Gloria's Call - A Wonderful Video about the Very Wonderful Gloria Orenstein

 

While my life has had its challenging moments and I have traversed many a dark woods in my quest for knowledge, I am fulfilled by the wondrous journeys I have made to the realms of the Marvelous, the Magical, the Great Goddess and the Shamanic Mysteries, and I will be forever grateful to the teachers who inspired me and to the feminist activists on whose strong shoulders we now stand as we welcome new generations of visionaries expanding our feminist legacy into the new millennium.  

 -Gloria Feman Orenstein

It was my pleasure to meet Gloria Feman Orenstein when I was pursuing a book on spiritual art and the Goddess in 1989.  She very generously agreed to meet with me, and I remember sitting in a cafe in Venice California, not far from the beach, utterly enthralled by the power of her personality, and the stories she told me about her journeys into Samiland, shamanism, and ecofeminism, as well as her scholarly  insights into surrealism, magic, and feminism in contemporary art.  Much later, she kindly let me post an important   article of hers about Shamanism on  this Blog.    

Gloria F. Orenstein is Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California. Her areas of research have ranged from Surrealism, contemporary feminist literature and the arts to Ecofeminism and Shamanism.

Her first book The Theater Of The Marvelous: Surrealism And The Contemporary Stage paved the way for her pioneering work on The Women of Surrealism. Leonora Carrington had been a friend and remained a major source of her inspiration in research and scholarship since 1971. Her book The Reflowering Of The Goddess offers a feminist analysis of the movement in the contemporary arts that reclaimed the Goddess as the symbol of a paradigm shift toward a more gynocentric mythos and ethos as women artists forged a link to the pre-patriarchal civilization of the ancient Goddess cultures, referencing them as their source of spiritual inspiration.

Gloria's Call is an award winning  2019 film by Cheri Gaulke and Colleagues.  Director Cheri Gaulke was presented, among other awards, with the "Women Transforming Media" Award for her film.  

"Blending animation, interviews and a trippy soundscape, this is a fitting look at the life of radical academic and writer Gloria Feman Orenstein’s serendipitous life. She vividly conjures an alternative history of art, surrealism and eco-feminism in the 20th century, with lively anecdotes about Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim and Jane Graverol, to name a few."

~Eileen Arandiga, Canadian International Documentary Festival

 

  https://youtu.be/mLhY9pGFjFQ?si=8AE7oiCTvxqhXlxD

In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein received a call from Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparked a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism and shamanism. The short film, Gloria’s Call, uses art, animation and storytelling to celebrate this wild adventure. Now more than 40 years later, award-winning Dr. Gloria Feman Orenstein is a feminist art critic and pioneer scholar of women in Surrealism and ecofeminism in the arts. Her delightful tale brings alive an often unseen history of women in the arts.

Runtime: 17 minutes

Copyright 2018 ACCCA Productions

CREW

Directed, written and edited by Cheri Gaulke

Produced by Cheryl Bookout, Anne Gauldin, Cheri Gaulke, Sue Maberry and Christine Papalexis

Writer Anne Gauldin

Music by Miriam Cutler

FESTIVALS & AWARDS

Gloria's Call has screened in 40+ film festivals internationally and won awards including Best Documentary at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Audience Award at Nevada City Film Festival, Audience Award runner-up at HotDocs in Toronto, and the Women Transforming Media Award from MY HERO International Film Festival.

"If Women Rose Rooted": for EARTH DAY

 

"This is the core of our task:  to remake the world in the image of those ancient   stories.  To respect and revere ourselves, and so bring about a world in which women are respected and revered, recognized once again as holding the life-giving power of the Earth itself.  We can reclaim that image in each of us:  the creative, ecstatic, powerful feminine that each of us embodies in her own unique way.  Lacking it, it is no wonder that we are grieving, alienated, imbalanced - that we cannot find a way to belong to a world that teaches us to cover up not just our bodies but our feelings, our dreams, our intuition.  There comes a point in each of our lives when we face a choice.  Will we stay as we are, embracing the pale shadow of womanhood permitted us by the patriarchy?  Or will we sink deep into the heart of the boglands, and find in the depths what it is to reclaim our creative power as women? 

