I am going to do "Memoir" quite a lot now in this Blog, re-visiting older posts and older "bread crumbs" along the pathways of my past. So here is a funny story about the "accidents" that end up changing our lives, and sometimes the lives of many others as well. Here's from a 2020 post:
"I was surprised when I found myself humming a song by Leo Kottke that I haven't thought about since the 70's, as my first husband took the album when we divorced in 1979! For that matter, I haven't thought about Paul in a number of decades. We parted young and amiably, and not too long after I was gone he met his life partner, they got married, and we long ago fell out of touch. But thinking of serendipity, and Leo Kottke's homage to Pamela Brown, there is a story worth telling. Paul and his best friend Peter were from Canada, near Toronto, and after graduating, decided to take his Volkswagen bug and go to Mexico. They drove down the California coast and visited the famous political hotbed of Berkeley, where their car broke down.
I was living in a warehouse with a lot of artists in Berkeley then. In those days if you had a volkswagon it was politically correct to fix it yourself with do it yourself manuals for "The People's Car" . In Berkeley there was a garage where you could also rent space and tools to work. So Paul and Peter decided to hang out in Berkeley for a while while they fixed the Volkswagon. Meanwhile, I and my artistic comrades were planning our Warehouse Halloween party. I had a date who was going to join me at the party, and on the other side of town, Paul met a woman who invited him to come with her to the same party. The party was a great success, but both of our prospective dates didn't show up, so Paul and I got together out of sympathy. In the course of our time together in Berkeley, Paul's brother, David, came to visit and decided to remain in San Francisco, where he became a photographer. His younger sister, Pat, also came to visit, and became a nanny and ended up meeting a young man from Sri Lanka there. They married, and she moved to Sri Lanka with him, and they had three children. And Peter, Paul's travelling friend, met Belinda while in Berkeley - they married and had a son. Paul and I left Berkeley, and moved to Wisconsin, where Paul remained after we separated, met his future wife, and they are still together.
So............Paul, Peter, David, and Pat never went back to Canada. Marriages happened, and children were born. New careers. All because a car happened to break down in Berkeley, and I and Paul got dumped by our dates for a Halloween party. Serendipity!
This was originally intended to be a journal, a journal that began with an artist residency based on my quest to follow the "trail of Spider Woman" in 2007. To envision what She might represent, across the ages, across the miles, and across cultures into this crucial contemporary time we live in. I wonder how far I have come or strayed from that path? I've tried to be true, and I think I mostly have.
But now it's been almost 20 years, and I am 77 years old - how did I get here, standing on the near precipice of closing the book of this (yes, very interesting) life)? What a long strange trip it's been, to quote the Grateful Dead. So....... I'm going to ramble. If anyone reads this, well, maybe you too sometimes ramble and feel the same.
Weaver (2007)
Ursula Leguin (my lifelong mentor) wrote that "Comfort is irrelevant. Unless you are an old woman, and then it is everything." I have to agree with her indeed. But where is "comfort" these days? This world, beyond the obvious dystopia that America has become, is especially strange. I understand now what my mother meant by "missing the old time ways". AI? Computers that talk to you? AI "companions" instead of a real friend (wasn't that a movie?), banks of laptops where a coffee shop used to be...... I've become an anachronism sitting by the roadside now, with a few old friends commiserating.
It looks to me like human technology may be advancing and evolving, but humanity hasn't caught up yet. Still the same greed and war, violence and ignorance. Is there a Golden Age ahead somewhere? It's been promised........but not before a whole lot of chaos I suspect. Kali is dancing.
Lately, I've been feeling like writing a Memoir, with certain stories as evolutionary "touchstones" or breadcrumbs along the pathway. Sometimes I see them, shining like Hecate's torch in the dark paths of memory, and say "ah, there you are!". But memoir: that also seems vain somehow. And yet, and yet, I've had some extraordinary moments that may well be worth sharing!
I think of that book "Meetings with Remarkable Men" by Gurdjieff that I had to wade through in my early 20's because everyone said he was "so heavy" (I am not particularly a fan of Gurdjieff, although I do think as Trickster Archetypes go he was a great one). Apparently Gurdjieff never met any Remarkable Women - a blind spot that hasn't changed much among men today either. Even in his "all and everything", women were amazingly invisible to him.
So my Memoir would appropriately be called
Meetings with Remarkable Women -
(All and Everything, Second Wave Series)
Ha! Thinking along those lines, I guess I do have a whole lot to share! Yes, I've met and worked with and learned from some Remarkable Women!
When I was 18 at L.A. City College, I announced that "I was going to be an artist!" I had not one, but three teachers (men) who informed me that I should re-consider that, because there had never been any great women artists. In other words, my gender didn't have what it takes. They were serious, as if that was a known fact. Fortunately, I and women like Judy Chicago and many others said "well, Now there is!"
