News From the Muse

 The Muse of Kamala Devi

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

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

No mud, no lotus.

                                                                           —Thick Nhat Hanh

What Story Are We In?

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

Kamala Campaign Button 2020

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

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

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

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

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

What Myth Are We In?

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

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

Goddess Devi

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

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

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

Goddess Lakshmi

“The Spell is Broken”

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

Goddess Durga

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

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

Volunteer: votesaveamerica.com/2024

Donate: kamalaharris.com

Find your polling place: Iwillvote.com

Divine Mother

The Sister from Below

is delighted to announce

Your Face in the Fire

is an Amazon Bestseller!

Cover art by Kathleen Russ

This happened because so many of you joined the book launch and

ordered a copy on June 1. A beautiful community effort.

Thank you, thank you!

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

Here’s another poem from the book:

Only the Blind

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

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

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

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

Can sing your way home
Only Isaac the Blind can see

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

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

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

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

You have always belonged to the moon

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

Only Blind Willie Johnson
Can sing your way home

Moon Goddess
Jemma M. Young

The Muse of Flight

The Poetry of Resistance II

We are pilgrims passing through

the metal detector. We remove our shoes, remove

our coats and shawls. Some of us will be hand wanded—

silver bracelets, seven quarters, three dimes—provoke

the security gods…

—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky “Root Canal”

In the Hands of the Security Gods

I was twenty–three before I took my first airplane flight. Since then, flight has become a commonplace in the lives of the privileged. Some fly for work. Many fly for pleasure, for adventure. Some fly to make pilgrimages to ancestral lands or to mythic places that speak to our souls. We return home full of images and experiences that change us, open our hearts and our minds. There is a gallery of such beloved places within me. They are numinous; they orient me to the journey of my life. I visit them often in reverie. They come to me in dreams, make their homes in my poems—South Indian women in glowing saris, Table Mountain hovering over Cape Town, a vaporetto plowing the glittering waters of the Grand Canal in Venice, the palm tree outside Lorca’s bedroom window in Granada, the green hills of Wilhelmhöhe, outside Kassel, from which my mother, age twelve, and her family took flight just before Hitler came to power.

Flight is a wonder, but also a peril. In my early years of flying the fear was that the plane would crash. Since the 9/11 attacks tore up our sense of safety, the fear is a terrorist will make the plane crash. We’ve had to learn the strange ritual required by the Transportation Security Administration—shoe removal, jacket removal, the placing of carryon luggage on a moving belt to be examined by X-ray. Sometimes we get wanded. Sometimes we get groped. Our precious, carefully packed stuff is picked through, manhandled. We are ambivalent about all this—is the TSA protecting us or abusing us? Recently, as border issues have heated up and travel bans been announced, agents are demanding that certain travellers unlock their cell phones, tablets, laptops, reveal their passwords so they can scroll through e–mail, photos, private Facebook posts. People have missed their flights while agents are poking through their personal communications without a warrant. U.S. citizens have been detained for hours, questioned aggressively and released without apology. The stink of racism surrounds these events, often targeting people with Muslim names, or dark skin.

The Last Laugh

Poems of Resistance can take many forms, evoke many emotions. Diane Frank’s lovely poem “When you fly…” uses humor to unpack this complex political phenomenon. The poem pretends to be simple and direct. In fact it is subtle and sly. A list poem, it opens by naming things that might be bombs—food, drink, musical instruments. The second stanza takes flight. We are given a suitcase full of images sacred to the traveller—the iconic symbols of east and west coast America are thrown in with the “packing cases of the San Francisco Symphony”—reminding us that flight is essential to cultural exchange. Then we’re off to Paris and to the last remaining “Wonder of the Ancient World”—the Great Pyramid at Giza. We’ve flown through space as well as through time—back to ancient Egypt, in the company, it seems of a world–travelling musician.

