6 Sides to Every Story

Living in the Hive

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 20:55:00 +0000

Here is a small collection of images from around the web detailing how hexagons are making their way into architecture. Crazy beautiful. Enjoy.

Here are shelving units featured at the Disney store. I don't know if they are a prototype or for sale or just part of a display.

Here is building cladding created in Austria.

A photoshopped image of an unrealized plan, a student project, I believe.

A floor plan of a hexagonal home.

On a smaller scale, check out the Honefoss mirror system by IKEA. 10 hexagonal mirrors (about five inches across) for $15.00 in the USA. Copper or silver toned.

Beehive Heart by Thomas Truax

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:44:00 +0000

Netflix and Beyond

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 04:13:00 +0000

Yeah. So I haven't blogged for a while. I've been settling in to Life in Portland, Oregon, and ignoring my greater responsibilities. Sorry.

Since I last checked in to Blogger I have acquired 5 viewers! What a surprise--welcome. I feel motivated to continue writing, now that I see folks are reading. It's very exciting.

What Kieran and I have been doing lots of, is watching movies on Netflix. We don't own a television machine, so we watch movies on the computer.

So...my plan is to now and again post a review of a movie that has a particularly shamanic theme. Shamanic themes in movies, if you will.

Tonight's selection is the the Spanish movie, "The Orphanage." Old-style orphanages seem to have died out sometime in the 1970's, but this movie, despite its anachronisms, plays upon the very fertile spooky possibilities of orphanages and the poignancy of neglected children. (Even though in this film, the wife is currently 37 years old, she appears to have grown up on an orphanage last decorated in 1910.)

A middle-aged couple with a young son purchase and move into an abandoned 19th century villa, with the intention of opening an exclusive center for a small group of special-needs children. The villa had formerly served as an orphanage at which the wife had grown up until she was adopted around age seven. The couple have adopted an adorable HIV-positive son, from whom they keep the knowledge that he is adopted and (possibly) terminally ill. This seven year-old has invisible friends, and begins to add more of them to his life when they move to this villa, which his parents find unsettling. Supernaturally-tinged things start to happen: spirits appear to move objects and inform the son of his situation, despite the parents' best intentions of keeping him unaware.

During an opening party for the center, the son disappears, and the parents begin a months-long search for him which involves local police searching for his body along the beach, as well as mediums who can feel the presence of unhappy children on the grounds. The medium (a fluent-in-Spanish Geraldine Chaplin!) reveals to the wife the importance of setting belief before evidence, and tells her to use her intuition to find out what happened to her son. Meanwhile, a strange former employee of the orphanage provides a logical backstory for the events which ultimately gets buried in the otherworldly elements of the story. What gripped me was the last quarter of the film.

Emotionally unable to take any more weirdness, the husband leaves, and the wife asks for just two more days in which to find out what happened to their son. Making use of the medium's advice, she follows her intuition to create a shamanic/theatrical ceremony in which she calls forth the spirits of the abandoned children with whom she grew up. The movie shows better than any other, to my mind, how the wife enters a shamanic state of transcendent consciousness brought about by sustained grief, desperation, and sleeplessness, which she works with and sustains in order to contact the spirits who alone have the ability to inform her of what has happened to her child. She both enters an altered conscious state, AND makes it physical: truly, she walks between the worlds. She creates a sort of (dumb, in the traditional speechless sense) meal to call forth the missing children, and then she engages in a childhood game during which the spirits appear and lead her to to hints that reveal what has occurred in ordinary reality. She enters a sort of shamanic-metaphoric situation during which she goes underground into the cellar (a classic underworld journey) to both discover what happened to her child, and retrieve his soul.

The movie takes a Catholic turn, focusing on self-sacrifice and redemption, which I won't reveal to curious viewers. However, the film was quite interesting in how it expressed the possibility of communicating with the dead through consciously-created ceremonial ritual, and how the Spirits can reveal to us what normally remains unseen.

Queen of the Sun

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:53:00 +0000

There is a new documentary out about colony collapse syndrome called "Queen of the Sun." I found out about it while walking through my new neighborhood in Portland: seeing the posters for Queen of the Sun had been tacked to every possible pole on Hawthorne Street. Queen of the Sun plays through this weekend locally, but I had also seen the Craigslist ad for a marketing person to spread the word about Queen of the Sun a couple of months ago, but didn't apply since my computer-skillmind still can't quite fathom Twitter.

Hey, notice the flagrant SEO ing of this post? Yes indeed, to have it score in the world, the phrase Queen of the Sun must be repeated over and over, up to five times. I hope the movie is great...it's made by the same people who created "The Real Dirt on Farmer John."

http://www.queenofthesun.com/

while you're at it, check out the remarkable documenary group

http://www.collectiveeye.org/

Taken With the Wind

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:38:00 +0000

Visionary, self-taught folk artist Vollis Simpson has stopped work due to advanced age, and his collection of intensely detailed whirligigs (aka kinetic, wind-driven constructions) are going to be sold and redistributed.

http://www.reflector.com/mixer/artists-famous-whirligigs-be-moved-new-home-42093

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38311137/ns/travel-destination_travel/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/arts/design/06vollis.html

"The main part of doing anything that turns

is to get it centered."

– Vollis Simpson, whirlgig artist

Weird Emerging Sicknesses

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:33:00 +0000

In the shamanic traditions in which I was trained and raised, illness is the perfect expression of some part of the human body that is experiencing disconnect and denial by the human personality residing there. Experiencing any kind of discomfort, disturbed human response, lack of energy, et cetera, is always related to what one is carrying in one's field of energy that is asking for attention and integration.

I bring this up because there is a heap of information being spread around in the light-leaning spiritual community that everything uncomfortable, shocking and difficult that folks are experiencing right now is "perfect," and not to be afraid of, and that one must trust Spirit and simply endure it.

There is not a thing that makes us uncomfortable that is just something that Spirit is imposing on us, forcing us to endure for some unknown "greater good." It is never required that we endure difficulty and pain to satisfy Spirit (unless we believe or are implanted with beliefs that we must).

at left: Susan Jamison, Lovelace
We ourselves open the door to enduring difficulty when we decide to refuse to lovingly and ruthlessly do the work to know and transform ourselves, despite being given constant hints and clues as to who and what we have allowed ourselves to become.

Now that we're in the Changing Times, illnesses that people could bear and build for centuries undetected are now showing up, demanding to be acknowledged and integrated/cleared. Each person is at a crossroads of evolution, and if they don't shift their reality and take action, they may bring forth these very obvious forms of sickness.

We know that everyone who was born during this time and place entered into the agreement knowing (certainly their numinous self knows) that they would be given plenty of hints and wakeup calls and opportunity to come alive to themselves and clear their morphic fields. The strange sicknesses now coming into reality are the final, most undeniable signal that the person has consistently neglected inner calls to shift their perception.

Even though we call it cruel to "blame the victim," actually no human being is capable of getting sick unless his energy field is holding energy patterns created by his alignment with that form of reality in thought, feeling and action. Sometimes a pattern of sickness is magnetized when a person consistently chooses the same kind of experience, refusing over the long term to challenge herself to experience it's opposite...becoming overly developed in either the deep dark or the expansive light, not balancing her spiritual portfolio, so to speak.

