She Who Hears the Cries of the World

Mana Youngbear as "White Tara" in Restoring the Balance (2004)

SOUND POEM BY LAUREN RAINE (2019)

to listen:  

    https://soundcloud.com/user-972033003/white-tara-by-lauren-raine

White Tara is the manifestation of complete Compassion, She is the Bodlhissatva who will assist the suffering of the world, assist us to move through the suffering to love, and the reealization that we are not alone, that we all belong to the great Circle.  Quon Yin, Tara, Mother Mary.............. all manifestations or archetypes of the Divine Mother, and the expansion of unconditional compassion and love.  I wrote this spoken word poem in 1997, when I was going through  loss of a home/dream/community that eventually led me to create a new life on the other side of the continent.  

I reflect, as I try to recall the experience from which this poem arose, that the opening of the heart that grief and loss can bring can also be a path into profound evolutionary change, but in my experience, to grow one must first go through it, one must experience the pain and the loss.

Which is something very fearful to do, and can take a long time to do.  Because the heart does not know or reason in sequential time like the intellect does! Having just lost a beloved cat, I am experiencing this right now.  The emotional body, it seems to me, suffers all the losses at once as each loss arises.  And the heart also partakes in a greater  Mystery that somehow knows all beings are One, remembering all experiences of  love and belonging within the Circle dance of life.  Grief can be a great teacher.

 "I went to meet that savage creature I have run from,  lifetime after lifetime,

 the shape within the shadows, huge, a creature of smoke and bared fangs. "

This line arose from a dream I had many times, in which I was being pursued by a vampire.  Always it almost got me, or was a shadowy presence just behind me, and I would wake up. I suppose Jungians would call this the "denial of the shadow" or some such.    I was always too afraid to confront the creature that pursued me in those dreams, because I was sure it would kill me.  Finally I had a dream in which I became tired of running, and a I stopped to face the pursuing monster.   And when, at last, the horror embraced me it turned into a young boy,  vulnerable, with tears in his eyes. 

   

"A House of Doors"

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?

My MFA show in 1987 was called "A House of Doors", and I made, with the collaboration and generosity of artist and fellow graduate student Catherine Nash MFA,  a spoken word/electronic music  "sound track" to go with the paintings and lithographs that comprised the show. Catherine is an extraordinary artist whose work has always opened doors into other realms.  And  1987 was an exciting time to be alive, an optimistic time  when all kinds of inquiries into spirituality and consciousness were developing in the New Age era.  Catherine and I belonged to a group interested in exploring altered states of consciousness and other spiritual explorations, and from that group also came a show about art and spirituality.  We discussed people like Wassily Kandinsky and his book "Concerning the Spiritual in Art".  We meditated together, and did numerous sessions with Bob Monroe's Past Life Regression tapes - those shared visions were very significant for me, and became the inspiration for my show and performance piece  "A House of Doors" below:

https://soundcloud.com/user-972033003/a-house-of-doors-1987

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 that you hear 

or a bell

or a train

pulling away

somewhere