(Black) Butterflies

who is arguing with the storm
passing over oxen in a field
not me just a butterfly
whose eyes blind my shabby self


"Old Pajamas", 2010

"The Ancient Greek word for “butterfly” is “psuché/psyché”(ψυχή, 1st.declension) which is used in the meaning of ‘butterfly’/ ‘moth’ by Aristotle and Theophrastus, though its usual meanings are breath, spirit, life, soul, departed spirit, ghost, living being, person.  The butterfly was a symbol of the soul, because it changes from caterpillar to a beautiful winged creature. Plus it has a shape of a double ax which was an Minoan  symbol of the Great Goddess. Greek paintings often showed a small butterfly - "soul" - flying free from the mouth of the dead............Yahoo Answers.com

I think this is going to be a wandering/wondering post, because what I'm trying to approach with my capture net of words is the magical butterfly, a black one at that, a creature that clearly exists on such an elusive multitude of dimensions and metaphors........that it's impossible to consider her mysterious flight without a "holographic" approach. Butterfly is a creature that flies right into the Dreamtime as she so chooses. So, I'll begin by slipping, momentarily and gratefully, back into mythic time and mythic place, the life-renewing, fluid land of the Fey, the imaginal** (!!!).......for any hour I can spare.

I recently had energy work with a healer. With eyes closed, lying on a table, she did something similar to Reiki, running energy, helping me to connect with different areas of the "subtle body" that are blocked. Within this holistic approach, mind is viewed as being not only in the cranium. We perceive through at least 7 or more different "brains" - energy centers, symbolized by the Chakras, which represent different ways of receiving, experiencing, perceiving, responding to, and expressing consciousness. For example, the Base Chakra, identified with the color Red, is about physicality, the interface with nature and the planet; the Heart Chakra, Green, is associated with the ability to love and experience com-passion; the "Third Eye" Chakra, violet, is associated with psychic perception and visioning.

In energy medicine, practitioners help patients achieve integration between the chakras, the different "brains". Much of the work is surprisingly psychological, and is often concerned with helping clients to identify emotional "blockages", accessing, while in an altered state, old traumas, environmental issues, or erroneous belief systems that have caused an individual to close the heart or the doors of perception.

I had a vivid vision throughout this energy work of butterfly wings (not butterflies, just wings)...........folding, unfolding, before my closed eyes. I cannot help but feel that this was a kind of Grace, the wings offered were, perhaps, mine.

The butterfly has much significance to me, as personal archetype, and a sometimes visitor from the angelic realms, fulfilling the angelic role of messenger. Of course, I'm not alone in this. I've spoken with many people over the years who have had mystical Butterfly stories, among them my friend Fahrusha (her name, in Arabic, actually means Butterfly), who recounts an amazing synchronicity with a black butterfly in her blog.


Out of curiousity, I looked up "Black Butterfly" on Amazon.com recently, and was stunned to find there were 27 books with that title. I think a black butterfly is about the transformation that happens when the Shadow, in Jungian terms, is also given wings, transmuted.

I have met many people who have told me about butterflies appearing in connection with the loss of a loved one, or at times of personal despair. I list below a site that is devoted exclusively to "miraculous butterfly experiences". **To me, and I'm no psyche-ologist .....but to me, butterflies wonderfully participate in the interface between dream and waking life, flickering on the wings of synchronicity with their multi-dimensional messages, disappearing into the field of dreams just as mysteriously. A "Butterfly Experience" can be utterly intimate in the meanings they bear, and equally, universal and impersonal. For me, dealing as I have been for years now with therapy, and caretaking my mother and brother.........there is great personal meaning in my vision, meaning that has to do with karma, long patterns of family dysfunction, the work of emotional and psychic transformation.

Perhaps the most dramatic "butterfly experience" I had occured 10 years ago. Since this experience had to do with both dream and synchronicity, I don't know if I can tell it very cohesively, but I'll try.

It began with a disturbing dream. I dreamed I was on a ship, and on the deck many people sat in deck chairs, all of them playing with masks, taking them on and off. I seemed, in the dream, to be two people at once. I knew that there was, down in the lower decks of the boat, a demon. One of the women that I was was a kind of priestess or missionary - she was about to descend into the depths of the boat, where the demon below would torture and kill her. She thought that if she did so, offering herself as sacrificial victim, she could save the people above.

