Now

The umbrella

As tradition dictates, upon entering his Zen master’s house, the disciple left his shoes and umbrella outside.  “I saw through the window that you were arriving,” said the master. “Did you leave your shoes to the right or the left of the umbrella?”  “I haven’t the least idea. But what does that matter? I was thinking of the secret of Zen!”

“If you don’t pay attention in life, you will never learn anything. Communicate with life, pay each moment the attention it deserves – that is the only secret of Zen.”

             Paolo Coelho, 2009

I've been having fun lately just BEING. I walk in a fall symphony of leafy color, meeting creative and thoughtful people, looking at art....

My mind is full of colors, half-suggested compositions, dancing mythologies, obscure symbols that drift like smoke trails, and the de-light of rain, sun, dappled pavements. Even my solitude, which felt so unbearably lonely when I first came here, is now enjoyable. Not to mention the antics of squirrels. Oatmeal in the morning with in-season apples.  Shadow dapples.

Creativity engages the reservoir of all we learn, our skills, the conversations and story lines of our lives, the cultural context we speak and move within. At the same time, the only place it can ever really be live and available is in the NOW.

I am content at this moment in time, and accept it as a gift. Happiness comes in small things; yellow leaves, orange leaves, red leaves, each as unique and brilliant as a snowflake, miraculous. The trees are performing their Grand Finale..........

"Sedna" and a syncronicity

"In the archaic universe all things were signs and signatures of each other. Inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly."

Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill

Every time I sit down to write, I always feel like it entails constructing articles complete with footnotes and addendum.......which is one of the reasons my articles have been not very inventive lately. Having said that, I'm going to loosen up, maybe make a few subjective statements and meandering surmises, and stop feeling I have to write as if I was defending my ideas at a podium. So here's a mysterious synchronicity that involved my friend, sculptor Georgia Stacy recently.

Last week I sent out an announcement about "Restoring the Balance: the Mask of Sedna" being published in   Coreopsis : A Journal of Myth and Theatre Summer/Autumn 2009: Mask, Mirror, and Muse   

I'm proud of this article. It was the last event I did with the Masks of the Goddess collection. It was also wholly infused with, for lack of a better word, a kind of numinous presence. I've always felt I had a duty to document and share these stories, not just the myths, although they are beautiful and significant, but especially the stories of the rituals, the performances, the insights of the people who were involved. These were collective re-mythings, shared prayers through the medium of story, performed within the liminal landscapes of theatre and sacred space.

As Reclaiming members used to say when a circle was cast, "We are between the worlds now, and what happens between the worlds can change the world." To be "between the worlds" is to be in that zone between the secular and the sacred, a "wholly" place that is fertile and imaginally fluid. ("Imaginal cells" is the actual scientific term for the cells that are responsible for transforming a caterpillar, immersed in its chrysalis, into a butterfly. They are utterly transformative agents of biological change.)

"I think many artists feel they are weaving some form of energy into their work. It's what psychometrists see when they "read" objects. There is an aesthetic psychometry each person does as they look at a work of art. Artworks are like batteries - if we're receptive, they can charge us. My idea of reality is that there are many, many interpenetrating dimensions." .....Alex Grey

"Between the worlds" is a creative place, ripe with syncronicities, because the boundaries lessen.

So, what this is leading to is an email I received, after forwarding my article about the Myth of Sedna, to Georgia in New Mexico. Recently, Georgia has begun, for reasons she doesn't understand, to include whale flukes instead of wings in her pieces. Here's a new piece (this one with arms of bones, although not with the "fluke motif" in other recent works) and an email she sent me back.

Lauren, This is more than a coincidence. I was reading the "Inuit Imagination". When I came to the sculpture carved for Sedna, with a whale fluke, I cried for the second time. I cried the first time I heard the story, many years ago. But, the clincher...right before I turned on the computer to find your email, a friend called and wanted to read me the story of Sedna, because I had just finished a sculpture with bones for arms. Life is so interesting.

Georgia

Why this confluence of syncronicities? Who can know? I personally, having worked for years with myths, believe that the archetypes are alive in our collective consciousness, within the "dream body". The story of Sedna is a very important story for our time and for any time; a story about the suffering Earth Mother, and the rites of at-one-ment the Inuit do to regain balance and good relationship with Her. It's about exactly what we lack in our industrialized world: a deep ecological understanding of reciprocity with the living Earth. That event was ripe with synchronicity because it was a story that needed to be told, and continues to be so, passing through different hands, different minds, different voices. When we enter creative space, when we step inside the magic Circle "between the worlds", when we enter the "fissures", we find we are not alone. Here's another quote from Alex Grey, in an interview I did with him and Allyson in 1989: "If you reach down far enough, we're all made up of the same archetypes. Joseph Campbell talked about what he called "core myths". As did Jung. If you go deep enough into yourself, you find yourself in a noisy place with a lot of other people. And if you draw symbols from there, you plug into a collective form of consciousness." Well, to work now, and hopefully, the Cracks will continue to open, even if I'll never understand why.

