The Muse of Summer

The Story Behind the Poem

The muse makes weird things happen, excites your passions, moves your soul.

Lowinsky, The Sister from Below, pp. 2-3

Interior of My Grandparents North Berkeley Home
Oil Painting, 1943, by Emma Hoffman

Summer is my season. Summer fruit is a joy. I love it for breakfast. This morning it was glowing Bing cherries, sweet strawberries, a half a golden apricot, a handful of blueberries with my morning yogurt. Our summer garden is a joy. Dan tends the roses. They respond in vibrant yellow, salmon pink, fire orange. He brings bright treasure into the house. The Buddha of the kitchen window sits surrounded by all this color—his eyes closed. Mine aren’t. Dan’s tomatoes are gathering red. Their smell is ecstatic—sends me back to the girl I was, on summer vacation in Vermont—intoxicated by the smell of tomatoes in the sun. Dan feeds the birds. Finches and hummingbirds come, flashing their yellow bellies, their fuschia throats.

Summer is my season, the season of my birth. Summer’s colors and smells take me back to my new baby days in my grandparents’ North Berkeley home. I feel at home in summer, in my body, in light dresses, in my connection to earth and sky. I feel held by the warmth, blessed by the light, until the fog rolls in. Then I complain about what a cold wet blanket the fog is, how it interrupts my summer bliss. Dan, who doesn’t do so well in the heat, is grateful for the fog. And I must admit, there have been a few days, as the earth warms, that I too have welcomed the fog.

It’s not just the fog that intrudes on my bliss. For the summer I was born was war time, Shoah time—a terrible time for the world, for the Jews, for my family. My immediate family had made it out of Europe, and after a period of limbo, had found a home in America. They were haunted by those who did not get out, especially by the ghosts of my father’s parents. The ghosts wove themselves into my earliest sense of the world. They are always with me.

All this sensual delight, this stimulation, this seduction and color, this hot and cold, these ghosts that wander between the worlds, are heaven for a Muse. She thrives on summer fruit and roses, on tree light and dancing shadows, on long reveries in which the ghosts hold forth. She lures me to places I’ve never gone before. She rummages through her dress up box and puts on costumes I’ve never seen. One summer she showed up as Iris, a goddess I‘d never kept company with before. Iris demanded a poem.

Iris is the rainbow goddess, goddess of color, goddess of vision. She is a flower; she is psychopomp—she bridges the worlds between humans and gods. She is associated with writing, for writing bridges the inner and outer worlds. Some say she has recently appeared to star gazers as a planet. She guides the souls of dead women. No wonder she showed up, demanding her due. She was one of the goddesses present at my birth, and I had not honored her. Here is the poem that came:

Regarding Irisblue eyes are hers dark almost violet like the fierce
painter’s eyes of my mother’s mother and she slips off
her rainbow bridge making sense of the vision I had
as a girl of a being of light crossing over the water

she says she was there at my birth she
and her sea sister Thetis it was dawn
on a summer Wednesday far from the transit camp
Lag Westerbork where my father’s mother gave up

the ghost and Iris a small recently discovered
planet rose on the eastern horizon she the forgotten
goddess who carries a box of writing implements draws color
out of the glistening air is good at delicate negotiations between

those who belong to forever and those who are just
passing through gathered blessings for me from the sea
full of secrets full of wandering fish from the dead
who gave me sea horses to ride goat song

and shimmer my baby body was touched by the purple
of ghosts their blues their deep maroons and I was gifted
with every pleasure of voice of tongue of kicking feet full
of my mother’s sweet milk all joy to her who had longed for a child

and my mother’s mother painted my sea shell sleep and the red begonia
which glowed on the dining room table it was California and the yellow
hills stirred their big lion bodies and my hands reached out to touch
the light ah! I can see her face who is lilac and rose whose nipples

are apple blossoms who flings her green breasts at the dreaming sky
even now sixty years later as I sit on a wooden porch I can see
how she draws violet and orange out of trees words with their long
roots out of the seas and at the horizon she gathers me gold and silver
out of the summer air

(Published in Adagio and Lamentation)

Often my poems take me places I don’t know I’m going, show me inner landscapes, lead me to sacred springs I had not imagined. Sometimes when I read them years later, I understand that they have been prophetic. I suddenly understand my recent obsession with writing poems that respond to my Oma’s paintings. Iris has been engaged in “delicate negotiations” between Oma’s soul and mine. She carries a “box of writing implements” and “draws color out of the glistening air.” Iris bridges the world between writing and painting, between the dead and the living. She is what Jung would call the “transcendent function.” Jung writes:

The process of coming to terms with the unconscious is a true labour….It has been named the “transcendent function” because it represents a function based on real and “imaginary,” or rational and irrational, data, thus bridging the yawning gulf between conscious and unconscious. It is a natural process, a manifestation of the energy that springs from the tension of opposites, and it consists in a series of fantasy-occurrences which appear spontaneously in dreams and visions. Collected Works V. 7, 121

I began my collection of poems “Adagio and Lamentation” with the poem “Oma” in which I invoked her, asked her to “come visit me.” Years later, thanks to Iris’ “delicate negotiations,” she has. It is summer, my season, and I sit in deep conversation with my Oma. I spend hours looking at her paintings, at her oil painting of the “red begonia/ which glowed on the dining room table.” I am sure my baby eyes were transfixed by that flower; I am sure I reached for it with eager hands. In this season of my birth I am given back something of my earliest images, Thanks to Iris and her rainbow walking between the worlds, to the “transcendent function,” to Oma’s skillful paint brush and her willing ghost.

