around the pole in the form of a braid. There might also be a procession led by Jack O' the Green (a variant of the Green Man), fantastically arrayed with flowers, leaves and ribbons, and followed by Morris Dancers with bells jangling on their ankles. Last, there would be the choosing of the May Queen.

 

  

Flora was the Roman Goddess of Flowers and it’s not surprising that her festival was held on the first day of May. The May Dance festivals of Europe have many of their origins in the ancient “Feast of Flora”, the ecstatic Roman Rites of Spring. 

"Whitman says, "And your very flesh shall be a great poem."............That is the message I'd like to offer on Beltane.  Our flesh is a symbol, a microcosm of the earth we inhabit. Our flesh is what connects us to the seasons; it is where we feel the cold of winter, and -- more and more in the Northern Hemisphere -- the warmth of the sun. It is in and through our flesh that we experience our emotions. We feel love in the flesh; anger in the flesh; exuberance in the flesh. The body is a treasure trove of sensation, and our sensations inform our temporal existence. Sensation may not be all of what life is, and the experiences of the flesh may be subjective and passing. But subjectivity and impermanence do not make a thing meaningless. Flowers bloom for but a short time, and when they do they are beautiful.  We bloom, too. 

We are a body full of color and fragrance. We are a cycle of life unto ourselves, and we have good cause to celebrate our body -- our flesh -- for we have no knowledge of what is to come beyond this moment, this life, this body. We are here, alive, and we can, on the day and in the season of Beltane, choose to celebrate the life that we are living. We can choose to honor our flesh, and honor the flesh of others.  (What a world we would live in if the flesh was not seen as evil, but rather a manifestation of something holy and worthy of respect. I wonder if violence would be so commonplace if we recognized the flesh as sacred.)

Love the body you are in! Love your flesh! Celebrate this High Day with a fullness of being!!"

 Teo Bishop on Beltane, 5-1-2013

Woman Shaman: the Ancients - new film by Max Dashu

"That Which is Sacred" by Max Dashu  http://www.maxdashu.net

"This is the wisdom we need now, the far depth,
 the vision and the goodness, the medicine women." 

 http://www.suppressedhistories.net/womanshamandvd.html

I met the artist and scholar Max Dashu, author of the fascinating  "Suppressed Histories"  website and many, many brilliant articles, when I presented at the Women and Mythology  Conference last year.  Max has devoted her life to re-membering the lives and stories of women and Goddesses lost and reclaimed.    Her new video explores the rich cultural record of medicine women, seers, oracles, healers, trance-dancers, shapeshifters, and dreamers round the world. 

To experience the beauty of these spiritual legacies is medicine for the spirit. Her trailer includes the music of Suzanne Teng, Emmalee Crane, and Tiokasin Ghosthorse; scores of other musicians are featured on the dvd, including archival world music from Smithsonian Folkways. See link above for music credits, chapter listings, and more info.

http://youtu.be/-Be9SFJ_vuY

"Lesterland" - A Vital Message from Lawrence Lessig

 

I think this is a very important talk, and the solution he offers to "a pathological corporate aristocracy" is simple, and can perhaps change the course of the future.

"There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens. That's the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. With rapid-fire visuals, he shows how the funding process weakens the Republic in the most fundamental way, and issues a rallying bipartisan cry that will resonate with many in the U.S. and beyond. 

In 2011, Lessig founded Rootstrikers, an organization dedicated to changing the influence of money in Congress. In his latest book, Republic, Lost, he shows just how far the U.S. has spun off course -- and how citizens can regain control. As The New York Times wrote about him, “Mr. Lessig’s vision is at once profoundly pessimistic -- the integrity of the nation is collapsing under the best of intentions --and deeply optimistic. Simple legislative surgery, he says, can put the nation back on the path to greatness.”

 on.ted.com/Lessig

http://youtu.be/mw2z9lV3W1g

A River Runs Through Us

"Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. "

Norman MacLean, "A River Runs Through It"

These past few years, with a mother and brother and house and animals to care for, "retired" from my years of being a gypsy mask maker, I've found myself finally becoming domestic. "Home" used to be a van with a travelling cat, now it's suddenly a 3 bedroom house with a yard.   I don't walk out into the desert as I once did, calling for vision,  and when visions come anyway, too often now I have to put them at the bottom of the laundry list that some times seems to be my life.  Sometimes, I have to admit, my heart is somewhere else, in Glastonbury listening to the Numina of the sacred springs, the Lady of Avalon.  Or walking the Camino.  Or in Bali, listening to Gamelon in the dense, lush tropical air............ And yet........there was a time when I felt the gathering and transmission of vision was my job, my work in the world.  I don't know any more.    Everything changes, we change, we are each complex and many layered.  And  a "river runs through us".  

I have a good friend, an actress, who recently left me  a long message on my answering machine.  Almost 60, she wondered if we came into the world with a destiny, and if so, she is going through that threshold where she wonders if she might have "missed"  hers, not done whatever it was she was supposed to do, leaving behind her a wake of dissatisfaction.  To me she is an extraordinary, beautiful, accomplished woman.   How can I respond to such a thing, on a phone, or an answering machine, or an email?  Why does it seem we no longer live in a world where such a profound conversation can be had over a cafe table, and a bottle of wine, deep into the night, perhaps joined by others?  I don't know.  Sometimes I don't like "today's world", it seems so strange to me, not what I imagined I would be doing, or living, as I push the borders of old age. 

"Dreams.  They are never where you expect them to be."  

