The Sister from Below When the Muse gets Her Way

The Muse of Trees

2013-05-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

Path with Trees (Watercolor by Emma Hoffman)

Trees Are Our Rock and Our Roots

I come from a long line of tree loving women. When my grandmother, Emma Hoffman, a gifted painter in the impressionistic tradition, lost three children, a home and a country, she painted trees to keep her sanity

I have been thinking and writing about my grandmother for a talk I am soon to give in Cleveland, Self-Portrait with Ghost: The Art of Lament and Redemption. I have written a series of poems in response to her paintings, telling the story of my family’s exodus from Hitler’s Europe to the New World. They lived in Cuba for 18 months before they were allowed to enter the United States. This was in 1940, before I was born. In this painting of a Great Mother Tree I can see my grandmother beginning to get her bearings, beginning to grow roots and branches, beginning to find her way.

Cuba 1940 (Oil by Emma Hoffman)

This is the poem that came to me in response:

Refuge

I’m here
Footstep and breath
Real as the trees
Real as the archway they make
From shadow to glow
Real as my painting in oil
For your eyes

Trees are my rock and my roots
Trees are my silent angels
Will the ghosts ever find me?
Will they build their nests in these branches
Here
As they did in Europe?

We are refugees from that room
With its single bare light bulb
Will our visas ever be granted?
Will our dead know where we’ve gone?

I’m here
Heartbeat and belly
Real as the woman I paint
Passing through shade into glow
Hungry for sun and the sea
And for you yet to be

I’m here
Belly and breath
Trees are my rock and my temple
Trees are my vigilant angels
And you soon to be

Will you make your nest here?
(First published in Levure Litteraire)

Trees Are Our Silent Angels

It used to be when I called up my mother for our Sunday talks that we’d tell each other family stories or stories from our busy creative lives. She was a fine violinist and violist. She played chamber and symphonic music, taught violin, and worked therapeutically with young children and their parents. Now, in her nineties, she is mostly confused, says she doesn’t know who or where she is. I think she doesn’t know why she is. But she always knows about the trees. She watches them. They tell her the seasons, orient her in the life cycle and she reports back to me about their winter nakedness, their eloquent shapes and windy dances, their spring buds and gorgeous flowering, their summer green abundance, their fall explosion into many colors and then shedding all their finery. She finds them beautiful in all their states. They calm her. They watch over her. They are as they are, and so is she. My mother would never say they are angels. But I do.

A Life in Trees

In my just published collection, The Faust WomanPoems, I have a poem called “A Life in Trees.” And indeed, I can tell my life story in trees. There was the Great Mother Oak I sat in when I was eight, which taught me the “long slow language of the afternoon,” showed me the “sun tangled in the green,” made a poet of me. (This is from my poem “in the junction” published in red clay is talking.) There was the Sexy Seductive Willow from my childhood, what She “kindled in me.” There was the “long legged” Palm, “enchanting the edge of tomorrow” and the “Lady Tree” whom I drew as a girl before I knew the word Goddess. (These quotes are from “A Life in Trees.”) There was the Umbrella Elm under whose “canopy leaves” Dan and I were married almost thirty-four years ago. There was the Tree of Life which “sent its roots deep into me” filled me with the wild wisdom of the Kaballah and returned me to Judaism. (Quotes from my poem “Earth Spirit” in The Faust Woman Poems.)

Under the Oak: An Invitation

There is another Great Mother Oak in my life these days. She lives in the lavender fields at Harms Farm, where my friends Patricia Damery and Donald Harms grow lavender, grapes and tend goats. I am privileged to be in a group of women writers, dedicated to the work of raising consciousness about the threats to creatures, trees and to the earth. We will read under that enchanting oak tree. I hope you’ll join us.

Under the Oak: Reading for the Earth

How do we reconnect with the earth and with each other in these perilous times? How do we create a vessel, individually and collectively, for rebirth in a world we hold sacred?

We, three poets and a novelist, have devoted our work to these questions, adding our voices to the growing chorus. We are passionate advocates for the Deep Feminine and a return to the ancient and timeless values which She embodies.

Please join us Under The Oak at Harms Vineyards and Lavender Fields for an afternoon of poetry, prose, and refreshments.

When: 4:30 pm, Saturday, June 22, 2013. (The Harms Vineyards and Lavender Fields Open House will be from 10-4 pm. Click on link for more details.)

Where: 3185 Dry Creek Road, Napa, CA 94558. Please park in the parking lot. There is a short walk into the vineyards. Wear a hat and dress appropriately.

Who is reading: Poets Frances Hatfield, Naomi Lowinsky, and Leah Shelleda, and novelist Patricia Damery.

News From the Muse: The Earth Spirit Muse

2013-04-16T21:38:00.000-07:00

The Earth Spirit Appearing To Goethe’s Faust

The Faust Woman Poems Are Out

It is April, the month of poetry, of Earth Day, of flowering. What a fine month for The Faust Woman Poems to emerge out of their long hibernation and look around the blooming world, blinking. The life behind many of these poems has been hibernating for forty some years— hiding out in old notebooks stored in the garage—until a dream grabbed me, called me “Faust Woman” and insisted I go through those notebooks in search of my younger self.

Why Faust Woman? The notebooks took me back to that wild time when I, among so many women of my generation, was suddenly touched by the Goddess. Like Faust we had no idea what we were getting into when we invoked the Earth Spirit to release us from our narrow, confined lives. She thrust us into the wilds of sex, power and creativity, and we owe Her our sexuality, our creativity and our souls.

A consciousness-raising group

I remember the moment the Goddess first touched me—woke me up—in a Women’s consciousness raising group in 1969. She blew the top of my head off and I could see the light of my own nature, hear the voice of my soul.

Possessed by the Earth Spirit

I also remember doing Authentic Movement in the early ‘70s—how the Goddess lit up my body with essential fire, gave me carnal knowledge of hips, feet, pulse, desire. I saw molecules dance in the sun. Poetry came to me. So did lust, longing and ambition. The Earth Spirit claimed me as Her own.

Black Mountain Poet

My own poems gather me—show me who I am and where I’ve been. I hadn’t remembered that the Goddess had embraced me as a toddler. Often I don’t know such things until a poem reveals them. My father’s first job in America was at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. I was a baby there. I had no conscious memory of the place until Dan and I visited it—now a Presbyterian summer camp—a few years ago.

Black Mountain College

The poems that came made clear the power of the Earth Spirit in my earliest childhood. Here’s one of them, from the section of The Faust Woman Poems called “Earth Spirit.”

My Eden
(Black Mountain College, 1943-47)

Garden of the sun dappled baby I was
and the tow headed toddler I can see me now
on the wooded path beloved of the morning

and the night Drunk on mother’s milk
and daddy’s lullabies Cradled in the rapture
of the mountains Captivated by the fiery flash

of a Cardinal in flight Seer of the light
in willows and in the waters of Lake Eden
Enchanted by the song of the Carolina Wren

Transported into sleep on wings of Bach and Schubert
Enfolded as I was in this Black Mountain tribe
of music makers paint stirrers pot throwers leapers in
the air

Outside the gates news of the war
Smoke rose bombs fell
Inside the gates faculty fights

for or against communism twelve tone music short
shorts
on young women In the basement of the cottage named
Black Dwarf a Moccasin frightened my mother But I

lucky baby took my first steps
between your apple and your wild
rhododendron greedy for the names of your every living
thing

Early I lost you Lately I’ve found you
again Sweet spot, source
of the singing in my heart and my communion
with the mountains

This is why I consider myself a “Black Mountain Poet” even
though the famous poets—Creeley, Olson, Duncan— did not
come until my family was long gone.

Solastalgia

April 22nd is Earth Day, a kind of birthday for the Earth Spirit. She is the Goddess who claimed me when I was a toddler, who knocked down the walls of my uptight scared little life in my late 20s, who brought me back to my essential Self. I am deeply grateful to Her.

Now, most of a lifetime later, as oceans rise, as climate changes, as species die She comes back to me in deep trouble—as Wounded Earth. My poetry is a small thing to offer Her, but it’s what I have to give. It is impossible to take in the enormity of Her suffering, how many of Her creatures are losing the ground, the ice, the trees, the seas in which they survive; how many are losing their bearings among the high towers of cities, the violent weather, the shift in seasonal patterns.

Solastalgia is a term coined by Glenn Albrecht, an Australian environmental philosopher. A mash-up of “solace, “desolation, and “nostalgia,” it describes the inability to derive comfort from one’s home due to negative environmental change. I think we all suffer from it profoundly.

I found a list of threatened species on line: (http://www.earthsendangered.com/list.asp). It is overwhelming. As of this month 10,796 are listed and that does not include plants. I made myself scroll through that list. I could barely stand to read through it. I was amazed by the wild poetry of this human “naming the animals project,” and horrified by the desecration the list describes.

It is unbearable that the Earth is being deprived, starved, depleted of Her creative bounty, Her wild, teeming life. I do not know most of the creatures on that long, long list, but in honor of Our Mother I need to write out some of their marvelous names, look at a few of their haunting images; I need to grieve, to keen the loss of our creaturely legacy, our squandered inheritance.

How can we go on without the Fabulous Green Sphinx Moth, the Fairy Tree Frog, the Fat–nosed Spiny Rat, the Flame Templed Babbler, the Rusty Grave Digger, the Red Handed Howler Monkey, without Naomi's Forest Frog?

How will we live in our homelands without the African Elephant, the Atlantic Humpbacked Dolphin, without the Bombay Bubble–nest Frog, the Cambodian Laughing Thrush, the Egyptian Vulture, the Formosan Yellow–throated Martin, without Galapagos

Coral, without the Hawaiian Hoary Bat, without the Japanese Paradise-flycatcher, the Lake Placid Funnel Wolf–spider,

the Mexican Bobcat, or the Northern Sportive Lemur, without the New Zealand Grebe, the Oaxacan Coral Snake, the Philippine Warty Pig, the Queensland Rat Kangaroo, the Rio di Janeiro Antwren, the San Martin Side–blotched Lizard, the Tasmanian Devil, without the Upper Amazon Stubfoot Toad, the Venezuelan Flowerpiercer, the Wisconsin Well Amphipod, the Yucatan Brown Brocket Deer, the Zanzibar Red Colobos Monkey.

How can we be at home on earth when our kin, our totems, our teachers, our food, our dream figures, our very nature is gone?

Lailah Wants a Word

In Jewish legend Lailah, the Angel of Conception, watches over the unborn child, initiates us into life on this earth. She came to me in a temper, and this is what she said:

Lailah Wants a Word

Lailah, the Angel of Conception…watches
over the unborn child

Jewish Legend

You were not born for traffic
Not released into day for hustle

and drive. I did not send you past moonstone
past glow worm, to ignore the light. I did not touch

the soft spot on your crown, nor seal
my blessing on your upper lip, to be a slave

to acquisition. I sent you into the company
of frogs. I sent you to commune with willows

with oaks. Pay attention—
the frogs have stopped wooing

the oaks been sold down river
Grandmother Spider Brother Rabbit

are losing their worlds. You have ears —
Hear them. You have a heart—feel them

You have two lungs—breathe
I give you the wind

in the grasses. I give you the sight
of Coyote. She’s meandering up

the mountain. Follow her. Perhaps she will throw
your shoe at the moon. Perhaps the moon

will fill your shoe with shimmer—
sail it back down to you—Then

will you remember
me?

(Published in The Faust Woman Poems)

Cleveland Lecture & Workshop

2013-04-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

"Let us build the bond of community so that the
living and the dead image will become one and
the past will live on in the present…" — C.G. Jung

Self Portrait With Ghost: The Art of Lament and Redemption

Lecture and Workshop presented by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and hosted by Jung Cleveland and Braden & Associates

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Ph.D

Download Registration Form

Date: 5/17/13Time: 7 to 9 p.m.
Location:
First Unitarian Church of Cleveland
21600 Shaker Blvd.,
Shaker Heights, Ohio 44122

Lecture Description:

"Often I have such a great longing for myself. I know that the path ahead still stretches far; but in my best dreams I see the day when I shall stand and greet myself." — Rainer Maria Rilke

When you lose three children, your home and your country, how do you go on? If you are Emma Hoffman, a gifted painter in the impressionist tradition, you paint. Those paintings continue to speak of the redemptive power of art to Hoffman’s granddaughter, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky. Years ago, when she was in analytic training at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, Lowinsky had a dream in which she was told, "On your way to Jung’s house, you must first stop at your grandmother’s house and gather some of her paintings.” Lowinsky was the first child born in the New World to a family of German-Jewish refugees from the Shoah. She had a special tie with her only surviving grandparent, whom she knew as Oma. Oma taught her that making art can be a way to transmute grief and bear the unbearable.

