The Universe Responds

A  wonderful story from Alice Walker - I take the liberty of excerpting it here, and hope I won't be punished for publishing without permission. But it's so worth sharing.

The Universe Responds
by Alice Walker

A few years ago I wrote an essay called "Everything is a Human Being", which explores to some extent the Naive American view that all of creation is of one substance and therefore deserving of the same respect. In it I described the death of a snake that I caused, and wrote of my remorse.

That summer, "my" land in the country crawled with snakes. There was always the large resident snake, whom my mother named "Susie", crawling about in the area that marks the entrance to my studio. But there were also lots of others wherever we looked. A black-and-white king snake appeared underneath the shower stall in the garden. A striped red-and-black one, very pretty, appeared near the pond. It now revealed the little hole in the ground in which it lived by lying half in and half out of it as it basked in the sun. Garden snakes crawled up and down the roads and paths. One day leaving my house with a box of books in his arms, my companion literally tripped over one of these.

We spoke to all of these snakes in friendly voices. They went their way, we went ours. After about a two week bloom of snakes, we seemed to have our usual number: just Susie and a couple of her children.

A few years later, I wrote an essay about a horse called Blue. It was about how humans treat horses and other animals; how hard it is for us to see them as the suffering, fully conscious, enslaved beings they are. After reading this essay in public only once, this is what happened. A white horse came and settled herself on the land. (Her owner, a neighbor, soon came to move her.) The two horses on the ranch across the road began to run up to their fence whenever I passed, leaning over it and making what sounded like joyful noises. They had never done this before (I checked with the human beings I lived with to be sure of this), and after a few more times of greeting me as if I'd done something especially nice for them, they stopped. Now, when I pass they look at me with the same reserve they did before. But there is still a spark of recognition.

What to make of this?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I think I am telling you that the animals of the planet are in desperate peril, and that they are fully aware of this. No less than human beings are doing in all parts of the world, they also are seeking sanctuary. But I am also telling you that we are connected to them at least as intimately as we are connected to trees. Without plant life human beings could not breathe. They are the lungs of our planet. Plants produce oxygen. Without free animal life I believe we will lose increasingly the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. "Magic", intuition, sheer astonishment at the forms the Universe devises in which to express life - to express itself - will no longer be able to breathe in us.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But what I'm also sharing with you is this thought: The Universe responds. What you ask of it, it gives. The military-industrial complex and its leaders and scientists have shown more faith in this reality than have those of us who do not believe in war and who want peace. They have asked the Earth for all its deadlier substances. They have been confident in their faith in hatred and war. The universe, ever responsive, the Earth, ever giving, has opened itself fully to their desires. Ironically, Black Elk (the Lakota shaman) and nuclear scientists can be viewed in much the same way: as men who prayed to the Universe for what they believed they needed and who received from it a sign reflective of their own hearts.

I remember when I used to dismiss the bumper sticker "Pray for Peace". I realize now that I did not understand it, since I also did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world of our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do also unto me” - and to yourself. 

"God" answers prayers. which is another way of saying, "the Universe responds".
We are indeed the world. Only if we have reason to fear what is in our own hearts need we fear for the planet. Teach yourself peace. Pass it on."

(From: "The Universe Responds: Or, How I learned We Can Have Peace on Earth",
 Living by the Word, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, N.Y., N.Y., 1988.)

Silent Peacocks: Personal Reflections on the Need for Sacred Solitude

I am at the Holy Trinity Monastery in St. David, Arizona.  It is raining, and the only sound is the gentle fall of rain on leafless trees, droplets of water, little shining crystals on the dark branches before my window. 

And on the banister of the terrace before me are 5 peacocks and peahens, their magnificent, extravagant, impossible iridescent tails hanging over the edge.  They are just sitting there, making no sounds. I remember peacocks as noisy creatures, with a piercing cry.  How strange those peacocks are, motionless, silent.  I know that if they become aware of me, they will run off, so I join them in their silence for a moment, unmoving, aware of only peacocks, and the sound of rain. 