As always, the stories show us the way.  The old stories, the ones which tell us that women are the land, the Body of the Earth Mother.  The old stories, the ones in which the Earth is sacred, and so women are sacred too:  the force of creation, the givers of life.  The stories in which women are the bearers of the Grail, the keepers of the cauldron of inspiration and rebirth. "

Sharon Blackie, IF WOMEN ROSE ROOTED (2016)

In 2018 I went to the Gatekeeper's Conference in Pewsey, in the U.K.  It was also my delight to visit a number of prehistoric sacred sites, including Avebury, Silbury, the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, the  great (fallen) Stones and Henge of Arbor Lowe in Derbyshire, the Nine Maidens, also in Derbyshire,  and others.  Truly, as I sit here in my urban home, I reflect that it has often seemed,  among these ancient Mysteries, that I feel most at home.  

I was also introduced to Sharon Blackie's book  IF WOMEN ROSE ROOTED   which I enthusiastically read throughout my visit, feeling that it resonated greatly with me.  The author lives in rural Ireland, close to the   beloved land she writes about, and speaks with passion,  and the bitter/sweet  story-teller lilt of an Irish Bard, about an instinctual need women women have to return to mythic (and actual) roots in the land. 

In some ways she reminds me of  Clarissa Pinkola Estes, as she urges women to regain, and celebrate the creative power of the life-giving  Divine Feminine in mythology. and speaks of  an essence deeply rooted in nature because we ARE nature. 

 She  returns again and again to the need to be ROOTED in the Earth as well as a mythic and conversant landscape that is also woman affirming;  the Heroine's journey, she writes, is not the same as the classical  Hero's journey proposed by Joseph Campbell -  because it is a journey of interconnection, relationships, co-creative and co-experienced cycles, and finally, the journey of belonging to the Great Mother, the great "conversation" of the planet.  The Heroine's journey, in a new and yet ancient sense, is perhaps now  the journey of the Eco-heroine.

Ms. Blackie speaks with passion because she believes it is urgent for all to "rise rooted",  as the death dealing forces of  patriarchy and sociopathic,  unlimited capitalism  are  quite literally destroying the future for not only humans, but all children of Mother Earth.

The title is a poem in itself, and as an artist who compulsively for decades has been putting roots on  faces and  hands and  bodies........well, it jumped off the shelf at me!  Yes, all my work has been "rooted" for a long time, even if I haven't always consciously been so............ but like many Americans with a life of bewildering change and movement, I have always  wanted to be rooted, attuned to the essence of place, without always  knowing how or why.  I look at 45 years of art, and always the Tree is there.  The Tree that is Asherah, the Tree of Life, the union of Above and Below.  For me, intuitively a quest to find identity within the those  vital roots, found in the  living, composting dirt, and  among the twining vines, flying webbed among the branches with the sparrows.  

 

Silbury Hill, Avebury, Wiltshire, UK - believed to 
represent the pregnant belly of the Great Mother

When did we lose our roots?  When did the separation between nature and human happen?  When did the Great Earth Mother, eternally birthing and growing and dying and returning again...........when did She disappear under the weight of myth and patriarchal cultures?  When did the processes of nature and the cycles of nature cease to be sacred and became profane?  A question I many have sought to answer as we move fully now into ecological crisis. 

The Nine Maidens,  Derbyshire (Henge and Processional in background)

"For it was no peasant, but calm and cunning wizards, ruling and pegging out in granite  the windings of the dragon track  that writhes unseen in  marsh and moss and meadowland,  that twines in stellar gravity among the eaves of the cubic sky.   So they, upon the veins of Anu,  print a spell of glory in our blinks of lives.   Rightness of the world Self seen:  the green, the garden.  

Older yet and wiser far, and I will not forget."

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

Speaking With the Land

In so many  rural areas of the UK  the 21st Century seems like it is just another layer atop a continually emergent pentimento, the patterns of  a much older landscape.   Of course this is true everywhere, but it is so much in daily evidence in the UK and Europe.

