A Catholic Muse?

in the city where the music began
i hear the song of my life in your voice

yours is the clamorous “te deum” of the bellsyours the fingers of the early morning suntouching my face and the crown of my head  

—Lowinsky, “to the lost nurse of a childhood in Florence”
in red clay is talking p. 30

A Secret Catholic Soul

For a Jew, I have a very intense relationship with Catholicism. I find myself mesmerized by news of Pope Francis, the new Pontiff who castigates the church for being obsessed with people’s sexual behavior, forgetting love, mercy and social justice. Why should this make me feel so glad and hopeful? Why should I get all weepy and emotional? 

Maybe it’s because my childhood was steeped in Catholic church music. My father, a musicologist, focused on the music of the church in the Renaissance. My young sense of the sacred was shaped by Gregorian Chant and the Stabat Mater of Josquin des Prez, Pergolesi, Palestrina and Scarlatti. I experience the holy in churches, mostly when in Italy. When there I light candles for my beloved dead, and for friends and family who are suffering. Dan and I have just returned from a trip to Italy. My favorite church on this trip was the Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, in Rome. This medieval church embodies, in image and architecture, my experience of inwardness and interiority.

The Basilica feels deeply feminine to me and I love the animal presence. It’s strange to feel so at home in Italian churches. There is a family story behind this. I wrote about it in The Sister from Below:

The Lady of Florence is in the sound of the church bells. She is in every glimpse of the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, as I turn the dark corner of some narrow street and see her radiance anew.…She draws my eyes to Brunelleschi’s great red Duomo and suddenly I feel alive, full of inexplicable joy, as though I’ve come home after a long journey. Do I hear a voice say: “You can never get lost, as long as you keep sight of the Duomo.”

The Duomo, Santa Maria di Fiore, Florence

The Lady of Florence appears to me like the virgin of the annunciation in the painting by Fra Angelica, surprised out of some deep place, and at once disoriented by the news the angel has to tell her, and strangely calm…

Annunciation by Fra Angelico

The Lady of Florence is a graceful Italian woman, walking down an old cobbled street in a pair of elegant shoes, or buzzing about on her Vespa, trailing a lovely scarf…I feel quintessentially myself when I am here. Familiar. Beloved. Yet who is the one who loves me only in Florence. Who is it I seek whom I cannot quite touch?…

In the family stories there was a nursemaid, or was she a neighbor, Lydia…How can one touch the one who formed you when you can’t see her face, can’t understand her language?…Perhaps I should invoke the Lady…It seems too simple. And yet, when I sit down alone on my poetry porch, wrap myself in my red and purple shawl, and focus inward, she appears. I feel as though I am a child again. Her eyes are green and she looks at me as though I am the world’s most beloved child…I say, You are here. You remember me. 

Of course, because you remember me. I told you I would always be with you. You were so young, I thought you wouldn’t understand. But you did. You’ve come back.

We had a special bond, you and I…There you were, so delicate and small, so burdened with your mother’s heavy load. You looked more like me than you did your own mother. People thought you were mine as we wandered the piazzas and you dashed into flocks of pigeons, proclaiming your magical powers. Your Italian ass so good you could have been mine…I liked to dress you up. You loved this…I liked to take you out to see the saints, the Madonna, to pray in the churches…I understood you better than your own parents did. You were so relaxed with me, so playful. Around them you turned into a little grown up. I couldn’t bear the fact you had not been baptized, that you’d not go to heaven. Here in the city of Dante, I wanted you to be baptized so we could be reunited in Paradise. You were all excited about it. You loved the ritual, the Latin prayer, the priest. You told your father, how could you not? You were his child. 

He flew into a fury. How could I do such a thing? It was a violation! A desecration! How absurd! I was consecrating you forever. And in any case your father spent more time in churches and knew more about Gregorian Chant and the mass than do most Catholics. I suspected he had a hidden yearning, a secretly Catholic soul. But, as you know, there was no talking to your father.

A Secret Jewish Soul

Fast forward a number of years, from that active imagination which brought me the voice of my lost lady. It is 2013, the International Association of Analytical Psychology Conference in Copenhagen. Fisher King Press (FKP), a Jungian press, has a big presence among the book tables. Publishers Mel Mathews and Patty Cabanas, who have published five of my books in the past four years, are present. I feel flooded with my gratitude to them and with amazement at what they have accomplished. They now have 41 psychology titles, 8 poetry titles, 15 fiction titles plus books on creativity, astrology and ecopsychology.

