Thursday, May 7, 2009

Doris Lessing Revisited


Writers are often asked "How do you write?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?" Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration. If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

Doris Lessing,
Nobel Prize Speech, 2007 

 ___________________________________________________________

My friend Rose says that I should write a book about syncronicity - I think if I did, I would call it the "Book of Common Miracles", or perhaps, just "Grace". Because I've often felt there is a Conversation going on that, in a quantum sense, once we notice, becomes continually more animated. In other words, we're often "tapped on the shoulder" by angels, and pre-occupied with daily concerns, we fail to notice miracles fluttering like their translucent wings under our very noses. I'm glad the angelic realms seem to include a good sense of humor. 

Ecologist, magician, and philosopher David Abram (http://www.wildethics.org) has commented that perception is "a reciprocal phenomenon organized as much by the surrounding world as by oneself".* He suggests that a two-way dynamic of intention, or energy exchange, may be going on. In contrast to our idea of a non-living world we simply observe or act upon, Abram further comments that "the psyche is a property of the ecosystem as a whole", suggesting that we move beyond the notion that "one's mind is nothing other than the body itself".* Another way of putting it might be that we are "ensouled" in the whole world, a Conversant World. As writer Alice Walker has often said, "the Universe responds."

So the story I would like to tell concerns one of my favorite writers, a woman whose visionary books, most significantly SHIKASTA, have informed and inspired me for 35 years, Doris Lessing. The excerpt above is from her 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature speech, which she received at the age of 88.  In her speech, Lessing remembers her life early life in Africa, in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia. She urges us to remember how precious the gifts of literacy really are:

"We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world. The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative."**

*"The Perceptual Implications of Gaia", David Abram, THE ECOLOGIST (1985)
**© The Nobel Foundation 2007 __________________________________________________________ 

"I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in 1956, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.

This is north-west Zimbabwe early in the 80s, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa", as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like every other built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books or Biros. In the library there are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or titles like Weekend in Paris and Felicity Finds Love.

There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The headmaster has embezzled the school funds and is suspended. My friend doesn't have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from him when he is paid and will probably never pay it back. The pupils range from six to 26, because some who did not get schooling as children are here to make it up. Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can't study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they set off for school and when they get back.

As I sit with my friend in his room, people shyly drop in, and everyone begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London," one man says. "They taught us to read but we have no books." Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books. I was there some days. The dust blew. The pumps had broken and the women were having to fetch water from the river. Another idealistic teacher from England was rather ill after seeing what this "school" was like.

The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens. The children here have a visit from some well-known person every week: these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils; a visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.

As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: "Please send us books." But there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.

Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty? I do my best. They are polite.

I'm sure that some of them will one day win prizes. Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. "You know how it is," one of the teachers says. "A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used." Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men's libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.

We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.

Not long ago, a friend in Zimbabwe told me about a village where the people had not eaten for three days, but they were still talking about books and how to get them, about education.

I belong to an organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grassroots. They told me that the villages, unlike what is reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey to discover what people in Zimbabwe wanted to read, and found the results were the same as those of a Swedish survey I had not known about. People want to read the same kind of books that people in Europe want to read - novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective stories, plays, and do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account. All of Shakespeare too. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a set book, like The Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular simply because it just happens to be there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons, is the most popular of all novels.

Our organisation was helped from the very start by Norway, and then by Sweden. Without this kind of support our supplies of books would have dried up. We got books from wherever we could. Remember, a good paperback from England costs a month's wages in Zimbabwe: that was before Mugabe's reign of terror. Now, with inflation, it would cost several years' wages. But having taken a box of books out to a village - and remember there is a terrible shortage of petrol - I can tell you that the box was greeted with tears. The library may be a plank on bricks under a tree. And within a week there will be literacy classes - people who can read teaching those who can't, citizenship classes - and in one remote village, since there were no novels written in the Tonga language, a couple of lads sat down to write novels in Tonga. There are six or so main languages in Zimbabwe and there are novels in all of them: violent, incestuous, full of crime and murder.

It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe's regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.

This links up improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls - Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.

Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. "I shall be a writer too," they say, "because I've the same kind of house you were in."

But here is the difficulty. Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.

