Farewell to the East Coast.............

Well, hit the road today, leaving as I always seem to do from Lilydale first and last.  Now there's a sign you won't see everywhere..........but maybe it would be a much better world if you did.

I leave with great gratitude at the friendships I've revisited and new ones I've made, and the places I love that I also revisited, old friends that have given me new and sustainable courage.  I leave with much affirmation and encouragement to just keep on doing what i love to do - as Joseph Campbell famously said:  "Follow your Bliss, and doors will open where you don't expect them to."   And to quote from  a younger woman who was myself somewhere along the road:  "We live in a house of Doors".  

I was pleased with my show, which gave me a chance to share the original paintings from the  Rainbow Bridge Oracle as well as doing readings from the deck, something I haven't done in a while and find I still do well.  I was also pleased with the turnout my friend Berkanna got for showing "The World According to Monsanto".  There is some information to update on this issue, but don't have time to post right now. 

“What might we see, how might we act, if  we saw 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 

Perhaps I also always leave from Lilydale because I want to leave remembering that we're  provided with "invisible means of support".   It doesn't work in simple ways, and we don't always get what we "think we want", but I have always found that I get what I need, and synchronicities, dreams, and friends continually offer guidance along the way.

I don't know if there is a cure for evil such as the greed and destruction that drives a corporate monster like Monsanto.  But I do know that if we really understand, in our daily lives, how  intimately  connected we are to the vast multiplicity of life around us...........we would live with empathy, and act with empathy, because what we do to the earth and to all Her Beings,  is what we do to ourselves.  Ironically,  I believe that's the essence of what Jesus of Nazareth taught long before the church became the strange phenomenon it is now, long before doctrines about heaven and hell, being "saved", Christian soldiers, "God Fearing",  crusades, inquisitions, holy wars, and so on.  As I prepare to pass through the often scary "Bible belt" I find myself reflecting  on the loss of  Christianity's Gnostic beginnings.......well.   The origins of the U.S.A. included religious freedom, and the right to free speech, so in that spirit, my bumper stickers stay on the back of my car.  Including the one that says "God is Coming, and Boy Is She Pissed!".

For myself, I began this trip feeling very unsure of where to go now, what to do, and I leave the adventure with all the answers I need - serve the Goddess, serve kindness, beauty, and "a webbed vision", and all I really need will be provided.  

As I was saying goodbye to the "stump cathedral" in Leolyn woods, I saw that people had left all kinds of offerings/mementos on the "stump", and I remembered something I've been carrying around in my purse since the trip began - a plastic replica of a sheaf of wheat.  Admittedly, not something all that impressive, but back in April I was looking all over the Internet and Michaels for plastic wheat, which I wanted to use for a Demeter mask.  I was not successful, and finally gave up on the idea of finishing the mask.  So, it was a funny thing to discover a plastic "wheat sheaf" on the ground at a rest stop in Flagstaff as I was headed east. No big deal - but I had to laugh, and say "thank you".   

Oh..........and watch out for those Dragons!

Danger on the Beach (thanks to Joyce Weiss)

Ravenwood Forest

"Root People" - water color by Valerianna Claff

Yellow spider on a very yellow flower

It was my pleasure to spend a few days with  Valerianna at her studio and home in Ravenwood Forest, in Chesterfield,  Western Massachusetts. Valerianna is an artist, a teacher, a sound healer, and a ceremonialist, and she is also, truly, the stewardess and friend of her forest home, which abounds with the numinous  presence of elemental beings.....as well as the physical presence of birds, deer, bear, and butterfly.  

It was good to meet an artist who speaks so  elequently about  the Numina,  the intelligence one feels emanating from the trees, the stones, the land.  An intelligence conversant and responsive to the artist  as she offers reciprocity and love with her art and her music.  I especially responded to her  recent series of  watercolors that envision the  luminous energy  felt within the forest, sensed but rarely seen, the living essence one feel is dancing somewhere in the distance, rising from the  forest floor or flickering among the dark branches of tree and root, enchanting and mysterious as the call of a songbird in the silent wood.

"Earthlight", watercolor on paper, 15in X 22in, VClaff 2013

To me, the artist captures beautifully that invisible, but potent, Numina, brilliant and intense, humming within the soil, perhaps rising at certain auspicious times,  distant luminosity.   Thank you for a magical weekend!  To learn more about the artist and her work, as well as her classes, visit her website:  www.ravenwoodforestarts.com

RavenWood Forest  - water color by Valerianna Claff

RavenWood Forest  - water color by Valerianna Claff

I especially responded to Valerianna's paintings of what she calls "Root People". She  says  she sees the trees often morphing into faces......something I often experience myself.  Faces in the stone, faces in the roots.    (As if the elemental beings  occasionally manifest a face, a human form, a voice,  just so we can know them, briefly, in our own terms.........)And perhaps, from those brief moments, the mythic world emerges, the Fey folk dance at twilight, the Green Man makes his play.  And at the roots live those beings, that wonder. 

