The New Story

"The Universe is made of stories, not atoms."

Muriel Rukeyser

"Stories are not abstractions from life, but how we engage with it.  We make stories and those stories make us human.  We awaken into stories as we awaken into language, which is there before and after us.  The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories?" as "What stories do I want to live?" ........ that question might be just as much, "What stories want to come to life through me?"

David R. Loy, "The World Is Made Of Stories"

I truly do believe that story is the name of the country where the archetypes enact their dramas, the Gods and Goddesses weave their relationships and teach their values, and we, consciously or not, live out the myths. Within the Mythic Realms we find the templates of societies, and as individuals, each of us is "in-formed" by story, by mythos.  So what are the stories we're being told, infused with, fed by, what are the stories we've internalized?

I've so often spoken of artists, and myself, as people who often elect for the uneasy job of re-mything culture.  Sometimes they get elected, whether they think they are or not.  The myths rise up from the collective Self, perhaps from the Necessity of the time:  but it's individuals who give it voice, symbol, a language, and they often have to plow through the old mythos with a fair amount of resistance before they find resonant ears.  Pollinators of story........that's what I think I've been, along with many colleagues.  Pollinators, re-discoverers and re-mythers of stories about interdependance instead of competition, stories about a living Earth we live within, instead of a "reward" somewhere else, stories about the return of the Great Goddess and the feminine powers and values, stories that heal instead of making war.  Sometimes I worry that I come close to being propaganda, as I repeat myself and my themes over and over..........but these symbols and sounds lie at the root, the base, and are taproots that I can sink over and over to renew myself, to sustain.

So I felt like sharing again the video at the bottom of this post by Brian Swimme, and revisiting again the New Stories Foundation.

And here also is Someone I've been re-visiting, the ancient, and  ubiquitous,  Native American archetype of Spider Woman that has been so fascinating to me over the years.  Grandmother Spider Woman is more than an "archetype" to me...........She's also a wise mentor.  Since I seem to be going through a rather profound personal re-weaving at the moment, I've been renewing my aquaintance with Spider Woman as I ask for aid, a few of Her strong threads, through  friends, story, dream and synchronicity, to show me the way to go now.

Also called "Thought Woman" in Southwestern Pueblo cultures, Spider Woman is a primal creatrix who imagines things that come to be; she weaves the world continually into being and dissolution with the stories she tells. At the center of the great Web (symbolized by the ubiquitous cross representing the union of the 4 directions) that is always associated with her Spider Woman/Thought Woman sees the ever evolving pattern, the resonance, the harmonies and the disharmonies, the tears and new links. The gift of weaving, and the gift of story, are the gifts Spider Woman endowed her grandchildren with.  And as we are all, as it were, connected in the Great Web of life, the work is ultimately collaborative. 

Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman the Spider named things and as she named them they appeared. She is sitting in her room thinking of a good story now:

I'm telling you the story she is thinking.

Keresan Pueblo proverb

In some Pueblo myths,  when the world fell so out of balance that it was destroyed,  it was Spider Woman who "midwifed" the New World by leading the people through the Kiva.  The "Third World" ended by flood, and She led the people into the  "Fourth World", which is our time.
As the Hopi (and Mayan) calendar or cycle recently ended, surely Grandmother Spider Woman is very present again, ready to lead us into the new 5th  world,  helping us to spin "new stories".  And if we look at what element "5", the "Fifth World" might represent, it is Center, and its color is white, the union of all colors.  Surely now is the time to tell the story of interdependence, connection, the story that ends with:

And We Are All One......

 http://youtu.be/TRykk_0ovI0

 

Reflections on Loneliness and the Demise of Blockbuster...

 "Back in the 1990s, scholars started calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a lack of human contact the “Internet paradox................We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information."

"(Vickers’s) web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment...............Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation."

Stephen Marche **
"Is Facebook Making Us Lonelier?"

I feel very sad that the Blockbuster Video down the street, along with all Blockbuster Video stores, is closing.  I've had a relationship with them for years..........like going to a library, I knew the people there, would ask them about new arrivals, sometimes buy popcorn, and then settle down to enjoy a movie with my mother, who I visit at assisted living now.  I guess the internet, Netflix, and those obnoxious red boxes  in front of at every pharmacy were the end for this once ubiquitous business.