"There's a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in."   .....Leonard Cohen

Painting by Tyler Gore

The Dalai Lama at A.U.

the Dalai Lama teaches
across the street today, monks
cross the parking lot in saffron robes
at my feet
yellow leaves
wet black pavement
golden coins
everywhere, abundant

It was a pleasure indeed to be present during the visit of the Dalai Lama at American University. Although I could not attend the teaching THE HEART OF CHANGE, I was able to meet monks and attendees as they came by the cafeteria here at Wesley for lunch. The energy generated by the Dalai Lama and his entourage was extraordinary - a wonderful clear and serene energy that permeated the campus. I felt it being generated days before his arrival, and I cannot help but feel that his and their purposes in giving the teachings, especially in a world hub like Washington D.C., take place on dimensions other than the physical.

I found it disturbing that he was not received at the White House. He is a great spiritual leader, revered throughout the world. His living presence is, in fact, an indictment of the conquest and occupation of Tibet by China.

On a more auspicious note, I happened to finish (well, I still have to assemble the parts when they come back from the kiln) my WEAVERS sculpture, which I've been working on since I arrived, the very day of the Dalai Lama's visit. I also find it encouraging that the logo for this event was (above) a Tibetan woven motif. Everywhere I go these days I find weavers, it seems! Catherine Kapikian, who founded the Luce Center, is a weaver, and was just yesterday refinishing a loom in the studio we work in, with the help of Deborah, who is also a weaver (and has a woven backdrop to all of her paintings). Deborah is the new Director.

There you have it.........syncronicities abound. Why is this archetype so prevelent right now? I think, because we are truly in a time when we must profoundly evolve to be good Weavers, finding a creative and unified pattern in our human diversity, finding ways to connect instead of dissemble our energies and hearts.

weave [weev]:
1. to make something by interlacing threads vertically and horizontally,
2. to spin something such as a spider's web,
3. to construct story:
4. to introduce separate parts into something larger

[ Old English wefan )

War Protest

There is going to be a protest against acceleration of the war at the 8th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan on Monday at the White House. Since I happen to be here, I'm going.

The photo above was taken in 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq. There was a massive protest (over 300,000 people) in San Francisco - I participated with Alan Moore and his Butterfly Gardeners Association. For myself, I wore the "Mask of Sophia", and carried the Mirror of Sophia that we had used in our performance earlier, which was a ritual for Peace. The photo was in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Joan Baez sang, Martin Sheen gave a speech, and the sight of 300,000 people filling the streets down to the harbor was an amazing sight. As I remember, there were a million or so people here in D.C., and many more across the country. In spite of this protest, the war went forward, and continues.

I marched in San Francisco in 1970 as well, against Vietnam. Joan Baez sang then as well. There were over 300,000 people then as well. Twice I've seen the streets of San Francisco overwhelmed with people. 50,000 Americans, and millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians, most of them civilians, died in those years. I could say more, but I won't, because history has, in my opinion, enough to say about the futility and horror of war.

I believe in non-violence. I do not believe war does anything except breed more war.

Here is a bumper sticker I saw on one of the student's cars that made me laugh, but has plenty of truth to it:

What part of "Thou shall not kill" don't you understand? .....God

Here's some info about the action: http://www.iraqpledge.org/

reflections

I find myself in a strange kind of melancholy mood today. I was looking at some of the old realist/visionary paintings I did, and never showed, because I suppose I always thought they were "commercial", "illustration", not up to "fine arts" par.... all those derogatory words that got heaped on us in grad school. I occasionally wonder if I ever actually recovered from all of that!

I've made the mistake, perhaps, of reading Tom Wolfe and THE PAINTED WORD recently.........he will always be a great wit! In his famous 1970's book, he argued that contemporary art had become far too much a creation of art critics and the phenomenon of marketing and media. And, I reflect, there is still some truth to his cleverness. Who does create "value" and "aesthetic", if not the cultural backdrop or paradigm that the artist operates within?

I went to the National Museum recently, and stood in long communion with old friends......... two of Monet's vibrating Cathedral series, Manet's wonderful "slice of life" moments in a long ago French countryside, in the very flesh, some of Gauguin's dark Tahitian goddesses, Van Gogh's face looking out at me in all its tormented energy, Degas dancers forever suspended en pointe, Toulouse Lautrec's ladies of the Moulin Rouge forever drunk and sadly vulnerable.........oh, what a delight!