The Motherline Muse

Motherline stories evoke a worldview in which all beings and times are interconnected…They are as common as the repetitive loops made in weaving, crocheting and knitting. They are as powerful as touching a grandmother’s face in childhood, or seeing a daughter suckle her newborn child.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, The Motherline p, 23

I’ve been reading Patricia Damery’s novel “Snakes” whose narrator is the breast–feeding mother of a plump baby girl. My body remembers the suck of my own babies’ mouths, the sweet breast feeding reverie, the intoxicating smells of baby skin and my own milk. I remember the pleasure and I remember the overwhelm.

The muse would come to me in those days—baby at my breast, on my hip, in the stroller. She’d say: “Why aren’t you writing about this? A mother’s experience is the foundation of everyone’s life? It’s so powerful. Where are the poems, the novels, the essays about this demanding, amazing and transformative experience?”

“When do I have time to write?” I’d lament. I knew the muse was on to something. I felt deprived by the lack of literature about this most profound human experience. This made me edgy and defensive. “The baby is hungry. The baby needs changing. There’s dishes to do, and laundry. There’s dinner to cook. My body belongs to the baby. So does my head. How could I even focus?”

All that has changed in my lifetime, I’m delighted to say. Many women, myself included, have written about the mysteries, joys and sorrows of mothering. I wrote a poem recently, about my problem.

Your Problem

In a peanut butter and jelly haze
in play dough and lego worlds
amidst unmade beds and Mrs. Dalloway
lost in a pile of laundry, all the edges

of your days unraveling, between baby cries
and dinner, between the earth spirit
who has opened you up, and the call
of that angel before you fall…

If there are rainbows
you don’t see them. If songs are singing
they don’t sing to you. If poems are forming
deep in the dangerous woods, you can’t hear them—

Poems are wild things, they’ll eat you up
just like the wolf, your grandmother has warned you—
but somewhere in a grotto, the witch
who has known you all your life, is busy
fermenting her brew…
(first published in Ibbetson Street)


If I could give my confused and disoriented younger self, just one book to read, it would be “Snakes.” Why “Snakes?” Because it would give her courage and hope. She would understand that her way of being and seeing has value and beauty.

Angela, the first person narrator and central character in “Snakes” does not suffer from the problem of my younger self. She is both mother and artist— a weaver. Weaving is her medium and her way of perceiving. Her voice weaves a rich tapestry of many threads: the bodily sensations of her milk letting down when her baby cries, the healthy smell of breastfed baby shit, the emotional trials of parenting two prepubescent boys, her ambivalent feelings toward her visiting, recently widowed mother, her spirited conversations with her dead father, her marital issues and lusty love for her husband, her memories of the small family farm she grew up on and her grief about the loss of that way of life, her meditations on her ancestors, her fear of snakes, her fascination with snakes and the myth she tells her sons about a shape-shifting serpent and his human bride.

“You mean you don’t have to write paragraphs that focus on one thing at a time?” my younger self marvels, remembering red marks all over her creative attempts in college. “You mean you can write about a woman’s gaze, her bodily response to a man’s nakedness? Listen to this:

“Let’s swim,” Jake said, pulling off his clothes. I stood spellbound. His body was lean and forbidden, yet I looked at every muscle, the tautness of his belly, the bulging of his thighs…I watched the curve of his buttocks as he hung midair and then ever so slowly, slipped into deep waters.
p. 85

“You mean you can leap from memory to myth to talking with a ghost to funny family conversations in which big brother calls baby sister “the Leech” to philosophizing about the loneliness and grief of ancestral farmers in the Midwest while writing in plain speech that is accessible and poetic?” My younger self is amazed. “You can loop back and forth in the generations, remembering yourself as a child as you deal with your children and your mother’s response to your mothering? You can weave a Zuni myth about a beautiful maiden who marries the sea serpent Kolowissi into a dialogue with an eleven year old boy?”

“Lived with a snake” Trent used to say. “She married a snake?”
“Kolowissi is a god” I’d explain. “He can take any form. But his favorite is that of a serpent.”
p. 33

“Just like that she weaves the ordinary and the marvelous into one fabric.” My younger self is impressed. She has suffered under the fallacy of categories. I wish she could have known what Angela knows: that all the realms are interwoven. That is how her mind worked. Still does. But back then she thought there was something wrong with her mind, that modalities were supposed to stay in their separate categories like university departments, or milk and meat, according to Jewish Kosher law. This muzzled her, hobbled her, kept her in a mental strait jacket, denied the flow of her thoughts. I wish she could have known what Angela knows—that magic is always present, as surprising and as ordinary as a snake slipping through yellow grasses on a California hillside.

Exploring the Creative Process

On Monday, June 27 at 12pm EDT (9am PDT), I am being interviewed by Steve Dahlberg and Mary Alice Long Co-Hosts of Creativity in Play.

Creativity in Play describes the interview as one where “we'll explore what the creative process looks like and how it works across poetry and therapy….”

I'm looking forward to it! For more information, click here.

The House That Was My Muse

The Story Behind the Poem

A house was once my muse. How can that be? Most houses are about keeping out the rain and the noonday sun.