That "pentimento" is like an ancient tattoo - circular, serpentine, full of  standing  stones, henges, magic wells, pregnant "harvest hills",  and geomantic ley lines.   For me,  when I was able to walk and explore this overlay my vision expanded  to a  broader vista, a panorama that  opened in my mind  as  I imagined the world of those who walked there so long ago.  And that very faint yet vibrant Pentimento gave me a vision as well of what,  as myth makers and "geologians" for the future, we might re-invent from the dreaming Earth. 

As far as these energized, ley crossed sites go, what poet and Bard Robin Williamson called the "veins of Anu and the windings of the Serpent Track",  I agree with those scholars who believe that once upon a time the  very lands the people walked on, the land they grew their food and marked the Solstices and Equinoxes and the movements of the moon and the stars  upon, was  the "temple"  itself,  The Deity was beneath their feet, and all around them. 

As   Marija Gimbutas, and later Michael Dames, have argued, these sites mark a sacred landscape that was once viewed  literally as  the Body of the the  Great Mother from which the blessings of abundance came, and ultimately to which, in the great cycles of the year , all return.    Here, and in ubiquitous similar sites in Southern and Central England, Ireland, Scotland, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Brittany..........perhaps as well in the mysterious realms of the great Temples of Malta,  or the barely excavated, and truly ancient circles of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey as well, we see the remnants of a worship of the Earth as Great Mother that lasted for a very, very long time.    

According to  Michael Dames in his book the Silbury Treasure, Silbury,  which I visited in 2018 along with other similar "harvest hills" (there is one along the Processional to Arbor Lowe as well)  literally represented the pregnant belly of the Great Mother, and were associated with certain times of the agricultural cycles.  In the Neolithic and early Iron Age he makes a significant argument that there was a universal religion which regarded the LAND ITSELF AS THE DEITY.    Situated just south of Avebury, Silbury Hill in Wiltshire is Europe's tallest prehistoric structure.  When his  book was first published in 1976,  archaeological investigations sponsored by the BBC  had demonstrated that the hill was not, as had previously been believed, a burial mound, nor did it have any buriel remains connected with its antiquity. Dames surveys the history of earlier digs at the hill, then uses comparative archaeological evidence, astronomy, ethnography, folklore, mythology, mathematics and place-name research to argue that the shape of the site is designed to represent the pregnant Belly of the Goddess.  

As with the ditch/henges that surround stone circles, Silbury would have been at certain times of the year surrounded by a human made body of water, which Dames believed not only was fundamental to the "temples" that these ceremonial sites represented, but in the case of Silbury, actually formed the shape of a squatting (birthing) woman.  He believes that Silbury was a sacred mound that was part of the Avebury ceremonial landscape.  He likens the "Goddess form" of the henge surrounding Silbury to similar pregnant Goddess sculptures and icons found throughout Europe during the Neolithic.  

As a child, I had great conversations with flowers and squirrels.  And, of course, my cats. Even earthworms were not immune to my words of concern for them.  Much later, I read avidly of the Findhorn Community, or Perelandra, or the Sirious Community,  the conversations members of these communities had  between the Devas of the plant kingdoms and those who came to learn and grow amazing vegetables, healing herbs, and magical gardens in conscious collaboration with them.  

 We need to learn to "speak with the Earth" again.   This impresses itself on me again, and again.  Not in some removed, abstract, distant way, but intimately, beneath our rooted feet, in our creative hands rooted in a great collaboration with the planet that stands aside, protects,  and at best shepards  the land.  That releases for good the outmoded concept of "domination" of nature.  Humanity must become friends again with the family of planetary life, the "Covenant" of the Garden.  I believe that our next  evolution as a planetary humanity is not out in space, but right here, on the Earth.   There will be many new innovations, but there will also be many, many re-discoveries of what was once known and understood.  This is indisputable  in the face of climate change,  and a technology that is advancing much more rapidly than we are evolving as a global humanity  to meet it. 

So where does religion come into this?  To be honest, I am not a religious person, although I have an abiding interest in  and experience of spirituality.  But I am a mythologist, and religions are founded upon myths, upon world and creation stories, which are ever revised and co-opted throughout history within  different cultures, sometimes to serve specific purposes.  