Whether patterns were magnetized in this life or thousands of others, or in the lives of our genetic relations, has no bearing on the truth of their existence. If it's in the field, imbalance will sooner or later take shape.

A friend wrote my dad, asking for his thoughts about some Youtube videos that show folks experiencing a sickness whereby their skin erupts in sores all over their bodies, and out of these lesions emerge small threads or minute insects. It's all on disturbing view at Youtube. Search for "Morgellon."

There are also many clips showing dead bees carrying these threads, and anecdotal accounts of these mysterious threads quickly killing honeybees by contact resembling electro shock. One theory suggests that these errant fibers come from genetically modified cotton. Not a coincidence, then, that the spiritual tradition involving the honeybee is intimately and numinously related to the threads of fate and spinners of destiny.

Susan Jamison painted this featuring the spider.

The thread sickness is deeply symbolic, shamanically and mythically. In both Native American (Spider Woman) and European traditions (the Norns or Three Sisters), the spinner/s of fate, are the beings who tells us daily, if we acknowledge it, what our balanced place is in the web of life, and also that we are connected to all others. Chronic distraction and chronic overvaluing of individualism may be at the root of this sickness. Chronic refusal to keep one's spiritual weave intact and stay connected. The threads of connection in these humans are broken and scattered and the human has refused to acknowledge, energetically, his place in the web, refused to take responsibility for his experience as a human connected to the universe. These broken threads have no choice but to float to the surface and come out.

In the shamanic traditions worldwide, unacknowledged, unnecessary energy in the body shows up as writhing insects which the shaman can see. Infestation of this kind reflects a morphic field stuffed to overflowing with unresolved self-hatred and self-repulsion, a chronic deficit in self-love and an inability to integrate and transmute guilt. It is astounding that this universal watermark of shamanic spiritual extraction has recently become actualized in our world for all to witness.

Also strangely ironic/non-ironic at this point is that these unfortunate folks are being told they have created this, it doesn't really exist, and there is no help for them. It is a cruel denial of obvious reality, and yet: Yes, they have created this...yes, they are challenged to know what is real though previously unseen...yes, only they can change this, and nobody can make it go away for them. All of these things are true as the sickness has surfaced in our world which they have been unconsciously cultivating or carrying for eons in the other world of reality.

I do not mean to sound so detached, ruthless and uncaring about this shocking syndrome. I myself have carried garbage and lies in my own field that I have worked mightily to either avoid seeing, or indeed, take responsibility for and transform. I have been successful, and at times I have not been, and have experienced sickness that I was desperate to change, deeply frightened of, and feeling powerless about.

I was called to go in the opposite direction of powerlessness. To go to my power in order to find the solution. The solution is always self-and-spirit-crafted, regardless of which health professionals are helping. The solution appears always when the numinous self makes the decision at the deepest level to align with something else than what is apparent.

Our numinous selves want very much that the soul personality "get this" for once and for all. Soul-cleansing is what is necessary to evolve.

Human beings are conditioned to choose comfort, ease, and the known. How on earth do people learn to choose to align with going into the dark of the unknown in order to confront the ignorance of what they are holding? Desperate people want to go to what has worked before: the socially acknowledged experts, go to the medical professionals, to the place that says this isn’t about the numinous or the unseen. The mind wants to go to the "logical" solution.

My parents, my grandparents and me, by Frida Kahlo

In spiritual orders of old, the journey of any particular tradition had built into it work that took the seeker in a completely opposite direction of where their safe-modus-of-operation would normally go. The mind-blowing challenges meant to relieve our soul story of its accumulated content can only be activated by deciding to take them on, regardless of outcome...stepping into the void, being the innocent fool, yelling YES! no matter what. YES! I trust that I am heal-able, that I am healed, that is is taking place, that it is real, it is done.

So often when new diseases appear and strange happenings shock us, folks tend to align immediately with victim's story of struggle. When did humans forget that courage is necessary in the face of the unexpected, in the face of change? When did we forget to override the accustomed in order to allow new possibilities to be born?

Whether or not we choose to undergo spiritual challenges purposely, fate’s spinners take us there anyway. When we summon courage to surprise ourselves, we get to practice the power of intentional decision in the weaving of fate. Eventually we learn to choose all the colors and patterns and end up with a weave of our own design. I believe this is where we are headed, all of us.

New Face of Enchantment

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:27:00 +0000

Last year I wrote a largely supportive but ultimately scathing post about Amy and Monte Zerner's website. While I was very enthusiastic about Amy's enchanted-intuitive process of working with textiles, I was somewhat shrill about the "purchase it now" vibe of the site overall: in this, my words and the site then mirrored each other. I felt then and still feel that the integrity and beauty of her body of work is not served by all the many 'wisdom decks' the art is turning up in.

However, I understand the two are attempting to reach as many people as can be reached to spread a very positive, loving and expansive message. I heard from Monte Zerner personally and he was very kind and level-headed despite my tongue-lashing and urged me to take a new look at what they are doing.

Well. The whole site has been re-imagined. What is wonderful is that they have shared vast amounts of images of her older work, and overall the site is extremely generous and informative. It is leagues different than the site I saw about a year ago. It simply gives more than it asks for.

Please look here to see her incredible art collection and to see how the work has influenced and pollinated art-to-wear.

Sure, overall the site remains commercial and blinky, but the lovely collage border of her art puts the emphasis where it should be: on the body of work, on a unified visual frame. Seeing the art can be a challenge: follow "art" links among the many video/interactive clicks. These many free interactive utilities: readings, videos, etc, share techniques of self-insight and are fun besides.

It can't be necessarily easy deciding how widely to peddle one's art. It seems a real tightrope walk between over-exposure and sharing it with the world, for all artists. The Zerners seem to have decided that if their time on earth is limited this time around, that rather than pump up the prestige of Amy's art by limiting its exposure, they will instead share it was widely and encourage it to be bought in as many forms as possible. Clearly they believe the New Age messages the work convey are equally important to the work itself.

I still love the work more than I do reading about what it means. I love the mystery of letting the images unfold in myself, without prompting, and I believe this unintellectual, non-mental process it is one of the core occult strengths of the art itself. All art, in fact.

But from now on I put my stinger away for the Zerners, I wish them ever-increasing success and continuing joy in their collaboration, and I will always urge folks to have a look at Amy Zerner's enchanted textile art.

Mysterious Ways I have Imagined: The Art of Gail Potocki

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Tue, 25 May 2010 19:57:00 +0000

I found the work of Gail Potocki on the Anna Nathan (Chicago) Gallery website and was intrigued by her beautifully painted image of a honeybee. From there I found out that her November 2008 exhibition had featured several images of honeybees in surrealistic and symbolic, dream-like situations.

When I was about eighteen, I carried a book of surrealist poetry with me everywhere, and it fed my mind and dreams delicious spoonfuls of the wild dark.
At left: a study for "Thaw" in which a woman is washed up on glaciers and a honeybee hovers over her head, carrying fire

While there are many pieces of surrealist art that I can’t relate to and which make me feel cold and alienated (De Chirico comes to mind, Dali) I still believe that the surrealists have come as close as possible to the dream visions of shamans, so the work continues to magnetize me. I think I may have to dig deeper into exactly what the difference is between visionary art and surrealist art. It may be as thin as the hair of a mouse.