The Monastery is so quiet in fact, there are not even sounds of sparrows or ravens, no dogs or coyotes. It is also mostly deserted, probably because it is winter and mid-week.  The land has the familiar peace I have so often found in places of worship, a peace rising through the soil as one walks, an essence of place stepped and pressed into the land itself.  It does not matter what I "believe" in such places.... prayerful or sacred places are not about the intellect. 

 

There is a striking statue of Saint Benedict by the cloisters; he is holding a book, and there is a raven at his feet with, apparently, a rock in his beak. * I do not know what the raven means, but the white statue is welcoming.  I find myself watching my breath as I walk, clasping my hands behind my back.  Maybe the monks who lived here did that, and I am just picking up a memory in the land. 

The Benedictine Monastery in the small eastern Arizona town of St. David is actually no longer a Monastery, not since 2017 when the Vatican recalled the few monks and Father still living here.  It clearly once had a good-sized population that gradually diminished. As I walk, I try to imagine monks here, tending to the gardens, the shrines, the retreat buildings in the rain, or in the hot summers of this part of the country.   It is still managed by a faithful group of volunteer Oblates.  I notice that they are all elderly……I wonder if they will be able to attract younger people in the future to manage this special place? It seems, as I reflect with the meditative presence of the peacocks before me, that it is a great shame that the monastic life is so little appreciated in our frenetic world.    

Last evening, as the sun went down behind rows of pecan trees, I saw the flock of peacocks, some 20 of them, sitting on a fence before a particularly ancient pecan tree.  I watched as, one by one, they flew without sound into the tree, finding their particular perches.  Each bird seemed to wait patiently for his or her own “take-off”. This was clearly a daily ritual.   I was struck by how orderly this procession of the peacocks to their nightly roost took place. 

Peacocks……… one thinks of them as loud, stupid birds.  Yet at the St. David Monastery, where many generations of peacocks have lived and roamed freely, they are a tribe going about their business.  Just as the Monastery is devoted to silence and prayer, so they also seem to be.  They are wrapped in brilliant shades of quietude.  Beautiful in their other worldly iridescence among the gray and brown of winter leaves.

 

How did I end up here?  Not entirely sure.  By Grace? 

As I was driving without a destination a day ago, I vividly remembered a book I read (while spending the night on a bench in the ultimate liminal zone of Heathrow Airport) called

“The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye”. ** The central character, Harold, is in his 60’s, living a conservative retired life with his wife.  They do not really speak any more, as they navigate around each other with many years of habitual co-inhabitation.  One day Harold receives a letter from someone he has not seen in over 20 years, someone who is dying of cancer in a hospice far away to the north of the U.K.  She has written to let Harold know she remembers him fondly, and to say goodbye.  In his habitual numbness, but equally habitual English sense of propriety, he decides to write her a simple letter, a card that says something like “thank you for your friendship, best wishes, Harold Frye”.  He does so, and then decides to walk to the post office in order to mail it himself. 

Except when he gets to the post office, he decides to walk on to the next Post Office, one at the north of town, and mail it there.  And yet, when he gets to that post office, on the outskirts of town, he discovers that he still has the letter in his pocket, and he is still walking.  And so, the unplanned and unannounced and even unconscious pilgrimage of Harold Frye commences. 

Perhaps I am like Harold.  I just decided I needed to get away, from the Holidays, from Facebook, from cars, away from all the noise, and the noise incessantly sounding in my own head, right now:  but I had no idea of where to go. None.  

But I have a car, and a credit card.  All the way down 22^nd street to the freeway, I still couldn’t decide where I was going…. west, to Phoenix, maybe Sedona? A long way, and Sedona is expensive.  Or south, to Patagonia?  Head to New Mexico, the solace of those wide-open mystical spaces…. even though it is an even longer way than Sedona?  It was only when I got to the freeway underpass that I pulled into the left lane for route 19, heading in the direction of Patagonia, which at least had a bird sanctuary and a coffee shop.  I’d see what happened from there. 

