The Sister from Below When the Muse gets Her Way

News from the Muse

2025-10-02T00:28:00.000-07:00

The Muse of Lament and Dissent V

Weeping Madonna Credit to
Sara Spaulding Phillips

When your country strips you of rights and protections, it tells you that it no longer
recognizes you.
Other times, you realize that you no longer recognize your country…

[The] President…is remaking the country in his image: crude, harsh, gratuitously mean.

—M. Gessen

Opinion Piece in the Sunday NYTimes, Sept. 21, 2025

Introduction: Our Good News and Bad News September

This is the fifth and last News from the Muse featuring political poems from the Deep River Writing Circle. That’s because Deep River will reconvene in October after a four-month break for the summer. That’s because the Muse insists we focus on this coming year’s readings and writings. She is elated to return to her roots in the works of H.D., Robert Duncan, and Diane di Prima—her lineage of poetic ancestors. All of them lived in difficult times, which marked their writings. All of them wrote directly out of mythic consciousness.

In our own times we’ve suffered a good news/bad news September. The good news on Labor Day was demonstrations in every state protesting government “by the rich for the rich.” Their slogan: “Workers over Billionaires.” More good news is that in many communities activists have learned how to intervene when ICE agents kidnap immigrants at court houses and outside Home Depots without due process. The activists observe and document what happens.

The good news in Chicago, where my late parents lived for many years—a city they loved—was that thousands of people came out to protest the Berserker’s plans to invade with Federal troops. So far it hasn’t happened though there are frequent threats.

The bad news is that Federal Troops have invaded Memphis instead, despite the protests of the mayor and the City Council. The bad news, internationally, is that the Berserker has declared war on Venezuela, sending seven warships and a nuclear submarine into the Caribbean Sea. He has ordered military strikes against three speedboats. He has accused them of smuggling drugs, without any proof or due process. Seventeen people were murdered. The bad news is also that my dear friend who lives with her family in Caracas, has written me that people in her country are preparing for war, gathering provisions, alert for dangers from their own Berserk leadership and ours. They pray their power and WIFI keeps working. What is becoming of our world?

The bad news is the horrific assassination of a charismatic young Maga leader, Charlie Kirk, while speaking to students at a University in Utah. This dreadful event stunned the nation. Threatens to tear us apart, even more. It roused the Berserker to threaten all liberal organizations and all free speech. The bad news is that the beloved comedian Jimmy Kimmel was cancelled. The good news is Jimmy Kimmel is back!

The best news is that Indivisible is working hard to organize “No Kings” demonstrations across the country for Saturday, October 18th. They want millions of protestors to come out and demonstrate. The good/bad news was when Dan and I tried to join their call, it was overwhelmed. The good news, we were able to move to You Tube to see their presentation. It was inspiring to listen to their leaders speak of their aim to build a mass resistance movement, to fight a president who breaks the law and trashes the constitution. It was exciting to plan to join them and assert our right to peaceful protest. We heard: “You are not alone”

“I did not come to you without fear. Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s being able to move through it.”

“We are not here to be for justice. We are here to be it. We’re going to have over 5 million people in the streets this October.

“Invite everyone you know to join us in the streets on Saturday October 18th!”

Here's the link to No Kings: https://www.nokings.org/

Commentary on
“Poem In Which I Reflect on Presidents and Death”

This marvelous poem by Connie Hills is full of compelling imagery, dry humor, and deep insights. It reveals many aspects of a rich life as though the storyteller is looking at her past in a reflecting pool. In an arc about America’s politics our storyteller begins with the “B-movie actor” president from the ‘80s and arrives at “Cheeto man” who dominates our present tense. In scenes of landscape and people, the storyteller places herself near the Salish Sea, where she describes visiting her Norwegian friends, Carl Johan and his wife Mabel. The food and the flowers are luminous, as is the ritual scene “of the evening news, where Carl/ranted at the president on the tv screen—his merciless neglect of the most vulnerable among us.” In parenthesis, our storyteller names some of the issues of those days: “(Dear Reader, think AIDS, crack, psychosis, food stamps.)” She then makes an unexpected descent into her gut where the moral compass of the “wise owl” is “good medicine.”

The storyteller reveals herself as a “beleaguered baby therapist” learning how to listen “to the cries of the canaries among us.” What a moving description of the practice of therapy. Thus, the country’s cultural complexes flow into her personal suffering and her difficult initiation as a healer. The poem tells a story of political awakening, as well as professional and spiritual development. The storyteller’s dear friend Carl’s death, the dangerous politics we are currently “seeped in like some mesothelioma” and her Buddhist practice of meditating on her own death, flow into each other. In the sinister shadow of Cheeto man, the storyteller turns off the news “like some trembling cowardly lion.”

This raises the difficult question about the choices we make in these times, dominated by hate and a “malignant tyrant.” Do we shout at the news like Carl did? Do we take to the streets?

Or do we sit in the woods like Buddha—emptying ourselves of the chaos and the rage—facing our own mortality? The storyteller strains to hear Carl’s voice and gets an answer straight from the natural world. We hear Carl’s spirit calling us to leave the world to “owlets,” who will grow into magical, dangerous night hunters—wise creatures who know how to survive in the dark—something we all need to learn in these chaotic and perilous times.

Salish Sea Credit to Brandon Olafsson

POEM IN WHICH I REFLECT ON PRESIDENTS AND DEATH
Connie Hills

When the B-movie actor was president
I lived on a houseboat near the Salish Sea.
At the end of the long lake lived Carl Johan—
my grandmother’s friend from Norway,
land of the midnight sun.
His wife, Mabel set daffodils, lilacs,
cactus blossoms on their kitchen table
where we ate dollops of egg salad
nestled in lettuce cups

Photo by Connie Hills (Chair and Flowers)

followed by streusel and hot coffee
in front of the evening news where Carl
ranted at the president on the tv screen—
his merciless neglect of the most vulnerable among us.
(Dear Reader, think AIDS, crack, psychosis, food stamps.)
Mabel tried to shush her husband but I carried
the wise owl’s medicine in the smooth muscles of my gut
as I—a beleaguered baby therapist—sat in a chair
listening to the cries of the canaries among us.

Photo by Connie Hills (Bianca 2)

One gusty night, a lanky Texan they called
Poppy—our next President—appeared on tv
blowing warm thermals under the cool right wing.
Carl lowered his fjord-blue eyes.
I’m leaving this country to you, he ceded.
His tanks of resistance, empty
handing his long fight over to me.
Carl’s sense of his impending death
shook my DNA loose.
I was one third his age with a pink rosy future and
three great horned owl (democrat) presidents before me.

Photo by Connie Hills
(Young Woman with Great Horned Owl)

But since Carl’s purple light faded
and Cheeto man seeped in like some mesothelioma—
kicking down doors, spilling hate,
fracturing families, decimating freedom,
becoming a malignant tyrant who haunts us—

Photo by Connie Hills (Mural of Dragon)

I turn off the news like some trembling cowardly lion,
recite Buddhist meditations on my own death,
favor the cherry sweet songs of robins
outside my north window
and strain to hear Carl’s voice:
It’s okay to leave this world to the owlets.
First, feed them some white mice.

Photo by Connie Hills (Buddha in the Woods)

Bio, Connie Hills

Education is not the filling of a pail,
but the lighting of a fire.
—W.B. Yeats

I slid into Naomi Lowinsky’s Deep River poetry group over a decade ago. Naomi’s unbridled praise for each poem she hears has a settling effect—which allows us to step outside our comfort zone. Naomi is an influencer when it comes to political poetry.

I wear a tattoo of apathy when it comes to politics. Growing up, my mother and brother argued politics late into the night while my father—a WW-II veteran—and I retreated to our bedrooms. We needed peace. The radical feminists of the 1980’s motto the personal is political rang true when I couldn’t attest to uphold the policies of the president of the United States on a Peace Corps application. In 1984, I met a family friend, Carl Johan—an outspoken ninety-year-old—and was comforted by the thought that socialism could lie in my DNA. But apathy runs deep. I didn’t vote in the presidential election of 2000- thought to be one if the closest presidential races in history. After that, things got so bad I vowed to vote in every election going forward, and even watched the nightly news in 2024—praying that Kamala would win. Then, the worst happened, and I haven’t watched the news since. This is my first political poem. But more importantly—it’s me finding a way out of apathy.

News from the Muse

2025-08-29T15:22:00.000-07:00

The Muse of Lament and Dissent IV

Weeping Madonna
(with credit to Sara Spaulding Phillips)

Introduction

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck…

—Shelley

Haunted August, 2025

August was the month in which, in 1933, my mother, her sisters and parents, fled Germany by train on mother’s 13thbirthday. It was also the month, five years later, that my parents were married, in Holland, in 1938, just before Hitler invaded, just before my grandparents, aunts, and parents fled Europe by ship. Since Jews were not welcome in America, the family disembarked in Cuba and waited in Havana for 18 months, until by some unknown sleight of hand, my grandfather procured Haitian passports, which somehow allowed the family to enter America, in 1940. I’m still mystified by how all this happened.

85 years later, my ancestors haunt me, in turmoil and agony, as America, their Promised Land, dives down into its darkest shadow, on its way to becoming the “colossal Wreck” Shelley describes in his famous sonnet—a shattered statue, found in the desert —of the once powerful King of Kings, Ozymandias, better known as Ramses II. \ “Empires rise and empires fall,” my ancestors chant. They insist I face the unbearable truth, that the country that saved our family, is going the way of the country they fled. They recognize the symptoms, as the Berserker turns into the Gaslighter-in-Chief, telling Big Lies, disappearing ethnic minorities, appropriating the “Jewish Problem” for his own ends.

August began with the news that UCLA’s scientific research funds were to be frozen by the National Science Foundation to punish the University for Antisemitism! Say what? Chancellor Julio Frenk, whose Jewish family fled Nazi Germany just like mine did, was the recipient of a letter with this news! Is this some sort of cosmic joke? My ancestors are not amused. Neither was Governor Newsom who said, on August 1:

Freezing critical research funding for UCLA dollars that were going to study invasive diseases, cure cancer, and build new defense technologies makes our country less safe. It is a cruel manipulation to use Jewish students’ real concerns about Antisemitism on campus as an excuse to cut millions of dollars in grants that were being used to make all Americans safe and healthy.

The voices of my ancestors grew louder and more agitated, when, on August 11, the Berserker revealed his Gaslighter-in-Chief persona, declaring a “crime emergency” in Washington D. C., even though crime is down in that city, as well as in big cities across the country. He has deployed the National Guard and armed them with guns. They are not trained to work with civilian populations. They stand around in tourist locations available for selfies. But they are not available to neighborhoods who might genuinely need their help. We remember them standing around, not knowing what their role was, in Los Angeles in June. We saw the fear and anger in the eyes of Angelinos, especially Latinos. Now the Gaslighter is threatening other blue cities: Chicago, Oakland, New York, Baltimore. What do they have in common? Black mayors! Large, vibrant Black communities. “Woke” politics. The Gaslighter wants to put us all to sleep, into a state of denial about the huge black hole his ship of state is headed toward. Having rid the country of so many immigrants whose labor feeds, clothes and cares for us, is there going to be more racist ethnic cleansing in our great cities? What will happen to our economy? Our schools? Our businesses? Our friends and neighbors? Is he going to come after the Jews? Will the National Guard with its guns be deployed to liberal areas just before an election? Or will it be deployed to deny our rights to free speech and to gather in protest? The spirit of my mother remembers that Hitler came to her town when she was twelve. She and a group of her Jewish classmates agreed they would not make the Hitler salute, though they knew their refusal was dangerous. “In times like these” I hear her say, “courage is essential.”

A remarkable show of courage came to inspire me and my ancestors. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been stolen from his family and his life by the Berserker’s ICE agents, who accused him, falsely, of gang membership, was sent, despite protests from judges who noted the lack of evidence and due process, to a hell hole prison in El Salvador, where he was tortured. Then he was brought back to the U.S. with another false accusation—human smuggling. The Berserker says he will be deported to Uganda, a country with which Garcia has no ties. A judge has ruled that he cannot be deported until he’s had due process. Garcia spoke to a group of his supporters in Spanish, asking that they promise to pray, with love, not just for him but for everybody, and to continue to demand our freedom. His courage, and the generosity of his prayer, help calm me and my ancestors. If, given all he has suffered, he can reach into our hearts and souls and help us stay awake to the terrible danger he and we are in, perhaps we can face what haunts us.

Commentary on the poem “What We Build:”

“Dawn saunters over the horizon” sets the meandering tone with which Sheila deShields opens her haunting narrative poem, suggesting ease at the beginning of a new day. But by the next line this mood is undermined as dawn reveals “her chipped teeth and gray pearls.” Where are we? Our scene–shifting storyteller says we are on a ridge— “a migration path for golden eagles/red–shouldered hawks and peregrine falcons.” Then suddenly we find ourselves aloft in “the evergreen holly oak next to the curb” where “two Anna’s hummingbirds nestle ready to fledge” at “the edge between what–is–city and the unincorporated.” A few stanzas later we stand in awe, gazing at “Mount Umunhum on the western horizon// ‘resting place for the hummingbird’/named by the Ohlone for the One Who Brought Fire.”

It dawns on me that in these opening stanzas our storyteller has taken us deep into indigenous consciousness: We’ve looked to the east at the breaking dawn; we’ve looked up at the trees to see birds in their homes; we’ve looked north to the city, looked south to the suburbs; we’ve looked west to Mount Umunhum; we’ve looked down to the ground where the silver–gray fox trots, and down down to the Realm of the Ancestors, who tell the story of “the One Who Brought Fire.” I recognize this as the opening ritual—“Calling the Directions”—practiced by tribal peoples. We name where we are—on sacred ancestral ground—with gratitude for the new day and for the ancient gift of fire.

Like her indigenous ancestors, the storyteller observes the movements of animals. Silver fox, with whatever she’s hiding in her mouth, must navigate “the new retaining wall,” and rabbit must navigate the deck, in the realm the poem’s title names: “What We Build.” Our storyteller watches all this drama from “inside/next to the glass patio door…sitting in her “new armchair-writing-spot.”

She shifts from the animal realm to tell the human story of “three weeks of disruption” created by the building of a wall and haunted by the legacy of her late father. His gift to her of beautiful Hackett rock—a special flagstone with warm colors—has been transported from her family’s land in eastern Oklahoma to her California home in a major feat of planning and building “a 142-linear-foot-retaining wall.”

The poem meanders through epochs and landscapes, as the retaining wall with its gift of support to the “crumbling hill” and its promise of a vineyard “long-dreamed” by her husband meanders through rabbit’s disturbed habitat, and through the story teller’s memories of how her father’s “stone business” became hers. She imagines the three-foot-high wall as a sitting place for a garden party, and a place where “grandchildren can walk arms like windmills for balance.” What has been built is a hospitable wall, which brings her father’s presence from Oklahoma to California—a haunting that is a blessing, and a joy for his descendants.

As the tone of the first line of this poem is undermined by its second line, the reverent tone of the first section of the poem turns fearful and outraged in the second section. The ancestral and familial legacy of “What We Build,” what we hold holy, is rudely subverted by the unholy and cruel machinations of “the Destroyer”—whom “we humans have chosen” to lead us. How did this hell realm, in which immigrants and civil servants disappear, take over our land? By what sleight of hand has the inhospitable wall “the Destroyer” has built—"18 to 27 feet high patrolled bars southern neighbors out”—come to define us?

Our storyteller makes a powerful turn with the image of the “Colossal Wreck” and her prophesy that the Destroyer’s “transient creations/fall like stone pulverized into lone and level sands.” The italicized words are quoted from Shelley’s great sonnet, “Ozymandias,” which, as she explains in her note, “speaks to the fleeting nature of power and human achievement.”

Having done away with our contemporary Pharoah, the storyteller returns to her beloved backyard, inhabited by her friend the rabbit, and advises: “run, rabbit, run.” In myth and symbol rabbit is associated with the moon, fertility, and shape-shifting Mercurious. Perhaps it takes a trickster to deal with a trickster. The storyteller invites rabbit to return, and ends with a prayer which values the natural world—a prayer we all can join:

May we value one another and the ground beneath our feet
may we be grateful for the air we share

may we help one another face
what devours.

“Mount Umunhum at Dawn”

what we build

Poem and Images by Sheila deShields

Dawn saunters over the horizon

with her chipped teeth and gray pearls

on one spring day

in the suburbs

along a ridge a migration path for golden eagles

red-shouldered hawks and peregrine falcons

while in the nest of the evergreen holly oak next to the curb

two Anna’s hummingbirds nestle ready to fledge

“Ready to Fledge”

outskirts mind you

the edge between what-is-city and the unincorporated

miles from downtown

a site of no known historical impact

and yet from the highest evergreen ash at the top of the berm

you can see Mount Umunhum on the western horizon

“resting place for the hummingbird”

named by the Ohlone for the One Who Brought Fire

when suddenly

a silver-gray fox with rufous sides

tail bushy like a cat’s

hastens behind and over a new retaining wall

her dogtrot says

she’s hiding something perhaps a hummingbird in her mouth

and then on the deck a young rabbit appears

and races across the compressed wood

streaks back

from who-knows-what

while i inside

next to the glass patio door

sit in my new armchair-writing-spot

as still as my bonsai ficus

“Writing Spot”

for i relish this company

missed during three weeks of disruption –

construction using Hackett rock

stacked idle on twelve pallets for a decade

and now a 142-linear-foot retaining wall

that curves along the bottom of the berm

and though many of the hiding places for the white-tailed rabbit are gone

the stones turned on their sides fold into meandering grace

in a warm pattern of ochre, browns, and honey

topped by a long ledge of golden Dark Cameron capstone

from eastern oklahoma delivered on a semi what I would call a large surprise

the Hackett was a gift from my father

within the year he was gone

his stone business mine to manage for a decade

at last i can view his legacy

lifted and shaped by a master mason

“Dad’s Hat on the New Wall”

this wall useful as a brace for a crumbling hill

a boundary for the vineyard-to-come long dreamed by my husband

this border at mid-point has pillars which open onto winding steps

that lead up up to the first tree we planted here

we are grateful

for our long-awaited wall though only three feet high

where a garden party of friends and family may sit

where grandchildren can walk arms like windmills for balance

where part of our Oklahoma land

sustains

and now Dawn gives way to Joy with her weathered tan cowboy hat

a garden girl she dances on stone

ii.

Rabbit what did you see what sent you back into hiding

it wasn’t the wall or me

perhaps your Scary equals the Destroyer we humans have chosen

run, rabbit, run

his wall 18 to 27 feet high patrolled bars southern neighbors out

he claims Panama Greenland Canada

he promises to mine in international waters

he holds workers and branches of government by the neck “early retirement plans”

while American citizens are transported to another country’s prison –

is anyone safe?

while within our borders

he wields the highest court in his open palm

as he speaks of a third term with expanding power

“Colossal Wreck” Online Image*

and his words

changeable as a wall without mortar transient creations

fall like stone pulverized into lone and level sands

in our backyard small rabbit

come back when you can

may we value one another and the ground beneath our feet

may we be grateful for the air we share

may we help one another

face what devours

“Run, Rabbit, Run”

*The online image of a “Colossal Wreck” is the visage of the powerful and prosperous ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II (who ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE) and is referenced in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias.” Shelley’s poem speaks to the fleeting nature of power and human achievement and includes the line “into lone and level sands.” The statue and its temple, forgotten, have fallen into the desert.

Bio

When I chose Percy Bysshe Shelley as the subject of my undergraduate honor’s thesis in Oklahoma, and then later for my graduate master’s thesis in Wales, my studies culminated with access to Shelley’s originals in The Bodleian at Oxford. I was inspired by his lyricism but also by his essay on the Defence of Poetry. He conveyed why words matter, namely, why we must pursue Truth and Beauty and speak against tyranny. The early nineteenth century words of this master poet resonate within our own time.

In my current life, I balance managing the fourth-generation family ranch in Oklahoma with my work as a trustee in the Bay Area of California. Once a satellite software systems engineer, I am a founding member of Hedgebrook Sisters Writing Group, a recipient of Hedgebrook and Rotary International Fellowships, and a Deep River Poet. Every morning I wake to see our wall built with my father’s stone, and I feel grateful for my connections to the land, my ancestors, and the writers who nurture the planet and our humanity.

News from the Muse

2025-08-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

The Muse of Lament and Dissent III

Weeping Madonna
(with credit to Sara Spaulding Phillips)

Introduction

An Agony of Witness and Empathy

I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin. But now, I don’t know you
as myself.

—Joy Harjo “I Give You Back”

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light

If you are an American who pays attention to the news, July 2025 has brought a chaos of terror and grief, and an agony of witness and empathy. July 4th brought the signing of the Big Bad Bill, which cut Medicaid for poor people in order to lower taxes for the rich. To witness the slashing and burning of institutions that have supported our American way of life for decades, is to grieve for the world as we’ve known it. To witness hardworking immigrants, who pick our fruit and vegetables, build our houses, tend our gardens, serve us in restaurants and hotels, take care of us in old age, live in terror of being snatched out of their lives and families by masked secret police, without IDs or due process, brings tears of empathy and bursts of rage. How did America, the land of the free, morph into such a hell realm?

To witness civil servants, who have worked for the government for many years, on whom we have depended for help with Social Security, Health, Education, Homeland Security, Emergency Assistance, be fired, or live in terror of being fired, arouses our empathy and horror. Who stole our government and its agencies from us—our access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

To witness the humiliation of great universities, attacked for allowing their students to gather and speak freely, takes many of us back to our own student days, when we demonstrated for Free Speech. Many schools have had their scientific research funds withdrawn as punishment-- for whom? That is a blow to the health and wellbeing of every American, who, should they fall ill, will not be able to benefit from the latest medical advances.

Who will be held responsible for the monstrosity our country has become in just six months of the Berserker’s reign of terror?

Enter the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Is this some sort of Deus Ex Machina? An act of God intent on haunting the Berserker and his minions? The Man of Teflon seems unable to shake the dirty secret of his long association with a pedophile—a trafficker of young girls and women--sexual prey for rich and powerful men. The ghosts of some of those women, who died before their time, are wailing in the Underworld, seeking to rouse those of us who will listen. Their souls require our witness and our empathy.

Commentary on the Poem: Unease Listening to my Guide in Tallinn

The edgy title of Virginia Chen’s wide ranging and penetrating poem sets the reader up for the discomfort of facing difficult truths. Those truths come in two voices, speaking from very different histories and lands. We begin in Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia, where a tour guide lectures the visitors about a history unknown to most Americans--his country’s struggle with Russian Tsars, and how that tiny country prevailed: One million Estonians sang against the Soviets day and night.

The guide scolds the tourists from the West for being afraid to “stand up for freedom” and warns: Do nothing and you will lose everything.

The second voice is that of the poem’s speaker, a “traveler for forty years,” as, back in an America changed drastically by a new administration, she struggles with what has become of her country. Married to the birthright son of parents born in China, she comes home to the shock of seeing immigrants being “arrested by agents wearing masks.” She wonders about her husband’s safety, about her own standing—her grandparents came from Europe. In a powerful leap that takes us beyond “unease,” the speaker’s blood pressure rises, sending her to the emergency room. She sums up her medical crisis deftly: American rage gave me the political bends.

She makes an astute psychological assessment of the land of her birth: We have no ancient enemy outside ourself.

Which means, one gathers, that we are doomed to project our shadow on an enemy within. But, being a traveler, who has learned courage from her Estonian tour guide’s lecture, the speaker ends her poem:

I sing in praise of singing for our rights and freedoms
unsafe though it is.

May the wisdom she has brought back from Eastern Europe inspire our American struggle against our own would-be Tsar.

Unease Listening to My Guide in Tallinn

by Virginia Chen

Tallinn

The sun is decorative. It doesn’t warm and the wind is blowing.

Our borders are closed to Russians.
Tsar Putin wants all of Europe.
Just wait. He will take.

Russia on the Globe vs Estonia on the Globe

Kyiv was once the Russian capital. Ukraine kicked out the old Tsar.
He moved to a swamp—St. Petersburg.
We’re getting ready for a fight. Northern Europe is building up

its military —NATO will help us.
Not the U.S.
They can’t decide which side they’re on.

The West is afraid to stand up for freedom.
They’re scared of nukes. Retribution.
Do nothing and you will lose everything.

Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia

Naïve leaders think they can make a deal with a Tsar.
For 500 years, Russian Tsars and Soviets tried to annex the Baltics.
Russians took us over. Then the Nazis. Then the Soviets. We fought back.

We’ve held off the Russians since 1990s when we got
independence by singing. That’s right.
One million Estonians sang against the Soviets day and night.

Estonian Women Singing Against the Soviets

We were lucky.
Not a drop of blood.

Russians don’t travel. Don’t know how others live. We Americans don’t travel that much either. When I’m asked about traveling, I’m careful

not to say much. People here are easily bored. Some are listening for what tribe I belong
to. I did not buy a “Greenland is not for sale T-shirt” in Nuuk, I bought a deep blue one

that was a map of the Fjords. Think climate. Thawing permafrost.
I’ve been traveling for over forty years. This time I came home to riots in LA.

Masked Ice Agents Arresting Immigrants

Immigrants are being arrested by agents wearing masks. Some detainees are sent to prisons in Central America, Cuba and Africa. Americans voted for this.

My husband’s parents were born in China. They had Boxer Rebellion scholarships to medical school in the U.S. They became naturalized citizens.

Becoming Naturalized Citizens

They hated the communists. Couldn’t go back home. Will Americans whose parents were born in China be targeted next? Like the American Japanese during WW II?

My husband was born in Indiana. I spent my whole life in California. My grandparents were born in Europe. I love the Dutch and Swiss but my home is in the U.S.

I was home a week when my blood pressure rose. I went to the emergency room feeling like the salmon who couldn’t readjust in the brackish waters of home after living at sea.

Sockeye Salmon

Tests showed a possible blood clot from the long flight. They let me go after they factored in my
age. American rage gave me the political bends. I don’t feel at home swimming

in hostile waters. My home has the mightiest military in the world.
But—we have no ancient enemy outside ourselves. We’re only 250 years old.

I sing in praise of travel.
I sing in praise of singing for our rights and freedoms
unsafe though it is.

No Kings Demonstrations

Besides travel, Virginia Chen spent most of her life singing in choruses. She loves the idea of people singing together in religious congregations, community choruses, and other gatherings big and small. She cherishes the experience of singing with people from different backgrounds and cultures to make beautiful music—not war. When things are bad or good, we sing.

News from the Muse

2025-06-28T16:51:00.000-07:00

News from the Muse of Lament and Dissent

Sara Spaulding-Phillips

Introduction

You are a story fed by generations
You carry songs of grief, triumph
Loss and joy
Feel their power as they ascend
Within you
Joy Harjo “Prepare”
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light p. 86

Our world has changed drastically since last month, when the Muse of Lament and Dissent published the first of a series of political poems written by members of the Deep River Poetry Circle. On June 14th “No Kings” demonstrations all over our land brought some 6 million Americans out into the streets and public squares to give voice to their lament and dissent about the state of our country. In peaceful gatherings with handmade signs they protested the authoritarian regime which sends masked ICE agents to rip terrified immigrants out of their jobs and lives without due process, sends marauding DOGE members and their chainsaw wielding leader to fire thousands of civil servants and the staff of USAID without cause, and threatens Veterans Benefits, Social Security and Medicaid in order to give tax cuts to billionaires; I could go on.

