The MASKS OF THE GODDESS Workshops from March and April, 2026

Masks from the Beginner's Class  (including my own Spider Woman mask)

I'm delighted to share (with permission of my students) the results of the two 4 day residential Intensive Workshops I taught at my Studio-Enclave in Tucson, Arizona the past two weeks.  The first class was a "Reunion" class, and it was wonderful to have students from last year's Workshop return to make more masks, and to enlarge their vision, with new masks, and new stories about the masks.

The second class was equally as prolific, both in the work they produced and what the visioning revealed individually and for the group through the process of the masks.  I'm delighted indeed, and intend to offer the same classes again next year.  Bravo to the Mask artists of this year!

“We give our mythic side scant attention these days and so a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions.  In most cultures, theatre and dance are considered holy rituals, but in the United States, these arts have become strangely secular.”

Leslie  Saxon West,  Choreographer, METAMORPHOSES (The myths of Ovid)

Masks from the Reunion Class (including my own Spider Woman mask)

"Grandmother Moon" by Sue Ellen Parkinson

"Crow Woman" by Ananda

"Flora" by Patty West

"Mask of Time" by Chaya Kornreich

 “Creativity is the Blue Heron within us waiting to fly;

 through her imagination, all things become possible.”

 Nadia Janice Brown

'The End of the Known World "

 

In 2014 I made a  blog for my friend Nigelle, also known as Zoe, who walked the Camino de Santiago at the age of 68. I greatly admire her journey, and so often wish I had also walked the Camino, taken that Pilgrimage myself.  

The scallop shell is the symbol of the Camino, pointing the way all along the long pilgrimage route.   After achieving the great Cathedral at  Compostella, many pilgrims then continue on to Finisterre, which in English means  "Lands End", where they finish their pilgrimage before the vastness of the Atlantic ocean.   For some reason this beloved poem by David Whyte has haunted me today.  I think, sometimes, the ancient Sanskrit philosophers were right when they wrote that at old age, one should leave behind the old life and pursuits, and enter into Pilgrimage, physically or spiritually (however one wishes to look at it).  Toward the Compostella of your dreams that calls to you.  

Or, perhaps, to go just a bit farther at last, to Finisterre..........."Because now, you would find a different way to tread, and because, through it all, part of you could still walk on,  no matter how........."

FINISTERRE

The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken,
into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you
as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way
to your future now

but the way your shadow could take,
walking before you across water,

going where shadows go,

no way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass
except to call an end to the way you had come,
to take out each frayed letter you brought
and light their illumined corners, and to read
them as they drifted through the western light;
to empty your bags;
to sort this and to leave that;

to promise what you needed to promise all along
and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here
right at the water's edge,

not because you had given up
but because now, you would find a different way to tread,
and because, through it all,
part of you could still walk on,
no matter how, over the waves.”

― David Whyte

 

**Photos by Zoe D'Ay

Masks for the New Year: The Persistance of Butterflies

 

                                   "A Mask for the Far Journey" (2025)

My own exhibit of masks (and a painting called "Seeing in the Dark")  at the Visionary Art Show  I curated with Stevens Gallery Director Betina Fink.  Butterflies, it seems to me, are a hopeful symbol of transformation.......the thing about masks is, you put them on, and then they reveal their story. 

 

"A Mask for Crossing Dimensions" (2023)

"A Mask for Becoming Lighter" (2022)

"A Mask for the Shattering of Old Paradigms" (2024)

"A Mask for the Reconciliation of Opposites" (2025)

"A Mask for Talking With the Ancestors" (2024)

"A Mask for Chaos and for Order" (2024)

"A Mask for Composting Old Dreams" (2025)

For a Very Troubled Time: "The Curse of the Morrigan"

 

I have been feeling, as many have, overwhelmed with the chaos, violence, fear and destruction that is going on in our country as Trump and his sycophants, and surely the monied oligarchy behind him, has and is creating.  I don't need to reiterate the loss of social services, the unstable economy, the repression of ICE, and the loss of our democracy and standing in the world community this has brought, in such a short time.  This morning I call for the Justice of the Morrigan.