And I was also struck by the article I quote from above by Stephen Marche.  I don't know about others, but for myself, on a personal level, I have often found that the Internet has made me feel lonelier, certainly, more disposible.  I seem to be going through one of my "dancing on the table with a lampshade on my head" phases (again), and it's not even New Year's Eve.  I'm irritable, and know that I'm going through a kind of re-evaluation, and possible re-invention,  of my life.  But meanwhile,  I think it's a damn shame that Blockbuster is no more.  And I also think Americans have a deeply unconscious, buried,  "shadow" urge to feel interdependant and affiliated.  I hope.   More on this after my rant............

The video rental stores had real human beings behind the counter to talk to you about the movies you browsed for.  Unlike the "red boxes", which are similar in concept to the "self checkout" at grocery stores.   Not only is it another loss of many jobs, but it's yet another way in which Americans can, once again, avoid the messiness, eccentricities, and germs of  human contact with a click and a card.  What's next? Total virtual reality immersion?  

 "Individualism finds its roots in the attempt to deny the reality and importance of human interdependence.  One of the major goals  of technology in America is to "free" us from the necessity of relating to, submitting to, depending upon, or controlling other people.  Unfortunately, the more we have succeeded in doing this the more we have felt disconnected, bored, lonely, unprotected, unnecessary and unsafe."

Phillip Slater

In my mother's day the movies were a big deal - you went to the theatre,  which meant gathering with a bunch of friends, or dates, for a night out,  dinner as well.  A social occasion, which videos changed by making it a more private affair.  When she was a young working woman in Los Angeles in the 40's, even an  urban breakfast was less "private".   There was no "fast food" to speak of.  Breakfast meant a cafe, which had a cook, dishwasher, waitress and fellow breakfasters.  Every morning, a community of people was connected to  her eggs and coffee.  There were also no  disposable forks, spoons, cups, or plates - that idea, which we take so completely for granted, had not arrived yet, although it was looming just around the corner. 

And now we have the next evolutionary step:  Starbucks!  Instead of the inconvenience of a sit down restaurant and familiar breakfast faces, we have a lineup in our cars, greeted by a hand with a  paper cup, soon to end up in a landfill, and a universal litany of "welcome to Starbucks find everything you're looking for have a great day".  

I spent many personally evolutionary days in Cafe Society in the 60's and 70's in Berkeley and New York and other places, and have a great fondness for them.  They really aren't the same any more, or at least, I'm not.  Most of the Cafe's I can go to here in Tucson look  something like this:  

Now my true senior curmudgeon-ness is showing, along with my long winter underwear.  Because I remember Cafe Med, or Cafe Trieste, in pre-laptop days, as looking something like this:

 

or this:

Or this:   (ok, that's Alan Ginsburg and Company, and I wasn't there, but wish I had been....)
 

Yes, I know.  There would have been obnoxious cigarette smoke in those days.  And sometimes obnoxious people.   But there were also poets, regulars, friends, bead sellers, spare changers...........all the color and texture of human beings.  

And another question, for 2013,  might be, why would I need  to go to a cafe in the first place, when I can make gourmet coffee and bagels at home?  Don't I have a French Press and a toaster?   Could it be I, like  a few others, enjoy the sense of mutually  breathing bodies around us, a chance to eavesdrop on an interesting conversation, maybe even get to talk to that person with the intriguing book, or flirt with the guy who looks like he might be a fellow artist?

But notice one thing in the photos above, from the '60's.  The people generally look like they're talking to each other, or looking at each other at least.  Now look at photos from a contemporary coffee shop with wifi.  What you will see predominently   is a row of laptops, each at separate small tables.     If you're hoping for human contact,  there is nothing more impregnable than a laptop.  The fellow in the first photo on the right even has his earplugs in - about the only way you could get his attention would be to spill coffee on him.  Now that's privacy.

(I do have to note here a great article from the Huffington Post about coffee shops in San Francisco that have intentionally dropped wifi as  "part of a growing trend among San Francisco restaurateurs to reclaim the coffee shop as a place for face-to-face conversation among caffeinated human beings instead of just being a remote office for people silently tapping away on their laptops."  Huzzah for them!)

