A Poem for this This time

 

From the Pandemic........ 

But still a Poem to nourish in this time of Fear and Division

By Rev. Dr. Lynn Ungar, poet and minister for lifespan learning 

and editor of Quest for the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Pandemic
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?

Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.

Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.

(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)

Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love--
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

"She Who Hears the Cries of the World" by Jennifer Berezan

Mana Youngbear performing White Tara at "Restoring the Balance",
the Muse Community Arts Center, Tucson, AZ (2004)

 Voice of "The Charge of the Goddess": Olympia Dukakis

'Charge of the Goddess' adapted from Doreen Valiente by Star Hawk and Colleagues 1979 Music Courtesy: Jennifer Berezen 'She Carries Me' Source: http://www.EdgeofWonder.com

https://youtu.be/Fnf3nBPs8_o?si=YdyyB8Tvru6D0rD2

The Summer Solstice 2024

 

SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD

by Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions,

cruelties, dreams, concepts,

crimes and the exercise of virtue

in and beside a world devoid

of our preoccupations, free

from apprehension—though affected,

certainly, by our actions. A world

parallel to our own though overlapping.

We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.

Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,

our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,

an hour even, of pure (almost pure)

response to that insouciant life:

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices, mineral hum, wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal—then something tethered

in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch

of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.

No one discovers

just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again

into our own sphere (where we must

return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)

—but we have changed, a little.

Denise Levertov

I woke early, on this longest day:

the light rose among

 the green conversation 

of  trees, a fading star, exultant starlings,

  two grey squirrels 

performing their morning ritual

greeting the only God 

they know, 

the Sun

Lauren Raine

The Night Blooming Cereus

With wishes for fullness of life, nature, and friendship for all

 at this most potent of times.  

Gloria's Call - A Wonderful Video about the Very Wonderful Gloria Orenstein

 

While my life has had its challenging moments and I have traversed many a dark woods in my quest for knowledge, I am fulfilled by the wondrous journeys I have made to the realms of the Marvelous, the Magical, the Great Goddess and the Shamanic Mysteries, and I will be forever grateful to the teachers who inspired me and to the feminist activists on whose strong shoulders we now stand as we welcome new generations of visionaries expanding our feminist legacy into the new millennium.  

 -Gloria Feman Orenstein

It was my pleasure to meet Gloria Feman Orenstein when I was pursuing a book on spiritual art and the Goddess in 1989.  She very generously agreed to meet with me, and I remember sitting in a cafe in Venice California, not far from the beach, utterly enthralled by the power of her personality, and the stories she told me about her journeys into Samiland, shamanism, and ecofeminism, as well as her scholarly  insights into surrealism, magic, and feminism in contemporary art.  Much later, she kindly let me post an important   article of hers about Shamanism on  this Blog.    

Gloria F. Orenstein is Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California. Her areas of research have ranged from Surrealism, contemporary feminist literature and the arts to Ecofeminism and Shamanism.

Her first book The Theater Of The Marvelous: Surrealism And The Contemporary Stage paved the way for her pioneering work on The Women of Surrealism. Leonora Carrington had been a friend and remained a major source of her inspiration in research and scholarship since 1971. Her book The Reflowering Of The Goddess offers a feminist analysis of the movement in the contemporary arts that reclaimed the Goddess as the symbol of a paradigm shift toward a more gynocentric mythos and ethos as women artists forged a link to the pre-patriarchal civilization of the ancient Goddess cultures, referencing them as their source of spiritual inspiration.

Gloria's Call is an award winning  2019 film by Cheri Gaulke and Colleagues.  Director Cheri Gaulke was presented, among other awards, with the "Women Transforming Media" Award for her film.  

"Blending animation, interviews and a trippy soundscape, this is a fitting look at the life of radical academic and writer Gloria Feman Orenstein’s serendipitous life. She vividly conjures an alternative history of art, surrealism and eco-feminism in the 20th century, with lively anecdotes about Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim and Jane Graverol, to name a few."

~Eileen Arandiga, Canadian International Documentary Festival

 

  https://youtu.be/mLhY9pGFjFQ?si=8AE7oiCTvxqhXlxD

In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein received a call from Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparked a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism and shamanism. The short film, Gloria’s Call, uses art, animation and storytelling to celebrate this wild adventure. Now more than 40 years later, award-winning Dr. Gloria Feman Orenstein is a feminist art critic and pioneer scholar of women in Surrealism and ecofeminism in the arts. Her delightful tale brings alive an often unseen history of women in the arts.

Runtime: 17 minutes

Copyright 2018 ACCCA Productions

CREW

Directed, written and edited by Cheri Gaulke

Produced by Cheryl Bookout, Anne Gauldin, Cheri Gaulke, Sue Maberry and Christine Papalexis

Writer Anne Gauldin

Music by Miriam Cutler

FESTIVALS & AWARDS

Gloria's Call has screened in 40+ film festivals internationally and won awards including Best Documentary at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Audience Award at Nevada City Film Festival, Audience Award runner-up at HotDocs in Toronto, and the Women Transforming Media Award from MY HERO International Film Festival.

A Poem by May Sarton

 

                                               "There is time and Time is young."

i have been thinking of this poem, as the Summer Solstice again approaches.  It seems perfect, somehow, for who I am now, in my 7th decade, and all my friends who also are in their 7th decades, and for the fullness and ripeness of the Solstice, and for the Great Mandala of the glorious planet we live upon, more appropriately, live within and the Great Mandalas of our lives within that Greater Circle.  

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
‘Hurry, you will be dead before-’

(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)

Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.

All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.

Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

May Sarton

                         

My Interview on LITTLE GIFTS Podcast

"A Mask for Talking to the Ancestors" (2024)

 Very pleased with this conversation I had in LITTLE GIFTS Podcast in May, with the wonderful grandmother and granddaughter team of the extraordinary artist Sue Ellen Parkinson and her amazing granddaughter Savannah Wonderwheel.

We talked about, well, what I mostly talk about: the Goddess, masks, magic, and healing in a difficult world. And I love that the conversation spans generations! Thank you to both of them!

 https://open.spotify.com/episode/2J1rqRrdqoGptj7PwjzOag

"A Mask for Shattering Old Paradigms" (2024)

"A Mask for the Crossing of Dimensions" (2022)

"A Mask for Chaos and Order" (2024)

Sherry Glaser takes on Gaia

 I've posted this before, but this brilliant comedic voice never grows old, nor especially does the message she makes.  Sherry Glaser lets Gaia tell it like it is: 

https://youtu.be/xkztSqqBSO4?si=84P-UtYB6gNuh2o_