The change that must occur within western religious systems is that we cannot continue with a  patriarchal, tribal  alpha male centered mythos.     Nor  can we continue to worship deities that are founded upon ancient warrior sky gods -  wifeless, daughterless, motherless, preoccupied with with dominance,  however they are packaged.  We can't continue with religions that are "Renunciate" either, not if we wish to make our way back to a "conversation" with the land that sustains us.  Dissociative religions that teach that divinity and sanctity lie somewhere other than here,  whether that be conceived of as Heaven, Paradise,  some elusive "Enlightenment" or Nirvana,  or, as various New Age groups teach, that life is "not real", and hence we must reject its "unreality". ..... will not serve our children, or all the many other forms of consciousness that are co-evolving on planet Earth with us.  The paradigm is changing and the Goddess is rising - why?  Because She must.   

This is what is meant by the Return of the Goddess.  For  Restoring the Balance in the divided human psyche.  We cannot understand Her perhaps as  neolithic peoples understood Her, but we must facilitate Her rising as people of the 21st Century urgently need to understand Her.     Not as some hierarchical deity that replaces a tyrannical, misogynist  sky god with an equally "dominating" and merciless  matriarch -  but as, scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis demonstrated in their Gaia Theory,  the Body of the Earth itself, which we are living IN.  Not ON, but IN. 

And what we do to Her, we are doing to ourselves.  

 I respond deeply to Sharon Blackie's call to women to  "rise rooted" .  For those of us who have been rooting about in the shards and buried roots of prehistory and mythology........while we cannot really know what the ancients did or believed, we can sense it with our feet, divining rods,  instincts and imaginations, and (gnow)  that it is something that points toward a different way of being.  One we can invent, re-invent, and re-member ourselves into.

REFERENCES:

1 Blackie, Sharon,  If Women Rose Rooted:  The Journey to Authenticity and Belonging  2016, September Publishing 

2 The Gatekeepers Annual Conference, “Dreaming the Land” November 2018, Pewsey, Wiltshire, UK..   https://gatekeeper.org.uk/2018/05/dreaming-the-land-annual-conference-2018

3 Estes, Clarissa Pinkola,  Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype,  November 27th 1996,   Ballantine Books

4 Williamson, Robin, “Five Denials on Merlin’s  Grave” from A Glint At The Kindling & Selected Writings 1980-83    

https://youtu.be/iuRUVzqAfgk (to hear the performance)

http://www.songlyrics.com/robin-williamson/five-denials-on-merlin-s-grave-lyrics/  (lyrics)

 5 Gimbutas, Marija,  The Language of the Goddess,  (1989)  (and other writings), see also Old Europe Excavations and Kurgan Theory,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marija_Gimbutas

6 Dames, Michael,  The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered,  November 20th 1978 by Thames & Hudson

7 Findhorn Community of Scotland: https://www.findhorn.org/

8 Sirius Community of Massachusetts:  http://siriuscommunity.org/ 

9 Perelandra Center & Michaela Wright:   https://www.perelandra-ltd.com/ 

10 Lovelock, James and Margulis, Lynn ,   The Gaia Hypothesis AKA  Gaia Theory, Earth Sciences, first published 1972  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

On Masks, Theatre, and the Goddess

The Goddess has a thousand faces - maiden, mother, wise old woman, teacher, warrior, healer, destroyer, lover, nurturer of new life or the flame of creativity. She is found throughout world religions and mythologies, with names like red Kali, Inanna Queen of the stars, Quan Yin the compassionate, suffering Sedna ocean mother to the Inuit, Aphrodite the capricious goddess of love, and Mary, the Virgin. To me, most of all, she is Gaia, Anima Mundi , the feminine “World Soul”. And in the years I've spent studying Goddess traditions I've come to believe that re-discovering these universal stories of the sacred feminine is very important. For the transformation and profound affirmation they offer to women - and collectively, for the healing of our world. It's my privilege to share some of that telling with women and men through the use of my masks. 

I remember a conversation I shared with Dorit Bat Shalom, an artist I know who brought Israeli and Palestine women together in “Peace Tents ” to share their stories. Dorit asked: " How can there be peace in the Middle east without the Shekinah?" And she went on to say "The Shekinah has been driven away from the holy lands. We cannot heal without Her. " What does it mean, truly, that the Goddess.......is displaced, degraded, denied, less? And it is ironic that so much strife now takes place now in the very heart of what was once the ancient fertile homeland of the Great Mother, of Inanna, Astarte, of Isis.  

