"Our Lady of the Midwives"... Reflections

          "The breath of the ages 
            still ghosts to the vitality
            of our most early and unwritten forebears
            whose wizardry still makes a lie of history
            whose presence hints in every human word
            who somehow reared and loosed 
            an impossible beauty enduring yet:
            and I will not forget."

            Robin Williamson, "Five Denials on Merlin's Grave"

"Our Lady of the Shards" is a series of Madonnas I have been working on for a year or so now.  Our Lady of the Shards lies among the broken shards, debris, lost artifacts, and resurfacing mythos of the past.  She has been buried by time, his-story, and by endless war, and co-option of what was once sacred.  She is the Black Madonna, the dark Earth mystery at the roots of timeless sacred springs and caves, the generative "Numina" of place.  She is also the buried work and lives of the women who wove the ancient stories, who birthed our ancestors, the memory keepers and the comforters.  Perhaps collectively my "Madonnas" are  the Divine Feminine, arising into the world again at our greatest need, insisting that we see, re-member, re-claim. 

A number of years ago I met a midwife who was retiring.  Her hands had brought many children into this world, so I asked if I could take a cast of her hands.  She took what she told me was the "Midwives Gesture".  My Icon celebrates her life and work, and the lives of Midwives going back into prehistory, those un-named ancestors who brought us here through that Portal.

My Madonnas are also visual prayers, iconic images that pray that humanity will turn toward life-giving and life-nurturing once again, toward generation instead of destruction, toward reverence for our Mother Earth. 

            "I hate the scribblers, who only write of War
             and leave the glory of the past unsung between the lines."

             Robin Williamson, "Five Denials on Merlin's Grave"

I reflect on the ongoing tragedy of patriarchal culture and priorities, whereby the military, whereby technologies devoted to Death, are celebrated, funded excessively, endlessly rewarded and mythologized.  The U.S. has the highest military budget in the his-story of humanity.  What might be accomplished, if even a fraction of that went to serve Life, communion and love,  instead of Death?  Entire museums are devoted to famous generals, great epics about conquering armies and the rape and murder of women and children, like the Iliad or the Odyssey, are celebrated classics.  While ubiquitous Midwives of new life of all kinds.......are forgotten, un-known, trivialized, un-important.  How might we live, how might we act, if the welcomers of souls into this world were as celebrated, as honored, as those who are experts at killing? 

                                           

How might we live, how might we act, if Our Lady of the Midwives rose in all of Her power to teach us a new way of being?

            “What might we see, how might we act, 
               if  we saw with a webbed vision?
              The world seen through a web of relationships
               .…as delicate as spider’s silk,
              yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

             Catherine Keller,  From a Broken Web 

Midwives

Ancestral Midwives (2013)

I was thinking of my friend Lorie, who provided the hands for this sculpture.  Lorie retired just a few years ago from a long career as a midwife in Pittsburgh, and when I asked to cast her hands she assumed this pose, which she told me is a hand gesture used to symbolize midwifery.   To have spent so many years bringing new life into the world! 

Midwifery

Ancestral Midwifery 2009

This is a recent piece, actually cast from the hands of Lori, who I met last summer at Brushwood during the festivals. She is a midwife at the Midwife Center for Birth & Women's Health in Pittsburgh, Pa. Syncronistically, she was the second midwife I met last year who had impact on me, the first being Ilana, who I met in my Kripalu workshop. The gesture was Lori's, the piece evolved on its own. Birth canal.

A few people have commented that the piece is disturbingly visceral - well, I don't know how to respond to that. We are numbed daily with the media's gruesome "entertainments" , and the daily body count in Iraq, or Cleveland, or Darfur. (It says something about popular culture that Hanibal the cannibal has become a cultural movie icon, and sex seems to be endlessly associated with vampires).

And yet, the suggestion of a BIRTH CANAL makes viewers squeamish. Some have commented that it seems uncomfortably sexual. But where else, exactly, does birth come from? Except for the immaculate conception, most of us enter the embodied state in pain, blood, sweat, viscera. Giving birth is one of the most excruciating experiences a woman can have, and also the most ecstatic. I wonder if some of the reaction to this piece has to do with some deeply embedded cultural/religious associations with birth...........I think about the mythos that imposed an "immaculate conception" on Christianity, or the long, involved taboos found in earlier Jewish traditions in which women are considered "unclean" after giving birth, and have to go through long periods of "purification". If so, then the piece has succeeded, and I should figure out a way to make it much more disturbing!

Judy Chicago, from "The Birth Project"

Anyway, I reflect on the synchronicity of meeting two midwives who affected me deeply within a few months. I have often felt that certain archetypes rise up from the "collective unconscious", bubbling up from some non-local ground of being - perhaps, artists, shamans, and madmen notice them, bubbling into the universal dream. We are surely "midwiving" a new world, a new paradigm.

Personally, because syncronicities are something I think about, perhaps I am also "midwiving" my own life in some ways. Truth is, I'm ambivalent about about many things that once were so clear, if not outright assumptions. It think it was Plato who said "the more I know, the more I realize I don't know".

I would like to introduce here a related work by an emerging young artist, Tabor of New York City.

Untitled, 2009

Diving into abstract expressionism with unbridled passion, Tabor is notable for the energetic gestures of his paintings. Notice the use of very bold brush strokes to create an obscured "vestica piscis" form upon a vivid yellow ground......suggesting, perhaps, the emergence of diverse life forms from the black depths of a metaphorical "birth canal".

Here's a view of the artist's studio with the work in progress:

And the artist at home with his favorite model, Shari, his mother. Tabor (who just turned 2 and happens to be my grandson) is well on his way to a successful career in the arts.

The artist at work: