The Muse of Endurance

The Poetry of Resistance V

Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the

whirlwind

—Gwendolyn Brooks

“The Second Sermon on the Warpland”

Bear's Ears

Living in the Warpland
all about are the pushmen and jeapardy, theft—
all about are the stormers and scramblers but
what must our Season be, which starts from Fear?
          —Gwendolyn Brooks
          “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”

Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz

We live in a strange dissociated time, in a warped land. We’ve spent a year in fear—demonstrating, raging at the TV, looking for saviors. I see none on the horizon. We’ve had some victories, in Virginia and in Alabama. The Russia Investigation grinds on. But we’ve had to watch so much we value slashed, decimated—Bear’s Ears, The Arctic National Refuge, Obamacare, DACA, Civil Rights, abortion rights, the Paris Climate agreement. We’ve seen extreme weather events. Texas has never seen as much rain as Harvey dumped on it. California has never seen a wildfire as huge and unstoppable as the Thomas fire in Ventura. The coast of Louisiana is washing away. Puerto Rico suffered two hurricanes in a row—Irma and Maria—which knocked out the power grid for months. Hospitals couldn’t function, water and food was scarce. Pleas for help from Puerto Rican officials like Carmen Yulín Cruz—the feisty mayor of San Juan—were met with disdain and insults by our berserker president, throwing paper towels and blaming the people of the island for their troubles. Cruz responded: “You can’t handle the truth.”

The truth is—the intensity of these catastrophes is symptomatic of climate change; we can expect more. The truth is—he whom we prefer not to name is a master of hocus-pocus and deceit. He manipulates the news with incessant provocative tweeting, causing political storms and wildfires as he shamelessly exults in public about how rich the Wall Street tax cut will make his cronies, and of course, himself. We are at risk for burning ourselves out with outrage. The greed that stalks the land is mind boggling. What has become of caring for the poor, the homeless, the sick, the stranger? What has become of Dr. King’s arc toward justice? What about our souls?

In this dark time of the year I see a sea change in myself and in those I know. We are withdrawing into ourselves, connecting with our deep roots, our souls—not in defeat—but in order to endure. We are remembering how essential it is to tend our intimate lives, our families, our friends and our dreams. Dan and I take walks, watch “Stranger Things,” see children and grandchildren, make soup with root vegetables. Dan spends time texting “Rapid Resist” messages to organize the resistance. I spend time reading, writing and teaching “poems of resistance.” But I can feel how the center of our lives has dropped down to the vital and the eternal, far below the “noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks is good medicine right about now. Her “Sermons on the Warpland” feed my soul and remind me of the importance of tending one’s “blooming.” She wrote these poems 50 years ago, in times which brought civil rights to national attention and in which we suffered the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. She reminds us that we’ve been through terrible times before. She asks a question that is painfully relevant today: “what must our Season be, which starts from Fear?” Not much.

Night Blooming
The time
cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face
all unashamed.
          —Gwendolyn Brooks
          “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”

Brooks’ “Sermons on the Warpland” are blunt and truth telling. She is preaching to her own people, to “Big Bessie” whose “feet hurt like nobody’s business,” but who “stands/in the wild weed…a citizen.” In the first “Sermon” Brooks urges her brothers and sisters to “build your church…With love like lion–eyes./ With love like morningrise.” It is a love poem to a people who have not been treated with much love in a land still warped by slavery and Jim Crow. These “Sermons” are poems of direct address, of exhortation; they speak to the power of endurance and seem to me to be especially pertinent in our times.

Endurance takes many forms. My friend and poetry buddy Rich Messer sent me a poem recently that takes a more subtle, slant approach to resistance and to endurance. The word “endure” is related to Old English and Old German word roots for “true, “trust,” “tree” and “Druid.” This linguistic kinship web connects us to our pagan, oak seer roots, to the spirit of the earth, to our animal familiars, and to our ghosts. Messer’s poem is an example of what Jane Hirshfield, borrowing from Emily Dickinson, means with the phrase: “Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant” in the American PoetryReview, Sept/Oct. 2017. Hirshfield writes:

Good poems travel in ways that are strongly or subtly, meandering, askew, counter, extravagant, peculiar, free, and freeing. Their pelts are freckled. They loosen the map lines of the literal, underslip narrowness, and let us see more than would be possible by looking at things directly. They are raids on reality that allow raids on the heart. They are lies whose intention is truth exposed more fully.

That glorious freckled pelt is camouflage. “So it is with poems,” says Hirshfield, arguing that “any good poem has lurking somewhere about it the Houdini–esque energies of the Trickster…”

Here is Messer’s poem:

Night Blooming

The anniversaries fade, waves coast

up the beach and memories retreat

unrecognized. It happened. We went on,

Knowing, uneasy, we opened

the back door, to whistle home the dogs.


There are people who do not begin

and end each day, glued to the screen.