The Sphinx must be behind the third stanza, it is so mysterious and yet, revealing. This time the flight is inward, into the realms of mind, of the invisible, of the potential, of the mathematical. A magical twist reveals a medieval Book of Hours, a grandmother’s wedding ring. These riches of imagination and lineage are desecrated in the fourth stanza by the groping hands of the TSA agent. The poem illuminates the bewilderment and intrusion we’ve all experienced as we trudge through endless security lines, longing for flight, fearing our journey will be imperiled by the misinterpretation of the precious stuff of our lives. The political contract according to which we citizens hand over our privacy to the TSA in exchange for security is easily exploded by the abuse of power. The poem’s speaker reports that she has been violated, and then hit on. She regains her power and her authority in the final couplet, by stating the obvious— “It’s not a hand grenade;/it’s an avocado.” What better resistance than this—to get the last word, and the last laugh?

When you fly . . .

Things that might be a bomb . . .
Yogurt, avocados, lemonade, iced tea
the endpin of a cello

A banjo, a violin
electronic equipment wrapped carefully
in cotton fabric and bubble wrap
so it won’t be damaged after landing

The Empire State Building
The Golden Gate Bridge
The packing cases of the San Francisco Symphony
The Eiffel Tower
The Pyramids at Giza

The unwritten pages of a novel
in the genre of magical realism
An architectural drawing
An algorithm, a vector
An illuminated medieval book of hours
My grandmother’s wedding ring

And to the TSA agent
who groped me during the pat down
and then asked me out to lunch . . .

It’s not a hand grenade;
it’s an avocado.

—Diane Frank

Diane Frank is an award-winning poet and author of Swan Light, Entering the Word Temple, and The Winter Life of Shooting Stars. Her friends describe her as a harem of seven women in one very small body. She lives in San Francisco, where she dances, plays cello, and creates her life as an art form. The poem in Naomi’s blog, “When you fly,” will be published in Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines, forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. Diane teaches at San Francisco State University and Dominican University. Blackberries in the Dream House, her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place, a memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas, is forthcoming from Nirala Press.

The Muse of Synchronicity: Part III

We are all shape–shifters, but through your words we became human.

—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

Mother of Pink Flamingos

It’s hard to be a palomino with a pole stuck in your back.
—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

Judy Wells

Judy Wells made a synchronistic appearance in Part I of this blog, when, lonely for companions in Poetry Land I wandered into a poetry reading where I thought I’d know no one. Judy, the featured reader, reminded me that we had an old connection—we had been in a consciousness–raising group together in the late ‘60s. Since hearing her funny provocative poetry that night—a lapsed Catholic’s thrust and parry at the nuns, the pieties, the absurdities of a Catholic education—I have loved her wit and exuberance. But the wind chimes of synchronicity really began pealing as I immersed myself in her latest book of poems, The Glass Ship.

We poets often feel we travel alone. But in the realm of the old souls, where, to borrow Richard Messer’s eloquence, we are “one in the heart’s core,” we are companions. Judy Wells has been bitten by many of the same obsessions that possess me—the journey to other worlds, the visionary energy of what Robert Bly calls “leaping poetry,” the power of combining personal story and myth. Both of us have been possessed by a medieval tale, me, the tale of negotiating with the devil, Judy the Celtic immrama—tales of voyages to other–world islands. Both of us retell the story with a female protagonist.

Ancient Map with Sea Monsters

Judy uses the prose poem throughout this saga. It is a marvelous vehicle for telling marvels. Robert Bly says it well: “The urgent, alert rhythm of the prose poem prepares us to journey, to cross the border, either of the other world or to that place where the animal lives.” Judy does both at the same time. Here’s how she sets her story up: “A magnificent sailing ship made completely of glass” which reflects “rainbow lights like a crystal” bears down on our hero’s small boat. She sees a young couple dancing on the deck and recognizes her own parents. They don’t recognize her, however. Why?

I had not yet been born. Here were my parents deeply in love before they were married, before the four children began to come, before the toil of creating a home.

Our adventurer has clearly chosen a different life. She’s off to the Island of Pink Flamingos where she meets seventeen beautiful young women in “the shadow of a huge hibiscus tree. They wore glittery silver tops and long black skirts. They were barefoot, but their toenails were painted a glittery silver, as were their fingernails.” Color is essential in this tale, as is the number seventeen. They greet her, “Welcome, Mother.” She protests that she’s not their mother. They insist she is. “But how” she wonders. “I don’t remember ever giving birth."