From the outside the house was a shoe box—upended—with plain redwood siding. But from inside the house was all eyes: eyes on the western hills where the fog flowed in, eyes on the inner valley where blazes of trees announced the changing seasons, eyes on the long view out to a distant reservoir, eyes on the setting sun as it swung along the hills— north to summer, then west and south to winter. It was a poetry house, a muse house.

Most poetic of all was my poetry porch—a small glassed in deck off our bedroom—and the house gave me new eyes, or rather, it gave me back the eyes I had as a girl. Birds flew below us. Hawks were at eye level, making slow circles until their eyes caught motion and they dived. Once, I saw a golden eagle perched on the nearby power pole—watching me watching him. The poet I’d been as a child in the mountains of Vermont, in the ivy woods of Princeton, returned to me in that house. She had room to play in a structure that cultivated the contemplative, the imaginal, the wild.

Sometimes, at night, we’d wake to the uncanny “hoo hoo” of an owl, perched on a corner of roof, staring at us. Often, after work, Dan and I would stand on the living room deck, pour drops of red wine on the distant earth, say “Pacha Mama”—thanks to our mother—the earth.

Our houses shape us—they orient our senses, teach us what matters, give us our outlook on life. Before the muse house Dan and I lived in a strong warm maternal house in the city, with dark wood interiors. In those days we paid scant attention to what was happening outside. It was a house that sturdily embraced our complicated family: Dan’s three kids, my three kids, a dog, a cat, the custody dance of every other weekend vs. Dad’s week, Mom’s week. How many for dinner? When the kids grew up, we wanted a house just for us two.

The muse house on the ridge was a blessing of light, a lesson in the circles of life. It sang to me in the hot tub. It whispered fragments of poetry. I wrote and I wrote.

The house was also a headache, a money suck, a catastrophe waiting to happen. It leaked in the rain. We replaced the roof. It still leaked. We replaced the windows. It still leaked. The drip drip drip woke us in the night. It was water torture.

It needed to be painted frequently, for it stood three stories tall on that ridge and was beaten by weather. It cost a small fortune to paint because it required scaffolding. The house, Dan said, would keep him from ever retiring. It was making him crazy. Slowly, sadly I came around to Dan’s reality. We needed to sell the house. That was when I heard the lament of the house:

Lament of the House

How can you tear me apart, empty me out?
Haven’t I stroked you with fingers of light?
Haven’t I gentled your eyes? Filled you to brimming over
with the green world? How it goes
golden and brown? How it loses

its leaves and goes bare? Haven’t I given you
joy— shown you the setting sun
with streaks of purple and orange,
with white fog like sea foam
flowing over the western hills?

Haven’t you stood on my deck, you and Dan
poured red wine unto the earth
said praises, said blessings?
Haven’t I held your clay goddesses, your dancing
Ganesha, your gathering of Zuni frogs?
How can you tear me apart, empty me out,
get me staged to be god knows whose
fantasy house on a ridge? I who’ve been source
of your source, sanctuary, sacred seat
from which you’ve seen clouds form, hawks dive…

Haven’t you sat in me—on that old yellow chair—and been visited
by poetry? Haven’t you stood in me—naked,
moonstruck— in the gaze of the great horned one?
Will you send your gods into exile in cardboard boxes?
Will the soles of your feet forever be gone from my spiral stairs?

Where will your wild enthusiasms go, your wrestling
angels, your love cries? “Nasty,” you called me
when I thrust that long redwood splinter under your nail.
How else can I say it? You and I are inside one another.
How can you tear me apart, empty me out?
(This poem was first published in Poppyseed Kolache #2, Summer 2010)

Some time ago we learned that the young couple to whom we sold the house had to walk away from it. They were under water. The Great Recession had devoured their livelihood, their equity. And my magical house, my poetry porch, my glorious views hung desolate, abandoned, on the ridge— a foreclosure notice flapping on its front door, under the bare, late fall, wisteria which—I can see it in my mind’s eye—will make fervent purple blooms overarch the entrance, come summer.

The other morning Dan looked up from his newspaper. “It’s been sold” he said. “What has?” “Our old house.”

And indeed, we drove by to see trucks and cars parked in front of the house on the ridge, and work being done.

Thank you, whoever you are, who bought that magical house. Please take good care of it. May it bless your lives as it did ours.

5-Star Review of Adagio and Lamentation

In his May 21, 2011 Malcolm’s Round Table review, Malcolm Campbell gives Adagio and Lamentation 5 stars (out of 5) and imagines the poet working “…with a pen so sharp that it tears the paper, cutting through the desk’s polished veneer to carry ink and light deep into the primary wood.”

Campbell writes, “…the poems live and breathe on their pages, and when experienced together, comprise an ever-new song about long-ago wars, colors, shadows, moments and people…. Lowinsky’s words—written with “a flicker of serpent’s tongue in her ear”—tear through the paper-thin present and drive their way deep into the underworld of the unconscious where the inspirations of her muse are fiery, erotic, earthy, transcendent and whole.”

–Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “The Sun Singer,” “Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey” and “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire.”

Some Reflections on Loss and Grief on Mother’s Day

On a recent Thursday my friend Cathy and I were having lunch—as we regularly do— telling each other stories from our lives as we have done since we were girls. There was a sudden commotion across the street from the restaurant: a procession of many children and some adults had turned the corner of Alcatraz Avenue and was marching down College Avenue. They wore blood red T shirts, and carried placards that read: “Peace. Non Violence. Adam we love you.” Sad children, weeping children, adults with solemn faces. They chanted: “Adam Adam Adam. We want Peace.”