I have been looking at the speeches by some of the recent Nobel prizewinners. Take last year's winner, the magnificent Orhan Pamuk. He said his father had 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition. Take VS Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write, and when he got to England he would visit the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition. Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes; taught by that wonderfully brave, bold mind. In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the tradition.

I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well-cared-for huts of the better off. There was a school, but like the one I have described. He found a discarded children's encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.

On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites - the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe, not easily, not under Mugabe.

All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to becoming writers. I would say learning to read from the printed labels on jam jars and discarded encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education beyond them, living in huts with many children - an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.

Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than 100 years before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations, the transition was made from these stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books.

Books were literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book quite another. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.

Here I am talking about books never written, writers who could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.

Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration." If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire: "Is she good-looking?" If this is a man: "Charismatic? Handsome?" We joke, but it is not a joke.

This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of hype begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening. He, she, is flattered, pleased. But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me."

Some much-publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: "Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don't let it go."

My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa that I can revive and look at whenever I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading across the sky at evening? How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the pale grassy banks of the Zambesi, the water dark and glossy, with all the birds of Africa darting about? Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars?

There are other memories too. A young African man, 18 perhaps, in tears, standing in what he hopes will be his "library". A visiting American, seeing that his library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young man had taken each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. "But," we say, "these books were sent to be read, surely?" "No," he replies, "they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?"

I have seen a teacher in a school where there were no textbooks, not even a chalk for the blackboard. He taught his class of six- to 18-year-olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting: "Two times two is ... " and so on. I have seen a girl - perhaps not more than 20, also lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros - teach the ABC by scratching the letters in the dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.

I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.

The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn out of a book. She is reading Anna Karenina. She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman's headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines of people, all thirsty, but he doesn't have enough water for them. He is angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds.

This man is curious. He says to the young woman: "What are you reading?"

"It is about Russia," says the girl.

"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.

The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity, though her eyes are red from dust. "I was best in the class. My teacher said I was best."

The young woman resumes her reading: she wants to get to the end of the paragraph.

The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother says: "Fanta makes them thirsty."

The Indian knows he shouldn't do this, but he reaches down to a great plastic container beside him, behind the counter, and pours out two plastic mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is she.

Now she hands over to him a plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman and the children watch him closely so that he doesn't spill any.

She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly but the paragraph fascinates her and she reads it again.

"Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same time visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man she cared for, Varenka looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a smile that said too much."

This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies of magazines, some pages of newspapers, girls in bikinis.

It is time for her to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off back along the four miles to her village. Outside, the lines of waiting women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it will cost this girl, going back home with the two clinging children. He would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really understand it.

Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenina stuck here on this counter in a remote Indian store? It is like this.

A certain high official, United Nations, as it happens, bought a copy of this novel in the bookshop when he set out on his journeys to cross several oceans and seas. On the plane, settled in his business-class seat, he tore the book into three parts. When he was settled, his seatbelt tight, he said aloud to whomever could hear: "I always do this when I've a long trip. You don't want to have to hold up some heavy great book." The novel was a paperback, but, true, it is a long book. When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the airhostess, and sent it back to his secretary, who was travelling in the cheaper seats.

Meanwhile, down in the Indian store, the young woman is holding on to the counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans, since she is a modern woman, but over them she has put on the heavy woollen skirt, part of traditional garb of her people: her children can easily cling on to it, the thick folds. She sends a thankful look at the Indian, who she knows likes her and is sorry for her, and she steps out into the blowing clouds. The children have gone past crying, and their throats are full of dust anyway.

This is hard, oh yes, it is hard, this stepping, one foot after another, through the dust that lays in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard, hard - but she is used to hardship, is she not? Her mind is on the story she has been reading. She is thinking: "She is just like me, in her white headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry him. (She has not finished more than that one paragraph). Yes, and a man will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the children, yes, he will love me and look after me."

She thinks. My teacher said there was a library there, bigger than the supermarket, a big building, and it is full of books. The young woman is smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school. My children will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers - my teacher told me I could be a teacher. They will live far from here, earning money. They will live near the big library and enjoy a good life.

You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store? It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it. On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she would give her children once home, and drink a little herself. On she goes, through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.

We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us."