There are people who sit quietly

in their living rooms, doing nothing

before bed. These people did not

follow our leader down to the dark waters.

They speak to each other and know

wisdom and joy. I swear this to you.


We endure and go on like boulders

swallowed by a glacier, nudged farther

south every year, etched with dark furrows.


When I sit late at night

with all my animal familiars and ghosts,

the news whispered around the circle

avoids his name. The things


we love we lose.

Who will take care of the garden?

"Night Blooming" is achingly sad, lyrical, tender, deep. The first stanza casts a calm, meditative spell on us, transports us gently into a realm of fading anniversaries, waves on the beach and memories. Things happened. “We went on.” We are in the world of the aging, watching the cycles of life. What makes us “uneasy” is not named, but it casts a shadow. What feels most vital is “to whistle home the dogs,” our loyal animal familiars.

Messer moves on to a subject more complex than growing old. We are in a political poem about endurance in dreadful times which avoids all political language and reference. The poem’s speaker describes a people who have not lost their way in the “Season…of Fear," a people “who do not begin/and end each day, glued to the screen…/These people did not/follow our leader down to the dark waters." They are not complicit. There is a hint of biblical language in "the dark waters,” a sense of mystery. We are told of a people who continue to live soulful lives with "wisdom and joy." By the end of the second stanza the calm tone of the poem has risen to a passionate oath—"I swear this to you." We, the readers, receive the speaker’s intensity with relief. We are no longer in a warped land. We haven’t blindly “followed the leader” into danger and deception. We want to join this wise and joyful tribe, or rather—through the poem’s magic—we have become part of the tribe.

Here is where Messer’s trickster comes in, and, to borrow from Hirshfield’s language, “punctuate[s] pomposity and shake[s] things up.” 

Our peaceful moment among trustworthy folk is, lest we take ourselves too seriously, unhinged. The wily speaker casts another spell, turning us into "boulders/swallowed by a glacier, nudged farther/south every year." We haven’t been able to escape the fate of our times after all. We are pushed around by climate change like everything and everyone else. We do have to face our terrors, even if—like boulders— we endure. As Hirshfield says: “Trickster stories…make spells to break the spells that…grip us.”

In the fourth stanza we return to the eternal realm, the realm of what Jung calls the “Spirit of the Depths.” The poem’s speaker has shifted from the first person plural to the first person singular. Does he want to be alone with his late night blooming? Is he casting us out? We are uneasy again, as we were in the first stanza. The real news, it seems, comes from “animal familiars and ghosts,” who avoid “his name.” Of course, in true trickster sleight of hand fashion, to announce that his name is being avoided is to bring the unnamable one into the poem and the circle, while, at the same time, diminishing him, casting him out of the great cycles of life and death, and the terrible truth that “the things//we love we lose.”

Remember, he can’t face the truth. The trickster voice of the poem has put a spell on us, and out tricked our ephemeral trickster president. The poem resists the times, resists the screens, hangs out with dogs and with ghosts, and faces the ultimate loss, our lives, with that marvelous last line—"Who will take care of the garden?"

She Who Dances with Veils
It was the summer of ’43. What did my young parents know
about the Europe they’d fled

the trains the chimneys…
          —Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
          “Birth Day”

A poem of my own has just been published in the online journal Front Porch. It too is a “slant” poem, a trickster poem of resistance, which refers only tangentially to the “evil spirits” that spook our times. Like Messer’s poem it undermines the fearful “Spirit of the Times” by casting a larger view of life as seen from an ancient cave: “Your little life and mine in the flow/of all the mothers of mothers the grandmothers of magic/the daughters of ritual skill.” The poem invokes Maia, the goddess of illusion, creation and imagination—herself a trickster. I hope you’ll check it out.

The Poetry of Resistance III

The Muse at the Oasis

Chaos has awoken from a long nap

is putting on dancing shoes and heading for the streets…

—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “In the Wild Wake”

High Anxiety

The Kali Yuga say the Hindus is a dark age lacks holy law
a time of hubris greed war
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “In the Wild Wake”

We could use an oasis right about now, as the nightmare news cycle beats us about the head, invades our left temporal lobe, where speech dwells. It is hard to find words for the chaos we’re in. We wander a wasteland, our world torn apart at the seams, as our new president proceeds to rip up the careful advances of the Obama administration: Health Care, the Paris Climate Accord, Prison Justice Reform, wholesome food for school lunches, I could go on and on.

