The 100 Friends Project

I need a counter to my Holiday blues (which have been a long and hopefully transformative process this year) and I would like to introduce my friend Marc Gold, and his 100 Friends Project.

Marc is an amazingly energetic psychologist and teacher from El Cerrito, California, who now spends half of his year travelling around the world giving money to needy individuals and small organizations, and half in the U.S. fundraising. On his website, you can learn directly about the people who receive the funds people donate. In his own words, the project began in 1989,

"When I visited India for the first time. I met a Tibetan woman in the Himalayas who had terrible ear infections, and I was able save her life with antibiotics that cost about $1.00. For another $30 I purchased a hearing aid that restored her hearing. I was shocked to learn something so important could be accomplished with so little. I began raising money among my friends, as much as people were able to donate. Then, in 1992, I traveled to India with over $2,200 in donations, with the goal of distributing it as directly and intelligently as possible. The rest, as they say, is history. "

It's so important now, with the onslaught of despair and orchestrated fear in the media, to remember that there are many, many heroes like Marc, making a big difference. He's inspired me to travel next year myself, and I may be doing volunteer work or even starting a handcrafts business for women's products in the course of my travels. Thank you, Marc.

And as a further counter to the cynicism I'm too often guilty of myself, I copy below from the 100 Friends Website Marc's network page, in case anyone else may be inspired to do something similar to what he's done. So, wishing all of us a Global and Merry Christmas!


Tips & Hints from Marc Gold: How to Change the World While Traveling

How do you prepare? Get a lot of education about the place you're going to -- through reading, watching videos, talking to people, surfing web sites. Learn about the area's history, politics, and geography. Get there with as much knowledge as possible. Learn 20 phrases in that language. People appreciate that, and it goes a long way toward making connections. Do special research into the problems of that country. Find out what the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are doing. Meet with them when you get there.


How do you raise money? Talk to people. Write a letter (see sample letter) and send it to everyone you know. If you don't have 100 acquaintances, so what? Do you have 40? Start a web page. It's all about making the time and having the guts to follow through. Become a non-profit [this is actually more affordable than you might realize. Create a newsletter. Have photos to send, or to show on your web page. The most important part of raising money? ASK for it.


How do you know whom to donate to? You meet trustworthy people, and you keep going back to them. Meet with people at NGOs once you're in the country, and ask them to connect you to good people who are especially worthy or needy. Be cool. Hang out for a number of days. Get to know people before you start talking about money. Trust your instincts. It's easy for money to go into the wrong hands. One family member can keep it from the others, or it can introduce jealousy. You learn as you go. The longer you do it, the stronger your connections will be, the more you'll know whom to trust -- and they'll connect you with honest, reliable, deserving people in the community. Do a web search for NGOs or NGO directories in the region you're planning to visit. Visit the World Organization of Non-Governmental Organizations (WANGO) or Taking It Global.

Here are some links from other "Global Ambassadors" that are very helpful:

http://www.ethicaltraveler.com/profiles.php
http://www.intentional-traveler.com/index.html
http://www.theculturedtraveler.com/Archives/Nov2004/Lead_Story.htm
http://www.responsibletravel.com/Copy/Copy100061.htm
http://www.sustainabletravelinternational.org/ecodirectory/responsibletravel.html
http://www.adventure-life.com/travel_details/sustainable.html
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/columns/traveller_archive/2003jul30/index.htm
http://www.sustainabletravel.org/case_studies.htm
http://www.imaginative-traveller.com/planet/projects.asp
http://www.backpacknation.org/
http://www.studenttraveler.com/mag/05-04/scoop.php

(Marc's website is Copyright (c) 2004 Judy Wolf )

Pax Gaia - the Winter Solstice

Blessings to all at the Sun's Return!  May this year be a year of Balance.

Sig Lonegren and Geomancy

I ran across the Mid Atlantic Geomancy site while surfing the Web and was delighted to rediscover the mind, friends, and research of SIG LONEGREN http://www.geomancy.org/

I met Sig in 1982, when he serendipitously set me on a spiritual quest that ultimately defined my art's quest, and my religious affiliations. It's funny how we are led, in the most unlikely ways, to the teachers we need.