It makes me ill to see the way lies and deception, greed with no limits, has poisoned our lives.  I wonder so often, how is it possible that we have such corruption, how is it possible everyone doesn't see "the Law of One", the truth that all of us, including all the other Beings on this beautiful planet, are interdependent?  That what is done to another is ultimately done to each of us as well?  How is this not obvious?  

I've always loved this poem, which seemed to erupt from me when I was creating a mask for the Celtic Goddess of battle, justice, and lamentation in 1999.  The message is about the entwinement of all experiences, a call to re-member that the real battle is the evolution of our souls into compassion and love, that fundamental evolutionary truth, especially now.  I guess that's why, when I put together this collage to illustrate the poem, the threads of the Web had to be manifest in the drawing.    

The CURSE OF THE MORRIGAN

You who bring suffering to children:

​May you look into the sweetest, most open eyes, and howl the loss of your innocence.

You who ridicule the poor, the grieving, the lost, the fallen, the inarticulate, the wounded children in grown-up bodies:

May you look into each face, and see a mirror. May all your cleverness fall into the abyss of your speechless grief, your secret hunger, may you look into that black hole with no name, and find....the most tender touch in the darkest night, the hand that reaches out. May you take that hand. May you walk all your circles home at last, and coming home, know where you are.

You tree-killers, you wasters:    May you breathe the bitter dust, may you thirst, may you walk hungry in the wastelands, the barren places you have made. And when you cannot walk one step further, may you see at your foot a single blade of grass, green, defiantly green. And may you be remade by it's generosity.

And those who are greedy in a time of famine:  May you be emptied out, may your hearts break not in half, but wide open in a thousand places, and may the waters of the world pour from each crevice, washing you clean.

Those who mistake power for love:  May you know true loneliness. And when you think your loneliness will drive you mad, when you know you cannot bear it one more hour, may a line be cast to you, one shining, light woven strand of the Great Web glistening in the dark. And may you hold on for dear life.

Those passive ones, those ones who force others to shape them, and then complain if it's not to your liking:

May you find yourself in the hard place with your back against the wall. And may you rage, rage until you find your will. And may you learn to shape yourself.

And you who delight in exploiting others, imagining that you are better than they are:

May you wake up in a strange land as naked as the day you were born and thrice as raw. May you look into the eyes of any other soul, in your radiant need and terrible vulnerability. May you know yourSelf. And may you be blessed by that communion.

                   And may you love well, thrice and thrice and thrice,
                   and again and again and again
                   May you find your face before you were born.

                   And may you drink from deep, deep waters.

"Dreams, Deities and Archetypes" - an Exhibit of Visionary Artists

 

"DREAMS,  DEITIES  &  ARCHETYPES"

 Inspired by  Carl Jung's Red Book   the Southern AZ Friends of Jung (SAFOJ) presents  An Exhibition of Visionary Artists, in collaboration with Tucson's  STEVENS GALLERY  located at 1545 East Copper Street, Tucson, AZ  January 31  through April 21, 2026.

THE OPENING is  February 7  (6 to 8 pm)  with a  performance by Nanette Robinson &  ZUZI! Dance! at 7 pm.  To View the Show online:    Full Catalog with an Introduction by  Lauren Raine.

The Exhibit has works by over 20 of Tucson's Visionary artists:  ​

Judith Austen, Barbara Brandel, Madeleine Charron, Mary Theresa Dietz,  Suzanne Ellenbogen, Betina Fink,  Nina Halvax, Lisa Hastreiter-Lamb, Patrick Hynes, Kathy Keler, Carolyn King, Ingrid McCarty, Arnold Nelson, Michael Pellegrino, Lauren Raine,  Maria Renee, Kelly Sinclair, Carmen R. Sonnes, and  Linda Valdez

                                                                    Join us! 

My Introduction to the Visionary Arts Exhibit

Illustration by Carl Jung from The Red Book

                                                          INTRODUCTION

                 to "Dreams, Deities and Archetypes:  A Visionary Art Exhibit"

"Visionary seeing" is a force against the tyranny of "literal mind", a movement into a larger dimension that honors our connection with archetypal powers beyond the local self.  According to Carl Jung, much of the vacuum of meaning from which contemporary people suffer results from isolation of the "ego-mind" from "archetypal unconscious"…….Jung even went so far as to say that myths are more sustaining in our lives than economic security."