"Root People" - water color by Valerianna Claff

I walked among the trees
I wore the mask of the deer
I am that laughing man
with eyes like leaves

You will feel my breath, warm at your neck.
I will rise in the grass, a vine caressing your foot.

I am the blue eye of a crocus
  opening in the snow
  a trickle of water, a calling bird,
  a shaft of light among the trees.

You will hear me singing
among the green groves of memory,
the shining leaves of tomorrow.

I'll come
with daisies in my hands,
we'll dance among the sycamores
once more

"GreenWood", watercolor on paper, 15in X 22in, VClaff 2013

 

Pasha investigates my car

Magical garden

"The World According to Monsanto" in Newburgh Tonight

 

I was invited to introduce THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MONSANTO by my friend Lisa Gervais of the Healing Arts Studio at 75 Broadway, in Newburgh, N.Y. because I shared the film with her last year.  I’d also very much like to thank  Chris and Paul of Newburgh Brewing for the  privilege.  The film will be shown at 88 Colden Street, in Newburgh, N.Y. at 6:30. 

Our Mother Earth, with all of Her infinitely complex eco-systems, has spent millions of years evolving the systems that sustain us.  With unthinkable naiveté and  arrogance, multi-national corporate entities are altering the genetic basis of food that we eat with no understanding of the long range consequences, to our bodies, and to the body of the Earth.  Furthermore, as this film and the “Monsanto Protection Act” demonstrates, not only is the health of future generations in grave danger, but so is the future of  Democracy; we are very close to being a “corporateacracy”, with no real choice about what we eat, think, or know.  This is a very important film.

The World According to Monsanto
 (Re-posted from previous article)

The passing of the "Monsanto Protection Act" is something all Americans should be aware of, it's long term consequences and its implications.   Having watched the documentary "The World According to Monsanto", I believe everyone needs to see this film.  

We hear a French scientist reporting that the universally used weedkiller Roundup "provokes  cell division leading to the formation of cancer".  We also learn about the almost complete  loss of independent farms and  biodiversity in Paraguay, and that in India farmers are being driven to suicide because they can no longer, due the fact that Monsanto completely controls the cotton seed market,  afford to plant their traditional crops.  As a result, they are falling deeper and deeper into debt, and losing their traditional homelands.  

 

In North America as well,  Indiana farmer Troy Rouse talks about being sued by Monsanto and the "gene police" phenomenon.  (Consider:  if you grow organic or conventional,  and your neighbor grows Monsanto, the two will  inevitably cross and you will be legally liable to be sued by Monsanto when they field test your seeds.)  Further, seed crops are being designed to be sterile, so that future planting must be purchased anew from the corporation.    What this could mean is that essential crops could be potentially controlled by a corporate entity demanding a tax which it can determine at will.   They're doing this in India now.

We need to educate ourselves as to what lobbyists are accomplishing - it is frightening indeed to allow Monsanto to control  food production, as well as unleashing biologically modified crops with very little testing, and certainly no long term understanding of what the consequences of such tampering could mean.

As a mythologist,  I cannot help but reflect that the two most popular Epics of the past decade years was "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter", both about a "Dark Lord" intent on sacrificing everything in the pursuit of power.  The profit driven  soul-lessness of corporate entities such as Monsanto reflect that mythic struggle, the shadow of our crucial time.

 "Monsanto's talk of ‘technology' tries to hide its real objectives of control  where genetic engineering is a means to control seed.  These are the promises Monsanto India's website makes, alongside pictures of smiling, prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra. This is a desperate attempt by Monsanto and its PR machinery to delink the epidemic of farmers' suicides in India from the company's growing control over cotton seed supply - 95 per cent of India's cotton seed is now controlled by Monsanto."......GMOs are failing to control pests and weeds, and have instead led to the emergence of superpests and superweeds.   The highest acreage of Bt cotton is in Maharashtra and this is also where the highest farmer suicides are. Suicides increased after Bt cotton was introduced - Monsanto's royalty extraction, and the high costs of seed and chemicals have created a debt trap.  As Monsanto's profits grow, farmers' debt grows........Monsanto's seeds are seeds of suicide."