The other "me" was a cynical observer who thought she was a ridiculous martyr, and knew everyone, especially her, was doomed. I woke up as the "martyr self" began her descent.

Without going into the many circumstantial and psychological meanings of this important dream, I'll skip ahead in real time. About 6 months after having this dream, I actually found myself, with a lot of actors, and a few masks, on an old decommissioned ocean liner (the "art ship"), which was anchored in the industrial harbor of Oakland. I was acting in a movie, and the writer and director of the film, Antero Alli, had decided to do his filming in the very bottom of this 5 level boat; the old, cold, dark, dank, cargo bay.

Descending into the bottom of the boat brought my dream back vividly, and every superstitious notion of prophetic dreams I ever had came right to the fore. I didn't like it there! Between shoots, the cast hung out in what must have once been the crew's cafeteria - located in a middle deck, it had round portholes, all of which were closed because it was a cold day in March. As we waited, the Director offered everyone a card from his own fascinating deck of oracular cards (with his artist wife, Sylvie Alli), and there was lively interest as each person contemplated his or her card.

I took a card from Antero with trepidation, and sure enough, damn if it wasn't the "DEATH" card.  Not five minutes later, as I stood with the card of doom in hand, a small orange butterfly landed on my shoulder.

There was absolutely no explanation for how that butterfly could have gotten into that closed room. I had lots of witnesses - and after the miracle revealed itself, several of them helped to catch the butterfly and get it upstairs where it could be released.

As a kind of synchronistic post-script, in 2005 I was back in the Bay Area for a two-person show (with Rye Hudak) at Turn of the Century Gallery, in Berkeley. I was surprised that, of all the works in the show, the gallery owner chose to put on the card announcing the show the one above, "The Butterfly Woman". When I came to hang the show, I went to nearby Cafe Trieste for a cup of coffee. Two stacks of cards were on the table there, side by side.

One was the card for my show with the image above. The flyer next to it was an announcement of the premiere of a new movie by Antero Alli called "The Greater Circulation" (a gorgeous film inspired by the life of poet Rainier Maria Rilke). The image on his announcement was a face encased in a skull - a Death's Head.  Antero and I have never really conversed much, but perhaps we participated in a "mythic conversation".  Archetypes have their own kind of communicative intelligence.........

***"The caterpillar spins or weaves the cocoon, and in that cocoon, what the caterpillar is creating is his own tomb. We don’t know if he knows that or not. And he crawls into it, and his body liquefies. Complete disintegration of caterpillar. But in that caterpillar soup are these cells that have been in the caterpillar’s body all along, called imaginal cells. Isn’t that a fabulous word? Imaginal cells. It’s called imaginal by botanists because the adult form of that creature, the butterfly, is called imago. So these are imaginal cells, but to me those cells are ‘imagining’ flight. And these imaginal cells know how to take the soup and reconfigure that into a butterfly, an adult. I believe nature has designed us humans to go through a similar experience."

 from  "Imagine your Imago - Liberating the Imaginal Cells of the Human Psyche"   
by Bill Plotkin

THE BLACK BUTTERFLIES

by Frank Polite

The black butterflies of night
Clipped for sleep to nightshade and widowgrief,
Or in shaking luminous flight
On paired and silver wings, are rare,
And rarely seen by human sight.

Yet, they are there, surfacing
Out of range of neons and streetlights,
Preferring underleaf
And the dark offshores of air
To man and moth-maddening glare of things.
Tonight, As crisis after crisis
Cracks our skies like lightning,
I think of death,
Of different ways of dying,
And of Egypt and the myth
That once held black butterflies
Sacred to Isis.

They lived forever in flight
In her private groves, compelled like
Flickering minutes
Never to touch leaf nor stone,
Never to rest, except upon her nakedness
When she turned to love.
And here is death to be envied;
To be crushed to a personal breast
Between goddess
And whatever bird, beast, lover
Fell to her lips.
We are something else. . .

Myth and love will miss us
When the night is suddenly turned on,
Turned blank white,
And the black butterflies

Appear against that vellum sky
As far, flitting, burnt-out stars.

Animas Institute & Bill Plotkin

In the course of writing an article about butterflies and the imaginal (which I haven't yet finished) I ran across the writings of Bill Plotkin, and then discovered the Animas Valley Institute. I was so inspired I wanted to share my discovery. Dr. Plotkin is a colleague of David Abram, whose Wild Ethics I wrote about last spring. Here is also one who "speaks with the Earth", and knows how to teach others to listen.