I had shopped The Sister from Below around for seven years with no luck. Even Jungian publishers seemed squeamish about taking on a book that was essentially a series of acts of imagination. Synchronicity and my friendship with the Israeli analyst, Erel Shalit, whom I met at an Expressive Arts Conference in Bulgaria, led me to Fisher King. Erel has published many titles with FKP.

At the book launching party for three new Fisher King titles, Mel Mathews told his origin story—the short version. He’d been a tractor salesman. He had a big dream, got into analysis, and understood he needed to write novels. Then he couldn’t find a publisher. In the way of synchronicity he happened to rent a home from a man who knew the book business inside out. So Mel started a publishing house. He was drawn to Jungian writing and ideas and decided to make that his focus. As I listened to him I thought that his story followed the archetypal pattern of the “Jungian Way—” big dream, synchronicity, listening to the inner voice that tells one to change one’s life.

In the way of synchronicity I learned that Mel too had a love affair with Florence. In fact, he was in Florence when working on the cover of The Sister from Below.

The three titles that were being launched that day, to a pleasingly large crowd, were The Dream and its Amplification, edited by Erel Shalit and Nancy Furlotti, which I wrote a blog about last month, Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, a book I edited with Patricia Damery and have written about frequently on this blog site, and a play, On the Doorstep of the Castle, by Elizabeth Clark–Stern. Both Elizabeth and I, in speaking of our books, expressed out gratitude for (at long last) finding a publisher open to the creative imagination. FKP is a haven and a godsend to many of us Jungians who write out of our subjective experiences, dreams, conversations with inner figures and wanderings in the irrational. Strange to say in the Jungian world, but it’s taken an “outsider” with his own compelling “story of the Jungian Way” to open up the publishing world to us.

Elizabeth and her colleague, the wonderful dancer Lindsey Rosen, performed the play one evening. In the way of synchronicity I found myself weeping, not only because the play is extraordinarily moving, and Elizabeth and Lindsey are fine actors and movers, but because it hit on of so many of my obsessions:

Catholicism
The Jews in Medieval Spain
The Inquisition
Conversos who are secret Jews
Kabbalah and the Feminine Face of God
Active Imagination and its earlier incarnation as mystical prayer

The conceit of the play is fabulous. A young converso, Alma de Leon (Lindsey), who is a descendant of the famous Kabbalistic rabbi Moses de Leon, applies to become a novice under the tutelage of Teresa of Avila (Elizabeth), a Carmelite nun said to be “the most awake woman in Spain,” “a woman who receives raptures from God.” Alma is suffering from an “aridity of soul.” She wants to learn how to receive the divine. She also clearly needs a sanctuary from the dread hands of the Inquisition.

Teresa, as she is played convincingly by Elizabeth, is able to convey to the audience the experience of being answered by an inner voice, by an other who has a different point of view, a larger wisdom. I identified with Teresa, though my inner figures are very different. That look of listening, on the face of a Saint deep in prayer—hearing the voice of the divine—or on the face of the poet in reverie—suddenly hearing the voice of the poem begin to sing—or the face of one engaged in active imagination, when the figure in a dream begins to speak—voicing a wisdom unknown to the conscious mind—that feeling of wonder, delight, awe—is one I know well. This mystic, this saint, who, it turns out, is a converso herself, gives me a sense of lineage both as a Jew and a Jungian.

In the way of synchronicity, wandering through museums in Italy on our later trip, I saw that expression on the faces of many saints. Here's an image by Rubens of Teresa of Avila.

Teresa prays to her God for counsel about whether to take in this young converso who knows Teresa’s secret and could betray her to the Inquisition. Should she take this risk? We watch her face light up, listening:” You want me to fight for her…You know what it is to be an outcast Jew?”

With Alma’s encouragement Teresa has the courage to write down her encounters with the divine, risking the fires of the Inquisition. With Teresa’s guidance Alma finds her way into her own Kabbalistic vision of the feminine face of God. The two women struggle with each other, support each other, go out into the world to touch the lives of the poor. By the end of the play the whole audience was in tears, and Elizabeth and Lindsey got a much–deserved standing ovation.