The ultimate seeds of suicide is Monsanto's patented technology to create sterile seeds. (Called "Terminator technology" by the media, sterile seed technology is a type of Gene Use Restriction Technology, GRUT, in which seed produced by a crop will not grow - crops will not produce viable offspring seeds or will produce viable seeds with specific genes switched off.) The Convention on Biological Diversity has banned its use, otherwise Monsanto would be collecting even higher profits from seed............ A Monsanto representative admitted that they were "the patient's diagnostician and physician all in one" in writing the patents on life-forms, from micro-organisms to plants, in the TRIPS' agreement of WTO. Stopping farmers from saving seeds and exercising their seed sovereignty was the main objective." 

Read More:

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/16674-focus-monsanto-and-the-seeds-of-suicide

Thanks to Janie Rezner for article.

Show at Newburgh Healing Arts Center, & Film "The World According to Monsanto" this Weekend

 

I'm delighted to be able to share the paintings from my Rainbow Bridge Oracle, as well as some of the "NUMINA - Masks for the Elemental Powers" collection at the Studio at 75 Broadway in Newburgh, New York this weekend.

Tomorrow, August 9th,  I will be reading from my Deck at the Gallery.  The Opening and Reception is from 6:00 to 8:00 on Saturday, August 10th, and will be followed by a performance of masks in the upstairs Gallery.  If you are in the area, please come join Lisa Gervais, Holly Boughton-McPhee,  and myself for a lovely evening!

 

 

Born innocent, one
- that’s I- strives hard to become
an adult, no longer childish,
worldly-wise in one’s art, one’s love,
one’s life…

Then discovers:
that no one ever becomes an adult,
becomes either delightfully childlike
or pitifully juvenile…

Discovers:
one’s art to be outside the art game
one’s faith outside the religious game
one’s love outside the sex game

Discovers:
one’s own little song and dares to sing it
in all variations, unsuited as it may be
for mass communication…

For perhaps here and there
someone will hear it
and listen and know
and say

Ah! Yes!

Frederick Franck
Art as a Way: A Return to the Spiritual Roots

On Sunday, August 11 at  6:30 at Newburgh Brewing, 88 Colden Street, Newburgh, N.Y. 12550,  we will be introducing the documentary THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MONSANTO,  a 2008 film directed by Marie-Monique Robin. Originally released in French as Le monde selon Monsanto, the film is based on Robin's three-year long investigation into the corporate practices around the world of the United States multinational corporation, Monsanto. The World According to Monsanto is also a book written by Marie-Monique Robin, winner of the Rachel Carson Prize (a Norwegian prize for female environmentalists), which has been translated into many languages.

 *** And if you can't be there, you can see the film for free at:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-monsanto/

Going Back to Familiar Places...............

The Hidden Sky

Tom Wolfe said "you can't go home again".   Having spent yesterday chilling out in the Tuxedo Motel, and spending the day with ghosts from the years I lived in New York state, and the summers I did the Renaissance Faire,  I agree and don't agree.  It can hurt to visit places so full of memories, but the only refuge is to cherish them, to keep saying "thank you - it was great!" while I look for the shapes, tastes, and colors of those days in my memory box.
 
So many memories.......maybe that's what love is.  The perfume that lingers, the threads that weave between the empty spaces where a face, a voice, a name used to be.

Raukkadesa. 

Sterling Forest, near N.Y. Renaissance Festival,  Tuxedo, New York

Pavement,  Woodstock, New York

my "moss garden", Brushwood

Lightening struck tree

my Moss Garden, deep woods, Brushwood Folklore Center

Tara's Magic

"White Tara" (Photo courtesy Gather the Women ***)

To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you
Put down the weight 
of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation.
Everything is waiting for you.

  Everything is Waiting for You
  by David Whyte

Sometimes I get a glimpse of the seamlessness of our lives, the grace that is present when we ask for what really matters.  And even when we don't realize that we are asking, the answers we need are still given - but, of course, we also have to be listening.  One of the pleasures of being over 60 for me is that my capacity for humility and awe has deepened, which seems to allow me to notice a whole lot more of the circles we move in. I suppose, in my case since I'm restless and travel as much as I can,  that's literal as well! 

So here is a beautiful Circle.  At the beginning of this trip,   I commented that I had decided to leave for the summer because I felt stale, depressed, and unsure of what to do next.  I lack community in Tucson, and needed to return to my "source" in the East, to revisit friends and places I love.   I decided before leaving I would make a point of also visiting Jewell, the energy healer I worked with when I lived in Brattleboro, Vermont 17 years ago.  Jewell lives in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, a small New England town that can be devilishly difficult to find among winding forested roads with very few road signs.