Once upon a time, the young women tell her, she was the Queen of this island. She transformed them all from other shapes—butterfly, cat, flamingo—by making poems. Poetry made them human. Here we touch the realm of the White Goddess, in which poetry is magic. But our hero does not take herself so seriously. She’s on to other adventures, which is fine with her daughters who “don’t need a Queen to boss” them around, but love her anyway.

Our sailor girl shifts archetypal shapes frequently. Sometimes she is a hero, as when she releases fifty palominos from their bondage to the Purple Carousel. She follows the instructions of her carousel steed, who complains to her: “It’s hard to be a palomino with a pole stuck in your back. Every day, I pray the dwarf will release me…” He instructs her to steal the black key and the gold key from the dwarf’s shoes. The dwarf mutters, “So that’s why my feet hurt all these years.” There’s always an unexpected turn in these prose poems that brings us back from the land of faerie to the comic and human. She is a happy hero as she watches “fifty golden palominos racing down the beach into the waves.”

Sometimes she’s a fool, as when, on the Isle of Black and White Sheep an ancient couple promises to tell her the secret of immortality if she can achieve a simple task—“put one white sheep in the black flock and one black sheep in the white flock.” But this is a slippery realm we are in. The white sheep she lugs over the central wall turns black as it joins the black herd. And vice versa. No secret of immortality is revealed to this fool.

Ancient Hide Boat or Coracle

Our adventurer reveals that she is a compulsive gambler. She finds herself on the Island of Card Players with three poker playing chimps, “one in a black bowler hat, another in a white fedora, the third in a red beret.” She has “never played poker with a worse group of companions.” She thinks she’s winning big time, because these chimps have “no sense of a poker face.” But the chimps are savvy tricksters, and though she wins she loses.

Our voyaging poet’s trickster humor is constantly pulling the rug out from under our expectations, playing jokes on the reader. Playing with our natural associations to Homer’s Odyssey our sea captain embarks on a voyage to tell off Odysseus. She has planned out her speech, which she knows is not very diplomatic, but “some people just need a kick in the pants.”

Look Odysseus, you’ve spend ten years at war already. Stop procrastinating and go home.Telemachus might be begging for a little brother or sister. [Penelope] might even be in menopause if you spend ten years dilly–dallying around with nymphs, princesses and witches. Or worse, Penelope might just scoop up Telemachus and set sail on her own adventures instead of waiting for you, the bow–legged wonder.

So the adventurer who has rejected the domestic, can speak for the domestic. The liberated poet can liberate Penelope—that queen of domesticity—with a swift leap of her imagination. There’s a kick in the pants for Odysseus. But not so fast. It’s the reader eager for the pleasure of this come–uppance who gets the kick. For the “man with brawny forearms” our voyaging poet spots, “releasing a mound of sails into his boat,” is not Homer’s hero. He is Popeye the sailor man.

There is a delightful iconoclastic bent in such rapid shifts from Homer to twentieth century popular culture to Celtic myth to the poet’s wild imaginings. For a moment we are encouraged to believe we are in the world of epic. But no, we are in a ribald, comic world and our poet has tricked us again.

In another adventure our poet reveals her lust. When she rescues a beautiful young man who is lost at sea, she confesses “an urge to bend down and kiss him…I am a woman after all, at sea for too many months without a man.” In one of the many shape–shifts in this tale, that delight our imagination, the handsome sailor is transformed into a giant bird who announces:

My name is Sweeney…and I am an eagle, a rare, proud species. I have heard of an island in these parts inhabited by seventeen beautiful young women. My destiny is to fly to this island, court one of these women, and marry her. Thank you for saving me from the sea so I could fulfill my destiny.

“Sweet” our sea captain thinks, “I’m going to be the mother–in–law of an eagle. And so it will come to pass.