We who had marched against wars and other atrocities, we who had been washed down the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall while demonstrating against the House Un-American Activities Committee fifty years ago—when we were students at Berkeley High— watched this procession with amazement and wonder.

What was being protested?

Who was Adam?

Adam, we learned, was Adam Williams, a young man, 22 years old, who worked as an aide and mentor in Peralta Elementary School’s P.E.A.C.E. after school program. He was shot outside Sweet Jimmie’s at Jack London Square on the night after Easter—an innocent passerby during an attempted robbery. I found his photo on line—such a beautiful young man.


Cathy has a son named Adam. I have a step-son named Adam. My children and step-children, including Adam, went to Peralta in the 70s. It was a wonderful school, diverse, challenging, creative. I gather it still is. I learned from the Peralta School Website that Adam Williams went to Peralta in the 90s and that his mother has worked on the support staff for years.

I don’t know Adam Williams. But I know something about how loved he was. The children whose lives he touched, touched me with their tears, their passionate protest against his senseless death, their hand written placards. One read “Be treated as you want to be treated. Mr. Adam, I miss you.”

I don’t know Adam’s mother, but I do know something about grief. My grandmother lost her two sons when they were in their early 20s. They had gone skiing. Their young lives were buried in an avalanche. This was many years before I was born. But her grief was my companion growing up. I learned that a mother who loses her child never stops grieving, never stops remembering, needs to keep that child’s memory alive by telling the stories. I wrote about this in my book, The Motherline.

Terrible loss, sudden death, unbearable grief are part of all our Motherlines. Go back far enough in your Motherline and you’ll find children who died too young, mothers who died in childbirth, fathers killed in war or on the streets.

Cathy and I stood at the corner of College and Alcatraz in the throngs of blood red T shirts whose slogan was ”Adam’s March for Peace.” We looked at each other with tears in our eyes.

One can think of this terrible story as an example of the mysteries of fate. Or one can see it as a symptom of a violent and gun crazy culture. Either way it is unbearable.

Cathy and I know that grief is part of every mother’s experience. Whether it’s grief for your baby growing up, grief for a child who is disabled or sick, grief for an adult child who is suffering, the capacity to grieve is part of being human, part of being able to love.

This Mother’s Day make room in your reflections for mothers who have lost their children. They do not stop being mothers. Remember the mother of Adam Williams. Remember how much he was loved.

My Mother’s Hallelujah Violin

A Mother’s Day Offering

I am losing my mother in little flakes of peeling off memories. Sometimes, during our Sunday morning phone conversations, she tells me she wakes up and doesn’t know where she is. Sometimes she doesn’t know who she is.

My mother is in Chicago, in a beautiful retirement community by the lake. I am in Northern California. She forgets this. She also forgets where my children and grandchildren live. “You’re so lucky!” she exclaims, each time we have this conversation, “They’re all near you! You can see them whenever you like.” I get her meaning. It’s not easy for her that I’m so far away. It’s not easy for me.

My mother is a fine musician—a violinist and violist. She still plays chamber music regularly. “What did you play?” I wonder. “Oh, I can’t remember” she says. “But it was fun.”

I remember, just a few years ago, when my mother was in her eighties, she’d tell me proudly about her Christmas time ”gigs,” playing Handel’s Messiah in Black churches all over Chicago. I wrote a poem about how our family identified with African-American culture, “Your People Are My People.” My mother and her “Hallelujah violin” make an appearance in the poem, which was recently published in New Millennium Writings.

So mother, here’s my poem as a Mother’s Day offering to you, who have taught me so much about aging with grace and with passion for what you love. It’s dedicated to Al Young, whose poetry inspired my poem.


YOUR PEOPLE ARE MY PEOPLE
for Al Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but I want you to know Al

every Christmas
in black churches all over Chicago
the Messiah shows up
accompanied by my mother’s
Hallelujah violin

(Published in New Millennium Writings)


You can learn more about my mother’s life, and about the power of the mother archetype in all our lives, in my book: The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots. By the way, it makes a great Mother’s Day gift.

My mother and her “Hallelujah violin.”Photo by Joan David, 2007 

A Mother’s Day Gift of Memory

My mother, past 90, is losing her memories. The other day on the phone she couldn’t remember where I was born. Was it Cuba? Was it California? She couldn’t remember how she and her family got out of Europe, in those terrible days before World War II.

My mother has given me the gift of her stories. I remember the story she told about losing two pregnancies early in her marriage. My father thought it was from walking on the beach. One more try, he told his young wife, who longed for children. I was the result of that try, born in California. I cleared the way for three more— all brothers.

All through my childhood I heard stories of how she and her German Jewish family got out of Europe. Those stories inspired my book, The Motherline, and have spilled into poems, many of them collected in my most recent collection, Adagio & Lamentation.

When I was working on the Motherline, my mother was the age I am now. She was vibrant, adventurous, traveled all over the world on her own.

She is my inspiration for growing old with grace and joy. Will I live to be the age she is now? Will I too lose my memories?