Elizabeth has the courage, the creative freedom, to bring together a historical figure, Teresa of Avila, and a fictional figure, a creation of her own imagination, Alma de Leon. She says:

I was aware of the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, Edith Stein, who chanced to read Teresa’s autobiography and realized it was what she had been searching for all her life. She converted to the Carmelite order, yet could not curb her criticism of the Pope, who turned the other way while the Jews were being led to the death camps from Italy. Her public denunciation eventually resulted in the Gestapo escorting Edith and her sister, Rosa, to Auschwitz, where they were exterminated in 1942. 

I was so moved by this story I began to imagine a young Jewish woman, living in 16th century Spain, who, like Edith Stein, was searching for something to feed the longing of her soul. “What if Teresa and Edith met?” I thought, with a sense of great excitement. I did not transpose Edith directly to the 16th century, but began to research the story of the Jews at that time. The character of Alma, Spanish for soul, emerged in vivid dreams and images from the dusty plains of central Spain.

She describes her creative process, very much like active imagination, requiring inward listening, allowing her characters to lead:

I tossed out my preconceptions and ideas about the story, and just let the characters guide me. Alma had Edith’s courage, but was not a philosopher. She was a woman of the senses, the earth, the arts.

The figure behind the play, Edith Stein, struggled and died in the breach between her Jewishness and her Catholicism. In the way of synchronicity, I hear from Elizabeth that she and Lindsey will be performing the play in their home town of Seattle, in a church which houses a Jewish congregation in the basement. The minister and the rabbi are excited, because they have been looking for a way to bring their communities together. Elizabeth and Lindsey have created a bridge between the Jew and Catholic, the mystical and the quotidian. I felt my soul and my imagination reflected throughout their performance.

Later, in the Italian part of our journey, Dan and I walked across our beloved Ponte Vecchio, in Florence. We had not been here since the late ‘90s—the trip I wrote about in The Sister from Below. I thought about the new Pope, that the word Pontiff means bridge-builders. I remembered what the Sister had said to me about the bridge:

Look at the Ponte Vecchio, the only bridge over the Arno that survived the Nazi bombings in 1944, with its elegant jewelry shops and its arches. You can see that it is actually two bridges, especially at night. There is the flesh and blood bridge, full of tourists…There is the other, deeper bridge, insubstantial, with its reflected arches and yellow shops on the dark waters of the river. They touch each other, these two bridges, reflect on each other, can’t be without each other, and yet are inhabitants, like you and I are, of different realms.

Dan took this photo:

Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italy

The Muse of Exile

they say home

is a place
in the mind

—Adam David Miller

The Muse of Exile has been singing to me since I was a girl. She sings a wanderer’s song, longing for lost landscapes, lost homes. She gives me many poems.

Emma Hoffman

Many Houses Ago

I wish I could see
those fabled houses from before I was born
the home of my grandparents in the hills above Kassel
the home of the poet Nelly Sachs on Lessingstrasse in Berlin

the crystal, the silver fish knives, the music room, the library
the well-tempered Bach, the Hölderin, the Goethe
Buber’s “Legend
of the Baal Shem Tov” who, it is said,
                                                ascended
                                                to the radiance…

We wander around America
transporting what’s left
of the crystal, the fish knives
from haunted house to haunted house

the house with the pond and the scary catfish
the house with the frieze of dancing maenads
the house on the ridge where we watched the sun circle
from summer to winter and back

But always I am also
in that other life—refugee reality
the Nazis have confiscated home
Nelly Sachs has made it to sanctuary
sits in a white room in Stockholm
talking to stones

O the chimneys
....cleverly devised houses of death
when Israel’s body dissolves
into smoke.
        (first published in The Pinch)

View From a Lost Home, oil by Emma Hoffman

Where is home? Is it in the Europe my family fled because of the Nazis? Is it in North Carolina, where my father had his first job at Black Mountain College and I was a baby in that Eden? Or Italy, where I was 4 and 5 and spoke that language fluently, I’m told. Hearing Italian makes me feel strangely at home, but my tongue has lost its music. Is home in Queens, Princeton, Berkeley, India, Oakland, Orinda, Pleasant Hill? Is it in Barton, Vermont, where we spent summers by Crystal Lake, or is in Chicago where I visited my mother for so many years, before dementia exiled her from the great lake in which she swam well into her eighties?