Taken by the Boogey Man

The boogey men are out—white supremacists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-Semites. Our rampaging president does a sword dance with Arab potentates while his supporters and his opponents duke it out on–line and in the streets. The phantoms of slavery emerge in Jim Crow–like laws, in police shootings of unarmed black men and in the Prison Industrial Complex. Immigrants who have been living in the U.S. peaceably for years, working hard and paying taxes, are deported for no good reason, their families splintered. Gunmen shoot strangers to make who knows what statement in a land where guns are king. The Russians it seems have hijacked our election. The President’s people may have colluded. There are investigations and more investigations; we are holding our breath for justice, for sanity, though we know all this will take time to untangle. We have a President who doesn’t believe in facts, in science or in climate change, who seems to care only about money, power and towers bearing his name, who keeps us in an anxiety state with relentless tweet attacks on all we hold dear: the earth our Mother, our democracy, our immigrant ancestors, our civil rights and liberties, our moral compass, our soul as a culture. He represents our cultural shadow, the worst, most shallow, materialistic, greedy side of America. How do we gain the consciousness we need to confront this?

March for Science (April 22, 2017, New York City)

Soul Medicine

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
—Emily Dickinson

Let me offer you some medicine in the form of a poem: Lucille Lang Day’s magical “Oasis.” Day comes at the truth slantwise. She gives us a poem that resists our collective chaos by creating a green and fertile place in our consciousness, a space where soul visits and the Muse begins to sing. Listen:

Oasis

At an oasis deep
in my left temporal lobe,
I encounter my soul
just before it leaves the party
at 33,000 feet, where
the dead do as they please,
and time is a circular target.

Where does meaning
lurk in a universe
where mountains are mangy
from fires and logging,
the president brags about
forcing himself on women,
and marksmen take aim?

In the heart of a hummingbird

beating more than one
thousand times each minute
during a rapid dive
in a high–speed chase,
while outside a bright theater
night ripens like an avocado,
and a gunman decides
not to shoot after all
because consciousness
is a moth that finally got in.

(First published in Talking Writing)

Mangy Mountain 

I imagine the poem’s speaker sitting scrunched up 33,000 feet above the earth, in that dissociated state we call airplane travel. Suddenly something shifts in her left temporal lobe, and she is released from the engine noise and the busy glow of lap top screens into another reality, where she encounters her soul. I know that moment—a sacred moment, a moment of grace—space and time open up, the dead show up, past, present and future converge and the poem begins to sing. The “Oasis” speaker looks down at the mountains, which, like a miserable dog, suffer from mange—a contagious skin disease caused by parasitic mites. In the case of the mountains, the disease is caused by parasitic capitalistic practices, which abuse the forest and the earth much as the president abuses women. The “Oasis” speaker looks for meaning in this ugliness. With the power of the pen she transforms reality: meaning lives in “the heart of a hummingbird/beating more than one/thousand times each minute…” This is a quintessential Lucille Lang Day move—merging a living symbol and scientific fact. Day holds a doctorate in Science/Mathematical Education; her poetry is full of healing medicine in our science-bashing times.

According to American Indian lore, hummingbird medicine evokes joy. Hummingbirds dart from one bright flower to another, sucking nectar, pollinating, able to fly backwards and forwards or to stay in one place. The poem, like the hummingbird, darts from one strong image to another: oasis, soul, the dead, mangy mountains, our misogynistic president. A single hummingbird makes a “rapid dive,” and everything changes: 

…a gunman decides
not to shoot after all
because consciousness
is a moth that finally got in.

The poem takes the reader on a journey from a loss of faith and meaning, to the miracle of grace. We find ourselves, with the “Oasis” speaker, in the company of the hummingbird. The moth of consciousness gets in. The gunman decides not to shoot. When the moth enters the poem we are in the presence of a transformational mystery. The gunman is transformed. The world, spared all that evil, that suffering, is transformed. We, the readers, are delivered to an oasis, a healing place with trees and water, where we can imagine that moth of consciousness, like the butterfly whose wings change the weather on the other side of the globe, transforming our world.

The Muse of Hillary

A woman on fire is a wonderful thing if you are dreaming of a bright new future. Burning Woman is…a trail–blazer for those of us who dream beyond the strangulation of patriarchy.

—Lucy Pearce, Burning Woman

Wishing for Hillary

Approaching the winter solstice—longest night—I long for Hillary. I miss her on the radio. I miss her thoughtful, policy wonkish voice. I miss her on TV, her radiance, her ability to laugh at herself, that little shimmy she did during a debate, when her opponent blamed her yet again, it seemed, for all the ills of the world. I watched her intently during the debates. I saw the fire burning deep within her, a fire cultivated throughout her life, since she was a young feminist leader at Wellesley in the late ‘60s. I watched her take on the bully, refuse his bait, ignore his jabs, take a deep breath and deftly pull the rug out from under him. She became my hero—a warrior woman.

During the dark days of the endless election campaign, I held myself together by reading and writing political poetry. I needed to remind myself that others had gone through dark days. Some survived, some did not. I needed to make sense of what we are going through in the way that poems do, through wild associations, leaps of imagination, mythic stories, slant– wise truth. After we lost Hillary for president my daughter sent me a link to a Facebook post: A young mother, baby daughter on her back, had met Hillary in the woods the day after the election, and taken a selfie. I was moved by that photo. Hillary was still in the world, though not on stage, not on TV. She was a woman walking in the woods with her husband and her dogs. That’s when she became my muse. I dealt with my grief and fury by working compulsively on a poem about her, about women in patriarchy, about women’s sacred circles in the woods, about our archetypal connections to the trees, the earth and the seasons.

