Sunday, May 12, 2013

The Muse of Trees


Path with Trees (Watercolor by Emma Hoffman)

Trees Are Our Rock and Our Roots

I come from a long line of tree loving women. When my grandmother, Emma Hoffman, a gifted painter in the impressionistic tradition, lost three children, a home and a country, she painted trees to keep her sanity

I have been thinking and writing about my grandmother for a talk I am soon to give in Cleveland, Self-Portrait with Ghost: The Art of Lament and Redemption. I have written a series of poems in response to her paintings, telling the story of my family’s exodus from Hitler’s Europe to the New World. They lived in Cuba for 18 months before they were allowed to enter the United States. This was in 1940, before I was born. In this painting of a Great Mother Tree I can see my grandmother beginning to get her bearings, beginning to grow roots and branches, beginning to find her way.

Cuba 1940 (Oil by Emma Hoffman)

This is the poem that came to me in response:

Refuge

I’m here
Footstep and breath
Real as the trees
Real as the archway they make
From shadow to glow
Real as my painting in oil
For your eyes

Trees are my rock and my roots
Trees are my silent angels
Will the ghosts ever find me?
Will they build their nests in these branches
Here
As they did in Europe?
We are refugees from that room
With its single bare light bulb
Will our visas ever be granted?
Will our dead know where we’ve gone?
I’m here
Heartbeat and belly
Real as the woman I paint
Passing through shade into glow
Hungry for sun and the sea
And for you yet to be

I’m here
Belly and breath
Trees are my rock and my temple
Trees are my vigilant angels
And you     soon to be

Will you make your nest here?
                (First published in Levure Litteraire)


Trees Are Our Silent Angels

It used to be when I called up my mother for our Sunday talks that we’d tell each other family stories or stories from our busy creative lives. She was a fine violinist and violist. She played chamber and symphonic music, taught violin, and worked therapeutically with young children and their parents. Now, in her nineties, she is mostly confused, says she doesn’t know who or where she is. I think she doesn’t know why she is. But she always knows about the trees. She watches them. They tell her the seasons, orient her in the life cycle and she reports back to me about their winter nakedness, their eloquent shapes and windy dances, their spring buds and gorgeous flowering, their summer green abundance, their fall explosion into many colors and then shedding all their finery. She finds them beautiful in all their states. They calm her. They watch over her. They are as they are, and so is she. My mother would never say they are angels. But I do.


A Life in Trees

In my just published collection, The Faust WomanPoems, I have a poem called “A Life in Trees.” And indeed, I can tell my life story in trees. There was the Great Mother Oak I sat in when I was eight, which taught me the “long slow language of the afternoon,” showed me the “sun tangled in the green,” made a poet of me. (This is from my poem “in the junction” published in red clay is talking.) There was the Sexy Seductive Willow from my childhood, what She “kindled in me.” There was the “long legged” Palm, “enchanting the edge of tomorrow” and the “Lady Tree” whom I drew as a girl before I knew the word Goddess. (These quotes are from “A Life in Trees.”) There was the Umbrella Elm under whose “canopy leaves” Dan and I were married almost thirty-four years ago. There was the Tree of Life which “sent its roots deep into me” filled me with the wild wisdom of the Kaballah and returned me to Judaism. (Quotes from my poem “Earth Spirit” in The Faust Woman Poems.)


Under the Oak: An Invitation

There is another Great Mother Oak in my life these days. She lives in the lavender fields at Harms Farm, where my friends Patricia Damery and Donald Harms grow lavender, grapes and tend goats. I am privileged to be in a group of women writers, dedicated to the work of raising consciousness about the threats to creatures, trees and to the earth. We will read under that enchanting oak tree. I hope you’ll join us.



Under the Oak: Reading for the Earth

How do we reconnect with the earth and with each other in these perilous times? How do we create a vessel, individually and collectively, for rebirth in a world we hold sacred?

We, three poets and a novelist, have devoted our work to these questions, adding our voices to the growing chorus. We are passionate advocates for the Deep Feminine and a return to the ancient and timeless values which She embodies.

Please join us Under The Oak at Harms Vineyards and Lavender Fields for an afternoon of poetry, prose, and refreshments.