(1972)?
My idea of being an artist has mostly been king of like being a stenographer: you learn your skills, and are able and willing to do transcription from the Muses. But there aren't a lot of job opportunities for this sort of thing lately........ And yet the Powers that Be keep sending me visions, that I try to make manifest between elderly naps.
Here comes a literary comment: I do know that what I love best are the stories people tell of their lives. I have encountered many inspired, dedicated spiritual books that unfortunately drone on and on about "love" and "spirit" and "sacred" and end each paragraph with "you should....." until I'm fast asleep halfway through Chapter I. These well meaning teachers don't know how to write in ways that aren't like sermons. Stories are what capture the reader, and can also conveniently contain metaphors that get the message across.
Another literary failing is the promiscuous use of Abstractions. At 77, I'm weary indeed of Abstractions (although some Symbols are ok). But do we really need all those words that take us into "higher concepts"? I sometimes wonder how well some of those (patriarchal) "higher concepts" have served us? Hitler had a lot of "higher concepts" and so did the Inquisition. Rousing and inspirational ways to provoke genocide.
I suppose, to use a "lower concept" metaphor, I would like to write with my hands in the moist earth, planting seeds that will grow in the imagination. Just add water.
"The World is not with us enough, O Taste and See" wrote the poet Denise Levertov. Abstractions often distance us from that truth, even fascinating metaphysical abstractions. "O Taste and See!" is important at 70 something: I don't need abstractions now. I need sunrises, good coffee, friends to share with, mountains purple and azure, star scapes, the purring of cats, the taste of yellow wine and fresh bread........... I need to love the World, to remember all the poignant and numinous moments and places, even as my time here grows shorter. And to say Thank You World as I rise at sunrise each day, listening to the birds greet the Sun, and watering my garden.
But I also think I am experiencing Grief these days, along with a lot of others. The Earth is heating up, the oceans are filling up with plastic, California is burning and Florida is sinking, millions of fellow beings on this beautiful world are becoming extinct every week, refugees are fleeing drought and war, and sociopathic, greed driven men are too often the ones in power.
Some days I don't know how to get "positive" and "enlightened". I think about the Roman practice of the Saturn shrine, a somber place that was set aside in their gardens, where one might sit in solitude, and allow the dark, melancholy God to inform and converse with one's psyche.
There is a place for the voice of Saturn in the gardens of our lives. I claim the right to examine this long life I have been privileged to have, to en-sadden about the losses and the disappointments, to grieve the daily destruction of the Living Earth, and the decimation of my country, which for all it's faults, was also a place of hope and idealism and some great innovation. Yes, my country is, as another of my heros Bernie Sanders says loud and clear, bless his heart, no longer a democracy. It's an end stage capitalist oligarchy. The Barbarians are coming, the Barbarians are here.
When I was a child in the 50's my family toured Italy. My mother dragged us to Roman temples and mausoleums and museums, and I am embarrassed to say that all I really remember of it all, outside of the wonderful cats in the Coliseum, are the statues without noses. They always seemed to be without noses, and in my 10 year old imagination, I pictured Romans as toga clad people without noses.
Much later, when contemplating pictures of those impressive (nose-less) marble statues, I imagined breaking floods of roaring barbarians crossing the Rubicon and riding into civilized Rome, looting the Temples, raping the women (women always seem to be perceived as loot), and shouting with glee as they knocked the noses off of every statue they saw.
Waiting for the Barbarians. ( I do not refer here, by the way, to the poem by C.P. Cavafy, or the famous book by Pulitzer prize winner J.M. Coetzee , or even the very powerful performance by Laurie Anderson. I co-opt the term for my own uses. As an educated (MFA), and thus privileged woman, sitting here sipping tea and enjoying the sound of dawn birds in my garden, sometimes I imagine myself as an aristocratic late Roman woman. How might she have felt, sitting in her Atrium, "waiting for the barbarians" to arrive?
I've partaken of the higher benefits of civilization, been part of an optimistic and creative generation. In the modern version, I wondered if all the Goddess sculptures in my sculpture garden would be nose-less one day. Would the Barbarians ride in with their motorcycles, assault rifles in hand and red baseball hats on their heads, eagerly blowing up the Smithsonian or the Met, knocking the noses off of every statue in the place?
Instead of Star trek, is the future to be more like the Road Warrior? A glorious patriarchal dream of one alpha male duking it out with another for unending narcissistic exploitative supremacy and all the virgins he can impregnate?
I hope not. Forgive me if I get discouraged sometimes. Change is coming, I hope.