Gail Potocki is a masterful painter, in the style of the 17th Century Dutch masters, with just a bit of Spanish mannerist attenuation thrown in. Her images are lush and riveting and multi-layered. Visionary writer Grant Morrison says of her, “…brilliant occult portraits from the Symbolist underworld of the 21st century. More than just paintings, Gail Potocki conducts séances on canvas…” This is very well put.

Indeed, she seems to be in the act of placing moments of distilled high climaxes of Gaia's unconscious on her canvas, as if the veil has been ripped away - the immediacy of the timing of each event is baroque. She expresses more than her personal view, so her environmentally-charged images don't come off as an axe to grind - more like a clarion call to action. Like all great art, she has put down what we didn’t even know we were feeling. The way a shaman would, she sees environmental issues embodied in the mythical beings, gods and goddesses which have the contemporary faces of her models.

(I have posted here a few details of her work, since they are already posted and since it is for the purposes of education, which is within Fair Use.)

"Angel" at right, in which bees create winged presences on a red clad woman.

The HI-Fructose online review of her 2008 exhibition has reproduced some of her work in a grand scale: have a look at Red Spirals, Tiara, the complete Thaw and Corrupted Mother. Her own website details the progression of her paintings from 2000 onwards, although it hasn’t been updated for a few years. She also has had a book produced by Thomas Negovan of Century Guild.net, a surrealist and symbolist art website.

Boing Boing also reviewed her 2008 show, of which she said:

"I've addressed my concern with the plight of the honeybees quite a bit in this body of work. The mysterious loss of such a huge percentage of the bee population is one of the most alarming collapses and seems to be happening so silently with little press or media concern. I wanted to show the importance of this issue by making the bees larger than life while meeting their death in mysterious ways that I have imagined."

"Shipwrecked" at left in which honeybees are washed up against rocks from an ocean swollen with glacial melt within a stormy seascape.

The last exhibition for which I can find any information was titled “Opened Apples.” This for me was breath-taking synchronicity, as I have been lately remembering the arcane tradition and symbols of the apple in my family/spiritual heritage line.

"I think of the apple as a symbolic representation of the earth and of course, from the story of the Garden of Eden, as paradise. In the painting "Opened Apples" for example, a woman is taking bites out of apples and throwing them to the ground. It represents humans' careless disregard for the natural world and wasteful consumption. The idea of "Opened Apples" made me think of how we have savagely bitten into the symbolic "earth" apple and left it to turn brown and rot. Also, I was thinking of the opening of Pandora's Box as a metaphor of what we are doing by "opening the apple" and unleashing unforeseen consequences."

Restoring the Oracle

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:56:00 +0000

William J. Broad's The Oracle: The Lost Secrets & Hidden Messages of Ancient Delphi is a fine mystery book that chronicles how easy it is to lose the thread-of-reality connecting ancient historical evidence (of narratives and description) with physical evidence when archeological and geological losses and alterations occur in the landscape over the centuries.

He describes how French excavations of the late 19th century, which failed to find an underground cavern to support an entheogenic origin of the Oracle of Delphi's visions and prophecies - instead relegating her to a charlatan despite hundreds of years of centrality to Greek culture - became the standard line which paralyzed the evolution of all other studies of the Oracle of Delphi.

For a hundred years in archeology it was simply taken as fact that the Pythia had no consciousness-altering underground cavern, no vapors with a distinctive aroma which had been repeatedly described in the historical record.

Then Mr. Broad goes on to describe the remarkable geologist and archeologist who worked together to find and mentally reconstruct the underground area of the omphalos, the fissures in the rocks and the traces of ethylene which made it clear that the pythia/priestess indeed had a bit of euphoric help in accessing her visions.

Ethylene, however, is a relatively light drug. Laughing gas: I had lots of it as a child in the 70s as I had my teeth moved around, and I remember floating about and mentally making patterns in the pierced ceiling tiles at the orthodontist's office, or staring into his freakish sunglassed eyes. I can imagine it kicking off the relaxation required to enter an altered state, but not sustaining entire prophesies over the course of hundreds of years. Having experienced states of oracular shamanism myself without any drugs, I believe the gases from the omphalos functioned as an atmosphere-shifter, rather than the source of her visions.

Humphry Davy describes a nitrous oxide trip in 1798:
"I felt a sense of tangible extension highly pleasurable in every limb; my visible impressions were dazzling, and apparently magnified, I heard distinctly every sound in the room, and was perfectly aware of my situation. By degrees the pleasurable sensations increased, I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind, and were connected with words as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas."

This is likewise the description of a kind of deep shamanic trance state, without drugs. I would only add that containing another spirit can be physically intense rather than exactly pleasurable: I felt my heart beating faster, and my entire sense of self filled with another being whose access to ecstasy was nearer than my own. I felt I was only just containing this presence.

I especially liked Mr. Broad's Epilogue where he reveals a personal message that the spirit of the pythia reveals to him. I admire that he is willing to go there. It is, in fact, his own oracular reading...however it came through to him.

"Be sensitive to the lessons of liberality, she seemed to be saying. Cherish your science but understand it as a finite guide to the immensities of time and space. It's not a religion, not a worldview. Will it save you? Can it explain my insights and actions? With Delphi, do not let knowledge of the vapors blind you to other truths, other vistas. Look far. Dance with the world rather than trying to explain it away. Consider the boat, not just the planks. Seize knowledge. But know, too, that your intellect is a small window and that its views can be surprisingly incomplete. Feel deeply. Revere truth in all its forms.
Yes, she seemed to be saying. (because she was.--ed.) You have discovered one of my secrets. I have others."

Endangered Languages

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:50:00 +0000

Post move...letting Mr. Davis do the Talking

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:40:00 +0000

We have moved from Germany to Colorado. Back to, I should say. Here is where half the family is, and where we have been for the past two months after almost seven years of exile.

It has been a culture shock, and yet also quite comfortingly familiar. The good and the bad blend, the past with the present blend, all like oils on a sheet of water when you're marbling paper. That is: they don't blend really, to make mud, but they stay resiliantly separate, swirling next to each other, constantly contrasting. What belongs there, what belongs here...what belongs no longer in either place and time.

Today. Earth Day. And I'd like to share with you one of my very favorite talks given, ever, by anthropologist and world explorer Wade Davis. More writing later. And not so vague.

The Zerner Method

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:30:00 +0000

I've admired the work of Amy Zerner for many years. She makes pieces of textile art that fuse traditional occult symbolism with multi-layered, appliqued techniques. I love how she basically recycles the scraps and fabric ephemera that have traditionally cluttered women's lives into powerful, resonant talismans.
Her series of Goddesses were singular for defining the cultural subtext of each Goddess by using textile scraps that reflected each area of the world from which each Goddess came.