As I drove, I felt better.  I turned my phone off.  In Patagonia I had a coffee, discovered that the only hotel (cleverly cowboy vintage)      was ridiculously expensive, then thought what the heck, I’ll head to New Mexico, why not. The mood I’m in I could drive all night anyway.   The road from Patagonia to I-10 is scenic, with a snow-covered mountain range in the distance.  In Saint David, a little town on the way to Benson, I remembered there was a Benedictine Monastery. Always curious about it, I stopped, inquired about retreats, and here I am.  Ask and ye shall receive, truly. 

Lately I’ve been having those winter-born (what a wonderful word, “winterborne”) …… “dark nights of the soul” ………. which look, practically speaking, more like being overwhelmed, brittle, snappish, and exhausted and increasingly disturbed by it. I am running a successful AIRBNB “enclave”, still working thus in the “service industry” at the age of 72. 

I have to work and know few who can afford not to these days. I am glad sometimes that no one much notices me, or my current inner landscape. To me, of late, everything sounds like “yap yap yap”.  Sometimes I feel like contemporary life is a bit like being endlessly barked at by a chihuahua.  Our modern world - an entire fleet of chihuahuas. A demanding litany of inconsequential complaint, vented commentary, monologue for the sake of attention, appeals for money, offers for deals, electronic voices, irritated drivers……exhausting. And, as I am an empath, all the human pain in there too, all the loneliness and fear and despair and grief and human pain I can’t help, and increasingly feel too frayed to listen to.  

When I’m not “in service” changing sheets or scrubbing floors, I am an artist.  (Yes, one can be an “emerged” artist and not wealthy.  In fact, most artists have to find other means of support.) The artifacts of that 50-year career surround my property.  I have to say, running an AIRBNB has been somewhat deflating, as I have noticed that most people don’t think about art unless it is in a museum or a gallery.  Or now, I suppose, on Instagram.  Instant art for an increasingly microscopic attention span! 

For myself, art is a language, albeit an often-archaic language, one that one has to be educated in, like learning to speak Latin. Certainly, it requires what our lives increasingly lack ......contemplation. Patience.  Without that introduction, and time, artworks are just a backdrop that ‘specialists’ understand, dismissed as irrelevant.  

Or a colorful passing tidbit to consume like a candy. 

People do not see that a painting is a conversation, a window into another world……in this case, my world.  For me, the works have numinous names and places in the landscape of my life.   The bodies of work on my property are the best of me, my personal shrines and devotions, and now I just want to protect them from the infidels, so to speak. 

If they don’t see it, it is safe, and those visionary depths the paintings and sculptures arose from (in me) are also underground.  Even if they are in plain sight.   

How do I feel about all of this?  I often question my discontent; I am often despairing of contemporary life.  Yet here, in a monastery where many came to seek God........it doesn’t matter whether I am “right” or “wrong” in my discontent.  It doesn’t matter what I think at all. 

I sit on a bench and listen to the melancholy voice of Saturn.  Wise and winter-borne Saturn. 

I contemplate a cast-off, brightly turquoise, feather on the ground, gleaming as it catches a bit of sun.  Here I am, enjoying this pentimento under the surface of time, given the grace and simplicity to turn under, within, below the fallen leaves, into the dark.  It occurs to me that it does not matter at all what I “think” I should do once I rejoin the noise and distractions of life.  Here is refuge, here is the power of silence.  Silence enough to listen, and my soul, for lack of a better word, is speaking. 

 

“When we are living in accord with our inner reality while simultaneously suffering the depredations of this discordant, dis-eased world, we nonetheless have supportive energy, clarifying affects, and a sense of purpose.  When we get off track, these same manifestations turn against us.  While the world rushes to pharmacology to numb the inner discord, the question remaining is simply and obviously this:  What does the soul want, as opposed to our protective but regressive complexes?  This simple question is intimidating because such an agenda can very quickly lead to the larger rather than the smaller in our lives, necessarily re-framing our sense of what our life journey is about.” 