I read this poem recently, at a poetry reading on the Northside of the UC Berkeley campus, my Alma Mater, my old stomping grounds. [Many years ago] I used to live on the Northside, walk to campus, leaving my young baby with a sitter. I realized, reading my Hillary poem, that I had come full circle in my life, for two members of the [very] consciousness raising group that had blown open the top of my head in the late ‘60s and made me a feminist, were there, that evening. Hillary was their hero too. I give you the poem I read that night, in the hope that it will speak to you who miss Hillary, who mourn her, and our country.

Wishing in the Woods   With Hillary

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

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

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

she was fierce   about voting for you in ‘08
Now she’s lost   her way in the woods
lost my name   your fame   lost the whole world
of visible powers   lost to the outcry
the pandemonium    the kids walking out
of their schools shouting   “Not Our President”

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

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

Hillary   my wish is to surround you   with sisters
of the secret grove   We’ll sit in a circle   kiss the earth
with our holiest lips   We’ll lift up our hands and pray
for your healing our healing the healing   of the dis–
respected    disaffected   molested   undocumented   Jim Crowed
And let’s not forget   the trees   the bees   the buffalo

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

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

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

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

My Lady Tree

In my just published book, The Rabbi, theGoddess, and Jung: Getting the Word from Within, the symbolic meaning of the tree is revealed as I contemplate a painful childhood experience. Here is a section from the first chapter of the book:

I am haunted by a memory. When I was five or six I once drew a female figure—her arms reached upward; her feet were the roots of a tree; she was numinous to me. I called her my “Lady Tree.” Proudly, I showed her to my father. He was a college professor, a musicologist. He could make music shine. He could make a Renaissance painting radiant with his words, even to the eyes of a young child. But he couldn’t see the beauty of my “Lady Tree.”

“That’s silly,” he said. “Is it a bull?” The hurt of that moment is still palpable. I imagine we can all remember moments like that, when our young spirits were crushed. Looking back I can see that my “Lady Tree” was a living symbol for me, an archetype that would shape my life and my fate. I had no idea then that the “Lady Tree” was both the goddess and her priestess, that she was sacred to the old religion in which the feminine is worshiped, that she was a divinity who would seek her way into flesh through me and many others of my time. I had no idea there was an ancient “Celtic Tree Alphabet” which Robert Graves argued was a secret code by which poets handed down their worship of the forbidden White Goddess. I had no idea that in Africa, a young man, Malidoma Somé—who was to become a well known shaman—would see the Goddess in the Tree, while undergoing his initiatory rites. He would recognize Her body glowing with green, as an expression of Her “immeasurable love.” I had no idea that the goddess was associated with trees in cultures all over the world, no idea that in the Middle Ages the tree was addressed with the honorific “Lady,” or that Hildegard of Bingen had married two words—“green” and “truth” to coin the word “veriditas,” to describe the moment God heals you with a plant. I had no idea that the Tree of Life was the sacred glyph of Jewish mysticism, or that I would spend much of my life reclaiming the living symbol of my “Lady Tree”—she would come to me in dreams, in life, in poems—she was the primordial form of my shape-shifting muse, “The Sister from Below.”

I had no idea that just a few years later I would find a tree to sit in—an oak—which would become my friend, my familiar, and in its branches I would begin to write poems. I had no idea I was becoming an oak-seer, haunted by the spiritual world of the Druids…

How could I have known then, that I was not only carrying the wound of a little girl whose father mocked her “Lady Tree,” I was carrying the wound of generations of women held in a patriarchal worldview that cut them off from their primordial roots in the earth, their arms that reached for the sky.

The Motherline, Redux

I was recently approached by two writers, Melia Keeton–Digby, whose book is called TheHeroines Club: A Mother–Daughter Empowerment Circle and Vanessa Olorenshaw, whose book is Liberating Motherhood:Birthing the Purple Stockings Movement. They both had been influenced by my book, The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots, first published a generation ago. They hoped I would give them a blurb. They were being published by Womancraft Publishing, which is committed “to sharing powerful new women’s voices.”

I had no idea anyone was still reading my book. I hadn’t known of the press, or that there were women, younger than my children, writing exciting feminist books that reach down to the ancient roots of the feminine. The founder of Womancraft Publishing, Lucy Pearce, I learned, has written a powerful book called Burning Woman, in whose acknowledgements I was flattered to find my own name. I gather from the titles of her books that she shares the passions that moved me to write The Motherline, about which my daughters used to tease: “Mommy writes about the moon and the womb.”