Claude Monet
Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight, 1894

And John Singer Sargent's portraits, so close I could touch their textured surfaces, if I wasn't sure the guard would then throw me out. How incredibly Sargent was able to not only capture the "remains of the day", the colors of light at bay windows, endless New England summers, the feel of silk skirts and a still uneaten peach in a painted bowl.........but most of all, the way he could capture, with true sympathy, the soul of his subjects. A society woman peers at her audience with spirit and humor, a child laughs with intelligent eyes, Madame X scandalizes with the cool, elegant sensuality that oozes from her bare shoulders and her sheer essence. And Whistler, fluent in all his arrogant mastery, whistles effortlessly from 30 years of exploring color and shape at viewers from across generations, pulling you into his world. Robert Henri and company paint the fierce struggle of life in New York tenements and hopeful immigrants at the turn of the century, while his colleagues further upstate paint peaceful scenes of the gorgeous Hudson River valley.

John Singer Sargent
Nonchaloir (Repose), 1911

And then you cross a long, very impressive hallway, into the new, Contemporary Art section of the National Gallery. Well, I here comes some heresy. C'est la difference!

Frank Stella
Sacramento Mall Proposal #4, 1978

A huge, vast, cavernous first floor ........some interesting large mounds of black rocks outside the glass windows (I liked them because they reminded me, naturally, of prehistoric Irish Cairns, but the artist called them something else) , a Max Ernst bronze with a Minotaur, a colorful Caldor mobile, and a large intentionally rusty thing by Richard Serra that looked like a piece of the side of a shipwrecked battle ship sticking upright in the sand (he called it Five Plates, Two Poles).
A few abstract paintings with stripes (Stella) , and one entire (vast) wall with about 10 canvases climbing it at different levels. The canvases were each about 4 feet square, and were each painted a different color - by this I mean, they were flat squares of yellow, magenta, teal green, red, and I think some black and white as well. They looked pretty much like latex house paint, no need for brush strokes or Liquitex there, by golly. They were "Untitled". Yeah, I guess if the artist is so unimaginative he (or she) couldn't come up with anything better to do with such expensive canvases as to pull out left over house paint and a paint roller and cover the offending white, why should he be expected to come up with a creative name?

But, and I have to ask, why? After emerging from the rich, vibrant, complex mastery of the impressionists, the post-impressionists, the portraiture of the past century............I don't care what anyone says, this piece at least certainly shows distinctly less imagination!

Don't get me wrong. There is much abstract art I love (especially Kandinsky, who wrote the wonderful "Concerning the Spiritual in Art". ). Within Modernism, I especially enjoy Jackson Pollock. I can look at the dapples cast by the sun on pavement and see beauty in the patterns and texture, and in the same way, I can look at Pollock's canvases and see color and texture, the same random patterning at artful play. I also feel what a lot of fun he must have had in creating them. His paintings are all about process, and the vitality within that process. Still, I can't resist quoting the man who had so much to do with marketing, if not publicly creating, the phenomenon that was Jackson Pollock. Harold Rosenberg was THE influential art critic of his day. His quest was for some kind of "pure" aesthetics, which he imagined and celebrated with the emerging Abstract Expressionist movement. As Rosenberg wrote in 1952,

"The turning point of Abstract Expressionism occurred when its artists abandoned trying to paint Art (Cubism, Post-Impressionism), and decided to paint - just PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from Value - political, aesthetic, moral."

But, to liberate art from aesthetic or moral value is to render it meaningless. It becomes thus an intellectual exercise, an objective endeavor isolated from any larger context, like ethics, meaning, cultural mythos, etc. I don't know, from my point of view, if such a thing is even possibly, no matter how heroically the artists in Soho tried to imagine such a thing. Artists are generally human beings, and thus firmly embedded within their cultures and social constructs/contexts, at least, as long as they speak a language, and have mothers. I also pause at that old, tiresome argument from the long ago days............"Does art have to mean anything?"

Well, ultimately I suppose not. What's the "meaning" of a rose, or a dragonfly? We impose those meanings upon the inherant mystery and beauty of nature. But, returning to the peculiarly human environment of a museum or art gallery, maybe the question can have a bit of relevance, as a viewer, tour guide in hand, stands before a canvas. If the art, being part of a long cultural discourse that began somewhere in the Renaissance, aggressively doesn't "mean" anything, then it's "meaning" is still a rebellion against meaning, context and aesthetics.............and we're right back at the chicken and egg proposition. I can't believe I'm still doing this!