James Hollis PhD.  “Living an Examined Life” 

As the Winter Solstice approaches, I bless the Dark, the nourishment that comes from this time of incubational dormancy, from quietude.  I am grateful to have stumbled into welcoming refuge for a few days.  To sit listening to the rain and privileged to join the silent, watchful witness of a great iridescent beauty that sits on a fence before me, waiting to be noticed, listening to the rain.  

 

Dec. 2019

*I learn later that the Raven was a friend of Saint Benedict who helped him by removing bread that had been poisoned by a jealous rival.  http://communio.stblogs.org/index.php/2011/07/saint-benedict-and-his-friend/

** The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye by Rachel Joyce (https://www.rachel-joyce.co.uk/)

“I love where we live. I love the stretch of sky from east to west. I work in a shepherd’s hut in a field, looking over the valley. It’s a place that feels alive with light and water and stories. My own view. My own silence.” …. Rachel Joyce

POSTSCRIPT

Shortly after I posted this article in my Blog (www.threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com) I found this earring by the trash can in front of my house.  It looks a great deal like a peacock feather to me!   I have no idea where it came from, but I will take it as a bit of guidance and affirmation.  The world is always speaking to us, I reflect, if we can only pause long enough to listen.

New Work: Hecate and The Memory Keeper

A "Webbed Vision " - Toward a New World Story

"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, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self  1

The quote above, from theologian Catherine Keller, has been deeply important to me.   I first read her book "From a Broken Web" in 2008, when I was pursuing my "Hands of the Spider Woman" Community Arts Projects.  The first project  was at the Midland Center for the Arts (with the Alden B. Dow Creativity Center) in Michigan, then at the Creative Spirit Center, also  in Midland (with Kathy Space),  and last when I was a Resident Artist at the Henry Luce Center for the Arts and Religion in Washington D.C. 

Perhaps because I live in the Southwest,  the "legends of the Spider Woman" have always fascinated me as I encountered Her in native American art.  Spider Woman is an ubiquitous Creatrix found throughout the Americas, with her earliest known  origins among the Maya of South America.  Spider Woman manifests among the Navajo and the Pueblo Peoples of the Southwest as the "great Weaver".    Among the people of the Keresan Pueblo she is also called  Tse Che Nako,  the "Thought Woman" who weaves the worlds into being with the stories She tells.  Within this metaphor of the "great weaver",  Spider Woman waits at the center of the Web of life, within which we are all connected,  interwoven and co-creating.

Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman, the Spider is sitting in her room thinking of a story now:   I'm telling you the story   She is thinking.

Keresan Pueblo Proverb from Carol Patterson-Rudolph 2

My path on the trail of  Spider Woman has been fraught with synchronicities, which I have come to think of as  touchstones along the way.  Synchonicities, to me, are a mystical part of the overlay (and the foundational "under")  of  the metaphor Dr. Keller writes  of.  As I write about   "A Webbed Vision" , for example, I note that for the past weeks a spider has made its home on the ceiling directly above the keyboard where I write.  I have come to think of that spider as my muse - perhaps, fancifully, she is Spider Woman's envoy,  weaving its patient web just  above my head, reminding me each day of a vision I want to hold.

In her 1989 book  Dr. Keller does not speak of the Native American Goddess Spider Woman, but she often  references  the Greek myth of  "Penelope".  Penelope is a name with  ancient origins that derive from an archaic  Greek word  meaning  "with a web on her face".   It is likely that Penelope was originally a Fate or Oracular Goddess before she was later demoted in patriarchal Greek mythology to the faithful wife of Odysseus, weaving and un-weaving a shroud to avoid her suitors (it's always  interesting the way myths are transformed to suit the evolving mythos and power base of different cultures).   Yet within the earlier context of a more egalitarian society, "Penelope" would be one who could "see" and "weave" the beginnings and the ends of a life.  She might have been personified with a loom before her, or spinning a thread.  Taking the metaphor further, such a Goddess  would "see" the inter-dependencies between all things, the Great Web spreading out across the landscapes of life.   