A series of paintings, self portraits, portraits of family, landscapes and interior scenes of the houses she lived in reflects her lamentations, her wandering and her search for redemption. Lowinsky understood her dream to mean that she had to follow the path of her own creativity. She did not know then that the dream would turn out to be literally true as well. She would need to put her art — her poetry — at the service of her grandmother’s paintings. Her grandmother’s spirit would demand it. Her opus would need to intersect with her Oma’s, and together they’d make their way to Jung’s house.

This presentation is the result of an ongoing dialogue between Hoffman and Lowinsky’s art. She will weave together Emma Hoffman’s story and paintings, her poetry and prose and her reflections on Jung’s Red Book as an example of the “art of lament and redemption,” a form she calls Jungian memoir.

Lecture Goals:
1. Understand the psychology of the refugee
2. Understand the psychology of Jews who fled the Nazis and their descendants
3. Contemplate the experience of grief
4. Consider the uses of creative process in healing trauma

Speak, Muse
A Day with the Sister from Below
Date: 5/18/13 Download Registration Form
Time: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Location:
First Unitarian Church of Cleveland
21600 Shaker Blvd.,
Shaker Heights, Ohio 44122

Workshop Description:

In this writing workshop, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky will introduce her muse, the shape-shifting Sister from Below, and invite her to inspire your writing practice. With the Sister’s help, Lowinsky will facilitate an imaginative encounter with the stuff of your inner and outer life — your own Jungian memoir.

The Sister from Below is a fierce inner figure. She emerges out of reverie, dream, a fleeting memory or a difficult emotion as the moment of inspiration — the muse.  This Sister is not about the ordinary business of life: work, shopping or making dinner. She speaks from other realms. If you'll allow, she'll whisper in your ear, lead your thoughts astray, fill you with strange yearnings, get you hot and bothered, send you off on some wild-goose-chase of a daydream and eat up hours of your time. She's a siren, a seductress, a shape-shifter... Why listen to such a troublemaker? Because she is essential to the creative process: She holds the keys to the doors of our imaginations and deeper life—the evolution of soul.

Open to those who write and those who want to. Bring pen and notebook.

Workshop Goals:
1. Have direct experience of the creative process
2. Have direct experience of active imagination
3. Deepen self knowledge about inner experience
4. Deepen psychological understanding of writers and other artists

About Lowinsky:
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Ph.D., lives at the confluence of the River Psyche and the Deep River of poetry. Her book, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way, tells stories of her pushy muse. She is the co-editor of the new collection Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way. She is a Jungian analyst and the author of four books of poetry, including the forthcoming Faust Woman Poems. Lowinsky is the winner of the Obama Millennium Award, and her poetry and prose have been widely published. She is a member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and has led a writing circle there, called Deep River, for years.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

News from the Muse

2013-03-29T15:17:00.001-07:00

The Muse of Remedios Varo

On the cover of my about to be published book, The Faust Woman Poems, a woman is feeding stardust to the moon. She sits in a sort of gazebo, suspended in dark moody skies. She operates an old–fashioned food mill—I remember it from my mother’s kitchen. Only her machine has a chimney that seems to draw down the stars. She grinds them up to make baby food, which she feeds to the moon in its cage with a long handled spoon. Where are we?

We’re in the imaginal world of Remedios Varo, a surrealist painter of the mid 20th century. We’re also in the poet’s study—I live in that world—feeding the moon—though my moon—I’m happy to say— is not in a cage. Perhaps that’s because I am a member of a generation that experienced the rebirth of the deep feminine, just a few years after Varo’s untimely death in 1963. That rebirth is the subject of the poems in this collection for which Varo is an inspiration and a muse.

Look at her painting, titled “Reborn.” A naked woman breaks through a wall. The moon breaks through the ceiling and is reflected in a bowl. Twigs and branches push through cracks, windows, the ceiling. The human made world is red as blood, vibrant as passion. The woman’s eyes are full of uncanny light. That’s one of the ways Faust Woman looks in my imagination.

Remedios Varo was born in Spain in 1908. She married the Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret. The couple went to Paris in the late 30s and was active in Surrealist circles. Peret was a left-wing activist and she a Loyalist so they were not safe in Franco’s Spain. They emigrated to Mexico. She was never to return to her homeland. But Mexico was magical for her art. Look at her “Unexpected Journeys” which is the cover art for a book about her work.

My own family was forced to make an unexpected journey too, out of Hitlerian Europe to America. I identify with Varo’s story. In Mexico she befriended another fabulous Surrealist painter, British born Leonara Carrington.

The two women studied mysticism, Kabbalah and Alchemy. They were interested in psychoanalysis and told each other their dreams. My kind of friends. Here is Varo’s painting of a woman leaving her analysts’ office.

The woman is holding a ghost like a dead rat, her headdress is wild with what’s been released in her soul, her shawl covers her mouth for she’s been telling secrets, another pair of eyes are draped at her heart for she’s been seen and reflected; above her the sky is wild and moody. I know that feeling; I know her world well. My poems explore the weird and the uncanny, the mystical and the taboo. I too have an intimate connection with the moon. I want to thank the spirit of Remedios Varo and her estate for the privilege of using her image on the cover of The Faust Woman Poems. And I want to dedicate the following moon stuck poem from that collection to Varo, my sister in the imaginal realm.

Witch’s Sabbath

Long ago when night was your familiar
you knew the moon and the moon knew you
I mean carnally
Those stories about sex with the devil are about this

You knew the moon and the moon knew you
Joy from the sky made a music in your body
Those stories about sex with the devil are about this
moon penetration stars awakening

Joy from the sky made a music in your body
Lion arose horse flew
moon penetration stars awakening
Something from forever loved you for a night

Lion rising horse flying
Roots of the tree reach up into the sky
Something from forever loves you for a night
and the moon sings

Roots of the tree reach up into the sky
Branches touch down into earth
the moon sings
Naked you are and flying

Branches touch down into earth
I mean carnally
Naked you are and flying
rooted in the night your familiar

Announcement

I’ll be one of a group of local poets reading for National Poetry Week at the Montclair branch of the Oakland Public Library on April 16th at 6:00 pm. If you’re in the neighborhood, please come. I’ll be reading from The Faust Woman Poems.

News from the Muse

2013-03-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

The Muse of a Younger Self

How Do I Get Back to You?

The Faust Woman Poems are about to come out. I have held the advance copy in my hands and mused about the wistful tug from my younger self that was one of many inspirations for this collection. She wants to be heard. Or maybe it’s that my aging body and soul need her voice, her “river glitter,” her “marijuana music” and “Kama Sutra dances” to sweeten and deepen my sense of my own life and that of my generation. Here is a poem I wrote for her:

In Memory’s Pan

You are river glitter
You with the long wavy hair
You with the questions

Once you saw molecules flow
in a tree branch
Sat on a river rock
in that old blue skirt

(Someone outside you was watching)

Now salmon have trouble leaping
Oak trees send their dead

downstream

I have woven marijuana music
Kama Sutra dances
All the colors of fire
into a shawl to wrap us both

My pretty one
O my fleeting one

How do I get back to you?
The Faust Woman Poems

Just as the final details for the book were being completed I got to see her again, or one much like her. She showed up in an Antonioni movie I’d never seen before—Zabriskie Point.

A Story We Know Well

Dan and I have been watching Antonioni movies in anticipation of a trip to Italy. Antonioni enchants us, captivates us with his slow reflective weird stories—how he enters the interior of his characters worlds, especially that of women, how their worlds unravel and mysteries never get solved, how landscapes become characters—trees breathe and sigh—uncanny commentary from another realm. We’ve followed him to England (Blow Up). We’ve followed him to the America of our youth (Zabriskie Point)

Suddenly we’re in a story we know well—we have our own versions of it. It’s the meeting about the student strike. There’s the angry rhetoric, the divisive righteousness of the left. There’s Kathleen Cleaver with her glorious Afro, her piercing blue eyes and her fierce tongue. There’s Mark, the young outlaw, full of the rage of the day, but his own man. He thumbs his nose at the movement while agreeing with their protest: “I’m not afraid to die,” he says, “just not of boredom” and walks out. I’ve known him in many versions. And there’s Daria, the long legged lovely, the hippie girl full of light who works for The Man. She’s on a road trip to escape L.A. and the bland blather of the developers; she wants to meditate. Like most Antonioni heroines she’s in for an adventure she does not expect. So were we all, back in that day. This Daria is Daria Halprin in her non-movie life—daughter of Anna Halprin—the well-known and beloved dancer and leader in the expressive arts movement.

A Split America

Antonioni gives us an image of a splintered America. We drive with our outlaw friend Mark in his old red truck through the industrial landscape of L.A., plastered with bill boards: Bethlehem Steel. Broom Bevis Industrial, Ladewig Water Meters, Danola Ham & Bacon, Pacific Metals, Hiller Machinery, Conway Crates. We pass junkyards, train yards, big trucks in heavy traffic, until suddenly we are transported to a promenade of graceful palms lining a boulevard on the way to the university.

The strike is on. The cops have gathered. The students have taken over the administration building. A student is about to be shot. A cop is about to be shot—perhaps by our outlaw friend Mark—who is now a marked man. We are with him on the bus. We’re with him in the poor neighborhood he wanders, before he finds his way to the airport and steals a small plane—the pink Lilly 7—and rises above the billboards, the freeways, the corporate towers to the wild blue where the rich cavort in the sky. We are with him as he heads over the landscape of the desert—the ancient world that was L.A. before it was developed. We’ve traveled with our marked friend through and over America the industrial, America the corporate, America the driven, the impoverished, the police state, the killer of its children, America the crusher of the spirit of the times, into America the wild, the uncanny, the erotic Goddess of the Desert. And this is where things get really wild.

The Goddess of the Desert

For Daria, who pulls at my heartstrings—I know her so well in myself though her story is a different one than mine—is traveling that very Goddess Desert in her old Buick coupe. Soon—how American—there is a mating dance between these two machines—the pink small plane in the air and the gray car on the ground. Our outlaw demands her attention—flies low over her again and again, scares her, outrages her, throws her a red T shirt peace offering. Soon he’s on the ground with her and they are looking out over the breathtaking landscape of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley where ancient lake beds have been tilted and pushed upward by millions of years of wind and water. The land has peaks and valleys, is furrowed and folded, rounded and angular, sensuous and so erotic. Soon Mark and Daria are rolling around together, rocking and coiling, uncoiling and kissing, entwining and doing a dance of desire.

This is where Antonioni catches the collective moment. For suddenly there are dancers all over the desert, lovers in rapturous entanglement—couples, trios quartets, enjoying the feel of each other’s sweet flesh, doing the tender dance of desire. What’s new is that, unlike the erotically vacant women of his other movies, these women are fully engaged—lusty and hot. It is 1970. I remember it well. In that moment the Goddess of Desire—who had been asleep in us women for millennia—forbidden and taboo—woke up. She filled us with sexual joy, passion and creativity and got us into all kinds of trouble. That’s the story The Faust Woman Poems tells forty some years after Antonioni created his version, which by the way, got panned. But I love Zabriskie Point and the Goddess of Desire in the American desert. Here’s my version of that moment of awakening:

A Brief History of Mothers and Daughters

We were the daughters of girdled mothers, Jello mold mothers, mothers
schooled

in the uses of Lipton’s Dried Onion Soup, mothers who dusted
every other morning, taught their daughters how
to iron a man’s long-sleeved shirt: first the collar
then the shoulder yoke, poking the hot metal nose
between white buttons. We were the hungry daughters
of mothers long severed
from the moon in their thighs, long severed
from what had called them
when they were seventeen. We promised ourselves
never to be our mothers.

We were the daughters of Moon Tide, of Life Lust, of what insisted
on coming through us. We smoked it. We drank it. We ingested its Magic
Mushrooms. We saw molecules dance in a leaf, in a stone. We were daughters
of First People, of rivers, of trees. We belonged
to each other. We belonged to the earth. Mystery
called us by name.

We leapt out of marriages, invoked Forbidden Goddesses—the ones the
prophets

railed about—you know who I mean: The Whore
of Babylon, the Golden Serpent, the Temple Dancer. It was She
who moved in our bodies, She who tasted the fruit, She
who was exiled from the Garden. She
whom our mothers never dared
to imagine, sat alone, chanting sultry verses
by the Red Sea…

Everything was possible.
We could leap over the moon
We could chant
write
paint
dance
make love like warm rain
make love like wild surf

It was Our Period
The Faust Woman Poems

The Sea Turtle Muse

2013-02-24T11:36:00.000-08:00

These days I find myself careening between despair for our earth and wild hope. We have experienced so many signs of our deteriorating climate: storms, fires, melting glaciers, rising seas. We have experienced so many signs of the harm we humans do—the Gulf Oil Spill was just over 2 years ago.

And yet, I also see so many signs of rising consciousness about the danger we are in, of growing awareness that we humans are part of a vast web of life—totally dependent on the well being of all creatures and plants. Many of us, including our president, are talking about the environmental crisis we are in; some of us are writing poetry about it.