Mother, I said on the phone the other day, open your copy of the Motherline. You’ll find some of your stories there. Oh yes, she said, you did write about all that. I hope she will turn to page 169, and read about the time she, my husband Dan and I went to Germany, to see where she had lived as a child, before the family fled. The large, gracious home she remembers, in a beautiful suburb of Kassel, was gone. It had been bombed in the war, and now there was a new modern house. This is what I wrote:

The landscape of her childhood descends upon my mother and she exclaims, sighs, laughs and points. The reserve of her adult persona fades, and I can see the exuberant little girl in her. “Ach!” she exclaims, here was the school she loved. Here they walked after school. Here is where her friend, Ursula, still lives, and their dog played with the dog who lived round the corner.

“Here is the wall around the house!” She shows us a stone and iron wall. “This is the original wall! Here we hung over the edge with our bowl of cherries, spitting the pits directly into the open windows of the passing bus. I was good at it too!”

My mother (in the center), age three, with two of her sisters

The Motherline is full of women’s stories, women’s mysteries, women’s memories. Since it was published in the 90s it has inspired many women to gather their family stories, track their Motherlines, honor the lives of their mothers and grandmothers. It has recently been reissued by Fisher King Press with a beautiful new cover—a painting by Sara Spaulding Phillips. It makes a great mother’s day gift.

This Mother's Day Bouquet Requires No Water and Never Goes Bad

The Motherline by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, a Mother's Day Bouquet Steeped in Mother Earth and Soul.

So many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my Mother’s stories. Only recently did I fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother's stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories–like her life–must be recorded. –ALICE WALKER[1]

Being a mother is an experience of body and soul which ties one to the source of our life and all life. The Motherline is for women who have mothers, are mothers, or are considering becoming mothers, and for the men who love them. Telling the stories of women whose maturation has been experienced in the cycle of mothering, this book does not sever mother from daughter, feminism from "the feminine," body from psyche. The path to wholeness requires reclaiming aspects of the feminine self that we have lost and forgotten in our struggle to free ourselves from constricting roles; it requires that a woman make a journey to find her roots in the personal, cultural, and archetypal Motherline.


Mother is the first world we know, the source of our lives and our stories. Embodying the mystery of origin, she connects us to the great web of kin and generation. Yet the voice of her experience is seldom heard in our literature. Psychology, the field that examines human nature, has tended to be child-oriented. And much of the feminist literature has been daughter-identified. We are so full of judgments about what mother ought to be that we can barely see what mother is. This has been shattering to a woman's sense of self and her connection to roots. We have no cultural mirror in which to envision the fullness of female development; we are deprived of images of female wisdom and maturity. Finding our female roots, reclaiming our feminine souls, requires paying attention to our real mothers' lives and experience; listening to our mothers' stories, and our grandmothers' stories, is the beginning of understanding our own. When we hear these stories, we tap into the wisdom of our Motherline.

Being a mother is an experience of body and soul that ties one to the source of one's own life and to all life. In the deepest sense of the word it is a religious experience, for the word religion comes from the Latin religare, which means to bind back to, to reconnect with. The Motherline will help you reconnect to the story of your origins, your Motherline, your body, and your soul.

I have been gathering material for this book all of my life, much like one gathers material for a patchwork quilt. I've taken the stories of the women of my Motherline, memories of childhood, journal entries, my experience raising children and stepchildren to adulthood, pieces of my master's and doctoral dissertations[2] (both of them studies of mothers), the stories I've heard as a psychotherapist and the stories I've told as an analysand, what I've learned from students and colleagues at the Women's Therapy Center and the Pacifica Graduate Institute, and what I've learned at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco where I trained as a Jungian analyst. I've gathered dreams and poetry and prose, and sewed them all together with journeys I have made to create a pattern that evokes female wholeness. Like most women's sewing projects, it has been worked on, put away while children are being raised and life makes other demands, felt guilty about, and brought back out to be worked on again. As in quilting, the design of the book has been created by combining many separate elements into one pattern.

Although The Motherline contains the voices of many women, its structure is based on my personal life because it is the flesh and blood of our female, subjective experience that I seek to bring to consciousness. Each of our stories is unique and yet there is an underlying Motherline pattern. Other women's stories set up sympathetic vibrations so that we can begin to near our own.

The process of finding one's Motherline is idiosyncratic and chaotic. It takes most of a lifetime. Every woman must engage in it in her own way and in her own time. The reclamation of feminine soul is not a process that can be readily taught. Rather it is a potentiality that can be evoked by shifting the way we listen to women's voices, and the way we see ourselves, our mothers, and our grandmothers. I hope to facilitate this process.

Each chapter of the book describes reclaiming an aspect of the feminine self. It is not the entire story. There are aspects of female nature, such as the warrior-amazon and the erotic lover, that are not addressed here. The Motherline is a search for female continuity and the sense of wholeness that is gained when we find it.


OF SELF, SOUL, AND SHADOW

What is self and soul? Self has come to have specific meanings in psychology. In self psychology, it is used to mean an inborn potentiality for an authentic and vital identity. Jungians use the word self in a similar but larger sense. For them, the self is the "potential for integration of the total personality"; it "contains the seeds of the individual's destiny";[3] it includes the psychological, biological, and spiritual aspects of being human.

There has been much controversy among feminist thinkers about whether the experience of self is gender-specific. There are those who argue that a gendered sense of self is a by-product of culture. Though I agree that the culture may warp and damage the female experience of self, it makes no sense to me to separate one's sense of self entirely from one's body. Female identity is rooted in embodied experiences of menstruation, childbearing, lactation, and menopause, which are filtered through the veils that different cultures throw over them. Clearly a woman's identity consists of much more than her reproductive system, and this is where the feminist critique is invaluable in confronting cultural misogyny. But I believe that we go to the depths of our feminine selves in these primal, physical experiences, common to women of all cultures. Devaluing these depths is a function of our own cultural bias.