Pueblo mythology tells that when each of the previous worlds ended in catastrophe, it was Spider Woman who led the people through the sipapu, the kiva (or birth canal) into the next world.  As such Spider Woman is the divine midwife for the birth of  each new age. According to Hopi cosmology,  we have now entered the "Fifth World".  It is interesting that, in contemporary  Neo-Pagan practices,  there are 5 Elements that symbolize the "great Circle".   The Fifth Element is called "Center", and is represented with the color white, the union of all colors.  It is the last Element, and symbolizes the universal force or Aether that unites all the other Elements.  

I cannot resist imagining that the World Wide Web might just be  is Spider Woman's latest appearance!  

“In Hopi cosmology Spider Woman was the first to weave. Her techniques and patterns have stood the test of time, or more properly, the test of timelessness.…..…..Weaving is not an act in which one creates something oneself – it is an act in which one uncovers a pattern that was already there.” 

John Loftin 3

As we confront the universal catastrophe of climate change,  it seems to me that this is a significant and appropriate metaphor.  Indeed, a significant Prophecy:  for what we now confront concerns  not just a tribe or nation, but all beings upon planet Earth.  We must evolve a new, global paradigm  for this Fifth Age if we are to survive.   Spider Woman, bringing a vision of the Great Web of life, once again must be the midwife as She makes visible the connections, the strands of the Web,  whether we speak of  ecology,  economy, quantum physics, or integral psychology.   In our essence, as Jungian psychologist Ann Baring has said, "we are one".

 " The new myth manifests through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and the ecological movement suggests that we are participants in a great web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field.  It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other. In our essence, we are one."

Anne Baring,  Awakening to the New Story   4

How indeed, as an evolving  global society, would we think and act, if we saw,  like  Penelope (or Grandmother Spider Woman)  "with a webbed vision"? Would we be able to change the catastrophic course of ecological destruction if  we had such a theology based upon Relationship instead of Domination?  If our reasoning, and our way of seeing,  was inclusive rather than dissectionist?  If instead of valuing  competition and the "alpha" winner,  we valued consensus? If instead of "fight and flight" in the face of danger, we instead pulled out the defense tactic found among female monkeys of "tend and befriend"?   If instead of renunciate, hierarchical religions that turn us away from nature and Earthly existence toward an abstract "heaven" or "nirvana", we saw ourselves as profoundly embedded in the sacred body and evolving soul of our living planet?

"The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as "What stories do I want to live?" 

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" 5

                      


If each of us could, like Penelope,  "see" ourselves holding  a thread that originates with all of those who came before us - and touches all of those who will come after us - how indeed might we see, and act?

"The New Story coming into being is that the whole universe is a unified field. The world we experience is like a minute excitation on the surface of an infinite cosmic sea which sustains not only our world, but the entire Cosmos. We live within a cosmic web of life which underlies and connects all life forms in the universe and on our planet. Through a vast network of electro-magnetic fields we are connected to the earth, the sun and the hundred billion galaxies. So we are not separate from any aspect of planetary or cosmic life. "

          Anne Baring, Awakening to the New Story 6

As I watch the ongoing corporate greed that is eroding not only democracy, but the very life of our planet,  and the unreasoned ideology of capitalism (as opposed to local free enterprise) that makes it  possible for this new monarchy of the 1% to arise, I wonder sometimes if there is any hope for the future at all.  If I am not my brother's and sister's keeper, and they mine - who is?  Monsanto?  Walmart?  A civilization, indeed the raising of a single child, is a grand collaboration among many,  and it might be said from that "webbed vision" of societies  that the exploiters and  warlords pounding their chests and sitting like dragons on their stolen gold....... are the parasites of a civilization, rather than any  appropriate leaders.