My friend Leah Shelleda’s powerful anthology, The Book of Now, is an often elegiac expression of our concerns. As she writes: “the waters are rising and the animals are dying." Shelleda included my poem, “Invoking Patiann Rogers During the Oil Spill,” which speaks to those fears, that grief. Patiann Rogers is a fine nature poet with an “Audubon eye” for the creatures she describes. Here is the poem.

INVOKING PATIANN ROGERS DURING THE OIL SPILL

I thank the distinct edges
Of the six‑spined spider crab for their peculiarities
And praise the freshwater eel for its graces.
—Patiann Rogers

If I knew as much science as you, Patiann
the migratory patterns, mating rituals, feeding behavior
of all those creatures engulfed in sludge
would be in this poem. Would that help
those whose feathers are encrusted in crude
those whose webbed feet can’t swim
those with gaping mouths—dead on the beach?

If I had your Audubon eye—to describe how the least tern
sits on her eggs, how the pelican makes her nest—
could we protect their hatchlings? Could we rescue
the oil clogged sea turtle, the laughing gull
the meandering crab dodging balls of tar, with poems?

Me? I get visions, and their unbearable
music—there’s a dragon fly with oil
weighted wings, there’s a blackened egret…
This is a dirge for the blue fin tuna —
They’ve lost their spawning grounds
in an ocean gone mad with black blood

If we could create an amulet, Patiann
of feather and fin, of marsh grass and mystical measures
of dolphin song, could we bring back the deep sea roe

or are we washed up too
in the Gulf
between how we are all connected—pelicans, poets, blue fin tuna—
and what has become of our world?

We read of the valiant work of volunteers trying to rescue creatures—least tern, sea turtle, laughing gull—“engulfed in sludge…encrusted in crude” and worried that they, and we, were “all washed up,” that neither human rescuers or poetry could bring back what we’ve lost.

In the little village on the Pacific side of Mexico, which Dan and I visit each winter, we are witness to a hopeful effort to protect creatures. San Pancho is devoted to sea turtles. For years “Turtle Frank” and his group of volunteers have raised consciousness about the endangered status of these turtles, and developed methods to protect them. If you hang out long enough on the beach at sunset you are likely to take part in a miracle. Dan and I did.

We were sitting at our favorite beach café, La Playa, as the sun began its descent and the crows and egrets began their fluttering ascent into the palms above us. Suddenly we saw a crowd gather at the water’s edge.

Turtle Frank and his volunteers were releasing 57 Leatherback turtle hatchlings into the sea. They had protected the eggs, kept them from human and bird predators, and now Turtle Frank was raking the sand to smooth the passage of these tiny beings, protected from harm by a crowd of humans and their children. Some of the baby turtles toppled over on their back. Little children lovingly turned them right side up, pointed them toward the sea.

Meanwhile the beach dogs wandered and the lovers held hands. At La Playa folks were drinking Mango Margaritas and eating guacamole. The sun turned deep orange. The sea turned purple. A couple silhouetted in the fading light kissed. The sun fell into the sea, and cast its purple, pink and deep orange on a fringe of small clouds above us. All 57 hatchlings had made it into the sea. We knew many of them would be food for the fish or the birds. We hoped some of them would survive to grow into those enormous turtles, whose evolutionary roots go back 100 million years, who grow big as an SUV, big as the mother who had laid her eggs one night in the very spot where she was hatched and wandered back into the sea.

Leatherback Sea Turtle preparing to leave eggs

San Pancho sunset

News from the Muse

2013-02-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce

the publication of

The Faust Woman Poems

by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

The Faust Woman Poems, in good Jungian form, began with a dream.

I am a woman from another time and place, dressed in long skirts, a mauve shawl—a baby on my hip. I am me and not me—larger and older than my one small life. I arrive at the door of the Church at Chimayo—an old and magical church in New Mexico. A priest greets me and hands me an intricate brooch of Mary, carved in amethyst. He pins it at my throat.

Suddenly there is a violent transformation. I am not who I was, but it is unclear who I have become. A voice from the altar calls out “Faust Woman!”

Faust Woman? What was that supposed to mean? I had spend years reading, writing about and teaching Goethe’s Faust and its importance for Jungian psychology and our times. But why should Faust be a woman? And why should I— a Jew—be given the image of Mary to wear at my throat?

“Aha!” a voice inside me said: “you participated fully in that wild ride in the ‘60s and ‘70s—when you and your sisters liberated yourselves. And Mary is an ancient goddess who was stripped of her powers. Remember Jung’s excitement when the Assumption of Mary became dogma in the Catholic Church in the 1950s? He saw this as the return of the feminine to western consciousness.”

Well, that was all very interesting. But the interpretation by my inner voice was not sufficient. The dream kept tugging at me, wanting something else from me.

I wrote to my dear friend Alicia in Venezuela. She often can see what I can’t. “Oh” she wrote, “it’s simple. The brooch is at your throat chakra. You need to write about being a Faust Woman.” And so I did. Here is the poem that came to describe the dream:

The Dream

You arrive at the church in long skirts
mauve shawl the baby
on your hip

Light from the eyes
on the altar
touches your throat

Maria carved in amethyst
sing to us
sing to the wooden Santos

We have come to be
healed Reveal to us
your next incarnation

Look at you
in your red power suit
your pointed shoes
amulets tucked
between your breasts

Changed woman
what have you done
with the baby?

What will you do
with hot blood
hard currency
the smell
of new cars?

A voice from the altar calls you

Faust Woman

What Became of Our Fierce Flowering?

2013-01-31T13:05:00.001-08:00

The Faust Woman Poems
by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Available April 10, 2013 - Advance Orders Welcomed!

What became of our fierce flowering?

In the 1960s and '70s the long forgotten and forbidden Great Goddess roused herself from millennia of slumber and took possession of young women’s imaginations. That cast out She offered a Faustian bargain—She would rip you out of your narrow domesticated self image, thrust you into the wilds of sex, power and creativity, initiate you into the mysteries of Earth and Starry Heaven, but you would owe Her your soul. A generation of women followed Her. Some knew her as Feminism, some knew her as the Deep Feminine, many as both.

The Faust Woman Poems trace one woman’s Faustian adventures through that time. Most of a lifetime later the Great Goddess returns to the poet. As oceans rise and species die She demands Her due.

About the Author:
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky lives at the confluence of the River Psyche and the Deep River of poetry. The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way tells stories of her pushy muse. She is the co-editor, with Patricia Damery, of the new collection Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way. In addition to the Faust Woman Poems, Naomi is also the author of three books of poetry, including the recently published Adagio & Lamentation. Her poetry has been widely published and she is the winner of the Obama Millennium Award. She is a member of the San Francisco Institute and has for years led a writing circle there, called Deep River.

Product Details
Paperback: 90 pages
Publisher: il piccolo editions; 1st edition (April 10, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1926715971

Cover image Papilla Estelar is a painting by Remedios Varo, used with permission from the Varo Estate, © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry,

and a growing list of alternative titles.

www.fisherkingpress.com

The Muse of the Opposites

2013-01-23T19:38:00.003-08:00

“Holding the tension of the opposites” is a Jungian mantra. Worrying about the future of glaciers, polar bears and grandchildren, I weave between the opposites of hope and despair. I wish I could land on hope and live there. But Jung reminds me that “Life, being an energic process, needs the opposites, for without opposition there is…no energy.” We might add: without opposition there is no democracy. Neither democracy or holding the opposites is easy. It is shattering to one’s firm convictions to open oneself to the opposite view. But, as Jung points out, it opens one to “wider and higher consciousness.”

It’s not only individuals who must hold these tensions, but countries, cultures—the whole world. In our shattering times we know the danger of identifying only with one side of things. Jung describes it well. “The more compulsive the onesidedness…the more daemonic it becomes.” Our congress is a case example. The majority of politicians have some flexibility, some capacity to hold the tension of the opposites. However, those that can’t or won’t, have created a daemonic polarization and paralysis. Instead of a back and forth flow, we suffer a severing of our connection to our government, a severing between opposites: freedom vs. community, gun rights vs. gun control, haves vs. have-nots, rural vs. urban, the narrative of America as a refuge for those fleeing poverty and tyranny vs. the narrative of America as the Wild West where anything goes.

What a healing it was to watch Obama’s second inauguration. He himself is an adept at holding the tension of the opposites, a capacity that has gotten him into trouble with his base. The hope side in me was deeply stirred by his speech—by how many opposites he named and brought together.

He honored the past and called upon us, his fellow citizens, to work for a better, more egalitarian future. He invoked the ancestors, Lincoln and Martin Luther King and spoke for future generations and our threatened earth. He spoke of the need for community, for social responsibility and co-operation, while praising the vitality of a people who are suspicious of centralized authority and value freedom. He spoke for the warriors and he spoke for the peacemakers, arguing for the hard work of real diplomatic engagement that can turn “sworn enemies into friends.” He said: “We cannot confuse absolutism with principle.”

Perhaps because he is himself a product of such opposites: black and white, African and American, he is eloquent about the new responses that a changing world requires. Our forebears’ belief in equality has had to take new forms. At Seneca Falls, at Selma, at Stonewall new consciousness was born; it opened our culture to a wider and higher understanding of women’s rights, African-American rights, and gay rights. What once seemed impossible now seems obvious.

We live in disorienting times of vast energetic changes—revolutions, wars, migrations, terrorism, economic collapse, rising seas and violent weather. The pairs of opposites that described our inner and outer lives—East/West, Hero/Outlaw, Madonna/Magdalene, Apollo/Dionysus—no longer tell the stories of our times. When myths change we feel disoriented. When gods die and new ones are born, when long dead and forgotten gods come back to life, we don’t know what ground we stand on, what story we belong to.

We wonder “Where are the Opposites Now?” This compelling question will be taken up in a day long symposium presented by the San Francisco Jung Institute on Saturday, February 23rd at the Firehouse at Fort Mason. Jungian analysts will join artists and activists to explore our changing world and it’s myths. You can read about this unique day and register at wwwsfjung.org or wherearetheopposites.eventbrite.com. Please join us.

* * * * * *

The opposites take many forms. In my life as a writer I’ve struggled mightily to hold the tension of the opposites of the creative flow and the book keeping practices required on the business side of poetry. If you want to publish you have to research appropriate literary magazines, send poems out, keep track of what poems went where, which were rejected and which accepted by whom. Who has time for all this when the Muse calls?

This job was made so much easier for me when I decided to work with the submission service, Writer’s Relief. They have smoothed my capacity to handle the detailed work of Poetry Business, by doing most of it for me.

Writer’s Relief had to hold a really difficult tension of opposites recently. They are based in Hackensack New Jersey. Their headquarters was badly damaged in the hurricane, Sandy.

Their roof blew off. They can’t return to their old home. They had to find temporary quarters and have just moved into a new permanent place. Through all this chaos they kept up their e-mail connection with me, kept track of my poems, did their work of finding markets, copy editing, keeping track of my submissions. I was so moved by their gallantry through the storm.

When they asked me to make a video for them I did so gladly. You can check it out at: http://www.writersrelief.com/blog/2013/01/featured-client-naomi-ruth-lowinsky/

The January Muse

2013-01-09T20:06:00.000-08:00

Edward Lowinsky -photo by Nikki Arai

Every January I’m visited by my father’s ghost. It’s the month he was born. I remember his death date—October 11, 1985—but I’ve forgotten his exact birth date. There was no World Wide Web in my father’s day. But he loved word play and puns and found English, his adopted language, very amusing. I can hear him laugh as I announce that I will Google him. Wikipedia says his birth date is January 12, 1908.
“Wikipedia, what in heaven’s name is that?” the ghost of my father wonders? What happened to the Encyclopedia Britannica I gave you and Dan when you married?”

(I don’t want to go there with the ghost of my father. I protected that Encyclopedia for years, wouldn’t let Dan move it out of the garage, though I never consulted it. I looked at Wikipedia. Finally Dan prevailed.)

“The Britannica doesn’t know your birthdate, but Wikipedia does. Look Dad, it says ‘Lowinsky was one of the most prominent and influential musicologists in post-World War II America. His 1946 work on the "secret chromatic art" of Renaissance motets was hotly debated in its time.’”

“How does it know that? Who informed Wikipedia?”

(Another topic I’d rather avoid. If my father, the distinguished professor and scholar, knew that anyone could write a Wikipedia entry, that no academic credentials were required, he’d blow his ghostly top.)

“Dad,” I say, “you wouldn’t recognize the world I inhabit now.” My poetry is backed up in the Cloud. I write a blog, called News from the Muse. This month I’m blogging about your birthday.” This is a source of great amusement to my father’s ghost. How could anything that sounds so silly be a serious way to express oneself?

“For my birthday I have been Googled, Wikipediaed and blogged. Should I feel good about this?”