As I've shown with my enthusiasm for the film AVATAR **, I deeply feel that people like Bill Plotkin, David Abram, Starhawk, Joanna Macy, Jesse Wolf Hardin with Kiva and Loba, and many others, are quietly addressing the most important, far reaching, and revolutionary question of our time - how can we live in harmony and spiritual communion with the planetary Self. As Dr. Plotkin points out, we are in our adolescence, and must mature as culture, soon, if we are going to meet the evolutionary challenge of our time, or de-evolve and fail, taking with us the demise of so many species, so much potential, so much that is beautiful and precious.

I've taken the liberty of copying below from the Animas website.

"Either you will go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through there is always the risk
of remembering your name.....

-Adrienne Rich

Animas Valley Institute
Nature and the human Soul, (by Bill Plotkin)

ABOUT ANIMAS VALLEY INSTITUTE

The primary goal and method of all Animas programs is the encounter with soul. Founded in 1980 by wilderness guide and depth psychologist Bill Plotkin, the Institute is one of North America's longest-standing organizations offering contemporary wilderness rites. "Animas" is plural for "souls" in Spanish. In Jungian psychology, the Anima is the Inner Woman in a man; the Animus, the Inner Man in a woman. The Anima and Animus refer to the mysterious energies within our psyches that guide us on the journey of descent to soul. Animas Valley Institute is located in southwest Colorado in the valley of El Rio de las Animas Perdidas — The River of Lost Souls.

Animas programs differ significantly from those offered by most other wilderness organizations, vision-fast guides, and experiential educators. Our work is not primarily rites of passage, wilderness-based psychotherapy, or emotional healing. Our focus, rather, is nature-based initiation, whose central goal is the descent to soul for the purpose of maturing the ego so that it becomes a vessel for a person’s deepest, world-transforming gifts. Our programs are not designed to solve everyday personal problems or to help people better adjust to — or be happier in — the surface world of contemporary Western culture. Instead, our intent is a foundational shift that elicits each person’s most creative, soul-rooted response to our precious, critical moment in history.

"The heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world."

— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Animas Valley Institute: Who We Are

Our mission, in its widest scope, is to contribute to cultural transformation by fostering nature-based personal development and thus the maturation of individuals and the human species. We support each participant to access and embody the world-changing and vital creativity at his or her core.

Humanity has arrived at a pivotal moment in Earth’s evolutionary process. The early decades of the twenty-first century offer us the opportunity and imperative for what deep ecologist Joanna Macy calls the Great Turning — the transformation from a life-destroying human presence (the Industrial-Growth Society) to a life-enhancing presence, a way of life worthy of our unique human potential — and the planet’s natural unfolding. Writer and guide Geneen Marie Haugen reminds us that, as far as we know, we humans are the only Earth creatures with the ability to imagine never-before-seen futures and make them real. In this precarious moment in history, we are being called to make real a global network of just, ecocentric, and sustainable societies — the human element in a true Earth community. It is every person’s obligation and privilege to contribute to this metamorphosis. Cultural historian and geologian Thomas Berry referred to this vital endeavor as the Great Work of our time.

Animas’ objective is to contribute to this Great Work by helping individuals re-align their lives with the rhythms and cycles of nature, with the unfolding stories of Earth and cosmos, and with their own visionary potential — their artistry as innovators of cultural change.

The most potent seeds of cultural renaissance come from the uniquely creative ventures of authentic adults, those who have consciously discovered and committed to the one true life they can call their own, a life that emerges from the largest conversation one is capable of having with the world. All such adults are, by definition, true artists, visionaries, and leaders, whether they live and work quietly in small arenas or very publicly on grand stages.

As Thomas Berry wrote, “We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources.” Such a descent is the purpose of the underworld journey to soul undertaken by those who have moved beyond the self-involved early adolescence in which our society has stalled. The most creative, inspiring deeds in the world today are being performed by visionaries who have made that descent and have returned with their unique contribution to the Great Turning. Animas is helping to engender innovative cultural forms that enable every person to mature in this way.

Animas’ central purpose is to assist people through the initiatory process that leads to visionary leadership and cultural artistry. Our primary work is with those ready to undergo the joys and challenges of the underworld descent to soul, which flowers into a life of meaningful service and abundant fulfillment — or a deepening for those already on the journey.