Do we really need all this "privacy"?  As Philip Slater, author of  The Pursuit of Loneliness, wrote in 1970 (I was very sad to learn this visionary writer died this year) - all this privacy and pursuit of individualism is not only sometimes bad for our health and personal prospects of longevity, but it is now increasingly clear that it's very, very bad for our planet's health and longevity.

"It is easy to produce examples of the many ways in which we attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based.  We seek a "private" house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind.  an enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business.  ..........we seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it.  What accidental contact we do have, furthermore, seem more intrusive, not only because they are unsought but because they are unconnected with any familiar pattern of interdependence."

I've been renting rooms at my house to make ends meet for a couple of years now, initially inspired by my experiences with B and B's in England, a tradition that goes way back there.  But this is not England, and it's also true that I live in a big Southwestern city,  and not a quaint tourist town.  Still, it's been interesting to observe that, although I've had some great interactions with a few of my guests,  even made a friend or two.........overall, the interactions are very impersonal.  And yet, I do find AIRBNB, and other such "share economy" ventures a real step forward, not only because they create much need small local businesses, but also because they promote more of a interchange economy.

"Our servility toward technology, however, is no more dangerous than our exaggerated moral commitment to the "virtues" of striving and individual achievement.  The mechanized disaster that surrounds us is in no small part a result of our having deluded ourselves that a motley scramble of people trying to get the better of one another is socially useful instead of something to be avoided at all costs.  It has taken us a long time to realize that seeking to surpass others might be pathological, and trying to enjoy and cooperate with others healthy, rather than the other way around."

Philip Slater

So.....having shared this, I would like to say that AIRBNB, and other "share economy" services, may be the fiscal end of the tip of an iceberg when it comes to the underlying realization many Americans are making that it's time to return to a more communal, more interdependent   relationship to each other, and to our environment.  I would like to remind myself in this journal that, like the broader implications of the archetype of "Spider Woman's Web", interdependency is the root of our problem now, and a "webbed vision" of interdependency is our solution as well. 

"The three variables we have been discussing - community, engagement, dependency - can all trace their suppression in American society to our commitment to individualism......We are so accustomed to living in a society that stresses individualism that we need to be reminded that "collectivism" in a broad sense has always been the more usual lot of mankind, as well as of of most other species. "

“What might we see, how might we act, if  we saw with a webbed vision? 
 The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, 
yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

Catherine Keller, Theologian

 From a Broken Web

**
"Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.” Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside." 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/

Lady Olivia Passes

   I was saddened  to learn that Lady Olivia, one of the founders of the international Fellowship of Isis, passed away this past month at the age of 96.  She's had a long life, and done so much to inspire, teach, initiate, and serve the Goddess - she will be missed by many.

I've many times gone to Isis Oasis in California, a Center for Goddess Spirituality that  is dedicated to the Fellowship of Isis.   Lady Olivia, who lived in Ireland, came there for many years.    If  you have met any of the Fellowship, you immediately are struck by what a wonderful, warm, life-affirming and creative group of people they are. 

Lady Olivia, who co-founded the Fellowship of Isis with her brother in Ireland (and now around the world)  was much loved by friends and family everywhere.  I met her briefly when I was at the Goddess Conference in Glastonbury in 2011.  Recently a movie has been made about the Fellowship and Lady Olivia.  She came to Isis Oasis for Convocation and initiation of priestesses for many years from her home in Ireland.  

It will be strange to be in a world without Lady Olivia, although I know her work continues.

http://youtu.be/hBjshYBHEns

"Accidental" Yonis - What would Jung Have to Say?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/18/qatar-accidental-vagina-stadium-al-wakrah-world-cup-stadium

Al-Wakrah stadium.       Photograph: Aecom

The design for Qatar's new Al-Wakrah sports stadium has quickly gone viral: with its shiny, pinkish tinge, its labia-like side appendages and its large opening in the middle, the supposedly innocent building ("based upon the design of a traditional Qatari dhow boat") was just asking for trouble.

A while back I wrote about Yoni stones, the documentary "Half the Sky",  and the strange "Black Stone of Mecca", once apparently  dedicated to an ancient, pre-Islamic  Arabian Moon Goddess, and its amazing silver "yoni" container.  Hmm.  In the context of such a phallic, patriarchal world, one wonders what Jung might have to say about it all..................or Marija Gimbutas.