**© The Nobel Foundation 2007

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Prayers for the Dying

My brother was a Buddhist, with interests in other religions as well. I am pleased to have found some beautiful prayers for him. I also remembered a poem I wrote a very long time ago, around the time the singer Tim Buckley died. I include it just because it seems strange thing to recall it, after all these years....Tim's exquisite music and vision was a part of the youth Glenn and I shared as well.

When my time has come and
impermanence and death
have caught up with me,
when the breath ceases
and body and mind
go their separate ways

may I not experience delusion,
attachment and clinging,
but remain
in the natural state
of ultimate reality.


Longchenpa Rabjampa


Now when the bardo of dying dawns upon me,
I will abandon grasping, yearning and attachment,
Enter undistracted into a clear awareness of the teaching,
And eject my consciousness into the space of unborn awareness;
As I leave this compound body of flesh and blood
I will know it to be a transitory illusion.

Tibetan BOOK OF THE DEAD
(Padmasambhava
)


Form is empty, emptiness is form.
Likewise, sensation, discrimination,
conditioning, and awareness are empty.
In this way, Shariputra, all things are emptiness;
they are without defining characteristics;
they are not born, they do not cease
THE HEART SUTRA


I invite you to enter
into Sacred Time and Space,
into a way of seeing broad and spacious.
See this Day, from the time you arose this morning
until you sleep this evening, as one Ceremony,
divided into small and familiar rituals,

your Heart as the Altar.
You, part of the Cycles of Light and Darkness.
Now begin to see your Life,
from the moment of your Conception
until the time of your Death
as one long, continuous Ceremony,
filled with many rituals,
some familiar, some unknown and challenging.
Your Home and all Your Relations, the Altar.
You, part of many Seasons and Cycles.
Now see this Ceremony of your Life
as part of a much larger Ceremony that extends
Seven Generations into the Past and Seven into the Future,
made up of many Births and Deaths.
This beautiful spinning Earth the Altar.
You, part of the great Ebb and Flow.
Now, if You will, imagine this larger Ceremony
to be but one part of a Ceremony so grand,
so magnificent as to be hardly comprehensible,
a vast Ceremonial Circle, with
Circles of Dancing Light,
and You,

a Dancer on the Altar that is the Universe,
where Time is Eternal.

Sedonia Cahill


On the day I die, when I'm being carried
toward the grave, don't weep. Don't say,
He's gone! He's gone.

Death has nothing
to do with going away. The sun sets and the moon sets,

but they're not gone. Death is a coming together.
The tomb looks like a prison,but it's really release into union.
The human seed goes down in the ground
like a bucket into the well where Joseph is.

It grows and comes up full of some unimagined beauty.

Your mouth closes here and opens with a shout of joy there.

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am sunlight on ripened grain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there. I did not die.

Mary Elizabeth Frye

BIND the sick man to Heaven, for from Earth he is being torn away!
Of the brave man who was so strong, his strength has departed.
Of the righteous servant, the force does not return,
In his bodily frame he lies dangerously ill.
But Ishtar,
who in her dwelling is grieved
descends from her mountain unvisited of men.
To the door of the sick man she comes.
The sick man listens!
Who is there? Who comes?
It is Ishtar, daughter of the Moon!
Like pure silver may his garment be shining white!
Like brass may he be radiant!
To the Sun may he ascend!

(Assyrian prayer for the dying)

O nobly born
The time may soon come

for you to seek new levels of reality.
You may soon be face to face with the Clear Light.
You may soon experience it in its truth.
The state in which all things are like the void and the cloudless sky,
And the naked spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum;
At this moment, know yourself and abide in that state.

Concentrate on the unity of all living beings.
Hold onto the Clear Light.
Use it to attain understanding and love.
Remember the unity of all living things.
Remember the bliss of the Clear Light.

O nobly born
Try to reach the experience of the Clear Light.
The Light. The Radiance. Join it.
It is part of you.

Your own consciousness, inseparable from the body of radiance

has no birth, nor death.
It is the immutable light.

O nobly born
The Radiant Energy of the Seed
From which come all living forms,
Shoots forth and strikes against you
With a light so brilliant you will scarcely be able to look at it.
Do not be frightened.
This is the Source
Ever manifesting in different forms.
Accept it. Merge with it.
Let it flow through you.
Fuse in the Halo of Rainbow Light

O nobly born
You are joining into the fluid unity of life.
Flow with it. Feel the pulse of the sun's heart.
Do not fear the ecstasy.
Do not resist the flow.
Let your heart burst in love for all life.