Stuttgart, early 1900s

My father was born in Stuttgart, Germany 105 years ago. No cars, no telephones, no airplanes, electricity was new. His father hand rolled cigarettes for a living. His mother, who was the intellectual, encouraged my father’s passion for music.

My father had to adapt to enormous changes in his life. First in his family to go to college, he was the first who came to America to escape the Nazis. Though he had studied English in Germany, he was not a good idiomatic speaker when he arrived. He liked to tell the story about the Quaker camp for refugee Jews, held somewhere in the South, where he and my mother were being oriented about America. He was asked to speak about music. He didn’t understand why people laughed when he announced that he was going to discuss Beethoven’s “Moonshine Sonata.”

He became an articulate speaker and writer in English, a sophisticated commentator on American government and politics, a great civil libertarian and passionate advocate of civil rights. He was famous for his elegantly phrased and scathing letters to the New York Times—frequently published—about the latest outrage.

What he couldn’t adapt to was technology. He never learned to drive, though he was a dreadful backseat driver. He wrote out all his letters and musicological essays in a sloping, vigorous and illegible hand. My mother and later my step-mother were his drivers, typists, housekeepers, cooks— general all-purpose hand maidens. He didn’t know how to boil an egg. He was used to being served by women. That was not so unusual in the 1940s and 50s when I was coming to consciousness. But he was extreme. He was able to see the humor in it. He’d tell the story about the waitress who, after he’d asked her to cut up and peel his apple, wondered if he wanted her to chew it as well. Then there was the cousin who wondered whether he wanted her to peel his grapes.

My father was a secular humanist, an historian of the early Renaissance when the individual human voice began to wander out of the church to sing of love and springtime. He didn’t like machines. He was suspicious of mass culture. We didn’t have TV when I was a child. At the time I seemed a terrible deprivation to me. It left me feeling like a total outsider. Who was Howdy Doody? Who was Princess SummerFallWinterSpring? Now I am grateful for the emphasis on books, music and art in my childhood. For the value placed on reflection, inner life and imagination.

My father would be aghast at the world my grandchildren inhabit, full of smartphones and angry birds. I hear his voice in me: “How are they going to develop their capacity to muse, to ponder, to feel deeply about things with all that constant outer stimulation? How are they going to learn to think critically, to become active citizens of our democracy?” My father was always sensitive to the tension between individual expression and outer controls. He’d be very worried about privacy issues on line, as am I. Though my muse has taken to blogging like a duck to water, I have mixed feelings about all this technological change.

It is hard to believe that it's just over a hundred years since my father was born—in such a different world. A hundred years from now, who can begin to imagine? But it’s my father’s birthday and I want to blog about my gratitude to him and my mother for encouraging my creativity when I was a girl. He never wanted anything store-bought for his birthday. He wanted a drawing or a poem.

So, happy birthday Dad. Here’s a poem for you.

MY EDEN
(Black Mountain College, 1943-47)

Garden of the sun dappled baby I was
and the tow headed toddler, I can see me now
on the wooded path, beloved of the morning

and the night, drunk on mother’s milk
and daddy’s lullabies, cradled in the rapture
of the mountains, captivated by the fiery flash

of a Cardinal in flight, seer of the light
in willows, and in the waters of Lake Eden
enchanted by the song of the Carolina Wren

transported into sleep on wings of Bach and Schubert
enfolded as I was in this Black Mountain tribe
of music makers, paint stirrers, pot throwers, leapers in the air…

Outside the gates—news of the war
Smoke rose, bombs fell
Inside the gates—faculty fights

for or against, communism, twelve tone music, short shorts
on young women. In the basement of the cottage named
Black Dwarf, a Moccasin frightened my mother. But I

lucky baby, took my first steps
between your apple and your wild
rhododendron, greedy for the names of your every living thing

Early I lost you. Lately I’ve found you
again. Sweet spot, source
of the singing in my heart, and my communion

with the mountains…

(first published in New MillenniumWritings)

Lake Eden, Black Mountain, NC

News From The Muse

2012-12-24T08:43:00.000-08:00

On Grief and Gratitude

During the longest night of the year I heard myself say in a dream, “It’s my job to hold the center.” It’s a hard job, tossed between the poles of grief and gratitude as so many of us have been during this past winter solstice.

There is so much I grieve. We lost my children’s father this year—a loving and supportive father, a devoted Zaide. His passing leaves a big hole in our family.

We lost our dear friend Lou, a devoted healer who magically blended Jungian, psychiatric and shamanic approaches to the psyche.

We are slowly losing my mother, who still walks in her body, but is losing her orientation in the realms between life and death.

We grieve the principal, the school psychologist and teachers who gave their lives to protect the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School. We grieve the precious children. We grieve for the survivors and what they must carry.

Newtown, CT Shrine

We grieve the children who are being terrorized and killed daily in senseless violence all over our land. As President Obama said in Newtown:

There have been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country, almost daily reports of victims, many of them children, in small towns and in big cities all across America, victims whose -- much of the time their only fault was being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

We grieve little Hiram Lawrence, an adorable baby boy, killed in cross fire while in his father’s arms during a gangland shooting in Oakland.

Hiram and his father

We grieve his father, who was also shot and is recovering. His grief is unimaginable.

We grieve the sixteen year old boy Frederick Charles Coleman, who is being charged as an adult in the shooting. We grieve Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the massacre at Sandy Hook and his first victim, his mother. We wonder what their stories are.

We grieve for the weeping grandmothers. Their suffering is incalculable.

We grieve for our country, which has lost its way, confounding gun rights with freedom, shooting “Explosive Entry” bullets into the soft underbelly of our body politic.

* * * * * * *

And at the same moment, as the earth begins its return toward the sun, we are so grateful.

We are grateful to our country for re-electing a president who can hold the center, who can speak for the massacred children of a sweet affluent town as well as the massacred children of the mean streets of Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Oakland and so many other cities.

We are grateful for a president who has the capacity to feel and articulate our collective agony, and the integrity to insist: “We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.”

After all, that is what the solstice is about, the cycle of change—the longest night ends and the light returns. This particular solstice has gotten much press because of a misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar. Those of us who know it is our job to hold the center understand that the Mayans see this recent solstice as the end of a 5,125 year cycle and the beginning of a new one. We are in a time with great potential for catastrophe as well as for renewal and transformation of what it means to be human and to live responsibly on our mother earth.

I am grateful for my inner life, for the access to dreams and inner figures cultivated by my Jungian analyses and training. I am forever grateful to my first analyst, who gave me a safe place to begin to become myself. I am grieved that he has been seriously ill. May he return from the underworld to flourish among us again.

I am grateful to the Sister from Below— my muse—who insists on time from me every day: she gives glow and flow to my life and helps me understand who I am and what I mean.

I am grateful to my sweet husband Dan, who helps me translate my musings into this blog. I am grateful to Patty Cabanas who knows how to reassure technophobes and who helps us get the News from the Muse out to all of you.

I am grateful to those who publish my work, especially to Mel Mathews of Fisher King Press who gave the Sister a life in print. Publishing is magic. It transforms what was inner, private—held in notebooks or in Word documents—into an object that belongs to whoever claims it in the world, where it develops a life of its own. Who knows who will read it and what they will make of it?

I am grateful for a recent harvest of publications, many in forms new to me. These are my gifts to you—family, friends, colleagues, fellow followers of the Muse—I am so grateful for your companionship in the dark and in the light.

I. Clinging to the Axis Mundi: The Poetry of Politics

Tree of Life by Aloria Weaver

I suffered a fit of technophobia when I learned that I’d need to do a Power Point presentation as a participant in A Citizen’s Dilemma: Four Voices, a pre-presidential election conference held at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. I’d never done Power Point before. But as I played with the dialogue between images and my political poetry I got high on the process of illuminating words with images and images with words. I was lucky to have the competent help of Dan and my daughter Shanti.

My fellow presenter, Tom Singer, Co-Chair of ARAS Online, asked me to submit my piece to ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype, a beautiful online newsletter. I was honored. You can read my piece and see the images at http://aras.org/notices/newsletter12-04.htm. You can receive this newsletter for free by clicking on "Receive this Newsletter for Free" at the top left or by emailing at newsletter@aras.org.

II. “Self Portrait with Ghost”

"Self Portrait with Ghost" is a new poem of mine, which has just been published on line by DecomP Magazine.

There is an ancient tension in poetry between the oral and the written traditions. My poems are highly musical. I chant them aloud as I compose them and they love to be read aloud. But I am also obsessive about crafting them for the page.

So it was a gift to be published by DecomP, which includes audio recordings of poems as well as the written text. "Self Portrait with Ghost" is part of a sequence of poems based on my close relationship with my maternal grandmother, the painter Emma Hoffman. She painted many portraits and self portraits. They are full of grief and gratitude. In the poem I imagine her returning from the dead to paint me now.

III. “Spacious Enough to Receive What Came to Me”

Robert Henderson's interview with me was published in Psychological Perspectives.

For years, Robert Henderson has conducted a series of what he calls Enterviews with Jungian Analysts and writers. These have been published in a three volume collection called, Living with Jung. I was flattered when he asked to meet with me. His questions engaged me in a different way than does the Sister. I found myself sharing how I do Active Imagination, how I talk to the dead, how a terrible dream catapulted me into my first Jungian analysis. I hope you’ll check it out in Psychological Perspectives 55:3.

IV. “Heart Work"

I recently reviewed In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke:A Soul History, Wilmette, Illinois, Chiron Publications, 2011 by Daniel Polikoff in the Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche.

I grew up with Rilke. My father quoted him in German. He was as familiar as a dear family friend. I thought I knew him well until I read Polikoff’s marvelous soul history, which brought a spiritual sensibility, informed by the works of Jung and Hillman to the life of this beloved poet. I am grateful to Polikoff for deepening and enriching my feeling for Rilke, such an important ancestor of mine. Here is my review, published in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 6:4/Fall2012.

Heart Work
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Work of the eyes is done
Now do heart work
on all the images imprisoned within you
Rilke (Polikoff)

I grew up with Rilke. He was a revered ancestor in my German Jewish family. Rilke is my kin, my familiar, part of my identity in the way that early impressions shape one. I can see my father now, bowing to a particularly lovely tree and reciting Rilke’s first sonnet to Orpheus by heart, in the German:

Da steig ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung!
O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr!
(Rilke, 1985)

A tree rose up. O pure transcendence!
O Orpheus sings! O tall tree in the ear.
(Polikoff)

For my father, a musicologist, that tall tree in the ear expressed his calling. For me, Rilke’s imagery was mysterious, incomprehensible and yet deeply true. I would learn, later in life, what that tree in the ear means to me. Rilke was to be my spirit guide—a major influence on my work. I would hear his cadences, get high on the wild flow of his images, his poetic music. I would come to understand that it is Rilke himself who is the tall tree in my ear. I thought I knew him well.

What a surprise then—and a gift—to meet a deeper, more psychological and spiritually complex Rilke than I had dreamt of, in Daniel Polikoff’s magnificent In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke: A Soul History. Polikoff gives us an ambitious and profound 700+ page amplification of Rilke’s opus. Reading it has been a pilgrimage—a hajj to my own poetic Mecca. Polikoff is a brilliant guide and companion, leading the reader into the rich world of his associations. Like the Muslim who traces the path of the prophet, Polikoff traces Rilke’s life process of “soul making,” how he worked his way out of his native Catholicism into a “poetic spirituality centered upon the soul—qua anima.”

Amplification is a method that ties together strands of meaning by association. It is not necessarily history or fact. It is about resonance. Polikoff leads us into Rilke’s life not to give an accounting of events and dates, but to invite us into us to walk with him and his companions as he follows the path of the poet.

Polikoff is himself a poet, and a fine translator of Rilke. He understands the mysterious realm in which a poet can change his or her life with words. In my experience this process is similar to working regularly with one’s dreams. Something ineffable happens as a poem comes to life—space opens, images that have been imprisoned leap free to become guides and signifiers, the texture of experience shifts, colors deepen, heart opens. In what realm does this happens?

Polikoff introduces us to his companions on the pilgrimage: James Hillman, C.G.Jung, Richard Tarnas, Henri Corbin, among others. He weaves a rich tapestry of associations out of threads from Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology—his credo that “Soul is imagination,” from Jung’s work on the anima and his belief that the feminine must be brought back into collective consciousness, from Richard Tarnas’ argument that monotheism has contributed to the desacralization of the cosmos. Following Hillman and Rilke’s interest in Sufism Polikoff associates to the work of Henri Corbin on the Sufi master Ibn Arabi, whose compelling writings on the creative imagination open doors to the heart of Rilke’s poetic religion and enable us to understand the confluence of poetry and prayer. He quotes Corbin: “Creation is epiphany…It is an act of the divine, primordial imagination.