Animas is a nonprofit organization of over 20 guides, many volunteers, and four part-time staff with offices in Durango, Colorado, USA. Since 2008, we have structured ourselves as a non-hierarchical, team-led, service organization, with no directors or executives. Other than our four staff, all team members are volunteers. All team members, whether staff or not, are responsible for their own service — and not for the service of anyone else.

Our 30-plus annual programs include 12-day contemporary vision fasts, five-day retreat-center-based soulcraft intensives, one-day and weekend introductory programs, yearlong immersions that meet for four sessions (one in each season), and advanced intensives on soulcentric dreamwork, shadow work, the cultivation of ecological identity, deep imagery journeys, and other topics. Animas founder Bill Plotkin and the other Animas guides have created and shaped over 40 contemporary practices that assist people of Western cultures in their quests for more meaningful, fulfilling, and culturally engaged lives aligned with nature, soul, and the Great Turning.

Animas also serves as a training institute. Our Soulcraft Apprenticeship and Initiation Program (SAIP) is an advanced training curriculum designed for those who have been called by Mystery to serve as nature-based underworld guides. For more information, see the Training Programs sub-menu under the Animas Programs tab of this website.

Bill Plotkin’s first book, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, provides a thorough overview of the practices utilized in Animas programs and of the mystical descent into the underworld of soul. Bill's second book, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World, introduces a nature-based map of the eight stages of a soulcentric and ecocentric human life cycle. Twenty years in the making, this visionary ecopsychology of human development reveals how fully and creatively we can mature when soul and wild nature guide us. Nature and the Human Soul presents a model for a human life span rooted in the cycles and qualities of the natural world, a blueprint for individual development that ultimately yields a strategy for cultural transformation. Learn more at www.natureandthehumansoul.com.

"Speak to the Earth,
and it shall teach thee"

Job 12:8

A few more thoughts about AVATAR

"Speak to the Earth
and it shall teach thee"

Job 12:8

I was not surprised that Avatar lost in the Oscars to a film about war. I don't give a damn that it was ironically made by a woman.........."The Hurt Locker", regardless of how well made, is yet another example of patriarchal war mythos. Cameron's Avatar was the revolutionary film, with it's Gaian message.

I find it encouraging that, regardless, Avatar is the most successful movie ever made! Perhaps the message is beginning to reach critical mass.

In my secret life..........

I have a kind of alternate or unlived wish life that has never left me. As my mother's caretaker now, and with my business pretty much extinct, to tell you the truth, I am beginning to feel that it's never going to happen, except in my imagination. That grand adventure - joining the Peace Corps, working in a orphanage, helping women in a village somewhere..........

I graduated from AISK (the American International School of Kabul), and lived in Afghanistan as a teenager. I was amazed to find recently a website for AISK, to learn that there have actually been school reunions (although, understandably, not so many in Kabul). Some of my fondest, and familiar, memories include the jingling of camel bells on camels, the smells of stalls baking nan, flat bread, the harsh mountains of the Hindu Kush, women washing clothes beside the river, a world without TVs. My first job was with the peace corps office there, sorting letters for the volunteers, and I suppose I always pictured myself becoming one of them.

So. It helps me to remember some extraordinary people, lest I surrender my own dreams of travel and service too soon. I remember here, with gratitude and admiration, a few people who have accomplished wonderful things at 60 and beyond. Among them, amazing Marc Gold and his 100 Friends Project (who I met in Tucson in 2008). And Dana Dakin and Women's Trust of Ghana, who I met at a workshop the same year I gave at Kripalu. Murial in Morocco (who is a Peace Corps volunteer at 85) is a blog I follow. And last, Olga Murrey, founder of the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation (which she established after her 60th birthday).

It's my pleasure to share her work (and words) below.

Hi from Kathmandu!

We have only 12 hours of electricity a day (and most of that in the middle of the night), the streets are strewn with festering garbage because of a strike by government workers, and today was the umpteenth day of “bandh” – i.e., a strike by one political party or another – everyone has lost track of who is striking for what. During bandhs, all the roads are closed to vehicular traffic except for bicycles and rickshaws. The silver lining in all this is that bicycle rickshaw drivers are among the most downtrodden, lowly, poverty-stricken, bottom of the barrel citizens of Nepal, and when taxis are not allowed to ply the roads, they are able to charge a decent sum for their back-breaking services.

