Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Paintings from "Shamanic" Series


A long time ago I had a dream about a man who offered me fire.   In fact, I had the dream twice, and although I never fully understood it, I remember the dream still.   It is a beautiful metaphor for love, for courtship, for sacred sexuality, for a longing I must have felt then for being offered all of those things.

I rediscovered this painting in the process of looking through my files (I seem to be engaged very much in contemplation of my life these days).  I always loved it, never showed it, don't remember anyone ever saying anything about it to me, and finally it was destroyed, as so many of my paintings were.  It is hard to have opportunities to share paintings, and it is hard to store paintings, especially when they come off the canvases.  I am sad that it's lost, but glad that I have the image still.

I remember when I painted it, during a magnificent, magical residency at the (now defunct) Cummington Community, in Western Massachusetts, not far from where Emily Dickenson lived.  It was 1989, and I was reading Journey of the Wounded Healer by Joan Halifax, and was very much thinking about the way shamans and healers find their callings.  All of the paintings I did then were based on the concept of the Shamanic journey, and on my dreams.  The painting below was called "Fire Heart".  Now that I think about it, all of the paintings were also about Fire.  Which has always been my friend, and my Element.




Monday, December 27, 2021

Films for Hope

Toronto Tower, Canada  Studio Precht


I wanted to share, at the Eve of 2022, the link to this amazing resource of documentaries about people, and technologies, and "New Stories" that are all about hope, sustainability, evolution, and solutions to the crisis of our time.   As the creators of Films for Action say:

 "Stop imagining the apocalypse; start imagining the revolution."

https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/cancel-the-apocalypse-documentaries-to-help-unlock-the-good-ending

Shilda winery in Kakheti, Georgia   -   Copyright  X-architecture

"Our present moment is saturated in dystopian, apocalyptic fantasies of the future.  As the late Mark Fisher said, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” We can envision a thousand ways that humanity might destroy itself and the rest of the world, but positive visions of the future remain severely lacking in comparison. Why is that?

The Dark Ages led to the Renaissance. Feudalism led to capitalism. No era remains stagnant forever. But there's an invisible meme in our culture today that says capitalism is the greatest economic idea humanity has ever invented and it will never be surpassed. That's why a thousand dystopian visions of the future all imagined that capitalism stayed the same, our economic paradigm never evolved... and then the world was eventually destroyed. Could the two be connected? Is our failure to imagine something better than capitalism going to be what actually leads to "the bad ending" for humanity? 

What this points to, in our view, is a crisis of imagination.  Humans at heart are storytellers, and we enact the stories we tell ourselves. As we've written before, our culture is enacting a story that's destroying the world. If humanity is going to unlock "the good ending," we've got to imagine it first. We've got to imagine ten thousand localized versions of it. That's how things change. 

Fortunately, visions of a more beautiful, compassionate, regenerative future already exist. But since they're not being broadcast daily on the evening news, we've got to dedicate a little more energy towards broadcasting them ourselves. This is what this list of films is for. These films decided that the apocalypse is canceled. Climate change is canceled. Biodiversity loss is canceled. A comeback of this scale has never been attempted before, but that's why it's going to work.  The people in these films aren't listening to the folks that say it's too late. They're imagining the future they want, not the future they're afraid of, and they're bringing that future into being.

Whether we're ultimately successful is not the point, and beyond anyone's ability to truly know. The point is that our true nature calls us to choose determination over defeat, and resilience over despair.   We hope these films inspire the former - that place in your heart that knows a better world *is* possible, and is ready to make it happen."

Monday, December 20, 2021

The Winter Solstice: Bridgit's Poem

 

BRIDGIT

 "God's abstention is only from human dialects;

 the holy voice utters its woe and glory in myriad musics,

 in signs and portents. 

 Our own words are for us to speak,

 a way to ask and to answer." 

.....Denise Levertov


There are some gifts that come to us

just once or twice in a lifetime,

gifts that cannot be named

beyond the simple act of gratitude.

 

We are given a vision so bountiful

we can only gaze with eyes wide,

like a child in summer's first garden.

 

We reach our clumsy hands

toward that communion

that single perfection

and walk away speechless, blessed.

 

And breathe, in years to come

breathe, breathe our hearts open

aching to tell it well

to sing it into every other heart

to dance it down, into the hungry soil

to hold it before us

 

that light,

  that grace given

  voiceless light

 

Lauren Raine (1999)

The Winter Solstice: The Shortest Day

 

 "Only now can 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 the first universal holy day, celebrated in different ways  throughout the world from the earliest days of human culture. When language was young, when even the gods and goddesses had not yet taken human forms in the human imagination, but 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........ even then, this 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. 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 as the Sun returned to the world  (which is why we still light candles, and Christmas lights, today). 