Do not try to hold to your old bodily fears.
Float in the Rainbow Sea.



COCOONS

(for Tim Buckley)


Once I watched pollen

take to the air, the fragrance

of lemon trees flowering in Ojai;

I admired patterns of water

running across rocks,

I made songs about the ocean's exaltation.

Now, both pollen and promise -

I am. I know

the life of lemon trees,

the water runs in me.

What I have most cherished

has fallen from my hands

Fortune, ambition, and chance

are songs I left behind me.

I have left the pain of slow decay

to become something

less than light


Lauren Raine (1975)




Sunday, May 3, 2009

interim

Dream Weaver, 2009

It's kind of ironic that today I finally moved into my studio, and I'll have to vacate it at the end of the month. I took the studio back in November, and then my brother had his stroke, and I've had to spend much of my winter in Tucson. I rented it to a friend from New York, who lived in it for the past 4 months. Now it looks like I'll have to summer in Tucson, leaving for D.C. in August. I've not really had a chance to get to know this town, to feel a part of it, before it's time to leave again. Will I be back? I don't know. So I went into the studio today, and kind of wandered around, making tea and unsure of how to inhabit it. I finished one of my "hands" pieces..........I would like to make a series of such "tiles" someday.

The fact of the matter is that my winter has been spent going back and forth between Tucson, and I've accomplished little in my creative life except many questions about what I can, should, or want to do in the future. My brother suffered a massive stroke in November, and has been sustained by breathing machines and feeding machines in a vegetative state since then. I am suspended in a kind of "bardo" with him - I so often wished I could help him in his unhappy life, and was impotent to do so. Now I can't even help him to die, thanks to the obscenity of a technology that keeps people alive whose spirits have left. This is truly what I feel about my brother. He's not there.

My mother and other brother want me to live at home with them and become my mothers caretaker, a job I've on and off tried to fulfill for years now, a familial cord that has kept me for years in a situation I find depressing, lonely, and never somehow able to transcend. My creativity dries up in Tucson like water on the hot pavement, and it never seems to matter how many affirmations or churches or meetings I go to. Without my creativity, what am I? Living with people who do not have the means to value my creative life, I soon, even now and after all these years, doubt its worth myself. Self pity? I don't know.

At any rate, this has been the winter of waiting for my poor brother to die. There is no grace in this, only the awful impersonal gray halls of hospitals and nursing homes, and denial which seems to me to be endemic to our world. My mother and surviving brother, David, are unable to talk about the prospect of Glenn dying - it is as if it is something that "cannot be spoken" or it will break the spell of imagining that he is somehow going to get well. What a strange culture America is, that cannot speak about death until it suddenly is no longer possible to avoid the truth of it. Could I pull the plug, if I had the power? I do not know. I pray that he is not conscious, not able to perceive himself paralyzed within a body that will never be able to function again. I have been able to get Glenn into a hospice program, and have found a social worker and a minister to offer help and comfort to my mother when the time comes.

Me? I would be false if I didn't say I wish I could just stay in my studio for a while and see what emerges, or get in my car and drive east, watching the world green again, thinking of the emergence of life, instead of all this death. At this moment, I have neither spiritual insight, or artistic meaning and expression to draw from this that will somehow give the situation energy, transcendance, meaning. It's what it is, and sometimes, as the poet says (Robin Williamson) "A stone is just a stone."

I seem to have pulled my "Butterfly" book out - a fantastic coffee table book by photographer Thomas Marent. It's the truth of all of this, transformation and waiting rooms and passages. If I allow any anger in this, the awful stuck ignorance of my family, and a society that denies the passages of life..........causes so much more suffering than is necessary.

The butterfly, it seems to me, is the true symbol for all of this.