The Secret of Immortality

My boat awaited me, my pen, my red book.
—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

But not so fast. We are not yet ready for the wedding. First we must visit the land of the dead. Despite herself, our poet has a profound psychological vision for her voyaging craft. Like the poets of the Celtic immrana from whom she is descended, her purpose is to “teach the craft of dying and to pilot the departing spirit on a sea of perils and wonders.”

Sea-faring Map of Old Ireland

We find ourselves on the Island of Joe where our hero meets her old friend Joe “reading a book, with a crimson bird feather cape around his shoulders.” The book is the story of his life, which he has written. He reads to her from his concluding chapter:

I was in the desert, lying on a stone slab, emaciated, ready to die. I felt myself taking my last breath—and then silence, stillness. My spirit arose, a great crimson bid in the sky, and looked down on my withered body, now attracting dark–winged scavengers of the desert. Then my spirit soared to this island, where the crimson bird gave me back my body and sacrificed its own. I plucked its carcass carefully and created my feathered roof and my wonderful red–feathered cape. 
                                                                                           I am at home here.

Is it possible we fools, who are all of course, on a voyage to death, are being initiated into the secret of immortality after all? Joe closes his book, smiles and says, “And now you must write your story?” Are we reading the product of that wisdom from the dear departed? The Glass Ship is the poet’s immortality?

But not so fast. We know by now that our trickster poet will not allow us so sanguine a vision for long. For now we have voyaged to the Island of Ash where we meet Joe again, and our poet’s other recently departed friend Rose. “‘Time’s up for me says Joe,’” and we watch in dismay as his body begins “crumbling into ash…Finally only his head remained, covered/with a battered straw hat.”

Rose still sat on the surface of the mountain of ash. “You meet the most interesting people here,” she said, “but they always tend to disappear.” As she spoke, her body began to fade as if a brilliant red rose gradually turned light pink, then invisible. 

I felt a great emptiness in my soul as my friends disappeared. Retreating to my boat I lay down and drifted out to sea. A mysterious voice whispered…Go carry the living. 

And so she does.

Mother–in–law of an Eagle

One shape shifting must be paid for by another.
—Judy Wells, The Glass Ship

The wedding at the end of our tale—as in most good comedies—gathers the dramatis personae, human and animal, dead and living, our adventurer met as she wandered other worlds. And, as it happens in faerie tales, our hero has a difficult task to perform. The Mother of Pink Flamingoes must compose a poem that will break the spell that has turned her beautiful daughter, the bride, into a pink flamingo. This daughter, who was enamored of Sweeney’s beautiful body as she watched him cast off his bird feathers and become a man, when he came to her island to court her, and who was so fascinated by that magical protuberance between his legs, is anxious to get on with the ceremony. She says: “The wedding feast is all prepared, the guests have arrived, and Sweeney, my intended, is growing impatient. O Mother, I beg you to compose the poem that will break the spell of my bird–body.”

Our poet, who never signed up for the role of mother, turns into a mother. Concerned at the anguish in her daughter’s voice, she strokes her pink feathers. “I lay awake half the night wracking my brains for a poem and could only come up with two pitiful stanzas.” What poet hasn’t spent a night like that, especially when so much rides on a poem.

Her poem asserts, “human flesh is best,” though “I myself was not sure of this. Perhaps being able to fly with one’s own wings is exchange enough for the wild imagination we humans have been given.” Her words do the trick—the spell is broken. Her daughter is released to be the bride, the sacred triple bride of Celtic lore—maiden, mother, crone—is consecrated. All is well with the world, no? Not so fast. Our mother of the bride notices “tiny feathers poking from my flesh…” and realizes, “one shape–shifting must be paid for by another.”

So Judy Wells, my long ago companion in the wild adventure of Women’s Liberation, who sat with me and others in a consciousness raising group that blew off the top of our heads and transformed us all, has charmed, enchanted, made me laugh out loud with her saga. We, who were palominos with poles stuck in our backs, going up and down on the carousel of the conventional female roles we were born into, have been freed to run into the waves. We, who are on a voyage to our deaths, have been taught in the Celtic tradition, by a wise, and wisecracking bard.

The Muse of Synchronicity: Part II

“My prayer is to be open to how I’m being led.”