Jackson Pollock
Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950

Anyway, I quickly retreated back across the corridor, into the sweet, familiar landscape of the Impressionists. I know the aesthetic of the Post Modern Era is harsh, and I'm feeling quite lonely these days (being in a strange city), so, I even lingered to have tea beneath the graceful, corny 19th century nymph eternally cradling a marble art nouveau water lily.

Regarding my Peace Corps application, here's something completely unrelated to the above rant. An extraordinary person to know about. Muriel just turned 85, and she is into her first year as a PC volunteer in Morocco. Read about her at her blog "Muriel in Morocco" . What an amazing woman!

The Native American Museum in D.C.

You have
noticed that everything
an Indian does is in a circle, and that
is because the Power of the World always
works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In
the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all
our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and
as long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The
flowering tree was the living center of the hoop and the circle of the
four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south
gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty
wind gave strength and endurance. Everything the Power of the World does
is in a circle. The sky is round and I have heard that the Earth is round like a
ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds
make their nests in circles. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a
circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons
form a great Circle in their changing, and always come back again
to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood
to childhood, and so is everything where Power moves. Our
teepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were
always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of
many nests, where the Great Spirit meant
for us to hatch our children.
----Black Elk

I had an interesting syncronicity occur this past week. While enroute to the National Gallery with my friend Rose, we went to the Horticultural Museum. There, Rose decided she absolutely had to have a cup of coffee before proceeding, and the nearest place to obtain such, we were informed, was down the street at the American Indian Museum. So, even though unplanned, there we went - an amazing building, very modern in design and concept. After coffee, we decided to see the exhibits, which were so well done as the museum attempted to address the myths, histories, and what has survived of some thousands of Native American tribes and languages. Their logo? A circle of hands around a circle!

On the way out, we stopped at the bookstore, where my eyes were immediately drawn to a book by psychologist and storyteller Susan Hazen- Hammond, called Spider Woman's Web - Traditional Native American Tales About Women's Power. Such a wonderful collection of stories by many different traditions, many of which I did not know. And the logo running throughout the book (at the end of each story, with the title "Connecting the Story to Your Life"?) A hand holding a thread!

All tales are born in the mind of Spider Woman,

and all tales exist as a result of her naming."

---Paula Gunn Allen

The Sacred Hoop, 1991

The Peace Tent

"Blessing Hands" by Dorit Bat Shalom

Since I have participated in discussions about art and spirituality while here, I felt like sharing the work of a colleague of mine, Dorit, whose "Peace Tent" project has travelled throughout the Middle East and the U.S. for at least 10 years, bringing together Palestininians, Jews, and others under the "tent" of creativity. She has also been touring for the past 6 years with Salima Shanti, with whom she has created a 2-person play.

Dorit Bat Shalom is a native Israeli who can trace her family back seven generations in Israel. Her

not-for-profit theater company in Israel became the source of the concept for the Peace Tent. Dorit used theater as a medium for participatory discussion of social and psychological ills, so that theater became a forum for understandoing, issue mediation, and resolution. The Peace Tent becomes a teaching forum.

Dorit travels throughout the United States and Israel with the Peace Tent project, bringing individuals and groups from foreign and domestic locations to participate. In the past 5 years, Dorit has taken five delegations for peace from the United States to Isreal to give workshops and participate in inter-faith healing sessions and ceremonies as part of her Peace Tent mission. Dorit uses her own art work as well as work from other artists to further the reach of the Peace Tent.

"Creating and sharing art is how I personally pray for my homeland Israel and the Jewish and Arab world. I invite you to join me on a journey that embarks on a pilgrimage into the collective story of Israel and Palestine.

A Peace Tent in the Middle East is an ancient tradition, creating a sacred space for reconciliation where people in conflict can safely share their vulnerability without threat of blame or judgment of right and wrong. Entering the Peace Tent is thus a portal into the Holy Land with fresh eyes, a tender heart and courage to fully be present with images of the enormous pain, inner terror and uncontrollable rage of traumatized, crushed and angry souls.

After my brother was killed in action in Jerusalem during the Six Day War (1967), I decided to dedicate my life to peace work. As a mother and artist, I especially am concerned with ways that we, as women - whose very beings are about bringing new life into the world - can step forward with

courage into our divine role, so that peace will manifest in the world."

Salima Shanti, her collaborator, is also an artist, an actor, and a dancer and choreographer.

Salima is a Sufi teacher who has led Dances for peace as part of the Peace Tent's instructional performance segment. She is an ongoing instructor.