But that’s not what I want to write about. What I want to tell you is that we have a new boy at J house – I’ll call him Manoj. He just turned four. His father died of AIDS and his mother is HIV positive, as is his sister. They have been evicted from the family home because of the stigma associated with their illness and live in a falling down shack in a rural village. His mother cannot find work. She asked if we would admit him to J House, and although it was hard to separate him from his mother, the chance that she will survive and be able to provide him with decent food and an education are very slim. (She is encouraged to visit whenever she can, and NYOF will pay her travel expenses if necessary.)

The best – the very best – times for me here in Nepal are when I watch how our children respond to a newcomer among them. It is never necessary to ask an older boy or girl to help a younger one – they rush to help and comfort almost without thinking. I just returned from J House a little while ago, and he ran to me immediately showing me the numbers and alphabet he was writing with the help of the teacher we have hired to give him a boost when he starts Montessori school in April. She says he is an apt learner and will be a good student. So, welcome, Manoj, to a new life and a new family.

I’ll write again soon and let you know about our trip with the children from J and K House to a wildlife park in the jungle.

Warm regards,

Olga Murray, NYOF Founder

Circe

An odd poem I rediscovered recently, originally inspired by Margaret Atwood's Circe/Mud Poems.** I re-read this collection recently, after reading Atwoods (much later and incredibly witty) The Penelopiad as well. The voice of "Lexus" turned up later after writing the first poem, no doubt to protest the indignity of being caught in someone else's epic.

CIRCE'S LAMENT

I cannot recall how it happened.

I was on fire, I do remember that,
my imagination a tropical sunset
enflamed, exaltant

and for one shining
Hallelujah of an hour
everything I touched
ignited

You squeal your indignation
through ruddy snouts:

It was a misfire, I swear it.

In the splendor of my exuberance
this was nothing I anticipated.

Tell your handsome Captain
I will petition the Gods this very day.
I have grown old, absent minded

in my solitude
my spells go astray

be patient, dear ones.
Meditate upon this dark, fertile
squalor of sensuous mud
you find yourself
so horizontal in.
This low rooting through an
odoriferous cosmos of fragrant compost.

Are you so undone
by the base pleasure of it all?
This nosing, snorting self-knowing,
the delight of a half fermented carrot?
Never a sow smelt so sweetly fecund before
nor was love so simple.

Surely we have become sleepy,
half-drowned by the lethargy
of our two-legged dignity.

Consider this, if you will,
an interlude of primordial grace.

(2000)

LEXUS LAMENTS HIS FATE

All I wanted
was a touch, a kindly word,
a little ease.

Eight long Gods' forsaken years
on the stinking boat, and before that,
war, war, war, blood
and lamentation.

Who are you,
to name me thus?
Is your worth and wit
so much greater than mine

to dole out shame,
because I dared to love you
in my clumsy way?

Did I not bring you flowers
admire you from afar?

HE is adored by Goddesses,
hears the Sirens sing his wild praises,
returning at last to patient little Penelope,
his pretty kingdom.
Ballads, sung at last
beside his flowery grave.

Me - bale, Lexus, bale!
hoist the mast,
and don’t piss on the foredeck.

Who are you, to unmake me thus?
To twist and shape me
as suits your capricious humor
because my face is unlovely,
my gestures naive?

Who are you to judge my folly?

what magnitudes I glimpsed,
what private splendors
lived once within this breast?

Lauren Raine (2000)

**
There are so many things
I wanted you to have.
This is mine, this tree,
I give you its name,

here is food, white like roots, red,
growing in the marsh, on the shore,
I pronounce these names for you also.

This is mine, this island, you can have
the rocks, the plants
that spread themselves flat over
the thin soil, I renounce them.
You can have this water,
this flesh, I abdicate,

I watch you, you claim
without noticing it,
you know how to take.

Margaret Atwood, CIRCE/MUD POEMS, (1972)

"Rio Abajo Rio"

"Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. "

Norman MacLean, "A River Runs Through It"

The quote above has always been so beautiful to me that I wanted to meditate on it for a moment, take a look into the depths of these waters. Perhaps he speaks of what storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes * called "Rio Abajo Rio, the river beneath the river of the world". Perhaps "El Rio" is also what Jung called the Collective Unconscious, I don't know. But Estes' speaks of the great River of Story, the universal waters flowing beneath the surfaces of all things.

