Green Caterpillar Synchronicity

(it looked kind of like this)

9/18/10

This morning I went to my mother's house to prepare her breakfast, and beside the door, on a "cat rug", was a strange looking fat green thing, curled into a little spiral. At first I thought it was a bit of plastic the cat had dragged home, but then it moved! Keep in mind that I live in Southern Arizona, where it is currently about 102 degrees, and there are very few leafy trees. I've never seen a caterpillar like this here, although obviously they must be  around.

I put it on a potted plant, the only thing I could find it might like to eat, although, sadly, the poor thing looks none too well for its encounter with a cat.

Can't get over the fact that just yesterday I was writing about, and reading about, "The Chrysalis Effect" by sociologist and visionary Phillip Slater in my previous post!

Here's from the Harvard Magazine Review of Slater's last book (he died in 2009).  It is ultimately a hopeful book, a visionary book, from the premiere American sociologist who wrote The Pursuit of Loneliness: America's Discontent and the Search for a New Democratic Ideal   so many years ago, pointing out the continuing drift toward isolationism, distrust, and loss of community in American culture in the early 1970's.  

"Always adept at spotting patterns before others notice them, Slater here describes cultural styles that play out on a macroscopic, Toynbee-like level, while stitching these massive systems closely to the facts of daily life.  Many of today’s jarring dislocations, he asserts, stem from the clash between the ancient system of control culture and a newer pattern: integrative culture. “Incivility and chaos arise when an old system is breaking down and a new one hasn’t yet fully taken hold,” he writes. The “chrysalis” of the title refers to the transitional state between one life form and the successor that grows out of it.

The ethos of control culture has dominated human societies for millennia, Slater writes, ever since the advent of agriculture: it embraces “a static vision of the universe, a deep dependence on authoritarian rule, a conviction that order was something that had to be imposed, and a preoccupation with combat.” Integrative culture, in contrast, breaks down mental walls and boundaries and celebrates interdependence. “It has a dynamic vision of the universe, a democratic ethos, and sees order as something that evolves, as it does in Nature, from spontaneous interaction.”

It was suggested that I consider what this synchronicity might mean symbolically.  Caterpillars represent, to me, what we are as a global humanity, adolescent, trying to mature, to transform, to become winged creatures. We're presently, like a caterpillar on a leaf, mindlessly gobbling up our world, eating up everything in sight. We confront the "imaginal cell" time, the time when what we as a common humanity are about to become deconstructed.  The hopeful thought is that there is an impulse, a greater force, within our collective instinct that will lead us into, like the force that drives the caterpillar, to the  Chrysalis, the "imaginal" stage. So that we might become, at last, become beautiful Pollinators.......such is my hope.

"Butterfly Man" Crop Circle, Netherlands, August 2009

Phillip Slater

This morning I walked into my usual early morning coffee shop in Tucson. It is pleasantly arranged, open early, and the only coffee shop in all of Tucson I've found that doesn't blast loud music (and I don't mean the Brandenburg Concertos) at you.

Almost everyone sat behind a laptop, well bulwarked against the world. Many had earplugs as well, just to be sure that nothing external interfered with cyberspace intimacy. As usual, I had my sentimental, grouchy moment of remembering mystical days at Cafe Trieste, espresso machines steaming, poets sitting with books in hand, transparently open to conversation with anyone who cared to ask what the book was about. You kind of went to a coffee shop to meet people, or at least, be surrounded with the hum of noisy, eccentric humanity. I romanticize those days, no doubt, and they seem as ancient as bell bottoms. Books can be transparent......but a laptop is impregnable.

I pull out my laptop, and here I am. Where else is there to go?

Ironically, I have in my bag a copy of Philip Slater's The Pursuit of Loneliness - American Culture at the Breaking Point (First publication 1970, Beacon Press) - I started re-reading it last night. This classic indictment of America's "cult of individualism and isolationism" is, if anything, more relevant now than it was in the 1970's when it was first published. I pulled out the book because, of all things, I was thinking about a proposal for a talk at the next Pagan Studies Conference on community.