I want to share this good news with those of you who mourn Hillary, who, like these writers, is a passionate feminist committed to improving the lives of women and children. There will be a new day after the longest night. There is a future for feminist writing that honors the archetypal feminine. The Goddess has not been forgotten.

The Heroines Club: A Mother–Daughter Empowerment Circle by Melia Keeton–Digby. 

Keeton–Digby understands the magic of the sacred circle, of story, of the talking stick. She knows that girls need heroines, need a relationship with their mothers “based on love and mutuality.” She has created a curriculum for a circle that meets once a month for a year. She has chosen twelve diverse heroines, each of whom stands for psychological theme. Among her heroines—my heroines too—are Frida Kahlo, “I Express My Feelings in Healthy Ways,” Ann Frank, “I Am Resilient in the Face of Adversity,” Malala Yousafzai, “I Am Worthy,” and Maya Angelou, “I Speak My Truth.”

Keeton–Digby writes clear and easily understandable instructions for the circles, in an intimate personal tone, based on the archetypal circle of women and the mother–daughter bond—held sacred in the Eleusinian Mystery religion and in matriarchal cultures. I wish there had been such circles when I was a girl, when my daughters were girls.

Here is the blurb I wrote for The Heroines Club:

Melia Keeton–Digby has created a wise ritual, rooted in ancient practices and invoking the issues of our times. The Heroines Club brings relational sensitivity and a fierce fighting spirit to the support of mother–daughter bonding, the creation of community, the calling forth of the Motherline and the honoring of a pantheon of heroines who inspire women’s empowerment as well as their psychological and spiritual development. A blessing for women and girls. I hope the Heroines Club will travel the world.

Liberating Motherhood: Birthing the Purple Stockings Movement by Vanessa Olorenshaw.

Olorenshaw is a sharp–tongued critic of the patriarchy and of capitalism. She’s burning mad about the denial of women’s power, disrespect for the work of mothering and the deification of the bottom line. She writes passionately of the profound experiences of embodied motherhood:

From the power of our bodies to create life and give birth, to the nurturing of our children we, as mothers, touch something outside the ‘machine’ of modern economic existence.

She dares to criticize feminism’s devaluation of motherhood:

So the work of pregnancy, birth and motherhood are overlooked in our culture (by many feminists and patriarchs alike) but so too are the joys, beauty, power, majesty and spirit.

She writes in an intimate sister to sister tone, and has a wicked sense of humor:

One biological feature that defines us as mammals is our mammary glands. They sustained our species for tens of thousands of years. Yet, the way Western culture reacts to our breasts, you’d think that they had been invented by the porn industry in 1970.

Here’s my blurb:

“The time for a mother movement has arrived,” proclaims Vanessa Olorenshaw, in her smart, funny, provocative and highly political manifesto, Liberating Motherhood. She confronts the fear and loathing of the female body, which undermines a woman’s pleasure in her glorious mammalian body. She argues that a woman’s choice should include staying home with her children without being impoverished. What a radical—in the sense of having deep roots—idea!

Liberating Motherhood is a breath of fresh air in a culture deadened by the soulless grip of the money machine. Olorenshaw’s call to mothers to honor the mysteries of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and childrearing, brings joy to the heart of this old feminist. Olorenshaw is a “Purplestocking”—her phrase—a “maternal feminist” intellectual who honors women’s life–giving power and remembers when the Great Mother ruled heaven and earth. So, all you mothers, grandmothers and children of mothers, read Liberating Motherhood, pull on your purple stockings and join the revolution: #MothersOfTheWorldUnite!

Burning Woman by Lucy H. Pearce

Though I didn’t write a blurb for this profound book, I want to praise it. Burning Woman, Pearce writes, is a lost archetype of the feminine. We know her in her negatives form, she is the pilloried, despised, feared witch, bitch, heretic, whore of the “burning times,” burned “simply for speaking [her] own truth.” We hear our latest witch hunt in the chant “Lock her up!” at the rallies of our president elect. But who is she in her positive form? Listen to Pearce:

Burning Woman is she who is inflamed by her own direct connection to the Feminine life force. She who dares to follow her own vision, who speaks up and tells her own stories. She naturally sails counter to what she has been taught…The process of unlearning is long, as she learns to uncover her own authentic source to life’s power, and claims her own authority to navigate her life according to her inner flame…

She has often been depicted in the forms of the dark goddesses: Kali, Medusa, Oshun and Hecate. When she is given her way, she gives birth to the world.

Is this a way of understanding what happened to Hillary and to us? Why her loss feels so unbearable? As though we were all expecting the birth of a divine girl child, and suffered a miscarriage?

And yet, all is not lost. I remember feeling an unbearable loss when The Motherline went out of print. Years later, my wonderful publisher Fisher King Press, reissued it, with a beautiful cover painting by my dear friend Sara Spaulding–Phillips, a cover that put the Lady Tree and the Motherline together in one image. It was read by a new generation of feminists with roots in the archetypal.