Artists are mythmakers - and myths are the templates of dreams, art  and religion, the templates upon which both civilizations and individuals name what is sacred, and what is profane. I think the question Dorit raised is profound: How indeed can there be peace, in the Mideast or anywhere else, when deity, and human values, are personified and polarized as almost exclusively male? A mythos that denies “ the feminine face of God”, and degrades or belittles the sanctity of feminine experience - has left us a humanity profoundly divided against itself.

In 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, a group of women created a performance in Oakland, California, that was dedicated to peacemaking. Participants approached a masked “ Sophia” , who held a mirror over her heart. As they drew near, each saw themselves reflected in the mirror. Because Sophia, whose name means "wisdom", ultimately means "know thyself". In all our complex diversity, male and female, dark and light. Then can we become true peacemakers. 

SACRED MASKS AND DANCE 

When I studied mask arts in Bali, I realized the Balinese had no understanding of our western discourse on the meaning of art....art, to them, is a way to commune with the deities and spirits of their Hindu religion. Temple masks are not "art objects" - they "belong to the Gods", and are imbued with special meaning and energy, just as the telling of their stories was more than entertainment. 

"Theater" comes from the same Greek word as "theology" - theos , or "god". In traditional cultures, masks, drama and dance are about contacting the divine, and refreshing the mythologies that inform their cultures.. Masks are never made lightly. Animated by the body, masks are threshold tools that mediate between this world and the realms of spirit. There are many procedures to be followed, including choosing the right materials from the right place, asking ancestral spirits what kind of mask is required for specific ceremonies, and consecrating the finished work. A great deal of preparation was necessary, and masks were activated and de-activated with great respect. 

As psychologist Stephen Larsen commented in The Mythic Imagination :

"The primary function of the mask is to unite the indwelling wearer (and the observer) with a mythic being, or as Jung would say, 'an archetypal power'. The mask, as we have found in our own work, becomes a transformer of energy, a medium of exchange between ego and archetype. Thus in traditional societies one finds taboos surrounding the mask, its recognition as a power object.”

Among natives of central Mexico, masks used for corn and rain dances were destroyed after a number of years, because they believed they accrued too much power over time. 

This sensibility is found in Japanese Noh Theatre. Noh masks are created according to traditions that go back many generations to represent personae that have firmly become animated by the mask. Actors will often sit for days with a mask, creating fusion with the character. An artist I know once told me of an African mask at the Museum of Art in Milwaukee that, legend had it, sweated. She said she went to view it over a number of days, and sure enough, there it was, if carefully observed, sweating away.

 How is it possible that something like that can occur in a glass case before hundreds of people unnoticed?

 Magic is literally on display.

 Performance with sacred intent is about giving play, voice, and possibility to the mystery of our multi-dimensional being. We dance and are danced, and find ourselves engaged in a conversation. "We're really praying" Drissana Devananda, a Tantric dancer, said, 

 "It's a devotional practice. We're not bodies seeking the spirit, but spirits seeking bodily experience. Dance is about remembering to function from our whole bodies, the "body mind". That is the place we remember the Goddess."

What happens when we invite the archetypal powers, the Goddesses and Gods, into our magic circle? 

The answer is, "If you build it, They will come ." There is a magnetic field the work engages, a field of syncronicity and relatedness we step into. 

"When you create within a sacred paradigm", playwright Elizabeth Fuller said,

 "You find a strange thing. You are communicating with, and being fed by, sources you know are within you, but have a much greater reflection somewhere else. You are in touch with something timeless.” 

 

CIRCLE ART 

Theatre is circle work. It's been said that no one person holds the truth - rather, within a circle, the truth becomes visible from many different perspectives. This is true of sacred theatre - as the group becomes a strong container, it generates energy that flows to the audience, an expanding circle. "Circularity", the Spiral, is the essence of artforms devoted to the Goddess, to Mother Earth. The wheel of the elements, of the year, circulate. Water and wind move across the landscape like a sinuous snake. All things circle and wind and spiral. 