We urgently need pragmatic ways to create and envision expanding community, which can be simplified to a fundamental sense of belonging.   Beyond that, we need an ethos and mythos that supports the fundamental, and foundational, understanding of inter-dependency.    If America was not a culture that idealizes "rugged individualism" where "good fences make good neighbors"  what other kinds of values might enhance the quality of life for us (and perhaps the very survival of our species) along with an extended community of many other species we share our world with?

"The Rugged Individualist" cheers when needy people are deprived of food, battered women are deprived of protection from brutal husbands, children are deprived of education, because this is "getting government off our backs.”

Philip Slater,  The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture  6

"Alpha male" individualism fails in every way to communicate that we live within a  web of human and environmental inter-dependency, a web that is unimaginably vast and  also very intimate. This is the "Webbed Vision" that sees and recognizes the links that must be restored.   A successful adult is so because of  parents, siblings, friends,  teachers, community resources, the backdrop of nature and environment, global society.........and distant ancestors that enabled him or her to be born.  Without a sense of belonging and contributing to that continuum as it reaches into both the past and into  future generations, human beings end up feeling alienated, disposable,  and without a sense of purpose.   Which is what an unsustainable, insatiable consumer system, as a placebo for the pain of spiritual and communal isolation, feeds on.

In tribal societies, survival depended  on cooperation, as well as the collective ability to adapt continually to new environmental challenges, be it drought, invaders, or the exhaustion of resources.  The mythic foundation of any tribe (or civilization) is ultimately  the template upon which they stand; a culture with a rigid mythos that cannot adapt and change is doomed to collapse.   Without a significant mythos of co-dependency in the face of global ecological crisis, the coming collapse of our civilization is apparent.  

"The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic.  The problem we have with holism is that our reasoning is fragmentary, dissectionist, it removes us from relating things, it structures things in separate compartments in order to "have control". 

 Rafael Montanez Ortiz  7

The Latin origin of the word "religion", religios, means to "link back".  To rejoin with the greater and divine  whole in some way.  In my opinion, many of today's religions, at least in their institutionalized forms, fail in communicating  this ultimate "webbed vision" - in fact, as tribal social control mechanisms with millenia of often mutually contradictory doctrines behind them, they do exactly the opposite.  They separate, create discord and fear, and damn those who do not share their cultural or philosophical constructs.  Religions are essentially concretized mythologies - concretized communal stories.  

           

What stories are so many people and institutions telling about the world we live in, the 21st Century world of global civilization? How do these sacred stories - most of them with their origins in ancient tribal societies existing in a very different kind of world - serve, or fail, the world of today?

Returning to "religios", the "linking back" to what is sacred, patriarchal  Renunciate religions that teach us to renounce the world, the body, and the demands of relationships of every kind, either in service of some abstract "better place" or teachings that degrade earthly life as "impure" or "unreality"..............will not help us.  More importantly, they certainly will not  help  those who must come after us to live in a diminished world.   In traditional theological  systems of patriarchal religions,  divinity is placed "elsewhere", be it the literally conceived  paradise that awaits the faithful,  heaven, or nirvana.  Equally, this renunciation of life can include more elegant abstractions that teach us that  "this is not real" but fail to describe what actually "is real" in a way that is tangible.  Renunciation of a false, dangerous, or corrupt world is a prime theme  to be found in patriarchal religions, religions that have their origins in violent  warrior ideology and warrior  lifestyles.  It might be said, for an example, that the  Old Testament God Yahweh, with all his punishments and rules,  is a classic  example of an authoritarian, merciless, warrior  "sky god".   

And more subtly, the  New Age message that "this experience  is not real" which drives devotees to seek "the real world"  found in  some divine, other-worldly, perfected  abstraction once we are "purified" or "surrender" in order to have one's consciousness raised sufficiently.  Which often must happen  through an authoritarian Guru or spiritual leader, with many of the attendant social abuses.  

