Visiting New Mexico - White Sands National Monument

 

Truly one of the most fey, elemental, beautiful places on Earth.  In truth, it's very much like being on a different planet.  And no, those vast fields are not snow.

 

Photo by Georgia Stacy

The Cave Artist - Ra Paulette

LUMINOUS CAVES

The world within the Earth and Ourselves

Here's an amazing artist.................Ra Paulette is a true New Mexico visionary.

 "My final and most ambitious project is both an environmental and social art project that uses solitude and the beauty of the natural world to create an experience that fosters spiritual renewal and personal well being.  It is a culmination of everything I have learned and dreamed of in creating caves.     A mile walk in the wilderness becomes a pilgrimage journey to a hand dug, elaborately sculpted cave complex illuminated by the sun through multiple tunneled windows.

 The cave is both a shared ecumenical shrine and an otherworldly venue for presentations and performances designed to address issues of social welfare and the art of well being...............In social art, creating the work of art is not the objective in itself, as in an exhibit, but is a means to bring about social change. The response to the artwork is not merely left to its audience as an endpoint in the process but is an element in a larger encompassing creative process."    

   Ra Paulette 

http://www.demilked.com/cave-carving-ra-paulette/

To view the Slide Show:  http://www.racavedigger.com/racavedigger.com/Cave_Photos.html#4

http://youtu.be/GSWdp6RVSS8

Travel Notes

"A girl, my lord, in a flattop ford" forever checks out the lonely hitch hiker in Winslow, Arizona

Travel notes #1:

From the Grand Canyon and Sedona, where I visit my friend Linda and view the Grand Canyon over lunch at Mary Coulter's famous Bright Angel Lodge.  To be honest, there is really no way you can describe the Grand Canyon.  It is so huge, so vast, so amazing, that you can only look down into its depth in utter wonder. 

Stopped in Winslow, forever immortalized by Jackson Brown.  His youthful self stands forever on the corner there, lonely in bronze, always waiting with 7 women on his mind.  

Went to  see another one of Mary Coulter's hotels (the woman architect who was a colleague of Frank Lloyd Wright and built the beautiful hotels visitors to the Grand Canyon stayed at on their pilgrimages West.)  La Posada was her favorite.  Sadly this amazing building sat vacant for over 40 years, until it was bought by an artist couple in the early 90's, who restored it, brought it back to life.

It is also Tina's studio, and her surrealistic paintings are well worth seeing as well.  

No such trip in the dry vastness en route to Gallup should be without a visit to Meteor Crater, the best preserved meteor impact crater in the world, or at least, so they tell us.  And it's indeed a humbling sight to see, and to touch as well, that heavy stone from outer space.  Our tour guide had lived there, beside the crater, for 15 years...............one of the "care takers" of that great hole in the ground.  I wondered what it was like, to be a caretaker for something like that.  He loved it there; each place has its voice, it's "numina".  But it would not be my place, I think...................

To Nogal Canyon, my friend Georgia's handmade Earth Ship house, and a visit to Carrizozo in New Mexico. We visit an artist's home in Lincoln, out in the middle of nowhere really, beautiful place to dream and make.  

  A visit to another tiny village along a dusty road, we visit a lovely garden that is an Iris and Lily farm, and the beautiful Sanctuary of San Patricio, where I walk the Labyrinth.  There is no one there but us, we walk unhindered, make a lunch, all the doors are open, we look in the quiet rooms and think what a wonderful place to have a retreat it would be, sit and meditate in the old chapel.   There is a big feather found on the Labyrinth path, which I take as a gift, a "magic spell for the far journey", and that feather travels with me now, east. 

 

 

 I offer my gratitude to the Goddess as She manifest here, ubiquitous, Our Virgin of Guadeloupe, the Catholic Madonna standing in her Vesica Piscis, the Lady so many millions make pilgrimage to, who is also the most ancient Aztec Earth Mother  Tonantzin, finding another form to manifest, just as she has done for 35,000 years, ever since people began to paint her vulva along with mammoths and cave bears.  All return to the Mother, even if they don't know it!  But, of course, I keep these thoughts to myself, and keep on driving.