The Muse of Exile was singing up a storm on the trip Dan and I took recently to the mid-west. I gave a talk in Cleveland about my grandmother, the painter Emma Hoffman. The Muse of Exile was her inspiration as she painted self portraits, portraits of family, landscapes, interior scenes of the houses in which she lived: these paintings reflect her losses, her wandering, her search for a new life. I have been tracking her exodus for years in my writing, first in The Motherline, then in many poems. In Cleveland I could see the theme of exile resonate on people’s faces. We are all exiles of one sort or another.

Ticket to Exile
The Muse of Exile sang to me in a different key as we wandered around Ohio and into Indiana where I have family. I was reading Adam David Miller’s memoir, A Ticket to Exile. Miller is a fine poet who has written a gripping book about the pre-Civil Rights movement South. The intense drama of his book is described on the back cover:

At age nineteen, A.D. Miller sat in a jail cell. His crime? He passed a white girl a note that read, “I would like to get to know you better.” For this he was accused of attempted rape.

Miller says he has an eidetic memory, which enables him to bring up scenes from his youth with great clarity. His memoir transports one into the 1920s and 30s Jim Crow South. Its structure is riveting. It opens in the middle of the drama:

I had typed that note, I would like to know you better, after work the evening before, on my thirty-dollar used Underwood, a machine I had bought on five-dollar installments with money I earned as a carhop…and…as a cobbler’s apprentice at a black-owned shoe repair shop in town.

The passing of the note is observed and Miller’s life is forever changed. The chief of police, with whom he is friendly, from whom he was about to buy a used suit, comes to the shoe repair shop to arrest him. He sits in jail, terrified, not eating. End of Part I. The reader keeps seeing him in jail, wondering how he’s doing, while he takes us back to his early childhood on his grandma’s farm, to his later childhood with his stalwart mother in Orangeville, South Carolina. He gives us rich, sensuous portraits of what life was like in his family. He describes the farm:

…good bottomland cleared from the swamp, [it] had been owned by the family since what many called the “farce” of Reconstruction. It had supported twelve mouths, twenty-four hands, working year-round.… 

They grew cotton for cash, corn as food for humans and animals. Tobacco was later to replace cotton as a cash crop. Vegetables: beans, tomatoes, okra, and the root crops, beets potatoes and rutabagas filled the garden. There were apples, pears, peaches, pecans and black walnuts in season. Berries and nuts were gathered from the woods…

The women knew what herbs to gather in the woods if someone were hurt or sick. He lived in a rural world of Black people; saw his first white people on the road to Orangeville when he was four and his mother came for him.

Miller was a bright, industrious boy who did all sorts of odd jobs to help support his family. He tells the story of all the houses his family moved to because of money or landlord problems, seven in three years. None of them had electricity or inside toilets. He tells stories that give us the texture and feel of that time, full of the pleasures and the humiliations of being Black. His was a restless, curious mind and he refused to imprison it in Jim Crow norms. That got him into deep trouble and in the way that deep trouble often does, opened his way into a larger world in which he could develop his many gifts. But he leaves us hanging onto the image of him stuck in that jail for most of the book. We are not released from that tension until the very end, when we learn how fate steps in to get him his ticket to exile.

He writes: “I was hit by trauma so severe that my memory was frozen. I could not visit that event for many years.” It is clear from his poignant descriptions of life in the 20s and 30s South, how much his exile cost him. He brings that lost home to life for his readers and I imagine for himself.

Adam David Miller

Crossing Cultures

Dan and I took a few days to explore Ohio. We wandered around the Vermillion River Reservation, heard the song of the bull frog and the hammering of a woodpecker. We visited the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge and saw two bald eagles in a tree. We stayed at Maumee Bay resort, on the shores of Lake Erie.

It is also a bird sanctuary and we were treated to the sight of a baby owl sticking its head out of a nesting box. These creatures have been in exile too. We drove to Toledo to meet my e-mail friend and poetry buddy Richard and his lady Carol. We sat for hours in a Lebanese restaurant with brass lamps and beaded curtains (undoubtedly owned by exiles), eating hummus and kebabs and telling our stories of exile and wandering.