But, also during this month many of us learned of the “3.5% Rule” developed by political scientist Erica Chenowith, which says that authoritarian regimes have a difficult time withstanding the power of their people once 3.5% of the population mobilizes against them. This gives me hope and courage. Less hopeful is the President’s decision to go to war with Iran on June 21st, using enormous bunker busting bombs. Many believe this escalation will encourage Iran to continue to develop a nuclear weapon. How did we land in this dangerous hell realm? How did the way of life we took for granted just a few months ago get ripped to shreds?

Note: If you are grateful to the activist group indivisible, which organized the “No Kings” as well as the earlier “Hands Off” demonstrations, please consider joining and/or donating to them: (indivisible.org).

The Moon Is a River of Darkness

Jacqueline Thurston’s prose poem, “The Moon is a River of Darkness” braves an excruciating issue of our times, about a people whose lives have literally been ripped to shreds. On the wings of poetic imagination, we are transported to Gaza where the poem’s speaker is engaged in a heroic mission to sooth a terrified Palestinian child, and to find the Israeli activist Vivian Silver who disappeared on October 7th. Silver “linked arms with Palestinians and marched in protests” against the Israeli government’s denial of Palestinian rights. The poem’s speaker reveals that she wears her “rage like a buoy lighting the way.” But rage, and lighted buoys, tend to burn themselves out.

In the second section of the poem the speaker’s heroic determination unravels as she confesses: “I will do none of these things.” Like many of us who have suffered the horrors of the news from Gaza since the war began, the poem’s speaker is caught in an agonizing paralysis. She is back in painful reality—polarized America. She sees the dreadful truth--the slaughter, the devastation, the starvation and the echoes of the war in our own land. And then she reveals the horrible truth of Silver’s fate. In America today, protesting the war in Gaza can get you arrested for antisemitism even if you are a Jew. How can anything be solved in such times?

Thurston uses her own artwork as a kind of balm for her searing vision. Three strong images and her commentary on them illuminate her text and provide a counterpoint to the terrible truths of her poem. She reaches back in time for a Bob Dylan song from another difficult era and a poem about singing by Bertold Brecht. She ends her moving poem with a poignant peace “Offering” of seashell, feather and the uplifting image of the Holy Land as a flyway for migrating birds.

Note: When I wrote this prose poem in November of 2023, I was enraged at the violence inflicted by two Semitic peoples upon one another. At that time, I could not have envisioned the heart-breaking images of starving children and a land reduced to rubble. I am heartened by the blunt assessment of Ehud Olmert, the twelfth Prime Minister of Israel, which appeared in an edition of Haaretz in late May of 2025.“What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.” I continue to believe in the mission of inter-faith groups like Combatants for Peace and Women Wage Peace, but my days are filled with foreboding about the perilous times in which we are living.

The Moon Is a River of Darkness

Prose poem and images by Jacqueline Thurston
November 8, 2023

I will plunge through the gate at the Rafa border crossing and make my way to the heart of a city encircled by tanks. Wash the concrete and blood from the frightened face of a Palestinian child with enormous brown eyes and banish the nightmare that her life has become. Whisper “Malesh,” (“It doesn’t matter.”) knowing, of course, that it does matter, and croon “Fi Amanillah” (“In the protection of God.”)—over and over and over—until she stops sobbing. Make my way into the catacombs of Hamas’s underground city. When I find Vivian Silver, and I will find her, I will deliver her to her sons, their faces rivers of grief, who wait for her on the other side of a broken fence. How can these men who hold her prisoner not know she has dedicated her life to peace, driven ill children to Jerusalem for medical treatments, linked arms with Palestinians and marched in protests, believed she and they were comrades bound by a shared cause. I will walk through concrete walls, burning rubble, smoke-filled air—wearing my righteous anger like a buoy lighting the way through a difficult channel to the safety of a small calm port at night. I will turn Antony Blinken into a pillar of salt and release him from his prison of diplomatic rationality only when he brings this madness to an end.

“Between Two Worlds”

Mixed media image symbolizing the separate realms inhabited by hope and despair

and the secret inner world of the soul in contrast to the known elements of the outer world.

I will do none of these things. I will stare at the white ceiling of my study streaked with shadows cast by the streetlight outside my home and wait to be taken into the arms of night and finally sleep. In the morning, I will awaken to grim photographs of Palestinians being pulled from the rubble; a boy, barely ten, will turn away from the camera in anguish screaming. A child himself, he has just pulled the bodies of two children from a collapsed building. Two U.S. senators will visit kibbutzim, pause in front of uninhabitable homes, smell the stench of burnt rubber and human flesh, offer predictable platitudes, and leave.

I will listen to a Stanford student, a Syrian refugee studying computer science, describe being mowed down by a “white man with dirty blond hair” spewing curses and shouting “Fuck you and your people!” The young university student, a refugee from a war-torn country, will acknowledge that his attacker’s “hateful screams . . . still echo in my ears.” A woman who believed she was crashing her car into a Jewish school will be arrested by police in Indiana. The school, the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, is in fact an extremist organization that is anti-Israel. A sixty-nine-year-old Jew will decide to attend a pro-Israel rally in Southern California. He will be struck by a pro-Palestinian man with a megaphone and fall to the ground. His accused assailant will call 911, but the victim will die of massive head injuries in an antiseptic hospital.

“Genesis”

Mixed media image, an emblem of

the interplay of dynamic, creative, and destructive forces.

Five weeks after the Hamas attack, Vivian Silver’s remains will be found in the charred detritus of the safe room in which she sought shelter. Hundreds of members of Women Wage Peace, an Israeli organization she co-chaired, will raise their voices in song at a celebration of her life. “How many deaths will it take ’til he knows that too many people have died?” The answer, my friend, cannot be “blowin’ in the wind,” for as Dylan’s edgy voice reminds us, “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.”

I will reach back in time; retrieve the words of a playwright and poet who fled his homeland and settled in an adopted beach community filled with palm trees, sunlight, and other German refugee intellectuals, only to be uprooted once again and cross an ocean to the land of his ancestors—his return driven by the McCarthy-era investigations.

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing

About the dark times.

—Bertolt Brecht

“Offering”

Photograph celebrating fragile gifts from the sky and sea. (Bordered by a great sea to the West,
the Holy Land is a flyway for hundreds of different species of migrating birds.)

About Deep River: My creative life has been enriched by being a member of Deep River, a community of rare soul and substance. I have been nourished by the poems forged by members of this community and am grateful to Naomi Lowinsky, who has introduced us to many wonderful contemporary poets and shared her poems with us.

News from the Muse

2025-05-31T20:35:00.000-07:00

The Muse of Lament and Dissent

Introduction

We heard it.
The racket in every corner of the world. As
the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be
president
to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything
else that moved around the earth, inside the earth
and above it. —Joy Harjo

“When the World As We Knew It Ended”
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light pp. 49-50

Sara Spaulding-Phillips

Since the “Orange Man” began his tricky and treacherous reign, the Muse of Lament and Dissent has been causing a ruckus in the poetry circle I lead--Deep River—a public program for the San Francisco Jung Institute. We read great poets and write under their influence. Thankfully, we spent our last three months of this year’s cycle with Joy Harjo, who has shown us, brilliantly, how to engage in dissent and lament, in political poems that speak out of Indigenous consciousness—out of love and concern for our Mother the Earth and all her creatures.

As poets, our mode of expression is verse. So I’ve invited the poets of Deep River to give voice to their Lament and Dissent through writing political poems. The Sister from Below has graciously agreed to publish a series of these poems.

Our first poet, Maureen Wolf, gives us “Breaking News.” This powerful poem loops and spins from the NYTimes to the colorful changes spring creates in the foothills, to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, to the horrors of a Hades in El Salvador, where hapless immigrant men are held with “Trumped up” charges and without due process. In lithe poetic leaps Wolf carries us off to Ukraine, to children’s paintings of rising waters, to her Irish grandmother as she prays for her sons at war in the war to end all wars, back to the “riot” of Nature in spring, to the song in the mouth of a Stag at Easter and the Raven’s raspy voice, which even the Orange Man can’t stop.

Breaking News

by Maureen Wolf

“Guernica” Picasso - ARAS Online

News from the NY Times: not much has changed;

the world is still riding the roller coaster of the

Orange man’s policies

dipping, looping, spinning beyond the rule of law.

“Pink Peach Trees” Van Gogh -
ARAS Online

But then maybe everything has changed.

It is spring: pops of orange, blue and white

speckle the green grass of the foothills populated

with scrub oaks, grazing cattle and the confidence of Nature.

“Demeter and Kore” - ARAS Online

Spring won’t last long here: the gentle warmth of spring sun will change

quickly. The lupine, the paint brush, the shooting stars will shrivel

and the grass will brown and the air will become heavy and oppressive

under the summer sun. Remembering the scorched earth,

I wonder if Demeter has lost her bargain with Hades.

“Wailing Female Mourner”
Yeats - ARAS Online

Haven’t we all?
Aren’t we all waiting for the long winter days of the centuries to end,
Wondering when Persephone will push through

the hard pan clay of the human heart.

“Death in the Afternoon” Yeats - ARAS Online

This spring I can hear the echo of Abel’s scream as the cell door clangs behind

Neri Jose Alvarado, Andry Hernandez-Romero, Kilmar Agrego Garcia and

more in the Terroism Confinement Center in El Salvador. Trumped up stories,

no evidence, no trials. The Orange Man and Nayib Bukele casting lots.

Not long after, I learn of a Ukrainian woman nearing her hundredth birthday,

living alone in an apartment which is miraculously standing in Zaporizhzhia—

with no electricity, no heat, thimbles of food brought by her niece

when bombs aren’t falling--who stays three more days in hospital,

not for medical reasons, but to visit friends.

Hour Glass Drawing by child

I imagine a broken table in the hospital ward where the crones have tea

and grieve for the soldiers they once suckled at their breasts and talk

of the images their great grandchildren paint, images of a child standing

on the roof of home surrounded by rising water, of earth in an hourglass.

Scrawled in a child’s hand: No more planet.

“Weeping Madonna”
Sara Spaulding Phillips

I hear them singing Bozhe Velykyi and Mariye Maty Bozha prayers for protection,

prayers of supplication. I hear my Irish grandmother praying for thirty days

until her sons come home from the war after the war to end all wars.

Prayers to Mary. Prayers to Demeter. Prayers to Gaia.

“Stag and Moon” pixabay

The songs are carried in the mouth of a Stag to me on Easter morning. When I watch

the pinks and blues of the eastern sky gently pull back the curtain of night, I hear

the raven’s raspy voice greet the sun and see the crown headed sparrow search

for seeds and know the confidence of Nature.

“In Shoreham Garden” Palmer
ARAS Online

The Orange Man cannot pen an order stopping the riot of Spring from hearts on fire.

But as the Stag, and the raven, the sparrow and the crones have sung to me

to be consumed by fire means leaving so much of me behind. The path to the Other

winds through the path hidden in plain sight.

"My Nurse and I" - ARAS Online

Artist’s Statement

For several years I had eyed Naomi’s Deep River workshop in the CG Jung Institute of San Francisco program brochure. In 2019, I attended a conference on the Other at the Institute where Naomi was presenting. I spoke with her briefly about my interest in Deep River but also of my hesitation. I found understanding the works of most poets a mystery. Naomi said something to the effect of “Jump in.”

Nearly five years later, I jumped into Deep River. During this past year we wrote “under the influence” of three poets dislocated from the land of their birth. In these turbulent times in the States, I too have felt dislocated. Deep River became the place where I could explore and give voice to my exile. I am grateful to Naomi for providing a place and for her enthusiastic greeting of my fledging poems. I am grateful for the Deep River poets for their warm embrace of me and, especially, of my work. Over the years, I have collected several degrees. I am a psychotherapist and live with Ruby, a dislocated husky, in Fresno, California in the Central Valley, the doorway to the Sierra Nevada.

—Maureen Wolf

June 14th No Kings Day of Defiance

If you are feeling a need to express your own lament and dissent about the state of our country, we urge you to join Indivisible’s demonstrations on June 14th—A Day of Defiance.

News from the Muse

2025-04-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

News from the Muse

of Revolution

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul—

—Emily Dickinson

Sister from Below: Cover
Painting by Bianca Dalder

What’s Happened to the Sister from Below?

If you follow the Sister from Below’s News from the Muse you may wonder what’s become of her. I’ll tell you what: the November 2024 Election, and since the January Inauguration, the onslaught of bedlam and chaos in the crazed fists of a Berserker President. The Sister from Below has been silenced. Struck dumb. The breath of inspiration knocked out of her. She, my connection to Soul, to deep Self, has withdrawn to a dark cave, to keen, to howl, to moan. She’s brought me no wisdom, no glowing intuitions from the depths, only nightmares about stormy weather.

Kamala & Tim

Gone, gone the joyous dance of Kamala Devi Harris & Tim Walz, in whose vision of America women are free to choose, workers are paid livable wages, Mother Earth is honored and protected. Gone gone the feathered thing called Hope. Now we’re in a story of total devastation. The Robber Baron crew has showed up with their chain saws, to fell every tree our ancestors planted—the habitat for feathered creatures and their songs.

But then, one night, I had a dream which changed everything. The Sister from Below showed up in the form of Diane di Prima, my late, long ago poetry teacher, demanding I write a revolutionary rant. That dream evoked memories of a difficult mentorship. It woke The Sister from Below to the inspiration of the Muse of Revolution and to the necessity of political rants. She gave me this poem to pass on to you. And she asks, if you are so inclined, that you pass it on to others in need of inspiration.

Diane di Prima

A Revolutionary Letter

to the Spirit of Diane di Prima

Revolution: a turning, as the earth
turns, among planets, as the sun
turns. . .

                               we turn. . .
faces of pain and fear, the dawn
awash among them
—Diane di Prima

You came to my dream last night   Diane
like a Zen slap   your fierce spirit hell bent   on waking
me up   rousing me to write   a roaring rant
for these terrible times   you find me in   You
who were my poetry teacher   decades ago   You
whose lineage   is my lineage   Blake   H.D.
The Black Mountain Poets   Your own wild Loba   You

usher me up a steep staircase to your garret a word

whose root means watchtower   You who believed
there is gold   deep in the roots of words   You
       whose creed was   a poet must always be   on the watch

White Wolf Fantasy

Remember the first time I came to you?   wearing a flouncy
gypsy skirt   so femme   beside your tattered Beat poet jeans
I was scared   for I had given you the power   to dub me poet
or dud   Back in the day   at a demonstration against The War
I’d heard you read   Revolutionary Letters   I was smitten   you
who mingled the lyrical   & the political   (forbidden to an English
major)   called to me   like a Muse   Turns out my lucky stars
had unexpected plans for me   an esoteric path you walked
me down   to the roots of Poetry’s Tree of Life   in the Spirit
of the Depths   in the Lunar Realms   of Magick   Tarot
                                       Kabbala Alchemy Mythology Dreams

Wm. Turner Angel Standing in the sun

I watched you being brilliant fierce tongue-lashing nasty

You scared me   just as my Father had   & yet I stayed
in your circle   in the spell of your Magick   long enough
to become the poet I am   whose Muse insists   on mingling
the esoteric   the lyrical   & the political   Your lineage
is my lineage   At the cusp of the pandemic   I learned

you’d left your body & now here you are in my dream

insisting I remember who I am the first-born birth right baby

of refugee Jews from the Shoah reliving the very catastrophe

into which I was born I used to believe never again

would such an atrocity assault us

The holy wind’s been knocked out of my Muse

My Goddess has retreated to the underworld

Your spirit demands that I tell it as I see it

the whole cruel scourge of our passion play

He has come who sees himself as savior creator

of a Golden Age whose given name means

Ruler of the World Sea Monster from the Depths

I prefer to call him   Berserker   You say that hardly
does him justice   The truth is that he stinks
He is corrupt   his guts rotting   in Big Mac Sauce
His Doppelganger   who does his dirty work
his little boy   as a shield against assassination   He wields
a jubilant chain saw   to cut & slash   the Civil Service
to rend asunder   the bonds that bind our land   Diane
is that you chanting   the Declaration of Independence?

Lady Liberty Weeping

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive
of our rights to Life Liberty and the Pursuit
of Happiness It is the Right of the People to abolish it

He has ridden roughshod   over the Constitution
He has tossed landmines at clinics that serve   wounded veterans
He has swindled the working classes   to cut taxes for the rich
He has eviscerated truth   violated due process
disobeyed judges   ripped peaceful legal immigrants
out of their lives   O monstrous chaos agents
wreckers of law   & community   You who believe
that empathy is a sin   a feminine weakness
like helping a stranger   like feeding a starving child
like calling out   cruelty & bigotry   Be careful

Our Goddess has arisen   from her underworld meat hook
She who is a love Goddess   a warrior Goddess   a flood
& fire Goddess   for whom earth & sky sing
               is in a holy fury   about this desecration &   She’s Woke!

The Goddess Durga: Photo by Subhrajyoti

News from the Muse

2024-12-29T00:58:00.000-08:00

The Muse of Lament and Dissent

invites you to a Poetry Reading on Zoom

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

will read from her 6th poetry collection

Your Face in the Fire

Blue Light at the Gallery

Friday, Jan. 10, 2025 6pm Pacific Time

7pm Mountain Time 8 pm Central Time 9 pm Eastern Time

                                                                       Though the weather’s becoming
                                       a banshee goddess   Though the “white only” nation
                                       is trolling the web   Though the emperor-elect
                                       is tweeting our downfall   My wish is   Remember
                                       The way of women   is our way   The moon swells
                                       the moon goes dark   pulling the tides   in and out
                                       The way of trees   is our way   So raise up
                                       your branches   sisters   for we are one   gathering
                                       Soon sap   will rise   apple trees flower

                                       We’ll weave us a canopy   all over this land
                                       It will be uprising time   once again
                                                                                   in America

                                                                           from “Wishing in the Woods with Hillary”
                                                                                      in Your Face in the Fire

Two Women Under the Tree in the Garden - Edvard Munch

Request your Zoom link at bluelightpress@aol.com

For a signed copy of Your Face in the Fire

Send request, name and address to danielsafran@yahoo.com

($25.00 via PayPal--nlowsky@hotmail.com--includes shipping and handling)

News From the Muse

2024-08-10T15:30:00.000-07:00

The Muse of Kamala Devi

Without mud you cannot have lotus flowers. Without suffering, you

have no way to learn how to be understanding and compassionate…

No mud, no lotus.

—Thick Nhat Hanh

What Story Are We In?

I keep a Kamala Harris campaign button from 2020 on my bureau, among jewelry boxes and dancing goddesses from various cultures. I’ve asked myself why I hold on to this souvenir of her unsuccessful run for president in the long ago Before Times. An inner voice argues: “Because you love her name, her smile and her slogan: ‘Kamala Harris For the People.’ She’s a Muse for Truth and Justice. Hold on to her.”

Kamala Campaign Button 2020

Like so many who watched Joe Biden’s devastating debate performance on June 28th, I fell into a void of terror and despair. I’ve known this place since childhood, when a chorus of ancestors who died in the Shoah visited me frequently, filling my soul with unbearable lamentations. My father taught me to keep my eye on the political horizon, always looking for the next Hitler. He has appeared in myriad incarnations—Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, George Wallace, and most recently, in 2016, that berserker with orange hair. He’s back, big time.

I saw our good President Biden looking like a ghost at the debate, his tongue frozen, unable to articulate the truth as lie after lie came out of the mouth of the wanna-be king. Seized by ancient dread, I saw myself wandering among hordes of other lost souls, tramping through the muck of our desecrated country, besmirched by hate, rage and the terrifying MAGA plot—Project 2025—to dismantle our democracy and our constitution.

And then, suddenly, in just a few hours, as though someone had waved a magic wand, everything changed. Our President made the painful decision not to run for a second term. He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Devi Harris. That our president put the good of the country before his own ambitions caused the world to fall back into order for me. An enormous weight lifted from my shoulders, and the shoulders of everyone with whom I spoke. Maybe our democracy is not on the chopping block, after all.

Kamala Devi, with her beautiful smile and compassionate eyes leapt into the fray with so much joy and verve that we find ourselves wondering, what story are we in? She glows and laughs as she speaks truth to the torrent of lies and inanities coming from the MAGA candidates.

A bright burst of hope for our country, the kind of hope I haven’t felt since Obama ran for President in 2008—hope for our poor beleaguered planet, hope for women’s rights—so devastated by the Dobbs decision—hope for the future of our children and grandchildren, hope for our agonized land, fills my heart. Maybe we’ve been transported into a redemption story, a story of love and freedom. I find myself praying to every goddess I know to protect and bless Kamala Devi. I find myself wondering what myth we are in.

What Myth Are We In?

Curious about the meaning of Kamala Devi’s names I reach for a favorite book—Hindu Goddesses, by David Kinsley, and am astounded at how deftly they spell out her destiny. Kamala means lotus flower—sacred in Hindu iconography. Kinsley writes of the lotus: “It is a symbol of fertility and life which takes its strength from the primordial waters. . . Rooted in the mud but blossoming above the water, completely uncontaminated—the lotus represents spiritual. . . authority. (p. 21)

Devi, I learn, is Sanskrit for “shining one” or Goddess. Kinsley writes of Devi that she “represents the ultimate reality in the universe. . .a powerful, creative, active transcendent female being. . . said to be the life force of all being. . . the root of the tree of the Universe. . . [whose] essential nature is Shakti. . . the active dimension of the godhead.” Devi is the Mother of all Goddesses, but especially associated with the goddesses Lakshmi and Durga. This is particularly apt because Lakshmi—the Goddess of beauty, happiness and good fortune—is often portrayed sitting on a lotus blossom—and Kinsley writes, “is often called Kamala.” (p. 21) Durga, on the other hand, is a fierce warrior Goddess whose “mythological function is to combat demons who threaten the stability of the cosmos. . .” (p. 95) “Durga,” writes Kinsley, “violates the model of the Hindu woman. She is not submissive, she is not subordinated to a male deity. . . She is an independent warrior who can hold her own against any male on the battlefield.” (p. 97) I wonder if Shyamala Gopalan Harris contemplated the mythic forces she was invoking, when she gave her first born daughter such powerful names, which embed her in Indian culture and foretell this astonishing moment we are in.

Goddess Devi

Kamala Devi is filled with the energies of these three goddesses—Lakshmi, Durga and Devi—full of love and laughter, fierceness and resilience, seated on the lotus blossom of her spiritual authority, in touch with her Shakti, and with our culture’s profound need for the deep female energies she manifests. It’s no wonder that, as our Muse, she is so vital, so inspiring, so able to make us feel full of creativity and possibility. Just hours after Biden endorsed Kamala Devi, 44,000 Black Women got on a Zoom call and raised $1.6 million dollars for the campaign. Next day, 53,000 Black Men raised $1.3 million. These events inspired Shannon Watts, a white gun control activist, to organize “White Women: Answer the Call” a few days later. I got on that call, with 164,000 white women, the largest Zoom call ever, though it kept crashing, freezing, and then coming back on. We raised $10.5 million. Many women spoke of their hopes and fears. One woman said she’d been waiting for “love to arrive,” she was so sick of all the hate and the fear. And love did arrive, in the form of Kamala Devi. Another woman spoke of her subgroup—“Witches for Harris” I was thrown back in time to the late ‘60s early ‘70s Second Wave Feminism that changed my life when I was young. It was then that I learned about witches, that they were healers and priestesses of the Great Mother; it was then that I learned about the Goddess. It was in those years—1973—that Roe vs. Wade became law, and that I stopped hearing dreadful stories about back-alley abortions.

Many other fundraising events have raised unheard of amounts of money for Kamala Devi, including “White Dudes for Harris,” “Cat Ladies for Kamala”—a dig at the Republican vice presidential candidate who attacked Democratic women activists as “childless cat ladies,” and “Elders for Kamala” which focused on climate change and how supportive and knowledgeable Kamala Devi is on those essential issues.

With Kamala, we are reclaiming the Myth of the Goddess who inspired so many of us half a century ago, and whose transformative powers have been forgotten in the agony of the patriarchal backlash we have been suffering.

Goddess Lakshmi

“The Spell is Broken”

So says Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, who has been chosen as Kamala’s vice-presidential running mate. I find this profound. Walz speaks to the mythical shadow world we’ve been trapped in—a scary fairy tale about a demonic sorcerer, who has had our country in his thrall since 2016. Listen to the berserker chaos man—there is something hypnotic in how he speaks, how he riffs on names, plays with nasty nicknames, conjures terrifying visions of invasion and disaster, puts his followers in a nightmarish trance, proclaims himself the only one who can save them. For the rest of us he is a bully, a boogie man under the bed, the intruder who chases you down dark corridors in frightening dreams. And now, thanks to Kamala Devi, thanks to Tim Walz, he is unveiled as an unhinged old man.

Goddess Durga

Walz is also the one who said, of the berserker and his circle—“those guys are creepy and just weird.” Creepy is spot on. But usually, I’m a fan of weird. I’m drawn to the uncanny and the eerie—portals to the unconscious realms of dream and imagination. However, I get that Walz is naming the shadowy underbelly of our country which has been revealed during this frightening time. He is not hyperbolic about this. Just matter of fact. He doesn’t buy into the terror and the chaos. He says it plainly and directly: “These guys are the anti-freedoms.” “Who is asking to ban birth control?” “Who is asking to raise the price of insulin?” And then he stuns me by returning me to the political values I held as a child and a young adult. He says: “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s Socialism is another person’s Neighborliness.” In such plain yet profound speech he sums it all up. And then challenges us: “How often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the world?” As I write it is just 90 days. By the time you read this it will be fewer.

Dear friends and fellow survivors of the shock of 2016, this is our moment. It is a great gift. We can’t waste it. Kamala is our Devi, and Tim is our favorite uncle. They have already changed our lives. Please support them in any way that suits you. Donate, Volunteer, Vote! Here are some places to start:

Volunteer: votesaveamerica.com/2024

Donate: kamalaharris.com

Find your polling place: Iwillvote.com

Divine Mother

The Sister from Below

2024-06-04T09:42:00.000-07:00

is delighted to announce

Your Face in the Fire

is an Amazon Bestseller!

Cover art by Kathleen Russ

This happened because so many of you joined the book launch and
ordered a copy on June 1. A beautiful community effort.
Thank you, thank you!

If you haven’t ordered your copy yet it’s still available on Amazon.

Here’s another poem from the book:

Only the Blind

You have always belonged to the moon
Though sometimes it leads you astray

Past willows across the swinging bridge
To somebody’s grave by the river

Stuck in the cave of your skull
You grope for the disappeared moon

Down where it’s blue so blue
Only Blind Willie Johnson

Can sing your way home
Only Isaac the Blind can see

The banshee has got your bones
She’s beating her drum with your bones

And you’re stuck in the cave of your skull
No willows no swinging bridge

Who will plant you deep in the earth?
Who will water your toes?