The word soul is most commonly used in a religious context, and means the part of our being that is connected to the immortal. Some psychological thinkers such as James Hillman use soul in a broader way, to name the experience of seeing the gods or the sacred in all life forms. This book is about women's immortality through our birth-giving capacity. Soul here is not separate from body. It is through our full honoring of bodily experience that we become ensouled. Soul does not separate us from ordinary life. It does not float off into the stratosphere as spirit seems to in the distinction commonly made between spirit and flesh. In colloquial usage one who has soul is one who has acquired depth through suffering, often one who has been oppressed. Soul is born of the kind of suffering that brings us in touch with the mysteries of life.

One way we garner soul is through the integration of what Jungians call the shadow. The shadow is that part of our personality that is cast into darkness by our fears, values, temperament, and cultural prejudice–a part of ourselves we do not know. Traits that we deny and repress in ourselves and dislike intensely in others are usually parts of our shadow. Contemporary women are prone to project aspects of their shadows on their mothers. We cut off our natural energy flow when we disown our envy, rage, competitiveness, pettiness, sensuality. Paradoxically, when these traits are recognized and owned, they tend to soften and get humanized. Learning to suffer our own shortcomings and those of others, even to develop a sense of humor about it all, gives depth and richness to the personality. It is an aspect of maturation and of soul.

Jungian theory describes psychological experience on three levels: the personal, the cultural, and the archetypal. Most current psychology emphasizes the personal and neglects the cultural (leaving that to the anthropologists) and the archetypal (leaving that to the theologians). The problems created by this narrowness in psychological thought are more than academic. Mothers get saddled with cultural baggage or with archetypal expectations. Because the gods are dead, mothers are expected to stand in for them, taking the blame for much that more truly belongs to fate. Because we've lost a historical sense of how culture shifts, we are outraged that our mothers did not raise us according to the standards of our times but had the effrontery to be shaped by the values of their own generation. Thus painful intergenerational rifts and misunderstandings arise. Women whose mothers love them deeply feel estranged and unmothered. Women whose daughters long to know them can find no language of mutuality.


OUR MAMMALIAN MAMA

How do we distinguish between the three levels of experience–personal, cultural, and archetypal? Archetypal psychologist James Hillman sees Archetypes as the "roots of the soul."[4] Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson describes the archetype as involving both a primordial image and an instinctual root that "create a pervasive sense of being gripped by an urge and dazzled by an image of compelling power."[5] An archetype can be described as an underlying life pattern with both instinctive and symbolic poles of expression surrounding a core of great emotional charge. The Great Mother archetype, for example, is a primordial image that expresses our instinctual, mammalian nature. It takes many cultural forms, from images of the Virgin Mary to those of the death-dealing goddess, Kali, in India. But the female form with breasts is recognizable in all cultures. We are all born of woman. Her breasts and her womb permeate all times and all cultures. Every culture translates the mother archetype differently, and every biological, or personal, mother has her own unique psychology and connection to her child.

The personal experience of the mother-daughter relationship is shaped by the individual lives and temperaments of the two women. If, for example, the daughter is the longed-for only child of an older mother who tried for years to get pregnant, her experience of her personal mother will be very different from that of the sixth child of an exhausted mother who considered getting an abortion. The quiet, introverted child of a quiet, introverted mother will have a different experience of self than would the fiery, extroverted child of that same introverted mother. When a woman becomes a mother she embodies the archetypal mother and becomes the culture bearer who will socialize the child. At the cultural level a child will be schedule or demand fed, bottle or breast fed, told she should be seen but not heard, or encouraged to express her spontaneity, raised by her mother or a nanny or an au pair depending on the culture, historical period, class, and personal circumstances into which she is born. However, all these children need to be held and protected, praised and fed and played with, scolded and limited. Though this is done differently in various cultures, a child needs some manifestation of the mother archetype in her life or she will be severely damaged.

It is confusing to sort out the personal, cultural, and archetypal levels of our experience. Archetypes are mostly seen in their cultural manifestation, and changes in cultural attitude become personal battlegrounds between generations. But there are some areas in which the archetype shines through. For example, it is striking to consider how many cultures make similar sounds for naming the mother: Mama, Mutti, Ama, Ema. The "ma" sound brings the lips together as in reaching for the breast. Thus a linguistic form reveals the physiological nature of the archetype across cultures.

I remember seeing a television report about a gorilla mother who had just given birth in a local zoo. She held her baby close. When she lifted her great gorilla hand to tenderly pat its head, a shiver of archetypal energy burst through me. I knew that gesture. Every human being knows that gesture. The mother archetype in her gorilla form had been revealed to me on the evening news!

The words male and female refer to our biological natures, while the words masculine and feminine imply cultural and archetypal meanings as well. Jungians historically have been interested in the archetypal distinctions between the masculine and the feminine, not limiting them to one gender. Whether these concepts are useful or stereotypical has been controversial in both Jungian and feminist circles. The feminist critique is that these are culturally biased concepts. Jungians respond by pointing out that the masculine is not limited to men, or the feminine to women.