THE SHORTEST DAY

BY SUSAN COOPER 


So the shortest day came, and the year died,

And everywhere down the centuries

of the snow-white world


Came people singing, dancing,

To drive the dark away.


They lighted candles in the winter trees;

They hung their homes with evergreen;

They burned beseeching fires all night long

To keep the year alive


And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake

They shouted, reveling.


Through all the frosty ages you can hear them

Echoing behind us—Listen!!

All the long echoes sing the same delight,

This shortest day,


As promise wakens in the sleeping land:

They carol, feast, give thanks,

And dearly love their friends,

And hope for peace.


And so do we, here, now,

This year and every year.

Welcome Yule!

Sunday, December 19, 2021

Silent Peacocks: Personal Reflections on the Need for Sacred Solitude

Here is another article, this from around this time in 2019, that I just revised for publication submission.  It means a lot to me, that moment, that place.  I think the time is coming to return again.  Perhaps this is where I'll spend the Solstice.........

(December 19, 2019)

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 22nd 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 70. 

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.

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Tis the Season for.............Wassailling!

 

Winter Solstice Blessings to All!

Instead of seeing "nature" as "other", or a "resource",  earlier times often had a mythic, even friendly and reciprocal, relationship with the extended community of life. When we talk to the trees, the  animals, even stones………..we might just might begin to notice that we get a response sometimes!  For example, the old English custom  of telling the bees when someone has died in a farm family - and there are actually documented cases of a swarm of bees turning up at the funeral!  How vain it is of us to think we are the only intelligences sharing this beautiful planet.  

“Wassailing” has thus also included a tradition of  singing to trees in celebration of Christmas, of the all important return of the Sun.  Who is  to say that the apple trees don’t enjoy being part of the festivities? How would our world be a different place if we saw apple trees as being our generous friends, or inviting bees to the funeral of those they have lived among for so long, as a regular bit of hospitality?  

Although Wassail is popularly a spiced cider drink, often with brandy added and served hot, originally it included the  Yuletide custom of  singing to the trees, in particular, the orchards  of apple trees from which the celebratory drink came.  The spiced cider was offered in honor to the trees,  and around the time of the Solstice,   traditional wassail would be prepared – soaking pieces of bread, cake or toast in it – and Wassailers would travel from apple orchard to apple orchard singing carols   to the trees, in order to demonstrate appreciation for the harvest being enjoyed.  Wassail-soaked pieces of bread or toast were then left at the trees’ roots or hung in the trees’ branches to appease the tree spirits and feed them well until the next harvest.

Like the Romans'  offerings on small farm shrines dedicated  to the "Numina", the spirits of place that assisted them with their crops and orchards (the indigenous Roman Goddess Pomona, whose name meant "apple",  originated as a Numen of the orchards), this custom, which is still practiced with a lot of good cheer  in some rural areas of  England, reflects that ancient pagan sense of "reciprocity" with an intelligent, spiritually  inhabited natural world.

Here's what goes on in Whimple, England to this very day:  (http://www.whimple.org/wassail.htm)

 Our ritual follows the traditional well-tried and tested ceremony of our predecessors with the Mayor in his robes of office and the Princess carrying lightly toasted bread in her delicately trimmed flasket, whilst the Queen, wearing her crown of Ivy, Lichen and Mistletoe, recites the traditional verse. The original Whimple Incantation has been retained:
Here's to thee, old apple tree,That blooms well, bears well.Hats full,caps full,Three bushel bags full,An' all under one tree.Hurrah! Hurrah!
Her Majesty is then gently but manfully assisted up the treein order to place the cyder-soaked toast in the branches whilst the assembled throng, accompanied by a group of talented musicians, sing the Wassail Song and dance around the tree. The Mulled Cider or 'Wassail Cup' is produced and everyone takes a sample with their 'Clayen Cup'.





I read recently  that our habit of "toasting" may go back to Wassail revelries.  "Waes hael"  revelers would say,  from the Old English term  meaning "be well".  Eventually  "wassail" referred less to the greeting and more to the drink.  The contents of the Wassail bowl varied, but a popular one was known as 'lambs wool'. It consisted of hot ale, roasted crab apples, sugar, spices, eggs, and cream served with little pieces of toast. It was the toast floating on the top that made it look like lamb's wool.  The toast that was traditionally floated atop the wassail eventually became our "toast" -  when you hold up your glass and announce, “Let’s have a toast,”  or  ”I’ll toast to that,” you’re remembering this very old ritual of floating a bit of toast in spiced ale or mulled wine or wassail in celebration.