When the banshee has got your bones
When she’s beating her drum with your bones

You have always belonged to the moon

Only Isaac the Blind can show you
That glow beyond the bridge

Only Blind Willie Johnson
Can sing your way home

Moon Goddess
Jemma M. Young

The Sister from Below

2024-05-17T11:37:00.000-07:00

is delighted to announce the publication of

Your Face in the Fire

Launch Date: June 1, 2024

Help this book become a best seller!!
Order your copy from Amazon on June 1

Here is the first poem in the book: (Images added)

Sun Goddess, Jonny Ujiokubas

Fire is Your Name and Your Maker

Fire is your god’s
eye gleam the tiger that prowls your dreams

Fire is your sun and your rising

Tiger, Franz Marc

You had to tamp your fire
down hard   back in the day of pointy bras
and girdles   when a spark in the back of a Chevy

could knock you up   Remember
when a fiery tongue could get you
                                                   burnt alive?

Fire in the hearth   now that’s
a woman’s business   embers
from Mother’s fire   offerings

Peasant Woman by the Fire,
Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Nugent

from the tree   kitchen fire
bedroom fire   birth fire fire
from the core of the earth   When cauldron boils

there is no fire that can’t escape   no fire
that will not leap and sass   change shape
be burning snake in summer grasses

The Tiger Lucky Eight, Thomas Nugent

hot breasted home wrecker
funeral pyre I ask you
how do you keep from burning

Open Fire in Hearth,
Black Horse Inn, West Sussex

your love to ashes?
l tell you how
Take a twig from the tree   Whittle a sharp tip

Mix Mother’s fire with yours   Burn
Make ash marks
on white paper   Write yourself down

your leap and your sass   your hot breasted
double edged axe   the tiger that prowls your dreams
                                                           your sun and your rising

(Poem first published in Ginosko )

Sehkmet Goddess of the Sun
Robbie Bailey

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

2024-04-23T14:55:00.000-07:00

Your Face in the Fire

Launch Date: June 1, 2024

Watch this blog for more information

* * * *

News from the Muse of the Double-headed Axe*

*The Double-Headed Axe or labrys was sacred as a tool and a weapon. It belonged to the Minoan
Goddess. It is associated with the labyrinth—“house of the double axe.”

Roi Faineant

an online literary publication

has published four of Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s recent poems.

It is difficult to find literary magazines which will publish long poems, and/or poems that take on the difficult issues of our terrible times. Hats off to the editors of this brave publication. You can find all four poems here:

The Muse of the Double-headed Axe

insists on sharing Her poem, below.

Labyrinth

Pilgrimage in the Shape of a Prayer

I.
You never know   where   you’re going
                                               until you get there
You never know   what   you’ll stumble into
                                               until you’re in it
so said the Labyrinth       one afternoon
                                               in late November
as your feet faltered    round the sudden   twists and turns
                                                of the double-headed ax
When at last   you emerged   from that pilgrimage
                                           in the shape of a prayer
ruby red and gold trees   flared up   into a glory
                                           and you suddenly remembered   the Dream

II.
The Dream knows you   are a wandering Jew
whose bones ache   with the agony weight
of the world   forever   seeking sanctuary
forever   on a pilgrimage   in the shape of a prayer
you stumble   into   a small   Black Hole   A temple?
A trap?   A desecration of the Holy Land?   Can’t see a thing
but the bony labyrinth   of your ear hears   demonic chanting
bibinetanyahubibinetanyahubibnetanyahu
The One and the Only   Mr Security
The One and the Only   Judge and Jury
rousing your ancestors   to warn you
This double-headed ax blow   to the stomach
this manic metronome   with its hypnotic spell
means to render you   powerless   or is it
a call to witness   how swiftly sanctuary
                                               can turn   treacherous?

Nova Music Festival

Hostages

III.
The Dream knows you   will stumble
   into this damp and gloomy spider web of tunnels
       a double-headed ax   a labyrinth of passageways
           You walk   with the walkers   who can’t see
                                                   you   seem to be   a spirit   in this underworld
               You come at last   to a well-lit room
                   a group of young people   wounded   bandaged
                       dazed   confused   held prisoner
                           Are you called to witness   the abducted?
                       Are you called to hear   what they remember?
                     Just yesterday   they were ecstatic   trance dancers
               a synchronized flow   of mandalas   within mandalas
           spheres beyond spheres   in the company   of Great Buddha
       on a pilgrimage   in the shape of a prayer   for peace   for joy
   between Jews and Muslims   loving the land they share   all day
all night   in the desert   until suddenly   at sunrise   Nirvana cracks

   gun shots   hand grenades   terrorists are hunting them   running
       running   weeping    shrieking   corpses scattered   everywhere
           and they   the survivors   abducted
               Where was the army?   We served our time
                   We would have saved us   Now we’re stuck
                       in this hell hole   without our phones
                           How can we text   our terrified mothers?
                               What would Buddha say?

Destruction in Gaza

Eye and Child

IV.
The Dream transports you stumbling   into a temple   or is it a mosque by the sea?   The Dream
shows you   the spirit of a girl who reveals   I am the “Unknown Trauma Child” of Gaza
Did anyone survive under the rubble that terrible night   when the bomb crashed into our home
like a double-headed ax?   All I could hear was   shrieking   shrieking   Then nothing a tunnel
of darkness   a sudden bright light   as the ancestors gathered   fragments of my soul
so I can visit with you   in your dream   so you can see me whole   a radiant loving child
of radiant loving people   May they come to me   as ghosts who walk the labyrinth
a pilgrimage   in the shape of a prayer   May you greet them   here in this sanctuary
made sacred by your sorrow   Sit with us   Meet my mother who was tender   Meet my father
who was playful   Meet my older brother   the joker   Meet my younger sister   the dreamer
and that unknown unborn one  in mother’s womb  who never will see   the light  of the new day
This is my family   broken pottery  shattered lineage  cast away flesh and bones  No one is left
to identify   our bodies   No one is left   to grieve   May you be our witness   our weeper
                                                                                  May you gather  and treasure  our souls

Underworld

The Dream knows   you are weary               still stumbling   on difficult terrain
   This pilgrimage  in the shape of a prayer   has not yet revealed the  Temple of your Soul
       The Dream is a labyrinth   in motion           in the shape of a butterfly
           in the shape of a double-headed ax              it cuts through tumult  and you find yourself
               ascending a Rock   given a hand up           by kind people   who know   sorrow
           “This Rock” they tell you                       “is our Sanctuary   without walls
           where all who love this land               call it Palestine  call it Israel may gather to pray
       that the Rock will hold us   know us     help us face the hard truth of our history
   the hard truth   of our geography           the hard truth   of our kinship in catastrophe
       We bring prayer rugs   and prayer shawls       We prostrate ourselves   we daven

We’ve come to hear the Stone speak”

I am the voice of the land you love

Hear O Israel Hear O Palestine

I am your Mother

I say “Enough Already!

Salaam is Sholom Sholom is Salaam

Make Peace!”

Sacred Rock

The Sister from Below

2023-11-27T21:10:00.000-08:00

Is Pleased to Announce

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s poem:

“The Ghost of My Father Remembers Himself

Playing the ‘Moonshine’ Sonata”

has won Synkroniciti’s “Space” Poetry Contest.

Katherine McDonald, the editor of Synkroniciti writes:

Synkroniciti is thrilled to announce the winner of our “Space” poetry contest, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s “The Ghost of My Father Remembers Himself Playing the ‘Moonshine’ Sonata.” Much of the poetry we received for the “Space” issue was outstanding, but this poem stole our hearts and brought us to tears. Naomi’s father grew up Jewish in early 20th century Germany and was a great believer in the European musical tradition, a student of the musicologist Besseler, who studied with the esteemed philosopher Heidegger. As the second World War began to brew in Germany, he found himself not only homeless and stateless, but a cultural orphan, disowned by the institutions he respected and cherished. Immigrating to America greatly disillusioned with culture, institutions, and God, he found community in the American South and began to reconstruct his life through the redeeming power of music. Announcing the sorrowful “Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven, which he translated as the “Moonshine Sonata,” he was momentarily baffled that the southern audience laughed, but played anyway. “In America I learn Moonshine will get you drunk.” Naomi’s command of language, her rich imagery, and her use of visual spacing as a tool to slow and control narrative rhythm are finely honed and the effect is breathtaking, rich in empathy, vulnerability and drama. The poem is in three parts, three episodes from her father’s life, presented out of chronological order. The second and third sections take the visual form of waves, recalling both the undulations of the river Neckar and the broken accompaniment of Beethoven’s most famous sonata.

We will be publishing two of Naomi’s stunning poems in “Space” and two more in “Family (March 2024).” “Space” debuts at the end of the month.

Here is a link to the “Space” issue of Synkroniciti:

The Muse of the Promised Land

2023-10-30T17:25:00.030-07:00

News from the Muse of

The Promised Land

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Jerusalem Sliman Monsour

A Dream of Jerusalem

Jerusalem sits in mourning. She’s sitting shiva.

—Yehuda Amichai Open Close Open p. 136.

Isaac Frenkel Frenel

This blog piece was inspired by a dream:

I am in Jerusalem, standing among others outside an imposing structure—part city hall, part synagogue. But this is not a sanctuary for the living. It reverberates with spirits who seem trapped within it. They lament and they clamor. They beat their spectral heads and hands against the walls and windows, demanding the Jerusalem we always said we would return to, next year—as part of the Passover ritual. It is as though the building itself is possessed—writhing in an agony of dead Jewish souls. This almost living being is trying to contain the torment, the longing, the sorrow, the rage of generations of ancestors railing at the living, demanding the Jerusalem of their souls. My paternal grandparents, who died in the Shoah, tug at me, as though they want to join those inhabiting “The City of God,” a protest tent city that sprang up after tens of thousands of Israelis hiked in 95 degree heat from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to protest Netanyahu’s Judicial Coup. One sign reads: “Bibi, haven’t the Jews suffered enough?” This cacophony of suffering invoked in me the Muse of the Promised Land—that shining angel of hope in Jewish history—which seems to lurch from catastrophe to miracle and back. But history had other plans.

Catastrophe

Have You not, O God, abandoned us?

—Psalm 60:12 Translated by Robert Alter

By the Rivers of Babylon - Gebhard Fugel, c. 1920

On October 7th—a Saturday as well as the holiday, Simchat Torah, which celebrates the end and the beginning of the annual cycle of reading the Torah—the Jewish world was blind-sided by a brutal, entirely unexpected attack on Israel by Hamas, which invaded its southern border with Gaza by land, by sea, and by air. How could this happen to a warrior nation, famous for its masterful military and cunning intelligence capabilities? How could terrorists have crossed the border of Gaza, entered Israel, killing and taking hostage Israelis in their homes, towns, kibbutzim and at a night long music festival held near that border? Three thousand mostly young people danced and sang in the Negev desert until dawn to celebrate Peace, Unity, Love and Sukkot—the Jewish harvest festival. Suddenly, at sunrise, sirens clamored, rockets and missiles fell from everywhere, hundreds of terrorists shot at the revelers from every direction. The children of Israel were slaughtered, raped, stolen away on motorcycles—hostages to be taken over the border to Gaza. Survivors keep saying: ‘It’s the Shoah, all over again.’ What happened to Israel’s vaunted Defense Forces, its Iron Dome, its Pegasus spyware?

That refrain, ‘It’s the Shoah all over again’ is a trauma response among Jews that sends us whirling downward into a pit of despair and agony—there seems no way out of it. I lived much of my childhood in that pit.

In the Wake of the Shoah

when my father’s fierce fingers made Bach flow

our dead came in and sat with us a ghostly visitation

and my grandmother sang lieder from long ago

—Naomi Lowinsky Adagio and Lamentation p. 27

Haunted - Unknown artist

As a child I lived in the dark undertow of the Shoah. The dead were an unspoken presence. I felt them in my father’s rages, in my mother’s depression, in the sense of dread that emanated from the dark corners of the house; I saw them in my Oma’s haunted eyes. We were a family of Jewish refugees from Hitler thrown back and forth between catastrophe and miracle. There was nothing in between. The catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe was just behind us. Daily catastrophes assaulted our household. My brothers chased each around the house, disturbing our father’s work on a musical score. He came roaring out of his study, looking and sounding like Hitler, grabbed each little boy by the ear and knocked their heads together. They wailed. My mother, who had married a distinguished thirty-year-old scholar when she was eighteen, had no authority over him—no gravitas. She wept. And I, terrified of father’s Hitlerian furies, hid out in a corner, said nothing. That was my catastrophe.

Miracle

Justice and law are the base of Your throne.

—Psalm 89:15 Translated by Robert Alter

Promised Land

But there was redemption. The Muse of the Promised Land visited us often and cast a spell of hope and joy. She was a shapeshifter, answering to different names: Palestine, America, Israel. When She arrived, often on Shabbat, I watched my father’s face light up, I heard his language become mythopoetic, as he told us miracle stories of how he, our family, our people were saved from Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews by those three Promised Lands which took in Jewish refugees. Father told a magical story of how, in the clutch of history’s brutal fist, his path opened before him, and he was shown the way to sanctuary.

I and the Village - Marc Chagal

My father was born in Stuttgart to a family of impoverished Jews who fled the brutal pogroms which targeted Jews in the Russian Pale. They found refuge in Germany, in the early years of the 20th century. Father was the only son among six children. He was destined to be the chosen one, the one who would bring the glories of German culture and the patina of knowledge and success to the family. He was well on his way, pursuing a doctorate in Musicology at Heidelberg University in 1932, just before Hitler came to power. I can hear father now, in the spellbinding tradition of Russian Jewish storytellers who leap gracefully from the everyday to the mystical and back:

A Stuttgart policeman—not a Jew—was the first miracle. He warned my family that we were under suspicion because my sister had a communist boyfriend. He told my mother to flush the left-wing pamphlets down the toilet and flee the country immediately. Word got to me in Heidelberg and I—again a miracle—was able to complete my dissertation in six weeks and—another miracle—cross the border to Holland at dusk, while the guards were looking the other way. And wasn’t it a miracle that my dissertation was about a Flemish Renaissance composer, Orlando di Lasso, who was of great interest to Princess Juliana of Holland whom I happened to meet on the street one day, which led to my becoming the royal piano teacher, which led to my becoming the piano teacher for the Hoffman family, which led to my marrying the youngest daughter—your mother—just before the Anschluss, when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. We knew Holland would soon be invaded.

The Promised Land was calling all Jews to get out of Europe. My father-in-law saw it clearly—no place in Europe was safe for the Jews. He was a miracle maker who had the means and the intelligence to figure out how to get people out. He helped to get three of my sisters passage to British controlled Palestine years before it became Israel. What a miracle that they found refuge and community, that they were able to marry and raise families in the Jewish homeland. Your Opa would not have thought it a miracle that he helped my sisters emigrate, or that he found passage out of Holland for his family and new son-in-law. He was a practical and ethical man who would consider it the only thing to do under the circumstances.

Father never spoke about the difficulties of the family’s long passage. The Promised Land of America was calling. But America was in no mood to take in Jewish refugees from Hitler—anti-Semitism was widespread, and the country was recovering from the Great Depression. The Hoffman–Lowinsky family had to wait in Cuba for 20 months before the miracle of entering the Promised Land could happen. How my Opa managed that was never clear to me until well into my midlife, when a relative’s death brought letters into my possession that explained what had happened—Opa had purchased Haitian passports. No wonder my family identifies so strongly with people of color. The passports worked to get the family into America but were no help when it came to getting visas, or citizenship. I gather, from the letters, that Opa had to go through a difficult legal struggle. A few months later, shortly after I was born, Opa dropped dead, while playing chess with himself. He’d had a stroke. He had devoted himself to helping many members of our family immigrate to America. I heard the Muse of the Promised Land in the stories my mother’s cousins told of how Opa had saved them. Whenever I hear news stories about the difficulties refugees from dangerous situations face when they try to enter our Promised Land, I feel grieved and furious. But for luck and Opa’s skilled perseverance, none of my family would be here.

Catastrophe
I reviewed Arab history
found no dream to borrow…
the tortured homeland infiltrated me
Siham Da’oud The Poetry of Arab Women p. 92

Olive Harvest in Palestine - Maher Naji

My ancestral rememberings are constantly interrupted by news from Israel and from Gaza. I feel suffused with the news. I remember when my husband Dan and I visited Israel in 1987, just before the first Intifada—Arabic for Uprising—every Israeli home we visited had the television news on constantly. They lived in a state of perpetual vigilance. These days I feel like an Israeli, caught up in my own Shoah trauma vortex. But of course, I’m not living in the horror of today’s Israeli reality. I’m not hearing sirens and rockets go off many times a day. I don’t have to drop everything I’m doing and run to the bomb shelter. I’m not getting news of dear friends or family who have been slaughtered or taken hostage. I’m not going to funerals. But I am flooded with the agony of the moment. My moral compass keeps spinning. My heart hurts for the Palestinians in Gaza who are being brutally bombarded day after day. They have no bomb shelters. My heart hurts for the mother in Jerusalem whose beautiful 23 year old son was at that music festival. His left arm was blown off by a grenade attack before he was taken hostage. Is he alive? My heart hurts for the mother in Gaza City, where the siege of Israeli bombing has begun. How can she find food and water for her little ones, without risking her life? Israel has stopped the transport of food, water, fuel and electricity. How will she and her little ones survive? My heart hurts for Tony Blinken, our American Secretary of State, who has a Shoah history much like mine. His grandfather fled from Russian pogroms. His stepfather survived Auschwitz and Dachau. He’s engaged in indefatigable shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, trying to calm the fevers of war. He too must be in a trauma vortex.

Miracle
Always there is hope
always one is born to pay off
an old debt…
—Anat Zecharia A Winding Line p.145

Zvi Adler - Judean Hills

Back in 1950, the Promised Land of Israel, opened its doors to my mother’s sister Ilein. She chose to make Aliyah rather than remain in America with her parents and sisters. She married, became a chicken farmer, selling eggs on the outskirts of Haifa. Unable to bear children, she adopted them. My Oma, an accomplished painter of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, visited her Ilein often and returned with glowing canvases—the beach at Haifa, the azure blue of the Mediterranean Sea. The Muse of the Promised Land spoke to me through those paintings, gave me a vision of Israel as a land of light blessed by its ocean port. Many of these trips happened in the 1950s, before people traveled by air. Oma must have seen the Port of Haifa often, as her ship approached The Promised Land.

The Muse of Israel added trees to this vision. She spoke through my father on Shabbat, who loved telling stories of “The Miracle that turned the Desert into Paradise.” How had this been achieved? By the planting of trees. At Sunday School the Muse took the form of small blue and white metal boxes with slots for coins. We were urged to make offerings to the “Miracle of Trees in the Promised Land.”

The Muse of Israel spoke in the voice of my Tante Ilein, who came to visit every few years, bringing laughter, joy and music to my mother and our family. We had chamber music evenings. She played the cello, Mother played violin and viola, Father played the piano. Tante Ilein told stories of the wonders of this new land. She told us about a Kibbutz near her home. She marveled that these intentional communities revolutionized family and gender roles based on egalitarian and communal values. In the Kibbutz she knew, children lived together, played together, studied together, and worked on the land together. Maybe their parents would visit them on Shabbat. Maybe not. Maybe they’d grow up to continue in the community, work on the land, keep the traditions. Maybe they’d leave, go to a university, learn a profession. The Muse of those times in Israel was not interested in whether you studied Torah, or kept kosher, or observed Shabbat. She was a free thinker, agnostic, progressive. But I never heard Her speak of what happened to the Palestinians whose houses and lands were stolen in the mass displacement of indigenous people that occurred during the 1948 Arab Israeli war—despite the United Nations resolution calling for two states—and continues to this day.

Catastrophe versus Catastrophe

My longing weeps for everything. My longing shoots back at me, to kill or be killed…

I am from here, I am from there, yet am neither here nor there.

—Mahmoud Darwish Unfortunately, It Was Paradise p. 4

To Where? - Ismail Shammout

Many say that the painful history of the Palestinian people is behind the horror of the October 7th attack. Palestinians lost their homes, their land, their way of life when Jewish refugees from the Shoah—which means catastrophe—took over what Palestinians believe belongs to them. Israelis, however, see the land as their ancestral homeland. Palestinians call their mass displacement and dispossession during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war The Naqba—which also means catastrophe. The agony in Israel and Palestine has its roots in these competing catastrophes. Israel’s 75-year history is filled with attempts to negotiate a way for both peoples to live together peaceably, interrupted by wars, uprisings and the intrusion of Jewish settlers into Palestinian areas under Israeli Occupation—notably the West Bank.

The recent attack on Israel came from Gaza, a narrow strip of land into which 2 million Palestinians are crushed—commonly referred to as an “outdoor prison—because the Israelis on the northern and eastern side and the Egyptians on the southern and western sides control the borders. Though Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005 many consider it an occupying power due to its continuing blockade of the territory. The Israeli government doesn’t agree. At this point Israel is at war—the fifth Gaza war since 2007. It is also the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, when a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria crossed ceasefire lines and entered the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. Again my moral compass is spinning. The Hamas terrorists committed horrendous atrocities. Israel needs to fight back. But if the Israelis, and their allies don’t consider the context out of which these catastrophes emerge, they will continue to repeat this catastrophic history. Some say Hamas is also responding to the normalization of relationships between Israel and other Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia which Netanyahu is promoting. They feel squeezed out, forgotten.

Mister, Prime Minister

you must be very proud of your country

as you observe what’s going on with your eyes shut…

Which gives us a reason to stand for years

in the square and sing.

—Anat Zecharia A Winding Line p. 131

The Spring that Was - Ismail Shammout

On October 8, the day after the attack, an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz laid the blame for what happened on Prime Minister, Netanyahu, and his policies concerning Palestine. In Haaretz’ view the catastrophe was the result of Netanyahu’s “fully–right” coalition of Ultra-Orthodox, racist ministers who took “overt steps…to annex the West Bank and to carry out ethnic cleansing” in areas the Oslo Accords had protected, including the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley. The editorial holds him and his cronies responsible for the “massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing.” Haaretz expressed outrage about the “open talk of a ‘second Nakba’ in his governing coalition.” They point out that a Prime Minister who has been indicted in three corruption cases will hardly have time and energy to attend to matters of state.

Before the Israeli–Hamas war broke out, I thought I was writing about a different catastrophe, one that has also been attributed to the Prime Minister—his treacherous Judicial Coup. The autocratic, self–serving and criminal Netanyahu has made common cause with extreme right wingers in a plot to strip the judiciary of its power and independence. This would mean no judicial checks and balances on government power. In response to this there has been a mighty wave of protests. Of course, as soon as Hamas struck the demonstrations stopped. Israelis rallied to the war effort as they must. Army reservists who had threatened not to serve because they were angered by the Prime Minister’s assault on democracy, rushed to protect their country.

This story is fast–moving, changing every hour. As I write a ground war against Gaza seems to be the next step, putting two million civilians at risk. The Israeli government is warning citizens of Gaza City to leave. Where are they supposed to go? They have already been denied food, water, fuel and electricity by the Israeli government. Hospitals are running out of power, just as thousands of civilians are being bombed. This is punishment of non-combatants, considered a war crime, just as the Hamas brutality against civilians is a war crime. My ancestors, always with me, are lamenting-- “Oy veh is mir”.

In what feels like a ray of light in all the chaos and misery of war news, my favorite former American president, Barack Obama, makes a significant statement: “Thoughts on Israel and Gaza.” No longer constricted by the politics of his former role, Obama tells a truth that calms the clamoring ancestors in my soul, who have been crazed with worry about the very danger Obama names. After expressing his outrage at the “horrific attack against Israel” Obama goes on to argue that the way Israel is conducting the war is likely to backfire. My ancestors say, “That’s right. It is very bad for the Jews”! Obama says:

The Israeli government’s decision to cut off food, water and electricity to a captive civilian population (in Gaza) threatens not only to worsen a growing humanitarian crisis, it could further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations, erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel’s enemies, and undermine long–term efforts to achieve peace and stability in the region.

Obama, you may remember, made a valiant attempt to achieve such a peace in 2010 and was undermined again and again by Netanyahu’s refusal to withdraw from the occupied territories in the West Bank.

Catastrophe American style

My family had a Sabbath ritual

We lit the candles sang Go Down Moses sang Swing Low

Sweet Chariot sang slave music freedom music secret signals

in the night music My father said you never know

when Pharoah will be back

—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky Death and His Lorca p. 16

Moses with the Ten Commandments - Rembrandt

As the first-born child of refugees I saw the Muse of America as a guardian angel. I heard her in my father’s voice, extolling the virtues of the American Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence—“liberty for all.” He knew full well that America had not lived up to those ideals, that Black people were discriminated against, as were other minorities including Jews. But because we had been lucky enough to find our way to the Promised Land he was grateful, and believed devoutly that America would fulfill its promise. He was a Martin Luther King liberal. On Shabbat and at Passover we sang “Go Down Moses” because for us Black Moses and Jewish Moses were the same.

The Muse of America as the Promised Land lit a passion for the Jewish ethical tradition in my father as it did in me. I clearly remember my first experience of the Great American Shadow—the Army McCarthy Hearings of 1954. I was 11, recovering from eye surgery, which freed me to stay home from school and listen to the drama on the radio. I can hear McCarthy’s noxious voice to this day, shouting: “Point of order, point of order Mr. Chairman.” McCarthy was a Republican Senator from Wisconsin, a bully, a demagogue, a virulent anti-communist who saw communist infiltration everywhere—the government, universities and the film industry. He chaired the subcommittee on Government Operations which accused the Army of harboring communists. In the dramatic story I followed day after day the Senate was investigating the conflicting charges made by McCarthy and by the Army. Joseph Welch was chief counsel for the Army. I took pride in reporting the events of the day to my father when he came home. I was filled with righteous indignation until the day the tables turned. McCarthy had accused a young lawyer on Welch’s staff of Communist sympathies. Welsh responded with words I will never forget: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness… Let us not assassinate this lad further senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?” That phrase—no sense of decency—proved the downfall of McCarthy. The American people in 1954—glued to their TVs—could see what a bad actor McCarthy was. The Muse of the Promised Land won that battle.

Most of a lifetime later, it grieves me greatly to see a similar bully, provocateur, and criminal—currently facing 91 felony counts— who trumpets his anti-democratic and autocratic attitudes as he leads the charge against justice and ethical behavior in our land. He led the attempted coup against his own government on January 6th 2021. I hear “Have you no decency?” as a subtext of the myriad indictments made against our former president who wants to be president again. It disturbs me profoundly that the question of decency, of telling the truth, of not being cruel, of being ethical seems to have little power over a renegade politician these days, at least in America.

But in Israel, before the attack by Hamas, the story was different. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators filled the streets of Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem shouting “Busha!”—the Hebrew word for “Shame!” It comforted me that Jews in the Promised Land were standing up for our ancient ethical tradition. I was moved by an urgent and devastating request for support by Mika Almog, of USA4IsraeliDemocracy.org. She is an Israeli writer, journalist, political activist and the granddaughter of the late Shimon Perez—former prime minister and former president of Israel. Here is some of what she said:

Israel is facing the greatest threat in its 75 year history…We are literally fighting for our survival, not just as a democracy but as a homeland for the entire Jewish people. The ground is burning beneath our feet…The Judicial Coup is not an internal Israeli matter…This is about shaping the future and the story of the Jewish people. Israel is the glue that kept us together for millennia, our homeland is a safe haven for a people without a home.