Saturday, May 2, 2009

Arab Woman Talking (and dancing)

Photo by Baskar Banerji

In 2006 when I was in Berkeley preparing masks for the Spiral Dance, i met Lana Nassar, and enjoyed long talks with this inspiring sacred dancer, visionary, and truly compassionate artist in Cafe Trieste. We spoke about the Sacred Feminine as she manifests throughout the Middle East. Since that time Lana has taken her performance "Arab Woman Talking" to not only California, but to Boston and Virginia. Lana was born in Jordan, and has a home in both the U.S. and her native Middle East. Remembering her recently, I am pleased to include the following article she sent me in my book "The Masks of the Goddess". (It's also my intention soon to write about the meanings of sacred dance, which Lana embodies. For those interested, also read about Prema Dasara and the 21 Praises to Tara.)

For information about Lana's play "Arab Woman Talking", her dance performances, as well as tours she leads to the Middle East, visit her website: www.LanaNasser.com.


When we remember the sacred feminine, it remembers itself. The Goddess lives through us and is brought into the world through our creative expression.

From a young age, I knew that when I danced I connected with something much larger than myself. I did not know what it was and had no name for it. I was never officially trained as a dancer, I grew up in Jordan and simply watched my mother and followed suite. At sixteen, I came to the US and learnt new dances. I studied psychology and consciousness, and I danced. With time, dance became my spiritual practice; it opened me to new ways of expression and set me on my path.

For a long time, I had reservations about the term ‘belly dance’: it was a Western term used to describe a dance I simply knew as raqs; I felt objectified and exotic-ized by it. But I also had reservations about my womanhood and my power. I revisited the "belly" during my graduate research-through indirect means. I was writing my thesis on the jinn, fire spirits from Arabic lore, accredited for inspiring poets, but also blamed for possession. Spirit is said to dwell "in the belly". I learned that when blocked, creativity caused depression, but dance could release it. I learned about ritual dances of healing. “Dance du ventre” is ancient; the belly is the seat of passion and fear. The womb: the creative center.

I "delved into the belly" to discover the Goddess. I experienced her through my body - a most ecstatic feeling! I danced with her stories, from tales of Inanna and Isis, to Al-Lat, Ishtar, and Aphrodite. In the process I gained insight into myself as well as my relationships; and I began to dialogue with dreams - with my personal myths.

At that time I had a dream in which an old woman handed me a scarf. I was going to wrap it around my hips, but she stopped me, saying: "Tie it around your head." I realize this dream mirrored my waking questions about academia or art. I did not know which career to choose. I danced the dream to explore its meaning, and this led to my first solo piece. I continued to perform at schools, museums, and conferences for the study of Dreams. With time “Arab Woman Talking” was born, my one-woman show, a synthesis of both my research and artistic expression, providing me a platform on which to reconcile dual aspects of myself: mind and body, masculine and feminine. By performing I discovered my own story.

I began giving workshops, sharing my process of working with symbols from both myths and dreams. My methods developed though personal exploration, as well as from teachers who inspired me. They were women who embodied this sacred energy: artists and educators, drummers and dreamers, my own mother. I worked with women from diverse backgrounds, young and old. When we danced together, all barriers dissolved, and we spoke a common language. To witnessing the Goddess awaken always rewarded me.

As I continued to explore lore of the Goddess, I learned about the Shekinah-Sakina. Sakina literally means "indwelling". I had never heard of her before, although she was the feminine divine in both Judaism and Islam. To me, discovering the Sakina felt like coming home. I remember reading a quote by an Israili artist, Dorit Bat Shalom, who wrote that the Sakina hadDorit Bat Shalom, who wrote that the Sakina had been driven out of the holy land.....and that there could be no lasting peace without Her. I felt this to be true.
In a dream, I heard:

"Travel around the world and teach about the Goddess"

- and that dream inspired a vision of dancing barefoot - around the world - for peace. I imagined dancing with other women at special places, celebrating the Goddess, celebrating the earth.

That's where my concept for the “Journey to Jordan” emerged, and I scheduled my first trip this coming spring. I hope it will extend to other countries and sacred sites, connecting people, creating harmony, restoring balance.

Lana Nasser, 2007

Saturday, April 25, 2009

Veils


Image result for istalif afghanistan

Photo of Istalif area

Istalif, outside of Kabul, was famous for its blue glass artisans, and its beautiful blue pottery.  Maybe it still is. I don’t know – my memories are of bulky azure glasses, and thick strands of cerulean beads that jingled on the camel harnesses, and occasionally the wrists, of nomadic Kootchi women passing through Kabul, where I lived as a teenager, in caravans.  My father worked for U.S. A.I.D., and I attended an international school in Kabul.