—Charles Asher 

Part I tells the story of a thread of synchronicities that led to finding companions and publishers in poetry land.  In these synchronistic moments I’d see myself standing in the center of the kaleidoscope of my life, and suddenly it was as if all the fragments rearranged themselves into a new pattern, full of color and light.

Part II insisted on being written because more synchronicities kept revealing themselves, making new patterns, new meanings.

Wind Chimes in the Jung Journal

Any progress I have made, in becoming a vessel in which a greater
communion with all of life…is possible, is because of the great
network of immense old souls, reaching far into the heavens and
deep into the earth, sustaining me in my darkest times…for the sake
of a mystery to which we are bound and out of which we are made.

                                                                                      —Frances Hatfield
                                                                                      in The Jung Journal Fall, 2014

Frances Hatfield’s gorgeous image of immense old souls, who like trees, communicate over long distances through their roots, in her lovely meditation on her labyrinth, gives me another image of how I experience synchronicity. Waves of energy, happening below consciousness, deep in the roots of our being, connect us to earth, sky, ancestors and those souls who transform our lives. Synchronistic events are a wind chime in the breeze, noting the grace of connection.

How that wind chime chimed when I picked up the latest issue of the Jung Journal and saw the names, heard the voices, of so many souls who touched my life and opened my path. Here’s Charles Asher, writing on the “Good Enough Prayer,” in his wry self–effacing way. His one sentence prayer—which I take as epigraph for this offering—says it all: “My prayer is to be open to how I am being led.” Luckily I was open to how I was being led back in the early nineties, when Charles invited me to teach at Pacifica. I was in the throes of becoming an analyst, struggling to sort out what kind of Jungian I was going to be, when I was thrown into an unfamiliar culture of depth psychology. They spoke a different dialect at Pacifica. Under the influence of James Hillman and Joseph Campbell they used words like poetics, polytheism, imagination, soul. They talked like poets. Actually there was a creative ferment between the enthusiasts of mythopoeisis and iconoclastic critical thinkers like David Miller, now a retired Professor of Religion, who shows up in this issue asking penetrating and disturbing questions about the unconscious biases of mythological studies.

The poets are well represented by Dennis Slattery, who is core faculty in Mythological Studies at Pacifica and writes poetry. He has a beautiful essay on Revisioning Psychology, which he calls “Hillman’s Moby Dick.” He writes, “like the White Whale, soul itself in Hillman’s lexicon is the anima mundi, the world soul, which only the deepest philosophic and poetic meditations are capable of grasping through the intuitive grappling hooks of the imagination.” Wow. This kind of talk opened new windows and doors for me, and inspired me to teach my class on basic Jungian psychology using Goethe’s Faust. I remember the day Hillman came to visit my class. He looked surprised when I explained my approach and then said, “Why didn’t I think of that?” I took that as a blessing.

Pacifica freed me to take seriously my own calling as a poet. Luckily I was open to where I was being led. I left Pacifica to pursue poetry. How synchronistic then, that this issue should include a review of my fourth book of poems, The Faust Woman Poems.

Dark Healing

Face the pain as an enemy
that you respect, that it may become a vessel
For what you love.
—Richard Messer

Those wind chimes began chiming again when I realized that Diane Deutsch’s profound review of my book, and Richard Sugg’s masterful review of my friend Richard Messer’s selected poems, Dark Healing, were published next to each other due to the intuitive sensitivity of the Review Editor, Helen Marlo. This is a synchronicity on a number of levels. Richard and I are poetry buddies. He is one of a few people I show new poems to for feedback. This happens by e-mail since Richard lives in Ohio. He gets my work and can mirror it back to me so I can get it at another level. He has an uncanny ability to sniff out just what doesn’t work in early drafts of my poems, and to explain it to me without getting my back up. He has had an extraordinarily difficult life path and his poems track his “dark healing.” Both our books are on that theme in different ways. Here is Richard Sugg’s eloquent summary:

Richard Messer’s extraordinary book of poetry and active imagination focuses on three decades-long parts of the poet’s life: the catastrophe for him and his two young children of his wife’s murder, followed by his conscious efforts to rebuild the family’s life on the new realities they are trying to assimilate, and finally the poet’s efforts to integrate the material following his wife’s murder into his entire birth–to–seventy–five–year–old life.