Reading this I was in tears, reminded of a story my father never told his children—though he was born in Germany in 1908 he was stateless because, in those days, Germany had no birth-right citizenship. I learned this recently, when my nephew, Hillel, moved to Germany to marry Aurelia, a German woman he met in Israel. He petitioned to become a citizen under German laws that allow for the renaturalization of Jews whose ancestors were victims of Nazi persecution. But he needed to show proof of German citizenship. My mother’s family fled a few months before Hitler came to power. And my father, it turns out, was a citizen of nowhere—not Russia, not Germany not Holland. No wonder the Promised Land was so essential to him. It hurts my heart now, generations later, to imagine how frightening it must have been for him and his kin to be stateless and unprotected. Hillel has created a Café in Hamburg, which he calls Lowinsky’s. His logo is a photo of his grandfather’s face. He has brought his Opa, my father, back to a very different Germany than the one from which he fled.

Lowinsky’s NY Coffee and Tea in Hamburg

As Almog said: “No war is as dangerous as a government attacking its own people.” Isn’t that what happened in Germany? Didn’t a version of that happen here in America on January 6, 2021, when the outgoing president provoked an attempted coup? Isn’t avoiding that the whole purpose of the Promised Land?

“Where There is Much Light There is Much Shadow”

Emma Hoffman

The Ghosts - Miki de Goodaboom

That is what my Oma used to say to me, when I complained to her about my father and his rages. At night, deep in the pit of my Shoah trauma, I hear her voice saying: “That is true of countries as well as people.” I don’t know if Oma ever read Jung. But she was an artist who worked with shadow and light. She used shadow to delineate the shape of what she drew and painted. As I think about her wise words, heroic stories coming out of the agony of the war come to mind. I marvel at the Muslim medic who stayed to take care of the wounded after the attack on the music festival. He thought speaking Arabic would protect him. Unfortunately, it didn’t. I marvel at the doctors and nurses at the hospital in Gaza City who do their best to care for the sick and wounded despite Israel’s blockade of medications, food, water, fuel and electricity to the suffering population. I marvel at the son whose mother, an Israeli peace activist, is believed to be a hostage. He said: “Vengeance is not something to build foundations on. It is not a strategy. How many dead Palestinians will be enough for us to feel safe?” (Quoted in Nicholas Kristof’s column, October 27th 2023.)

The Camel Carrier of Hardships
Sliman Mansour

Shadow and light, catastrophe and miracle seem to take turns on the stage of Jewish history. Consider the Psalms, to which we turn for comfort and support when we feel overwhelmed by suffering and grief. Judaism gives us a deity who can be ruthless and cruel as well as just and loving—which, of course, is true of us all. The Psalms move from shadow to light and back. Sometimes it is the Lord who puts us “in the nethermost pit,/in darkness, in the depths” (Psalm 88:7), sometimes it is other humans: “How long the Wicked, O Lord,/ how long will the wicked exult? (Psalm 94:3). But Psalm 89:1 sings “the Lord’s kindnesses forever.” And Psalm 95:1 invites us to “sing gladly to the Lord.”

Robert Alter—whose translation of the Psalms is the one I quote—points out in The Art of Biblical Poetry:

The God of biblical faith…is not a God of the cosmos alone, but also a God of history. A good many psalms…are responses to the most urgent pressures of the historical moment. (p. 121)

Perseverance and Hope - Sliman Mansour

I wanted to sing gladly to that God of history on the morning of October 18th when Dan and I woke to hear the voice of our President, Joe Biden, speaking from Tel Aviv—the only American president who has visited Israel in wartime. I wept, listening to his empathic, strong and ethical response to the atrocities:

Shock, pain, rage—an all-consuming rage. I understand, and many Americans understand

You can’t look at what has happened here to your mothers, your fathers, your grandparents, sons, daughters, children—even babies—and not scream out for justice. Justice must be done.

But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.

The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.

And Biden, who is so familiar with sorrow, spoke to the Israeli people about the nature of grief:

To those who are living in limbo waiting desperately to learn the fate of loved ones, especially to families of the hostages: You’re not alone …

To those who are grieving a child, a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a friend, I know you feel like there’s that black hole in the middle of your chest. You feel like you’re being sucked into it.

The survivor’s remorse, the anger, the questions of faith in your soul.

Starting at—staring at that empty chair, sitting shiva. The first Sabbath without them…

For those who have lost loved ones, this is what I know: They’ll never be truly gone. There’s something that’s never fully lost: your love for them and their love for you…

Read full text: transcript of U.S. President Joe Biden's remarks in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, 2023.

Jaffa (A Palestinian City before 1948)
Juhaina Habibi Kandalaft

Biden also spoke passionately about the humanitarian issues raised by the siege on Gaza and declared it time to return to negotiating a two–state solution! I wonder how that went over with Netanyahu? I say to my inner Oma, ‘isn’t this also a miracle?’ We have a president who, in our angry, unstable, cruel times, has the courage to speak out for justice and compassion. The shadow is, he gets so little credit for his valor, his moral compass, and most of all for his decency. These virtues are not, it seems, in vogue. The shadow is that, as I write, the people of Gaza are still being bombed. The count of Palestinian dead keeps rising and rising. Many who obeyed the Israeli command to evacuate Gaza City and go south have been struck by bombs in what they were told would be safe areas. Most of Gaza City is debris and death—appalling, unbearable.

I began this blog piece thinking I was telling a story about courageous protests by Israelis against their government—which has gone seriously awry. But on October 7th the story shifted into a hell realm—the Jewish-Palestinian trauma vortex. As I come to the end of this piece, with the story still changing every hour, it strikes me that the second story is actually an outcome of the first. The Haaretz editorial I quoted earlier makes the connection. As President Obama knows all too well, the catastrophe in Israel has everything to do with the Netanyahu government’s consistent undermining of a two–state solution. They have thrown gasoline on the fires of Israeli and Palestinian conflict by their support of the settlers in the West Bank, who are encouraged to be violent with their Palestinian neighbors. And they eased the way for terrorists to invade Israel, by their lack of a military presence at the Southern border. Netanyahu, I’m told, dislikes the kibbutzim and small towns in what is called the “periphery”—because they are inhabited by progressive people who don’t vote for him. Some say Hamas was surprised and a bit shocked by how little resistance they met. As the protesters have shouted at their government for many months of marching in the streets: “Busha!” “Busha!” “Shame!” I am moved to quote the words of Nir Avishai Cohen, author of Love Israel, Support Palestine, and an Israeli reservist in his way to join the war (published in the Opinion Section of the NYTimes, Sunday, October 15th, 2023):

At the end, after all of the dead Israelis and Palestinians are buried, after we have finished washing away the rivers of blood, the people who share a home in this land will have to understand that there is no other choice but to follow the path of peace. That is where true victory lies.

Many years ago, during another time of terrorist attacks in Israel, when the ground was burning beneath Israeli feet, I wrote a Psalm to the God of history that is, sadly relevant again:

Unnamed - Ahlam Al Faqih

Your Face in the Fire

Descend upon me you who are source
before source fire in the sky gleam
in the back of my skull Come in the wind
with wings Come in my breath I cling
to the luminous stair Sing me your names
spirit void darkening sea world
tree When thunder speaks come into my heart
where terrible stories are told
The woman
whose womb has cast pieces of flesh all over the streets
of Jerusalem that son of your prophet whose light
splintered into thousands of dangerous
shards

I gather it all for the altar
the blood the rage the weeping
Show me your face
in the fire

(forthcoming in Your Face in the Fire)

Bibliography

Alter, R. trans. 2007. The Book of Psalms. W.W. Norton.

______ 1985. The Art of Biblical Poetry. Basic Books

Amichai, Y. 2000. Open Closed Open. Trans. Chana Bloch, Chana Kronfeld. Harcourt, Inc.

Darwish, M. 2003. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. University of California Press.

Handal, R. ed. 2001. The Poetry of Arab Women. Interlink Books.

Keller, T. trans. 2023. A Winding Line: Three Hebrew Poets. Zephyr Press.

Lowinsky, NR. 2007. Adagio and Lamentation. Fisher King Press.
_________, 2021, Death and His Lorca. Blue Light Press.
__________, (forthcoming) Your Face in the Fire.

The Sister from Below invites you to:

2023-02-02T14:51:00.046-08:00

Spectral Presences as Healers of Cultural Complexes

THE CITY OF BONES: SPECTRAL PRESENCES AS HEALERS OF CULTURAL COMPLEXES

SATURDAY & SUNDAY, MARCH 18 AND 19, 2023 

10AM – 5PM
LIVESTREAM ONLY

FACULTY: SAM KIMBLES, PhD; NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY, PhD;  FANNY BREWSTER, PhD, MFA; ALAN VAUGHAN, JD, PhD;  MEDRIA CONNOLLY, PhD; BRYAN NICHOLS, PhD

12 Possible Continuing Education Credits Approved for MD, PhD, PsyD, MFT, LCSW,  LPCC, LEP & RN

TUITION: $300 (INCLUDES CEUS) 

Can the presence of our ancestors both speak as well as act  to help us come to grips with our collective histories of racial,  ethnic, gender identities and biases?

Using the healing processes in poetry, literature, visual arts and  psychoanalysis, the presenters will consider how phantomatic and  ancestral forces act in us through “cultural complexes” and “phantom narratives.” We will contemplate the ways we come to grips with our  collective histories of racial, ethnic, gender identities and biases  through reparation, implication, forgiveness and clinical work.

 The contemporary written word from African Americans about  the spectral presences who act as our guides from our world to  in-between worlds, landing on mythical shores where history can  be revealed, witnessed, and cleansed in our souls will be used to  amplify the need for such presences. Clinical examples of this  process will be included.

 SAM KIMBLES, PhD, is an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of  San Francisco and a clinical professor at UCSF. His published books include:  Phantom Narratives: The Unseen Contribution of  Culture to Psyche and Transgenerational Complexes in  Analytical Psychology.

NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY, PhD, is an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and a widely published and anthologized  poet. She is the winner of The Blue Light Poetry Prize and the Obama Millennial Prize. Her fifth poetry collection Death and His Lorca,  was recently published.

ALAN VAUGHAN, JD, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and an analyst  member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He is the author  of many articles including recently, “Phenomenology of the Trickster Archetype, U.S. Electoral Politics and the Black Lives Matter Movement”  in the Journal of Analytical Psychology.

FANNY BREWSTER, PhD, MFA, is a Jungian analyst and professor at  Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is the author of African Americans  and Jungian Psychology, Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s  Legacy and The Racial Complex.

MEDRIA CONNOLLY, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice  in Santa Monica, CA. Her work is particularly attuned to the challenges  faced by people of color. Recently, Dr. Connolly has focused her attention  on the psychological case for reparations to descendants of American slavery. 

BRYAN NICHOLS, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with a practice  located in West Los Angeles, CA. Nichols is a certified trainer, and trainer  of trainers in the Effective Black Parenting Program. He has also conducted  numerous groups and trainings in anger management utilizing elements  of the “Dealing with Anger” program that was designed for African  American teens.

Date: Mar 18, 2023 and Mar 19, 2023

10:00 AM - 05:00 PM

Fee
$300.00

CE Hours
12.00
Registration closes on Mar 19, 2023 01:00 AM

Activity Type

Extended Education

Accreditation(s)

Requirements for CE Credit

Participants will receive credit following the completion of the post-test and evaluation, based on actual attendance.

THE CITY OF BONES: SPECTRAL PRESENCES AS HEALERS OF CULTURAL COMPLEXES (Entire Program)

The Sister from Below is Delighted to Invite You

2022-10-10T20:58:00.004-07:00

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and the Deep River Poets

invite you to a reading of

Soul-Making in the Valley of the Shadow

with

Kent Butzine, Virginia Chen, Sheila deShields, Dossie Easton, Connie Hills, Raluca Ioanid, Daniela Kantorová, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Clare Marcus, and Anita Sánchez

Sat. Oct. 22, 2022

3-5PM/PT

On Zoom

Cover Image: Kent Butzine

General Admission: $25

Esse in anima (Live in the soul)–C. G. Jung

How does one live in the soul during dangerous times? The ancient mode of mythopoesis is an imaginal practice which can confront shadow and give voice to soul. Since 2006 the Deep River Poetry Circle has provided a temenos for this process. After the trauma of the 2016 election, followed by the pandemic and the climate catastrophes that have followed, we in Deep River have engaged the Spirit of the Times as well as the Spirit of the Depths. It has become a sacred river we wash ourselves in, as the Hindus do in Ganga Ma—Mother Ganges—to cleanse our souls and heal our broken hearts. We gather at the river to follow the flow of our poems; they take us to surprising places, show us the unexpected—the Tree of Life around a bend in the river, its roots deep in the earth.

We gathered to create our anthology, Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow, as a gift to the community. We offer this reading to the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, in celebration of its passage from a beloved old home to a transformative new home, in memory of our Jungian ancestors, and as an expression of deep gratitude to the Extended Education Committee, who have given us support, visibility, and a way to gather for so many years, through so many changes.

Please join us. The $25.00 admission fee will get you a copy of Soul Making. All proceeds will go to the Extended Education Program.

- No Continuing Education Credits are available for this event.

The Muse of Free Women

2022-08-27T06:56:00.007-07:00

“Lady Liberty”
by Theodore Bonev St. Martin

We Dissent: There are few greater incursions on a body than forcing a woman to complete a pregnancy and give birth. For every woman, these experiences involve all manner of physical changes, medical treatments (including the possibility of a cesarian section), and medical risk. Just as one example, an American woman is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion…
Today’s decision strips women of agency…It forces her to carry out the State’s will, whatever the circumstances and whatever harm it will wreak on her and her family. In the Fourteenth amendments terms, it takes away her liberty.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women Health Organization Dissent, by Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomajor.

Musing in the Desert by Jeremy Bishop

An Awful Bleakness of Being

The Muse of Free Women has gone on retreat. No one knows where or why. You say: “It’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the overturning of Roe v. Wade—that upsets Her.” True. But She left us much earlier, went off, it is said, to the desert, alone. Women have stopped celebrating Her, praying to Her, bringing Her offerings. Maybe She’s learning how to ride a camel over the Abyss. Maybe She’s praying for Our Mother the Earth, whose future looks bleak. Maybe She’s waiting for America’s psychotic episode to be over. Could the recent good news, about the Inflation Reduction Bill which addresses Climate Change, or the surprising vote for Women’s Freedom in Kansas, which rejected an attempt to overturn the existing constitutional right to abortion in Kansas, lure Her back to us?

Like most women in America, I felt gut punched by the Supreme Court’s Ruling in Dobbs, ending a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. We knew it was coming but it continues to feel unreal that so many women will have to return to back-alley abortions or, for those who can afford it, trips to faraway places. Maureen Dowd, in her NYTimes Opinion Column, quoted the author Niall O’Dowd: “Now that the world has turned upside down, there will be charter flights from America to Ireland for abortions.” Remember, Ireland was virulently anti-abortion until 2018, when the Irish voted to legalize it, and to free women. Dowd wrote:

Ireland and the United States have traded places. Ireland leapt into modernity, rejecting religious reactionaries’ insistence on controlling women’s bodies. America lurched backward, ruled by religious reactionaries’ insistence on controlling women’s bodies.
Once, Ireland seemed obsessed with punishing women. Now it’s America. (July 17th, 2022)

An Awful Bleakness: “Magdalena” by El Greco

An awful bleakness of being descended upon me in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. I have heard that word—bleak—from so many women, on media and in my life. Did you feel it? It’s as though our inner world has turned into a barren, dangerous landscape where women are shamed and punished just for being women—made to cover our hair and faces, not allowed to be part of the world of school, sports, work, politics, the arts. Have we been transported to Afghanistan, where, just a year ago, women’s rights and freedoms were torn away from them as the Americans left and the Taliban took over? Have the Taliban taken over America?

The Patriarch: “Zeus” by Jacob Potma

In Thrall to the Patriarchy

I grew up in a Patriarchy. Always attuned to my mother’s feelings—though she never spoke of them to me—I felt her inner bleakness as she trudged around like a pack animal doing my father’s bidding—typing his manuscripts, tending to us children, doing all the housework and cooking, having no life of her own. Years later, after she left my father, my mother became one of the freest, most self-actualized women I knew in her generation. She made a rich life for herself, doing what she loved—working with young children, playing violin and viola in chamber groups and orchestras, giving music lessons. She traveled to Prague because there was a workshop on performing Bartók she wanted to take. She travelled to Florence, to visit me and Dan when we were there for a conference, and then went off to visit friends in Northern Europe, laughing at us when we worried about her plan to spend the night in the train station, which she did, and was just fine.

Mother Doing Her Thing

Mother died in 2018. I’m grateful that she did not live to see her granddaughters and great granddaughters lose their rights. The Patriarchy has spoken. It has cut women’s freedom out of the American constitution, handed it over to the states. It has enacted its misogynous cruelty over women’s bodies and souls as it has for thousands of years—stigmatizing and controlling women and girls as though our only function is to be vessels for new life. Our bodily autonomy, our right to make our own decisions about childbearing has been plundered in many states in American—the so called “land of the free.” Our freedom to travel to nearby states that allow abortion is in question. If a basic right we’ve had for close to fifty years can be torn out of the constitution by a virulent minority, if our dignity can be denied, our authority over ourselves ripped up like a contract that has been reneged on, how are we equal citizens? Like Jews forced to wear the Yellow Star, we walk on dangerous ground, unsure what will set the powers that be against us.

The Patriarchy has determined that it owns our wombs. It is up to them and not to us what use we put them to. The Supreme Court has determined that my uterus belongs to the state I live in. I am lucky to live in California, and to be past the age of childbearing. But what of my granddaughters? The Patriarchy has plans to make the abortion ban federal. What if a granddaughter should need an abortion, or have a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy that requires an abortion-like procedure to save her life? It was up to the state of Ohio to determine whether a ten-year-old girl, raped by a twenty–seven–year old man, could have an abortion in her home state. “Not in Ohio! Not even in cases of rape or incest!” the child and her parents were told. She had to be driven to nearby Indiana, where a gutsy doctor did the procedure. Sadly, that doctor has been harassed and threatened. Sadly, Indiana has changed its mind on abortion. Another child in that situation will need to be driven all the way to Illinois. Would her freedom to travel remain intact? Or would she and her doctor be at risk under the brutal law of the Patriarchy?

Don’t get me wrong, when I say Patriarchy I don’t mean men. The men in my life don’t buy into the hateful ideas promoted by the Supreme Court majority or the people in charge of states like Ohio, Texas and Florida. The men I know consider themselves feminists and value their inner feminine side. In my lifetime I have seen women’s rights and freedoms expanded exponentially. Most Americans, even Republicans, support women’s freedom to choose in childbearing as well as in work and in relationships. What we are seeing, I believe, is an enormous Patriarchal backlash, because some parts of America feel a loss of power and privilege, and because misogyny lives in both men and women’s unconscious. This, accompanied by extreme economic and class inequality, and racism, makes life a living hell for many poor people, especially women with children and women of color, for whom, having to bear an unwanted child can sink them deep into poverty.

“Witches being Burned in Derenburg, 1555”

Akin to Slavery and to the Inquisition

It is the work of The Muse of Free Women to bring our fierceness and grief out of the woodwork. She comes to me in the form of furious ghosts. The witches of Salem are howling in me. The witches who were burnt at the stake during hundreds of years of the Inquisition, which murdered women of power, women of wisdom, uncanny women who had visions, who knew the medicinal uses of herbs, who were midwives and performed abortions, are moaning and keening in my soul. Women who died too young having back-alley abortions before Roe became law, are weeping in my heart. They cry out:

We thought this was over, that this hatred of us, of our bodies, which are so powerful that no one can be born without coming through us, had ended. That a woman’s power to bear life would be honored. That her right to refuse a child was part of that honoring and basic common sense. What child wants a mother who wishes it had never been born? What child needs a mother whose own life and future is sacrificed in bearing one she is not ready to mother, or can’t afford to feed, clothe and love?

This is not a country that recognizes the essential work of mothering, or that healthy, loved, well–educated children are the backbone of our democracy. We don’t give new parents time off to bond with their babies and make the transition into being parents. We don’t support childcare and make it affordable; we don’t pay childcare workers a living wage; we don’t support early education and pay teachers decently. We don’t support single mothers so they don’t have to work multiple jobs and can be with their children. The unborn child that is so precious to the anti-choice people is on its own and so is its mother. I know there are well intentioned people who are setting up centers to support women who are bearing unwanted children. But from what I’ve heard none of these programs goes very far beyond early infancy. And none can deal with the wound to a woman’s sense of self, when her reality and truth are denied and she is compelled to do something as difficult as bearing a child against her will. Being forced to bear a child is like being forced into a marriage—a violation of the most essential human freedom. Both are akin to slavery. Jamelle Bouie puts it well in an opinion piece in the New York Times of July 17th, 2022:

When a state claims the right to limit your travel on account of your body—when it claims one of the most fundamental aspects of your personal liberty in order to take control of your reproductive health—then that state has rendered you little more than another form of property.

“A Slave Interrupts General Lee’s Breakfast”
during the Civil War

The Motherline

I became a mother very young, age 19, a decade before Roe v Wade freed women to live full lives. I was lucky because I was married, had a mother who loved being a mother, and had family support and resources. But I felt the disrespect for mothers acutely—the Patriarchal attitude that demeans and marginalizes women and mothers. Mothers were a joke in popular culture and blamed for most psychological issues in therapy. For me, having children young was a profound education in life. I learned child development from my children. They taught me the basics of psychology. When I decided to become a psychotherapist, I was infuriated that none of my experience as a mother was valued—none of it could be claimed in a resumé, or help me get into grad school.

Cover art by Sara Spaulding-Phillips
Cover of Fisher King Press Motherline

That fury led to my writing my first book, The Motherline. This year is the 30th anniversary of The Motherline’s publication in 1992. Thanks to my publisher, Fisher King Press, it is still available, and I still hear from women who value it for its alternative view of women’s lives. At the time I wrote it I saw women rejecting their mothers and “wandering like motherless daughters in the too bright light of Patriarchal consciousness.” I wrote that it is “our task to integrate our feminine and feminist selves. We must connect the historical self that was freed by feminism to live in the “real” world, with the feminine self that binds us to our mothers and grandmothers” (p. 32) and to the Deep Feminine. Thirty years later, I still consider this essential. For most women I know, valuing being a mother and wanting to make our own choices about childbearing, are totally interconnected. Here are some quotes from the Motherline that seem pertinent to our times:

The Great Mother, in all of her aspects, is especially fearful for women who identify with feminism and the women’s movement. Many of us broke free of the stranglehold that biology has on our destinies. Surpassing our mothers we charged into the world of achievement and mastery. We want to feel we are living conscious lives directed by muscular egos. The Motherline and matriarchal consciousness are at odds with these goals. The heroism of yin, which opens up the boundaries of the female body to take in seed, allowing new life to grow within it and be born out of it, is seen as a frightening swamp of passivity. Female flesh—fat, breasts, hips—become a fearful shadow…
We are left only with feelings of shame and inferiority for the blood, sweat, desire, and fury of our female experience.
Integrating feminism and the feminine requires bringing to consciousness the Motherline as it is expressed in the very texture of how women talk, the looping that ties together life–cycle experiences…the sacred nature of organic experience. This requires honoring the ebb and flow of a woman’s body…
A woman who can integrate her hunger for the world with carnal self–knowledge lives in relation to her body, as well as to her generation. She can attend to her life’s unfolding from the inner whispers of her dreams, to the interpersonal dialogue with kith and kin, to the collective currents that sweep her time. She knows who she is, where she comes from, where she is going, and what her place is among the living and the dead. (p. 36)

Free Women: “The Witches go to Market, 1876” by Alice Boyd

What Does it Mean to Be Free?

“Free” is a fascinating word. It means the obvious—“not in bondage.” But its root can be traced back to Sanskrit “priyah,” meaning “love,” or “beloved,” German “Friede,” meaning “peace,” and to the Norse Goddess “Freya” alias “Frigg,” whom Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, associates with the Goddess of Love and Death.”

The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips as red as rowan–berries, startling blue eyes and long fair hair. She will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, birch, vixen, she–ass, weasel, serpent owl, she–wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag… In ghost stories she often figures as “the white lady; and in ancient religions…as the “white goddess”…The test of a true poet’s vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess…The reason why her hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine…is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust…whose embrace is death. (p. 21)

“Freya” by John Bauer

Barbara Walker, in The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has a long entry about Freya:

Great Goddess of northern Europe, leader of the “primal matriarchs”…”divine grandmothers…Freya was…the ruling ancestress…who ruled before the arrival of Odin…Myths say Odin learned everything he knew about magic and divine power from Freya.
The pagans said nothing could be lucky without Freya’s presence…
Freya represented sexual love, which is why her alternate name Frigg became a colloquialism for sexual intercourse.

Walker speaks of Freya’s “Kali–like function as Destroying Goddess, which she would assume when men and gods displeased her by forgetting her principles of right living, justice, honor and peace.” (p. 325) Is it any wonder that when the Patriarchal gods took over, they feared this powerful Muse of Free and Beloved women? In many of the myths, though Freya was married, she was strong willed, slept around, belonged to herself, knew more magic than any other god, wasn’t controlled by any male. It’s not hard to understand the hatred and fear that underlie the dying throes of a Patriarchal mentality that denies the mysteries, tries to gun down death, has forgotten how to live in the dark, in connection with the ancestors, in the vagaries of the moon, in harmony with the seasons and in service to the earth.

Goddess Ambika Leads Eight Mother Goddesses
in Battle Against the Demon

Freya the Free, the Beloved, the Terrible

What, you wonder, do we do now? How so we get our Muse, our Beloved, out of the desert to free us? She’s scary. She’s uncanny. She makes no sense to the Patriarchal mind, which punishes us for Her powers. And yet She is in us, of us, and we need Her badly.

She’s been with me since I lived in India, as a young woman with young children. India is full of images of powerful Goddesses fighting demons. The Goddess changed my life by helping me understand the cycles of birth and destruction and the distinction between personal, cultural and archetypal experience.