I was living at the time in Putney, Vermont. I had a little crafts business, and was specializing in bars, dancing, and drinking too much. One fine Saturday morning I headed down to the Putney Inn from my studio, and was amazed to see all kinds of interesting looking people wandering around the Inn doing interesting things.

Some of them had tables with books, and were from NEARA (the New England Archeological Research Association). Some had weird looking pendulums. On the lawn in the front of the building was a circle of people. I liked their energy, so I hung around, curious. Within 15 minutes or so, a van arrived, and a very energetic man in blue jeans with a pendulum (Sig) gathered the group, and without knowing I wasn't included, ushered me into the van with them, even though I had no idea what they were doing, or where they were going.

It seemed like fun, I thought Sig was cute, it was one of those beautiful Vermont days when the land was inhaling and exhaling an intoxicating, mysterious green breath, and I was hungover anyway. So I went.

For the next few hours we visited three different stone chambers around Putney, two hidden on Putney Mountain, one virtually in the back yard of a local resident.

If you've never heard of Barry Fell, or "America B.C.", or "America's Stonehedge" in New Hampshire, or read any books about ancient geomantic sites (like Earthmind by John Steele (who I later met at a symposium at Rutgers), or Manitou, by Mavor and Dix) - then you probably have no idea what I'm talking about.

There are over 500 prehistoric sites, from cairns and underground stone chambers very similar to sites in Ireland and Great Britain, to astronomical sites marked, like Stonehenge, with huge stones to mark the positions of the solstices, equinoxes, and other celestial events, scattered throughout New England, many concentrated along the Connecticut River. Barry Fell and others believed them to be the remnants of a long ago Phoenician/Celtic colony that preceeded the European, or even Viking, visits to the "new lands". Others, like Mavor and Dix, argue that they were religious and ceremonial centers for native Americans, some of them still maintained until well into Colonial times.

But archeology wasn't what this little group was exploring. We were exploring earth energies, and Sig gave us all divining rods ("L" shaped coathangers) to determine the location of the leys* to see how each site was built on a place of geomantic intensity. I was absolutely flabbergasted even though I had never done this before, and didn't even "believe" in it. It just worked, the rods bent and swayed when they were in my hand. In time, a good dowser can experience his or her divining rods much as antenna, as sensors.

To continue my story, a year later a group met (I put it together) at one of these very sites to watch the Solstice sun rise through a chamber that was aligned with it perfectly. 13 of us gathered, and although we knew nothing about ritual, we did know that this was a powerful and magical place, that we were sitting where ancient people once sat to watch the sun rise over the green mountains, participating in the significance of the event. That was my first ritual, long before I ever heard of Gaia, pagans, goddesses, shamans, or anything similar.

Who would have thought a chance meeting would lead me on a life long journey?
But sometimes it works out that way.

George Carlin on Pace, Progress and Love

A Message by George Carlin was sent to me today. I found him eloquent, reflecting on my earlier entry in this Blog about "Pace, Progress, and Hecate"(November), and felt like copying it here.

A Message by George Carlin

The paradox of our time in history is that we spend more,but have less, buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We write more, but learn less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait.

Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever. Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind. AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. If you don't send this to at least 8 people....Who cares?

George Carlin

Just the other day I was talking with a friend who had lived in Tempe, Arizona. Tempe is the home of ASU, a mega-university, and is part of the vast sprawling urban complex that Phoenix has become. She lived there in the early '70's - my memories go back to the '50's, when I was a child.