Using lines from the poems to make his points Sugg does an elegant job of demonstrating the power, breadth and depth of Messer’s poetic and psychological achievement. I believe Dark Healing should be required reading for depth psychologists interested in trauma.

Here is what Messer himself wrote when he was the Featured Poet in Psychological Perspectives:

Those who survive trauma and heal and go on to thrive reach out to those who are in the midst of their suffering.

Tragedy teaches what intuition always whispers—there is a realm in which we are all present to each other, we are one in the deep heart’s core. We mourn for those who die and we move on through the knowledge that what has happened to them, no matter how brutal or tragic, does not define them, or us. Our spirits and souls tell us who we are and give our lives their meaning.

Messer’s realm in which “we are all one in the deep heart’s core” resonates with that other fabulous poet’s realm, Frances Hatfield, of a “great network of immense old souls,” with which we began.

Faust in the Light of the Moon

The moon glows,…and calls out of the poet by the poet’s
attunement to the moon, an attunement to herself.
—Diane Deutsch

Diane Deutsch, who reviews The Faust Woman Poems, is another one of those souls who has touched my life in unexpected ways. I met her in a poetry workshop led by Diane di Prima, a brilliant and wild poet in the Beat tradition. Having returned to poetry I struggled to make peace between my analyst self and my poet self. They quarreled all the time. I suffered from a split in me, in my family of origin, and in the culture, between the values of those passionate souls, like Diane di Prima, like my father, who follow their muse, and those devoted souls, Jungian analysts, my mother, who support other people’s creativity. Could I get them both into one body, one life? Their quarrel became my book, The Sister from Below, but that’s another story. The story about Diane Deutsch is that one day she announced she was becoming a candidate at the San Francisco Jung Institute, and blew up my categories. To me she became a bridge figure between the wild realms of poetry and the contained realm of the consulting room. How appropriate that she would be the one to review my book of poems in the pages of our Institute Journal.

The catastrophe in Messer’s book and life came from outside him—a terrible visitation from pure evil. The catastrophe, in my case, came from the devil in me, who, as Deutsch notes, is female, “comes from the realm of the goddess…breaks things;…is a home wrecker.” Deutsch understands that it is the devil who ignites the individuation process, in Goethe’s Faust, and in my poetry. Healing requires destruction, especially of the “cultural accretion of constrained and repressed female sexuality.”

Deutsch and the editors of the Jung Journal went to the trouble of publishing a full color image of the cover of my book, a painting by Remedios Varo, Papilla Estelar, “depicting a wan moon being fed a concoction by spoon, ground by a pale artist.” I love what Deutsch does with this image:

Taking imagination and spirit, working it into poetry,
feeds the moon spirit, feeds the feminine moon energy,
feeds the poet. In the painting the moon looks weak,
anemic, and is held in a cage. She is being strengthened
by being fed the poetry that comes out of the hard work
of taking imagination, spirit and experience and turning it
until poetry comes.

My gratitude to the Jung Journal for this gathering of souls—like trees in the forest we are connected to each other through our roots, and for the spirit that moves the wind chimes of synchronicity.

To Be Continued.

The Muse of Suffering

I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: 

I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.

I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.

Psalm 69

Our Measure of Suffering

Suffering is a powerful muse for poets. Consider the Psalmist, who cries out to God in psalm after psalm, trying to comprehend the meaning of his suffering, and God’s absence. The question of why we must suffer is central to religious thought, to psychology, and to creative work. We turn to the nameless God of the Jews; we turn Christ, to Mary, to Buddha, to Krishna and Ganesha, to the Goddess in all her manifestations, for relief from our suffering. Some of us turn to psychology—we pay attention to our dreams, we try to understand the message in our suffering. Some of us turn to writing, to painting, to dancing, to music.