Masks are also about circles. To me, masks are an impeccable metaphor for the personae that encircle our souls. Who are we, really? In the course of our lives we inhabit a noisy council of selves. The metaphor of the mask leads into that essential inquiry....Is this me? Or this? Can I wear this mask, become it for a while, express its unique qualities, feel it in my body, find it's story? I believe we are transformed into more compassionate beings when we can witness, embrace, and truly celebrate the " circle of self" , from dark to light, mundane to divine, as the whole being each of us really is. Not as an abstract concept, but as an authentic experience to be had within our spontaneous, creative imaginations, and in the sensory, visionary immediacy of our bodies. One way to do that is to use the mask consciously - putting on and taking off "faces",  becoming self-aware shape shifters.

Each mask has its reserve of energy. Women and men exploring mythology may chose to work with an archetype for specific reasons, sometimes to call back something they feel has been lost. A woman named Turquoise, for example, discovered a joyful opportunity to reconnect with "the instinctual woman" when she created a performance for "Artemis". "I found ", she wrote, "renewed love for the animals, the trees, for all living things. I saw my surroundings illuminated with light, the light of nature." 

Some may find themselves drawn to a figure because it affords them an opportunity to explore something they believe they do not know. Enacting the myth of Inanna's descent to meet her dark twin Ereshkigal has been powerful visioning for women into the "underground" of the psyche. Dwelling in the underworld, Ereshkigal may be understood as the “shadow self”, difficult to meet, destructive until her story can be told and known, a dialog can occur. The descent of Inanna is among the most powerful universal myths of death, fragmentation, and psychic integration, and enacting this myth for an individual, or as group process, can symbolically be seen as an intiation into mature empowerment - personal, and collective. Like the Elysinian Mysteries of Greece and Rome, an enactment of the universal cycle of death and rebirth. 

The Goddess within can manifest in the imagination in intimate, contemporary ways. She is a living presence expressed in the "here and now" of our lives. Three young women, for example, created a dance for Lilith as three aspects: a dark winged, elemental Lilith, Lilith cast out of Eden, and finally, Lilith as she appears today - a vamp. 

Finally, sacred intention in theatre and art can create a sacred space, a liminal zone where the "mythic self" can find voice and expression. Which is why it is important to "invoke" with respect, and to "devoke" as well (with gratitude), perhaps especially when working with masks. I used to make sure that all my events had "Heyoka" as well, a person who acted as the Sacred Clown, reminding us that there is chaos, humor and uncertainty as well. "Mystery" derives from a Greek word, myein , which means "to keep silent ". There are Gnostic experiences that cannot be spoken because they are, simply, larger than any words can express. They cast us into the field of a consciousness that is greater than our individuality. Their expression belongs to dreams, art, and myth. That was surely why the Elusinian rites of Greece and Rome, which endured for 2,000 years, were called "Mysteries".

Here is a story that demonstrates the power that ritual theatre can have, shared by Ann Weller, an artist and community activist in California. Ann took on the difficult task of personifying the Dark Goddess for a community theatre event in 2000. At the approach of the millenium, its purpose was to symbolically witness and transform the violence of the past century into a new, evolved consciousness. As Ann described her process:

"The Dark Goddess is found in many cultures by many names, and is not aspected lightly. The work calls forth an internal capacity for psychic empowerment, an energy not easy for our limited ego selves to encompass. Because the work is, I believe, ultimately, impersonal. I was a brief vessel for an immense archetypal intelligence manifesting within the drama we created. And yet, the experience did bring personal change. You can't work with sacred theatre and not be changed in some way. I was being re-constructed, whether I was aware of it or not, to better serve Her. I found myself confronting aspects of myself that were just not useful any more. Which meant better serving myself. That's how I look at it. The little overlay of how I imagined myself, which had never been very effective, was now utterly obvious to me. My authentic power began to manifest."

In 1999, and in 2006,  it was my privilege to see 30 of the masks used for the  Annual Spiral Dance in San Francisco. By offering to "aspect" a Goddess, each woman who wore her mask that night was providing a blessing for all gathered, allowing the power of each aspect of the Divine Feminine to radiate into the world. This is an ancient tradition made contemporary, and it was my privilege to participate with many others in this over the years that followed.  It is my hope that this will be carried on by other women in the future, with or without masks, with or without me or my colleagues participating.