Burning Woman is grounded in a Jungian sensibility. Pearce writes that she has been researching lost archetypes of the feminine for many years. Pearce sees Burning Woman as “the archetypal Feminine we all have within us from birth, one we are programmed to be, and our role is to unwrap ourselves…” I recognize that process in my own development, and in that of the women with whom I work. One of the forms of the Self, for a woman, is Burning Woman. Pearce writes:

The process of embodying Feminine Power has a distinct pattern and structure that our bodies instinctively know. It is not the pyramid of masculine power, but the endless flowing of the spiral. It will lead you in and out of the darkness and towards the fire.

I wasn’t thinking about that when I wrote the poem I gave you, dear reader, “Wishing in the Woods With Hillary.” But if you look at it again, you will see the pattern Pearce describes. Hillary is our Burning Woman in both senses. She represents Feminine power lighting our way in the woods, and in the world.

The Muse of Vacation

Mural/Mosaic made with bottle caps

Why were you born voyager?
—Robert Hass

Hummingbird Medicine

Once a year for many years Dan and I have come to San Pancho, a village by the sea in Mexico, in winter, on vacation. To vacation is to vacate, to empty out—essential as an exhalation, as ebb tide and waning moon. For us it is a kind of annual Sabbath, a holy time to remember who we are and who we were.

To vacation is to let go schedules, traffic, everyday worries and rituals, to settle into a chaise lounge and listen to the ocean’s murmur and hush—our Mother Tongue, our origin. To watch Her is endlessly fascinating, Her rise and Her fall, Her great blue curl, white crash, spent swirls reaching for the beach.

To hear Her puts me in trance, in a reverie visited by hummingbird in intimate contact with pink hibiscus.

Hummingbird medicine, it is said, is all about beauty and joy, about the nectar of life, the love between plants and creatures—life-pollinating life. Hummingbird feathers will make you a love charm. Hummingbird sightings—the dazzle of tiny wings moving so fast they seem invisible, the bird hovering in mid air—return me to the realm of magic, the interpenetration of inside and outside, of earth, sky and water, of myth and fairy tale, birds and trees, stories and dream. The sound of the waves is cut by the whine of a saw cutting tiles for the house being worked on next door. There’s laughter by the pool, and somewhere, a Mexican love song on the radio.

“Look at those colors” says Dan, framing a shot with his ipad. He takes photos of beach restaurants: houses, playful details, birds, plants, flowers, spellbound by the radiance everywhere. The palette is different here. The bright green T–shirt I buy looks all wrong at home. But here it belongs to the joy of color.

The ocean is azure at the horizon, goes aquamarine with patches of turquoise until the swell breaks radiant white. Seven brown pelicans swoop down, caressing the waters. There’s a bright orange beach umbrella, intense blue of the roof of the house on the cliff that was lost in a lawsuit. A girl in a purple bikini cavorts with her lover in the surf. A dad, with his lime green boogey board, falls off it numerous times, until at last he rides a wave triumphantly to shore. His daughter laughs. Houses are painted bright shades on the beach and off.

Sometimes when we’re lucky, the night is clear, and the sky reveals its splendor—great wash of Milky Way and countless stars—a sight we city dwellers are never granted at home. We look up, hungry for the bounty and the mystery, until our necks ache. Dan finds the Pleiades. We contemplate the ancients, their intimacy with all those shifting stories in the dark.

The Ballad of Time and Mutability

One of the most beautiful rooms in my life is the great room at Casa Obelisco, our B&B, where we gather for breakfast, meet strangers, hear origin stories about the town and its people. The gracious space, with three open arches framing the ocean view, and high ceilings rising to a cupola, has a Moorish flavor, remembers Southern Spain—the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Sunburst sconces light it in the evening, and star shaped lanterns fill the chapel like dome.

Outside the cupola is covered with Moorish blue tiles. We visit it to watch the sunset from the roof. It is a beloved ritual, to watch the sun go down as people have forever. Every sundown is the same and entirely different.

Time changes on vacation, especially when you stay in one place for two weeks, a place you’ve known and loved for so long. There is a timelessness about it—we’re here, we’ve been here, the gods willing we will be here again.

The Muse of this vacation is a ballad. The chorus is repeated. Our hosts discovered this enchanted place some twenty years ago, and built themselves and us a lovely B&B. They tell this story over breakfast many mornings, when entertaining newcomers. The chorus is the great room. The town is much the same and always changing. Each stanza tells the story of some new eating–place, some gone familiar place. There’s always someone building, someone tearing down. The old hotel nearby has been razed to the ground. There are differing rumors about what will be built there next. That beach restaurant we loved at sunset—where egrets flew into the palms above us, as the light dimmed—is gone. There is a new Italian restaurant right off the plaza, near St. Francis, the town saint. We sat there listening to three old guys talking rapid Italian, shades of Venice where we spent time a few months ago. Trance music, curated by a disc jockey, goes in loops, in circles, a kind of techno ballad—magical, at once familiar and strange, of now and of forever.