When: 4:30 pm, Saturday, June 22, 2013. (The Harms Vineyards and Lavender Fields Open House will be from 10-4 pm. Click on link for more details.)

Where: 3185 Dry Creek Road, Napa, CA 94558. Please park in the parking lot. There is a short walk into the vineyards. Wear a hat and dress appropriately.

Who is reading: Poets Frances Hatfield, Naomi Lowinsky, and Leah Shelleda, and novelist Patricia Damery.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

The Earth Spirit Muse


The Earth Spirit Appearing To Goethe’s Faust

The Faust Woman Poems Are Out 

It is April, the month of poetry, of Earth Day, of flowering. What a fine month for The Faust Woman Poems to emerge out of their long hibernation and look around the blooming world, blinking. The life behind many of these poems has been hibernating for forty some years— hiding out in old notebooks stored in the garage—until a dream grabbed me, called me “Faust Woman” and insisted I go through those notebooks in search of my younger self.

Why Faust Woman? The notebooks took me back to that wild time when I, among so many women of my generation, was suddenly touched by the Goddess. Like Faust we had no idea what we were getting into when we invoked the Earth Spirit to release us from our narrow, confined lives. She thrust us into the wilds of sex, power and creativity, and we owe Her our sexuality, our creativity and our souls.


A consciousness-raising group

I remember the moment the Goddess first touched me—woke me up—in a Women’s consciousness raising group in 1969. She blew the top of my head off and I could see the light of my own nature, hear the voice of my soul.

Possessed by the Earth Spirit

I also remember doing Authentic Movement in the early ‘70s—how the Goddess lit up my body with essential fire, gave me carnal knowledge of hips, feet, pulse, desire. I saw molecules dance in the sun. Poetry came to me. So did lust, longing and ambition. The Earth Spirit claimed me as Her own.


Black Mountain Poet

My own poems gather me—show me who I am and where I’ve been. I hadn’t remembered that the Goddess had embraced me as a toddler. Often I don’t know such things until a poem reveals them. My father’s first job in America was at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. I was a baby there. I had no conscious memory of the place until Dan and I visited it—now a Presbyterian summer camp—a few years ago.

Black Mountain College 

The poems that came made clear the power of the Earth Spirit in my earliest childhood. Here’s one of them, from the section of The Faust Woman Poems called “Earth Spirit.”

My Eden
(Black Mountain College, 1943-47)

Garden of the sun dappled baby I was
and the tow headed toddler      I can see me now
on the wooded path      beloved of the morning

and the night      Drunk on mother’s milk
and daddy’s lullabies      Cradled in the rapture
of the mountains      Captivated by the fiery flash

of a Cardinal in flight      Seer of the light
in willows and in the waters of Lake Eden
Enchanted by the song of the Carolina Wren

Transported into sleep on wings of Bach and Schubert
Enfolded as I was in this Black Mountain tribe
of music makers     paint stirrers     pot throwers     leapers in
the air

Outside the gates     news of the war
Smoke rose     bombs fell
Inside the gates     faculty fights

for or against      communism twelve tone music     short
shorts
on young women      In the basement of the cottage named
Black Dwarf      a Moccasin frightened my mother      But I

lucky baby      took my first steps
between your apple and your wild
rhododendron      greedy for the names of your every living
thing

Early I lost you      Lately I’ve found you
again      Sweet spot, source
of the singing in my heart      and my communion
with the mountains

This is why I consider myself a “Black Mountain Poet” even
though the famous poets—Creeley, Olson, Duncan— did not
come until my family was long gone.


Solastalgia 

April 22nd is Earth Day, a kind of birthday for the Earth Spirit. She is the Goddess who claimed me when I was a toddler, who knocked down the walls of my uptight scared little life in my late 20s, who brought me back to my essential Self. I am deeply grateful to Her.

Now, most of a lifetime later, as oceans rise, as climate changes, as species die She comes back to me in deep trouble—as Wounded Earth. My poetry is a small thing to offer Her, but it’s what I have to give. It is impossible to take in the enormity of Her suffering, how many of Her creatures are losing the ground, the ice, the trees, the seas in which they survive; how many are losing their bearings among the high towers of cities, the violent weather, the shift in seasonal patterns.

