The Muse of Politics Reborn

Reflections on the 2012 Election

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

Martin Luther King

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

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

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

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

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

Long lines for the 2012 Election

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

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

Barack Obama November 6, 2012

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

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

Image from RFK’s funeral train

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

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

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

For those of you who are black and are tempted to…be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.

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

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

Aeschylus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image of Madelyn Dunham and
her grandson, Barack Obama

Madelyn Dunham, Passing On

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

                         /Xan poem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                    (first published in New Millennium Writings)

Election Night

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

The Citizen’s Dilemma: An Invitation

Aloria Weaver's Axis Mundi
www.aloriaweaver.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Muse of Politics

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

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

An Invitation

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

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

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

Chie Lee

Jacqueline Gerson

Karlyn Ward

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

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

The Muse of Crater Lake

"Marked by Fire"

A Story of the Jungian Way in Geological Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

An Invitation

 October 7, 2012

2 - 5pm 

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

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

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

Muse of the Wild Girl

Hushpuppy and Fleur

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

Hushpuppy in “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WILD GIRL OF PLEASANT HILL

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

But she’s still here, that girl.
You’ll see her playing in the fountains
near Rotten Robbie’s Gasoline
or herding her geese by the Chinese
All-You-Can-Eat Buffet,
while cars zoom past on 680
in sight of the mountain.
               
You’d think she’d be dead by now—
after all the concrete that’s been poured.
But that girl is
wild as Rima— 
talks to the willows, to the birches,
laughs aloud at the ducks
who have commandeered
the community
swimming pool.

And you,
old ecstatic
of trees,  
have you forgotten
   
Green Mansions—that slip
of a girl who first lit
the green fire?

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

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

(Published in Weber, The Contemporary West Journal)

The Muse of Radio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

San Francisco Community Radio

P.O. Box 170697

San Francisco, CA 94117-0697

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

A Review by Erel Shalit

Lakes of Memory and Burning Nights

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

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

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

Marked by Fire Book Event

Book Celebration and Author Event

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

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

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

Marked by Fire on Shrink Rap Radio

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

Bonnie Bright Interviews "Marked by Fire" Editors

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

You can find the interview in the following locations:

• Radio page on Depth Insights 
• News section on the home page at Depth Psychology Alliance

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

A Review by Smoky Zeidel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News From the Muse: The Serpent Muse

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

Patricia Damery

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

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

Here are some sections from the just published review:

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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