San Francisco (near the beach)

Time relaxes. Takes its own sweet time. The muse craves such time—time to ponder, time to get obsessed with a poem, work it, rework it, let it talk back to you in the night and show new facets of itself come morning. Time to forget the latest spasm of outrage in U.S. politics. Time to read the novel that sat on the floor of your study at home for months. Time to write about the time you’re having in your journal, make notes for your blog. Time to sleep in, to remember your dreams, to write them down and work with them. Time to meditate on Robert Hass’ “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Hass floats the notion that “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” I muse on that. My words reflect on what I love. They’re not the thing itself, not the crash of the surf, not the hummingbird. That’s gone, on invisible wings.

For me, much of the meaning in a stay put vacation is time to engage with such loss. Hass begins his poem, “All the new thinking is about loss./In this it resembles the old thinking.” How true of living into one’s seventies, where every pleasure glimmers with its loss, its built in mutability. It’s always been so, but now it’s more so. The B&B, that great room I love, is up for sale—has been for years. One day the market forces will shift and it will be gone. Some extended family from Mexico City will make it their beloved second home. And for us it will be a shadow, a longing, an old flame. My chapbook, The Little House on Stilts Remembers is all about such losses of place. Here is the opening poem:

Her Next Life

All the houses she's loved and sold
remember her
call her by name

What will her next life be? 

In the dream she must change
clothes    stitch mirrors
red thread
on deer skin dress
                             reflect her
                                    journey    temple dancer
                                                           stone chariot
                                                  river at sunset with elephants

All the pretty houses have peeled off
                                     like snake skin

Her feet are listening 
                  Song of the earth 
                                     holds her now

[Photographs -except for hummingbird- by Dan Safran]

The Muse of Kinship Libido

First generation Americans—the children of immigrants—are haunted. Though they walk in the New World, their souls belong to an Old World they’ve never seen—an ancestral world that no longer exists. Ancestors wander into memory, dream and family story, telling tales of war and persecution, of hunger and deprivation, of lost parents and dead children, of ordeals and miracles that brought them to safety.
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
“Self Portrait with Ghost”

Italian Immigrants at Ellis Island

Two Worlds

Gratitude for language—the German my parents spoke
the Dutch they kept their secrets in, the Italian I forgot
the sorcery of Russian—those lullabies
my father sang, his mother sang to him.
Gratitude for English—my oak grove, my oracle, my mule—
 Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
“Give Thanks for Poets”

Venice Canal Scene

A Jungian Conference, Encounters, Traditions, Developments: Analysis at the Cultural Crossroads, has brought us to the Old World—Italy. The conference was in Trieste.  We are now in Venice. I sit in an apartment which was built as a convent in the 16th century. Boats slip past our windows on the green gray waters of a side canal. The haunted magnetism of Venice, its golds and umbers, its bridges and gondolas, its labyrinths of medieval streets and canals, its smells and sounds, tug at my senses. And yet, there is the story of Trieste, unfinished. As is so often my way, living in two worlds as I do, I am in one place, reflecting on another. 

Trieste train station

The Muse of Kinship Libido took possession of me at the Trieste conference. She sang to me in many experiences and many languages. This was the Third European Conference on Analytic Psychology, though it is the first one I’ve attended. The first two were in Eastern Europe—Vilnius, Lithuania and St. Petersburg, Russia. The focus in Trieste was on culture and trauma. There were 250 participants from 37 countries. Eastern Europe was well represented. We Americans were blessedly a small group, outnumbered by those who spoke the languages of our ancestors. There were also Asians, South Americans and a spirited group of Israelis. 

There was the joy of seeing people from far away who feel like kin. Israeli analyst Henry Abramovitch, for example. Henry contributed a fine chapter to the book I co-edited with Patricia Damery, Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way. He is a friend in the written word and I was glad to see him in the fleshly world. He gave a wonderful opening talk about working clinically with people from different cultures. In his joyous and engaging way he encouraged us to work not across culture but through culture.

I always feel the tug of kinship when I’m around Israelis. My immediate family fled Europe to settle in America, but many of my kinfolk went to Israel. Hearing Hebrew always stirs me with kinship libido.

Most people at the conference spoke English.  But a special grant supported translation for the Russians. There is now a large group of Jungians in Russia, thanks to a number of Jungians from Western Europe who have travelled there to do training and analysis. The Russians brought youth and enthusiasm to the gathering, and the mellifluous sound of their language.

I sat in a discussion group listening to Russian being spoken, and it suddenly hit me like a rush of waters—this language is engraved on my soul, though I don’t speak a word of it. My father spoke it, some. More often he sang the Russian lullabies his mother had sung to him. His parents, whom I never met, were refugees from Russia and later refugees from Germany. They didn’t survive the war. I told the group that the sound of Russian resonates deeply in me,  as well it should since my family name is Russian.