I've been having a lot of fun painting these days. It's been such a stressful, if creative, year. The Visionary Arts Show at Stevens Gallery was a great success, highlighting the work of 20 of Tucson's visionary artists along with the Red Book of Carl Jung, as were the talks by Charles Gillespie, Kathy Keler, and myself. But it was a lot of work! And I was delighted that my workshops were so successful too!
But for the first time in many months, I've had some time to myself to just go in the studio and play.
I decided to just paint whatever I felt like painting. No post modern angst, no effort at deep meaning either, I would just paint. What arose immediately was the desire to fill my walls with more Butterflies.
And........... this image, which has haunted me for years, and finally I was able to paint a new variation on it.
I call this the "Pollinator". In truth, it's actually a Prayer, a visual Prayer I make for myself, and for other creatives. It goes something like this:
"May the works of my hands, words, and creative mind emanate from me, like butterflies, pollinating the flowering imaginations of those they touch".
Some photos from a visit to White Sands with my friend Georgia about a decade ago. Another mysterious place, one I particularly would have liked to visit by moonlight, the glistening white sands reflecting moon shadows.
White Sands National Park is in the Tularosa Basin, a vast field of white sand dunes composed of gypsum crystals. Approximately 12,000 years ago, the Tularosa Basin featured lakes, streams, grasslands, and Ice Age mammals. As the climate warmed, rain and snowmelt dissolved gypsum from the surrounding mountains and carried it into the basin. As the lakes dried up selenite crystals formed, which broke up and were transported east, producing gypsum sand. About 45 species live only in the Park, and 40 of those are moths. Given the high heat in the summer, most of those are nocturnal, illusive "moon moths". It's believed that the oldest known human footprints in North America are found at White Sands. These are fossilized footprints found buried in layers of gypsum soil that can be dated to 21,000 and 23,000 years ago - remarkable, as the present consensus for human arrival into North America is placed at 13–16,000 years ago.
Legend also has it that there is a ghostly woman who wanders among the sands at night, mourning her lost children and her lost life.
The nearby "valley of Fire", a vast volcanic field called the Malpais ("bad land") is also fascinating and darkly beautiful.
Back in 2007 I began to paint butterflies, inspired by the amazing book "Butterfly" by photographer Thomas Marent.
2026
I began mostly because my brother, Glenn, was on life support (he has since passed away). The Butterfly is such a perfect and literal symbol of ultimate transformation, from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to beautiful ephemeral flying creature - a living work of art, each one. The little paintings were a kind of prayer for my brother, and I vowed to make at least one each year. I've more or less been true to that, and I have quite a collection now of butterflies over my door!
Which, now that I think about it, is another fitting metaphor. Lately, with everything going on, I have the compulsion to make lots of butterflies, here's a few new ones.
A couple of weeks ago, over Easter weekend, I had the privilege of participating in The Masks of the Goddess workshop offered by Lauren Raine. Thanks to Lauren’s artistic brilliance and soulful generosity, the being pictured above emerged over the course of two and a half days. At first she was just layers of dark colors, then she requested stardust, a crown of multicolored maize seeds, and a blue corn sprout at her third eye. As she took shape, I imagined she was likely connected to the story I’d heard Jade Wah’oo Grigori offer about the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades and the Blue Corn maidens. But there was something else about her; she was familiar to me in a different way. I couldn’t quite place her, but it’s as if my cells could recognize her on the tip of my senses.
Who are you?
The evening before our closing circle, Lauren sent us off to dialogue with our beings. I couldn’t stay overnight with the rest of the group, so I returned to the familiar chaos of my home, tending my daughter, getting her to sleep. As usually happens, by the time the household was settled, I was too tired to do anything. I went to bed with the lingering echoes of this being, hoping she might tell me more in my dreams.
My body recognized the sensory signature of this being behind the mask.
You are the story.
Today, in the wake of the Super New Moon in Aries and the dramatic dance of the celestial bodies this week, I offer this story again, now delivered anew with the goddess of the mask.
Just to set the scene a bit, this is a different kind of writing than I usually share here on Substack. This comes from my collection of soul stories, which are tellings that don’t map onto ordinary reality. This telling comes through a familiar duo in my medicine world: Nana Coyo is an old crone spirit I often sense here in my Sonoran Desert home. Her name is derived from the Mexica moon goddess, Coyolxauhqui. Lázaro is a presence who often comes to talk to me about the wounded masculine seeking the care of a healing crone. They have a lot to say, these two, and they deeply love each other.
And with no further ado…
The Pleiades as seen from Mt. Lemmon, AZ SkyCenter. WikiCommons Media.
The Corn Comes Down from the Stars: A Story for the People
Nana Coyo never sleeps on the night before the day of remembering. As soon as the sun has dropped with certainty behind the western mountains, she arranges herself on a folding chair outside in her backyard. She places her feet on a hot water bottle and wraps a rebozo around her shoulders. At her side is the thermos of steaming atole with piloncillo and chocolate for wakefulness. There is nowhere she’d rather be.