That said, for the past ten or fifteen years, Zerner and her husband Monte appear to have concentrated primarily on turning the images of her textile works into twee advice books, tarot card sets and pre-packaged divination systems and peddling them as hard as they can. I find their website with its self-congratulatory, new agey tone and photos taken with celebrities to be somewhat crass...cheesy...undignified. That's how I see it. I ran across their site and was astounded to find how the artwork I have come to love felt so marketed. The deep and resonant tone of the work doesn't align with the promotion of it.

However, I believe Amy Zerner works in an enchanted way with her materials. The following is a description of how she begins a textile piece, and it describes very well the instinctive, poetically resonant state of receptive meditation that one enters when beginning to work. Amy Zerner's enchanted process, from Monte Zerner:

"She begins her complex accretions of fabric with trust in the fragment. She goes to her little trunks or bags or boxes, haphazardly pulling out this little clump of remnants, that wisp of lace, those shreds of metallics and threads. She is performing a ritual act, an incantation, a ceremony that was decided a long time ago, for which she is the medium.

She scatters her pieces in heaps in a ring on the floor. She sits down in the center of it all and waits for the first impulse. The first move will set free the many others that follow. Suddenly she rises and goes like a sleepwalker straight to one of her piles of textile fragments. She picks a piece of iridescent netting, takes up her scissors, and cuts a shape. She has already prepared her "canvas", the rectangular fabric backing with the outer border already sewn in as a frame. She places the first fragment in the middle of the lower portion of the backing.

She does not know what she is going to do next, which of the hundreds of fragments or rags she will turn to, separating it from its own little heap of related pieces (not similar scraps, but pieces related through source or time or some other association). It is all decided intuitively, on the spot, layer on layer, as she goes along. She is not aware of any conscious thinking as she moves from one piece of cloth to the next. She is totally in her own world, at one with her obsession, unaware of anything else going on around her.

She spreads each fragment on the backing, putting this one on that one, this next to that, silently for hours. Gradually, miraculously, images begin to emerge. They are as surprising to Amy as to those watching her work. Generally, she is entirely alone during the process of composition, sitting and rising from the floor, pausing, bending to place this patch and that piece, turning and reaching in the midst of her multitude of bags and boxes.

She moves constantly, unaware of anything else around her, gradually building detail. Many of these fragments are old, precious, and costly. She will risk them for the spiritual treasure she pursues. She has no preparatory sketches. She simply recognizes what happens as it is happening, without really knowing how it happened. It is amazing, even to the artist.

Each work emerges the way Robert Frost, in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, described the emergence of a poem: "A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it, comes to nothing. It finds its thought and the thought finds the words."

The Farther Out the Better

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:07:00 +0000

Here, by the way, is the plexiglass bee house I mentioned in an earlier post. It is the work of Aganetha Dyck and is owned by state art museum of North Dakota.

It's like Habittrails, only for bees. I wonder if the light bothers them. However, as the animal communicator said, the bees would like a variety of houses to experience, it's just the love that matters, the joy, the fun. I think it should be made of glass, at least.

Worth the trip

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:21:00 +0000

I want to see the Linden-Museum of Stuttgart's current show which features a bunch of Siberian Shamanic items that haven't ever left the area before. 200 pieces. Museums are a great love of mine, because I tend to be able to feel the waves of experience coming off the stuff, and can just sit there and bask in the glow of a psychic history lesson.

When I was little, the Denver Art Museum put all the Native American Indian things in a jumble in floor-to-ceiling glass cases. Nations, tribes, were mixed, tourist-trade items with authentic tools. It sure wasn't anthropologically clean, but it was a banquet for the imagination. The mad mix of it developed the child's artists' eye. I didn't care then that Harvey tourist trade items were set next to rare and authentic parfleche purses. All the dresses decorated with elks' teeth were together. It was like a group of women were really there. You could feel it.

Then someone got the brilliant idea to Teach the Public what They Should Know about History. Some body thought it was better to inform and teach and bore-to-death, than to ignite the interest. This is why we now have museums filled with items, 90% of which can only rarely be viewed, tucked safely away from our greedy eyes. This is why now, there are what feels like 18 items in the Native American area, isolated from all the others in plexiglass cases and spot lit so as to keep everything uncontaminable as an operating theatre.

It means everyone has to walk around the exhibits whispering as if they are in the presence of the Holy Grail and it is a Privilege to Even be Able to Witness them. No mad jumble of actually-used implements, here. No chalk and plaster mannikins of babies stuck in the papooses to make you love them. Just objects, displayed with the precision of an obsessive-compulsive archivist.

Give me the real disorder, instead. I learn more from a person at their yard sale, surrounded by their once-loved or simply-collected things, than I would by seeing eight of their possessions reverently framed on the wall in a white gallery.

The show in Stuttgart, I might just be able to swing getting to. I know it will likely feature the modern style of museum curation, and give me nibbles rather than big bites to fill my mind with. But it would be a great chance to see and feel these things. Sure, it would be even better if they were in a real yurt on the wind swept plain with ponies nickering under snowfall and the scent of boiling komyss.

Work produces a sweet essence

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Wed, 13 May 2009 09:01:00 +0000

One of the Melissa Garden’s founders is Barbara Schlumberger, who does process paintings for the site, and is involved with the modern extention of an ancient spiritual order from Afghanistan, called the Sarmoun (“The Bees”) Brotherhood and affiliated Sisterhood.

“There are many legends about Sarmoun-Dargauh ('Court of the Bees'), and one of them is this. True knowledge, it is asserted, exists as a positive commodity, like the honey of the bee. Like honey, it can be accumulated. From time to time in human history, however, it lies unused and starts to leak away. On those occasions the Sarmouni and their associates all over the world collect it and store it in a special receptacle. Then, when the time is ripe, they release it into the world again, through specially trained emissaries.”

This 1965 article by Desmond Martin explains a few more tantalizing drops about it.

Elsewhere on the web it is written: Sarmoun is a word meaning bee in Old Persian, and refers symbolically to the practice of the brotherhood of storing the honey of both the traditional wisdom and the supernatural energy or baraka (Barack?) enabling it to be understood, and sending this double nectar out into the world in times of great need. The word Sarmoun can also mean “those who are enlightened.” The Sarmouni are believed to have secret training centres hidden to this day in the most remote regions of Central Asia.

The Sarmouni are a universal family who operate on a metaphorically invisible level. As Idries Shah paraphrased from the sufi tradition:

"The Secret protects itself by virtue of its implausibility."

Process painting is intuitive painting, and I didn’t know very much about it until I searched around more. Oregon artist Robin Urton shows very clearly how she experienced this method of working in her blog, wherein her painting of a woman transforms into that of a bird, by turning it upside down, and continuing to work spontaneously.

This transformation appears to have shamanic undertones: setting free this magnificent bird out of a vague form of a woman—a bird that was always there, just hidden. It illustrates beautifully how more ripened, fully magical art can develop only with time and with attention kept focussed on allowing the obscured truth underneath to surface and break through.

The Melissa Garden

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:26:00 +0000

The Melissa Garden has a very inspiring site which shows the development and workings of a bio-organic honeybee sanctuary in California. The plans and the site have been co-created by listening and working with nature spirits, in the Findhorn tradition, as far as I can see.

