"Black Madonna" 2013

"Black Madonna" 2013, mixed media

I seem to be fascinated with the Black Madonna, and if I was Catholic, I would undoubtedly join one of the many, very ancient and traditional, Pilgrimages to the Black Madonna that occur throughout Europe, including Poland, Spain, France, and elsewhere.   Many believe that the Black Madonna has its roots in Pre-Christian worship of Isis, portrayed with Her child Horus throughout the Roman world and, of course, Egypt. 


But I believe the origins may go back even farther. 

The Black Madonnas are almost always associated with Sacred Sites, places that contain a holy well, spring, or are associated with a sacred cave.  In other words, places of numinous power within the earth, places that ancient peoples knew to enhance visionary experience, heal, raise energy, enhance fertility, and facilitate communion with the spiritual realms. 

The earliest representation of the human figure, going back as far as 40,000 years and possibly farther...........are the ubiquitous so-called "Venus"  figures, such as the famous "Venus of Willendorf", as well as representations of a stylized vulva found in visual iconography.    In the  2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams  ,   Werner Herzog  followed an exclusive expedition into the nearly inaccessible Chauvet cave in France, which houses the  most ancient visual art known from the upper Paleolithic era.  Archeo/mythologist Mirrium Dexter pointed out that the only human image within the site is a female lower torso, or vulva form......the bull image was painted above it a later time.  Although it's never commented on in the movie, or in most discussions of the cave,  Dexter suggested that the  cave represented the womb/tomb where the magic of rebirth occurs, and by the act of honoring and representing  the animal powers which were both allies and sustenance, they were offering them for re-birth within the cave/womb of the Great Mother.

So perhaps my sculpture is a contemporary echo of that image, the "Black Madonna" in Her most primal form, roots and source and life radiating out from Her belly, Her breasts.  This is a Diety that brings us back to our own very primal roots, reverence for the Earth Mother that births us, sustains us, and takes us back to be re-born. 

Another aspect of the Black Madonna to me, which of course I so often refer back to, is the element of "composting" (which isn't unrelated to "rebirth").  Composting is a biological process of renewal, and I believe it's a soul process as well. 

"I do what the poet Gary Snyder calls "composting" — You let everything you do/learn/think/read/feel sink down inside yourself and stay in the dark, and then (years later maybe) something entirely new grows up out of that rich darkness. This takes patience."

Ursula K. Leguin

2005

It's believed by many that the earliest pilgrimages on the "Camino" in Spain were made to the "Black Madonna of Compostella", a very ancient effigy. Compostella comes from the same root word as "compost". Compost is the fertile soil created from rotting organic matter, the "Black Matter". The alchemical soup to which everything living returns, and is continually resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new form. Matrix/Creatrix. Matter. Mater. Mother.

"From this compost -- life and light will emerge. When the pilgrims came to the Cathedral at Compostella they were being 'composted' in a sense. After emergence from the dark confines of the cathedral and the spirit -- they were ready to flower, they were ready to return home with their spirits lightened."

~~ Jay Weidner

Photos from the All Souls Parade, Tucson, 2013

 

Some wonderful photos by Kathleen Dreier of the recent Dia de Los Muertes Parade in Tucson!

https://www.facebook.com/EsensPhotographybyKathleenDreier

All images © Esens Photography by Kathleen Dreier

Meet the Anti-Fracking Nuns

I was inspired by this short video about a group of nuns in Kentucky who are fighting to save their land, their "Mother House" against "eminent domain" of the oil companies.  I'd like to see everyone showing their spirit, and spiritual committment to their land, against the corporate "eminent domain" that is destructive everywhere.

http://youtu.be/UQY5NrvnLNw

Another "Odd Eyed" Cat

Here are some wonderful photos that I was recently turned on to, by a Japanese photographer who documented the relationship between her 88 year old Grandmother and her cat.

Since I have two "Van Cats" myself, I couldn't help but love these photos.


http://www.viralforest.com/misao-fukumaru/

The Feast of Samhain, 2013

Feast of Samhain, 2012

I'll be celebrating the "The Feast of  Samhain" again (November 1st), with a place set at the table for the Guest of Honor, the Ancestors and the Beloved Dead.  As last year, it will be a candlelit night of sharing stories of those who have passed away but remain in our hearts, our memory, and our bloodlines. What is remembered lives. 

Decor will include, of course, pumpkins, to commemorate also the Last Celtic Harvest Festival (there are 3), All Hallows Night, before going into the darkness of Winter.  And November 1st is also the Witches New Year, as well as Dia de Los Muertos, something widely celebrated here in the Southwest, and in Tucson, with a famous parade (and just in case you don't believe the Spirits come to join the Celebration, check out Ginny's "Orb" photo below from last years parade.

Photo by Ginny Moss

I don't feel that I can say anything more eloquent about this High Holy Day than I have in previous years, so I copy below musing from a previous year..........and also a post I did on Dia de Los Muertos can be found HERE.  I  Wish all a very wonderful Samhain!