Wassailing – visiting neighbors (and much appreciated, friendly trees), singing carols  and sharing warmed drink – is a tradition related to the Winter Solstice with ancient roots indeed.  


I found a good Wassail recipe, which I've taken the liberty of sharing at the end of this post.  I don't know if I'll be going out to sing to the Saguaros  this Solstice myself...... but who knows what I might end up doing if I drink enough Wassail with brandy.  I'm sure the Saguaros wouldn't mind the attention.  Happy Wassailing!

Photo by Martin Beebee

 Apple Tree Wassailing Chants and Rhymes

Compiled in The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton

From the South Hams of Devon, recorded 1871: 

Here's to thee, old apple tree,
Whence thou mayst bud
And whence thou mayst blow!
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats full! Caps full!
Bushel--bushel--sacks full,
And my pockets full too! Huzza!

From Cornworthy, Devon, recorded 1805:

Huzza, Huzza, in our good town
The bread shall be white, and the liquor be brown
So here my old fellow I drink to thee
And the very health of each other tree.
Well may ye blow, well may ye bear
Blossom and fruit both apple and pear.
So that every bough and every twig
May bend with a burden both fair and big
May ye bear us and yield us fruit such a stores
That the bags and chambers and house run o'er.

Wassail Recipe

                     http://www.aspicyperspective.com/2013/09/wassail-recipe.html

Yield: 10-12 servings,  Prep Time: 5 minutes, Cook Time: 4 hours
Ingredients:
  • 1 gallon Apple Cider
  • 4 cups orange juice
  • 4 hibiscus tea bags
  • 10 cinnamon sticks
  • 1 tsp. whole cloves
  • 1 Tb. juniper berries
  • 1 1/2 inch piece of fresh ginger, cut into slices
  • 1 apple, sliced into rounds
  • 1 orange, sliced into rounds

Directions:

  1. Place all the ingredients in a slow cooker and cover.
  2. Turn the slow cooker on high heat and cook for 3-4 hours, until the color has darkened and the fruit is soft. Remove the tea bags and serve hot.

Monday, December 13, 2021

Coyote Trots Thru All Our Certainties......

 

"Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans"   Allen Saunders

                                                                          🐺

“The truth is all of life is a grand, blooming ambiguity"

James Hollis: WHAT MATTERS MOST: Living a More Considered Life

                                                                         🐺

"Coyote is an anarchist. She can confuse all civilized ideas simply by trotting through. And she always fools the pompous. Just when your ideas begin to get all nicely arranged and squared off, she messes them up. Things are never going to be neat, that's one thing you can count on.   Coyote walks through all our minds. Obviously, we need a trickster, a creator who made the world all wrong. We need the idea of a God who makes mistakes, gets into trouble, and who is identified with a scruffy little animal."

Ursula Leguin, "Coming Back From the Silence"

                                                                       🐺

 I recently had a silent retreat at an (almost) deserted former Benedictine Monastery I go to.  Wonderful! Solitude, just me and the peacocks that live there, and Coyote.  In every sense of the word,  just when I was ready for a visitation from an Angel or a Goddess, guess who turned up? Sometimes that voice of chaos is exactly the voice you need to hear.

Yellow Dog

 

Coyote howls a midnight serenade

to the desert tonight,

Her chorus answers, noisy as all hell. 

She brays down a tale about the frayed moon,

a prairie dog’s misfortune,

old dancing bones,

and all my carefully conceived plans.

 

Coyote is running tonight

between the splintered shutters

of my house of doors,

laughing through every tattered crevice

in all my certainties.

 

That yellow dog

Is a real pain

 

(1996)

 

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent,

intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Ursula Leguin


Thursday, December 9, 2021

An Image for Grace - from my Divination Deck



I just felt like looking at this image again, one of my favorite paintings
 from my Rainbow Bridge Oracle The painting is only 8"x 4", a study I did in painting small.  Recently, despairing of ever doing much marketing for it, I gave the Oracle deck to a friend to market, just giving me a royalty.  I want to share this rather huge body of work, and the book I wrote to accompany it, with a larger audience but seem to lack the marketing skills;  so I am hopeful she will do something with it.  I worked hard on the inspiration to create this deck, as I used to be a professional Tarot reader.  She wants to create a boxed set with a small book enclosed, as a limited edition Tarot Deck.  Sounds good to me!