In Slater's famous book, he argues that the desire for community is frustrated by the cultural emphasis on individualism and competition, to which our self-perpetuating materialist emphasis contributes. We are preoccupied with insulating ourselves from each other as much as possible, Slater maintains, our technology continually enhancing this "shadow" side of the collective mind. The desire for engagement is further frustrated by the irrational American belief in "independence". Looking through one of his blogs, which shares many excerpts from his new book, THE CHRYSALIS EFFECT, I was pleased to see that he has lost none of his fire:

"We live in a world today in which the problems we face are all planetary. Where hiding behind national boundaries is ultimately suicidal. A world in which conventional warfare -- army vs. army in pitched battle -- exists only in the movies, TV, and video games............Making boys macho today is condemning them to irrelevance." .....from the Huffington Post

"The Rugged Individualist--cheers when needy people are deprived of food, battered women are deprived of protection from brutal husbands, children are deprived of education, etc., because this is "getting government off our backs."(Huffington Post)

As my mother's caretaker these days, I've spent a lot of time watching television with her. It's hard not to become engaged when you're a captive audience; perhaps, as a student of mythology, it's hard not to contemplate this contemporary myth making. I was thinking about why I find the "reality shows" so appalling. Take "Survivor": Put a lot of people on a desert island with few resources, and test their survival skills by making them compete with each other. Now, that is a helpful strategy, should the real thing ever happen. Or "The Biggest Loser": Take a lot of people who are literally eating themselves to death from loneliness, and give them something they deeply long for - a community of kindred souls with a difficult, shared goal. Then make them compete with each other until only one is left.

Or how about the popular sci-fi shows, "Lost" or "Battlestar Galactica"? Whether fleeing the Cyclons as the last remnants of humanity or crashed on a mysterious desert island, none of these characters seem to be able to cooperate with, or trust, each other for any longer than between commercial breaks. There certainly, unlike the hopeful years of Star Trek, is no "ships counsellor" to help them communicate with each other. In the first Battlestar Galactica, Lorne Greene and crew were less complicated, but they were certainly noble, and you knew they'd eventually win; with this bunch of characters, I found myself beginning to root for the cyclons. At least they seemed to have the cooperation skill necessary to rebuild a civilization.

So before I continue down this depressing road to far, I was delighted to see that Mr. Slater (who teaches at the California College of Integral Studies) has written a new and hopeful book called "The Crysalis Effect". I'm ordering it today. It's described as:

The Chrysalis Effect shows that the polarization and chaos we see in the world today are the effect of a global cultural metamorphosis, one that has accelerated so rapidly in recent decades as to provoke fierce resistance. The changes that have taken place in the last fifty years – the feminist movement, minority movements, the spread of democracy, the global economy, the revolutions in physics and biology, the peace movement, the sexual revolution – are all part of this cultural transformation. Contrary to popular opinion, the polarization this metamorphosis engenders is not a struggle between Left and Right, or between the West and Islam, but one taking place within the Left, within the Right, within the West, within Islam, within every individual and every institution.

Our world is in the middle of an adaptive process, moving convulsively toward a cultural ethos more appropriate to a species living in a shrinking world and in danger of destroying its habitat.
Today we’re caught in the middle of this disturbing transformation —a metamorphosis that creates confusion over values, loss of ethical certainty, and a bewildering lack of consensus about almost everything.

The Chrysalis Effect provides an answer to the question: Why is the world in such a mess?


I look forward to getting my copy!

Giant "crop circle" in the Netherlands, summer of 2009.
A hopeful thought, whether from Space, or closer to home!

For 7 Generations

"Gaia Shield" (1994) (with Duncan Eagleson)

Here's a wonderful site I felt like sharing:

For 7 Generations: the Indigenous Grandmothers Film

Mitakuye Oyasin, "all my Relations".