There is a way of knowing that we are the artists of our lives, a way of seeing our creativity as a conversation we are having with an infinitely creative, conversant world. Like the Web of Grandmother Spider Woman , the threads of myth are spun far behind us, and weave their way far into the futures of those not yet born. May we dance empathy instead of despair, may we tell the stories that make life sacred and loving, profound and reverent. For today, and for the future. 

Copyright Lauren Raine MFA  2003, 2008, 2014

All photographs by Thomas Lux, Ann Beam, Ileya Stewart, Jerri Jo Idarius and copyright the artists. 

With gratitude to: Elizabeth Fuller, THE INDEPENDENT EYE THEATRE

Dorit Bat Shalom, "The Peace Tent ", inteview 2002

Stephen Larsen., THE MYTHIC IMAGINATION

Drissana Devananda, interview 2001

Ann Weller, "Restoring the Balance" , interview 2001

Women healing the World Movie

At the Vancouver Peace Summit in September 2009, the Dalai Lama announced, “The world will be saved by the Western woman.”

His comment has sparked controversy, including one very dense journalist who said he had visions of blond valkyries riding forth to battle armageddon.  Some people seriously can't think outside the box.

To me, the Dalai Lama is, and always has been, a very practical man, and what he comments on is the arising of women and woman's priorities in our war torn, greed driven world.  Western women predominantly have access to education, empowerment,  and resources that their sisters in poor nations are struggling to gain (and they will).  

 I've been feeling lately that this year, 2013, is going to be very much about the arising of women and the rising of the Goddess.   My sense about this is almost too much for me to somehow squeeze into an article or blog entry...........it's from scanning many bits of information and news that have been coming my way lately.  And, from dreams.

Here's a movie coming out that seems very hopeful to me, and includes interviews with some of my favorite cultural transformers, women who have profoundly impacted our world:  Riane Eisler, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Sandra Ingerman, Gloria Steinem, and others.

13 is the magical number of the Goddess, and has been for a very long time, because there are 13 lunations in a month (month -moon), and 13 menstrual cycles.  The origin of the "unlucky Friday the 13th" myth may go back to patriarchal re-mything of symbols once sacred to the Divine Feminine, as Friday derives from the name of an ancient Nordic goddess, Freya (Friday - Freya's Day).  So, for people inclined like myself, Friday the 13th is a lucky day, because it's a sacred day of the Goddess.

So, may 2013 see the profound arising of the feminine, bringing healing, justice, peace, and Restoring the Balance.

 
 

From Women Will Save the World, edited by Caroline Shearer:

“At a time when it is clear that life and business as usual is leading us towards collective calamity, we search for signs and wisdom that can help us imagine a new world and tell ourselves a new story. If women are to help lead the world towards a more just, peaceful, and abundant future, what is it that lives in women that holds these keys? What might live in us that we haven't considered as sources of strength and ingenuity that could support our coming together in unity to co-create and birth a new earth? Women always have been at one with birth and renewal, and Mother Nature shows us that the life cycles of the seed, from blossom to death to re-birth, are part of our universal reality."

- Jennifer Buffett, President of NoVo Foundation

Vicki Noble and "the Cassandra complex"

 

I belong to a group that includes teacher, shaman and artist Vicki Noble, who, along with Karen Vogel, created the Motherpeace Tarot.  She is also the author of numerous books, was the editor of UNCOILING THE SNAKE - Ancient Patterns in Contemporary Women's Lives, was a key presenter at the Goddess Conference I attended in 2011 in Glastonbury, and is on the faculty of the Women's Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

With the U.N. Conference on Climate change going on, and the article by Chris Hedges I shared in the previous post, I've been feeling overwhelmed and despairing.  Vicki kindly let me share her comments in response to the article, and my own questions.  I find what she said so helpful.  In the final analysis, all we can really do is ease the suffering, in small ways or great, and that suffering has to include ourselves.    Thank you, Vicki, for many years of dedication and inspiration for  so many, for your dedication to the return of the Goddess.