“Goddess Kali” Calcutta Art Studio, 1883

She came to me as Kali, who gives birth and death in one fell swoop. As I was wrestling with writing The Motherline, I came to understand that Kali is essential to female psychology:

Every woman has a Kali side, every mother has a secret devourer, a baby killer in her soul. When contemporary women write honestly out of their lived experience, they wrestle…with their Kali natures; they dare to name…their murderous impulses…(p. 195)
At a psychological level the abortion issue is about our capacity to confront Kali consciously. Those who would deny women the right to choose abortion seek to control Kali by forcing women to bear children. Kali will then take other forms: ruined lives, neglected and abused children, women maimed or killed in illegal, back–alley abortions. However those who support a woman’s right to choose abortion also need to face the truth that…abortion is not merely a medical procedure. It is the tearing from the womb of our own flesh and blood. It is a sacrifice of life, hopefully for life. (pp. 196-97)
To bear her children, her mother, her life in the presence of Kali…requires that a woman know her carnal self, bear her mother’s pain and limitations, face the bones of her ancestors and the bloody truth that she has no control over what she is born into, or what she gives birth to…; though we have our human responsibility, we are not in charge of destiny…Our personal mothers are not to blame for what is in the nature of human life. [Kali] links us to the blood and bones of our female knowledge, to our mother’s suffering as well as our own. She tells us that we are flesh and blood; that we give life and take life, nurture and destroy, suckle and poison; that these are in the very nature of existence, not the fault of women. She knows that it is in the very corruptibility of our flesh that our human souls bloom. She knows that we live in the great hands of history, which can tear our small lives to shreds. (pp. 206)

“Lilith as the Temptress” by Raphael,
between 1509 and 1511

Whether we call Her Kali or Freya, The White Goddess, the Muse of Free Women, or Lilith, we need to claim Her in our own souls in order to find our footing on female ground. I am reminded of a phrase used by the Jungian Analyst, Irene de Claremont Castillejo, in her 1967 book Knowing Woman, in which she called a woman’s ability to choose whether or not to bear a child “the Second Apple.” The first apple is the one Eve tempted Adam to eat from the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The Second Apple is the one every woman tastes when we make the choice to use contraception or to have an abortion. That is how Eve becomes Lilith—Adam’s uppity first wife who refused to lie beneath him and was sent into exile by the Red Sea—how she loses her innocence, faces her shadow, takes responsibility for her freedom. In Raphael’s version of the story, Lilith and the Serpent/Satan are the same. Tasting the Second Apple is always dangerous and essential. Women are eating Forbidden Fruit all over the country and handing it out to others. How do we support them?

Donate! Did you know there is an abortion clinic in Portland, Oregon called “Lilith”? Those women in Oregon are calling her back from her exile. There are brave women and men all over the country opening abortion clinics in states that allow them. Send them money as your way of offering others the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which grows on female ground. Whole Woman’s Health, for example, was an abortion provider which, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, went all the way to the Supreme Court, taking on Texas’ Abortion law, which outlaws abortions after a fetal heart beat is detectable (usually 6 weeks) and authorizes the public to become bounty hunters and sue anyone who performs, aids or abets a post–heartbeat abortion. This law sent shock waves of terror into those who support women’s rights. Women usually don’t know they are pregnant by six weeks and certainly can’t arrange an abortion that quickly. Which means you can’t get an abortion in Texas. Whole Women’s Health is moving to New Mexico. Its Abortion Wayfarer Program helps free women to find the medical help they need.

Vote! Your vote in the mid-term elections is essential. Vote for those who support Women’s Rights and Freedoms. Help get other women registered to vote by donating to Register Her.

Suffragettes, 1917

Pray! Call Her into your life! Do whatever you do to invoke the Muse or the Goddess. She shows up in unexpected places. She showed up as I was working on a poem about the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She stands on top of the dome—beautiful, strong, a woman of color. She is known as Freedom—a manifestation of Lady Liberty. Notice that Freedom wears feathers in her hair, and a beautiful blanket wrapped around her, Indian style. Her story holds some of the shadow truths we like to forget. She was created just before the Civil War, when the Capitol Dome was being rebuilt. Her creation was facilitated by a brilliant slave, Philip Reid, “who came up with the idea of using a pulley to move the statue, was then paid $1.25 a day by the federal government to ‘keep up fires under the moulds,’ according to the architects records.” His owner pocketed the money. But when the final cast of the Statue was raised in 1863, Reid was a free man. It took until 2014 for his contribution to be recognized in a ceremony on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

“Freedom,” by Thomas Crawford, 1863

Freedom leapt into my imagination and took over the end of my poem, “The Day They Roughed Up Lady Liberty.” I saw her surrounded by angry white men, ready to savage her. But she is an ancient Goddess, armed and fierce, as well as a midwife who knows: “The most dangerous time is transition”—in a woman’s labor, in our personal lives and in our collective lives. She knows that our country and our world are going through an enormous transition, due to climate change, drought, floods, fires, political extremes, economic inequality, racism, the backlash and power hunger of the Patriarchy—Putin’s War is a frightening example. “She Sings a Different Story,” knows different truths. Listen to Her.

The Day They Roughed Up Lady Liberty

is still happening on Instagram You can’t stop watching

Can’t stop trying to make sense of the senseless

Maybe you’re Black and haunted

by your grandmother’s grandmother born a slave

That whirlwind of Confederate flags agitates her spirit

This Capitol was Built by Slaves

Maybe you had a Cherokee grandmother

grew up on stories of the Trail of Tears

What’s up with that guy in face paint bison horns

calls himself Q Shaman

What kind of shaman is Q?

Here comes Trouble

Maybe you’re a Junior in High School the Covid has trapped you at home

You’d rather watch the Insurrection of Jan 6th 2021 watch members

of Congress push furniture against the doors as the mob snarls and shoves

than listen to your teacher drone on about “The Insurrection against King George”

How will they teach this day in fifty years? Now there’s a question for the quiz

A Noose Hangs Over the Capitol Dome

Maybe you’re undocumented slipped across the border years ago

You work as a gardener Stayed out of sight during the terror years

of the President of Hate Since the election you breathe more freely

but this riot on Instagram is what happened to your country

Why you left Where could you go from here?

He weaponized Fear Resentment

Maybe you’re an aging Jew whose parents may they rest in peace

were refugees from the slaughter in Europe This is their American Nightmare

You too have seen it coming But that rioter in a “Camp Auschwitz”

hoodie or the other one emblazoned with the slogan

“Six Million Jews Are Not Enough” knock the holy wind out of you

Tyranny Like Hell is Not Easily Conquered

Hear that sound of breaking glass?

That’s Kristallnacht! That’s how it begins

The Big Lie The Invasion of the Temple

They’re thundering up the stairs breaking

and entering chambers sanctuaries offices

shouting N a n c y W h e r e a r e y o u ?

No! No! No! No! No! No! No!

They’re shaking the Capitol Dome They’ve knocked down our Lady

of Liberty Look! She’s surrounded! They poke her with flag poles

The man in the “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie shouts That bitch

has feathers in her hair Look how she drapes her blanket Who

does she think she is? Pocahontas? Who let her rise above us?

Here Comes Trouble

Where are you from? Who created you?

These angry white men want to savage her But she rises

to her larger than life ethnically ambiguous full height

She’s armed with a sword swings it in figure eights

with the slash of a warrior with the grace of a dancer

Armed with a Lyre, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1842

She Sings a Different Story

She’s armed with a lyre strums it softly

as the dazed horde backs away sits down

like kids at a campfire She’s the storyteller

Once I was a Goddess ran wild in the woods me and my girls

knew the ways of the animals the ways of women in labor

The Most Dangerous Time is Transition

In Ancient Rome I was Libertas I was worshipped given burnt offerings

for I’d freed the slaves freed women given the people a choice a voice a sword

In Old English Old German the word “free” comes from the same root as “love”

Old Man Trouble stole my thunder Forbade me Denied me Burnt me as a witch

But I lived on in the hearts of runaway slaves the tribes on the Trail of Tears the women at Seneca Falls

This Capitol was Built by Slaves

I came to my creator as the spirit of my grandmother’s grandmother

born in her own mother’s wigwam She saw what she saw knew what she knew

tended the fire had voice had choice in the life of her tribe

I came to my high position at the top of your Capitol Dome

thanks to a slave one Philip Reid who fashioned a pulley to lift me up

Then came Big Trouble

They called it the Civil War but for Philip Reid it was Freedom

Now all of you fight over me The prophesies of Q claim me

Anti-Maskers claim me The Bougaloo Bois claim me The Proud Boys claim me

Black Lives Matter claim me Me Too claims me

So does United We Dream and the Tribes at Standing Rock

She Sings a Different Story

I tell you warring suitors No one owns me

I’ve got my voice

I’ve got my choice

I’ve got my sword We’ll need it

I see what I see Know what I know

The Most Dangerous Time is Transition

May Freedom be your Goddess, your choice, your labor. May Freedom be our rebirth into love for our Mother, the Earth, and for all creatures—flora and fauna—including one other.

“Joy of Life: The Quintessential Maternity of Nature”
by Mrinal Kanty Das” 2016

Special Offer:

A limited number of signed copies of the hardcover first edition of the Motherline, originally called Stories from the Motherline, is available for $20.00 each, which includes shipping. You can request a copy at danielsafran@yahoo.com.

Naomi Reads her Poetry from "Death and His Lorca"

2022-04-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky will read from her latest book of poems, "Death and His Lorca," via Zoom, 3:00pm PDT (US and Canada) on Apr 10, 2022.

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZclceipqDMrGdC8ukBWvnpkUcpM9_6iDLC0

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Spread the word!

The Muse of the Psalms

2022-02-12T09:13:00.041-08:00

Mainz Book of Hours

Save me O God;
For the waters are come in even unto the soul.
I am sunk in deep mire, where there is no standing;
I am come into deep waters, and the flood overwhelmeth me.
(The Holy Scriptures, Jewish Publication Society, 1917)

In the Valley of the Shadow

you are the last living generation

of the six that went before you

passing that invisible medicine basket

from one generation to the next…

Anita Cadena Sánchez
from her poem “Medicine Basket”
in Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow p. 6

Medicine Basket

On June 12th of last year, the Sister from Below celebrated the publication of Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow with a blog called: The Muse of Deep River. We of Deep River—the poetry circle I lead at the Jung Institute—had begun to feel the shadow of the pandemic lifting and the political scene brightening as the Biden administration vaccinated the willing and passed the American Rescue Plan which stimulated the economy, sent money to families with children and helped out state and local governments. That upbeat mood did not last long. New variants of Covid 19 attacked us, and the political will continue to support families with children, to protect voting rights, to protect our Mother Earth, seems to have ebbed away.

We’ve recently passed the one-year anniversary of the day Lady Liberty was roughed up so badly at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The question, now hanging in the air is: “Are we losing our democracy?” On the first anniversary of that infamous day, President Biden accused the former president of “holding a dagger to the throat of democracy.” The New York Times Editorial Board warned us that we face “an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends.” Republican lawmakers are passing bills that “would make it easier for lawmakers to reject the votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome.” (The New York Times Sunday Review Jan. 2nd, 2022) At this writing, the news is unbelievable: the Republican National Committee has decided that what happened on January 6th 2021 is “legitimate political discourse!” Excuse me? Have you watched the horrifying videos of that coup attempt on YouTube? Where are we? In Germany, 1933? In Mandelstam’s Soviet Union? In Milosz’ Poland? It’s not just the virus that hangs heavy in the air, but a terror that our elections are about to be undermined, and that the hopes for real change kindled by the victory of Biden and Harris, by the Black Lives Matter Movement, by the Green New Deal, by the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill, by the Build Back Better bill, are in deep trouble. “What is poetry which does not save/Nations or people?” asks Czeslaw Milosz in his famous poem “Dedication.” He answers this impossible question in another poem, “In Warsaw:”

My pen is lighter
Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden
Is too much for it to bear.

And yet, poems have been written about this unbearable burden since the psalmist took up his lyre and sang:

Why, O God, has Thou cast us off forever?
Why doth Thine anger smoke against the flock of Thy pasture?
(Psalm 74:1 The Holy Scriptures, Jewish Publication Society, 1917.)

In troubled times many of us turn to the Psalms, as we did in Deep River when, after the 2016 election and the assaults of climate change and the pandemic, we found ourselves writing poems about a world turned upside down and inside out. Like the psalmist, Deep River poet Daniela Kantorová pleads for help from the divine in her poem “The Ship:”

Dear God, please turn the ship
that floats in the rain above Foothill Blvd.
It lands in an apple orchard
The back merges with the land
(p. 65)

Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow became the name we gave our process of reading and writing. Eventually, it became the name of the book of poems we gathered as a bulwark against the looming catastrophes of our times. The origin of the name is in these famous lines from Psalm 23:

He restoreth my soul;
He guideth me in straight paths for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil,
For thou art with me
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
(Psalm 23: 3-6 The Holy Scriptures, Jewish Publication Society, 1917)

In his book, Keeping Faith with the Psalms, Daniel F. Polish refers to the profound idea that the “I” in this psalm is the soul on its life journey (p.171). In this way, making a poem is “making soul.” As I wrote in the Introduction to Soul Making: “The Muse is the voice of the soul, speaking in language that blends reason and mystery, She makes meaning of the incomprehensible.” (p. vii)

Many of the poems in our collection are about this process. Kent Ward Butzine opens his poem “Pandémie Hypnagogique” with a description of soul loss:

Everything is receding darkening
there is sadness as the trees go
the river birds and birdsong the sky
all beloved

Psalms are both poems and prayers. Many poems meander into prayer. They mix the stuff of everyday life with invocations to the divine. In Sheila de Shields’ poem “Flight of the Mind,” she prays for herself in old age:

in my last days
may I sit by the black basalt fountain wild blue
irises
and hooded orioles among my redwood trees

let me recall the names of my children…

In my poem “Birth Day Poem 2017” I pray:

Carry me back through the laboring dark
into first light first cry first touch
of mother’s hands

Later in the poem I refer to political events as “those evil spirits” and as “the furies” who “rave/ and mutter,” who “spooked// my cradle” as my parents began to learn of “the trains the chimneys” in the Europe they had recently fled. What spooked me all over again was the anti-Semitic chants we heard from the right wing in Charlottesville, Virginia on Aug. 12, 2017, when a "Unite the Right" rally turned deadly and the hate was palpable.

There are those who argue that it’s not kosher to mix poetry with the political—they are different spheres—just as the Jews separate the everyday from the Sabbath, just as Jung made a distinction between the Spirit of the Depths and the Spirit of the Times. But in Deep River we found we needed to mix the political with the profound themes that are poetry’s usual domain for the sake of our very souls. Poetry was our way of walking through the Valley of the Shadow. Despite the title of our book, it hadn’t fully come to me how much our path is influenced by the Psalms. As Robert Alter points out in The Art of Biblical Poetry:

The God of biblical faith…is not a God of the cosmos alone, but also a God of history. A good many psalms…are responses to the most urgent pressures of the historical moment.
(p. 121)

It is moving to realize that this poetic tradition—which speaks to the Divine from the overwhelm and panic we feel when in the grip of history’s violent fist—is as ancient as the Hebrew Bible. There is a lovely Jewish myth about King David, the Psalmist, which tells us that he wrote the psalms with “The Holy Breath” (Tree of Souls p. 279). In Judaism, Ruah, meaning breath or spirit, is one of the levels of the soul. Similarly, the word inspiration, which comes from the Latin word inspirare — meaning to breathe—came to mean divine guidance in Middle English. Thus our very language speaks to the spiritual nature of making poetry.

David and his Lyre

The Sister from Below is Delighted to Announce the Publication of “Songs from the Deep River: Selected Poems from Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow” in the Jung Journal

The sibyl breathes deeply
The vapors from the fire below
She is no longer herself
She from a respectable family
She who is reliably self–possessed
Is unhinged by the smell of death
Virginia Lee Chen from “Sibyl” p. 27

Deep River is honored that a selection of poems from Soul Making has been published in the latest issue of The Jung Journal (Volume 15, Number 4). Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes, the editor of The Jung Journal, doesn’t seem to worry about mixing the Spirit of the Times with the Spirit of the Depths. He writes eloquently of our crazed times in his introductory essay to this issue: “To the Reader:”

These days the dizzying pace and sheer ferocity of changes in our world leave us little to no time to recover from one catastrophe before the next hits. A pernicious pandemic and intensifying climate change events surge like tsunamis over the globe, leaving us roiling in existential crisis and economic, political and social instability…

How much can we take?
What do we do? Where do we go to find refuge, solace, healing, a way forward?

Doesn’t this sound like the psalmist’s cry? “My soul is sore afflicted;/And Thou, O Lord, how long?” (Psalm 6:4) Or like Dossie Easton’s lament in her poem “With my Pink Pussy Hat On”?

How will we open our hearts
to each other
in a country where half the voters are in love
with their hating

of people like me: like for instance:
women they can’t own, or men who can

love other men,
or those who belong to other cultures
part of Humanity’s far flung treasure… (p. 17)

Benevedes continues:

Depth psychologists, spiritual leaders and healers of all kinds strive to help heal the World Soul, one psyche at a time.

And artists make art. Out of the spirit of the depths, they engage with the spirit of the times in a way that anchors us, expressing our suffering and our light. (p. 1)

I agree with Benevedes that it is the very mingling of the Spirit of the Depths with the Spirit of the Times which helps us locate ourselves and cast light on our emotions. It describes a number of poems in the Soul Making collection, among them Raluca Ioanid’s “Bucharest Sestina” about her “vanished grandparents”:

In our pact never to forget
the momentum of loss
is greater. Have our night–vanishing grandparents
opened the door for dreams
and days and meals and adventures sweetened by our
kinship to this family of ghosts? (p. 47)

or Clare Cooper Marcus’ poem “Ann Frank’s Tree”

In spring, chestnut flowers
like ghostly candelabra
lit her days, as they did mine
not much distance west, across
the channel…

For her, the tree beyond her grasp
stood achingly alive, dear daily reminder
of leaf–birth,

leaf fall… (p. 52)

Flowering Chestnut tree

or Connie Hills’ poem “Time to Come”

If you visit Van Gogh’s grave
go after the gust of summer…

The quaintness of the place
so placid you can imagine
standing at Vincent’s burial
that July midi
surrounded by lemon sunflowers
battered dahlias
Hallelujahs oozing
from their thousands of
amber throats…
(pp. 41-2)

Benevedes goes on to write of Deep River and quotes the beautiful telling of our story by Poetry Editor Frances Hatfield:

For the past fifteen years, here at the San Francisco C.G. Jung Institute, something extraordinary has been quietly unfolding. Poetry editor Frances Hatfield provides the origin story of the poems you will read: “At the instigation of Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s “Sister from Below,” poets, nascent poets, and poetry lovers have gathered in the library of the Gough Street building…each month, immersed in the ghosts and spirits and deep soul of that holy place, and cooking together in the power of mythopoesis to express grief, beauty and love. Out of that profound communitas, a group of poets emerged who call themselves, aptly, the ‘Deep River Poets.’ This issue’s poetry section features a selection from a new book they have published as an offering to the institute and to the Extended Education program under which they have met. One can sense how these nine poets nourished each other as their voices of witness, grief, praise, awe and exuberance emerged in the presence of great poets, considered in the light of our extraordinary times. (p.3)

We are deeply grateful to Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes and Frances Hatfield for their generous response to Soul Making and to Managing Editor LeeAnn Pickrell for the beautiful layout of the poems.

Slave Ship: Wood Engraving by Smyth

“A Light So Terrible”

In the Psalms, as in many of the poems we turn to in terrible times, we seek access to a higher power, a deeper wisdom, a more expansive way of understanding, when the world as we know it cracks open, spilling out our firm beliefs and our grasp of what we think of as truth. When things we never thought could happen in America, or things we ignore or deny, are flung at us in a light as terrible as nightmare, what is our responsibility as poets? When we learn that the former president had draft executive orders drawn up involving the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense—in a plot to seize voting machines after the 2020 election—what can we do or say? (My father, a refugee from the Nazis and a passionate believer in American democracy, is turning in his grave.) What scares me more than anything is how little outrage and furor I hear in the collective. Psalm 94: 3-6 comes to mind:

Lord, how long shall the wicked,
How long shall the wicked exult?
They gush out, they speak arrogancy;
All the workers of iniquity bear themselves loftily.
They crush Thy people, O Lord,
And afflict Thy heritage.
They slay the widow and the stranger,
And murder the fatherless…

We who have put our faith in the wisdom of our Founding Fathers, feel fatherless. We who have fought for Women’s Liberation, Racial Justice, Equality and the well-being of our Mother Earth find ourselves still in the thrall of the Patriarchy—bereft of Mother Power. Orphaned. Terribly afraid.

Amanda Gorman at Inauguration

But there is help and wisdom among the young and among poets. Amanda Gorman, who gave us her beautiful Inaugural Poem, “The Hill We Climb,” continues to inspire us. In an opinion piece in the New York Times Sunday Review, (January 20, 2022)—“If You’re Alive, You’re Afraid”—she reframes the meaning of fear. She had almost decided against being the Inaugural poet because of her fear—amplified by friends and family— that she might lose her life on that very visible platform. She suffered with insomnia and nightmares as she wrestled with her decision. “Was this poem worth it?” She writes:

And then it struck me: Maybe being brave enough doesn’t mean lessening my fear but listening to it. I closed my eyes in bed and let myself utter all the leviathans that scared me, both monstrous and miniscule. What stood out most of all was the worry that I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what this poem might have achieved. There was only one way to find out.

If Gorman was praying to a higher power in her dark night of the soul, it strikes me she includes the power to strike fear as an aspect of the deity. This resonates with the Jewish view of the Divine who is not only about goodness and kindness, but about wrath and trouble. Her breakthrough came when she could listen to what her fear taught her.

In the year since the Inauguration, Gorman has written a new book of poems, Call Us What We Carry. I want to quote from sections of the opening poem in that collection—“Ship’s Manifest”—in which she speaks to the role of the poet in our awful times. Like the Psalmist who urges his people to “Depart from evil and do good” (Psalm 34:15), Gorman clearly sees the poet’s function as ethical as well as spiritual. It is worth noting that a ship’s manifest lists the cargo, passengers and crew of a ship. It is an accounting of what the ship carries. Ship’s manifests for slave ships are one of the few places historians of slavery can find the names and some details about the people who were stolen from Africa and brought to the New World against their will. The poem never mentions the Middle Passage, but its dark waters, its ghosts and demons flow deep below the surface. Notice she holds poets accountable, as though our work requires the tools of an accountant making lists. In fact, much of her poem is a list. Her passion is contagious. Her word play is brilliant—for example, “An ark articulated?” or “Our greatest test will be/Our testimony.” Her use of the word “testimony”—which in Black Churches means telling how the Divine has interceded in our lives—brings us deep into the realm of the psalms, as does the line “A light so terrible” which makes clear how difficult, soul wrenching and essential is the work of the poet.

Here is a section of Gorman’s poem:

The poet’s diagnosis is that what we have lived
Has already warped itself into a fever dream,
The contours of its shape stripped from the murky mind.

To be accountable we must render an account:
Not what was said, but what was meant.
Not the fact, but what was felt.
What was known, even while unnamed.
Our greatest test will be
Our testimony.
This book is a message in a bottle.
This book is a letter.
This book does not let up.
This book is awake.
This book is a wake.
For what is a record but a reckoning?
The capsule captured?
A repository.
An ark articulated?
& the poet, the preserver
Of ghosts & gains,
Our demons & dreams,
Our haunts & hopes.
Here’s to the preservation
Of a light so terrible.
from Call Us What We Carry, “Ship’s Manifest.”

Miniature from Hafiz-i Abru’s Majma al-tawarikh

The Muse of Duende

2021-08-13T16:38:00.185-07:00

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

Death and His Lorca

The Muse of Duende

I’m wandering in a shadowy part of town. It is dusk in my dream. I am lost. Can’t find my purse. I think I’m headed for a staircase when I hit a wall. I am told I’m in the Duende—which is the name of a trickster spirit or elf in the mythos of Southern Spain. The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca insisted that duende was essential for the arts. For Lorca duende includes “irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical” writes Christopher Maurer in the Preface to a lovely little book called In Search of Duende.

Flamenco Dancer

Lorca has been with me since college, when I was awe–struck by his Poet in New York. I was strangely at home in his nightmarish visions of that city ninety years ago—during the Great Depression. I shared his outrage about American materialism and industrialization and was spellbound by the prophetic tone of his poems, their musicality, and long Whitmanesque lines. As the firstborn in America child of a family that fled the Shoah I never felt at home in the death–denying, “positive–thinking” America of the fifties and early sixties. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Lorca’s duende opened my path into poetry. I recognized this spirit in myself—in my own intense relationship with the dead, and my tender feelings of kinship with Lorca, who died tragically in 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. He was assassinated by Franco’s goons because of his leftist politics and because he was gay. He was 38.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Lorca is a poetic ancestor, a Virgil who guides me in and out of underworlds, a major influence whose work derives from music—the Deep Song of the Gypsy siguiriya. In Search of Duende includes Lorca’s essay, Deep Song, in which he writes that the siguiriya “begins with a terrible scream…It is the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds.” These gypsy songs have duende, Lorca writes—[they] “are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the mire that gives us the very substance of art.” Jung would recognize that mire as the prima materia of the alchemists. But for Lorca it is more embodied. He quotes “an old maestro of the guitar” who said: “The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of your feet.”

Alhambra Dome

Twelve years ago, when Dan suggested we travel to Southern Spain, I felt the duende climb up inside me, from the soles of my feet, insisting that we visit Granada—Lorca’s home. Granada is also the home of Manuel de Falla—one of Dan’s favorite Spanish composers. Dan and I had always wanted to see the fabled Alhambra— situated in Granada. The Alhambra, Lorca’s home, de Falla’s home, flamenco music and dance are etched in my memory and in a series of poems which poured through me during that pilgrimage. They are saturated in Lorca’s duende and later, as we travelled to Córdoba with its tragic history of the Jews, by the duende of our ancestors.

Lorca makes a distinction between the Muse and duende. I don’t. My Muse comes to life when the duende appears, when the flamenco dancer raises her skirts and stamps her feet, when the gypsy singer screams, when death makes an unexpected appearance. She and the duende dance, sing, and poetry begins. As fate would have it, when we returned from that trip, the duende came home with us. We suffered a series of significant deaths among friends and family. And both Dan and I had serious health issues. The duende had escaped from its Spanish container and leaked into our whole lives and into my fifth collection of poems.

According to Lorca, “the true fight is with the duende.” The duende, unlike the Muse, is a combatant, who “does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible. The duende must know beforehand that he can serenade death’s house.” Why is this so important? Because, Lorca explains: “The magical property of a poem is to remain possessed by duende that can baptize in dark water all who look at it, for with duende it is easier to love and understand.” It is the duende who insists I face my own mortality, that I let in the dead who knock on the windows of my heart, wanting to be remembered. it is duende which became the magnet for the poems in Death and His Lorca —a collection in which death takes many forms and the dead show up as spirit guides and companions.

These poems were written before Trump was elected, before the pandemic hit, before mass death invaded our safe American world. I hope Death and His Lorca will bring you who read it to the confluence of the “dark waters” of duende—where life and death flow together—aspects of the same mystery. Here is the opening poem:

Flamenco Dancer

When her arms rise up like Gaudi’s spires

and her hands unfurl like forest violets

When the lamentation of the Moors the Gypsies the Jews

makes an agony about her eyes and her spine

is a wild and supple snake When she hitches up her skirts

and the stamping begins in red shoes She is riding

the exiled horse of her hips over the yellow land

over dust that remembers ashes of the burnt

bones of the broken The soles of her feet

beat a drum arousing the spirits of her great

great great great grand parents

She rides and she rides

that exiled horse

over Lorca’s unmarked grave

* * * * * *

August 24th Event Invitation:

Please join me on Zoom on August 24th from 7-8. I’ll be reading from Death and His Lorca as the featured reader in the Poetic License Fourth Tuesday Series. Check out the website at www.poeticlicensesonoma.com for more information.