The terms masculine and feminine are vital concepts that are typically truncated by the tendency of cultures to make rigid gender distinctions. These hurt both men and women. There is an enormous overlap in what men and women can do. At all levels, including the physical, we are more alike than we are different. But we can rob ourselves of our deep instinctual roots in life if we deny the power of the differences between the sexes. The feminine experienced by a woman is very different from the feminine experienced by a man, and vice versa. Gender differences have biological roots that go far below the cultural level, below human history: they precede our evolution as a species and take us down to our mammalian beginnings.

All mammals are divided into males and females. Females have breasts and wombs. Males have testes and penises. These sexual differences are meaningful; far from being a curse or a limitation on women's lives, our mammalian experience is what grounds us in our feminine selves. My thinking resonates with that of the men's movement, of which poet Robert Bly is a central spokesperson. He and others argue for a recognition of the differences between men and women at the instinctual level. It is a relief and a pleasure to hear men honoring their own embodied experience. These differences are, indeed, empowering for both men and women.


A PATTERN OF FEMININE SOUL

The Motherline is arranged in ten chapters, each evoking an aspect of the feminine self and how it can be reclaimed. The sequence describes the journey I made, but it is not a linear path. One could begin from any place in the pattern to find one's way into the Motherline.

We begin with a conceptualization of the Motherline as the source of our stories. In the second chapter we consider the women's movement, which at once frees us and gets in our way as we seek our female roots. In the third chapter we pick up the thread of our Motherline search by going back to our forgotten knowledge of the mother tongue, remembering images we took in with our mother's milk, of the primal female experiences of bearing, bonding, and being in relation to children.

In Chapter 4, we confront the developmental problem of differentiation between mother and daughter, which forces both women to engage in the painful process of sorting out self from other, and acknowledging shadow. The thread of our story is taken up in Chapter 5 by four women who, in telling their stories from the middle of their lives, loop from the past through the present to the future and back, weaving a rich tapestry of contemporary female maturity.

In Chapter 6 we follow the thread of women's lives by looking at generational change and how we are shaped by the times we live in. Chapter 7 explores girlhood memories of a grandmother and how this process links a woman to her past and to her future and transforms the mother-daughter dyad into the ancient, sacred, female trinity: maiden, mother, and crone.

Throughout The Motherline, my own Motherline story unfolds; I am confronted by the ghost of the grandmother I never knew. Her voice comes to me from before my birth and requires me to make a journey into the realm of my ancestors. This takes me to Israel in Chapter 8 to meet female relatives and learn their stories, and to Germany in Chapter 9 to see the landscape of my mother's childhood through the ashes of the Holocaust. My journey is part of a pattern of female development; you will see how many women make this descent into the past to find their roots.

In the end we must seek our spiritual roots in the old female religion. In Chapter 10 we traverse the land from the lost shore temples of the east coast of India to a sacred hill in Glastonbury and discover that the forbidden and taboo aspects of feminine soul are a part of our landscape as well as our dreams and our visions. What we have lost or forgotten of the feminine mysteries is hidden in our everyday lives.

About the Author
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is the author of The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way and The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots and numerous prose essays, many of which have been published in Psychological Perspectives and The Jung Journal. She has had poetry published in many literary magazines and anthologies, among them After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery, Weber Studies, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Tiferet and Asheville Poetry Review. Naomi has three published poetry collections: Adagio and Lamentation (2010), red clay is talking (2000) and crimes of the dreamer (2005).

Naomi has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times and is the recipient of the 2009 Obama Millennium Poetry award for "Madelyn Dunham, Passing On.” Naomi is a Jungian analyst in private practice, poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives, and a grandmother many times over.

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[1] Alice Walker, In Search of My Mother's Garden (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1983), p. 240.
[2] Naomi Ruth Lowinsky "The Generation Cord: A Hand-Me-Down of Mothering in Four Families and a Changing Culture," (Master's thesis, Lone Mountain College, 1977). "All the Days of Her Life: A Study of Adult Development and the Motherline in Modern Women," (Ph.D. diss., Center for Psychological Studies, 1985).
[3] Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 91.
[4] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), p. xiii.
[5] Joseph Henderson, Shadow and Self (Wilmette, Ill: Chiron, 1990), P. 54.

Copyright 2010 © Fisher King Press - Permission to reprint this article is granted. Credits should be linked to www.fisherkingpress.com

High in the Afterglow

I woke up this morning with a dream: I am being transported in a small boat over blue waters whose waves curl up and down as elegantly as in a Japanese woodblock. Light sparkles. I am not in charge of this journey. But everything is so clearly delineated— so intense— I feel high. I realize I’m still in the afterglow of last Friday’s Red Book conversation in which Maxine Hong Kingston, Rhoda Feinberg and I wrestled with Jung’s strange and beautiful book.

The Red Book is the record, in the form of an illuminated manuscript, of Jung’s famous “confrontation with the unconscious.” He writes directly out of his vulnerability, working out his relationship with his soul in the depths of the mythopoetic imagination.

Maxine Hong Kingston lives in a mythopoetic landscape, as do I. Maxine, of course, is the author of "The Woman Warrior," "China Men," "The Fifth Book of Peace" and other literary treasures of our time. Rhoda Feinberg, Maxine’s good friend of many years, is a psychotherapist who traveled from Hawaii to join us for the evening. Her humor, her wisdom, her teaching stories of everyday life were earth to Maxine’s fire and sometimes water, my air and water.

We three had spent months reading the Red Book and getting to know one another. Here we were, unscripted—sitting in the lovely sanctuary of San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church before an audience of over 200 people—not knowing what would happen.