As I sit here considering the audacity of writing an application for a Guggenheim (well, what the heck. It's kind of like buying a lottery ticket, only it takes a lot longer)..........I try to articulate what my theme of a "Webbed Vision" means ..........foremost, it is participatory in practice, and vision: like a web, everything is meant to expand outwards from a center. By enacting and exploring the theme of "weaving a webbed vision", through cross-disciplinary shared art process, it would be my hope that a vision of interdependancy.....could become personally articulated, and practically conceived, as participants engage in a collective conversation.


Dr. Keller's quote has been a long meditation for me. It was the basis for the group sculpture that hangs now in the hallway at Wesley, "Weavers". Dr. Keller derives her term from the name Penelope, which actually means in archaic Greek "with a web on her face", indicating that the name's origins probably derived from the oracles or fates of ancient times. To see world through the lens of a "web" is to see the world within a paradigm built of relationships: interwoven relationships between all things, from the intimate ecology of a community vegetable garden, to Gaia Theory, to family systems, to particle entanglement. "Good Relationship" thus is a spiritual practice that keeps us connected to a higher order. The "Web" is the underlying truth of being.

"What is the new mythology to be,
the mythology of this unified earth
as of one harmonious being?"

Joseph Campbell

Crop circle, Avebury, 1994

" The new myth coming into being through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and the ecological movement suggests that we are participants in a great cosmic web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field. It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other. In our essence, we are one."

Anne Baring

Artists are myth makers, but we all have the capacity to be artists; and we all participate in the weaving of today's mythology. The time to think of art as some kind of isolated activity performed by macho, heroic, alienated "genius" is over. I have always felt ill at ease with many "art world" assumptions I got in the course of my education, which is why I so much admired people like Judy Chicago, Daniel Dancer, and Alex and Allison Grey, people who stepped way outside of the "rules".

When Tibetan monks make their beautiful sand mandalas, they are performing a ritual blessing, a prayer that incorporates symbols with a rich lineage and context. When Navajo medicine men make one, they are creating a portal for healing. In traditional societies, masks are meant to be, literally, spiritual vessels for the Gods and Goddesses to enter this world within sacred space, ritual and drama, and commune or bless those present. This was a sensibility that was very clear to me when I created the Masks of the Goddess collection; even signing my name to the masks seemed not quite right, since it was a collaboration on multiple dimensions from the very beginning. I do not know how to demonstrate this, but I see it all the time.

I think I had my first "Spider Woman" epiphany while hiking in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona long ago. In search of petroglyphs, I huffed up the mountain thinking of native American mythology as I climbed. I remember, specifically, I was thinking about a wonderful story from Ursula Leguin's "Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences" * - in the title story, a little girl goes to meet Grandmother Spider Woman. When I stopped to rest, I enjoyed the dramatic union of "red mountain meeting the blue sky". Then, gradually I noticed I was viewing the landscape through a transparent spiderweb - suspended at eye level - from a cactus and chaparral bush before me. Turn slightly, it was invisible. Turn again, there it was, just as plain as day. A "Webbed Vision".

"Spider Woman", Anasazi petroglyph (courtesy Bill Pennington, 2007)

Recently I read the following blurb from a little article slipped in between something about some media star's divorce problems, on the AOL site:

"Human activity such as fishing, agriculture and logging have greatly accelerated the rate at which species go extinct. As of last year, one in eight birds, one third of amphibians and almost a quarter of all mammals were threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature....Alroy's study looked at 100,000 fossil collections spanning hundreds of millions of years, with a strong focus on marine life. He found that dominant creatures can be dramatically affected by large extinctions."

I would think this would be terrifyingly obvious........it is amazing to me that we need, apparently, an expert to determine, from 100,000 fossils, that as "dominant creatures" who are the agent of the 6th Extinction, it just might impact us as well. Why are we so paralyzed? How have we lost "a webbed vision"?

My grandson is going to reach his adulthood in a world without tigers. Snow leopards. Prides of lions. Mountain gorillas. Oh, they'll be around, maybe, in zoos, or in nature preserves. But not in the wild any longer. He will probably also come of age in a world without seafood that is safe to eat without the risk of mercury poisoning or absorbing plastic particles ingested by the fish. A world without many of the songbirds we now enjoy, without many of the butterflies, the frogs. A world where pristine beaches without plastic debris and polluted waters belong only to the very wealthy, a world preoccupied with escalating war as resources continue to become scarce and population continues to explode.