A check in with the UFO Research Center and Museum in Roswell, where I buy a bumper sticker, and regret that I won't be there this year to hear Stan Friedman and colleagues discuss the Roswell Incident, as they have been doing together for some 40 years.  Then the long, hot drive through the Bible Belt, strange billboards warning me that I better get "saved" before it's too late and their "Merciful God" will gleefully impose an eternity of very painful torture on me because I don't believe in him and him alone.  Hmm.  This contradiction should be obvious to even the most devout, but, apparently not. I keep these thoughts to myself as well. Oklahoma with its terrifying storm fronts, now there is a not-so-merciful God I definitely believe in, and fortunately can drive away from.   Kansas, a night spent at a nameless rest area somewhere in Missouri. 

Here I am, on this Life Loop, following the lovely touchstones of my herstory,  reclaiming little bits of memory, people, all the stories that each Place holds that become me.  At last, I wake up to suddenly realize how GREEN everything suddenly is - the trees are tall, there is a green carpet underfoot, there is even a robin warbling and hopping.  

The terrain has changed, I'm going East, the spirit of Water makes her presence felt again.  

I have a synchronicity to note as well (since this is a journal)...........an aquaintance I haven't heard from in years writes to tell me about an amazing, bright and talkative little boy she met in Brooklyn this summer while she was doing face painting at an outdoor festival.  She painted his face, and was amazed at how charming he was, and got to talking with his father as well.  She mentioned that she had done the New York Renaissance Faire, and he mentioned that his wife's mother had done it for a while as well.    She realized, in the course of speaking with him, that she was painting my grandson's face..........which is kind of amazing, since my daughter and I have been out of touch for 6 years now (the reasons aren't necessary to go into here).  

What are the odds?  Once more, I'm blessed to remember that, no matter what goes on on the surfaces of our lives, we're all really connected, a part of each other, at the roots.  

So, on to the summer's adventure!

Farewell to New Mexico

"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

Returning to Tucson, cars and asphalt and noise, the urban cacophony (and summer heat), I feel melancholy. The solitude and solace of New Mexico's vast skies and open space worked it's magic for me, peeling away the dross like old paint, revealing essential layers beneath. I hope I can retain this spaciousness.

"A House of Doors", lithograph (1986)

A HOUSE OF DOORS

I.

He opened the door and walked outside.
It was summer, I remember cicadas
scratching a hole in the door
where a man used to be.

The house I live in
has various dimensions.

I recall white rooms,
wallpapered with old letters.
Some rooms are tombs for the heart,
full of damp bones
and useless ornaments.

I remember a pink room
that pressed me until I couldn't breath

Some rooms diminish
some rooms compress.
Rooms can be tricky.
What I remember are doors.
I live in a house of doors.

II.

She stood at the door
and walked outside.
It was spring, I remember
lilacs framed by a window
where a girl in a white dress stood.

A white dress,
flying like a flag,
a white dress
opening like a morning glory.

III.

I opened the door:
she was sitting there,
the girl with the Kodak smile.
The sign on the door said 1969,
it was February in Berkeley.
The plum trees were red in the rain,
steam rose from an espresso machine

the girl listens
to the boyfriend whose name
I don’t remember, cigarette in hand
a baton, orchestrating. She listens,
she knows the punch line.

When I closed the door
she slipped away behind me,
riding a train
I could see in perspective

riding to a vanishing point.

IV.

An onion, that's it.
All those layers.

Just when you think
you can name yourself,
you discover new layers,
you’re forming a new skin,
a new ring.

But there's a core.
And where
does that core start?

V.

This room I live in.
These walls.
They seem to be getting thin.
I can almost see through them today.

Today I feel
like a Chinese box
one inside another.
I consider a state of grace:

I think
I think I may be the gate
that opens
into another room
made of clouds, or sky
or something
I can't name.