Order Death and His Lorca from Amazon here.

To order from your favorite bookstore: ISBN: 9781421837024 (Distributed by Ingram)

To order a signed copy from me, send an email and I’ll send you the information.

The Muse of Deep River

2021-06-12T16:16:00.007-07:00

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow

by the Deep River Poets

Esse in anima (Live in the soul)

—C.G. Jung

Cover Art by Kent Butzine

The Muse of Deep River

Our way is the way of the poet, who knows that poems have lives of their own. Poems need us, their poets, to listen to them, see them, feel them, wrestle with them until their hidden natures emerge. In return they reflect us, revise us, refine us, play us like musical instruments; they shape shift our stories and light up dim corners of our souls. The craft of making a poem becomes a craft—a vessel—for knowing ourselves and our world.

from the Introduction

Those of us who are called to write poems often wrestle, especially in terrible times, with the question: What can poetry do? Poetry is a lightweight feather dipped in ink; it cannot put out a wildfire, stop a pandemic, stop police brutality or voter suppression, prevent an authoritarian coup or heal a furious fragmentation of the social contract. But it can, sometimes, shift consciousness, open doors and windows to a wider vision, a deeper wisdom expressed in compelling images which leap out of imagination or come as dream figures to initiate us into the realm of The Mysteries. The question of what poetry can do became a catalyst for change in the Deep River Poetry Circle—a workshop that meets monthly at the Jung Institute of San Francisco—when the 2016 election shocked us out of our comfortable faith in American democracy.

"Red Fishes" by Marianna Ochyra

Deep River has been meeting for over fifteen years. It emerged out of a mountain spring in my soul, when my Muse, better known as The Sister from Below, informed me that writing poetry was my spiritual practice. We write under the influence of great poets and have explored poetries from many cultures all over the world and all over America. But when the Spirit of Our Times took such a frightening turn in 2016 we realized we needed each other and poetry for support and it was essential that we ‘get political.’ We could no longer indulge the luxury of exploring for the sake of broadening cultural horizons. Poetry doesn’t boast a big bully pulpit in America. It speaks from the margins, from the depths of the river, from night terrors, about the state of our world. Making a poem is wrestling with the angel: it is shaping a vessel to hold what we fear. We understood that we need our poetry to address the attacks on our democracy by callous, greedy politicians, out for their own aggrandizement and immune to the suffering of ordinary people in a terrible pandemic. We needed language to tell the dreadful truth revealed by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many other Black and brown people at the hands of police, and by the growing consciousness of systemic and structural racism. We needed images to express the suffering caused by extreme weather events and wildfires in our own landscapes, the destruction of habitat and the decimation of species all over our earth.

So we studied the poetry of witness and of engagement, wrote under the influence of poets whose work flows between the political and the spiritual—James Baldwin, Carolyn Forché, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Judy Grahn, W.S. Merwin, Ada Limón. Our circle became a ritual space, in which great poets guided us into our own poetic expression. They showed us the ways of their soul and gave us permission to try new modes of writing. They helped create that space in which the conscious and the unconscious meet—Winnicott calls it “potential space;” Jung calls it “the transcendent function.” Deep River became a sacred river we wash ourselves in, as the Hindus do in Ganga Ma—Mother Ganges—to cleanse our souls and heal our broken hearts.

“Women Bathing” by Lionel Walden

When Covid hit we retreated to our individual homes, like cloistered contemplatives in the Dark Ages. Deep River met on Zoom. Surprisingly, the ritual of our meetings seemed to deepen, despite its virtual nature. We found ourselves writing “pandemic poems.” Someone suggested we make a collection of them. Someone else said, let’s make it broader, more inclusive of our writings. We wanted to speak to our Jungian community about what we were learning—that in bad times, the inner work of poetry is a way to tend the soul, to bring together the realms of spirit and the world. It is healing for the poet, healing for the reader; a practice which reminds us that there is a greater reality in which soul and polis, soul and nature, soul and word, mingle.

And so it was that we began gathering this harvest of our recent years together, Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow. We give it as a gift to the Jung Institute of San Francisco in celebration of its passage from a beloved old home to a transformative new home, and as an expression of deep gratitude to Extended Education, which has given Deep River support, visibility and a place to gather for so many years. We offer it as a manifestation of the Jungian belief in the creative arts as a way of healing psyche and culture. We offer it as a gift to you, dear reader. May it help you remember ‘what happened.’ May it help you find your way through The Valley of the Shadow and The Realm of the Dead, to The Tree of Life, The Living Symbol and The Way of the Soul.

A dream showed me a deeper meaning for this gift of Soul Making: In the dark, by the sea, there is a “Jungian Grave—” a white, glowing monument commemorating our dead. It is the only bright spot in this moonless, starless scene, providing a bit of light by which we see a gathering of living Jungians, sitting on logs on the beach. There is feeling of excitement and of awe. We are doing a ritual to honor our ancestors.

“Mid-Summer Night’s Dream” by William Blake

Soul Making follows the mythopoetic path of the soul’s progress from the realms of shadow and death to rebirth into embodied life through the magic of the symbolic process and the awakening of the Self. When I was editing this book I followed an intuitive structure, dividing the anthology into five sections separated by quotes from Jung’s Red Book. These epigraphs set the themes of the sections. But until the dream, I was in the dark about the collective ritual significance of the book’s arrangement as our community moves from our beautiful old home in the Presidio to a very different beautiful new home in the Mission. We are in the dark about how it will be. For many of us this move signifies an interest in engaging with our new neighborhood, as part of a growing feeling that our psychology needs to be more attuned to the outer world, though we are in the dark about how this might manifest. However, we carry a structure within us that I associate with the work of Joe Henderson—one of our founding analysts—an understanding of the initiatory path in which “to cross a threshold is to unite oneself with a new world” (The Wisdom of the Serpent p. 48)

What follows is a sketch of Soul Making, illuminated by quotes from some of the poems. Forgive me, dear reader and dear contributing poets, if I offer slight fragments from the work. Truth be told, we’re hoping you’ll buy the book, enjoy the poems, and the collection, whole.

* * * * *

Godville Game

The Valley of the Shadow

Section I

And so we had to taste hell…
– C.G. Jung

Anita Cadena Sánchez opens our anthology with a short essay, “Why Poetry?” (p. 5) in which she writes that the 2016 election “revealed this country’s steady descent into the valley of its historically unrecognized shadow” and hopes her poems will “weave a medicine basket” (p. 5). Now there’s something poetry can do. Her first poem, “Will This Ever End,” (pp. 6–7) does it elegantly, naming our trauma, which is the beginning of healing. Here are the opening and ending lines.

Without notice the White House grows whiter still
invisible swastikas slide off the frozen walls…

The president conflates
Black Lives Matter with hate

So I draw in breath to settle and center
Yes, I can breathe but I witness who can’t

Another black man dies
again and again and again

Kent Butzine’s poem, “In the Soup” (p. 8), places us in the messy, befuddled, ‘fine kettle of fish’ we know all too well from our recent past:

I am walking through soup
a thick heavy soup that slows
me down makes it hard to see…

Don’t know if the soup is hot
or my soul is burning…

In a few short lines the poem takes us to the possibility of new life:

Don’t know if I’m ready to die
Or to live at last in aliveness

He brings together the opposites of death and life as they so often appear at the crossroads of our journeys.

* * * * *

Dante and Virgil in Hell by Crescenzio Onofri

The Realm of the Dead

Section II

Take pains to waken the dead…
–C.G. Jung

In my short essay, opening this section, I argue that “we owe the dead our poems, and our awe.” This follows Jung’s idea that the dead need our attention so we can help them heal. Raluca Ioanid takes on this task for the living as well as the dead in her “Bucharest 1958 Sestina (p 46).” She gives us a powerful image of intergenerational trauma:

History churns inside the family of ghosts
we cannot forget,
unmoored by our
ancestral loss
unravelling backwards from a nightmare–dream
we search eternally for Anita and Paul, our disappeared parents…

In “Funeral Cot” Daniela Kantorová invites us into a surreal and frightening scene:

I’m rocking a funeral cot
The fire is burning…
I’m singing a lullaby
to the rhythm of bones
cracking in the fire
There is a baby in the funeral cot

What a grim image for our times, for the next generation, for the fate of humans, species and the earth. And yet, Kantorová, through the magic of her poem, finds a way out. The poem’s speaker invites the reader, or perhaps it is the Divine, to “Breath me/Breathe my dust” which would seem to breathe life and hope back into her and the poem.

* * * * *

"Tree of Zhiva" by Marianna Ochyra

The Tree of Life

Section III

I became a greening tree…
–C.G. Jung

In her opening essay to this section Clare Marcus compares two Saturdays, one at an academic, highly rational workshop, the other, Deep River, where “the psyche was allowed its freedom to soar, explore, pour out its fantasies into the warm receptive ears of fellow poets (p. 59).”

In the drought ridden Sierra foothills Sheila deShields’ poem paints the miracle of an unexpected storm and how it transforms the lives of the “Nine crows in my backyard (pp. 66-67)” who “sway high on the row of towering trees” until the skies clear and they descend to enjoy:

The bounty
worms rise
above the soaked sable soil
while the crows
eat
and eat.

Earth is alive again, wet, full of worms, and the creatures feast on the pleasure of plenty.

* * * * *

“World Creation Music” by Marianna Ochyra

The Living Symbol

Section IV

The Symbol is the word…that rises out of the depths of the self…
– C.G. Jung

In her essay, “A Way to Love” (p. 77), which opens this section, Connie Hills remarks that it is often an encounter which moves her deeply that sparks a poem’s beginning. She writes: “Poetry is a way back to love.” In her poem, “God of Garbage, (pp. 78-9)” a “tall muscular Jamaican” garbage man fills the poem with life and joy. His magic:

Remover of filth, ferment
Everything that is dying…

His smile, like heliotrope
in warm bloom…
I could have loved him.

Through this beautifully drawn character, we experience again, how death is transfigured by the living symbol of the man’s smile.

In my poem, “Ghazal of the Boy in My Dream,” the encounter is with a dream figure, a black boy, symbolic of the magic of poetry and dream:

After gumbo and jazz after rain on my head you befell me in a dream
Strange boy your spiraling hands your eyes ablaze cast a spell in my dream…

How long have you lived in my heart child alphabet balm for sorrow and ache?
You open the door to The Mysteries compel me to enter by way of the dream

The boy shows up in the context of New Orleans, a decade after Katrina. He turns out to be a psychopomp, who initiates the speaker into the mysteries—the magic of language. There are many dream poems in this collection, appropriate to our Jungian context. In “Healing the Wound” (pp. 89-90), Clare Marcus remembers a dream in which a black bird with white beak comes to heal the wound “brought by the surgeon’s knife”:

It is a coot
exploring the unconscious
to retrieve sustenance for life
diving the waters
of the Nile
algae and mollusks morphing
to messages of resurrection

What a succinct description of how dreams feed and nurture the damaged psyche and body with the riches of the collective unconscious.

* * * * *

"Pilgrimage to Shiva" by Janaka Stagnaro

The Way of the Soul

Section 5

I am weary my soul, my wandering has lasted too long…
–C.G. Jung

In his essay introducing this section, “How Poems Come and What They Bring” (pp. 97-99), Kent Butzine writes of the Muse, that she is “both a part of oneself and a part of the natural world, a part that is ‘wild’ and cannot be controlled.” He gives us a wonderful quote from Galway Kinnell: “There is no work on the poem that is not work on the poet.”

Virginia Chen’s poem, “Old Song” (p. 102), is a lyrical evocation of the experience of Self. The poem’s first line and refrain—borrowed from a poem by W.S. Merwin—shows the power of poetic influence on our work.

When I was me I remembered
The songs of the stars
Before I was born…

When I was me I remembered
I once was me

It is the work of poetry, as well as the work of Jungian analysis, to find our way back to the one we’ve forgotten we are. And as my dream shows—in the dark by the sea in a gathering of Jungians doing a ritual for our ancestors—we are not just individuals, we are a group with a lineage, finding our way back to our ancestral roots. And though the work of writing poetry is mostly solitary, a writing circle in which we read poets who help shape our work and become our common poetic lineage, a circle in which we share our poems and get feedback on them, can become a vessel for collective creativity even, or maybe especially, in dark times. Can an anthology created by such a group, become a crucible which can carry the spirit and soul of Deep River’s years in the Gough Street Institute library, to our new home in the Mission?

"Ancestors" by Marietjie Henning

The Muse of Lady Liberty Part II

2021-02-28T15:47:00.022-08:00

Statue of Freedom at the top of the Capitol Dome

In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
—Aeschylus

[Quoted by Bobby Kennedy speaking about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.]

Part I of this News from the Muse began with the joy and terror of January 6, 2021— a day which gave us news of the election of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff both from Georgia, turning that state a glorious blue, a day which shocked us with horrendous scenes of the violent insurrection against the Capitol, incited by a berserker outgoing president.

The Muse then led us back into American history, remembering the assassinations of so many of our leaders, JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and finally Bobby Kennedy, in the 1960s. I turned to my husband, Dan Safran, who was a ‘60’s activist, to help me understand what happened to Lady Liberty in that fraught decade. What will we need to remember in order to revive Her?

The Education of a ‘60s Activist

But history will judge you, and as the years pass, you will ultimately judge yourself, in the extent to which you have used your gifts and talents to lighten and enrich the lives of your fellow men. In your hands lies the future of your world and the fulfillment of the best qualities of your own spirit.
—Bobby Kennedy

Hannah and baby Dan

Though I’ve been married to Dan for over four decades and heard many of his stories about being an activist in the ’60s, I couldn’t articulate what had led him to this path. So, I asked him. He credits his mother’s activism with sparking his own. When he was a child his mother, Hannah, taught elementary school in Harlem. She knew what Black people were suffering and supported their issues. His father, Saul, was an immigrant from Poland who had come to America to escape anti-Semitism. His stories attuned Dan to the immigrant experience.

Saul and Hannah, Florence, Italy 1931

But what really raised his consciousness was the racially integrated progressive camp his parents sent him to when he was 13. Before then he had had little exposure to people from other cultures. He loved that camp, attended it for three summers. It was a work camp—they built a recreation hall. He says he learned about social consciousness from the kids at camp.

Dan (the tall one) at Camp Wyandot

As I listened to Dan speak of how he became an activist, I realized what a fateful collision of energies—the Spirit of the Times, Dan’s personality, and Lady Luck created the stepping-stones of his path, leading him into the major issues of that time. Anyone who knows Dan knows how good he is at making connections with people, at networking, and at being open to learning from any situation he is in. He said: “In 1960, when the sit-ins began, it raised my consciousness, crystallized my energy. The protests were being done by college students. I was one—at Queens College in New York. I participated in boycotting Woolworth’s.”

Dan at 21

At the University of Pennsylvania Dan became active in the NAACP and continued boycotting Woolworth’s. He said: “In the meantime the War in Vietnam was beginning to cook. I became aware of Gandhi and Martin Luther King’s commitment to non-violence and how their convictions and courage inspired thousands to resist oppression. As I read more about non-violence, it became a powerful belief system for me. As a Jew with a cousin who fought and was wounded in World War II, I was conflicted about the war and the obligation to fight, albeit violently to save oppressed people. However, because of my growing belief in non–violence, I decided I wouldn’t join the military. I was called to a pre–induction physical and refused to step forward when I was asked to.”

That turned out to be smart. An ACLU staff attorney told Dan that not stepping forward meant he was still a civilian and the military couldn’t force him to do anything. However, as a result of his resistance, Dan was “invited” to speak to Army Intelligence. He went three times, was asked all the usual questions: No, he didn’t belong to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. No, he wasn’t against the United States; he just didn’t agree with all its policies. Yes, he had refused to sign a loyalty oath; he considered it a violation of his Civil Rights. Dan made a connection with a Sergeant who, while fingerprinting him, said that if asked, he too would refuse to sign a loyalty oath.

Dan learned he was simultaneously being investigated by the FBI. They said they had reason to believe he was a communist. (Remember, this is just a few years after the House Un-American Activities Committee had ruined the lives and careers of many progressive Americans by accusing them of being communists.) But Dan was consulting with the ACLU, which told him that the FBI had no business investigating him just because they had a suspicion.

During this time, it became clear to Dan that he wanted to work in the field of Race Relations. How could one earn a living by doing this sort of thing? He arranged to meet with leaders of the organizations he knew were doing this kind of work: the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, the Urban League, the National Conference of Christians and Jews and asked them what they looked for in the people they hired. He learned that a Master’s Degree in Social Work with a focus on community organizing was a good ticket. When he and his first wife, Barbara, went to Bryn Mawr Social Work School, Barbara chose the clinical track and Dan chose community organization. His informational interviews turned out to be spot on. His first job out of Social Work school was with the American Friends Service Committee in Washington DC, organizing fair housing groups.

Dan and Lisa, age 2

Dan told me: “That was the best job I ever had. I worked with Jim Harvey, an African American Baptist and a military veteran. We appreciated each other as we worked to prevent discrimination. We were dealing with a vast system: if a Black family purchased a home in a previously white neighborhood, Real Estate companies would frighten the current homeowners, saying that they had better sell quickly because their home values would plummet. Our job was to work with communities to adopt a more welcoming attitude in order to prevent this kind of block busting from going on.

“Our approach was to go to social action committees of churches and synagogues and find out who was interested in holding neighborhood meetings. Our operating strategy was to ‘Change the Climate of Opinion.’ It was fear and hostility—what we now call ‘othering’ —that caused the problems. Jim and I basically facilitated and listened. We were good organizers because we didn’t preach. People would say a few things about their fears. There was always this moment when someone in the group would say: ‘I’m not moving. If someone sells their house to a Negro family that’s fine. If they can afford to live here, they’ll be good neighbors.’ That changed the climate. Every so often someone would spit out a bunch of racist stuff. That also changed the climate of opinion in our favor, because no one wanted to be identified with that kind of bullshit, particularly because the meeting was sponsored by a faith–based institution with good human values.”

Dan and Jim created a safe container for people to express their fears. They facilitated and listened respectfully and in so doing changed the climate of opinion because of their accepting attitude. A Jungian might call that an alchemical transformation.

When the Anti–Poverty Program began Dan got a position as a community organizer for the Southeast Neighborhood House. Lady Luck was smiling on him, because the trainer for the program was Amy Horton, wife of Miles Horton of the Highlander Folk School, famous for teaching activists non-violence and community development. What Dan learned from her about role playing and empowering people by respecting their skills is alive in him to this day. The policy of the Anti–Poverty Program was that their grantees be run by the people who were affected—“Maximum feasible participation of the people to be served.”

I love a story Dan tells about a training he did to support citizen participation for people on Neighborhood Advisory Committees. Dan said, “I was learning a lot on the fly. I provided information. They raised questions. I used the experiences they actually had in their Advisory Committee meetings in the workshop. It was very practical. I used role playing. I asked them to come up with a problem. The group said there weren’t enough neighborhood workers. Possible solution—get more. Course of Action—go to the of Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) national headquarters and demand more. They decided to do it. I didn’t think this was a good idea because our funding came from a local community action agency via the regional OEO headquarters where allocation decisions were made. But their logic was to go to the top. They wanted me to lead them. I said I wouldn’t lead them. I would attend.

“We went into high gear role playing. I played Sargent Shriver (then the head of OEO) for three nights. They learned a lot about power. I would divide them against each other. Or I would talk and talk and fill the time— thank them for coming and escort them out of the room. They learned they needed to have a spokesperson—they could always caucus. A 25 year–old single mom with four kids—ages 3 to 9—was chosen by the group. I role played with her, frustrated her by doing the bureaucratic dance. Finally, she banged her hands on the table and said, ‘My kids are hungry!’ This stopped me in my tracks. I said, ‘Winner! That’s it!’

“The group followed up on their decision to go to the national OEO headquarters. They brought some of their kids. They went up to the 8th floor of the OEO building on L St., got out of the elevator, stood in the lobby. The staff, who had become part of the bureaucracy, were thrilled to see real people. They told us Sargent Shriver was in Europe. Members of the group asked:

‘Who’s in charge?
‘The Deputy Director.’
‘We’ll see him.’
‘He’s busy now.’
‘We’ll wait.’

The staff brought the group into a conference room, offered pizza and Cokes, were very solicitous. I never forgot that. It made a tremendous impression on me to realize bureaucracies are not made up of people who see everything the same way. This led me to a whole different organizational tactic I learned to use to help oppressed groups see that the ‘wall’ of power was made of bricks, which they could take apart.

“So, the Deputy Director comes in. He opens a huge ledger book and when he starts explaining the allocation system, the group’s spokesperson listens and then says,

‘My kids are hungry! We don’t have time for this. We need action now.’
‘Well, what do you want?’
‘We need 300 neighborhood workers.’

“Meanwhile the press came and observed. The group decided they weren’t leaving until they got what they came for. That wasn’t part of the training. The result was that OEO gave them a commitment for 25 additional neighborhood workers for the whole city. Southeast Neighborhood House would get an additional 5. This was very successful, got lots of media attention. And I got into a lot of trouble with the Southeast Neighborhood House Director, who was upset because I hadn’t alerted him. He was blindsided, though he supported the action. The people were very empowered. The training worked.”

Dan recalled something he read years later in Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed —you’re not really teaching if you’re not learning. It has to be dialogical. Dan and the group had presumed that the staff of OEO would be hostile. They weren’t. Quite the opposite: “Don’t treat power as monolithic. It’s not. Your job is to find the loose brick. Find ways of extracting it and the thing will collapse.”

In 1965, Dan began working as a consultant to Head Start. This took him to the South, where he had many complex and interesting experiences. One, in Alberta, Alabama particularly stands out for him. He told me: “An African American Church had written to OEO, saying: ‘We’re not getting help from the local politicians, they are not involving us.’ The Church wanted early childhood education that would serve their kids. I met with a community group at the church and spent two days helping them do their proposal for Head Start. It was the kind of South that I had always heard about. Abject discrimination. Refusal to cooperate by a white power structure that was accustomed to ruling over Black community members, completely discounting Black people and their needs. It was exciting to me to realize we had the Federal Government responding to an appeal from a community group. That’s the way it should be. I loved telling my mother: ‘Guess who’s paying me to do this work? The Federal Government!’ The people in Alberta, Alabama got their Head Start program.

Head Start Flag

“I really enjoyed doing consulting work. I developed an expertise in Parent Involvement, one of Head Start’s key components. I loved helping parents become more astute and engaged. And of course, I was identified with them because I had a toddler at home. Often, I’d be there to hear a parenting talk and realized I knew nothing about all of this—for instance, developmental stages. I was being empowered.”

Bobby Kennedy with Black leaders

Bobby Kennedy for President

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppressions and resistance.
—Bobby Kennedy

In March 1968 President Johnson announced he would not run for President for a second time. This was a complicated moment. Johnson was reviled by many on the left, including Dan and me, for continuing the horrendous slaughter that was the Vietnam War. But it was Johnson who was making real change happen in domestic politics. It was he who won passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the legislation that created Medicare and Medicaid. We all owe him such a debt of gratitude. It was also Johnson who pushed through the many aspects of The War on Poverty. This did so much to open the doors for Lady Liberty’s arrival among poor, Black and brown people, giving them a voice in the institutions set up to help them and hired Dan and many others to do their remarkable community organizing work. Johnson was a tragic figure. To this day, he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for some of the most progressive legislation in Dan and my lifetimes. In 1966 Bobbie Kennedy had warned him against continuing the bombing campaign, declaring that we were "on a road from which there is no turning back, a road that leads to catastrophe…” It certainly led to a catastrophe for Johnson and the Great Society he envisioned.

Images of the Viet Nam War

By 1968 Dan had become well known as an activist and community organizer in Washington D.C. He was recruited to run on the slate of delegates to the Democratic Convention by a group which opposed Vice President Hubert Humphries’ nomination to become President. Humphrey, also a tragic figure, was rumored to oppose continuing the Viet Nam war but, as Vice President, he continued to support Lyndon Johnson’s policies. The delegation supporting Bobby Kennedy won in the primary and Dan was elected as an alternate delegate. He was part of a diverse delegation, ethnically and by age and gender. It was exciting. And then on June 4th everything fell apart when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated right after winning the California primary. Dan told me: “The Washington DC delegation wasn’t sure what to do. Gene McCarthy, who was also running, asked to meet with us. It was a very disappointing meeting. One young man, in his 20s, had expressed his concern that there were insufficient recreational activities in his part of Washington and kids couldn’t play at night—no lights. He got a very unempathic response from McCarthy: ‘Well that’s a local issue.’ It was such a shut–down that everybody—even those who had supported McCarthy initially—came away knowing they were not going to support him. We ended up supporting one of the members of our delegation—an African American Minister named Channing Phillips—knowing that he didn’t have a chance. This was July. The convention was in late August.

“On the night before the convention began, I was in Chicago, taking a walk with one of the other delegates, an African American psychologist, named Roy, who did training for the police. As we were walking through the streets, we came upon police lined up near buildings, beating their batons. Roy turned to me and said ‘Dan, I’m scared.’ I said ‘Roy, what do you mean?’ He said ‘They’re very high strung. They’re almost looking for trouble.’ That, of course is exactly what happened. The police rioted.

Images of the 1968 Democratic Convention

“I attended the convention. There was one defeat after another. The anti-war platform was defeated. On the night Humphrey was to be nominated I and many others walked out of the convention. We decided to join the protestors outside. We were very aware of what was happening in the streets. Dick Gregory invited all of us to come to his house for chitlins. Hundreds of people. A whole bunch of us wearing our suits and our convention badges started walking to Dick Gregory’s house and were blocked by the police. We decided this was the time for civil disobedience. We thought, OK they can arrest us. But they refused to arrest us. Clearly, they were blocking us from the Black neighborhoods of Chicago. They didn’t want to have other people join us. We went back to the main street and joined the marchers. Because we were delegates we were at the front, thinking this would be some kind of protection for people. The whole street was filled from curb to curb with marchers. Up ahead were a whole line of police cars and trucks, some with barbed wire grills, blocking the way.

“This was a very peaceful march. We were all committed to non-violence. The word went out: ‘Let’s just sit.’ So, everybody sat. I was in the front row with maybe 80 other people. The vehicles started approaching us. It was nighttime. We could see them because the TV camera lights were behind them. I remember thinking, ‘they won’t run over us.’ All of a sudden, the police were shooting tear gas at us. A young man, sitting a bit to the right of me was hit by a tear gas canister. Earlier, some young people—I think they were medical volunteers—had been giving out information about what to do in case of tear gas. I thought, ‘That’s nice of them, but it’s not going to happen.’ When I saw that young man hit, I was so angry, I almost lost it. We started running. I tried to pick up cobblestones from the streets but fortunately I couldn’t dislodge them. One of the medical volunteer kids came by with a washcloth and it worked—the tear gas was terrible. None of our delegation badges had any value when the police rioted. I had to get myself together internally. I hadn’t felt that kind of violent anger in a long time, not since I first began to study conscientious objection.

“We were near the Hilton. I walked into the bar. It was like a scene in a movie. People on the inside had no idea of the action on the outside. I felt somewhat safe because I had a suit on and a badge. In a movie the outside would have crashed in through a window. But that didn’t happen, not until the police began storming into the hotel, right past the bar. I learned later that they had gone up to the McCarthy headquarters where they said people were throwing things out the window at them. They came down with people they’d arrested.”