We were talking about the "Tempe Beach". Actually, I was doing the talking, because she never heard of it - but I remember the "Beach" vividly. Back then, Tempe was just a little college town, and in the '50's, only rich people (very few of whom lived in Tempe) could afford a private swimming pool. The Tempe Beach was a huge public swimming pool that took up a whole block, and in the summer, when it was too hot to swim in the day, as soon as the sun went down families arrived with towels in hand, to swim, and eat hot dogs and ice cream from stands at the "Beach". It was a riotous scene of kids in plastic swimming caps and boxer shorts leaping in and out of the pool, a legion of life guards, flirtatious college students posing for each other, and young families socializing at picnic tables.

The "Beach" is long gone, and public swimming pools like that are pretty much long gone as well. Private swimming pools are very common now, and people can swim with all the "privacy" they could want in their own back yard, along with spending a lot of time and money maintaining that privacy (not to mention the enormously wasteful water use all this privilege of "privacy" requires). But I doubt, even with the obsession Americans seem to have with insulating themselves thoroughly from contact with "strangers" - that there aren't many people like myself, who would take the color, fun, and crowds of the "Beach", if they could still get it.

The demise of the "Tempe Beach" reminds me of the demise of the "diners" my 90 year old mother still remembers fondly (at 90, she does a lot of time shifting, and I think the faces and tastes of a diner in New York 60 years ago are more vivid to her now than anything on her morning tv tray) - breakfast, for her as a young working woman, involved a whole community of people. A restaurant was a bunch of people, cooperating to share an experience called "breakfast". Her eggs came with a waitress, cooks, dishwashers, and the regulars she got to know by virtue of eating there regularly.

For me at least, a disposible egg mac muffin and a throwaway coffee alone in the car on the way to work.......is no good tradeoff. Not just environmentally, and nutritionally, but emotionally and psychically as well.

As I write, I sit in the Epic Cafe, with its free wi fi,. Most of the little round tables here have laptops on them and people emersed in cyber space (like me). Some of the people have earplugs on, and not a few have their cellphones on the table. They're doing business, schoolwork, whatever. I don't know how I feel about it. I suppose, because I'm here, I've given up and joined the parade.

THE MASKS OF THE GODDESS - Benefit Auction

Dear Friends,

Since 1999, my "Masks of the Goddess" have traveled across the U.S. for exhibits, rituals, and community performances. The Goddesses have appeared in theatres in Sebastopol and Tucson, in the woods at the Starwood Festival, at the Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors in New York City, at Syracuse University's "Matrilineage Festival" and the Mask Symposium at the University of Southern Illinois, and many others. In 2006 it was my privilege to see the full collection reunited at the 27th Annual Spiral Dance at Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco.

Now new projects call, and it's time for the masks to find new homes. So I'm offering them, through an auction, to you. I've purposefully made the prices low because I want to see them go to people who will continue their mythic journey. I'm also delighted to offer 30% of the proceeds to benefit The Independent Eye - the magical theatre ensemble of Elizabeth Fuller and Conrad Bishop, so they can develop their new initiative in visionary puppetry, "The Mythic Kitchen". (http://www.independenteye.org/)

The auction begins November 27, and lasts until January 27. To learn more, or bid on a mask in the collection, enter my gallery at http://www.rainewalker.com/ and visit the Auction page. Thank you for your support over the years - I'm so grateful for all we've shared. Metaquiesin.

Lauren Raine

Linda Johnston as " Bridgit" (photograph courtesy Thomas Lux)

Kathy Hutaluhta - "Cornmother Blessing" (Photo courtesy Ileya Stewart)


Mana Youngbear as "Amaterasu" (photo by Ileya Stewart)

November is also Thanksgiving.......

(Illuminated paper sculpture by Catherine Nash)

I have failed, in the course of pursuing my threads and poetics about November, to add that November is also the month of Thanksgiving, at least, in the United States it is. The end of November. And that makes sense to me ~ how can we talk about the closing of the year, going "into the dark", and honoring our ancestral strands ~ without, finally, arriving at GRATITUDE? For all that has been and been given, the gift of life not the least, the tapestry we each are woven into, and weavers as well?

Perhaps Gratitude is the soil, the enzyme, the only appropriate medium to plant any seed in.