Suzi Gablik,  The Re-Enchantment of Art  (Thames Hudson, 1991) p. 52

It was my privilege, in the late 1980's, to share conversations about art, spirituality, and cultural transformation with some extraordinary artists as I pursued material for a book on Visionary Art. I travelled across the country to interview artists, and I realize now that  I was also trying to understand my own reasons for making art. The contemporary "art world" seemed dry and disconnected from a deep well of inspiration I recognized in my conversations with the artists I met.
                                                               
In New York City  I met Alex and Alison Grey, who told me of the profound visionary experience they shared together that became the Genesis of the "Sacred Mirrors" * for which they became famous. In California I met sculptor Lorraine Capparell, who told me she had dreamed of her  amazing sculpture "Hands", fully realized, before she made it. And in Arizona I spoke with  Sarah Mertz, whose "petroglyphic" paintings seemed like a forgotten tribal language, glimpsed among the valleys of the Rincons and Sarah's imagination.  Mertz  reminded me that once upon a time:    "Everything was made for the greater meaning and use of the tribe. A spoon was more than a spoon, and a sacred pot was also used to store grain in - because they understood that there had to be a weaving between the material world and the other worlds in order to live right and well. An artist was one of those who did the weaving." 

Those conversations  still infuse my creative life.  In our Exhibit, artist Carolyn King reaches into the heart of myth as she shows us  "ancestral roots", seen as hieroglyphs or elemental beings, just beneath the skin on women who, as she puts it, are  "memory keepers of  myths and deep relationships with Nature within their cultures."  Carmon R. Sonnes in her painting "The Ancestors Speak" also envisions iconography of her Native roots,  imprinted in the present life of a woman's body.

Myth is intrinsic to much that is visionary, and myth is one of the foundations on which cultures are built. Mythos is the sometimes-fluid template of religions, and ultimately the means  by which we decide  what is sacred and what is not. Artists, as technicians of story, possess the means to  "re-myth" not just their personal lives, but culture at large.

In Kathy Keler's  "She Approaches" Keler envisions the approach of the Divine Feminine, adorned with the sacred Earth serpents of antiquity,  rising amid the destructive forces of Patriarchy.  Judith Austen paints the invisible hand that creates a lotus,  an ancient symbol of spiritual transformation, and faith that we are not alone in our striving. And Maria Renee envisions the magical intelligence of nature, of the Sonoran Desert she lives in, as she  "seeks to understand the roots of disconnection and engage in practices of re-connection with others – at the center of this is listening to and building relationship with the animate, more-than-human world." "My work" she asserts, "holds a vision toward justice, stewardship, and belonging."
​
Visioning can also be abstract, and subtle, requiring a kind of deep quiet to fully perceive.  Kelly Sinclair's symbolic paintings  envision the experience of  Love as a "symphony" of color and vibration, with many distinct forms and expressions. Abstract painter Ingrid McCarty further abstracts to an energetic essence, states of emotional and spiritual transformation.  And Betina Fink's plein air paintings subtly capture the quiet sentience and conversant Mystery inherent in place - "what is unseen" unless one sees/listens carefully.

Lisa Hastreiter-Lamb  makes Icons to "intercede with the divine". Inspired by the Catholic Icons she grew up with, her bas relief sculptures are Icons representing  visual prayers for strength, protection, and transformation.  Michael Pellegrino's whimsical paintings are "snapshots" of the ineffable. The viewer is left to interpret them as one  might interpret dreams. A goat called "Capricorn"  leaps over a snow-clad mountain,  leaping from day into moonlit night. A grieving monkey holds prayer beads. In "The Egyptian Way" A great condor flies over a man and his long shadow. And in the vibrant visionary paintings of Mary Theresa Dietz we also enter the paintings as "windows" into  story as well as metaphor, complex in their layering.

I agree with the writer Ursula Leguin when she said in her 2014 speech that we very much  need, at this time of social and environmental crisis,  what she called "realists of a larger reality"* - visionaries who can envision new worlds and ways, who can renew and re-define the sacred,  pollinating the future with hope and, for lack of any better word, "enchantment".    All these years later, it's my privilege to enter that Conversation again, though the works of Tucson's extraordinary Visionaries in our Visionary Art Exhibition. Listen with your eyes and imagination to these works,  because they speak of the numinous Mystery of being,  in each unique way.