Carol, a docent at the Toledo Museum, had told us that it was imperative that we see the exhibit, Crossing Cultures, on Aboriginal Australian Art. She was right. It was a moving and mind altering experience and continued our odyssey of exile.

Aboriginal Art, Toledo Museum

These paintings are not abstract. They are the way these people, who have been exiled from their lands, pass down their knowledge of the landscape, how they mark the waterholes and cliffs and hills. It is how they were able to reclaim lands, proving by their artwork their intimate knowledge of the landscape.

The Muse of Exile was singing to me as we traveled to visit my mother in Indianapolis. She is living with my brother and sister-in-law, their teenage daughter and son, three dogs and four cats. They have given her a wonderful home. But seeing her there is another kind of exile. When my children were growing up she was “Chicago Grandma.” For me, she has always been the essence of home—a comforting, loving, funny mother, my informant on all the family stories, hub of the family wheel. Now she tells me she doesn’t know who she is or where she is. She is in exile from herself. She has lost that home in the mind of which Miller writes. My homing instinct still points to Chicago. Where is the center now?

My mother and Miller are of the same generation, though he is vibrant and clear-minded at ninety-one. A few years after Miller got his ticket to exile my mother helped my father integrate Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It became the first white college in the South to accept Black students. Exiles from their home because of who they were, my parents identified deeply with Black people in America. I grew up singing spirituals and believing that Black people were my kin.

Like the aboriginal people of Australia, my art is how I find my way home. My poems bring me back to center. Poetry connects me to the hub of the wheel of life. I have always felt at home in African American poetry, and especially loved the poems of Al Young, [link to his website] because of their musicality. Years ago I wrote a poem dedicated to Al. It is an important poem for me, and one I have often posted on this blog. I wanted to get the poem to Al but never could figure out how.

Al Young

My friend Leah Shelleda and I decided to do a poetry reading for friends and family, to celebrate turning seventy and forty-four years of being poetry buddies. Al is an old friend of Leah’s. They grew up together in Detroit. He came to our party. I realized that this was my moment. I read the poem to him and our gathered kin. I handed it to him. And when he blessed me for it, visibly moved, this exile felt, for that moment, at home.

YOUR PEOPLE ARE MY PEOPLE

I’m going to be just like you, Ma
Rainey…
& sing from the bottom of hell
up to the tops of high heaven                       
                         —Al Young

for Al Young

My people are the people of the pianoforte and the violin
Mozart people    Bach people    Hallelujah people
My people are the Requiem people    Winterreise people    Messiah people
who crossed the red sea   Pharaoh’s dogs at our heels

Your people are the drum beat people   the field holler people    the conjure people
Blues people    Jubilee people    people who talk straight to God
Your people are the Old Man River people    the Drinking Gourd people
singing the Lord’s songs in a strange land

My family had a Sabbath ritual
We lit the candles      sang Go Down Moses     sang Swing Low Sweet Chariot
sang slave music freedom music secret signals in the night music
my father said you never know
when Pharaoh will be back

I was young
I was American   I thought
my people were the Beatles     the Lovin’ Spoonful    the Jefferson Airplane
singing Alice and her White Rabbit through all
those changes my parents did not understand

That didn’t last
That was leaving home music      magic mushroom music
Puff the Dragon music floating off to Never Never land
now heard in elevators in the pyramids of finance

But Old Man River still rolls through my fields
Bessie Smith still sweetens my bowl
Ma Rainey appears in the inner sanctum
of the CG Jung Institute      flaunting her deep black bottom

My father’s long gone over Jordan
and I’d hate for him to see
how right he was about Pharaoh

but I want you to know    Al

every Christmas
in black churches all over Chicago
the Messiah shows up
accompanied by my mother’s
Hallelujah violin
         (first published in New Millennium Writings)

Gretel (Hoffman) Lowinsky, age 9

Reminder

Under the Oak: Reading for the Earth

Naomi Lowinsky, Leah Shelleda, Frances Hatfield and Patricia Damery

Harms Farm, June 22, 2013

4:30 pm

The Muse of Trees

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.

The Sea Turtle Muse

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

Publication of The Faust Woman Poems

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

The Muse of the Opposites

“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.

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

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…