Black Tara/Kali (Updated article)

Ture, Dark Mother of Bones and Blood
Silent night and smoldering ruins
the Wheel always turning
Black heart center
of understanding.
Grant the art of Letting-go
in the still silence
of your dark smile
Om tare tuttare ture soha

Silverstar

The Tibetan Goddess Tara is celebrated with a long prayer called "The 21 Praises to Tara". The Goddess, portrayed as a Gestalt by Green Tara in the center,  has 21 manifestations - peaceful and wrathful - all  expressions of divine mercy and wisdom. In the painting below, Green Tara is surrounded by smaller figures, each representing a different aspect of the Goddess that can offer help and enlightenment  (such as "White Tara", "Red Tara", etc.) 

Black Tara is a wrathful manifestation of Tara, identical in form and, probably  source, to Hindu Kali. Like Kali, she has a headdress of grinning skulls, like Kali, she is black, like Kali she has three eyes. Like many Tibetan deities in the wrathful aspect, She has the fangs of a tiger, symbolizing ferocity, with a ferocious appetite to devour and battle the demons of the mind. Her aura or halo is fiery, energetic, full of smoke that symbolizes the transformative powers of fire.  I have heard Kali described as the "cleansing Fire that burns the forest, so that new Life can emerge".  This may be said of the fierce Black Tara aspect of Tara.

Painting of forest fire in N.M. (2010)

In Hindu mythology, when the world was being devoured by demons, there came a time when even the great Gods couldn't battle them. And so Durga manifested Kali the terrible, the "last ditch savioress". Kali is the One who brings the forest fire, levelling the ground so new growth can occur, the surgeon who cuts away morbid tissue so flesh can heal, the great force that destroys what has become corrupt so that "those who are yet to come" may be born. 

The icon of Kali, dancing on the prostrate body of Shiva, is a strange image to the western dualistic sensibility. Christian theology is dualistic, but Hinduism and Buddhism are not: I will never forget when I was in Ubud in Bali.  The  curbs of Ubud are all painted like a checker board, black and white, as are the altar clothes. This is to remind those who walk down the street continuously of Sekala and Neskala, the continuing balance of Dark and Light, the Visible and the Invisible interacting in  the yin/yang of life.

Kali appears in Bali as the dreadful, fanged, bloodthirsty Rangda, who lives in graveyards. A great ritual battle is yearly performed, where Rangda is fought by the  benign dragon-like creature, the Barong.  But no one ultimately wins. A balance has been achieved, and neither forceful Deity is destroyed, because the battle must continually be fought. And Rangda, work done, often (within the Balinese myth)  then returns to the heaven realms, to become the beautiful, peaceful Uma, wife of their version of Lord Shiva, the God who dances at the end of all things. Kali, whose name means "Time" (Kala) lives beyond form, beyond the pairs of opposites.  She is the truth and peace beyond the skeins of karma and time.

Tara  in Her different aspects has been my revered and mysterious divine teacher for many years. In many ways I see Her 21 manifestations as similar to the "thousand hands" of Quon Yin - all the many ways She helps and heals and teaches.  I won't presume to say I can understand a Goddess:  but if I was going to make a tenuous statement, it would be when you call on a Goddess, She's not going to give you a polite reply that's been spell-checked. The ineffable work with us in the arena of energy, in the field of dreams and soul language.  But Black Tara, and  Kali,  are so important to our time.  Sometimes, when I most despair, I envision Her  dancing Her very tough love, crimson lips full of that vast, vast laughter. 

There's a great old film called "The Shipping News" (with Kevin Spacey) I have and occasionally watch again. It is a remarkable story that demonstrates what Black Tara means to me - lives and dark legacies that undergo necessary transformation, usually violently, and erupting for healing in the cold, windy, and austere landscape of Newfoundland (even the metaphor "new found land" is perfect).  Towards the end of the movie, a storm destroys the old  family's house, a harsh and weary old house haunted with too many dark ancestral secrets, too much ancestral and personal karma.  Literally moored atop a crag, we see the house blown at last in a great storm into the ocean below, vanishing beneath the waves.  Confronting the littered place where it once stood, Spacey (who has become a newspaper reporter) comments:  "Headline: House disappears in storm. The view is great."

                                                                     

 KALI

Kali is called "she who devours time".  Hindu  legend tells that Kali was so full of the rapture of battle that she destroyed all before her as she danced.  None could stop her,  so  at last Lord Shiva lay  down before her.  When Kali stepped on his body  her madness ceased and she stopped at last.  But there is a Tantric interpretation that the aroused (often portrayed with an erection) Lord Shiva represents the ecstasy of death,  and hence trans-form-ation.  Kali is  the destroyer of the illusions of time.

Here is a commentary from an interview I did with Drissana Devananda,  a friend and sacred dancer I worked with when I had a gallery in Berkeley, California in the late 90's.  I feel she expressed the essence of Kali/Black Tara beautifully:

"Kali is the surgeon. She cuts away what has to go. I ask for that quality to come into me when I have to cut something out of my life; an addiction, or a relationship that no longer is about growth. And I ask it be done precisely, cutting away the dis-ease, malignancy, the aspects that no longer serve. That's what Kali is to me: the last resort savior. When the Gods couldn't kill the demonic forces that ravaged the Earth, they called on a woman's wrath.