How do we bring alive, now, this new and ancient mythos, this template of relationship ......a "webbed vision"?

“Hope now lies in moving beyond our past in order to build together a sustainable future for all the interwoven and interdependent life on our planet, including the human element. We will have to evolve now into a truly compassionate and tolerant world – because for the first time since the little tribes of humanity’s infancy, everyone’s well being is once again linked with cooperation for survival. Our circle will have to include the entire world.”

Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, "The Guru Papers"

**There is also a wonderful story in this collection called "May's Lion" in which an old woman is visited by a dying mountain lion. Leguin shares this scene from the perspective of our contemporary world, and what it might have been like for an old native woman ("Rain's End) in another time and place.........here, the lion has come to her to die, and she is honored by this, offering her presence to the lion, her prayers for it's journey into the next world. When "May", in this time and place, tentatively calls the police about the lion, they shoot it - and in some incoherent way she does not fully understand, May knows this was not right, she somehow lost something important.

"On The Beach"

"Spiral Offering" by Catherine Nash MFA

"Blessed are the Peacemakers,
for they shall inherit the Earth."

ON THE BEACH
(Oct. 11th, 2001)

One month
after the world ended.

The little island world we,
the privileged few, could pretend
was safe, forever, and righteous

The fallen towers,
fiery messengers
of unfathomable destruction yet to come.

Tourists walk barefoot
on the familiar beach.
They came here, I imagine,
as I have, not to forget,
but to remember.

To remember driftwood and high tide.
To remember a red dog, and a yellow-haired child
as they enter the water -
their cries of goodly shock
and honest forevers
always new, always cold, and blue.

A white heron,
balanced in perfect equanimity
on one leg.

Wave forms overlay my feet,
transparent hieroglyphs of infinity.
Her way of speaking.
Her manifest, unspoken words.

A brown man
lies beside the mossy cliff, spread-eagled
between sky and sea and land.

Sand sunk, leaf-molten,
blackberry thorn - into the green.
Toes, fingers, flesh
reaching into the green

the green,
redeeming Earth.
He is rooting himself.
He is taking himself back.

I lie down in grateful imitation, a stranger
in companionable human proximity,
sharing this rite of remembering.

I close my eyes, and see her.
A girl, walking on this very beach
Yesterday, and 30 years ago.
I see her sourcing,
sourcing the one who lives here.
A river Goddess
with no name.

She has made a mermaid offering
of sticks and sand and seaweed.

Companions arrive, offer shells,
and then return to Berkeley.
To Vietnam, the Cold War,
the Berlin Wall,
the war, the wall,
the war, the walls.
The war,
and the summer of love.

("the revolution will not be televised")

A generation to end war, raise hell, raise consciousness,
raise Atlantis, and raise the new and Golden Age

("the revolution will not be televised")

How did we get here
from there?

I call you back, girl.
I call you back.
I am at the other end of this life now.

Your sand prayers
ring here still, still ring true.

The Earth
is my witness.

Lauren Raine (2001)

Sig Lonegren

Callanish Stones, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

Since I can't seem to finish my latest entry in this journal, I felt like sharing one from Sig Lonegren, who I met many years ago when, quite without any intention on his part, he set me to wandering and wondering on my path. At the time, I was living in Vermont, and wandered down, rather hungover, to the Putney Inn for a cup of coffee. Unknown to me, the New England Archeological Research Association was having its conference there, and before I knew it, I was on a bus with Sig's group, and learning to dowse for ley lines at several of the mysterious cairns and sacred sites that are in the Putney area. A year later I sat with a group of people and watched the Sun rise through two huge entranceway stones aligned with the Summer Solstice.