In her wonderful book Women Who Run With the Wolves *** she writes,

"Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayer making, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. And even with these well-crafted practices, much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them."*

Having just finished my workshop sponsored by the Southern Arizona Friends of Jung, I'm always amazed at what happens when people enter the magic circle, the liminal zone outside of the mundane world, where it is possible to speak to the Goddesses and Gods, where the masks can tell their hidden stories. Whether tapping, if only briefly, the wellsprings of El Rio in grief, creativity, meditation, or through the sudden psychic upwelling that can happen when the so-called ego cracks and splinters, it is always a blessing when the waters are revealed, for they remind us of the greater life.

If the river of story has a voice, it's a voice that contains all voices, human and planetary, and the song it sings may be Om, may be "Nameste", I am Thou. Thus, Estes, who is a Jungian psychologist, believes that to simply experience this great river of being is not enough; one must also instinctively participate in some way, find some way to open a pathway, a well spring, for others.

"...[W]hat Jung called 'the moral obligation' to live out and to express what one has learned in the descent or ascent to the wild Self. This moral obligation he speaks of means to live what we perceive, be it found in the psychic Elysian fields, the isles of the dead, the bone deserts of the psyche, the face of the mountain, the rock of the sea, the lush underworld - anyplace where La Que Sabe breathes upon us, changing us. Our work is to show we have been breathed upon - to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowings, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts."

I respectfully submit that this is so for any creative person, this is the work of the SEER, residing within each of us. The River beneath the River of the World.

* (p.30, below)

** (p.96, below)

*** Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Hardcover, 560 pages, Random House Publishing Group, 1992

**** I find I've been pulling out these drawings that I did  in the 70's.  Maybe, my desire to renew this acquaintance with my younger self is also an effort to see the River that runs through it.........sometimes, in looking at old work, one can be amazed to see the same storyline...........

Felicia Miller 1952 -2010

For three weeks

the cool moon
bound by occult cords
moves through the houses
of memory and sleep
distills night in a bowl

But on the night of the full moon
what is mirrored
in a still pool?


Felicia Miller (1972)

A friend I reconnected with several years ago, Felicia, a friend I knew more than 30 years before in the Halcyon days of Berkeley, when we were both very fortunate to be young in that creative ferment of place and time, a friend whose poetry travelled with me, like the paintings I did of her so long ago, down and up the road, companions..........passed away a few days ago after a long struggle with cancer.

When I saw Felicia in D.C. this past fall, she was very thin, very tired, but still generous with her time and thought. I remember pulling out one of her poems, and reading it to her and her friend. She said she hated it. I felt sad to think that all these years I've cherished work she abandoned, disavowed, long ago. Still, I think it was important that I read the poem, remind her perhaps of that work, that self............I don't know.

Brilliant, mystical Felicia was entirely a creature of water. Our meetings always seemed to occur by oceans, whether at a 1975 Rhododendron Festival near Mendocino, or in 2008 at a cafe near the famous surfers beach in Rincon, Puerto Rico . I remember her best on the streets of Berkeley, with her ubiquitous necklace of sea shells, telling us stories from her treasured, antique book about the Undines , the people who lived beneath the waters of the Danube. I've always secretly felt that Felicia was really a mermaid herself, one who left her element to walk on the land for a while, perhaps, never entirely comfortable away from her true home.

I painted Felicia several times, once as "The High Priestess" in 1975. By a strange and lovely synchronicity, I heard, just a few weeks before her death, from a long ago friend, Richard Meyer, who I also painted as a Tarot archetype at that time - Richard became "The Magician". When I told him about Felicia, he called her also, after 35 years.

El Rio Abajo,

The River Beneath the River of the World.

The River we all hear, some more than others. Felicia, I'll miss you. Swim free and wild, now.
We love you.

The green plants

magically

from water air

the soil

from water earth

air

earth water

air light

earth and sunlight

sunlight

vibrating waves

shimmering

grasses in the sun


Felicia Miller (1970)

Someone was the Sun
calling from across
the little island fields

we turned and took the last
glimpse of the closing lid

"Let's go, shall we?"

I could not answer,
but only followed after
just some one's glance

along the rock path.



Felicia Miller (1971)

Did I see you?
feel your smile
as you
fell?

People cross bridges
cars pass under them
or water
you waited
then jumped

(it must have happened quickly)

but what was it that rose in you

like a slow Phoenix
new wings

outstretched?

Felicia Miller (1971)

"Then in the half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops.

Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters. "

Norman McClean
"A River Runs Through It"