Solastalgia is a term coined by Glenn Albrecht, an Australian environmental philosopher. A mash-up of “solace, “desolation, and “nostalgia,” it describes the inability to derive comfort from one’s home due to negative environmental change. I think we all suffer from it profoundly.

I found a list of threatened species on line: (http://www.earthsendangered.com/list.asp). It is overwhelming. As of this month 10,796 are listed and that does not include plants. I made myself scroll through that list. I could barely stand to read through it. I was amazed by the wild poetry of this human “naming the animals project,” and horrified by the desecration the list describes.

It is unbearable that the Earth is being deprived, starved, depleted of Her creative bounty, Her wild, teeming life. I do not know most of the creatures on that long, long list, but in honor of Our Mother I need to write out some of their marvelous names, look at a few of their haunting images; I need to grieve, to keen the loss of our creaturely legacy, our squandered inheritance.

How can we go on without the Fabulous Green Sphinx Moth, the Fairy Tree Frog, the Fat–nosed Spiny Rat, the Flame Templed Babbler, the Rusty Grave Digger, the Red Handed Howler Monkey, without Naomi's Forest Frog?

How will we live in our homelands without the African Elephant, the Atlantic Humpbacked Dolphin, without the Bombay Bubble–nest Frog, the Cambodian Laughing Thrush, the Egyptian Vulture, the Formosan Yellow–throated Martin, without Galapagos


Coral, without the Hawaiian Hoary Bat, without the Japanese Paradise-flycatcher, the Lake Placid Funnel Wolf–spider,

the Mexican Bobcat, or the  Northern Sportive Lemur, without the New Zealand Grebe, the Oaxacan Coral Snake, the Philippine Warty Pig, the Queensland Rat Kangaroo, the Rio di Janeiro Antwren, the San Martin Side–blotched Lizard, the Tasmanian Devil, without the Upper Amazon Stubfoot Toad, the Venezuelan Flowerpiercer, the Wisconsin Well Amphipod, the Yucatan Brown Brocket Deer, the Zanzibar Red Colobos Monkey.

How can we be at home on earth when our kin, our totems, our teachers, our food, our dream figures, our very nature is gone?





Lailah Wants a Word

In Jewish legend Lailah, the Angel of Conception, watches over the unborn child, initiates us into life on this earth. She came to me in a temper, and this is what she said:


Lailah Wants a Word

Lailah, the Angel of Conception…watches
over the unborn child
Jewish Legend

You were not born for traffic
Not released into day for hustle

and drive. I did not send you past moonstone
past glow worm, to ignore the light. I did not touch

the soft spot on your crown, nor seal
my blessing on your upper lip, to be a slave

to acquisition. I sent you into the company
of frogs. I sent you to commune with willows

with oaks. Pay attention—
the frogs have stopped wooing

the oaks been sold down river
Grandmother Spider Brother Rabbit

are losing their worlds. You have ears —
Hear them. You have a heart—feel them

You have two lungs—breathe
I give you the wind

in the grasses. I give you the sight
of Coyote. She’s meandering up

the mountain. Follow her. Perhaps she will throw
your shoe at the moon. Perhaps the moon

will fill your shoe with shimmer—
sail it back down to you—Then

will you remember
                             me?

(Published in The Faust Woman Poems)

Friday, April 5, 2013

Cleveland Lecture & Workshop

"Let us build the bond of community so that the 
living and the dead image will become one and
 the past will live on in the present…" — C.G. Jung

Self Portrait With Ghost: The Art of Lament and Redemption

Lecture and Workshop presented by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and hosted by Jung Cleveland and Braden & Associates

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Ph.D
Download Registration Form

Date: 5/17/13Time: 7 to 9 p.m.
Location:
First Unitarian Church of Cleveland
21600 Shaker Blvd.,
Shaker Heights, Ohio 44122

Lecture Description:

"Often I have such a great longing for myself. I know that the path ahead still stretches far; but in my best dreams I see the day when I shall stand and greet myself." — Rainer Maria Rilke