German sang to me all over the conference. I even spoke a little myself. It carries the numen of childhood and home. The song of the Italians carries me back to early childhood when my family lived in Italy, and their language was mine. Now it tugs at me but I can’t bring it back.

I love English, but I’ve gotten stranded in it. Why didn’t I keep up my German, my Italian? Why didn’t I learn Russian? My other mother tongues kept licking me all conference long, stimulating forgotten yearnings. And though I was among so many strangers from so many places, I felt among kin in some intimate primordial way.

Refugee Reality

But always I am also
in that other life—refugee reality—
the Nazis have confiscated home
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “Many Houses Ago”
in The Little House On Stilts Remembers 

I came to Trieste because I wanted to tell the story of my grandmother, the painter Emma Hoffman, here, in the Old Country. Hers is a refugee story, and I carry the intergenerational trauma which my friend and colleague Sam Kimbles has called a “phantom narrative”—a ghost story shaped by collective trauma, which turns life experiences into the form of our dread. In Trieste I was surrounded by many variations on the refugee theme. Strangers became kin. We understood each other’s life stories. My Oma’s story resonated with so many similar stories. Tamar Kron, an Israeli analyst who gave a powerful talk on The Dreams of Palestinians and Israelis in a Time of War, in the same session as my talk, Self Portrait with Ghost, told me the quick version of her ghost story. Her people fled Austria. I heard similar stories from many Israelis.

Jan Wiener, one of the conference organizers, told me that her Austrian Jewish family fled to London in 1938. Her father liked to joke that the GB sticker—for Great Britain— on the back of their car stood for “Geworden British”— became British.

Among the refugee ghost stories were the stories of refugees now seeking safety all over Europe, from genocidal horrors in Africa and in the Middle East. In my discussion group a Russian woman spoke of the enormous ocean liner that had docked right in front of the hotel we were in. She imagined climbing aboard, a refugee from the cold of her native Siberia. A German said she had a different response to the ship, which was called Costa Mediterranea. It made her think of all the refugees flooding Southern Europe. She wondered whether the Italians were doing as the Greeks were—housing refugees on an ocean liner. There was a frisson of deep feeling in the group, whose members are haunted by the unbearable suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, and the difficult politics that has aroused.

Costa Mediterranea

Literary Kin

Birth and death are the ultimate bookends, and between them a muddled narrative unfolds…There crop up moments, experiences or places which in retrospect we recognize as markers…
Jan Morris, in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

Joyce in Trieste

For me, many of those markers on my life path are writers who influenced me early on—James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke. If I ever knew I’ve long forgotten that all of them lived and wrote in Trieste, or in Rilke’s case, just a few miles up the Adriatic Coast, until I read Jan Morris’ poetic prose about Trieste. Joyce wrote parts of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses in Trieste. Morris, writing of the large, prosperous Jewish community in Trieste, comments: “Joyce had many Jewish friends in the city, and when he came to write Ulysses, which was inspired by Trieste almost as profoundly as it was by Dublin, he called it an ‘epic of two races.’” Joyce was in one place, remembering another. So was Mann, who wrote portions of Buddenbrooks in Trieste, in which he portrayed his German hometown, Lübeck. Those great works were among my earliest literary muses. And Rilke, who has been my companion and muse since the beginning, heard the voice of his terrible angel at Duino Castle. He was in the grips, I learn from Morris, of that terrible North Wind of winter the Triestians call the Bora, which causes all manner of physical and emotional malaise.

These writers were in Trieste in the last years of the 19th century (Mann) and the early years of the 20th century (Joyce and Rilke). During that time, I’m not exactly sure which years, my young grandmother was sent away from her home town, Berlin, because her family disapproved of her suitor. She was sent to Italy, to Florence, to study painting. She sat for hours in the Accademia copying paintings by Titian and Giorgione. I remember particularly her copies of portraits and self-portraits. Here’s one by Gorgione very like one we had in our home, of which my little brother commented:  “He looks like a she.”

Giorgione, portrait of a young man

Oma would go on to paint many portraits and self-portraits, reflecting on the passages of her life. Both Titian and Giorgione painted profound self-portraits. So did Oma. My talk, “Self Portrait with Ghost” is about some of those, and my poems in response to them.

Library of Savoia Hotel, Trieste

So it was here in the city of my literary influences—Trieste, with all the resonances of tristesse and melancholy evoked by its name— in a lovely 19th century style hotel my Oma would have appreciated, not far from Venice whose painters so influenced her, that I called up her spirit to sing her a song of her life and mine, my poems to her paintings, my soul to her soul. Her spirit filled me, and I could see her story resounding in the faces of the audience, her difficult life journey, her individuation, the gifts she gave her family and her world. When I was finished a young German woman arose and said: “Your Oma is not dead. You have brought her to life for us all, here.”

And now it’s time for me to return to Venice.

Venice Canal