“The Melissa Garden is a new project that began in the fall of 2007. It is being created to provide honeybees with a place to live natural lives, insulated from known stressors, and nourished in a beautiful setting. The garden is being thoughtfully designed and planted with botanicals that offer year-round nectar and pollen sources honeybees are known to favor.”

I love some of the details of the garden, including a door to a workshop, cut through with bee silhouettes, and the round bee skep (Weissenseifener Haengekorb). Plans f or it can be bought, or you can occasionally take a workshop at the Melissa Garden on how to make one. The inner core is woven from reeds and grasses, as in old European skeps. The interior frames are in half-moon shapes, can be accessed from the top of the skep, and the bees are able to build their combs off them as they like.

The sanctuary leaders also brought in animal communicator Sharon Callahan to speak with the bees.

“The bees feel that a challenge for those at The Melissa Garden might be criticism from those doing things in more traditional way. Don’t worry about that. No matter how far out, bring in love and the element of fun, and they will be healthy. If you have a dream of a plexiglass castle, try it. The bees want to try whatever comes to us. It isn’t about finding the right hive or right shape. It is about acts of love. The love will heal the bees. Bees don’t want us to be afraid to be far out. We are on the leading edge. The farther out the better, as long as it is done with love.”

(Indeed, nearly every new beekeeper I know has had some struggles in trying to tend bees in a new, non-invasive way, while receiving or perceiving opposition from the so-called "traditional" way, which tends to treat bees like livestock. Read more about this talk, as well as another that Sharon posted on her site.)

Bringing the element of fun and love to the work reminds me immediately of Path of Pollen teacher and healer and 5 Rhythms dancer Kate Shela, whose elegant website shows where you can dance with her.

Interesting about the plexiglass house idea, because Canadian artist Aganetha Dyck has already made one! Dyck does collaborative art works with the bees, letting them add their wax and propolis to material items like shoes and drawings that she places in their hives. Her exhibitions smell of honey.

Comparing her work to that of surrealist Marcel Duchamp, in usual high-flown art history speak, Juan Antonio Ramirez reviewed a show featuring a a life-size wedding dress made of wax combs, saying, “Aganetha Dyck’s creation is, finally, a sweet feminine figure: a beehive-woman, emerging like a bright star in nocturnal obscurity, promising an endless ‘honeymoon’. From the mental and parodic undressing of Duchamp, we have passed with Aganetha Dyck to the total possession of the bride through an operation that is olfactory, visual, tactile, and gustatory. The total work of art."

love still lodged

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:14:00 +0000

"...He pried a globe of honeybees from its hive, slow-buzzing, stunned from the sudden exposure, each bee shimmying for warmth. When he placed the globe in her hands she fainted, her eyes rolled back. Lying down she saw all their dreams at once, the winter reveries of scores of worker bees, each one fiercely vivid: bright trails through thorns to a clutch of wild roses, honey tidily brimming a hundred combs.

With each day she learned more about what she could do. She felt a foreign and keen sensitivity bubbling in her blood, as though a seed planted long ago was just now sprouting. The larger the animal, the more powerfully it could shake her. The recently dead were virtual mines of visions, casting them off with a slow-fading strength like a long series of tethers being cut, one by one. She pulled off her mittens and touched everything she could: bats, salamanders, a cardinal chick tumbled from its nest, still warm. Each time she touched some frozen insect, some slumbering ambhibian, anything just dead, her eyes rolled back and its visions, its heaven, went shivering through her body..."

from The Hunter's Wife by Anthony Doerr

Wurzel Sepp

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:43:00 +0000

Here's a clip about the Austrian Sepp Holzer's mountainside permaculture farm. I am soaking in all the permaculture information I can, taking Suzi's advice, post bee crisis. Here I really grooved when the narrator says that the only experience Sepp trusts...is his own.

Crisis Mediation

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:06:00 +0000

Well. Last evening I had a crisis with the bees.

I'm a new beekeeper, and I started working with the local club about a year ago. I acquired two bienenvolk, (two colonies) which stood under some trees on a nearby farmer's land.

I was to learn the craft from the new president of the club, a guy who has been keeping bees for about 6 years, who had taken the job over from a long-standing older guy. Last spring, he showed me how to remove the sugar frames and put in empty frames for the bees to fill with new honey. Normally, I would have anticipated that when he worked on his own bees, which stand next to mine, he would phone me up and tell me to be there, so I could again see what to do. But he never calls me, and since I don't know when/where/what, I don't pester him with calls, either. At last I got a hold of him, last night.

I don't speak his language like, brilliantly, which he knows. But nevertheless I always feel or felt that he would rush the instructions, and then act like I was a dumb cow when I asked about something again. Because that was my experience. I experienced his instructions the way Charlie Brown experiences how adults talk: wah WAH mwha WAH WAH mwha wah wha, with a little bit that was clear about: drone frames...brood...sugar...blah blah bibbity blah.

So he described again what to do. After asking for a couple repetitions, I pretended to understand, thought I would get it, after all, I'd seen it done once in my life...and with this clarity I went out to visit the bees.

I was supposed to scrape away all their work and remove the frames containing sugar that the bees made from sugarfat that they were given last autumn and replace with empties that they will fill with honey. I opened the hive. Like a monster I scraped away the wax and new honey they had made, in order to reach the frames. When I reached them, me trembling with rage and tears by now, I could not tell which frames were of capped honey, which were brood, and which were capped sugar. So I had destroyed their own honey cells for nothing, and they were now furious. And I had opened the hive for nothing. I just stood there and wept in pure frustration. I can't believe they didn't repeatedly sting my sorry ass, thighs, arms and head.

I set everything back and apologized to the bees and stormed home. It's a good thing I couldn't reach my beekeeping teacher, because he would have gotten a sting from my native tongue, filled with fury that is more than partially owed to yours truly.

Because. All I want is that my bees are comfortable, healthy, able to raise their babies in peace, and make honey for themselves. The local training here says that bees can't eat their own honey because they will become constipated and explode. I'm not kidding, and it's not a failure of language--this is what they have been taught and continue to teach. Its a remarkable bit of old time wisdom, when you factor in evolution and everything. How ever did the bees get along without humans feeding them 200,000 years ago?

I am not a honey farmer. I am not interested in robbing the bees' honey and replacing it with the inner filling of twinkie snack cakes. I want to raise bees because I want to support pollination. That's all. And I've been taking some very occluded direction from honey farmers. Honey farmers who open up the hive all the time, bang the frames with violence to shake the bees off, and spend all their time killing healthy native queens and buying and trading foreign queens like little boys with fancy marbles.

But I took the teaching, because I was not trusting that I could learn it another way.

Still weepy, I got on the phone and failed to reach my 'teacher.' Then I phoned my friend Suzi in England. She talked me down off the ledge. She knows, and she taught me in twenty minutes what failed to get through otherwise. She told me what I already thought I knew, but had forgotten: to listen to them and they will tell me what they need, if they need it. How could I have forgotten?

The only reason to take anything away from a functioning hive is to give them more room for what they want to do. So in August if they've made tons of honey, I might remove the outer honey frames, leaving them plenty of their own, thereby giving them more room to store more honey again. Very elegant. Very simple.