 

Goddess Help Us, Monsanto Wins the Nobel Peace Prize

I've posted several times about the dangers of GMO's, and posted the film "The World According to Monsanto".  GMO's are illegal in Poland, and riots have ensued in France because of them.  Well, here's reality turned on its ear. 

 

Monsanto wins prestigious World Food Prize

October 9, 2013 | Filed under: Breaking News,Environment,Health,News,Rights | Posted by: Sophie McAdam
http://www.trueactivist.com/monsanto-wins-nobel-prize-for-agriculture/ 
 

If only, if only it were a joke……..

If you thought the world couldn´t get any crazier, news this week that a Monsanto executive is to receive the World Food Prize for its services to agriculture might make you think again.
Robert T Fraley, Executive Vice President of Monsanto, along with Mary Dell Chilton, founder of biotech giant Syngenta, have been announced as this year´s winners for the prestigious food prize, which has a $250,000 reward. Fraley, who has been with Monsanto throughout much of its dark history, is being lauded for his invention of GMOs, while Chilton is applauded for spending “the last three decades overseeing the implementation of the new technology she developed and further improving it to be used in the introduction of new and novel genes into plants.”

The accolades are set to be given to these cretinous executives on World Food Day, October 16. If this insane plan goes ahead without a public backlash, we will be rewarding CEOs who have systematically:

• Monopolized our food and driven millions of farmers into poverty
• Designed dangerous artificial growth hormones for dairy cows
• Created franken-seeds and prohibited investigation into their long-term effects
• Tried to block the labelling of GMO foods
• Patented food in a sickening attempt to own nature itself (Hey, Monsanto! I grow my own broccoli, what you gonna do about it?)
• Enforcing these patents by suing and threatening smallholders and family farmers who violate Monsanto´s iron rule
• Caused mass suicide among millions of farmers whose GM crops fail
• Invented pesticides that kill bees and endangered other wildlife
• And later had the audacity to launch legal action against the European Union after it finally banned bee-killing pesticides in May this year.

Read more http://www.trueactivist.com/monsanto-wins-nobel-prize-for-agriculture/

Doris Lessing Passes Away

 We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

 The Nobel-prize winning novelist Doris Lessing passed away on Sunday morning in London at the age of 94.  Doris Lessing was important to me, especially her Shikasta series, which I've always felt was  prophetic.   In 2008 a Synchronicity brought her "blessing" to me again, in the form of a book that reminded me to remember "the habit of loving".  In honor of  Doris Lessing, I felt like copying that post again.  

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Doris Lessing  and  my "Book of Common Miracles"

"Writers are often asked: "How do you write?" But the essential question is:

"Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?"

Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration. If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

 Doris Lessing,

Nobel Prize Speech, 2007

My friend Rose says that I should compile a little book about syncronicities. I think, if I did, I would call it the "Book of Common Miracles", or perhaps, "Grace". Because I've often felt there is a Conversation going on that, once we notice, becomes continually more animated. In other words, we're often "tapped on the shoulder" by angels, and pre-occupied with our daily concerns, fail to notice little miracles fluttering under our very noses, attempting to wake us up.

David Abram commented that perception is "a reciprocal phenomenon organized as much by the sourrounding world as by oneself", and suggested that a two-way dynamic of intention, or energy exchange, may be going on. In contrast to our idea of a non-living world we simply "observe", he went on to say that "the psyche is a property of the ecosystem as a whole", suggesting that we move beyond the notion that "one's mind is nothing other than the body itself".* A Conversant World. Or as writer Alice Walker has often said, "the Universe responds."

So the story I would like to tell concerns one of my  favorite writers, a woman whose visionary books, most significantly SHIKASTA, has informed and inspired me since the mid '70's, Doris Lessing. The excerpt above is from her 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature speech, which she received at the age of 88. The visual is her personal note and autograph, found on the back cover of a paperback I found lying on the sidewalk at my feet, a pile of discarded books just a few blocks from where I live in downtown Tucson, Arizona. To me, it's a talisman - infused with energy from the living hand of this prolific and visionary writer, whose long and enduring gift she has never failed.