Mariachi Wedding from All Soul's Procession, Tucson

© dominic arizona bonuccelli | AZFOTO

 I remember  the Spiral Dance, which I participated in a number of times in San Francisco (I created the Masks of the Goddess for the 20th Annual Spiral Dance).  I also brought this beautiful ritual to Tucson in 2000 with the help of Priestess  Macha NightMare.   When one has danced the Spiral Dance and come face to face with each participant in the course of the dance, you leave changed.  

November 1st has been called the "Witches New Year", and what comes to mind. of course, is the universal image of the  "Witch and her broom". The Broom is associated with many folk traditions of "sweeping away the old bad energies" - purification rituals for the home and Hearth (Heart). Traditionally this was the time to celebrate the last of three Celtic Harvest Festivals before going into the dark of Winter.   It is the closing of the old year,  a time to honor the ancestors, the harvest, and the gifts of the year past.  When I lay out the Feast, I always imagine many generations laying out the last fresh apples, the treasured honey mead reserved only for special occasions, and toasts raised  to the invisible ones,  their plates heaped high as well. Inherent in this celebration was a profound respect for the Spiral wheel of the year,  cycling the natural cycles of death and re-birth.

Here is my gratitude to the year that is soon to pass away, and to all of those who have passed away from my life as well, people who have gifted me and created with me and loved me, and I them.  Blessed Be!

Sometimes we don't realize, because things manifest through time, the ways that our wishes have often been granted.  Thinking of the Spiral Dance, and Reclaiming, I remember another one of those stories of Grace and Magic, and want to tell it, although, as all true stories are, it's part of a much larger story that is woven into the fabric of my life, and lots of other lives.  I think when we tell  these stories we get a glimpse of how seamless "reality" really is.  And Magic is always afoot, although I don't believe it has anything to do with wands.  I think it's much more about Weaving and being Woven.

"Gaia" (1986)

When I was in graduate school, I began reading "The Spiral Dance" by Starhawk.  It was such a revelation, the way she spoke about the Goddess, and a theology of Immanence.  It became the central inspiration for one of my shows while in Grad school.  When I graduated I went to live in New York, and married, and then in 1997 got divorced.  My ex and I were very involved with the Pagan community on the East Coast, and when we divorced I felt like I lost my community.   In those days I was doing Renaissance Faires, so I packed up my van and became a nomad.

I had a booth in the fall of that year at the Maryland Renaissance Faire, and I happened to hear of a holistic health practitioner who also did shamanic work and "soul retrievals" in the area.  I figured it couldn't hurt, so I made an appointment.  We lay down on the floor, he "journeyed" for me, and "blew my soul pieces" back into my chest.  I didn't know what to think, but as he described his impressions, among them he told me that there were two things that would show me that my old life, were over.  One was a magenta flower, a Cosmos.  The other was a little terra cotta angel.

In November I packed up and went to Arizona to spend the winter in my trailer.  By March I was  wondering where to go next.  I had recently discovered the Internet, so I looked up just about everything I was interested in - Goddess, ritual, mask theatre, transpersonal psychology, etc.  Every single time it came up Berkeley, Marin Country, or San Francisco!   The clincher was when I was looking for the email for something called the Center for Symbolic Studies near New Paltz, New York.  I knew Stephen and Robin Larsen, and wanted to get a recommendation from them. Up came the Center for Symbolic Studies in Berkeley, California!  And the Center was the creation of a Jungian psychologist named Robert H. Hopcke  who had just written a book called There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives!

Well, that was enough for me, so I packed up the van when the show ended,  and headed west to California, back to the Berkeley I remembered so well but hadn't seen in over 20 years.  I decided I would sleep in my van if I had to, until I could find a place to stay (and fortunately for me, I had no idea of how hard it can be to find a place to stay in Berkeley now.....)

Arriving finally, I looked around for a familiar landmark, and found the Cafe Mediterranean.  I didn't know anyone anymore in Berkeley, but for old times sake I parked the van nearby and went in for my first Cappachino since the 70's.  As I stood in line, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said "Are you Lauren Raine?"  It was my old friend Joji!  I couldn't believe it.  He bought me a cup of coffee, asked me where I was staying, I told him I had just arrived and planned on moving back to Berkeley, and he invited to stay at his house where he had an extra room.  I didn't have to sleep in my car for even one night!

Judy Foster

And when I went to his house that evening, in his living room was a big, framed close-up photograph of a magenta Cosmos.

When, two months later, I found a room to rent with Judy Foster, the first thing I encountered when I walked into her house was an altar with a terra cotta angel.  And as it turned out, Judy was one of the founders of Reclaiming and the Spiral Dance, and a close friend of Starhawk.   The universe put me exactly where I needed to go, a Spiral Dance.

"Handle With Care" Synchronicity

I don't know what's in the stars, but it's been a month of "everything is going wrong".  Or another way to put it would be that it's been one of those "lessons and learning experiences" months.

I returned to Tucson to find my mother with health problems.  A tooth went bad and had to be extracted.  The roommate/caretaker was impossible to live with, and I had to very gingerly and diplomatically find a new home for her, which ended up being expensive, although it ended well.