Thank All That Hums that she was there. She is a wise, wise, woman. It was so great to hear her voice. She also makes fabulous drums of local Dartmoor deer skin and iron rings forged by a blacksmith. Thanks, Suzi.

What is your will? What is their will? The bees are intelligent, they have their own way of doing. I want to support them in their will--not impose farming on them. I won't do it, anymore. I finally got it, in one rage filled evening. My will is their will. It reminds me of the story of the loathly lady.

One of Arthur's Knights agrees to marry a woman who looks hideous because she promises in exchange to give Arthur some magical information which will save his life. On their wedding night, the knight finds this loathly lady has become beautiful. She is beautiful during the night, when they are alone, and repulsive during the day, when the world might judge them. She asks him, what would he rather have: as it is, or beautiful by day and ugly by night? He answers with the greatest wisdom: I will support you with what you want. Your will is mine. And immediately she sheds her ugliness and becomes gorgeous 24/7. It was the correct answer.

My new teacher will be my friends and also Michael Bush, of Bush's Bees site. Much of what he says is refreshingly authentic.

Honey in the Sauna

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:34:00 +0000

At the gym the other day, having a sweat, two Russian ladies gave me advice on how to do it.

You're meant to sit in the finnish sauna for about 10 to 15 minutes, then go outside and have a breath of fresh air, lie down, have a drink, and go for another round. One woman was smoothing something amber-colored on her body: it was honey! Of course! Both said it was good for the stomach, to smooth it on, I mean. So noted.

In other news, the UK shop Toast is selling honey from Rhodes for 15 pounds a pop!

The Getting of Inside Information

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:04:00 +0000

The book Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History by Owen Davies is a good book to have. It truly fills a gap in understanding the history of cunning people, those who used folk magic for hundreds of years to help their clients in their communities. His research draws from a wide range of sources, and is particularly useful in illuminating who had access to magical texts and how they were used in folk magic.

BUT. There seems to be a big black hole in Davies’ understanding of HOW cunning people gained their information, and he presents them repeatedly as using illusory methods or charlatanism in their dealings with clients. From a shamanic perspective, Davies misses the mark on several vital aspects of this subject.

Of particular note is Chapter 7, which makes some major missteps regarding folk magic practice and shamanism.

“Moving further westwards, the link with shamanism becomes even more culturally tenuous, despite similar concepts and motifs being found. This is because the idea of soul travel or communication with the spirit world was not culturally specific, let alone definably shamanistic.”

As has been too often the case during the last twenty years of study of the folk/spirit experience, we have an overly narrow, squished definition of shamanism hobbling a larger, necessary point of inquiry. Davies aligns himself with the camp that believes that shamanism is confined to deep trance states (visually observable, resembling epilepsy or catatonia) that are only brought about by drumming, and that are witnessed by the community, ala Siberian shamanism.

This means the author discounts all other ways that Europeans had of communicating with the spirits or taking trance journeys: oneiric practices/dreaming, simple spirit talking, relationship with the familiar, fetch or fairy, solitary (what is now called) meditation—these are all methods for inducing varying degrees of trance which put people into contact with the spirits. And none of them count, here. Because they don’t fit the definition of shamanism which is confined to one remote part of northern Eurasia. What is wrong with this picture?

“Once such widely shared core beliefs and experiences such as soul travel, spirit communication and fairy gatherings are recognized, referring to the shamanistic characteristics of magical practitioners loses its relevance in a European context.”

This statement utterly baffles me. It seems that the opposite should be true: that once we recognise how widely shared core soul/spirit experiences are, then in the European context (given the long, post-Christianization history of fragmentation and persecution) it becomes even more fertile and revealing to ascertain the shamanic relevance of these experiences in practice, expression and result.

Davies presents the case of Chonrad Stoecklin: “Whether he made up the stories of his soul journeys, or whether he really experienced some form of altered consciousness, is not important because the purpose of his stories was to legitimate his claim to special knowledge...” (my italics)

Oh, I believe it is important. Davies appears to believe that every cunning person or healer made use of stories and claims merely to enhance their reputations, to attract clients—as merely a cynical but practical ploy. And by failing to dig deeper, he seems to say that charlatanism and self-promotion were the main focus of all folk magicians.

Surely, he makes a good case that cunning people often made performances out of their special and rare skills. (I will explain why.) Because: shamanic skills are interior to the shaman. The voices and promptings are relayed on the inside, and blended with integrating the observation of signals in every day life. (In the shamanic experience, the spiritual and corporal merge.) Even Siberian shamans (like many others) enhance the performance quality of their healings, for two reasons. One, to create a deeply liminal, resonant atmosphere so that he/she can hear the spirits and respond to what they require. And two, so that all the people present are let in on the shaman’s private experience, so they too can touch the numinous, in case their spiritually-perceptive abilities are dulled, as most undeveloped people’s are. The exterior performance helps folks realize the interior healing which has occurred to them.

By Davies’ own research we see that folk magicians were paid to place and remove spells, write charms, find lost cloaks, heal dry cows, et cetera, and that they were integral parts of their communities. Because Davies at no point explains HOW they did these things, the key is missing.

Were they all just clever? Shall we say that at least a thousand years of the cunning profession points to just a collection of wily characters who were brilliant at self-promotion? Of course, those pellars who were found to be fraudulent had their works examined in court. So if a pellar simply tried to ascertain who had placed a spell simply by cleverly asking the right questions of the client, that might be revealed in these records. What hasn’t been left behind, besides good reputations, are those records concerning pellars who were able to make magic or heal without clever tricks, but with the aid of supernatural guides. When every voice or friend or fairy or animal who spoke to a pellar on the inside of their mind could be called a demon, few were ever motivated to share how they received their “inside information.”

Davies also misinterprets the relevance of fairy belief and interaction.

“Yet, while the notion of fairy fraternizing was certainly a vibrant aspect of English popular belief, it was not as integrated into the world of popular magic as elsewhere.”

This statement is absolutely unsupported. How could an important part of folk belief not have its counterpart or expression in the medium best meant to convey it: namely, human cooperation with spirits to create magic? Or: If English folks believed in fairies, danced with fairies, met fairies, and spoke with fairies...why would they have not naturally expounded on that relationship by shifting realities in our world, with fairies' help? When hundreds of years of folk myth reveal that fairies helped people spiritually and materially, giving them inside information...at what point would this have become inapplicable to cunning people? How then did cunning-people get their magical information?

“...unlike other continental fairy healers, English meetings with the fairies, like those confessed to by John Walsh, were usually conducted corporally and not spiritually.”

This displays a basic misunderstanding of the experience of walking-between-the-worlds, which would have been a necessary part of obtaining otherworldly guidance. In the strongest moments of trance-contact, experiences with fairies and spirits is often corporal and spiritual at the same time. Is Davies saying that John Walsh physically and concretely danced with supernatural beings? Could he have caught them in a cage? The shaman knows that the deepest contact with supernatural beings occurs simultaneously in the space between our world and theirs. It is corporal and spiritual, at the same time, and usually has to be experienced to be understood. (This is why in-their-heads western anthropologists started drinking ayahuasca in ceremony, because it became obvious they were missing the experience of this merging of the physical and spiritual worlds.)