We follow Rilke to Russia and to his profoundly religious text, The Book of Hours, written in the voice of a monk, an icon painter. Influenced by his lover, Lou Andrea Salome, Rilke takes us out of what James Hillman calls “that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness.” The icon painter knows that his God depends as much on him as vice versa. We’ve heard this before, from Jung. Suddenly sacred space opens and we realize we have entered the imaginal realm. That is where the poet changes her life. That is where Rilke undertook his great project of reconnecting “matter with spirit in and through the speech of the soul.” The Book of Hours “makes a case for the essentially imaginative and creative function of prayer.” In these poems Rilke’s God is down to earth, located “in the dark, invisible, densely material underground of the earth…not…a single centralized source, but… a spreading network of roots….” Doesn’t this sound like Jung’s rhizome?

Beginning in The Book of Hours and working through the cataclysmic crisis of The Duino Elegies, coming to the fruition of a mature religious orientation in the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke writes “out of a keen awareness that the ongoing life of God…depends upon the rejuvenating force of the human imagination. This resonates with Jung and the Sufis.

It is also Rilke’s mission to bring the feminine back into consciousness. Polikoff, leaning on Jung, focuses on Rilke’s anima fascinations in life and in poetry. He traces Rilke’s soul development as he separates from Lou Andreas Salome, who has been a maternal figure, and meets the lovely young artists Paula Becker and Clara Westhof in the bucolic landscape of Worpeswede. Clara would eventually become his wife. Rilke’s understanding of the sacred shifts “away from the name and spirit of God toward the soul of nature experienced in and through the eyes of two enchanting maiden-artists.” Following Hillman, Polikoff understands the power of anima as enlivening more than the personal realm. Anima is “the archetype of soul coming into its own by way of creative imagination.” In a great poem like “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” Rilke brings the dead maiden to life: “Like as fruit ripe with sweetness and night/she was filled with her great death.” Later in his life the death of a maiden will become the inspiration for his Sonnets to Orpheus.

I found Polikoff’s tracing of Rilke’s theme, that “God can be truly known only in and through the deed of creation itself,” one of the most compelling aspects of his Soul History. The reader follows the development of Rilke’s “poetic religion” from The Book of Hours, which is written “out of a keen awareness that the ongoing life of God…depends upon the invigorating force of the human imagination, to the Duino Elegies, which “sound out of his soul’s dark night” to the Sonnets to Orpheus whose “Orphic voice…moves freely through the world…reflecting the hidden imaginal reality inhering in all visible and invisible” things. In the Elegies we taste the heights and depths of “the initiatory experience itself.” The Sonnets are the fruit of that descent, the suffering of divine absence transformed into divine presence by the poet’s song, that tree in the ear which connects underworld, world and heaven. The Elegies, Polikoff argues, are monotheistic, in contrast to the polytheism of the Sonnets. For Polikoff, as for Hillman, this is an important spiritual development away from dualism and into the anima mundi.

I did not expect, when I began this pilgrimage—this hajj—with Polikoff, Hillman, Corbin and the others to be led to El Greco’s angel—one of the inspirations, Polikoff says, for the terrifying angel of the Elegies. Synchronistically, El Greco’s angel had recently given me goose bumps in a church in Toledo. Nor had I expected to be led to the Sufi poets, who have been tugging at my heart for years. Rilke mentions Persian place names in his Sonnet II #21: “Fountains and roses from Ispahan or Shiraz.” Shiraz, Polikoff points out, was the birthplace of the Sufi poet Hafiz. He goes on to write that Sufism “construes the heart…as the primary organ of the imagination.”

Rilke, this pilgrimage has taught me, is more than kin, more than that “tall tree in the ear.” He has revealed himself, through Polikoff’s superb reflections, as the angel of “heart work”—a prophet of my own poetic religion.

Note: The reference to Rilke’s sonnet in the German is taken from the Stephen Mitchell’s translation, New York: Simon and Shuster,1985. The translations of Rilke’s poems are by Polikoff.

Christmas Tree as Axis Mundi

Holiday Blessings

from the Muse

The Muse of Friendship

2012-11-30T19:50:00.000-08:00

Musings on The Book of Now

[Cover Art by Bill Fulton]

There are times in a life when the threads of one’s tapestry are illuminated—one can see how one’s passions, obsessions and relationships are tied together. I had such a moment recently when I first held in my hands my friend Leah Shelleda’s beautiful anthology: The Book of Now: Poetry for the Rising Tide. The back of the book describes the contents: “Seven lyrical women poets, each accompanied by a study of their work…travel to the depths of the psyche, experience exile, rhapsodize on the beauty of our planet…write courageously about what threatens us: climate change, war, mountain–top removal, loss of species…” I am privileged to be one of them.

Leah and I have been friends and poetry buddies for over forty years. We met in an authentic movement class. What’s that, you wonder? It is an expressive art, a form of active imagination, a practice in which body and psyche are free to explore inner and outer worlds, to play with music, images, limits and wild permissions. Back in the 70s I was breaking out of my conventional identity as a wife and mother. Authentic movement was a great liberation for one who longed to move, who had taken a bit of ballet and a bit of modern dance and always felt too womanly, too voluptuous for the straight and narrows of dance.

Leah and I met each other playing on the dance floor, and soon became muses for one another. Our passions and obsessions overlapped—feminism and the feminine, psyche and the underworld, the mystic and the mysteries, poetry and prophesy, art and culture, the natural world and the world of the ancients. We became one another’s first readers, editors, consultants on all things creative. We supported one another’s authentic movement in words. We nourished, critiqued, deepened, broadened and enlivened one another’s work, listened to each other’s life stories unfold, held each other during times of suffering and loss, celebrated each others loves and accomplishments. To find myself among the amazing poets whose work Leah has gathered here is at once a harvest and an offering to the storm gods—the gods of the rising tide.

In a short essay introducing each section Leah engages eloquently with each poet’s work. Some of these poets are well known to me—Jane Downs, Frances Hatfield, and of course Leah herself. Some of them I’ve never read before and they are a wonderful discovery.

Anita Endrezee writes a poem about the “drunk on Main Avenue” who dreams “of pintos the color of wine/and ice, and drums that speak the names/of wind.” This is a deep cry from the lost world, lost music, lost authentic dance of the Native American Shaman.

Anita Endrezze

Another poet—also new to me—is Dunya Mikhail. She too has lost a world. As Leah writes she has “witnessed dictatorship and war in Iraq…[She] is a witness- and a Courier.” Mikhail’s biting irony and plain speech are sharp tools to carve memorials to the unbearable. Her poem “The War Works Hard” begins with these lines:

How magnificent the war is!

How eager

and efficient

Dunya Mikhail

Crystal Good, who writes from West Virginia—Land of Coal and Mountain Removal—is also a discovery for me. Her plain speech and irony about the world that is being lost as she writes comes in a different idiom, but she writes in a striking and compelling voice.

Crystal Good

Her poem “Boom Boom” is devastating on the subject of devastation:

Them boys come back ‘round after all the damage

is done. After all her long hair is gone. They grin/admire

what’s left of her hips–just

checkin’ on you.

Frances Hatfield

Hatfield’s first published book
of poems, Rudiments of Flight

Frances Hatfield is a colleague of mine at the San Francisco Jung Institute. She writes gorgeous, mind bending poems out of worlds much like the ones I inhabit—myth, dream, the underworld, strange happenings in the process of “The Talking Cure”:

the locked gate to the forbidden

room gapes open

the snarls of the guard dogs

hang like icicles in the air…

I’ve admired Jane Downs’ poetry for years, and have written about it in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Perspectives. She can evoke the sensual world of Now, while at the same time invoking the mythic world of Forever. Takes my breath away:

Marie Dern and Jane Downs

Our tender mouths,

our tender arms,

How could

we know that beneath

us a god roams

with dirt

in his mouth

Jane and book artist Marie Dern are the founders of Red Berry Editions where they create beautiful, often handmade, books. Jane’s collection of prose poems, Adirondack Dream, is forthcoming.

Leah’s poems continue to amaze and delight me. She can leap about in all the strata of being. She is inspired by dreams, travel, family, myth, art—all the wonder and grief of a deeply lived life. She understands shape shifting; she knows metamorphosis from the inside out:

Leah Shelleda

I saw a woman born of a doe

I saw a woman step out of the body of a wolf

There is return

Here’s some of what I wrote about Leah’s beautiful book of poems After the Jug Was Broken:

Shelleda's poems play at the edge of the wild and the forbidden; they dive down to the depths, bringing up treasure from the collective unconscious and the wisdom traditions; they enchant, seduce and bless…

I was especially pleased that Leah chose my poem Where the Buffalo Roam to be in this anthology. That’s because it’s so weird—a vision of the lost world of the Native Americans that came to me while driving on Highway 24. It’s been a long process of breaking the taboos of the conventional mind for me to own my visions and ghosts. This liberation began in that authentic movement class where Leah and I met, and of course, in years of the subversive practices of Jungian analysis and reading and writing poetry. We’ll need our visions, our weird other worldly experiences, our fierce love for the worlds of Now and the worlds of Forever— where the ghost dancers still stamp and beat their drums—if we are to navigate the Rising Tide.

Where the Buffalo Roam

A sky herd of buffalo stampeded the moon—I saw it
driving on 24. The radio said

the shadow of earth would steal the moon—
our only moon—but I tell you

It was a thundering ghost herd of buffalo
that shouldered the moon out of her sky

The moon disappeared in her deerskin dress
The ghost dancers stamped and beat their drums

They chanted the world before Highway 24
when earth was home to the buffalo

when the people followed the dance
of the sun, when they knew each story of rock

each spirit of mountain, of tree
what flowered, what died, what came back

as the moon came back in her deerskin dress—
our only moon—

in her radiant light
I looked at the sky over 24

but the buffalo were gone…

The Muse of Politics Reborn

2012-11-13T08:06:00.000-08:00

Reflections on the 2012 Election

Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period in a way that [people], in some strange way, are responding.

Martin Luther King

Before the recent election, during the long and rancorous campaign season, the Muse of my Politics was having conniption fits, anxiety attacks, paroxysms of fear about going backwards to the bad old days, when we were owned by the company store, our bodies controlled by The Man. The Muse of my Politics remembers the days of back alley abortions. It’s easy for Her to morph into a Lament, one of those grieving, keening women in black weeping for all we have lost.

My Muse of Lament could see it all clearly, how the promise of Obama’s election four years ago would be squandered, how we‘d lose Obamacare, Medicare, Social Security, Women’s Rights, Gay Rights, Voting Rights, Abortion Rights, Minority Rights, Supreme Court seats, our chance to address Climate Change, to improve education, to reform immigration policy, to address the immense inequalities between the 1% and the 99%; She could foresee the loss of the great pragmatic spirit of America to rigid idealogues, see how we’d lose our souls, our shirts, our only Mother Earth.

In California She lamented how sad it would be when Governor Brown’s courageous Proposition 30—going against the “No Taxes” absolutism of the times—lost and the public schools my grandchildren attend, the high school in which my step-daughter does her devoted best to get young people talking and reading French, were slashed beyond viability.

O She of little faith. In the sweet glow of rebirth the Muse of My Politics laughs at Herself for so vastly underestimating:

The Youth Vote
The African American Vote
The Hispanic Vote
The Women’s Vote
The Rust Belt
The Democrat’s brilliant campaign
The storm-battered East Coast
The jubilant West Coast
Our common sense and sense of fairness—Our Selves!

Long lines for the 2012 Election

O we of little faith. In the sweet glow of victory we realize that we underestimated the enthusiasm for Obama, people’s determination to vote even if it meant standing in line for hours, the outrage about economic inequality, climate change denial, racial, sexist and homophobic nastiness, voter suppression, and the attempts to dismantle the New Deal and Obamacare. Now the sick will not be denied health insurance because they are sick. What’s health insurance for, if not to take care of the sick? My stepson can breathe relief that his daughter, who was born with a heart problem, will now continue to be covered. Ruth Bader Ginsberg can retire, can claim her well–earned peace and quiet. And Obama can become the great President we know him to be.

In his election night speech the president said, “I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.”

Barack Obama November 6, 2012

We did keep reaching, working, fighting. We did have hope. But though the pollster Nate Silver kept telling us, Obama would win, though we hoped he was right, we bit our nails and obsessed about the Electoral College. Why were we so fearful?? I think it is because we have been so traumatized. Our golden moment, four years ago—electing our first African American President—was shattered by what happened next. We were stunned by the utter intransigence of many Republicans, their refusal to work with the president in a time of terrifying economic crisis—their only goal to destroy him, which seems to me a kind of treason, a betrayal of the purposes of representative democracy. Al Sharpton made one of his searing remarks about those who don’t like the captain, so they kill him, are also bringing down the ship and everyone on board. The racist undertones were not lost on us. We were shocked by the Supreme Court's decision that said “Corporations are people,” by the empowering of the rich to buy even more political clout than they already have. Were we losing our democracy? The 2010 elections brought the climate change deniers, the women rights plunderers, the New Deal dismantlers to power in the House. We saw the possibility of losing everything we and our forebears had struggled for.