To speak of "oneness",  to address creating a cohesive vision of holism that is appropriate to the world we live in today,  mythic systems that include  creative diversity within that "oneness" are needed.   Myths and symbols that can include many gods and goddesses, many voices and languages, and many ways to the truth instead of simply eliminating the competition.  Further, our world myth can no longer be simply a human world myth - it must include many evolutions, many other beings within the intimacy of ecosystems.  If we're to survive into sustainability.   

"We live in a world today in which the problems we face are all planetary" Philip Slater commented in his last book The Chrysalis Effect, “the polarization and chaos we see in the world are the effect of a global cultural metamorphosis".  Slater's view was ultimately hopeful - that we are witnessing the chaos of a new evolution.   That metamorphosis he spoke of, I personally  believe, is based on the realization of inter-dependency with all life.  In his view, this is humanity's childhood's end.  We are called now to the world, each other, and the miracle of life, with a "Webbed Vision". 

As the New Year approaches, I personally would like to call on artists, writers, musicians, storytellers,  and all  other "cultural creatives" to help to make a new mythology for the global tribe.   The writer Ursula Leguin called them "realists of a larger reality".  Among the Navajo (Dine`) infant girls still have a bit of spider web rubbed into their hands so they will "become good weavers".   May we all now rub a bit of spider web into our hands for the work ahead of us ..........and, like Penelope, may we all now see "with a web on our faces".

“Hope now lies in moving beyond our past in order to build together a sustainable future for all the interwoven and interdependent life on our planet, including the human element.  We will have to evolve now into a truly compassionate and tolerant world – because for the first time since the little tribes of humanity’s infancy, everyone’s well being is once again linked with cooperation for survival.  Our circle will have to include the entire world. 

Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power 8

                   

1)   Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self, 
       1988, Beacon Press

2)    Patterson-Rudolph,  Carol,  On the Trail of Spider Woman, 1997, Ancient City Press.

3)    Loftin, John D., Religion and Hopi Life, 2003,  Indiana University  \
        Press (first published January 1st 1988)

4)   Baring, Anne, "Awakening to the New Story",  2013, from her  website: 
       https://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm

5)   Loy, David R., The World is Made of Stories,  2010, Wisdom Publications

6)   Baring, Anne, "Awakening to the New Story",  2013, from her  website: 
       https://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm

7)   Slater, Phillip, The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture,  2008, 
       Sussex Academic Press

8)   Ortiz, Rafael Montanez Ph.D., interview with Lauren Raine, unpublished manuscript 
     (1989)

9)  Alstead, Diana and Kramer, Joel, The Guru Papers:  Masks of Authoritarian Power, 
       1993, Frog Books    

The Winter Solstice 2019

Saint Lucia Swedish Celebration 

Solstice Blessings to All

On this, the longest and darkest night,  we light our candles and our bonfires, as ancestors have done for uncounted centuries, around the world and in many languages, before us, in the depths of winter, an affirmation of light and warmth and the Sun's return.  I think what is important to affirm is also what Light each of us wants to ignite within ourselves, that might illuminate not only our own lives, but the lives of other Beings of the Earth.  And I also reflect on the healing and creative powers of  what poet David Whyte called "sweet darkness", the times of silence and incubation that are wedded to the times of  illumination.

"To go in the dark with a light
is to know the light. 

To know the dark, go dark.
 Go without sight, and find
 that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
 and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."

Wendell Berry

Winter Solstice, Willits Community (2012) Photo courtesy JJ Idarius and Ann Waters

Winter Solstice inside Newgrange

SWEET DARKNESS

When your eyes are tired
the world is  tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes to recognize its own.

There you can be sure you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb tonight.
The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness
and the sweet confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

David Whyte

"Realists of a Larger Reality" - Remembering Ursula Leguin

 "I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality. "

  For so many years, the writer Ursula Leguin always spoke to the core for me.   I've visited numerous times every world she has shown us, and one thing she has always shown are  the infinite possibilities of the imagination and human culture, brilliantly reasoned out through the eyes of the anthropologist's daughter that she also was.