In the late spring, waters rushed down in cold, lively streams from fierce mountains still snow-clad, and many westerners went to Istalif to sight-see. An exclusive restaurant catering to foreigners afforded a good view with coffee and croissants.  


Image result for istalif afghanistan

Debbie Simon (my best friend) and I were, like all 16 year olds, eager to get away from the boring conversations of our elders. Dressed in our French coats, our high black boots and mod turtlenecks, with adolescent stealth we escaped the tabled terraces for a while, to walk below on grey granite boulders that overlooked a stream of cold spring water.We were young, fashionable, and elated with the prospect of leaving Afghanistan.  Debbie was headed home to New York, and I was going to "swinging London".

Debbie’s father worked for the Embassy, mine was with AID, both had completed their assignments, and we were going back to the states at last.To the Rolling Stones and boys and beaches and college.
As we talked excitedly, not so far away was a familiar sight – a group of local women doing laundry by the stream. Seeing us approach, they had dropped their chadoris over their faces, and now resembled a collection of multi-colored tents huddled among the grey rocks.

I didn’t notice when one “tent” disengaged from the rest and quietly approached us.But we grew silent as she stood, silently, before us, her face hidden under layers of pleated cloth, an opaque net before her eyes.Hands emerged from the chador to lift it above her face, and before us stood a girl of 16 or 17.  Black eyes lined in kohl shone with humor.She smiled shyly at each of us as she lifted her veil, dropped it before her face again, turned and walked back to the group of veiled women as Debbie and I stood silently on our rock by the stream.

I don't know why she approached us. Perhaps she just wanted to let us know that she also was young and pretty, reminding us of our common youth, and yet living in worlds so far apart. I never forgot that moment - it was a gift.  I also never have forgotten the enormous privilege my life has been.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

archetypes

A month or so ago, my therapist, Jeaneen, asked me what archetype I thought my mother was. I couldn't answer, any more than I could have said which archetypes informed who or what my own life stories have been. So I put the question off for "later examination".

Yesterday I was looking at a photo I had placed on my altar, next to the photo of my brother. And I realized suddenly (actually, while at the riverbend hotsprings, which is a good place to get great ideas while inconveniently wet).........that a syncronicity had supplied the answer to my "for later examination" question. Sometimes, things work that way, once you begin to notice. Reviewing much of the stories in this blog, I see that I'm always recording and wondering at such phenomenon. The mythic dimension leaking through..........

The photo was taken in 2004 at the opening to an exhibit of my masks (which I shared with artist Catherine Nash MFA). Valerie James, an artist who lives in Amado, took the photo randomly. I kept it around because it's the most recent photo I have of my mom and me together...the last photo I have of her when she was fully here, fully cognizant, to be exact. And now Jeaneen's question is also within the frame of this photo, as well, perhaps, within the frame of having placed it upon an altar and thus imbuing it with sacred attention ..... at any rate, a serendipitous truth emerges that answers the question about archetypes.

My mother has the "Corn Mother" mask above her. That archetype of unconditional, self-sacrificing, idealized motherly love, devoted to the nurturance of her children without any limitations - is the very truth of what my mother has devoted herself to, both consciously and unconsciously, with its bright and "shadow" sides. She has lived the story of Selu. And for me, the picture could not be more appropriate. Above me, Spider Woman, the weaver, higher Self, the artist and divine co-creator, dedication to a vision of ecology, my most tangible mythos of deity. And beside me, Butterfly Woman, my personal "life story" archetype. "La Mariposa" is a story I wrote more than 15 years ago. And here in this photo........is one more living metaphor, one more poem about our journey together.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

The Goddess and the "Book of Eli" once more......

I can't resist showing some of the art from "The Return of the Mother"show which went up in Carrizozo, New Mexico this month. These photos were forwarded by my friend Georgia Stacy, who is one of the shows organizers. 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 syncronicity and hopeful paradox of having a dark, patriarchal, post-apocalyptic vision arise, and then dissipate like a dream, replaced with beautiful affirmations of the "return of the Goddess"........ Just for contrast, I copied the earlier post below as well.