Dan, my son and I went to the Oakland Museum some weeks ago, to see the exhibit “1968.” We watched a film clip of Robert Kennedy’s casket being taken by train through the country, and everywhere there were crowds of mourners, of all races, all cultures—all devastated by the loss of the man they had hoped would be president. A young black man, watching with us, saw the tears in our eyes. He told us he was two when RFK was assassinated, but that he had been his hero. I saw the through line of legacy, from RFK and Martin Luther King—who had been assassinated a few months earlier to Obama, and prayed that Obama would have the chance to create his legacy, which is our legacy and that of our dead.

Image from RFK’s funeral train

It is my father’s legacy. He was an immigrant from Nazi Germany, who became a passionate American liberal and supporter of civil rights.

It is the legacy of my ex-husband, my children’s father, who died a half year ago, praising Obama on his deathbed. He was a public health doctor, very politically engaged. He was concerned about voter suppression and dirty tricks. It’s so unfair that he didn’t live to glory in Obama’s reelection, but I think his spirit is dancing among us.

It is the Kennedy’s legacy—Jack, Bobby and Ted’s—especially Ted’s— since that brilliant and outspoken proponent of economic equality, Elizabeth Warren, just won his senate seat. Especially Bobby’s—he understood the civil rights movement as few politicians of his time did, and had the terrible task of telling a crowd in Indianapolis, on April 1968, about MLK’s assassination. This is part of what he said in that agonizing moment, just a few months before he too, was killed by a white man:

For those of you who are black and are tempted to…be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also 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 get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.

My …favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even 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

It is Martin Luther King’s legacy—just before he was assassinated, he said:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!

It is the legacy of my generation. We came of age in the 1960s, were gripped by the civil rights movement, by the women’s movement, by the expansive social and spiritual consciousness; we were traumatized by assassinations. It is the legacy of many I knew in India, when I was there with my first husband, who was the Peace Corps doctor in Hyderabad. I wrote about this time in The Sister from Below:

We opened our house…to Peace Corps volunteers. There was always someone sleeping on the floor, always several of us around the dining room table talking American politics, Indian politics, philosophies of life. We were there when Martin Luther King was assassinated. We were there when Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

India held us young Americans with curiosity and compassion and deep kindness. She mourned our fallen leaders with us. Sheela, who washed the floors every morning, and sat in the kitchen deftly removing rocks one by one from our daily rice, had lost three of her five children. She asked me about Rose Kennedy—how many sons had she lost. Three I told her—one by war, two by assassination. “Abah!” Three grown sons!” And she wept with me. She told me she had a photograph of JFK in her home, next to her photograph of Mahatma Gandhi. Now she would add photographs of RFK and MLK. (p. 100)

It is the legacy of Obama’s mother and father, of his Kenyan and his American ancestors. After his first election the Muse of my Politics came to me in the form of the ghost of his Hawaiian grandmother, the one who helped raise him and who died shortly before his election. She demanded a poem in her voice. Here it is, in honor of her legacy:

Image of Madelyn Dunham and
her grandson, Barack Obama

Madelyn Dunham, Passing On

A wind blows when we die
For each of us owns a wind

/Xan poem

I never knew I’d be wind, when I died—a warm wind
on my way home from the islands—a light breeze

off the lake—breath in my grandson’s lungs
as he speaks to the crowds on this—

his election night. Does he know this is me—
touching his face and the faces of those who never believed

they’d see the day. Who’d have thought I’d be breath
in the bodies of so many strangers; who’d have thought I’d be music,

sweet as the sound of the slack key guitar, or that I’d become
an ancestral spirit in the land where they know how to feed

the dead—they’re roasting four bulls, sixteen chickens,
some sheep and goats, to feast the one

who belongs to us all—to the Kenyan village
of his grandmother Sara, to the spirits of his father and mother, his black

and white grandfathers, to the ones who are laughing and crying in Grant Park.
In the land of the dead— nothing is over—we still wander, still worry

take pleasure, make trouble, demand our portion
of beer, of drumming, of dancing all night. I say to you living—

though I’ve drifted away, though I’m only a sigh—an ex–
halation—I can feel your whole world shift—

though I’m only the faraway sound
of a slack key guitar…

(first published in New Millennium Writings)

Election Night

Note: I am grateful to Steve Zemmelman for the reference to RFK’s Indianapolis speech and the quotation from Aeschylus.

The Citizen’s Dilemma: An Invitation

2012-10-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

Aloria Weaver's Axis Mundi
www.aloriaweaver.com

Are you a troubled citizen, suffering from election anxiety? Are you experiencing violent mood swings in response to the news of the day? Are you having trouble holding on to your center, to the spirit of the depths in these rancorous and polarized times?

The San Francisco C.G. Jung Institute is taking on this difficult historical moment with a one-day event— The Citizen’s Dilemma in Divisive Times.

I hope you will join us on Oct. 27th from 10-4 to hear:

Thomas Singer: The Presidential Elections 2012: Surfing the Emotions and Complexes of the Collective Psyche

Richard Stein: Love in the Time of Cacaphony: An Introvert’s Guide to Political Extremism

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky: Clinging to the Axis Mundi: The Poetry of Politics

Richard Tarnas: Cosmos, Psyche and Polis: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective on Our Time

The Institute is located at: 2040 Gough Street, San Francisco, CA 94109. Additional information about the Oct. 27th program can be obtained at info@sfjung.org or (415) 771-8055.

If you can’t make it in person, you can hear the event as a webinar, presented by the Asheville Jung Center http://ashevillejungcenter.org/webinars/w7/

For a preview of a poem I’ll be reading and discussing, check out "When I'm Gone" on YouTube.

The Muse of Politics

2012-09-19T18:39:00.000-07:00

In this overwrought political season I have been musing about politics—what a devil it is, what a muse it is in my life and creative work. The power of the political to shape and destroy lives came into focus for me around two recent experiences: seeing the theater piece Party People at Ashland's Oregon Shakespeare Festival this summer and hearing an interview with Seth Rosenfeld, the journalist author of Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and the Rise of Reagan.

Party People is a stunning piece of theater—a musical, multimedia drama using song, dance, hip hop, jazz, salsa, chant, rant, shouting, whispering, introspection, retrospection and video. In the beginning we meet two young creatives: Jimmy, engrossed in his Macbook Air is editing Malik’s video of former members of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords—a Puerto Rican nationalist organization. We see the video projected on the wall while in the stage area of this theatre-in-the-round actors portray the young revolutionaries with raised fists, slogans and guns. On video the former party members speak of the impossible conditions they were working to change—cockroach-infested apartments, terrible schools, hungry children, unavailable medical care. The Black Panthers provided free breakfasts to poor kids in Oakland. I remember this well—I had Panther kin. A close friend’s lover had been married to a Black Panther. They had two children—“Panther cubs.” My children played with them. I remember the pride with which their mother spoke of the breakfast program.

The young ones, Jimmy, whose uncle was a leader of the Young Lords, and Malik, a “Panther cub,” are orchestrating a reunion of the former revolutionaries, ostensibly to see the video at an art gallery. In fact they are tricksters, using their new-fangled technological devices to catch their elders in their most vulnerable moments. They are engaged in creating the theatre we see.

The play takes me back to the certainties of the far left in those years—the righteousness. I remember how we hated LBJ. “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” LBJ looks different now. His support for civil rights, his “War On Poverty” looks wildly progressive in our current political environment. I can admire his political genius retrospectively, understand how he got caught in a wrong war; I see him now as a complex tragic figure. I never was a member of the hard left but I do remember sharing the messianic fantasy that “Come the Revolution” this nasty, prejudiced, murderous, world would be transformed—swords would be beaten into plowshares. Nothing turned out as we expected.

This was painfully true for the aging revolutionaries of Party People. The play thrusts us into the unbearable in many forms—the angry splits between factions, whose backbiting and sniping continue to this day; the presence of the widow of a policeman who was shot during a demonstration—she holds an opposite point of view; the sense of failure, personal and collective—is any one better off now? the children? the schools? We hear whispers of “traitor.” People are still in a rage with each other, for good reason it turns out. Terrible things were done by those on both sides—unforgiveable betrayals, unredeemable guilt. Solias, Malik’s Black Panther father, who spent most of Malik’s childhood in jail, is a powerful figure—a well muscled, bald headed African American with a deep voice. He is played by the unforgettable Peter Macon (who also plays a searing Achilles in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Troilus and Cressida). Solias is a sympathetic figure, prowling the metal stairs and bars of the set until the terrible truth is revealed—he was an informer for CoIntelpro, the FBI's secret effort to neutralize political dissidents. It was his ticket out of jail. He is indeed the traitor the chorus of aging revolutionaries hisses about.

Party People is relentless in its truth telling. It is a Bardo realm in which aging revolutionaries review their lives, face their past, worry about their legacy. We in the audience begin to understand that these are traumatized senior citizens, stuck in ancient animosities, guilty secrets, unrequited injustices, fractured lives. The elders are disappointed in young Jimmy and Malik—they are not radicals, they are not political. We, however, are given a glimpse of hope in these young men, who argue that their work—essentially the theatre piece we have been watching in a theatre in the round, which thrusts us into the action—is an example of the use of media to transform consciousness. It worked for me. I haven’t stopped thinking and feeling about Party People.

* * * * *

As I was musing about Party People I happened to hear a radio interview on NPR’s Forum with Seth Rosenfeld, the author of Subversives: The FBIs War on Student Radicals and the Rise of Reagan. Rosenfeld tells the shocking story of the FBI’s infiltration into the Black Panthers as well as the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam Day Committee. I was a student at Berkeley in those years, and I joined the strike in Sproul Plaza; I was moved by Mario Savio’s eloquent protest against “the machine.” I was also involved with the Vietnam Day Committee— protesting the Vietnam War. My then husband and I began hearing a strange tapping sound on our phone. We assumed we were being tapped by the FBI and watched what we said. In later years I wondered were we paranoid? Apparently not.

Rosenfeld sued the FBI for release of documents concerning Richard Aoki—a Japanese American known on the left for his activism and for being a founder of the ethnic studies movement. He was a beloved and revered figure, a professor at a community college and a guidance counselor. He committed suicide in 2009.

According to Rosenfeld, Aoki’s family was interned in a concentration camp during the war. He was a conservative teenager—went to Berkeley High School a few years before I did—and while still very young was approached by the FBI who asked him to help them find communists in Bay Area student radical groups like the Young Socialist Alliance. Aoki got involved in various left wing groups, was befriended by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton and was involved with them in organizing the Black Panthers. He provided them with guns. Rosenfeld does not know whether he did that at the behest of the FBI or whether it was his own idea. Certainly it had terrible consequences for the Panthers who were shadowed by gun violence. Rosenfeld interviewed Aoki in 2007. Aoki denied being an informer, but made a terse, haunting statement about his political history: “It’s complex. Layers upon layers.” Aoki left the Bureau in the early ‘70s. I imagine he must have lived in a hell like that depicted in Party People, Solias’ hell in particular—the hell of having betrayed those he was closest to, for reasons that at the outset must have made good sense. As a young man Aoki was a soldier. He was patriotic. He probably wanted to help his country. I imagine he got caught up in the fervent fever of the ‘60s and became a radical himself. Yet there was still his informer side, even after he left the FBI. Who could hear his whole truth? Who could understand and forgive him? What if he spent the last 40 years of his life doing good works, and still could not expunge his terrible guilt?

* * * * *

Solias and Aoki are tragic figures. They remind us of how terrible life, fate and politics can be—how individual lives can get caught up in an undertow, picked up by a wave, and smashed against the rocks of history. Most Americans—the 99%—got caught in the undertow of the financial crisis that began in 2008. Many have been smashed against the rocks. The election of 2012 is filled with their suffering and their rage. The campaigns are being fought against the backdrop of a fierce zeitgeist—global economic and environmental crises, tyrants who murder their own citizens, young revolutionaries changing the world, reactionaries who deny climate change, who would dismantle the New Deal and repeal Women’s Rights.

The San Francisco C.G. Jung Institute is taking on this difficult historical moment with a one-day event— The Citizen’s Dilemma in Divisive Times.

I hope you will join us on Oct. 27, 2012 (10am to 4pm) to hear:

Thomas Singer: The Presidential Elections 2012: Surfing the Emotions and Complexes of the Collective Psyche.

Richard Stein: Love in the Time of Cacophony: An Introvert’s Guide to Political Extremism.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky: Clinging to the Axis Mundi: The Muse of Politics.

Richard Tarnas: Cosmos, Psyche and Polis: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective on Our Time.