I asked him how that experience had shaped him. Dan said, “It rededicated me to non-violence. I had taken a vow to be non-violent. That’s not natural for people. Violence comes naturally. One has to be aware of that and contradict it. It reaffirmed the corruption of Mayor Daly. He was not going to allow demonstrations to happen in his city. They were suppressed. I saw no violence on the part of demonstrators. We were very disciplined, almost jovial though we got very serious when we saw the police cars. So that also affirmed my belief in non-violence because I don’t think violence is going to work against a lot of guns.”

National Guard and protesters

The Funeral Train

There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
—Bobby Kennedy

Response to RFK’s funeral train

I am haunted by the images of the train that carried Bobby Kennedy’s dead body through America, from California to Washington D.C., haunted by all the people who gathered by the tracks, poor white people, poor Black people, people who looked middle class, waving, waving, in a kind of trance of disbelief. I hold in mind a particularly eloquent wave from a Black woman wearing a headscarf. The wave said not only goodbye to Bobby, goodbye to all he understood about what my people suffer, it said goodbye to the Civil Rights movement, goodbye to the Anti–Poverty Program, goodbye to the Federal Government’s taking an interest in the lives and needs of its ordinary citizens. What I saw on those thousands of faces that lined the tracks was mourning for the loss of hope in America. There is something soulful and substantial about mourning. You confront the reality of what you have lost. You know what it meant to you. And you weep, as John Lewis wept as he spoke of his friend Bobby’s death in the documentary film, Bobby Kennedy for President, as he told us that he had dedicated himself to Bobby’s unfinished work.

Images of John Lewis

Toward the end of his life, Bobby Kennedy became a man of such deep feeling, such courageous understanding, that the people lining the tracks knew they had lost someone of great value, not to mention all the other losses of that decade. Maybe they could feel the crush of history that would blockade and undermine so much of the progress we had begun to make. Richard Nixon was about to be elected President.

In our own time, we seem to have forgotten how to mourn, and as a result we find it difficult to hope. We get stuck in anger, in outrage, in denial, in doomscrolling. Maddening and destructive as the Berserker King of Bedlam has been, his years in power have revealed the ugly underbelly of America. I hope the Biden Harris administration will bring a moral compass back to America and empower the Federal Government to work for the good of its citizens. But there is something even harder that needs to happen. We need to engage in a process of reckoning with our history and the evil that has been committed in our name. Only then will we get our train back on its tracks.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

Inauguration Day January 20, 2021

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer in our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
—Bobby Kennedy

None of the outcomes we feared, happened. None of our terrors came true. No one was assassinated. No horde of insurrectionists overran the ceremonies, the gathered former presidents and their wives, the Senators and Congress people from both sides of the aisle, the big empty space left by the outgoing #45 who refused to participate in the peaceful transfer of power. The National Guard was out in force, with weapons. The ritual was elegantly planned and beautifully performed. Michelle and Kamala and Jill looked splendid in their richly colored coats—burgundy, purple, turquoise. It was a feast for the eyes —a solace for our aching hearts and bruised souls.

Kamala, Jill and Michelle at Inauguration

Dan and I watched in joy as, on a cold winter day in Washington D.C., Kamala removed her mask, revealing her glorious bronze skin, straightened herself up to her full height, and took the Oath of Office administered by Sonia Sotomayor, our only Latinx Supreme Court Justice. We watched as Kamala was embraced by her Jewish husband, about to become the nation’s first second gentleman. We saw Joe Biden looking healthy and strong at seventy-eight years of age, with his beautiful wife, Dr. Jill Biden. She looked as though she was carrying the worry and overwhelm of the last two weeks. She held the giant family bible as Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of Office to Joe. It was not yet noon in D.C., the magic hour when power would pass from the Orange Fury who had shadowed our world and made us fear for our futures for so many years, to the light filled face of the kind and determined man before us, giving his inaugural address. The soul of Bobby Kennedy was gladdened by Joe Biden’s words:

A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.

A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear.
And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat….

In another January in Washington, on New Year’s Day 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

When he put pen to paper, the President Lincoln said, “If my name ever goes down into history it will be for this act and my whole soul is in it.”

My whole soul is in it.

Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this….

Abraham Lincoln

Fifty-two and a half years after our hopes for America were dashed by assassins, by the kind of people Bobby described when he said:

There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of the comfortable past, which never existed.

For a moment I could see the souls of Bobby Kennedy and Joe Biden taking the arc of history in hand and curving it toward justice. Sadly, that moment is long gone. The Impeachment Hearings impressed me deeply because of the valiant truth telling work done by the Democratic Managers. But the narrative shown of the events of Jan 6th staggers my imagination. I found myself in a daze of disbelief about what happened, similar to what Dan felt in the Chicago Police Riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Though I do take heart that seven Republican Senators voted to impeach, the curtain has been raised on the crazed power of the far right, of the believers in hateful conspiracies, and their enablers in our government. How do we climb out of this morass?

My hope is that activists like Dan was in his generation—like Stacy Abrams and the many young people who worked with her in Georgia, and all those who worked for Truth, Justice and Lady Liberty in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, will continue to do the slow good work of community organizing, of empowering and raising consciousness, all over this land. That is how we earn the future described by our beautiful young Inaugural poet, may she revive our hope in Lady Liberty, may she be an inspiration to us all:

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover
and every known nook of our nation and
every corner called our country,
our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,
battered and beautiful
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
—Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gorman

The Muse of Lady Liberty: Part I

2021-01-22T17:50:00.221-08:00

Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of view.
—Timothy Snyder “The American Abyss”
New York Times Magazine Jan 17, 2021

Statue of Freedom at the top
of the Capitol Dome

Seize the Moment

But the spirits of those who die before their time will live, for the sake of our present incompleteness, in dark hordes in the rafters of our houses and besiege our ears with urgent laments, until we grant them redemption…
—C.G. Jung The Red Book p. 297

We are in a major moment in American History. We have seen an Insurrection Breach the Capitol and had to realize how fragile our democracy is. Lady Liberty lay bleeding in the halls of Congress. But then, just two weeks later, She picked Herself up, got Herself all decked out in as a Native American Warrior Woman, and presided over a peaceful—if armed to the teeth—Inauguration Day at the very place—the scene of the crime—where she had been rampaged.

We who have survived the last four Years of Outrage, the Year of the Pandemic, of Economic Collapse, and the final insult—the Insurrectionary Breach of our Capitol—have been taken on a terrifying but illuminating tour of the Great American Shadow. In this underworld, where all that has been denied, not taught in our schools, forgotten, lied about in our history—the genocide of our indigenous population, slavery, Jim Crow, voter suppression, the theft of wealth from those who built our country, our Capitol, our White House, shows up in the cultural unconscious as furious, grieving shades, who haunt us, possess us, take on demonic forms.

The Statue of Armed Freedom, a manifestation of Lady Liberty, which graces the top of the Capitol Dome, holds some of the shadow truths we like to forget. She was created just before the Civil War, when the Capitol Dome was being rebuilt. Her creation was facilitated by a brilliant slave, Philip Reid, “who came with the idea of using a pulley to move the statue, was then paid $1.25 a day by the federal government to ‘keep up fires under the moulds,’ according to the architects records.” His owner pocketed the money. But when the final cast of the Statue was raised in 1863, Reid was a free man. It took until 2014 for his contribution to be recognized in a ceremony on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

When you look at this statue, you’ll notice that Freedom wears feathers in her hair, and a beautiful blanket wrapped around her, Indian style. Wikipedia comments that many who see her assume she is a Native American. Was the designer, Thomas Crawford, haunted by the spirits of the indigenous dead, who died before their time?

Statue of Freedom

With Lady Liberty, we find ourselves blinking in the light of a cold winter Inauguration Day—peaceful—though filled with armed soldiers. We are disoriented, relieved, joyous but still afraid. Will we return to our denial, our lies to ourselves, our unwillingness to do the hard work of Truth and Reconciliation? Will the demons return to do more damage? Or will we seize the moment, as our new President urges, to make America live up to her promise and bring Lady Liberty’s gifts to all our people?

In this blog, which I’ve been fussing with for months, I’m seeking the roots of the Great American Trouble with Truth, as experienced in my life and in that of my husband, Dan Safran. I’m covering a lot of ground, so this will come in several installments.

Attempted Insurrection Breaches the Capitol: January 6th 2021

All Lost Causes find their lifeblood in lies, big and small, lies born of beliefs in search of a history that can be forged into a story and mobilize masses of people to act politically, violently and in the name of ideology.
—David W. Blight “Will the Myth of Trumpism Endure?”
New York Times Sunday Review 1/10/21

Recent American history has been a runaway train, driven faster and faster by a Berserker Conductor until it flew off the rails and threw us passengers into violently splintered versions of reality. We who sit in the progressive cars of the train were flung out of our familiar compartments into an unknown landscape, one in which we seesawed from euphoria to outrage and terror, from Georgia giving us two democratic senators—the first black man—Raphael Warnock— and the first Jewish man—Jon Ossoff—elected from that state—to the carnage at the Capitol. Now the Democrats control the Senate by the slimmest of margins—requiring the vote of our first African American, first Asian American, first female Vice President—to break a tie. This gives us a bit of leverage and hope that the Biden–Harris administration will be able to deal with the overwhelming issues that the outgoing administration has neglected or abused—the pandemic, economic inequality, millions of citizens out of work, the Racial Justice Movement and Climate Change. We weren’t given long to take pleasure in that hard won victory, to praise the activism of Stacy Abrams and her dedicated volunteers who brought out the vote, or to relish the realization that Mitch McConnell will no longer be able to block us at every pass.

Georgia’s Lady Liberty
Photo by Jim Bowen

Notice, this Lady Liberty is wearing a “Liberty Cap,” following the Roman tradition of wearing such a cap to indicate being a freed slave.

Our Berserker Conductor—He Who Would “Repeal Reality”—to borrow Nancy Pelosi’s phrase—purveyor of the Big Lie that it was he who won the election—invited and incited his followers to join the insurrection that took over the Capitol. This horde of militias and Trumpists came straight out of America’s worst nightmares—they bore arms, waved Confederate flags, dressed as eagles, clowns, wore face paint and horns, wore “Camp Auschwitz” hoodies and tee shirts that read “Six Million Jews Were Not Enough.” They chanted “Stop the Steal!” and “1776!”

Capitol Riot

Wait. What? Let’s step out of the chaos for a moment to reflect. What possessed the Trumpist insurrectionists to chant the year of the American Revolution? Our country’s mythic heroes are the rebels who stood up to that Tyrant, King George of Britain, and, in 1776, penned a litany of accusations we call the Declaration of Independence against the King’s “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States” which is read religiously every July 4th on NPR. Our American rebels created a democracy in a world full of monarchies. How did this horde of wannabe revolutionaries get the story turned inside out—rebelling against democracy to support a would-be Tyrant? Were they fueled by the misinformation perpetrated by a lying leader and by social media set up to cultivate echo chambers of opinion without regard to the Truth? Or were they put into trance by a Cult Leader, following him into a conspiracy laced splinter faction of lost souls in which his enemies are the Devil’s Spawn, the rapists of Lady Liberty, and he is the only one who can save them?

Back at the Capitol, the would be King had promised he’d lead his followers in person, but true to form, could only be found on Twitter until Twitter cancelled him. His mob of Proud Boys and other White Supremacists, folks who buy into his Big Lies, had set up a noose to make their point very clear. They breached the barricades, climbed over walls, used bicycle racks to break glass and bust through doors, attacked Capitol Police with American flagpoles, fire extinguishers and bear mace, threatened news reporters, Senators, Congress People and their staff members. They planted a sign reading “Pelosi is Satan” in a conspicuous spot. The Senate had to make an archetypal descent into the underworld of the building, where they were held in a secure area.

The mob

Members of the House sheltered in place, cowering under their seats as the mob tried to break into their chamber. They pushed heavy chests against the doors to keep the horde from storming in. They put on gas masks to protect themselves from tear gas the police had deployed in the Rotunda. They were finally evacuated just before the mob entered the chamber and they too made their descent into a secure underworld where 200 members were piled into a small room. This outrage was not only the result of our Berserker King rousing his followers to an insurrection against the country he was supposedly leading and defending, but of a large group of Republican Senators and Congress People poised to throw out the legal and valid election results of millions of voters, simply because they didn’t like the outcome. Their accusations of voter fraud had been adjudicated in the courts and been thrown out over and over again as having no merit.

You wonder why I keep using the word Berserker? Berserkers were ancient Viking warriors, who wore bear skins, or nothing at all, drove themselves into a rages to prepare for battle. It seems the most appropriate words for what we’ve experienced with our 45th President and his followers.

Berserker

On that wild train ride some of the outgoing President’s most loyal supporters were suddenly thrown to the other side. Vice President Pence refused to join those who were objecting to the certification. He insisted that his role was to do the bidding of the American people. And Senator McConnell said that hijacking the voting process would “send Democracy into a death spiral.” It was too little too late. On the Day of the Attempted Insurrection American Democracy was a train wreck—lying in pieces all over the land. Since then I’ve been working on this blog to try to get my bearings. The news keeps shifting, changing. Where are we? Where are we headed? That day looks worse and worse as more details are gathered. For example, it seems that some Republicans gave insurrectionists a reconnaissance tour of the building the night before the coup attempt, and that other Republicans refused to wear masks in the tight quarters where members of the House had to huddle and to share the air. Several who were there have since tested positive for Covid.

In hindsight it seems a miracle that no one from the press or from Congress was seriously hurt. However, many were badly traumatized. As the call to impeach the Inciter–in–Chief, again, was addressed in the House a week after the Coup attempt, the word was that many Republican members of Congress were afraid to take a stand against the would–be Tyrant, not only for political reasons—they were afraid for their physical safety and that of their families. Lady Liberty lies bleeding in the Temple of Democracy.

Noose

How in the world was this violent breach allowed to happen? Nobody has been allowed into the Capitol since the beginning of the pandemic. These confederate flag waving terrorists were not wearing masks. Yet doors were opened for them. Some Capitol policemen took selfies with them. The murderous mob, shouting “Hang Pence!” and “Where’s Nancy?” was actively hunting down our Vice President and the Speaker of our House. They rifled through Nancy Pelosi’s papers, put their feet on her desk. They defecated in the hallways. Their purpose was to desecrate the People’s House. Quick thinking by the Secret Service and Capitol police saved our elected representatives from being slaughtered. Most of the line of presidential succession was in that building—they got Pence, Harris, Pelosi and Hoyer to safety, protected the Senate and the House. There was hand–to–hand combat with vengeful invaders. One brave Capitol policeman, Eugene Goodman, a Black man and a Veteran, led the mob away from its prey by risking being its prey. They chased him upstairs, downstairs and through hallways as he craftily steered them away from the Senate Chamber, where members were still being evacuated, and showed them the exit.

We all saw this train wreck coming. The Inciter–in–Chief had been tweeting for weeks that Jan. 6th would be “wild” in Washington. Why wasn’t there more protection and defense for our lawmakers and journalists? Any peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration would not gotten anywhere near the Capitol. I shudder to think what would have happened to them. And those Proud Boys, tough guys, who desecrated the Senate chambers and sat in Nancy Pelosi’s office chair, were sent off with a kiss and a declaration of love from our White Supremacist–in–Chief, who told them it was “time to go home.”

The contrast!

Thankfully, no groups from the left came out to counter the insurrectionaries. But all of America was glued to phones and computers, watching in horror and dismay, as the Great American train crashed into our Democratic ideals, and is lying in pieces all over our land. How did we get here? Who allowed a Berserker King of Bedlam to drive our train?

Bobby Kennedy for President

This is America. This has always been America. If this were not America, this wouldn’t have happened. It’s time we face this ugly truth; let it sink into the marrow of our bones, let it move us to action.
—Roxane Gay New York Times Sunday Review Jan. 10, 2021

Who allowed a Berserker King of Bedlam to drive our train? I have been pondering that question since the 2016 election. It was brought into focus after the 2020 election, when my husband, Dan Safran, and I watched a remarkable documentary, made in 2018— Bobby Kennedy for President—which took us both back to our youth. Dan and I are both war babies—he was born in 1939; I was born in 1943. Radio newscasts about the war are the background noise of our earliest memories and terrors. We were Jewish babies, breathing in our parents’ anxiety and horror as the realities of what was happening to European Jewry began to be understood.

Now our grandchildren are young adults. Many of them have had their lives stalled by the pandemic, by the train wreck of American leadership which has failed to provide a coherent plan to protect all of us from the virus. Our grandchildren’s college years or career development have been rudely interrupted. Our hearts break for them. As we watched footage from 1962—Jack Kennedy and his brother Bobby stood facing each other as the horrifying reality of the Cuban Missile Crisis sank in— it was as though a portal had opened for both of us, into our young adult selves.

RFK and JFK facing each other
during Cuban Missile Crisis

At that moment in time, we were both early in our first marriages. I was pregnant, and terrified that the world would end before my child could be born. Dan and his new wife Barbara, were at Bryn Mawr College, studying Social Work. Dan was President of the Student Body of the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Earlier, in college, he had helped organize Students for a Sane Nuclear Policy. He had protested nuclear testing. He remembers a gathering of his fellow Bryn Mawr students, including Barbara, all in a state of terror, as they contemplated the unthinkable possibility of nuclear war. For thirteen days the world held its breath as Soviet nuclear missiles intruded into our hemisphere. Cuba had suffered an attempted invasion by the United States—the Bay of Pigs debacle. They asked the Soviets to protect them with missiles. Two nuclear nations faced each other. How could this issue be resolved without risking the end of the world? Bobby, who was good at diplomacy, came up with the trade off—the Russians remove the missiles, in exchange, we won’t invade Cuba. Dan and I realized that our souls had been badly bruised during those thirteen days, when we were so young, so frightened that we would never get to live out our destinies as the fate of humanity hung by a thread.

In a helpful synchronicity, we heard Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC, commenting on the Day of the Attempted Coup. It was fourteen days before the Inauguration of Biden and Harris. O’Donnell noted that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are old enough to remember those 13 days in 1962. They don’t want to relive that terror, and that is why they were pushing for an early departure for the outgoing Berserker. This helped me realize the obvious— our whole generation was shaped by the events of the 1960s, which were both an inspiration and a train wreck for America.

One year later President Kennedy was assassinated—a terrible crime that has never been solved. Two years after that Malcolm X was assassinated. Fifty-five years after his murder his case has been reopened by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office—there are ongoing questions about who murdered him. Three years after Malcolm’s murder Martin Luther King was assassinated. The F.B.I. fingered James Earl Ray, a career criminal and supporter of segregationist George Wallace. Ray has said he was not guilty. The family of Martin Luther King believes to this day that Ray was framed. There is evidence, they say of a conspiracy including the Mafia and the government. Two months after that it was Bobby Kennedy’s turn to be assassinated. Again, the accused gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, a slight Palestinian with no history of criminal behavior, has always claimed his innocence; there are many theories of who might really be responsible.

John F. Kennedy

Malcolm X

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy

We on the progressive side of the political world are suspicious of contemporary conspiracy theories. They are mostly Big Lies, devoid of any factual truth. But what if there were actual conspiracies in the ‘60s to assassinate all the potent leaders of those days? What if we have lived with Big Lies all our adult lives, most of us in denial of the terrible truth—we have never come to grips with how those murders happened, we have never had a Truth and Reconciliation process to make sense of our history.

Watching Bobby Kennedy for President, I was suddenly overcome with a wave of grief for our generation—how traumatized we’d all been by the assassinations of our leaders—those who carried our hopes and dreams that we could work through America’s great and terrible evil—the crimes of four hundred years of slavery, and the genocide perpetrated against our indigenous population. America’s efforts at Reconstruction in the late nineteenth century were derailed by White Supremacists who took away the voting rights of African American men, stole their promised forty acres and a mule, stole their rights and their power in their personal and political lives. The civil war had been fought to right the wrongs of slavery. But new forms of slavery emerged—Jim Crow, segregation, voter suppression, redlining, block busting, mass incarceration—all manipulated by white supremacist policies pretending to be normal politics. In 1962, Jack Kennedy and his brother Bobby sent federal marshals and U.S. Army troops to protect James Meredith, an African American who had enrolled in the University of Mississippi.

James Meredith at Old Miss

There was enormous resistance to desegregation, though the Supreme Court had made school desegregation the law of the land in 1954. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy all challenged the web of lies and racist ideas which were running the country; they dared to shine a light into what kept us in the dark about our own shadow. No wonder all those issues they spoke of so eloquently, the issues that Bobby came to understand so profoundly as he ran for president in 1968—starving children in Kentucky and Mississippi, inequality, segregation, poll taxes, lynchings—the entitlement claimed by rich white men over men of color and men who were poor—fell into an abyss of history.

RFK during his 1968 presidential run

Bobby allowed himself to change, to become a different man, as the terrible unfolding of his life ground him down he opened his heart to grief and to the terrible truths about America. His friend John Lewis was with him in Indianapolis on the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby was slated to speak to a mostly black crowd. Lewis told him he had to tell the people what happened. Here is a small part of what Bobby said, just two months before his own assassination

I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.

In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.

For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love. For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times…

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

RFK speaking to the crowd
in Indianapolis

We in the field of psychology understand that if you can’t confront your past, what has shaped you, what has traumatized you, if you allow family secrets to fester in the dark, if you live in denial and complacency, the demons will out. They’ll get you in the end. You’ll find yourself reenacting the horrors that were done to you. At the level of the culture those nasty shadows will grab the steering wheel and drive the country’s train like a Berserker Conductor and send us all off our rails.

How do we take up the truth again, deal with the history we’ve denied and revised? The light we can see now comes from Georgia, where Stacy Abrams and her group of activists and organizers just won us three important elections—one, in November 2020, for President Biden, the others, in January 2021 for Senator Warnock and Senator Ossoff? How do we keep that flame burning? That is when it occurred to me that I should talk to my favorite ‘60s activist, sitting on the couch beside me, Dan Safran, about the history he experienced.

RFK shot (June 4, 1968)

To Be Continued.

The Muse of Fire

2020-09-15T09:41:00.007-07:00

The Sister from Below is Pleased to Announce

A Political Poetry Reading

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and Dale Jensen

will read from their chapbooks

Dreaming Night Terrors and Trump Tics

Oct. 1, 2020 7-8:30 pm

To attend please register at:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83021344181?pwd=cDBoaG5ObHc4T1h2OTdSM3NybVh1QT09

The reading will be available on YouTube after Oct. 1: https://tinyurl.com/newsfrommuse

* * * * * * *

The Muse of Fire

And so we had to taste hell

C.G. Jung The Red Book

Photo by Jessica Christian, The San Francisco Chronicle

Rage

the haters will crawl out from under their rocks
the “white only” nation come out of the woodwork
You won’t know whose country you’re in
“Wishing in the Woods with Hillary"

We wake to the taste of ash in our mouths. The sky has an ominous sepia glow. Day never breaks. Our devices tell us its morning, but it is dark as night. The air quality index is dangerously high. We are filled with a primal fear our ancestors would recognize—what if the sun doesn’t rise?

What world are we in? Some call it Apocalypse. Some call The End Times. Some say it’s the fever dream of our Mother Earth—grievously ill. Some call it Wednesday, September 9, 2020 in California’s worst fire season yet.

Photo by Jessica Christian, The San Francisco Chronicle

Dan and I have been sheltering in place since the Ides of March. We’ve developed the rituals the lucky ones can afford in these times. I work from home. We have weekly family gatherings on Zoom. We get our groceries delivered and our kids help us out with farmer’s market produce and runs to Costco. We’ve learned to live in an introverted seclusion that has its pleasures. But crises keep erupting like new heads on the monster. Count them:

There’s the climate change crisis. That’s been a worry for at least forty years, though it has only recently been taken seriously, at least by some of us. In California decades of drought caused by rising temperatures have left the forests and the wild lands urban interface desiccated—ripe for wildfire.

Photo by Gabrielle Lurie, The San Francisco Chronicle

There’s the political crisis we’ve been in since the 2016 elections, which many of us think were stolen with help from the Russians or by voter suppression—or both—giving us a berserker President who yanked our country out of the Paris Climate Accords because, he claims, climate change is a hoax.

Since March we’ve been in the grip of an invisible killer—intent on inflaming our lungs— who has driven us into our caves. This too, says our leader, is a hoax, and the fault of the Chinese. According to Bob Woodward’s new book Rage, the President told him—on tape in February—that he lied to America about how deadly the virus is.

Rage is the right word for this time. It’s a fire that burns hot in me and everyone I know, outraged and beside ourselves with the corruption, cruelty, mendacity and greed of this administration. Rage is the fire that engulfed the country when we were witness to George Floyd’s terrible death, which ripped the veils of denial about systemic racism off many people’s eyes. We had a moment of hope. There were people of all ages and ethnicities in the streets, protesting the ongoing crisis of black and brown people murdered by police.

We began acknowledging inequities, how many more black and brown people were dying of the coronavirus, how much more they suffered the financial fiasco caused by a pandemic run amuck, with no leadership or responsibility taken by the Federal Government.

In the perverse way new heads keep growing on that monster, we watched in horror as peaceful protests were broken up by brown shirted officials without identification who arrested demonstrators for no reason, or by right wing thugs, whose fury was ignited by the racist–in–chief. He blames racial tensions on the left, especially on anti-fascists, known as Antifa, which makes no sense, since Antifa is not an organization, has no mission statement, no meetings, is essentially a right wing fantasy. He calls systemic racism—you guessed it—a hoax, and in his inimitable way, steals the media thunder and turns the protests into riots. The man is a walking crisis. Whatever he touches explodes in Rage.

Symphony Fantastique by Brad Tepaske

And then, as though the weather were enacting the dangerous fires of our politics, California was struck by lightening—1100 strikes—causing hundreds of wildfires in lands that hadn’t burned in years. Many had to evacuate. Many lost their homes. This in the midst of a frightening heat wave that kept us indoors. Not to mention the heavy smoke in the air—full of toxins, the remains of people’s houses, the remains of beloved forest lands. What has happened to temperate golden California? Our habitat is turning against us. We bought more air filters and turned up the air conditioning.