This year, the cycles of Earth and Cosmos arrange for the Moon to be wearing her darkest cloak. Nana Coyo hums and mutters. She sings as the sky reveals what people nowadays call secret knowledge. Nana Coyo knows better; these are simply memories retained. This is what she tells her adoptive son Lázaro.
When Lázaro was younger, he’d furrow his brow and complain about Nana Coyo and her odd ways of explaining things.
“Why can’t you just talk like a normal person?” he’d say.
She would laugh and tug at his ear.
“Te estoy entrenando a los oÃdos, hijo mÃo. One day you will know how to listen.”
Now that Lázaro’s hair is greying and Nana Coyo is practically old enough to join the stars, he feels a longing in his bones to sit outside with her. He walks out into the dark. He can barely make out Nana Coyo’s silhouette against the blackness of the night. He follows the sound of her voice, a trail of vocalizations beyond any language he recognizes. Clicks and trills. Hoots and whistles. Murmurs like the wings of hummingbirds. As his eyes adjust to the dark, he sees her huddled figure outlined by starlight.
Without a word, Lázaro sets up his folding chair next to Nana Coyo. She pats his knee. He feels a smile in the warmth of her hand, and she pours him a cup of atole. He breathes in the smells of roasted corn ground into flour, boiled in water, and whisked into a frothy beverage. As he raises the cup to his mouth, he can almost taste the hints of cinnamon and chocolate, but Nana Coyo’s bony fingers gently intervene, pulling back his cup before he can take a sip.
“Antes de todo, una pruebadita para Madrecita.”
As if she is assisting a child, Nana Coyo holds Lázaro’s hands in her own. She guides them down to the ground, where she tips the cup and spills out a taste of atole onto the cool desert floor beneath their feet.
She whispers to the ground and sighs with satisfaction.
“Ahora sÃ, mi amor. Drink up.”
And he does.
They sit for hours. Nana Coyo sings. She stretches her legs. She claps her hands. She stomps her feet. She settles into a chorus of sounds that only tall grasses know how to make in the wind.
Together, they drink the atole.
Without even intending it, Lázaro turns over his consciousness to the dark sky. He forgets that he is awake, staring into the starry abyss, with only the smell of corn and the tug of gravity to remind him that he is still a terrestrial creature. At some point during the night, he realizes that he can understand the meanings of the strange sounds being spoken by Nana Coyo. He surrenders to the warming spread of awareness through his body.
The Corn Mothers came to us long ago. They seeded themselves into us, generation after generation. Beings as big as the stars became morsels of nourishment. In Madre MaÃz, they came as clusters of constellations, all the colors of light, the energy of nuclear fusion—the glow of blue, yellow, red, orange, white, and every glimmer in between. They joined with the stones and made their way into our bones, our cells, the spiraling ladders of the fabric of our being. They fed us with the food of remembering because they knew a different kind of darkness would descend on the land. It is not the blackness of the night but the disease of forgetfulness. They knew there would come a day when we would eat and never be satiated. Ravenous, we would devour everything in our path, as if we had no memories.
Nana Coyo pours the last of the atole into Lázaro’s cup.
The Mothers are as close to you as your body. On this night before the day of remembering, drink and eat, mi amor. See them adorned in starlight and radiating with power. Receive their ripened bellies. Be filled by them.
With that Nano Coyo cups Lázaro’s head in her hands. She turns his gaze toward the Eastern sky. Against the mountains, the horizon begins to define itself as the night softens. A shard of light pierces through the worlds and illuminates the shoulders of the mountains.
In that moment, Lázaro’s heart cleaves open. His body spills to the ground. In heaving sobs, he wraps himself around Nana Coyo’s feet. He cries like a baby.
When he eventually comes to stillness, Nana Coyo pulls out her left foot and gently rests it on the small of his back. She applies the slightest pressure and rocks him gently. He breathes in deeply, as if reacquainting himself with air.
They rest this way, the two of them—together at the precipice between worlds.
They greet the day of remembering.
Wearing the mask of the goddess. Photo by author.
Last night, I wear the mask for the first time, gazing out from behind her dark splendor. I light the candle and offer the smoke of the copal to the night. I rattle and read the story of Lázaro and Nana Coyo aloud to the cosmos. I record it, but the audio isn’t great and doesn’t seem to want to be shared. Nonetheless, here is an image of us together. There is a sense in me that this Blue-Seeded Mother will be joining with Corn Mother in her basket. Who knows where our journeys will take us.
The Corn comes down from the Stars, and She grows up from the Earth.
As above, so below.
May the Corn Mothers remind us who we are as a People.
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