An Invitation

2012-09-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

Please join us in celebrating the publication of “Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way” event at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco! This is a donor event. Anyone can become a donor. Your donation supports the Institute's work of the psyche, making it possible for people to have Jungian analysis through the low cost clinic, for candidates to be trained in analytical methods, for international students whose countries do not have Jung Institutes to study here, for public programs to be offered to the general population, including the programs of the Friends of the Institute and to ensure our international Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche continues to reach around the globe.

The Donor Event will be on Sunday afternoon, October 7, 2012, from 2-5 pm at the C. G. Jung Institute, 2040 Gough Street, San Francisco, CA 94109.

Three contributing analyst authors will read from their highly personal and unique stories: Karlyn Ward from Mill Valley, California; Chie Lee from West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, and Jacqueline Gerson from Mexico City.

Chie Lee

Jacqueline Gerson

Karlyn Ward

Come join us and hear these powerful stories of three women from three countries whose lives were changed by the teachings of C. G. Jung.

For more information, contact Collin Eyre at 415-771-8055 extension 210 or e-mail Collin at pa2@sfjung.org to make a donation and reserve a seat at this exciting Donor Event.

The Muse of Crater Lake

2012-08-27T10:39:00.000-07:00

"Marked by Fire"

A Story of the Jungian Way in Geological Time

What does a “story of the Jungian way” have in common with a quiet lake in Southern Oregon? I find myself musing about this as I sit in a rocking chair on the terrace of Crater

Lake Lodge looking out at the mandala of Crater Lake—a jewel of a lake with constantly changing hues of blue—a mystery of a lake cupped in a rocky rim, without slopes down to its beaches, without streams bringing it water, without the look and feel of most lakes—and yet it is so lovely it takes one’s breath away.

What created this astounding beauty? The collapse of an enormous volcano: 7,700 years ago Mount Mazama erupted—blew its top—fell into itself leaving an enormous hole—a caldera. Mount Mazama was a powerful and sacred presence to the native peoples who lived in its vicinity—as imposing as Mount Shasta still is to this day. Its fall must have been a catastrophe for the world around it, for the people and the animals. There are Indian legends about the battle between the Chief of the Below World and the Chief of the Above World, which culminated in the fiery explosion of the Above World Mountain.

The origin of this magical lake required a later eruption, which created Wizard Island and sent lava to seal the bottom of the caldera. Because of this wizardry, thousands of years of snow and rain created the deepest lake in America, with the purest water in the world and the most amazing vicissitudes of blue.

In our human lives we have our own versions of this archetypal pattern—one world’s catastrophe is another world’s birth. An illness, a death, a wounding in love, a divorce, the loss of a homeland, a war, a financial disaster can be the catalyst that collapses our known world—it seems like the end of everything. We are in crisis, beside our selves, lost in the void, destitute, desperate, in agony, sick to death. We can’t imagine a future.

If we are lucky and mindful, if the gods are with us, a surprising turn of events may create a new space for our lives—a caldera for our deepest nature. What this enchanted lake has in common with many stories of the Jungian way are its fiery origins and the unexpected magic of its becoming. In the stories told by the contributors to “Marked by Fire” you can read many versions of this pattern of devastation and transformation.

As I rock and muse on the terrace of the beautifully renovated Lodge, I consider the fiery spirit of the political times we are in: bitterly divisive battles over the governance and future of America, destructive and dangerous firestorms lit by the climate change deniers, women’s rights repealers, New Deal destroyers, immigrant harassers, public education desecrators. American values I thought most of us shared are threatened; the earth itself is at risk.

What a relief from all the rancor and the rage it is to hang out with the spirit of the depths in this most American of institutions—a National Park. On this terrace there are at least 20 rocking chairs and people line up waiting for their turn to sit and rock and contemplate this mystery—the bowl of the sky touches the bowl of the lake and one feels held in a perfect circle, enraptured, enchanted.

The Muse of Crater Lake has many things to teach us. For example, it takes the craggy fire blasted walls of the world that was to cup the fluid waters of what dreams within us. What remains of the Old Chief of the Above reflects on itself in deep waters.

The soul of America can be seen in these waters that mingle ancient rains and snow falls with the latest arrivals. The spirit of America can be heard in the stories told by the ranger about the eccentric and fixated William Gladstone Steel, who saw the lake in 1885 and understood its spiritual power. He made it his life’s work to transform this sacred spot into a National Park. He was a gadfly on the body politic for 17 years before he achieved his goal. As the Park Ranger said to a little boy named Abraham, “You too can make your dreams come true.”

The muse of Crater Lake reminds us that the word caldera is Spanish for cauldron. In the heated cauldron of our own lives and in the geological life of the earth amazing changes are possible. A drive around the rim of the lake shows us many vantage points from which to marvel at how the old and the new, the hot and the cold can co-exist, how on a warm summer day you can still see banks of snow tucked in among the lava rock.

You can join your fellow Americans on bikes, in cars, on the trolley sent out by the Lodge, among those who need canes and those who are lithe and buff, to marvel at the cerulean lake, the azure lake, the baby blue lake, the turquoise lake, the deep indigo lake. You can hear a father tell his young son the story of the life and death of Mount Mazama and the genesis of Crater Lake, and ask, “Isn’t that crazy amazing?”

In the booklet, Crater Lake: The Story Behind the Scenery, put out by the National Parks about Crater Lake, from which I gleaned science, history and legend about this place, there is a dedication, “to all who find Nature not an adversary to conquer but a storehouse of infinite knowledge and experience linking man to all things past and present.“ If you change the word Nature to Human Nature you could say the same things about the human dimension we call the Jungian way, a worldview we need to cultivate in our dangerous times.

If you’d like to contemplate the geological story of a place that’s been profoundly “Marked by Fire,” I highly recommend a visit to Crater Lake. The Lodge is a lovely hotel right at the rim of the lake.

* * *

An Invitation

October 7, 2012

2 - 5pm

If you’d like to contemplate the human version of the story please become a donor and attend the “Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way” event at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco! Your donation supports the Institute's work of the psyche, making it possible for people to have Jungian analysis through the low cost clinic, for candidates to be trained in analytical methods, for international students whose countries do not have Jung Institutes to study here, for public programs to be offered to the general population, including the programs of the Friends of the Institute and to ensure our international Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche continues to reach around the globe.

The Donor Event will be on Sunday afternoon, October 7, from 2-5 pm at the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco. Three contributing analyst authors will read from their highly personal and unique stories: Karlyn Ward from Mill Valley, California; Chie Lee from West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, and Jacqueline Gerson from Mexico City.

Come join us and hear these powerful stories of three women from three countries whose lives were changed by the teachings of C. G. Jung. For more information, contact Collin Eyre at 415-771-8055 extension 210 or e-mail Collin at pa2@sfjung.org to make a donation and reserve a seat at this exciting Donor Event.

News from the Muse: Muse of the Wild Girl

2012-07-22T20:45:00.001-07:00

Hushpuppy and Fleur

Daddy says, up above the levee on the dry side, they’re afraid of the water like a bunch of babies.

Hushpuppy in “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

When people cover the earth with concrete, they close off its secret workings, making everyone so vulnerable to the void that they have to keep moving quickly.

Fleur, in “The History of My Body” p.72

These wild girls talk straight to your heart. They talk to you as if they’ve known you all their lives, as if you are their make-believe friend, a part of their inner world. They are children of this time and of all time. They know the ways of wild creatures, plants, trees, rivers. They contemplate the workings of the universe and of the tides. They understand what’s lost when wildness is covered over by concrete, or segregated by levees. They speak directly to the wild girl in you and in me. I wanted to be Rima of the Jungle, swinging from tree to tree, speaking in the language of the birds when I was a girl.

Just listen to Hushpuppy, in the amazing film “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” directed by 28 year old Benh Zeitlin. She speaks in a lyrical six-year old voice-over. She says: “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one thing busts, even a smallest thing, the whole universe will get busted."

Of course, like the rest of us, her universe is unraveling rapidly. She lives with her Daddy in the wilds of the Louisiana bayou, in a mythical place called “The Bathtub.” She has an ecological imagination, fertilized by Miss Bathsheba, her teacher, who tells the children tales of the Aurochs, great hairy pigs with huge tusks from before the last Ice Age, who will be resurrected as the polar ice melts. Hushpuppy sees the ice caps melting, she hears the Aurochs thundering over the landscape. So do we in the movie audience—awe-struck and fearful in the presence of these threatening images. Hushpuppy knows she is just a “little piece of a big big universe.” But she wants to survive, to leave her mark so that in a million years school children will know that once “there was a Hushpuppy who lived in the Bathtub with her Daddy.” Her Daddy, however, is dying. His blood, he tells her, is eating itself. Hushpuppy, like the rest of us, has to face the unknown. Her fierce spirit gives me hope in our scary times, as the climate warms and the oceans rise. I hope you’ll meet her soon.

Fleur is another wild girl who has visited me recently. She is the first person narrator in the amazing novel by Sharon Heath, “The History of My Body.” Within the first two pages we’ve been hurled from God’s creation of the world, as in Genesis, to Fleur’s genesis—a burger and a good screw involving her father, the virulently anti-abortionist Senator and his too-young date—now a “drowning woman clutching her wine glass like a life raft.” By page two we know that Fleur’s father thinks she is autistic. Is she?

She’s weird, that’s true. She spins, whirls and flaps when she’s upset. She’s precocious, a brilliant observer of everything around her, a tireless maker of lists. She’s been reading the dictionary and encyclopedia since she was potty trained. She’s potty mouthed and wild and never stops talking. And she’s hilarious. Her caretakers include the kind but odoriferous Sister Flatulencia. Her best buddies are her grandfather and her cat Jillily. Her grandfather had a stroke and doesn’t talk. But they hang out together, looking at their tree, watching birds. Fleur worries about her grandfather’s balls. Turns out she has reason to. She, too, will lose her male protector.

Fleur’s capacity to leap from the sublime to the ridiculous and back in a heartbeat, her resilience, her intelligence, her love for the natural world and its creatures, her strenuous efforts to keep herself amused, alive, stimulated and out of the VOID are heartening signs of what our world needs. And, she has the best vocabulary for a developing girl’s private parts. If you want to know you’ll have to read her, and become her secret friend, too.

With Hushpuppy and Fleur—and don’t forget Rima of the Jungle—maybe the wild girls will save us.

Here’s a poem of mine about the Wild Girl:

WILD GIRL OF PLEASANT HILL

Once this was somebody’s
grandparents’ farm—sweet
as Rebecca of Sunnybrook—
do you remember? How she skipped
among meadows with wildflowers,
til she was thrown
like a sheep
to the ground,
shorn of her corn, her hay.

But she’s still here, that girl.
You’ll see her playing in the fountains
near Rotten Robbie’s Gasoline
or herding her geese by the Chinese
All-You-Can-Eat Buffet,
while cars zoom past on 680
in sight of the mountain.

You’d think she’d be dead by now—
after all the concrete that’s been poured.
But that girl is
wild as Rima—
talks to the willows, to the birches,
laughs aloud at the ducks
who have commandeered
the community
swimming pool.

And you,
old ecstatic
of trees,
have you forgotten

Green Mansions—that slip
of a girl who first lit
the green fire?

Talk to her—
your wild friend from beyond
civilization—
give her a seat
in the camphor tree
by your study,

for she can give tongue
to the reveries of trees
and what
that mountain
commands…

(Published in Weber, The Contemporary West Journal)

News from the Muse: The Muse of Radio

2012-07-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

The Muse of Radio

How often does it happen that a poet and her muse get to live out a mutual fantasy? What would a poet and her muse’s mutual fantasy look like? Poet As Radio! Poet as voice, chant, spoken word, with enthusiastic radio hosts inviting her to read more poems, especially the long weird ones, like “crimes of the dreamer” she so seldom gets to read aloud. And these hosts, who asked smart questions and had actually read her work, would be particularly interested in her relationship with her muse.

This was not a dream. It actually happened to me and the Sister from Below on a recent beautiful Saturday morning in an industrial section of San Francisco where KUSF-in-Exile hides out amidst music studios and truckers. Delia Tramontina and Jay Thomas were the hosts of a Saturday morning show, “Poet As Radio.” They had an uncanny knack for asking me to talk about my favorite topics: the oral and musical nature of my poetry, its influences, the tension in my work between narrative and surrealistic impulses, my pushy muse and the influence of Jungian psychology on my life and work.

If you’re interested in any of this, you can hear the interview by clicking here.

By the way, here's a short history of why KUSF is in exile:

For 34 years, KUSF San Francisco defined free-form local radio that reflected the city’s unique heart and soul. Famous for featuring diverse cultural programs as well as new underground music, KUSF was one of the first radio stations in the U.S. to play punk rock, and also served a dozen different language groups. An irreplaceable source for community news, information, music and culture, KUSF reflected San Francisco’s diversity, earning the moniker “Your Cultural Oasis.”