Stone cairn chamber, Putney, Vermont

Dear Friends,

I have been reading in "Northern Earth" and hearing from friends in the publishing business that the bottom seems to be dropping out in terms of Earth Mystery (EM) magazines and books. The number of magazines covering this subject are falling here in the UK, and in the publishing business, they are just not bringing out as many books in this area as they had been doing in previous decades. Of course, the recession is responsible for some of this, but also, it is my feeling that a saturation point has been reached as far as the archaeological evidence our prehistoric ancestors have left us, therefore, the speculation as to what they might have been up to. How many more articles like "Ley Lines Really Do Exist!" or "Is Alexander Thom's Work on Archaeoastronomy more than Fantasy?" do you really need to read?

Archaeoastronomy in Sacred Space

How many more pictures of ancient (and new) sacred sites being oriented towards the Sun do we need to convince us that all over the planet, our ancestors gnew something we don't?

We live in changing times. The old paradigms that Western Man's civilisation has been living by don't seem to be working so well these days. Climate change appears to have some validity; the rape of our planet is growing ever more evident. Our economic system ain't doin' so good, and, today, regardless of what you think about 2012, its acceptance is predicated on an awareness by many people on our planet that change in one form or another needs to come. (The New Age movement of the eighties was a precursor of this same realisation.)

So now, there is perhaps a shift from "What were prehistoric people up to in their sacred sites?" to "I do not seek to walk in the footsteps of the ancient ones, I seek what they sought."   (Read: how can I use all of this Earth Mystery information to experience the reality of the Spiritual World myself?)

Our prehistoric foremothers and fathers were certainly in to the stars and other heavenly bodies. Do you know where Saturn or Mars or Venus will be in the sky this evening just after sunset? I'd put money on the reality that your 17,500th Great Grandfather (5 generations a century x 3,500 years) knew just where these planets were. 

So, how did your 17,500th Great Grandma and Grandpa relate to the heavens whilst in their sacred sites? And, much more importantly for us now here at the end of the beginning of our EM journey, might we be able to do the same today?

Of course, there is not one correct way (I'm no Fundamentalist), but I have developed a process that that might help others to experience this directly. I call it, "ArchaeoAstrology: From Knowing to Gnowing," and I will be offering this in a three part workshop at the BSD Convention in Cirencester next weekend.

}:-)

Sig Lonegren
SunnyBank
9 Bove Town
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8JE
England
http://www.geomancy.org

+44 (0)1458 835 818

Spider Woman "Crop Circle"....last reflections

West Kennet Long Barrow, April 19, 2009 Photo by Lucy Pringle

“What might we see, how might we act, if we saw the world with a webbed vision? The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web

I felt like writing a bit about the "Spider Woman" crop circle I found......I was somewhat amazed to find this obscure symbol in a crop circle site! Mr. Silva believes that it is a man made circle, but reminds me that that does not have to negate its power as a symbol, or for that matter, a beautiful work of earth art.

There was a legend that when the world was going to change, Spider Woman would return again to help her Relations, as she has done in the previous worlds.

I have often thought that the World Wide Web just might be Her latest appearance.

I am grateful to Mr. Mark Fussell and the Crop Circle Connector for feedback, as well as "Crop Circles Reflections of a Season, by Mr. Fussell and colleagues.

Below is the "circle" in black and white, and next to it a detail from a pre-historic Mississippian shell ornament. I believe this one is from Spiro Mound in Missouri, although I will have to check my reference books - the ornament, most probably worn on a cord around the neck, would be anywhere from 400 to 1,000 years old.

I see the Spider Woman image in the crop circle (without all of the legs), the cross, the head and "womb" shapes, and rayed "web" or "strands" emanating from the spider/creatrix figure. (There is often an emphasis upon the "womb" center of the spider, as Spider Woman is associated with the Earth Mother/Creatrix, from whose body all things emanate).

To me, obscure as it may seem, these "crop circles", and the interest, even the controversy surrounding them, are important as contemporary icons manifesting within the collective consciousness, "words" from a timeless language, the iconography of humanity. They are communications worth meditating upon.Spider and Cross Gorget, ca. A.D. 1300, Fulton County, Illinois, Dickson Mounds Museum

Whether created by paranormal forces or through the efforts of contemporary "earth artists" who prefer to further controversy about their work.........these are still sacred symbols that exist on many layers of meaning. Mr. Silva is right; the origins of the "crop circle" are not as important as what its meaning for our time might be.