So. The greatest question posed by this book is the invisible goliath in the room: How did English cunning folk do all the magical things they did, how did they actually accomplish satisfying their customers...if they had neither the shamanic abilities nor the relationship to supernaturals with which they could gain help and insight from the spirit world? A shaman’s answer would clarify everything. Despite the wide range I assume they displayed with regard to talent and power, cunning-folk were only able to help customers for hundreds of years because they had shamanic abilities, and because they were in relationship with spirits who helped them.

Cult of the House of Tudor

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:59:00 +0000

I just found out that the artist-illustrator Tasha Tudor died June 18, last summer (2008). She was a great influence on me while I was homeschooling my children. The sweetness and innocence of her country lifestyle and the cute books for kids she drew appeal greatly to folks who search for immaculate role models, and her property is now newly log jammed with Japanese tourists, who were rather quicker to discover her than other Americans have. She has a cult following, and her property could well become a shrine. Since she has recently died, there is that rush to define and polish her image, so she is presented as the fairy-grandmother from a dreamy rural world of perfect harmony with nature; yet the saltier aspects about her life are even more interesting.

I’m intrigued by people who appear not to belong to our time, but who steadfastly hold an idea of their perfect life in their mind’s eyes, and advance confidently toward it. She was such a figure. She seems somewhat morally ambiguous, and had a great many fairy-like qualities—fairy in the old, traditional witch-sense, that is. While Tasha Tudor was no shamanic artist, I consider her pursuit of her ideal lifestyle to be deliberately enchanted, and inspiring.

I confess I’ve watched the films about her, “Take Joy,” and “Take Peace” very closely. Both are effusive, lovely, and dignified, narrated by a deep roots-conferring female British voice, but neither were willing to reveal her complicated qualities. These somehow seep through, anyway, if you watch and listen carefully. I like the witch side of Tasha Tudor that snarls out from her shadow every now and again.

She was born Starling Burgess on August 28th, 1915 in Boston, Massachusetts, to an artsy couple; both parents were distant, self-absorbed figures: her dashing father was an early pilot and boat designer whom she worshipped from afar. Her mother seems to have been elegant, stern, and resistant to domestication. Her parents divorced when she was nine, after which she changed her name, and, so her mother could privately pursue her art career in Greenwich Village, Tasha was sent away with her brother Fredric to live with a wealthy, chaotic, bohemian, rural Connecticut family in the 1920’s, ("I was dumped into the most unconventional atmosphere you can imagine") which greatly influenced both her later independence and her attraction to the interior culture of large families.

This experience was seminal, and gave her a lifelong love of farm life. The careful moulding of her own family life was in direct reaction to the liberal yet fragmented experiences of her childhood, during which she appears to not only have gathered remnants of family traditions which she would later practice with her own children, (which I personally suspect were activities that she only got to experience second-hand, once or twice but not regularly) and she invented the same: many of these have the rare, palpable quality of ritual or ceremonial enchantment.

(Some details, from her New York Times Obit: Sparrow Post, a postal service for dolls with delivery by birds. Birthday parties featuring flotillas of cakes with lighted candles. Mouse Mills catalogs, for ordering dolls clothes made by mice, who take buttons for pay.)

She briefly attended art school in Boston, but dropped out. She was a self-taught artist, and this is clear from her work, which has a presence and numinous quality that is often more powerful than her skill in rendering. Sometimes her work was uneven in quality, but when she really hits it, her work is delightful.

It seems Tasha only ever wanted to live as if it was the 1830’s, and she wore 19th century clothing daily. Beginning in her childhood, she amassed one of the most important vernacular clothing collections of that era, many pieces of which she wore on a daily basis before the collection was partially auctioned off, and partially bestowed to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation shortly before her death.

In 1938, she married Thomas McCready Jr., a real estate trader who encouraged her to take her illustrations to publishers, and who himself wrote five of the children’s books she illustrated during the 1950’s. It was McCready’s inherited dolls which formed the cornerstone of Tudor’s legendary collection. She moved with him to a huge Hew Hampshire house on 450 acres sans indoor plumbing or electricity, bearing and raising four children (2 girls, 2 boys) during the 40s-50s. There: “Tudor washed clothes by hand, became proficient in spinning and weaving flax, made bread from scratch, sewed much of her children's clothing, and planted a vast garden of flowers and vegetables.”

The two divorced in 1961, after which the children’s last names were changed to match her own. Unfortunately, very little is known about the man with whom she shared 23 years of her life, who died five years after their divorce. Tasha later married briefly and divorced a second time. Because she deliberately refused to include any unpleasant details in the vision of the life which she had created with such intense focus, very little has ever been shared about Tudor’s loves.

As a mother of four children, she began to rely on her illustrations to bring in money—there are hints that McCready’s work was not adequate to provide for their immense farm. Her first published book, Pumpkin Moonshine, (1938) is still in print. Her reaction in later years to people supposing that it was a charming vocation for her to have taken up was greeted with a snap: she only turned to illustration as a means of support. Nevertheless, her tender stories and sweet illustrations weave their spell—they are filtered through a soft-focus lens, displaying almost no traces of 20th century, modern popular culture, nor trendy metaphors or themes. They too exist outside of time, relying on faithful observance of animals and small children, of family traditions and seasonal rituals.

Tasha Tudor and her family lived off the grid and were surrounded by rambunctious nature during the decades when a streamlined faith in the future, and the drive toward betterment and control defined modernity. (In 1972 she moved to her cabin in Vermont, which was built and roofed by sons Seth and Tom, using only hand tools.) She stepped out of time long before there was a back-to-the-land movement, and she lit her world with candlelight and cooked her food with 19th century appliances because she liked it better that way, and because the romance and atmosphere of that life was so important to her. I am astounded by her inviolate adherence to her dream.

Those of her children who speak about Tudor outside of her public perfect-granny image say that the chaos she experienced as a child was the rule during their childhoods too; there were no boundaries or predictable meal times, or even set meals. But Tudor’s children had to conform to her vision of the perfect childhood: the girls couldn’t cut their hair, had to wear 19th century clothing, weren’t allowed to play with neighbor kids—likewise, they took part in the authentically charming puppet shows and ephemeral doll weddings (also filmed for Life Magazine in the 1950’s) that she devised.

In Drawn From New England, her oldest daughter Bethany wrote, "My mother often said she wanted to live a life similar to that of New Englanders in the past century, so that is what our family did, in a way, for many a year. It was not easy, but the rewards were most satisfying,” and, “"We felt as if we were actually living some of the wonderful old fairy tales and stories my mother read to us so constantly."

Two of Tudor’s books were chosen for the Caldecott Honor in 1944 and 1956. Throughout the 1960’s to the 80’s, Tudor continued to write and illustrate books and travel in connection with their publicity. During the 80’s and 90’s she was featured in magazines, and had a series of books written about her and her distinctive lifestyle.

Watching the films about her, one sees that she did create unforgettable experiences for herself and her children—they seemed set on recapturing a childhood that remained just out of her own grasp. Yet despite the family-ethos so central to her image, most of her children are nowhere to be seen in these films. Their lack is uncomfortable, discordant; the extant scenes of today's family togetherness feel contrived. What is certain, however, is that her work influenced and inspired many, many other families who sought to recreate the magic that she illustrated.