I have travelled with her through worlds of vast introverted solitude, where a young girl must travel alone  to "make her soul" in "The Birthday of the World" collection.  I've visited a world in the midst of an Ice Age, and come to love a pragmatic  hero who is also a hermaphrodite, neither male nor female on a world without gender, in "The Left Hand of Darkness".  I've visited Earthsea many times, and watched the coming of age of the mage Ged, who can talk with dragons, and  must learn not only about power, but far  more importantly, he must learn about the uses of power, about maintaining the Equilibrium, becoming attuned to the balance of the world.  And in "Four Ways to Forgivenesss" I've seen two worlds come apart and re-form as millenias of slavery is ended, and former slaves and owners must also  find their personal salvation in the midst of a vast human revolution.  In "May's Lion" I  saw the visit of a lion, coming to the home of an old woman in order to die, from the perspective of not only an old American woman, but an old Native woman who knew  that she had been honored, because he came to her to open that way.

 Thank you, Ursula, thank you for making it possible for me and so many others  to visit those worlds, to escape my own when I needed to, to see with your words the infinite possibilities of  human experience. Her "view from the Ecumen" has helped me time and again to gain a view of life here on Earth.  

I wanted to  share her 2014  National Book Awards speech, because the call she made to visionary artists and writers,  on the precipice of a new year, it is important.  She says what I have so many times thought, especially recently - how "money sick" everything has become. We have lost the Equilibrium of consciousness of the whole, of a "webbed vision".  May this year coming be the seed of a turning of the way.

"But the name of the beautiful reward", Leguin says, "is not profit.  Its name is freedom."   The freedom to create uncensored, internally or externally,  by the demand that what is created somehow be justified, it's "value" determined,  by how much money "it" can make.

Which is no "real" evaluation of success at all, any more than the "success" of corporations has anything to do with preserving our planet's future or quality of life for us.  Indeed, the greed manifest in many of them is actively destroying not only the evolution of humanity, but the evolution of many, many other forms of life evolving on this planet Earth.    Capitalism  has become an oppressive force indeed, a profoundly destructive  force in  it's soulless quest for profit.  We need to put money "values" outside the door when we enter the house of  creative integrity - otherwise it's like a loud cacophony of endless commercials, nattering away, obstructing any capacity to hear, see, know, be "en-souled".

My house, of course, is full of art, 45 years of it, and being an AIRBNB host, I"m always amazed at how very rare it is for those who come here to comment or acknowledge it.  I've often said to myself that I could hang mops on the walls for all most people would be aware of the art.......which belongs, perhaps, to another conversation. To keep myself from feeling defensive about being an artist, I almost never attempt any longer to talk to my guests about my "other life" as an artist.....as if being an artist was never a "real job".  Ah..........But when young artists come to my home, I find I'm disappointed  for another reason.  Which is how rarely any of them ask about the work - what it means, what  it derives from, even just how I made it.  I find most of them ask about shows, ways to promote work, what kind of prices I get....... how, in other words, did I make money from my work and can I help them to do so.  I've never said this out loud, but so very few seem to see that artwork is a Conversation, one I so often wish I could share with others.   Paintings are doors into some other dimension, windows into story.   In the babble and preoccupation with money,  so many voices are never  heard.

What wealth, if money was left outside the door like our shoes so as not to soil the space........what wealth might be found in the creative language being spoken on the walls or streets  of many places, what dialogues might be shared about the  impulses from which they sprang?

In accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 2014  National Book Awards, eminent  writer Ursula Le Guin made a knock-out speech about the power of capitalism, literature and imagination that, as she put it afterwards, “went sort-of viral on YouTube.”

http://billmoyers.com/2014/12/27/ursula-le-guin-will-need-writers-can-remember-freedom/

Transcript:

I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.)

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.