Jung argues that no life is complete without its “measure of suffering.” He writes, “the opening of the unconscious always means the outbreak of intense spiritual suffering.” This, he explains, is because our rationally ordered world, our known round of days, our walls for safety and our dams to control Nature’s flow, all burst open as Mother Nature seeks revenge for the violence we have perpetrated on her. Jung, who had a strong environmental consciousness, essentially says that suffering, when done in the service of greater conscious, is the way our psyches regain their ecological balance when we have been too one-sided. Suffering is intrinsic to a spiritual path and to a creative path. Our best–laid plans are ripped asunder by storm, by illness, by fate, by death. If you surrender to your suffering, it can become The Way—to a deeper connection to your own nature and to Nature.

But who wants to surrender to suffering? Jung comments: “Because suffering is positively disagreeable, people prefer not to ponder how much fear and sorrow fall” to our lot in life. That’s for sure, especially in our goal oriented and materialistic culture, in which the “pursuit of happiness” is inscribed in our Declaration of Independence. We’re all supposed to “just do it,” and if we do it right our happiness should be revealed to us like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If we haven’t found the happiness to which we are entitled it must be because we’re not fighting for it hard enough. Surrender is not our cultural mode.

Heartbreak Hotel
Luckily, there are pockets in our culture that hold a deeper wisdom, Rock and Roll for example. I was suffering the agonies of adolescence when I first heard Elvis, that messenger of sexuality and sorrow sing his anthem:

"Heartbreak Hotel"

Well, since my baby left me,
I found a new place to dwell.
It's down at the end of lonely street
at Heartbreak Hotel.

You make me so lonely baby,
I get so lonely,
I get so lonely I could die.

And although it's always crowded,
you still can find some room.
Where broken hearted lovers
do cry away their gloom.

You make me so lonely baby,
I get so lonely,
I get so lonely I could die.

Well, the Bell hop's tears keep flowin',
and the desk clerk's dressed in black.
Well they been so long on lonely street
They ain't ever gonna look back.

You make me so lonely baby,
I get so lonely,
I get so lonely I could die.

Hey now, if your baby leaves you,
and you got a tale to tell.
Just take a walk down lonely street
to Heartbreak Hotel.

That song expressed my mood quite accurately. The lonely one in me loved knowing that if I took a walk down lonely street I’d find company at the Heartbreak Hotel. The poet in me loved the deep feeling, the images and word play. However I lived in a cultured family in which Elvis was seen as the lowest of low culture. Taboo. If I wanted access to the power of music to express suffering, why not listen to Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion or the Mozart Requiem? I liked Bach and Mozart just fine, but they weren’t sexy, they didn’t dance and grind their hips while they sang about their loneliness. It would be many years before I felt the inner freedom to appreciate Elvis, and follow his lineage back to the Blues where I found so much to love—so much beauty, wisdom and humor in the expression of terrible suffering. Here are some of the lyrics to Howlin Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightnin’” with it’s intense poetic imagery and sound, evoking lost radiance and abandonment.

“Smokestack Lightnin’”

Ah oh, smokestack lightnin'

Shinin' just like gold Why don't ya hear
me cryin'?

A whoo hoo, whoo hoo, whoo

Whoa oh tell me, baby

What's the matter with you?

Why don't ya hear me cryin'?

Whoo hoo, whoo hoo, whooo

Whoa oh tell me, baby

Where did ya, stay last night?

A-why don't ya hear me cryin'?

Whoo hoo, whoo hoo, whooo

Whoa oh, stop your train

Let her go for a ride

Why don't ya hear me cryin'?

Whoo hoo, whoo hoo, whooo

With Rock and Roll and the Blues we have moved from abandonment by God to abandonment by a lover. The “whoo hoo” of Howlin’ Wolf’s cry, is the whistle of the train pulling out of the station, is the wisdom that as we suffer life moves on and we never know where we’ll find ourselves next. 

Sea Glass

Suffering has been a major Muse for my dear friend Gilda Frantz, who, in her late 80s, has just published her first book: Sea Glass: A Jungian Analyst’s Exploration of Suffering and Individuation.