THE GODDESS AND THE BOOK OF ELI

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

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

I had a wonderful 4 day adventure into the "outback" of New Mexico, visiting a group of women artists who will be putting on a group show in Carrizozo, New Mexico called "The Return of the Mother". It will be opening on April 11th at Gallery 408 in Carrizozo. It was such a pleasure to meet these amazing women, among them sculptor Georgia Stacy, and fabric artist Karen Smith, who is creating a Sanctuary for the Divine Feminine called Kindred Spirits Sanctuary in the mountains of her beautiful home (she also has a labyrinth!).

"The Black Madonna and the Book of Eli" (composite photo with G. Stacy)

Inanna Champagne had been invited to speak to groups in the area about her work, and I was also invited to bring along my dvd about the Masks of the Goddess project. As we sat having coffee in prior to departure, Inanna and I both noticed that (this is the honest to goodness truth!) a tiny spider had slowly come down on its thread to hang eye level between us. We observed it move up a bit, and then down a bit, and then up a bit......back and forth for over an hour. At last, when we were ready to leave, I took it by the thread and placed the latest envoy of Spider Woman on my altar. We felt well aspected and blessed on our journey, and indeed, so we were! I may talk about a "webbed vision" in the abstract, but when these kinds of little syncronicities happen, well........the mystery of the divine has a great sense of humor. And our lives are always full of everyday Milagros.

Arriving at Carrizozo, which is a small town in central New Mexico, one drives through vast reaches of blond Georgia O'Keefe landscapes with brooding blue mountains in the distance. We saw that we were in time for the town's major attraction - the filming of a motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Denzel Washington. An entire downtown street (where the Gallery my friends' show will be) had been converted into a post-apocalyptic, "Road Warrior" type set, complete with rusting automobiles, foam core burned out buildings, and sad little "cubby holes" where, presumably, desperate children of the apocalypse lived. Dirty, dread-locked young people (extras) 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.

 

Joyce, a local visionary, was our tour guide. She had been there since the beginning of the town's transformation, watching the sets being built over facades of the existing buildings. They took 2 months to create, and next week it will all come down, revealing again the gallery where "The Return of the Mother" will be in April, after the foam core and plaster is peeled away. There is a splendid metaphor in here! It was weird to see this contemporary nightmare made so vivid that I could actually walk around in it. Life and art are sometimes seamless.

  To read about the movie see THE BOOK OF ELI . I don't think they have a trailer yet......... Try also this link: Book of Eli, which describes the movie 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."


It's interesting that there are two post apocalyptic movies scheduled for release ( the other is The Road, with Viggo Mortenson) within the next year. Like the "Road Warrior" of the '80's, our world has a fascination with images of a future in which all that remains of our civilization is a grim landscape of warlords shooting it out with each other, grimly pre-occupied with power, guns, and unceasing violence. That's the mythos of a dominator, hierarchy culture. Yet in reality, many people right here in New Mexico live in a world of enormous cooperation and generosity. That is also a part of the human spirit, the future's challenge and potential. I know many, many communities all over this country who participate in a "webbed" life-serving consciousness, envisioning sustainable futures.

 Cooperation, negotiation, and a collective means is actually the basis of any civilization. We are capable of enormous violence, yes. Perhaps, the ultimate violence. But we are also capable of enormous, vast, cooperation. As we approach 2012, we approach the next evolutionary step for humanity, wherein we must understand and participate in the larger life of our planet, of Gaia the Mother, or we will face the possibility of extinction. I am saddened to think so many are conditioned by the media to think that a violent world is our only possibility. How poorly what Gloria Steinam has called the "Cult of Masculinity" prepares us for the real challenges of the future. Because our survival can only be achieved through cooperation.

 But I doubt we'll see a movie about the "end of days" wherein heroic people get together to vision quest where the best place is to settle might be, or gather to share their food supplies, or figure out a way to dig a new community well, or for that matter, hold healing rituals and prayer circles. And yet, that is what people do together, all over the place. So, I am pleased (and amused) by the synchronicity of a show called The Return of the Great Mother rising from the ashes of the movie set, a bright alternative to the current paradigm's dark vision.

 Georgia saw a Goddess shape in one of her photos of the Book of Eli set, and I couldn't help but play with the images myself a bit. Artists are myth makers.  We're weaving the future with the stories we tell. So what are they?