But thinking about that conversation, I wanted to say that I no longer believe in "destiny".  We Americans are so materialistic, and grandiose, that the idea has come to mean some "great thing", so that if you aren't having a retrospective at the Met, or running an orphanage in Uganda, or in the Fortune 500, people somehow feel they've "failed", discounting all the glorious, beautiful, soul deepening experiences they've had.

Perhaps a "Destiny"was to learn to love someone hard to love, a difficult child perhaps, or to learn to have patience with yourself.  Perhaps you met your Soul Mate, and your destiny was not to be together, but to experience the gift of loss.  Perhaps "destiny" is to do something difficult, and fail, never knowing how many lives you touched and enriched in the process, and not knowing until much later how you were deepened by it.  Perhaps it's to connect with others through the mesh and warp and woof of synchronicity, never knowing consciously what gifts you've given each other, what waves and ripples of creative force you've sent out into the world.  We're dreamers and dreamed, and ultimately "a river runs through us", unfathomable, ineffable, splendid.

The quote above has always been so beautiful to me that I wanted to meditate on it for a moment, take a look into the depths of these waters. Perhaps Norman Maclean is speaking about what  storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes * called "Rio Abajo Rio, the river beneath the river of the world".   Looking back at a post about this from 2010, I felt like quoting myself again............perhaps "El Rio" is also what Jung called the Collective Unconscious, I don't know. But Estes' speaks of the great River of Story, the universal waters flowing beneath the surfaces of all things.

In her book Women Who Run With the Wolves *** she writes,

"Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayer making, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. And even with these well-crafted practices, much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them."*

 Why must we evaluate the value of our lives in such material terms of "accomplishment"?  Of "enlightenment"?  Why not think also of what has been our "endarkenment"?  Whether tapping, if only briefly, the wellsprings of El Rio in grief, creativity, meditation, or through the sudden psychic upwelling that can happen when the so-called ego cracks and splinters, it is always a blessing when the waters are revealed, for they remind us of the greater life.

In her book Meditation Secrets for Women, Camille Maurine writes, 

  “The realm of the soul is not light and airy, but more like mud: messy, wet, and fertile. Soul processes go on down there with the moss and worms, down there with the decaying leaves, down there where death turns into life. Deepening into soul requires the courage to go underground, to stretch our roots into the dark, to writhe and curl and meander through rick, moist soil. In this darkness we find wisdom, not through the glaring beam of will, but by following a wild, blind yet unfailing instinct that senses the essence in things, that finds nourishment to suck back into growth.” (p. 211)

If the river of story has a voice, it's a voice that contains all voices, human and planetary, and the song it sings may be Om, may be "Nameste", I am Thou.  What we ultimately bring to that song cannot be measured or valued in any terms we might try to wrap words around, try to put into some kind of list, some kind of materialistic order.  If there is any "point", a "destiny", it might be, as Estes, a Jungian psychologist, believed,  to  instinctively participate in some way, find some way to open a pathway, a well spring, for others.

"...[W]hat Jung called 'the moral obligation' to live out and to express what one has learned in the descent or ascent to the wild Self. This moral obligation he speaks of means to live what we perceive, be it found in the psychic Elysian fields, the isles of the dead, the bone deserts of the psyche, the face of the mountain, the rock of the sea, the lush underworld - anyplace where La Que Sabe breathes upon us, changing us. Our work is to show we have been breathed upon - to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowings, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts."

"Undine" (2005)

Perhaps all of our individuality, our uniqueness, is a gift we can only experience here and now, a great adventure.  I respectfully submit that this is  the work of the SEER, residing within each of us.  Remembering that a "river runs through us",  the  River beneath the River of the World.

 "The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were  opening out.
it seems as if things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach."           

Rainier Maria Rilke

* (p.30, below)

** (p.96, below)

*** Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Hardcover, 560 pages, Random House Publishing Group, 1992

Shirley Valentine

"Dreams. They are never in the place you expect them to be."

"I've led such a little life. I have allowed myself to lead this little life, when inside me there was so much more. And it's all gone unused.  Why do we get all this life if we don't ever use it? Why do we get all these feelings and dreams and hopes if we don't ever use them? That's where Shirley Valentine disappeared to. She got lost in all this unused life."

 "I've fallen in love with the idea of living. Because we don't do what we want to do, do we? We do what we have to do and pretend that it's what we want to do.  And what I want is to stay here and be Shirley Valentine. " 

Recently I saw Pauline Collins, who I remember so well for her role as Shirley  Valentine in 1989, in Quartet with Maggie Smith.  It was a tad difficult to see her 23 years later as an opera singer with dementia.  Well, she's always a great actress, and inspired, I went to some trouble to locate a rare copy of the out of print film -  Shirley Valentine ,  one of my favorite movies of all time.

I watched it again last night, and as  always, came away from it feeling uplifted – time hasn’t dated the movie at all, perhaps because it’s about something that’s  timeless. On its surface, the movie (and the award-winning play from which the movie was adapted) is about Shirley Bradshaw, a middle-aged housewife living a stagnant, loveless life, and the choices and chances she makes and takes during a chance two-week vacation in Greece.  But at its core, it’s about remembering the place our joy comes from.  The place where we're each of us, woman or man, "Shirley Valentine".

I was amazed to discover that, with the great generosity of UTube,  the whole movie is available!  Who would have thought I could just see it again on my computer.........

https://youtu.be/G_7MJQnk4M8  (the Trailer)

https://youtu.be/5ak0n7_LN3k (the Whole Movie!)