Why “Sea Glass?” Frantz writes:

As a child I had no way of knowing that these gem-like stones were originally broken shards of bottle glass that somehow wound up in the ocean…Were they wine bottles tossed over the side of an ocean liner plowing the wine–dark sea? Were they once carriers with a message a lonely person wrote on a desolate island in the middle of nowhere?… Once the glass was a vessel and now it is only a piece of what it once was… 

When I was casting about for a title for my book, the image of a piece of sea glass came to me. It dawned on me that the process the glass endures in the ocean is not dissimilar to what happens psychologically when a person is wounded, broken, and goes through life’s capricious twists and turns. We either drown in the sea, or if we can get a foothold possibly our fate changes and we can begin to grow consciously…

Gilda is direct, wise, beautiful and very funny. She has been writing all her life, but has never taken her writing seriously enough to gather it into a book. Luckily, she listened to an inner voice who led her to give us Sea Glass—a collection of her essays, talks and interviews, a treasure trove of gems from her long, rich and difficult life. It has been Gilda’s fate to witness the sudden death of several beloved family members. One of them was her husband, Kieffer Frantz, who was a Jungian analyst and much-respected member of the Los Angeles Jung Institute. She writes:

After my husband’s totally unexpected death when I was only in my late forties, I was eaten up by loneliness. For months I felt as though the house had a zipper that shut me out of life, and kept life out of my house I lived in the realm of the dead. 

Gilda, who, had been abandoned by her father as a child, found a relationship to the archetype of the “good father” in her marriage. Now, she was abandoned once again. Gilda has a mythopoetic sensibility and often uses etymological research to deepen the meaning of words. I learned something vital from her comments about the word abandonment:

Abandonment is a fateful experience in which we feel we have no choice. We feel alone, as if the gods are not present… The word abandonment means literally “not to be called.” It is etymologically connected with the world fate, which means “the divine word.”

Sea Glass is full of such luminous moments, bringing meaning to painful experience. It is also full of humor. When Patricia Damery and I began gathering essays for our book Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, I knew I wanted to ask Gilda for a piece, because she writes so directly out of her lived experience. We were delighted with “The Greyhound Path to Individuation,” in which she tells the tumultuous story of her difficult childhood with charm and wit. I was pleased to revisit it as the opening chapter of Sea Glass. Here’s an excerpt:

In the summer of 1938, I was 11 years old and being tossed back and forth, like a potato latke, between my mother in California and my father on the East Coast…I was beginning to do what my mother called “develop.” My “developing” worried my mother so much that even though we loved one another, she was tossing me back to my father. One morning she told me, “You are going to live with your father, the rat; I can’t take care of you anymore.”

Gilda is an inspiration to me and to many others in our community. She has learned from her suffering, learned that to “be alone and not lonely…is the treasure hard to attain and the pearl of great value.” It is, she writes “to be in contact with the inner divine; that inner light in which there is no darkness and no fear.” Reflecting on Elvis and Howlin’ Wolf’s songs in the light of her wisdom, deepens my understanding of the power of their work. Recently I had to go through a difficult experience. I found myself clutching Sea Glass almost as a transitional object. Reading Gilda’s voice was a comfort and a blessing.

Suffering has always been a major Muse for me. If I can write about it, I have found, I can suffer it and glean meaning from it. I believe I am in good company here, with the Psalmist, Elvis and Howling Wolf and Gilda. And so I close with a poem about suffering, from The Faust Woman Poems.

Because of What Aches

Because your knee, like the knee of your father before you
prophesies rain

Because you’re as weather beaten as the willow
which creaks in the night

Because your hips are as surly
as a girl at fourteen—fire tamped down and smoking—

Because your knuckles are cranky, remembering
your grandmother fumbling with buttons, with jar lids

Because words have failed with your brother
don’t do much good with your son

Because your neck tries to rise above
an aging tangle of knots

Because you’ve given yourself to the wild ride—chased after toddlers
broken commandments, had words with the owl on the roof—

Because your eyes long for the mountain
Because the old rose still blooms

You’re not ready for ash, or thin air

Submit to the fire your early drafts
your sagas of shame, your lost directions

The truth is—you’re still tied to this ferment—
because of what aches