Lauren Raine MFA  2025
for SAFOJ

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of  those who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for  hope.   We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, artists,  visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”

........ Ursula K. Leguin

 * See, "How Art Can Change Consciousness" - TED talk by Alex Grey on Visionary Art.
 * The  National Book Awards (2014) where she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters 

 
         

At the Solstice: Pax Gaia (Peace on Earth)

                        

  "What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?"

------ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1986)

Pax Gaia (the Peace of Earth) is the most compelling challenge of our time. Thomas Berry, speaking as he did for all the Relations on our beautiful planet,  introduced this t,heme after 9/11, reflecting on the urgent need to embrace a cosmology of a truly comprehensive Gaian  peace. It is a peace that transcends Pax Romana (the peace of an empire) and Pax Humana (peace among humans).  To imagine a Peace that extends to all the interwoven, interdependent life on Gaia, recognizing that what we do to others, and not just human, we are doing to ourselves, and to those who must come after us. Co-creators, not exploiters .  A great calling indeed, given the chaos and violence of our time.  But as Berry wrote, if we are to survive, and meet the evolutionary challenge we now face, holding that Pax in our minds and hearts is the only way.

"We are called as an evolving humanity to the Great Work that engenders Pax Gaia. To this end we create and foster deep cultural therapies that address the deep cultural pathology of our time that has brought about such ecological damage." 

Thomas Berry "Evening Thoughts" 2006)

"Only now we see with clarity that we live not so much in a cosmos (a place) as in a cosmogenesis (a process) -- scientific in its data, mythic in its form."  

~ The Universe Story by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry  

The Winter Solstice was perhaps the earliest universal holy day, celebrated in different ways   throughout the world from the earliest days of human culture.  The Solstice is the ancient center of the Holiday Season and our New Year.   When language was young, when even the gods and goddesses had not yet taken human forms within the human imagination, but they ran instead with deer in the forest, flew with the wings of crows, or were glimpsed nameless from the awed depths of every numinous pool, sensed as Presence in the womb depths of caves........ even then, the Return of the Light was a holy day, a day of celebration. 

Long ago ancestors lit fires to welcome the "shining god" who was the sun returning from mysterious underworld depths to bring the life giving Sun as the nights grew so long. They built stones or made circles or created doorways to be aligned with the sun's pathway. They lit fires as "sympathetic magic", fires to light and imitate the Sun's passage (which is why we still light candles, and Christmas lights, today, although no one remembers.........)

Welcoming the Sun, they left offerings of food to show their gratitude, and invented songs or danced throughout the longest cold night, encouraging, helping the Sun on its  difficult journey to return to the world, and to the promise of new life.    I remember at this time of the Holy/Wholly/Holidays that Holydays begin among our most ancient, instinctual roots, taproots that reach down, deeply entwined within the visible and invisible web of  Gaia's life.  I believe having a mythos, indeed, and experience of that taproot, is essential to our physical and spiritual health.  

Planet Earth turns her face toward her star again, circling in brilliant orbit, bearing every evolving, responsive, living, infinitely intertwined be-ing within her fragile, exquisite azure skin on her long journey.   

Perhaps we sensed, as the sun rose on the Winter Solstice,  that pre-verbal, instinctual knowing, found hidden beneath the pages of any book written with five fingered hands, beneath each inscribed layer of words, signs, hieroglyphs, pictures in jet or ochre or sepia, luminous beneath the oldest pages.  A veneer peels away, revealing a pentimento, an ancient heartbeat found within our genetic memories, shared again with all beings that keep vigil on the long night of the winter Solstice, and celebrate the Return of the Light with many different religious traditions.  Or with just awe and reverence, candles in the night.  

"Winter Solstice, Willits, California 2013" Photo by Jerri Jo Idarius

I pledge allegiance

to the soil of Turtle Island,

and to the beings

who thereon dwell

one ecosystem in diversity

under the sun

With joyful

interpenetration for all.

Gary Snyder