I remember white dresses I wore
I remember doors
I can't remember the girl's name.

"Funny", she said,
"how time takes the names out of things,
and bleaches the rest kind of transparent."

Funny.
Chiefly, I remember doors.

VI.

Sometimes,
you open a door
any door

and you have to walk outside
into something tender
like a touch
on a winter night
into a quiet yard
because of a voice you hear

or a bell
or a train
pulling away
somewhere



Lauren Raine

Carrizozo!

I wanted to share where I'll be this summer (July 1 through August 15) - a little town in central N.M., where I've been given the privilege of a residency with Gallery 408. I can't help but feel that this time, in the brilliant light of New Mexico, nestled between the great lava flow of the Valley of Fire and the mountains.........is going to be one of my most inspired times. I'm very grateful to Gallery 408 for offering me this opportunity. I'll also be offering a class at their studios in creating personal Icons and Reliquaries for those who may be interested. If any of you happen to be passing through while I'm there, please come by for a cup of coffee!

http://www.gallery408.com/air.php

http://www.gallery408.com/

I visited Carrizozo for the first time in early 2009, when the movie "The Book of Eli" was being shot on their main street, the very street that Gallery 208 is on. It was amazing ....... Carrizozo was converted to a post-Apocalypse wasteland. After the film was shot, this harsh veneer was peeled away to reveal the bright colors of New Mexico, and the opening of my friends' show, "The Return of the Mother" ..... This living metaphor so fascinated me that I wrote an article about it (I copy some text and images below).

But even after the show was over, I kept coming back, fascinated with this little town, and wanting to know more about the community, and the land. Now I've generously been given the opportunity.

Gallery 408 and the Studios on Twelfth Street
PO Box 853
Carrizozo, NM 88301
(575)648-2598
gallery408@tularosa.net

www.gallery408.com

Carrizozo is two hours South of Albuquerque. Drive South on I-25 to Hwy 380 East just 7 miles past Socorro at the San Antonio exit. Drive 65 miles east on Hwy 380 to Carrizozo. Turn South on Hwy 54 at the Crossroads, drive 4 blocks, turn left at Wells Fargo Bank building, drive 1 block to Twelfth Street, turn right and the Gallery will be on your right.

.......................................................................................................................

"The Return of the Mother", group show, May, 2009

May, 2009:

The entire set from "The Book of Eli" has been torn down, the gallery restored, and it looks as if the world that Hollywood created in this little town never was. I still can't get over the way this set has dissipated like a dream.

Corrisozo, N.M., set of "The Book of Eli", filming 3-2009. (Photo by Georgia Stacy)

To get here, one drives through vast reaches of blond Georgia O'Keefe landscapes with brooding blue mountains in the distance, and then the vast lava field called the "valley of fire". We were in time for the filming of a motion picture - the entire downtown had been converted to a vision of rusting automobiles, foam core burned out buildings, and sad little "cubby holes" where desperate children of the apocalypse lived. Dirty, dread-locked young people milled about, while armored cars raced up and down the street, and the sounds of "snipers" guns echoed in the crisp, windy New Mexico air.

It was fascinating to see this contemporary nightmare made so vivid that I could actually walk around in it. To read about the movie see THE BOOK OF ELI which describes it as:

"A post-apocalyptic Western, in which a lone man fights his way
across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind."

Like the "Road Warrior" of the '80's, our world has a fascination with images of a future in which all that remains of civilization is a grim landscape of chaotic violence. As we approach "2012" I personally believe we approach the next evolutionary step for humanity, wherein we must urgently protect, as an evolving global civilization, the universal life of our planet, of Gaia the Mother - or we may well face just such a future as The Book of Eli envisions. I am pleased (and amused) by the paradox of a show called The Return of the Mother rising from the ashes of this dark vision.

I couldn't help but play with the images a bit myself.

The Goddess and the Book of Eli (1) (photo by Georgia Stacy)