Jewell begins her healing sessions with prayers to Tara, and it was through her that I first heard of the "21 Praises to Tara."   I wrote in previous posts about my  "meeting with Tara"  while working with Jewell just before I left New England to move to California.  This is the most profound visionary experience I've ever had, releasing me ultimately from the past, and giving me the courage to move forward. I wrote a poem about that experience which still speaks to me on many levels.  I think only now do really understand it. **

 Om Tare, Tu Tare,
Your touch cools hatred and grief.
From you, the demons of delusion fly
Praise Tara, whose fingers adorn her heart
Light radiates from a wheel in Your hand.

Jewell is also a playwright.  She taught me much about ritual theatre with her "Theatre Alive!" Workshop, which I took that year - in fact, that was where my first "Spider Woman" performance manifested.  So, in many ways, working with Jewell was right at   "the Source" for me, a gathering of energies waiting to manifest.

So, getting ready to leave this year, I was pleasantly surprised by a synchronicity just before I left in June, when I received an order for a Greenman mask from a man in Shutesbury - what are the odds? Yet I saw this as an affirmation, because synchronicities, for me,  are increasingly about guidance.  They are living metaphors that, like dreams, can be touchstones as we wander through the forests and deserts of our lives.

I also recently posted that, en route to Starwood, I  received an email from Prema Dasara opening the possibility of going to Bali this winter to create 21 sacred masks for her "21 Praises to Tara" Mandala Dances.  It's now August 2, and it's going to happen now!  As soon as I return to Tucson I'll begin the research I will need to prepare for this wonderful project. 

Jewell didn't have much time for me yesterday - she met me  wearing black.  Her best friend, as she described her, her "spiritual partner" had died just 9 days previously.  Jewell was preparing to  leave for a few days to grieve.  Still, she was delighted to see my books about the Goddesses and Spider Woman, and I was happy to be able to show her what had followed those experiences with her so many years past.  She is a true mentor to me - I was pleased to be able to honor her.

Courtesy:  www.concord.org/~btinker/family_tree/joan_perkins/tara_show/tara.html

Jewell's friend who had passed was artist Joan Bredin Price.  It was she who initiated Jewell into Tara practice - and although I had never heard of Joan, she was well known for her beautiful devotional Buddhist paintings - among them, the 21 Aspects of Tara!.  In fact, the portfolios and  paintings were soon to be sent to a museum in Colorado for a memorial show, and what portfolios were left  of the collection would be sold there. 

Hearing this left me speechless.   Jewell was able to get one of these portfolios for me, which I now have as a treasured resource for my future work, not to mention a blessing from an artist  I wish I had been able to meet.  Here's the Circle  of the Goddess.  Thank you Jewell, thank you Joan, thank You Tara.  I will do my best.

Here's the link to Joan Bredin Price's paintings and writings about the 21 Praises to Tara.  I won't be able to reproduce any of these paintings on this Blog as Jewell informs me there are copyright issues with her estate.

http://www.bredinprice.com/galleries/taras/taras_thumbs.asp

Reflections on Synchronicity:

For me,  because I'm not good at remembering dreams, and because I am, frankly, too lazy to meditate effectively (although my art practice is a form of meditation for me).......synchronicities are a real form of guidance.  I can theorize on what they  are, but really, physicists like David Peat, writers like the MacGregors, and psychologists beginning with  Carl Young...have done a much better job of it than I can ever begin to touch, so I'm content to experience and record synchronicities for myself, and because I believe it's important to share the grace we receive in our lives.  Because as we see the Circles we move in, we see how truly interconnected we all are as people, as living planet, as souls.   Only joy can flow from that realization.  

And, I might add, in my experience, spirit expressing through dream and through synchronicity has a poetic twist and a great sense of humor.  Leaving Jewel and driving north to meet my old friend Ro for coffee, I remembered that when I met Ro some 18 years ago  she was the Director of the now defunct "GAIA'S WEB" center in Brattleboro, Vermont. Alright!   Weavers unite! 

And it's good to touch Vermont soil again, to breathe the sweet air, to see the beloved Green Mountains.  I left my heart here long ago.  Circles.

    WHITE TARA

            I went to meet that savage creature
            I have run from, lifetime after lifetime
            the shape within the shadows
            a creature of smoke and bared fangs.

            I went to meet it at last

            It took me into its vast arms,
            and I kissed its terrible face.