Photos by Scott Strazzante, San Francisco Chronicle

Crises collided with crises, as though the monster’s many heads were attacking each other. We watched our grandchildren struggle to find their way as colleges sent them home to study in isolation on screens, and their paths were obscured by ash. We worried about those less fortunate than we are. There is an ongoing housing crisis in California. As people lost their unemployment insurance and the extra money the government had been providing, how would they pay their rent? The Republicans in Congress are dead set against helping the economy by helping the poor. We have an ongoing crisis of homelessness. How can the jobless pay their rent? Where are they supposed to go? Live with relatives and give each other the virus? The words of the psalmist come to mind:

Lord… How long shall the wicked exult?
They gush out, they speak arrogantly;
All the workers of iniquity bear themselves loftily.
They crush thy people, O Lord,
And afflict Thy heritage.
Psalm 44: 3–7

The Surrealist by Victor Brauner (1947)

Cultivating Fire

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. It provides the opportunity to do things that were not possible to do before. Rahm Emanuel

In another life—post election 2008—in another crisis—the Great Recession—Obama’s Chief of Staff made this wise remark. But he said “crisis” in the singular. By my count I’ve just named 10 crises, as though it’s the Passover Seder and we are naming the plagues:

1. Climate Change
2. The Pandemic
3. Systemic Racism
4. Economic Inequality
5. Right Wing Extremism
6. Drought
7. Wildfires
8. Homelessness
9. Unhealthy Air
10. The Hoax in the White House

How do we confront all of these raging interlocking crises at one time? When I feel overwhelmed and unsure of how to proceed, I often look up the word I’m pondering in the etymological dictionary. It’s my way of calling up the magic of the ancestors, the wisdom embedded in the roots of language, to help me. “Crisis” is related to words that mean to separate, to discriminate, to judge. It’s also related to the word “riddle.” This calms me. I recognize that we need to use our fire strategically, that we need to separate careful judgment from our terror, we need to acknowledge the puzzling nature of the riddle of our times. Our ancestors have been through many crises. They knew fire as a deity, as a trickster, as a healer; they knew fire as trouble and fire as passion, fire as destroyer and fire as what cooks your food. “It is through fire, “wrote Eliade,” that Nature is changed, making it the “basis of the most ancient magics” (The Book of Symbols).

Fire, we are told by indigenous people, can be cultivated to tend the land so there won’t be wildfires. What has happened in our politics is a wildfire, because we haven’t done controlled burns—we haven’t faced our history, taken responsibility for genocide, slavery, racism and the catastrophic destruction of habitat and species. Many among us are engaged in that work, but not yet the powers that be—the ones with the money, the media, and the wherewithal to change things. As we approach the 2020 election I’m counting on the fire in all of our bellies, and the clear judgment and discrimination to sort right from wrong, corruption from policy, greedy self interest from the common good, our own habits and appetites from the needs of the planet, which must be obeyed if we are to survive.

We heard the fire and the judgment in both Michelle and Barack Obama’s speeches at the democratic convention. We heard Kamala Harris’ blazing tongue taking on the outrages of the current administration. And we heard Joe Biden’s righteous rage about the hoaxes perpetrated by the current president, his refusal to fight the virus in a strategic way, using the judgments of science, his refusal to confront the horror of so many people dead and gone, who had to die alone, because of the virulence of the crowned virus. Those that survive them, couldn’t say goodbye. Where are the rituals of mourning? Where is the wailing and the moaning? Where are the lowered flags? Where is the reading of names? How long would it take to read 200,000 names? It’s Joe Biden who speaks for the lost and the grieving.

Grief and empathy are qualities of maturity, of the capacity to hold complexity. The Hoax in Chief beats an angry drum that rouses the fire in people to say “No!” Like a tantruming two-year old or a rebellious teenager you can’t make them wear masks, you can’t make them stay home to protect themselves and others. They insist on their guns and their freedom to spread germs. But they are not the majority. If we can use our cultivated fire to listen to those who are lost, angry, isolated, alienated, who feel that their vote won’t make a difference, to acknowledge their hurt and their losses, perhaps we can light their fire to vote for a better world.

Uprising Time in America

We’ll make a fire talk story remember our mothers’
invisible powers
“Wishing in the Woods with Hillary”

I remember that night, long ago, in the Before Times—election night, November 2016. I drove home from work. Dan opened the door to the garage as I drove in. His eye-roll said it all. I gasped. I hadn’t wanted to believe what I’d begun to hear on the car radio. We weren’t about to drink that bottle of champagne. We were about to descend into a national hell realm with a misogynist rabble–rouser in chief who was about to destroy most of what we held sacred in our democracy. None of his atrocities seemed to leave a mark on him. His base was his base no matter how corrupt, cruel, shameless and crass he was. The refrain among my circle was: “How can 40% of Americans support these outrages?”

Four years later, having experienced horror upon horror, we need to remember the seats we won in 2018, because of our strategic use of political fire. We can’t allow our discouragement, our horror, our exhaustion to stomp out our fire. We need to do whatever is in us to do to win this election and begin to cut off the many heads of that monster. Whether its donating money, being a poll worker, sending postcards to voters in swing states, or telling everyone in your life to get out and vote, vote early! your involvement is essential. We are at a crossroads in the history of our country and our world. I think of James Baldwin’s remark about middle class white America:

…we must realize this,
that no other country in the world has been
so fat and so sleek and so safe and so happy,
and so irresponsible and so dead.
I Am Not Your Negro

This time of crisis is an opportunity for us to wake up to reality and begin protecting the earth, facing the truth of our history, taking seriously our responsibility to one another and to the common good. That is what I believe Hillary was working toward. That is what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are working toward. They need our help.

My fire is poetry. I hope you’ll join us on October 1 to hear fiery political poems. One of them, “Wishing in the Woods With Hillary” is a women’s healing circle for her and for all of us, to reconnect to our Mother the Earth, to our values, to our backbones, to our sacred fires. I offer it to you:

Wishing in the Woods With Hillary

I wish you’d surprise me in the woods Hillary as you did
that young mother baby daughter on her back the day after we lost you
for president She took a selfie My daughter sent me the link
Who will we be without you in your moon bright pantsuit?
Who will stand up to the strongman when Michelle and Barack
walk out of the White House and speak to us only in dreams?

My wish is to see you among trees their leaves gone gold
and crimson or dry and dead on the earth Your little dog
will sniff me And you who’ve been pilloried
your goodness debunked as though working
for women and children lacks gravitas As though gravitas
is a loaded scrotum whose natural enemy is a woman with powers

Mother trudged from father’s study to kitchen to bathroom
and back when he whistled I kid you not He whistled She typed
his manuscripts cooked bathed children darned socks Hillary
She was the air we breathed the water we swam in
the earth we walked on our hearth our heart beat
Her powers invisible to the kingdom of men But O

she was fierce about voting for you in ‘08
Now she’s lost her way in the woods
lost my name your fame lost the whole world
of visible powers lost to the outcry

the pandemonium the kids walking out
of their schools shouting “Not Our President”

The trees raise their boughs and prophesy
When the moon comes closer to earth
than it’s been since the year you were born
the haters will crawl out from under their rocks
the “white only” nation come out of the woodwork
You won’t know whose country you’re in

Maybe our time is over Hillary All that e-mail evil
because you’re attached to your old familiar that Blackberry
you refuse to waste time learning new smartphones I’m with you
But my dear the world is passing us by That young mother
in the woods after we lost you for president posted you
and her baby daughter on Facebook It went viral My daughter sent me the link

Hillary my wish is to surround you with sisters
of the secret grove We’ll sit in a circle kiss the earth
with our holiest lips We’ll lift up our hands and pray

for your healing our healing the healing of the dis–
respected disaffected molested undocumented Jim Crowed
And let’s not forget the trees the bees the buffalo

We’ll breathe into our bellies Our backbones grow
into strong tree trunks our roots descend While I’m wishing
let’s throw in a chorus of frogs and the smell
of the earth after rain For it’s downgoing time in America
underworld time time to hide out in a cave
How I wish for your company in the dark Hillary

We’ll make a fire talk story remember our mothers’
invisible powers Maybe we’ll sink into dreamtime Maybe Michelle
will visit She’ll wear a wonderful dress remind us of grace of joy
She’ll speak from her heart Though the weather’s becoming
a banshee goddess Though the “white only” nation
is trolling the web Though the emperor elect

is tweeting our downfall My wish is Remember
The way of women is our way The moon swells
the moon goes dark pulling the tides in and out
The way of the trees is our way So raise up
your branches sisters for we are one gathering
Soon sap will rise apple trees flower

We’ll weave us a canopy all over this land
It will be uprising time once again
in America

The Muse of Breath

2020-07-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

The Sister from Below is pleased to announce the publication of

Dreaming Night Terrors

Political Poems

on the eve of the 2020 Election

Who will speak truth to the Master of Mendacity?

“The Spirit of Elijah Cummings Speaks”

Stuck in the cloistered terror of a pandemic, it’s hard to remember the brawling days before and after the 2016 election, the furies released by the Kavanaugh hearings, our stunned grief at the death of Elijah Cummings in October 2019. That seems lifetimes ago. Yet the 2020 election, perhaps the most consequential of our lives, is looming.

Dreaming Night Terrors, is a chapbook of political poems from the time before Covid 19, before the murder of George Floyd and the protests about police brutality and American racism. Written in outrage and sorrow, these poems are Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s offering to the spirit of Elijah Cummings. He advised us to “speak truth to abuse.” He reminded us that our resilience comes from our constitution, which is based on the separation of powers. Were he alive today he would urge us to organize, raise money, write rants, vote, do everything it’s in us to do to remove the current administration, its chaos and corruption, its mendacity, cruelty and cult of personality. This is our moment, even as we shelter in place and gather on Zoom, to defend our democracy, honor Elijah, and reclaim our responsibilities to each other and to the earth.

############

The Muse of Breath

Like Emmet Till in the casket, the Floyd

image made clear no black person could be safe.

Carol Anderson

author of White Rage

NY Times Review, June 28th 2020

Emmet Till painting by Lisa Whittington

(Dreaming Night Terrors is dedicated to the spirit of my father, Edward Elias Lowinsky, whose politics were the hard-won truths of a refugee from the European slaughter of his people.)

Breath is Spirit

Father, your spirit takes over my reverie with ravenous cravings for news—of the pandemic, of the protests, of the tsunami of change that is sweeping away the world as we know it. You insist that I track the terrible stories, make something of them—poems, blogs, a chapbook. You keep disturbing my introverted sheltering in place, stirring my outrage. It’s been a half life since we talked. Come to think of it, have we ever really talked, ever really had a dialogue? You lectured. I listened. My responses were always carefully crafted not to incite your rage. My spirit hid out in your presence. Your spirit wandered off into the Beyond. I always think of Jung’s mother telling him that his father died in time for him to become himself. You did that for me, and I’m grateful. You haven’t been around me much in all those years. Why are you making such a ruckus now?

Why do you assume it’s my call? You’re the one who pulls me out of the Beyond by breathing my spirit, obsessing about words and their roots, working for musicality in your language, seeking the humanism and creativity to which I gave my last breath—finding it even in the realm of politics. You speak of spirit, yours and mine. The word spirit comes from the latin “spirere,” to breath. You have come to a place in your life where you can breathe, fully, in the presence of my spirit. Perhaps my spirit has evolved to allow you the space to breathe.

I come to remind you it’s not enough to hide out from the virus. You need to speak out about the truths the virus reveals. How is it possible that America is still such a racist nation, that unarmed black people get killed for no good reason, that black and brown people die of Covid 19 so much more frequently than do white people? Didn’t we fight for racial justice in my lifetime? What happened to Martin Luther King’s long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice? Has it been twisted backwards?

Portrait of George Floyd by Eme Freethinker

Breath is Life

Father, your great grandchildren are out in the streets protesting. They’re wearing masks and chanting George’s Floyd’s last words: “I can’t breathe” as his life was crushed out of him by a policeman’s knee. Why? Because a cashier in a store thought he was passing a forged twenty dollar bill. His image is all over the world, including in Germany. He joins the list of names, tragic names that fill me with grief and shame: Eric Garner who died in a police chokehold, saying “I can’t breathe.” Why did the police stop him? On suspicion of selling individual cigarettes illegally. Breonna Taylor, a young Emergency Medical Technician, was shot eight times in her bed in the middle of the night. The police had bad information and no warrant. Ahmoud Arbery, a young man who liked to jog to clear his mind, was gunned down by two white men. His crime? Running while black. Walter Scott, stopped on some traffic technicality, was shot in the back running away. He was unarmed. Tamir Rice, a twelve year old boy, was playing with a toy gun. Shot by police. I could go on and on. All of these people would be alive today if they were not black. A sign seen at a recent protest: “Legalize Being Black!” How can this still be happening, in the America that saved you and our family?

Have you noticed all this commotion is about breath? Covid 19 is a respiratory disease. It attacks a person’s lungs. If you’re sick with Covid you can’t breathe. Racism is a disease of the collective breath. Air is something we all share. But racism stops the oppressed from breathing freely, from living their lives with joy and purpose. If you’re black or brown you’re constantly feeling under assault. George Floyd can’t breathe. Eric Garner can’t breathe. Black and brown people can’t breathe because they are always at risk. Their spirits are crushed by the burden of such hatred, such constant danger. What did I always tell you? Eternal Vigilance is the price of liberty. What happened to your vigilance?

When I saw you last, father, you were curled up like a fetus in that hospital bed. Reagan was on TV, well into his dog whistle assault on the multicultural America you fought for. You were too sick to rant against him. It’s been 35 years since the cancer devoured you, since the cancer of white supremacy devoured the civil rights and liberties we had so recently achieved. I kept thinking the backlash would be over soon, the Age of Aquarius would finally begin. Our liberal America would triumph. I wasn’t vigilant enough to get it—things kept getting worse. In the ‘90s, during the democratic presidency of Bill Clinton, welfare was undermined, and mass incarceration stole black men out of their families, destroying young lives and ripping up communities. So many young fathers were in jail for meaningless, made up offenses. You can imagine what this did to their women, their children, their breath, their spirit. I didn’t understand that racism in America is systemic, and that I, even with the best of intentions, am complicit with a system which privileges me over black and brown people. I didn’t comprehend the Phantom Narratives, to borrow my friend Sam Kimbles’ phrase, that had America and me, in their grip—the ghosts of the American civil war and the ghosts of the Shoah telling competing stories. I didn’t begin to see that we were witnessing a resurrection of the chain gang, of the plantation system with slaves, until recently. I’m ashamed that it took me so long.

It takes spirit to confront unwelcome truths.

A graphic account of America's love affair with prisons

Breath is a Song

Father, you were in my dream the other night. You were so young and tender, the age you were, 33, when you got your first job in America, teaching Musicology at Black Mountain College; the age you were when I was born. We are on a fast moving train, sitting at a table in the dining car. You are headed forwards, me backwards. I’m the age I was when I visited your deathbed. There is sweetness and ease between us. We are headed South, to North Carolina. I wake to remember my favorite story of you.

Photo of Father, Mother, my baby brother, Si, and me (1946)

I was a toddler. You were recently off the boat, finding sanctuary at a small liberal arts school in the South. Like most of your colleagues, you were a refugee Jew, escaped from the Shoah. I have fleeting memories of all those European musicians, painters, weavers, Bauhaus builders in world changing times speaking many languages in the cafeteria. We were a community spat out of the mouth of Europe’s monstrous hatred of the Jews, lucky to land here on the shores of Lake Eden. But this was the South. Jim Crow reigned, which outraged you. Looked to you like how Hitler treated the Jews. You invited Roland Hayes, an African American tenor, to sing at a desegregated concert. Hayes sang the European repertoire as well as spirituals. He had been received by the crowned heads of Europe, but given little attention in America. Mother told me that you and she were afraid the Ku Klux Klan would burn Black Mountain College down. That didn’t happen. Hayes gave his breath, his great spirit, to Schubert’s “Du Bist die Rüh” and to “Go Down Moses.” That was 1945. The war was still on. Your parents had died in the year of my birth. That must have been such an assault on your breath. How did you have the chutzpah to take on segregation?

I knew I just had to keep on breathing, keep on living my life. My mother died in a concentration camp in Holland. I didn’t know what had happened to my father, though later it appeared he was in a cattle car on the way to Auschwitz when the allies bombed the train. What a terrible irony, to think my father was killed by America. My spirit rose up in fury and told me to do something! So I desegregated Black Mountain College—the first school in the South to open its doors to black people of color. I did it with the Roland Hayes concert, and with a campaign to invite black students. It was my intention to help America honor its promise. I had so much faith in America. What happened?

Black Mountain College faculty

Breath is Inspiration

We elected a black president in 2008, with a musical name—Barack Obama. He is brilliant, eloquent, elegant—a man with a strong moral compass. He has a beautiful, high spirited wife and two lovely daughters. It was inspiring to have such a loving, admirable black family in the White House for eight years. But racism was alive and well in America and Obama had a terrible time trying to govern. The Republicans blocked him at every turn. Obama is still deeply beloved. But the backlash was the election of the anti-Obama— a blatant racist, a master of mendacity, of chaos and corruption, a demagogue, a narcissist, the crazed center of a cult of personality. He follows the playbook for dictators. His self-serving and incompetent administration has made us the laughing stock of the world, and revealed the underbelly of American racism and inequality. He has not even attempted to lead the country out of the dreadful pandemic we’re stuck in. The body counts keep growing. The numbers of the sick keep growing. Other countries refuse to let Americans in. Not that we want to travel these days.

And what are you doing, my daughter, to confront all this horror?

I am putting my poems to work for the election of a good man, a man who has a moral compass, a man who understands suffering and grief, Joe Biden. I hope the poems will inspire people to do whatever is in them to do—especially to vote to oust the worst president we’ve ever had.

Worse than Nixon? Worse than Reagan?

Much worse. I wrote a poem during the spring of 2016 which expresses how dangerous I understood him to be even before he was elected. At the time mother was far gone into her dementia. She had no idea what was happening in the world. But the child in me yearned for her protection.

What I Want To Tell My Mama

Only she’s gone a slight rustle of reeds
at the edge of the pond a paw print in the mud

Sometimes she takes my hand like a curious
two year old tracing my veins touching my rings

Mutti you’ve dived down below your German
gutterals found your own Ur tongue

Crim crutz
Olam Bolam

If you were who you used to be Mama
I’d tell you about that Scary Man

that Chaos Man with Caterwauling Hair who beats
his chest and threatens

to drive us back
into the Tohu Bohu

He’d build a Golden Wall high as the Great Wall
of China Impenetrable as Negative Space

A Magnificent Wall to keep the likes of us
Refugees and our Rabble children out

of America Mama he’s a Huckster
a Big Hunk of Catastrophe

Flasher Man Slash Her Man
Hair sprayed into Caesar’s Brass Helmet

Olam Bolam
Crimini Crutz

All the ghosts we keep in the closet
rush in shrieking

“It’s the Nazis
It’s the Fascists
It’s the Cossacks
It’s the Huns
It’s Joseph McCarthy as Hair Spray Man
come to eat our young Run!”

He is the King of the Hoax the Prince of Evasion
Makes sausage

of our worst fears
We eat it

What he eats
is cotton candy

Rim Ram
Crimini hachts

There’s a gargantuan Wall of Broken
Glass between his lovers and his haters

yet we are spell bound Mama
How can I explain

He has hula dancer fingers
He curls them

unfurls them
We watch mesmerized

“On Day One Hour One
You’ll all be gone Every last one of you

Enemy Aliens!”

Crimini crumini
Olam Bolam

Mama make him
be gone…

That’s quite a language your mother developed in her dotage. Makes me think of another word that comes from the Latin, “spirare”— inspiration. Sounds like your mother was casting powerful spells.

Yes, I’ve had the same intuition about it. Speaking of inspiration, your passion for the political in its deepest, widest, most humanistic form, has inspired me to publish this little book. I want you to know, father, that I’ve dedicated my chapbook to your spirit.

Have you ever dedicated anything to me before?

No. But this train is moving swiftly. I’m nearing the age you were when you died. I want you to know that I am your daughter, that I feel your spirit moving in me. Your passion for life, for justice, and for song inspire me in these terrible times. I’m grateful.

The Muse of St. Francis and the Turtles

2020-02-18T17:36:00.001-08:00

Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us…

This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her… We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.

Pope Francis Encyclical Letter Laudate Si

On Care for Our Common Home

San Pancho, a charming coastal town north of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, has been a haven for Dan and me for fifteen years. We come for a couple of weeks in the winter, to get warm, to slow down our frenzied American minds, to open our beings to the color, music, and sensuality of a place where the tapestry of life is woven slowly, by different gods so it seems, than our own. This year especially, we were glad to get out of the US during the so–called impeachment trial, when the separation of powers was sacrificed to the growing tyranny, greed and corruption of the executive. Mexico is no example of fairness and democracy but in this little town we have found a rare blend of influences which create unusual harmony.

San Pancho is a nickname for San Francisco—the town’s official name. Its patron saint, of course, is St. Francis. Its small Catholic Church is a bastion of tradition. But the Huichol beadwork jaguars for sale in the square speak to other traditions, as does St. Francis himself; on murals all over town he is in harmony with the birds, the fish, the turtles who lay their eggs on the beach, and are protected by an environmental group— Grupo Ecológico de la Costa Verde —I call them the Turtle People, who harbor [protect the turtle] eggs until they are self sufficient hatchlings, and then in a sacred ritual, release them to the sea.

It is as though St. Francis had a vision of a place without poverty, where earth, sky, sea and their creatures live in harmony. San Pancho works at being such a place. The local people who own the stores and the restaurants go back to the four families—some say as many as ten families—who peopled the original fishing village. Many people from Mexico City and Guadalajara as well as from the US and Canada own houses here and are engaged in the community. They support the Turtle People, San Pancho Animales, which rescues animals and runs a spay and neuter clinic and Entre Amigos, which runs the recycling program, a program to help local families pay their children’s school fees and send them to college, and much more. Dan and I sponsor a youngster. Her animated drawing of land, sea, sun and birds brightens our refrigerator at home. It has been for us a blessed place, one of those magical spots that draws positive energies. But in recent years St. Francis’ vision has been threatened.

The visible manifestation of that threat is an ugly block of condominiums plopped down on the beach by some developer from another country, against the will of the townspeople and against the law of Mexico, which claims the beach for the people. This monster is in total disharmony with its environment—the palapa covered restaurants, the ocean, the surfers, the frigates high in the sky and a skedaddle of pelicans (sometimes 13 at a time) skimming the waves with their wings, who make Dan and me gasp with pleasure. We are, as is our ritual, on the beach to watch the sunset. But even more, we are here to participate in a demonstration against the monster, Punta Paraìso (Point Paradise), held in synchrony with a release of turtle hatchlings. What a scene this is:

A band of drummers, the Batalá Mundo, associated with the international samba reggae group begun in Brazil, wearing red, white and black clothing, beat their red, white and black drums ferociously, joyously, fiercely, shaking their drumsticks in the air like fists, clearly enjoying the threatening sound they make.

A tall, gaunt St. Francis, towers above it all, looking as though he’s been painted by El Greco, casting his sorrow like a shadow on the people, mystifying the children who approach him warily.

Saint Francis by El Greco

St. Francis is mourning our beautiful beach, the beach that belongs to the dogs who leap and run, to the laughing babies in their daddy’s arms, to the mother who pulls out her breast to nurse her newborn, to the vendors selling sweets, snacks, beaded earrings in vibrant colors, to the turtle hatchlings crawling over each other in two plastic pails, in a rush to get back to the sea, to the children with awed faces reaching into the pails—“can we hold them?”— to the people on their knees in the sand shaping large turtles —offerings to that great animal spirit of peace, patience, endurance and harmony among all forms of life—sacred to San Pancho, sacred to St. Francis.

The surf roars, the sun gets lost behind a cloud, is reflected in the sea. St. Francis dances with the children in front of the big monster building and its effigy—a piñata—which the children will soon destroy with fierce sticks.

The newcomers who bought condos stand on their decks, taking photos of the angry crowd. Did they know what they were getting into? St. Francis speaks for peace but knows that fierceness is required to stand up to the forces of greed, corruption and the desecration of our earth, our sea, our sky.

The drums beat. The crowd shouts “Playas Libra! No a Punta Paraìso!” (Free the Beaches. No to Point Paradise!) TV cameras are the eyes of the world as St. Francis hugs Turtle. A drone hovers over the monster looking like a huge mosquito. Our friend Bill, who lives here, who works hard for the people and the animals of San Pancho, tells us that somewhere, in a courtroom, the monster is on trial. Bill is hopeful.

Seems it takes the endurance of Turtle to defeat a monster. The children keep banging on the piñata. The drums keep on drumming. The hatchlings keep crawling over one another. The Turtle People keep admiring them, enchanted by their fragile beauty. St. Francis keeps shaking his mournful head as the sun slips out of the cloud and spreads rays of glory down to the horizon, creating a pyramid that becomes a circle of light at the horizon. Soon the sun will go down, the children will break up the monster piñata; releasing candy for all. When will the hatchlings be released?

Seems it takes the patience of Turtle to wait for the right time. The keeper of the hatchlings explains: “We need to wait for the end of twilight, when there is almost no light, to let them go, or the fish swimming below them will see their silhouettes and eat them up.” None of us want that to happen. Soon, the keeper of the hatchlings will mark out a space in the wet sand. No one may cross this line—this belongs to the babies. Soon we will watch him, who brings the love of St. Francis to these creatures, release them out of the plastic pails in the near dark. We strain to see them, such tiny beings, heading into the surf. We Turtle People gasp, cry out with joy when a wave comes to carry these babies home. Our babies, our brother turtles, as our sister the sickle moon drifts across the sky, carrying the vision of St Francis—all creatures are kin, pelicans and turtles, dogs and the buyers of condominiums, drummers of Batalia Mundo, mothers and fathers of baby humans, we are all brothers and sisters, all hatchlings of the universe.

The Sister from Below When the Muse gets Her Way

News from the Muse

The Muse of Lament and Dissent V

Introduction: Our Good News and Bad News September

Commentary on“Poem In Which I Reflect on Presidents and Death”

News from the Muse

The Muse of Lament and Dissent IV

News from the Muse

The Muse of Lament and Dissent III

Introduction

Commentary on the Poem: Unease Listening to my Guide in Tallinn

Unease Listening to My Guide in Tallinn

News from the Muse

The Moon Is a River of Darkness

The Moon Is a River of Darkness

News from the Muse

The Muse of Lament and Dissent

News from the Muse

News from the Muse

The Muse of Lament and Dissent

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Your Face in the Fire

Blue Light at the Gallery

News From the Muse

The Sister from Below

is delighted to announce

Your Face in the Fire

is an Amazon Bestseller!

This happened because so many of you joined the book launch andordered a copy on June 1. A beautiful community effort.Thank you, thank you!If you haven’t ordered your copy yet it’s still available on Amazon.

Here’s another poem from the book:

The Sister from Below

is delighted to announce the publication of

Your Face in the Fire

Launch Date: June 1, 2024

Help this book become a best seller!! Order your copy from Amazon on June 1

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

Your Face in the Fire

News from the Muse of the Double-headed Axe*

The Muse of the Double-headed Axe

The Sister from Below

Is Pleased to Announce

“The Ghost of My Father Remembers Himself

Playing the ‘Moonshine’ Sonata”

The Muse of the Promised Land

The Sister from Below invites you to:

The Sister from Below is Delighted to Invite You

The Muse of Free Women

Naomi Reads her Poetry from "Death and His Lorca"

Spread the word!

The Muse of the Psalms

The Muse of Duende

August 24th Event Invitation:

The Muse of Deep River

The Muse of Lady Liberty Part II

The Muse of Lady Liberty: Part I

The Muse of Fire

The Muse of Breath

The Muse of St. Francis and the Turtles

Commentary on
“Poem In Which I Reflect on Presidents and Death”

This happened because so many of you joined the book launch and
ordered a copy on June 1. A beautiful community effort.
Thank you, thank you!

If you haven’t ordered your copy yet it’s still available on Amazon.

Help this book become a best seller!!
Order your copy from Amazon on June 1