PERSEPHONE'S FEAST DAY

When all the names are gone
when there is nothing left
for memory to feed upon
November hides
an unborn rhythm
of bells.

Perhaps all the wastes
of love and time
ferment their healing, here
in these Nigrado depths,
becoming at last Albedo,
the medicine.

There is no valor today in rooting
among decomposing fragments
of so many lives ~

I offer now bread, red fruit, red wine.
To life. Come to the table, all.
Here is a rich conversation
harvested from the last
living garden.

A dappled pear, an apple, a pomegranate.
A butterfly in it's chrysalis, winged, moist,
the slow rebirth of color
deep in the depths of this dream.

The weathervanes will turn again.
The wheat has new life in it yet.
The blessing will still be given.


Lauren Raine, 2005

Reflections on Pace, Progress, and Hecate

Thought Woman Weaving the World into Being  (2007)

"They move too fast to see more than the surface glitter of a life too swift to be real. They are assailed by too many new things ever to find the depths in the old before it has gone by. The rush of life past them they call "progress", though it is too rapid for them to move with it. Man remains the same, baffled and astonished, with a heap of new things around him but gone before he knows them. Men may live many sorts of lives, and this they call "opportunity", and believe opportunity good without ever examining any one of those lives to know if it is good. "

           ........"Lord Dorn", from ISLANDIA, a novel by Austin Tappan Wright, 1942

The above quote lit up the page I was reading, and I felt moved enough to forsake my electric blanket, and come to the computer to copy it on my blog.

It's 4:00 am, I'm reading the book DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD - Thoughts on Words, Women and Places, by Ursula Kroeber Leguin. I have a cold or virus, and a recent conversation with my friend Barbara of San Francisco, about the dark, and menopause, and the crone Goddess Hecate, Guide through the Underworld, lie in bed with me, not entirely comfortable companions.

Now what does this comment have to do with Hecate, and my personal journey through the month of November, the month of endings, celebration of the dead, composting of the year, leaves, souls? What does this have to do with the Saturnine retreat from just about everything, including my own creative process, that I've been going through ever since I returned to Tucson from my summer Fellowship in Michigan? Well, a lot. 

I see a long and winding spiral developing here, and I'm going to follow it down and around, imagining in my mind the thoughts, threads and connections similar to brown leaves, blowing across a dark November pavement, forming some winterborne chrysalis, a pattern not yet under the snow, but soon, very soon it will be. Not to be revealed or read until the snow (which has not yet fallen) thaws in life's spring resurgence.

I love the quote above, from a popular 1940's Utopian novel, because its character, Lord Dorn, says it so well. Personally, I can't keep up anymore. I find myself retreating from the continual "stimulation" , hiding out, needing to get as far away sometimes into the wilderness as I can. 

What I feel a loss of is "depth experience".  As our world accelerates, we find it harder and harder, I believe, to touch things. To touch the depths and nuances of the stories of our lives, to touch each other, to relish and taste what we have within the onslaught of "more, and more" - to touch the Earth and the layers of lives that preceded us (although we carry them within). I think the pace of our lives has taken away the time needed, the cyclical time reflected in all organic systems...........to "compost". To rot, fall apart, re-turn into the dark, re-form, be re-formed by the organic, collective forces we are woven into in the cycles of the planet, and the mysterious turns of our souls.

"In Western traditions" author Jay Weidner writes, "there was once a vast pilgrimage that took place in Europe. Pilgrims made their way towards the town of Compostella in Spain, where an ancient effigy of the BLACK MADONNA is housed. The word Compostella comes from the same root word as compost. COMPOST is the living, black material that is made from rotting fruits, grains and other organic matter. 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."

Many Roman gardens used to have a special shrine devoted to the morose god, Saturn. A place, it was understood, one went to be alone, to brood, perhaps to grieve. As I get older, and my personal energy reserves are more concentrated and precious, I have come to believe that giving meloncholy its due, discovering what the gifts of depression are, taking time to experience the depths revealed in Saturn's solitary corner of the garden - is essential to nourishing, indeed sustaining, our spirits. Just as Romans understood the need to have a shadow-dappled seat dedicated to Saturn in the gardens of their lives, I think a seat devoted to Hecate, goddess of the underworld, in a contemporary garden, might be similar in design and purpose.