            And I thought I would die.
            I thought I would be swallowed,
            but I was not swallowed.

            For that creature I thought
            would devour me
            returned my embrace.

            I looked into eyes
            soft and liquid, filled with tears
            the eyes of a lonely child,
            my own lost child,
            my brother, my sister,
            my lover, my mother.

            And with great tenderness
            Fear lay upon my breast, and slept.

            What bound me for so long
            flowed out of me,
            my heart expanded,
            and I found I could hold

            the world entire
            in my open arms.

            I will make my arms a circle
            I will make my heart a circle

            I will walk all my sorrows,
            all my fears Home.

            I will walk
            circles around them
            until at last I find
            that bright and spacious center

            Come with me. Take my hand.
            We will do it together

            We will walk Home.

                         (1997)

***

About Gather the Women Global Matrix

Syncronicities,and Touchstones............

 

To me, synchronicities are touchstones, they point the way in the forest, usually indicating that I’m on the right path. I’ve never “followed” a synchronicity and ended up bored or in unfortunate circumstances. Instead they seem to reveal or emphasize what is most beautiful, meaningful, or helpful. I was honored when writers Trish and Rob MacGregor shared this story below on their wonderful Blog about Synchronicity a few days ago, and take the liberty of re-printing it below. 

 

I began this summer's long wandering back to the East Coast, and re-visiting places and people that have been very important to me, as a kind of "soul retrieval", asking all along the highway "what should I be doing now, at this phase of my life?".  I've been richly, richly answered even as I continue to wind up and down the asphalt (currently enroute to Shutesbury, Mass. to visit a  shamanic healer, and old friend, Jewel at The Source , her Center for Earth based spirituality and healing.....in many ways I feel I'm driving "full circle" indeed. Ironic that I should read the article below just as I finish my coffee at a hotel, and prepare to visit another Shaman, one who has been very important to me, and who I haven't seen in 17 years......more on this later.  This is a summer of synchronicity, ever since I got on the road, and it's a pleasure to share here the MacGregor's insights.

********************

 When Arizona sculptor and artist Lauren Raines was going through a divorce, she heard about a shamanic practitioner in Crownsville, Maryland, who had studied with Sandra Ingerman and was also an energy healer and herbalist. She was at a point in her life when she was “very open to anything,” and went to him for a soul retrieval.

This shamanic practice helps regain a soul that has become trapped, disconnected, or lost through some sort of trauma. Depending on the circumstances, a divorce can certainly qualify as a trauma.

“He was very business-like,  and without knowing anything about me, put on his drums tape and headset, had me lie down next to him, and we tranced together. At the end of the session he blew soul fragments back into my body, and we talked about what he ‘saw.’ We talked about cutting the cords from my ex-husband and my former community (I had moved away). He concluded the session by telling me: You’ll know it’s all over when you see a magenta flower that looks like a cosmos, and a terra cotta angel.

 Eight months later, Lauren crossed the country with her cat and all her possessions loaded into her van. She was determined to move back to Berkeley, California, and start a new life. She had decided she would sleep in her van if necessary until she found somewhere to live. “I began my adventure as soon as I arrived with a visit to a coffee house I last visited 20 years earlier. Almost immediately I was greeted by a long ago friend, Joji Yokoi, who recognized me, and bought me a cup of coffee, and offered me a place to stay. I didn’t have to spend a single night in my van. When I walked into his living room, there was a huge photograph of a magenta cosmos flower hanging above his fireplace!”

A few months after that, Lauren answered an ad for a roommate. “I walked into a house with an altar – and in the center was a terra cotta angel. Judy Foster was one of the founding members of Reclaiming and a colleague of my heroine, Starhawk, whose writings were the foundation of my MFA thesis more than a decade earlier. Needless to say, just like that, my new life began and I ended up working with the very people I most wanted to work with, never having had to even try! The shaman was right in his prediction.”

The shaman gave Lauren two very specific bits of information about markers that would signal her transition period was finished – the magenta cosmos flower and the terra cotta angel. How was he able to see something so precise, for a woman he had just met?

“Shamans are inspired visionaries who are able to access information through their invisible allies for the benefit of  themselves, their families, and their communities. This process is known as divination, and it is usually accomplished through ceremony and ritual,” wrote Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wesselman in Awakening to the Spirit World.  “Through their relationship with these transpersonal forces, shamans are able to retrieve lost power and restore it to its original owners…”  So through the trance state that the shaman and Lauren entered together, he was able to retrieve power that Lauren had lost and was allowed to see the most probable path her future would take.

 From http://www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets/  July 30, 2013