We've all forgotten that the Goddess, the Divine, dwells within us. She dwells within us all the time, and not just when you wear a mask, or are in a workshop, or a ritual. In Tantric
philosophy, we're all considered emanations of the Gods and Goddesses - we are their
material aspects on this plane of existence. We're not bodies seeking the spirit, we're spirits  
seeking bodily experiences. Sacred performance, for me, is about remembering that. And remembering is truly a devotional practice. In Hindu traditions  everyone has a deity they focus on as their personal deity. In the West, as we reclaim forms of the Goddess for spiritual  practice, we need to create a relationship with the Goddess form we have chosen, in order to manifest what we need for spiritual and emotional growth, to invoke the help of that Goddess. That practice is not just cerebral. We function out of our whole self, our bodies and spirits. The body-mind. That is the place we can re-member, the place we can communicate with the Goddess within ourselves.

Kali is so much about contemporary life. Women need to become angry now.  About the
women of Afghanistan, the meaningless wars, the destruction of our environment.  The demons  of insatiable greed that are devouring our planet. Those souls who await the future are being denied their birthright. Kali is the catalyst for saying "No more".She's the voice of women whose voices aren't being heard, the voice of women who need to open their mouths and speak for the first time. It's time to embrace the sword of Kali and cut away the delusions that are  destroying our world.

 Kali is the ferocious mother who says "get away from my children, or I'll kill you."Mothers aren't saying that. They're giving their children away, giving them away to war, giving them away by allowing our environment to be depleted, giving permission to the powers that be to destroy their future." 

Drissana Devananda (2001)

I found this commentary about Kali in my files, and it appears even AI does not know the author's name.  But explains it rather well.........***   

"Kali's black complexion symbolizes her all-embracing nature. Says the Mahanirvana Tantra: "Just as all colors disappear in black, so all names and forms disappear in her". Kali is free from the illusory covering, for she is beyond the all maya or "false consciousness." Her red lolling tongue indicates her omnivorous nature —her indiscriminate enjoyment of all the world's 'flavors'. Her sword is the destroyer of false consciousness.

Her three eyes represent past, present, and future, — the three modes of time — an attribute that lies in the very name Kali ('Kala' in Sanskrit means time). The eminent translator Sir John Woodroffe in Garland of Letters, writes, "Kali is so called because She devours Kala (Time) and then resumes Her own dark formlessness." Kali's proximity to cremation grounds where the five elements or "Pancha Mahabhuta" come together, and all worldly attachments are absolved, again point to the cycle of birth and death. "

***AI:

"The essay was published anonymously as an "Article of the Month" on Exotic India Art. Publication Date: August 2000.  The text synthesizes ancient scriptural philosophy with art history - the Mahanirvana Tantra Quote:  "just as all colors disappear in black..." directly translates a core philosophical concept from the Mahanirvana Tantra, an essential Indian Tantric text. It explains Kali's iconography using the concept of Nirguna (the ultimate reality beyond form and qualities). The  essayist explains that Kali's nudity represents nature stripped of illusion (maya), and her red lolling tongue represents her cosmic role as the consumer of all things in the universe."

Oligarch Capitalism ...........A Photo Collage

 

"I hope we shall crush in its birth (of our nation)  the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

Thomas Jefferson

In 1844 the Factory Acts were passed to address the injustice of exploitative child labor. These acts addressed the working conditions that children and women had to work in.  All women and young persons (13-18) were limited to work for only 12 hours and children under 13 could only work for under 6 ½ hours. In addition, all children under 8 could not be employed in factories. This was a continuation of the first factory acts in 1833, and there were 3 more factory acts to follow.  

Eventually  child labor, and slavery, were outlawed in the U.S.  Later came environmental protection laws, affirmative action in the labor market, decent work environment protection,  and pensions for retirees. 

 And also anti-trust laws to limit corporate power.

Faces of the past.

Just about everything we buy now does away with those laws. 

 oiiiiiiiii

 

Faces of  contemporary capitalism..........

 

  

Do you know where your chocolate comes from?

  It might not be so appetizing......

“The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.”  

 Eric Schlosser

 

Memoir: Leo Kottke, "Pamela Brown", and Serendipity

 

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!

https://youtu.be/9cweBs-tdaA

Grumblings and Ramblings

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 kind 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.  

Found Poetry

 

The Barbed Heart

Takes Refuge

In a hidden Grove

of Palos Verdes

Trees

(2009)

Mary Oliver & My Laptop Remind Me

 

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately. 

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.

Or not. 

 

I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

~Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses 

 

 

 

Pollinator

 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".

So may it be.

White Sands, and the Malpais, New Mexico

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.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sands_National_Park

Persistence of Butterflies (part 3)

2026

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.

2026

What Happens When the World Is Motherless?

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