The Federal Communications Commission Media Bureau ruled that the proposed sale of the KUSF 90.3 FM broadcast license from the University of San Francisco to Classical Public Radio Network (CPRN - a group controlled by the University of Southern California) could go ahead. Behind closed doors, the FCC, USF and CPRN agreed to a consent decree allowing the sale to go through in exchange for a $50,000 fine. We're as disappointed as you are that the Media Bureau ignored our arguments and held secret negotiations allowing USF and CPRN to claim they didn't knowingly violate the law.

You can help KUSF fight this travesty by generously donating to Friends of KUSF. Help restore an essential voice of the San Francisco Bay Area to the air. Any amount will benefit. You can also mail a check. Make it out to KUSF's fiscal sponsor, "Media Arts Center, San Diego," and mail it to:

San Francisco Community Radio

P.O. Box 170697

San Francisco, CA 94117-0697

Donations are tax-deductible and you will receive an acknowledgment letter confirming the donation.

A Review by Erel Shalit

2012-07-03T07:49:00.003-07:00

Lakes of Memory and Burning Nights

The Sister is happy to share an excerpt from a wonderful review of adagio and lamentation by Israeli Jungian Analyst and author, Erel Shalit. The entire review will appear in the July 2012 issue of the Jung Journal.

Dr. Shalit writes, "The contrasts and the contradictions that touch the senses and deepen the feelings, creating both complexity and unity, color every line of this beautiful work." See more on his blog.

Erel Shalit is the author of several publications, including Enemy, Cripple, & Beggar: Shadows in the Hero's Path, The Cycle of Life, The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel and The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego. He is a training and supervising analyst, and past president of the Israel Society of Analytical Psychology (ISAP).

Marked by Fire Book Event

2012-06-24T17:26:00.000-07:00

Book Celebration and Author Event

The Sister from Below is delighted to invite you to a book event for Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, sponsored by the Depth Psychology Alliance. Meet some of the authors and other like-minded folk. There will be refreshments and libations.

July 28, 2012
2:00 - 4:30pm
San Rafael, CA
Pre-registration is required

Also, Patricia Damery and Naomi Lowinsky will be hosting a book club discussion group on the Depth Psychology Alliance website. Participation is limited to book club members but membership is free. Join here.

Marked by Fire on Shrink Rap Radio

2012-06-22T16:34:00.000-07:00

Shrink Rap Radio has done an interview about Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way with Co-Editors, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and Patricia Damery. It can be found here!

Bonnie Bright Interviews "Marked by Fire" Editors

2012-06-19T21:47:00.000-07:00

Bonnie Bright of the Depth Psychology Alliance interviewed Naomi Lowinsky and Patricia Damery, Co-editors of Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way.

You can find the interview in the following locations:

Radio page on Depth Insights

News section on the home page at Depth Psychology Alliance

The interview will also be available through ITunes as a free audio podcast in a few days so it can be downloaded to Iphones, etc., and it will appear in the Depth Alliance June newsletter.

A Review by Smoky Zeidel

2012-06-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

The Sister from Below stuck her head out of her cave the other day and saw Smoky Zeidel's review of her book. (If you see her in the meadow doing a jig, it's because she's so pleased to be understood.)

The Sister From Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way
by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
Fisher King Press

As a writer, I find myself saying things like, “My muse went on vacation,” (if I’m having a difficult time writing), or “My muse really kept me hopping last week,” (if the words are flowing freely and easily). I’ve heard the same sort of comments from lots of my writer and artist friends, too.

But how many of us have taken the bother to learn who our muse is? Does she have a name? Is she ours exclusively, or does she hop from writer to writer on a whim?

I’m ashamed to say, it’s never crossed my mind to even ask my muse anything about herself. Her name? I have no idea. Her favorite book? Not a clue. Am I her only writer/artist, or one of many? Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve never asked her.

There’s one writer/poet out there who can answer those questions about her muse, because she’s been in a running dialogue with her for years. In her unique and highly entertaining book The Sister From Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky lets the reader listen in on the conversation she’s had with her muse, who has appeared to her in nine distinct manifestations, the last of which is, surprisingly, male.

Lowinsky writes of the Sister from Below, her inner poet who, she writes, has been “trying to get my attention all my life.” She writes with longing about her muse from early childhood, a nursemaid who cared for her during a year her family lived in Florence, Italy.

Then there is Eurydice, who expresses her resentment about being kept from making an appearance until Chapter 4, and once Lowinsky allows her to speak, tells a much different version of the story of Orpheus in the Underworld than we are used to hearing. Lowinsky’s Eurydice doesn’t meekly follow Orpheus when he descends into the Underworld to retrieve her. No, this Eurydice tells a decidedly different story: “Orpheus wants to keep me young and beautiful. He denies my ancient nature. He forgets I am nature … I am the dark part of the creative, the mold of change …”

Perhaps most heartbreaking is the grandmother who speaks to Lowinsky from the afterlife, a grandmother she never knew, a grandmother who died of cancer in Hitler’s concentration camps. A grandmother who insists the author confront the terrors of her childhood, her guilt that she lived when so many died, the terror and intense love felt simultaneously for her brilliant musicologist father. It is in this chapter Lowinsky fully opens her veins and allows her vulnerabilities as well as her abilities to flow from within in her poem, “a grandmother speaks from the other side.”

I had to put the book down and take time to recompose myself before moving on from this chapter, for my tears were flowing freely by this time. I wept not only for Lowinsky and all she lost, but for my own lost grandmothers as well.

Lowinsky talks of the muse that is Old Mother India, a place I have longed to visit. Then, she writes of Sappho, a favorite of mine, at midlife; a poet who lived 2600 years ago whose writings exist only as fragments. But what fragments they are, entwining the sexual and the sacred. “How is it she suddenly fills me with her presence, as though I’ve always known her; as though I can remember my time with her as a young woman on Lesbos: the temple to Aphrodite, the meadows with flowers we maidens wove into one another’s hair, what we sang around the altar in the moonlight; as though Sappho was my teacher, my priestess, my wild older woman crush.” Lowinsky asks, “How can I claim to remember Sappho?”

As a post-menopausal woman writer, I know the answer to her question: Sappho represents awakening kundalini, the awakening spiritual and creative energy that happens when women hit midlife. I just never realized this awakening was Sappho as the muse.

The book continues with chapters on Helena, a root vegetable; and the Naomi of the Bible, for whom the author was named. Like the story of Eurydice, the Naomi who presents herself as muse to the author has quite a different story to tell than the one you’ll read in the Bible—a beautiful tale I prefer to the original. Finally, she writes of the muse in her (his?) male manifestation.

The Sister From Below is an intensely personal, almost analytical exploration of the author’s creative side—not surprising, seeing as Lowinsky is a Jungian analyst. Filled with exquisite, heart-rending prose and poetry, it is a book to be savored, one chapter at a time, not rushed through like the latest Dan Brown suspense novel. It is, in places, highly entertaining, even funny. In other places, it will make you cry.

Most of all, it will send you on a long journey within yourself, searching for your own muse, identifying her, inviting her to not only manifest herself through your creative, artistic side, but as a part of your personality as a whole as well. It will leave you changed.

Smoky Trudeau Zeidel, whose deep connection to nature is apparent in all she writes, is the author of five books, three fiction and two nonfiction. Her current work in progress is due to be released in summer 2012. When not writing or exploring nature, Smoky spends time gardening, camping, meditating, and resisting the urge to speak in haiku.

News From the Muse: The Serpent Muse

2012-05-15T22:16:00.000-07:00

Patricia Damery and I are friends and colleagues who have known each other for over twenty years, and have read and supported one another‘s writings. I read her book Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation in manuscript, and connected Patricia with my publisher, Mel Mathews at my own book launching party for The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way. I knew they’d love each other, both being wild shamanic types, grounded in the life of farming. Patricia had read The Sister in manuscript and kept urging me on for years while I was looking for the right publisher.

Patricia Damery

When Patricia and I were in Los Angeles in April, celebrating the launching of Marked by Fire, which Patricia and I co-edited, Nancy Mozur, who runs the Los Angeles C.G. Jung Institute’s wonderful bookstore, handed me a copy of the latest Psychological Perspectives. Synchronistically, as these things seem to happen, the review I had written of Farming Soul was in that issue: Volume 55, Issue 1.

So let's be clear here—I am no dispassionate critic with an objective eye. I am a friend, a fan, a believer in Patricia’s courageous process, an admirer of her life and writing, and most recently, her co-editor. We both write in the genre we think of as Jungian memoir, personal stories that illuminate the inner life.

Here are some sections from the just published review:

Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation by Patricia Damery
(Fisher King Press,) 2010.

Individuation is not for sissies. If the Great Serpent of your unfolding demands you develop aspects of yourself that are frowned upon by the spirit of the times, disapproved of by your analyst, and considered weird by most everyone you know, you’ll need to cultivate your own truth. If, on the way to becoming a Jungian analyst, the Golden Snake of your flowering requires you to study shamanism, work with a psychic, commune with invisible Presences, wander off the beaten Jungian path to explore the path of Rudolf Steiner—a cousin of Jung’s in the lineage of Goethe—you may find yourself in various kinds of trouble. If you’re a farmer’s daughter who left the farm as a young woman but the Jeweled Snake of your essential nature transports you back to farming, and you find yourself growing lavender and grapes on a ranch with your second husband, following the magical practices of bio-dynamic farming—an alchemical process developed by Steiner—you’ll need strong muscles of body and of spirit…. If, on top of all of this, your Snake insists you are a writer, and that you must tell your story, you’ll likely learn how lonely it can be to follow your own path.

Farming Soul is the stirring story of a remarkable woman. Patricia Damery has developed all the aspects of herself required by her Snake. Clearly conceived, yet intricately layered, this memoir is a weaving of narrative strands that tell stories in time. They are weft to the timeless warp of the farming cycle, described in short chapters, mostly named for the months of the year. Those sections are more teachings than stories. We learn the mysterious practices of shamanic farming, the stirring of sun soaked waters with a tincture, for example, of valerian, to bring warmth to the grapes when it’s cold in early March. This requires stirring first clockwise then in reverse direction, which “throws the water into chaos, that state that Rudolf Steiner says is most receptive to the divine."

The biodynamic farmer listens to the land, sings to the vines. She does not impose her will upon it, as do industrial farmers. Like a Jungian analyst, she waits for what’s underground to reveal itself. Damery returns us to the roots of Jungian psychology, to Jung’s rhizome—the unseen “true life.” She takes us back to the alchemists, who stirred tinctures of flower essences, and invited the divine. She takes us back to Goethe, who was an alchemist. His great drama, Faust, influenced Jung’s psychology and his scientific studies of plant life influenced Steiner’s ideas about farming.…

A compelling strand of Damery’s story is about the group that followed the late Don Sandner into the Southwest to study shamanism. Sandner was a revered elder of our tribe. He had studied the Navajo and worked in the shamanic tradition. He did drumming rituals for candidates in the early years of my candidacy.…Those trips to the Southwest stirred Damery’s psyche, opened her up to the divine. The Great Serpent showed up during the drumming, in visions, in dreams and in active imagination. It shape-shifted into a Golden Snake, a Jeweled Snake, the Kundalini Snake uncoiling its sacred energies, which, in Damery’s case, erupted with such intensity that she set off car alarms.

Learning to contain and channel this energy required yet another initiatory path for Damery. She did not find her temenos for this work in her Jungian tribe. She had to go off and study with a wise psychic, Norma T, who helped validate Damery’s experience of the “spirit world."

Farming Soul is, as the subtitle indicates, a “tale of initiation,” actually several initiations. As I reflect on the long walkabout Damery had to make, the hermetic practices her Golden Snake required before she could return to her Jungian path and be certified as an analyst, I remember what Joe Henderson told me about initiation. Joe was a founder of the San Francisco Jung Institute and my control analyst. He explained that the initiate needs to leave the tribe, go off and have her personal vision, meet her totem, learn what her myth is before she can return to the tribe, bringing the gifts of her own nature.

Some years ago I was in charge of providing food for a Sunday afternoon event at the San Francisco Institute. Patricia Damery, now an analyst, was going to speak about the Horned Goat. Our community is housed in a gracious old home in an elegant part of town. Suddenly, entering the French doors from the garden, I saw three goats sauntering in. Goats in the Institute? My first thought was, “Oh my God, the food!” But I could see that each goat was firmly attached to a lead and a handler. My second thought was, “How perfect! This hallowed place is in sore need of goatsmell, goatsong, goat energy. And here is our own Patricia Damery, bringing in the vitality of the natural world, the ‘lumen naturae.’ What a blessing to us all.”

Farming Soul is a blessing for Jungians, a reminder of our roots in the Reality of the Psyche, and a challenge to expand our consciousness. Damery helps us remember Psyche as one aspect of the long story Mother Nature has been weaving, of plants and animals, humans and gods—like the Great Serpent who appeared to Damery during a drumming and informed her she needed to develop a practice. She has, and she is showing us the way.