This symbol, with it's origins in the remains of the "mound builder" sites in south eastern U.S., somehow found it's way to Great Britain last summer. No one knows the exact significance of the spider and cross in the ornaments pictured above, but Spider Woman has an ubiquitous presence throughout the Americas. It's generally thought the "Spider and Cross" represents the Great Weaver (Creatrix)/Earth Mother, the cross on her back representing the union of the 4 directions, thus, balance or completion.

Spider Woman's origins go back as far as the Maya. The Spider Woman/Weaver Woman was a goddess of the Pre-Columbian Teotihuacan Maya in Mexico, discovered on the ancient murals there.* I see that I"m moving into a dissertation here, so I'll cut to the chase.

What meaning could this symbol have for us today?

Spider Woman, the Great Weaver, was also called Thought Woman ("Tse Che Nako" ) among Pueblo peoples. She brought all things into being with what she thought about, the "stories she spun about the world" - like the spider, she "spins the world into being" from her own substance. All things are connected upon the Great Web.....and this power to co-create, to "make the world with the stories we tell" she passed on to her Relations.**

To the Navajo (the Dine`), Grandmother Spider Woman is a wise guide whose teachings can be heard in the wind; but she will only offer instruction to those who have achieved a certain level of maturity or initiation. To the uninitiated or immature, she will appear only as an insignificant insect, her power and words unperceived. Spider Woman was responsible for bringing the people from the previous worlds into the new worlds in Hopi mythology.........in some stories, when the 3rd world ended in flood, she help the people to make boats and stepping stones to cross into the new world in safety and harmony.

It's worth noting that it is the "end" of the Hopi calendar as well as the Mayan (2012); the "4th World" is coming to a close. In each previous world, the breaking of balance, loss of harmony, greed and war brought about destruction and chaos. Here's from Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_mythology):

"Some contemporary writers tend to posit an absolute importance of the feminine to the Hopi ............In this interpretation, the Hopis traditionally saw the goddess Spider Woman as the creator, "Grandmother of the sun and as the great Medicine Power who sang the people into this fourth world we live in now.”

In other interpretations, Spider Woman is an intermediary between Creator (Tawa) and this plane of being. Generally, it is agreed that in each "previous world" the people fell from harmony, and had come to live contrary to Creator's plan (Tawa)....thus, the people

"were led (usually by Spider Woman) to the next higher world, with physical changes occurring both in the people in the course of their journey, and in the environment of the next world. In some stories, former worlds were then destroyed........whereas in others people were simply led away from the chaos which had been created by their actions." (Wikipedia)

I am trying to understand why I'm so struck by this crop circle, which, like so many others, occurred near old sacred sites of Great Britain, "power centers" of the ancients.**** Perhaps, in this "way of telling, way of praying", Spider Woman is again invoked, to help, to bring us again through the kiva, the "sipapu", the "Birth Channel" of the Mother Earth.....into the "5th World" yet to be.

**Although often referred to as the "Great Goddess" of Teotihuacan, anthropologist Karl Taube was the first to appropriately christen her the "Teotihuacan Spider Woman" in his article in the 1983 edition of The Journal of Latin American Lore after his evaluation of the murals found there.

*** "Tse Che Nako, Thought Woman,
the Spider, is sitting in her room now.
I'm telling you the story
She is thinking". ...........Keresan Pueblo Proverb

Message from the Hopi Elders

MESSAGE FROM THE HOPI ELDERS

You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.
Now you must go back and tell people that THIS is the hour.

And there are things to be considered:
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

This could be a good time!
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold onto the shore.
They will feel they are being torn apart, and they will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination.
The Elders say we must let go of the shore.
Push off into the river,
keep our eyes open,
and our heads above the water.
See who is in there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history,
we are to take nothing personally,
least of all ourselves.
For the moment that we do,
our spiritual growth and journey
comes to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done
in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the Ones we have been waiting for.

Oraibi, Arizona
Hopi Nation