Or so I thought until I learned that the room she was in, the one she always had the windows and curtains closed in with the in-room air conditioner running..........was the same room she was chain smoking in, because she didn't want me to know she smoked.  My best room now smells like a bar................ever try to get deeply embedded cigarette smoke out of a room you rent to people who are often sensitive to smell?  It's an ordeal that involves painting every surface with a special sealant, and then re-painting, as well as renting an expensive ozone cleanser machine. Whew..........

So  last week I was surprised when I went to my car (in a parking lot) to see a pile of latex gloves all around the front of my car.  Latex gloves?  I picked them up, not being a person who wastes things, threw the mass into the back of the car, drove off.  But the sight of that pile of gloves on the parking lot by my car was so strange I couldn't help wondering if it had some kind of "symbolic value". 

A week ago a guest arrived who was going to stay a month in my guesthouse in the back.  I've always had such friendly experiences with the people who've stayed there.  But as soon as she moved in things got strange.  She complained, complained, complained, she sulked, she glared at me when she walked by, she said the neighbors were intrusive and noisy.  Since she paid in advance  I bent over backwards to appease her. I apologized several times for neighborhood noise.   I gave her 1/4th of the rent back in cash "for her inconvenience".  I told her I'd refund all if she wanted to find something else, and was told she had no where to go and was "stuck".

Then she took to blasting a radio toward my fence, to "get even" with the neighbors (who are very quiet). It took some talking down and  placating to deal with this, in the course of which I learned that she believes she is stalked by an invisible enemy, that no one believes her, and "they" get to her wherever she goes, including putting poison in her car every night.  After I talked her into calmness (and got the radio off), I retired feeling very sad at the endless suffering of this woman, who needed meds and help I could not provide,  and also frightened for myself, my other guests,  and my property.

With much careful effort, I managed to get her to leave without violence - handle with care, indeed, just like nurses must handle patients who are "infectious".  And I learned something about myself, and the need to not react and become "infected" by her emotional and psychological insanity.  Gloves are to avoid "infection", which means, reaction.

Last, I've spent the past day cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, the space this sad woman inhabited, which she left in bad shape, along with the challenging room the clandestine smoker left behind.    The gloves came in handy not only as metaphor, but literally. 

Terry Pratchett - Choosing to Die

 

"It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life"

"The trouble with having an open mind is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."

 

Terry Pratchett

I have always loved Terry Pratchett, who, like Ursula Leguin, has provided me with such wonderful worlds to investigate, laugh about, and learn from in his prolific writings.  He  is so beloved in England that he became Sir Terry Pratchett. Sir Terry Pratchett is the acclaimed creator of the global bestselling Discworld series. He’s the author of fifty bestselling books and his novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen. He’s the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood.  In December 2007, Sir Terry announced that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and he has campaigned and donated $1 million to Alzheimer’s Research UK.

In this documentary Terry Pratchett discusses his Alzheimer's and how it is slowly eroding his life and his talent. He meets others with medical conditions which will inevitably lead to a prolonged, painful and above all undignified death and asks the question "is it better to end things early?" There are few answers here. Pratchett has spent his life inquiring into every cultural assumption, and his film is no less a genuine mission of inquiry as he faces his own situation.  He takes a frank look at a subject most shy away from.

I try to keep my blog on the light side, or at least, the political/mystical side, but sometimes I don't know how to write away my personal troubles.  For five years now, my brother Glenn has been in a vegetative state in a nursing home, the result of a brain stem stroke in 2008.  I am also responsible for my mother, who, thankfully, is in an assisted living facility, and slips away into a cheerful, if confused, dementia.  Although I comfort myself with the idea that "brain dead" means no consciousness, and he's not in his body anymore,  to be honest, Glenn's one good eye opens, sometimes you would swear he's looking at you, his mouth moves.   How do you deal with that, the thought that he may be conscious sometimes?  If he is, I can't help him.  My other brother will not legally allow me to remove life support, and if I pull the plug, I would become a person who is legally considered a murderer.  And so I go talk to him, tell him he can leave this world, tell him not to be afraid.  I wish I was a medium, or had the faith of a priest sometimes.

 Sir Terry's film is somewhat related, and a hard film to watch.  Most people will turn away from having to think about such things, and I don't blame them.   The Romans believed in honorable suicide - when someone felt their meaningful life was over, they would hold a party, invite their friends and family, drink the best wine and favorite food, reminisce and give away gifts.  And then they would slit their wrists, leaving this world among the people and things they best loved.  For myself, it seems a much better idea than to end up like the people in my brother's ward.  I had a friend who, faced with incurable cancer, chose to take all of his saved up pain meds.  I respect his choice, and my only regret is that he wasn't able to gather his friends around to say goodbye when he did it.   I have my own living will, and perhaps, if I'm  faced with something like Terry Pratchett,  that might be my choice as well. I don't know.

http://youtu.be/slZnfC-V1SY