"I heard something about this (new statistics on climate change)  on NPR last week, and  the part about the anticipated temperature rise. It was so shocking, I thought I hadn’t heard it correctly, especially since there was no analysis or discussion at all, just a passing mention of the 3+ degree rise, and then on to the next item. It’s like a dream I also had last week, in which our whole population was standing at a “fiscal cliff” (I so hate that expression) waiting for an approaching tsunami, as if we were watching a movie. And so it does seem as if we are in a kind of trance state, waiting for the end of the world. (Paralyzed? Disembodied? Stupefied?)

Do you know that they have a medical name for what’s wrong with people like us who keep talking about these frightening possibilities, the inevitable consequences of our actions? It’s called the “Cassandra Complex.” I’ve got it for sure. You know, Cassandra of Troy, the priestess (“seer”) who saw what was coming and tried to warn the inhabitants of her city to no avail; she went crazy with the effort of holding her sight in the face of total denial. At least we’re talking to each other here—a helpful reality check—and taking whatever small steps we can in the direction of awareness, preparation, and change.

It’s a Full Moon Lunar Eclipse tonight, as the Mystery continues to unfold.  
 
In 1999 I left Berkeley after two decades, to move up into the redwoods near Santa Cruz, where I lived in a small cabin chopping wood and building fires in my wood stove, while I pondered the state of my global despair. I thought at the time that surely I am not the only activist left from the 1970s who thought we were going to change things more dramatically—and we didn’t. It was a crushing disappointment for me at the time and I suppose in all honesty, it still is—although I do my best to maintain peacefulness, rather than constant adrenaline. But when Monsanto makes some new inroad into killing off life on the planet, I am once again thrown into a dark mood.

The spiritual practices that I developed while up in those mountains—invocations to the Tibetan Dakinis of the four cardinal directions and the center—have become a mainstay of my current teachings, and at some point I received an answer to my fervent question of, "What should I be doing???"  The loving and very direct response to my question was: "There is nothing to do but alleviate suffering."  So I agreed to do that and came down from the mountains to teach and engage again. Just trying to stay present in the unflinching reality of Cassandra and the priestesses and prophetesses everywhere. Feminist activist spirituality, blessed be!"

 I felt like sharing another piece of guidance that helps me as well.  I received this many years ago (in 1992 actually) and it also seems timely........I keep the little picture below (that's pretty much its actual size) in a frame on my altar.  Of all the icons and magical objects I've collected over the years, it's one of my most important.

 In the fall of 1992 I was working on my own Tarot deck.  I went to a copy shop to make copies of some of the small paintings I had done for the series, among them my version of the "Hermit" card, which I called "Solitude".  It's actually a self portrait, and what the card means to me has to do with the journey of the soul through the darkness of ignorance, pain, confusion, and sometimes the "dark night of the soul".  When we find the light, kindle the flame, that illuminates the way we emerge from the darkness.  Very often this is a solitary journey.   But to simply illuminate the way for ourselves is not enough - having kindled a flame, I believe it's important to share what has been learned.  Perhaps the light we share, the warmth of the flame we contribute, can illuminate the path of another.  We are all pathfinders, and part of the journey is to share what has been learned along the way to  encourage others.   Even in the darkest nights.  What else, ultimately, is there to do?

Color copiers in 1992 were not as advanced as they are now, they often broke down, and copies were a lot more expensive.  So I wasn't surprised when the machine didn't do anything for a few minutes when I was copying this painting.  Finally it spit out a big piece of paper with only a tiny image in the center - the one above.  I called over the technician, who fiddled with the machine, and I finally got my copies.  It wasn't until I got home that I looked at the "mistake" and realized how extraordinary it was that of all things to focus in on, the machine had focused perfectly on the hand bearing a light.

We do get guidance, truly.  I do not know if I have always been true to this gift of guidance, but I never am without my little xerox "mistake", to remind me.

Blessed be.  May we all "bear a light", no matter how difficult.  What else can we do? 

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**The Motherpeace Round Tarot by Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel was one of the first feminine, Goddess-oriented decks, designed to celebrate the Great Mother and Her peaceful, life-loving creatures. It was self-published in 1981 in Berkeley, California and later released in a U. S. Games version in 1984. Like the cyclical ways of nature, the round cards can take on many positions in a reading beyond the usual two choices - upright and reversed.