One son and his wife, and two of their grown children (one couple plans to start a museum) carry on tours of her property and sales of her books from the Tasha Tudor website, which constantly stresses its familyness. But three other children were uninvolved with her business, the youngest daughter was utterly estranged, and Tudor bestowed token gestures to two birth children, while cutting six grandchildren out of her will entirely. In an comment for an online guest book from March 2009, her son Tom wrote: “As the second son of Tasha Tudor, I want to thank all of you for your very touching and kind comments forwarded to this website. You should also know that neither my sisters nor I are associated in any way with Tasha Tudor and Family, a company run exclusively by my brother Seth and his family.”

The Tasha Tudor that I most enjoy is a solitary figure, who, in the films about her, says offbeat and slightly cruel and eccentric things which are scattered among the many joyful and meaningful things she says. She exemplified a depth of connection to nature and the turning of the seasons, and love of animals and a facility with observing them (and she kept dead animals in her freezer as aids to illustration). She had a remarkably clever, intact sense of imagination with her dolls and her self-costuming. She was fierce and she liked to gently shock, saying that death “must be quite exciting.” She appeared admirably hard-working and inventive, doing the chores to maintain her remote and old-fashioned home and property.

In a 1996 interview, she said: "It's wonderful to grow old. You can get away with murder. Everyone takes great care of you. And they're afraid of offending you. You can say the most outrageous things and get away with it. I fully believe old age is one of the most delightful periods of my life."

I will miss her, and I look forward to one day reading her real biography, the one in which her cackling shadow may appear lurking behind her kindly facade. (The final line of a report about the legal challenges to her estate confirmed my suspicions about her. ) Tasha liked to quote Mark Twain by saying:

“Everyone is like the moon and has a dark side, which he never shows anybody:”

Bee Beard

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:53:00 +0000

I've always kinda had a thing for men with beards.

Now I know why.

(I'm sorry I've lost the URL for this photo...it seemed to be about helping alleviate obesity through nature or something...)

Moving on...Please check out Bees Without Borders.

Their Mission: to Educate and train impoverished individuals and communities in beekeeping skills and the value of beekeeping for poverty alleviation.

Champagne Supernovalis, final

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:05:00 +0000

One of the most fascinating aspects of Novalis, besides his Pollen, is a small reference in his work to what I consider to be a shamanic journey.

The young man lost himself, by degrees, in sweet fancies, and fell asleep. He dreamed first of immeasurable distances, and wild unknown regions. He wandered over seas with incredible speed; strange animals he saw; he lived with many varieties of men, now in war, in wild tumult, now in peaceful huts. He was taken captive and fell into the lowest wretchedness. All emotions rose to a height as yet unknown to him. He lived through an infinitely variegated life; died and came back; loved to the highest passion, and then again was forever parted from his loved one.

The symbol of the whole German Romantic movement came to be a small, bright blue flower, or indeed all blue flowers. Some have narrowed this down to the Forget-me-not, a tiny, electric blue blossom that comes up early in the spring. The birth home of Novalis, now a museum, features a garden of blue flowers.

In my work with bees, I have learned that they can see a broader range of blues of ultra-violet tones than people can see, and that they often see swathes of flowers, meadows of flowers, all in blue. Novalis’ next section in his journey describes a bee encountering a flower.

But what attracted him infinitely most was a high, light-blue flower, which stood close by the spring, touching it with its broad glittering leaves. Round it stood innumerable flowers of all colours, and the sweetest perfume filled the air. He saw nothing but the blue flower; and gazed on it long with nameless tenderness. At last he was for approaching, when all at once it began to move and change; the leaves grew more resplendent, and clasped themselves round the waxing stem; the flower bent itself towards him; and the petals showed like a blue spreading ruff, in which hovered a lovely face. His sweet astonishment at this transformation was increasing, when suddenly his mother's voice awoke him...

And finally, I’ll leave you with this Novalis-pollen grain:

The blossom is the symbol of the secret of our knowing.

Champagne Supernovalis, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Jill Flight) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:22:00 +0000

Novalis “envisioned a future golden age to beattained by the poeticization of the world.”

His concept of magical idealism made human beings the authors of the nature that they perceive. This ‘romanticization’ of nature means that humans can become reflectively aware of this capacity to merge with nature, and hone it consciously. So these ‘artists of nature’ transform the world into a welcoming ‘thou’ instead of an alienating threat.
He said, “Every beloved object is the centre of a paradise.”

This communion with nature was a huge leap during Novalis’ time, since 18th century people still saw the world as threatening and unknown, just before the Industrial Revolution’s re-imagination of it as ripe for the plundering.

Currently our most widely distributed weltanschauung sees nature primarily as victim, with sorrow, regret and pain about what has been and is being done to it: climate change, animal extinction, loss of habitat, genetic manipulation, et cetera. There is a great deal of fear in this which is self-perpetuating, and generates a belief in the inevitability of further loss and destruction, which is likewise internalised in the human as a pessimistic dread of our own pollution.

"There is, properly speaking, no misfortune in the world. Happiness and misfortune stand in continual balance. Every misfortune is, as it were, the obstruction of a stream, which, after overcoming this obstruction, but bursts through with the greater force."

left: E. Hausner's Happy Landscape (Glückliche Landschaft)

How much more fitting it would be to apply magical idealism to our view of nature, I mean in practice, not as a mere mental, dismissive “to do list” sense, but rather consciously participated in, in order to transform our thoughts of reality. As spiritual practice. I don’t mean to propose to “be optimistic” and “look on the bright side.” I mean to propose, that if, as Novalis says, “The power of thought is an internal sky,” and “Life is not so much a dream as life is a thought,” then the proper response is to merge with nature to re-enchant it with our thoughts, nourish it with our LOVE (love here is a verb). If this were done on a mass scale, we would see the transformation of nature before our very eyes.

“I will sink down into dewdrops and mingle myself with ashes.”

I think of Julia Butterfly and her activist odyssey in Luna the tr ee, when I think of the physical practice of this, or Sandra Ingerman’s Medicine for the Earth. So, it is happening today. Look how much change can occur from the work of single people.

Here are some more grains of Novalis’ Pollen.

A character is a completely fashioned will.

Philosophy is actually home-sickness; the wish to be at home—everywhere.

The person is a sun, her senses are as planets.
(I’m using the feminine pronoun here, just for kicks)
Sleep is only for the inhabitants of planets. In another time, people will sleep and wake continually at once. The greater part of our body, of our humanity itself, yet sleeps a deep sleep.

There is but one temple in the world; and that is the body of humanity. We touch heaven when we lay our hands on a human body.

Nature is a harp, a musical instrument whose tones are keys to numinous strings in us.

"It is only due to physical weakness and our inner turmoil that we do not see ourselves in a fairy-world. All fabulous stories and fairy tales are merely dreams of that home world, which is everywhere and nowhere. Our numinous powers, which one day as genies shall fulfil our will, for the present are muses which refresh us with sweet remembrances during our toilsome course."

(to be continued...)