When you lose three children, your home and your country, how do you go on? If you are Emma Hoffman, a gifted painter in the impressionist tradition, you paint. Those paintings continue to speak of the redemptive power of art to Hoffman’s granddaughter, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky. Years ago, when she was in analytic training at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, Lowinsky had a dream in which she was told, "On your way to Jung’s house, you must first stop at your grandmother’s house and gather some of her paintings.” Lowinsky was the first child born in the New World to a family of German-Jewish refugees from the Shoah. She had a special tie with her only surviving grandparent, whom she knew as Oma. Oma taught her that making art can be a way to transmute grief and bear the unbearable.

Friday, March 29, 2013

The Muse of Remedios Varo



On the cover of my about to be published book, The Faust Woman Poems, a woman is feeding stardust to the moon. She sits in a sort of gazebo, suspended in dark moody skies. She operates an old–fashioned food mill—I remember it from my mother’s kitchen. Only her machine has a chimney that seems to draw down the stars. She grinds them up to make baby food, which she feeds to the moon in its cage with a long handled spoon. Where are we?


We’re in the imaginal world of Remedios Varo, a surrealist painter of the mid 20th century. We’re also in the poet’s study—I live in that world—feeding the moon—though my moon—I’m happy to say— is not in a cage. Perhaps that’s because I am a member of a generation that experienced the rebirth of the deep feminine, just a few years after Varo’s untimely death in 1963. That rebirth is the subject of the poems in this collection for which Varo is an inspiration and a muse.


Look at her painting, titled “Reborn.” A naked woman breaks through a wall. The moon breaks through the ceiling and is reflected in a bowl. Twigs and branches push through cracks, windows, the ceiling. The human made world is red as blood, vibrant as passion. The woman’s eyes are full of uncanny light. That’s one of the ways Faust Woman looks in my imagination.

Remedios Varo was born in Spain in 1908. She married the Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret. The couple went to Paris in the late 30s and was active in Surrealist circles. Peret was a left-wing activist and she a Loyalist so they were not safe in Franco’s Spain. They emigrated to Mexico. She was never to return to her homeland. But Mexico was magical for her art. Look at her “Unexpected Journeys” which is the cover art for a book about her work. 


My own family was forced to make an unexpected journey too, out of Hitlerian Europe to America. I identify with Varo’s story. In Mexico she befriended another fabulous Surrealist painter, British born Leonara Carrington.

The two women studied mysticism, Kabbalah and Alchemy. They were interested in psychoanalysis and told each other their dreams. My kind of friends. Here is Varo’s painting of a woman leaving her analysts’ office.


The woman is holding a ghost like a dead rat, her headdress is wild with what’s been released in her soul, her shawl covers her mouth for she’s been telling secrets, another pair of eyes are draped at her heart for she’s been seen and reflected; above her the sky is wild and moody. I know that feeling; I know her world well. My poems explore the weird and the uncanny, the mystical and the taboo. I too have an intimate connection with the moon. I want to thank the spirit of Remedios Varo and her estate for the privilege of using her image on the cover of The Faust Woman Poems. And I want to dedicate the following moon stuck poem from that collection to Varo, my sister in the imaginal realm.


Witch’s Sabbath

Long ago when night was your familiar
you knew the moon and the moon knew you
I mean carnally
Those stories about sex with the devil are about this

You knew the moon and the moon knew you
Joy from the sky made a music in your body
Those stories about sex with the devil are about this
moon penetration     stars awakening

Joy from the sky made a music in your body
Lion arose     horse flew
moon penetration     stars awakening
Something from forever loved you for a night

Lion rising    horse flying
Roots of the tree reach up into the sky
Something from forever loves you for a night
and the moon sings

Roots of the tree reach up into the sky
Branches touch down into earth
the moon sings
Naked you are     and flying

Branches touch down into earth
I mean carnally
Naked you are     and flying
rooted in the night     your familiar


Announcement

I’ll be one of a group of local poets reading for National Poetry Week at the Montclair branch of the Oakland Public Library on April 16th at 6:00 pm. If you’re in the neighborhood, please come. I’ll be reading from The Faust Woman Poems.