So who is Hecate? She's the crone aspect of the triple Earth Mother Demeter/ Persephone/ Hecate. Like Saturn, she is old. An old woman, past menopause, past many life passages, well aquainted with various portals that separate these seeming doors. A Gatekeeper, and a light bearer. She is part of the whole that is the Goddess, and she is within each of us.

"In us is also a dark angel (Hekate was also called "angelos") - a consciousness (she was also called "Phosphoros") that shines in the dark and witnesses such events because it is already aware of them a priori.........Part of us is not dragged down but always lives there, as Hekate is partly an underworld Goddess."

The Dream and the Underworld, James Hillman ***

As Barbara pointed out (vehemently enough to demand I write it down, but after all, she did invoke and perform Hecate in 2001.....) - Hecate is the patroness of women (and men) who are no longer producing hormones. What are hormones? Well, from Gaia's point of view, they're very potent drugs that induce us to want to reproduce, and thus carry on the evolutionary experiment, braving the painful and even sometimes lethal consequences of childbearing. When estrogen is gone, as I've heard so many women say, many of life's illusions seem to peel away. Veils that have muffled all kinds of personal illusions, beliefs, and ideals fall away ..........and there you are. Revealed. Clarified. Pissed off that you've wasted so damn much of your precious time and energy on such nonsense, such dramas, such theatre, outraged and shamed that you were so stupid, immature, brainwashed........human.

You begin to see the storylines more deeply, the threads that weave the plot. Just recently, for example, I've painfully re-experienced many moments in my mother's marriage to my father, understood at last how trapped she felt, how he enjoyed humiliating her, and how she felt she had to call enduring his emotional cruelty "love" in order to emotionally survive. I see, of course, that I've carried on some of the same story in my own life, the same blinds. Time to "fall apart" has helped me to find compassion for my mother, and myself.  "Falling apart" is often "Re-assembling".

Occasionally, you also notice you are wise in your genuine, candid, and almost perfect Ignorance.
Maybe Hecate, in her mask and role as an old woman, standing so close to the final portals of this world, moving freely into the veiled realms - may be said to represent the SOUL aspect of self. "Part of us is not dragged down, but already lives there........." as Dr. Hillman said.

  

 Already lives there": the gestalt, the storyteller as well as the story. Looking at the yin/yang symbol I wear on a ring, I remind myself that somehow the various parts of my being are, like the dark teardrop and the white teardrop, in flux and co-creation. This weaving of story is not only enlightenment, it is also "endarkenment", the self that waits, is circular, un-named, yin. That "already lives there."

But one does not converse with Hecate, and gain the benefits of Her guidance, without stopping, listening. Perhaps she will not come at all, until we "fall apart", can't go any farther, run out of gas, slow the pace, fall off the treadmill. Thus, the necessary time to grieve, to be revealed, to make the pilgrimage to Compostella.  Then one may see Her, poised, with her candle or her torch, at the doorway. She won't let you get away with anything - she'll illuminate it all, as you begin that journey. She will not make an appearance during commercial breaks, or at any "convenient time". I don't believe you'll find her in a day spa, and I don't even believe she has patience with Prozac or things that blunt the descent.

Hecate dwells in the Caverns, she dwells in the Depths.  But She is also the Guide, the Guide to the ascent of Persephone.  And who is Persephone?  She's the innocent girl who must make both the descent and ascent in order to mature, to become, like the tale of Sumarian Innana before her, a Queen.

* Le Guin, Ursula K. DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: THOUGHTS ON WORDS, WOMEN, PLACES. New York: Grove Press, [1989].  

** Weidner, Jay  http://jayweidner.com/

*** Hillman, James  The Dream and the Underworld,  New York:  Harper & Row (1979)