I've been very depressed this winter, which led me to go into therapy to tell and reveal to myself, some of the stories of my personal life, and hopefully untangle them so I can move through the bardo of transition I've been mired in. I do not like the cynicism and bitterness that post-menopausally "haunts" me.......the Habit of Loving is the discipline from which creativity arises, and without it  the river dries up. I've been blessed to find a wise counselor to listen to me. And in the "unmasking process" (as she puts it) I've often felt like a ghost within the "legend" of my former self.......therapy is rather a painful process! And I've had plenty of doubts as to whether being an artist matters anymore.

So when I found"The Habit of Loving" at my feet while strolling down a residential street near where I live I picked it up with pleasure. To find a personal autograph on the inside (dated 1982) by the author........is pure magic. Personal magic - because if it was by Stephen King, or any of the thousands of authors I don't know or don't care about, it wouldn't mean a thing to me. But this is a talisman, as if, in some wonderful way, a creative spark was passed on to me from someone I tremendously admire. And a reminder to not only respect, but CHERISH the gifts of creativity and expression we're given. It's too easy to forget - they are high privilege.  And they need to be shared.

In her acceptance speech, Lessing remembers her life early life in Africa, in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, as well as her life in England. And she urges us to remember how precious knowledge, and the gifts of literacy, really are.

"We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill.

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

The poor girl (in Zimbabwe) trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us. 

 

© The Nobel Foundation 2007

*"The Perceptual Implications of Gaia", David Abram, THE ECOLOGIST (1985)

 

Misogyny and "crazy women"

 

On the bus recently, I listened to a group of noisy adolescents, out from school, carry on.  Their  common language was continually interspersed with "slut", "ho", and "F--k", so much so that I was shocked.  A daily language that makes absolutely profane sexuality, and in particular, girls and female sexuality.  So very sad to see this as the ugly petri dish within which these girls are blossuming into their female beauty and potency.  A very long cry from, say, the coming of age "Pollen Ceremony" for young women among the Navajo. 

I reflected on why the imagined world of Jane Austen is so popular to many sensitive young women, in the face of such brutality and vulgarity everywhere. 

I have to thank  Max Dashu  for forwarding this article by "Dr. Nerd" Harris O'Malley, which articulates so well something I know most women have had to deal with in one form or another.  At least, I did in my youth, and it was a long process learning to not become disempowered and self-negating.   Examining language is so important, as it reveals what is deeply, and collectively, embedded beneath the surface currents of social interaction. 

"There are certain words that are applied to women specifically in order to manipulate them into compliance: "slut," "bitch," "ugly/fat" and, of course, "crazy." These words encapsulate what society defines as the worst possible things a woman can be. Slut-shaming is used to coerce women into restricting their own sexuality into a pre-approved vision of feminine modesty and restraint. "Bitch" is used against women who might be seen as being too aggressive or assertive... acting, in other words, like a man might. "Ugly" or "fat" are used -- frequently interchangeably -- to remind them that their core worth is based on a specific definition of beauty, and to deviate from it is to devalue not only oneself but to render her accomplishments or concerns as invalid.

"Crazy" may well be the most insidious one of the four because it encompasses so much. At its base, calling women "crazy" is a way of waving away any behavior that men might find undesirable while simultaneously absolving those same men from responsibility. Why did you break up with her? Well, she was crazy. Said something a woman might find offensive? Stop being so sensitive. The idea of the "crazy" woman is so vague and nebulous that it can apply to just about any scenario."


"The association between women's behavior and being labeled "crazy" has a long and infamous history in Western culture. The word "hysteria" -- defined as "behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion, such as fear or panic" -- is derived from the ancient Greek word "hystera," meaning uterus. Until the early 20th century, female hysteria was the official medical diagnosis for a truly massive array of symptoms in women including but not limited to: loss of appetite, nervousness, irritability, fluid retention, emotional excitability, outbursts of negativity, excessive sexual desire and "a tendency to cause trouble."

While some of the symptoms of "female hysteria" could be signs of legitimate (if misdiagnosed) mental health issues, most of it described male (as the medical field was a men-only profession up until the mid-19th century) discomfort with women's behavior and sexuality. Calling it a medical issue meant that men didn't have to respond to behavior that challenged male sensibilities or belief structures. Instead, labeling women as "hysterical" made it much easier to diminish women's concerns and issues without having to pause to consider them as possibly being valid.

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harris-oamalley/on-labeling-women-crazy_b_4259779.html