Conversation happened. We spoke of Jung, how he opened himself to the powerful forces of the collective unconscious, suffering the intensity of his visions, engaging in dialogues with his inner figures. This direct experience was the raw material from which he shaped a psychology that includes spirituality, imagery and the creative imagination. We spoke of the healing power of the creativity, of Maxine’s writing workshops with veterans, of the importance of social engagement with the world and its suffering. We “talked–story,” an essential element in Maxine’s writing and in Rhoda and my practices. We spoke of the ancestors, of what they need from us. I quoted Jung’s passage in the Red Book:

The primordial fire that conquers every necessity shall burn again, since the night of the world is wide and cold, and the need is great…
The words uttered at the fire are ambiguous and deep and show life the right way…
Aware of their deep helplessness…they will respect the holy fire again, as well as the shades sitting at the hearth, and the words that encircle the flames. p.280

We imagined we were all sitting around that primordial fire.

Soul was with us. The mythopoetic imagination stirred all three of us, and, as we gathered from the response we got, the audience as well.

I am so grateful to Maxine and Rhoda for their generosity, their big hearts and great spirits. This was the fourth and last of a series of Red Book Dialogues created by Ellen Becker and the Development Committee of the SF Jung Institute. They have created an exciting new format for cultural events. I thank them for all the hard work they did making these events so successful.

I was not in charge of this journey. But that evening sparkles in memory, intense, full of wave and swirl. I feel high in the afterglow.

Red Book Dialogues

The C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco has been hosting a series of dialogues between Jungian Analysts and leading teachers, writers and artists in the community--all inspired by the recent publication of The Red Book.

The final event in the series will take place Friday, March 25, 2011 at 7:30 PM and will feature Maxine Hong Kingston in dialogue with Naomi Lowinsky and Rhoda Feinberg. The venue is the Unitarian Church at 1187 Franklin Street in San Francisco.

Tickets are available at www.sfjung.org. [$25 General Admission ($10 Student)]

The Music Muse

The Music Muse was a visitor when I was a girl. She was not really my muse. She belonged to my father, a musicologist and a fine pianist. My parents were German Jews who raised me and my brothers in the great European tradition of music and literature. Musical evenings were a family ritual, especially when my mother‘s mother, my Oma, came to visit. They connected us to our European roots. My father had entered my mother’s family as the piano teacher, in Holland. When he married my mother in 1938 he entered a family that had the means to escape the catastrophe that loomed over the Jews.

My father was a haunted man. He yelled at my mother. He yelled at us children. Ghosts were riding him, but he seldom spoke of them: his mother and father had died in the Shoah; so had millions of nameless dead, whose fate he’d escaped.

When the Music Muse came to our house all the raw angry pieces of the day fell away— the atmosphere softened. My mother relaxed. My brothers relaxed. My shoulders relaxed. My angst and my vigilance took a breather. The ghosts were there; I felt them. But they had stopped careening around, making a big commotion. They settled down, as did we children, and listened to the Music Muse.

She came as Bach. My father’s crisp, clear articulation enhanced the long lyrical phrases of a fugue or an adagio. He had been on his way to becoming a concert pianist as a young man in Germany, when he injured his hands. They were small hands—he could barely reach an octave. It was a catastrophe at the time. My father taught me that something good could come out of the bad. It changed his path. He always said that he was grateful, because he was much more suited to being a scholar of music.

Sometimes the Music Muse came as Schubert. I loved to hear my Oma sing Schubert lieder, my father at the piano. They are poems set to music. Oma’s voice vibrated with feeling. She was telling her story through those songs. My soul was stirred. I was filled with a longing for something intangible that lay beyond the everyday, beyond the fear and the rage, beyond the unredeemed dead and the broken lineage. Music, I’ve come to understand, was the religion of my childhood. It was blessing, solace, and prayer, how spirit became manifest, how passion was expressed, how soul returned to our haunted lives.

My father, I can hear him now, would be the first to say that the Music Muse and the Poetry Muse were sisters, even twins. They began life together back in the beginning of human time. He would point out, if he were alive to comment, that my poetry is very musical, and he would take full credit for that. Certainly it was he who inspired the title poem of my new collection, “Adagio & Lamentation” which invokes one of those musical evenings in my childhood. And it was my musical step daughter, Lisa Safran, who put this poem to music, bringing the Music Muse and the Poetry Muse together again.

adagio and lamentation

when my father’s fierce fingers made Bach flow
our dead came in and sat with us a ghostly visitation
and my grandmother sang lieder of long ago

this is how prayer was said in my childhood solo
piano arguing with god adagio and lamentation
when my father’s fierce fingers made Bach flow

music accompanied us into the valley of the shadow and lo
Bach was torah Mozart was our rod Schubert led us into contemplation
my grandmother sang lieder remembering long-ago

my child’s soul was full of glimmerings the glamour of the gone the glow
of candles borne by children into the dark German woods the illumination
of the evergreen all this I saw and more when my father’s fierce fingers made Bach flow

my mother’s dead sister my grandfather in a cattle car woe
permeated shadows stirred the curtains took up habitation
in my grandmother’s body filled every song she sang with how she longed for long ago

long gone now my grandmother my father although
sometimes I call them back by villanelle by incantation
come my fierce father play for me water my soul in Bach’s flow
sing my sad grandmother your song is my covenant with long ago


Photo: Edward Lowinsky (toward the end of his life) by Nikki Arai