The Female Center

I sometimes hear voices.  I kept pretty quiet about that my entire life, because, well, I was afraid of being judged by minds that do not understand such things.  This has been a month of letting go of fears... so that one's gone too.

In the early morning hours I sometimes hear a voice, telling me one thing at a time, helping me understand. It's always been a fatherly voice, until yesterday.  Yesterday the voice was female. It told me to Enter. 

The words were "Put yourself inside of me."  (If you immediately thought about sex read the next paragraph.  If not, you can skip it.)

The sexuality of the phrase, while undeniable, could easily become a distraction from the larger lesson of the words.  Making female power centered on sex is a way of taking away female power, by limiting it to one dimension of human activity.  If we as a culture had a healthy relationship with feminine power, then the relationship between sexuality and all the other forces that drive us as humans would exist in harmony.

I reflected on the words I had heard, "Put yourself inside of me" until I finally decided to paint.

My first interpretation of the voice was that of the earth, the mother, the female.

Fire inside, fire in the center.  What to enter?  The Center.  It is in the entering that the understanding begins to unfold, through the feeling, through the energy, through the very act of entering.

We are at a time in history when we have so much to look back on and sift through.  Books and knowledge excite me, offering so many paths of thought and exploration for the mind.  But, in the end, I have to get out of my head for the clarity I need.  The clarity that is needed for peace comes from calling my ancestors and finding my center.  It comes from a place that cannot be defined with words.  

The knowing that comes from the mind and the knowing that comes from the heart's center do not need to be in competition.   Coexisting, they work together, for we are in the world, as well as the spirit, at this time.  This is the conflict I see around me, that of opposing poles.  How does one shift that magnetic push of opposition into an alignment?   By entering the center, where the forces no longer push or pull.  Rather than split the atom, enter it.

What my ancestors and spirit are telling me is to release fear.  This happens by facing fears, not suppressing them or pushing them away.  Looking at fear and then letting it go is the way through the anxiety of our time.  It leads to a centered calm.  Everything must change, in a profound and all encompassing way.  That change is happening, and in order to adjust to the change, a strong and centered female energy is needed.  And this is an energy that is misunderstood in a patriarchal world, where equality is often sought on male terms, and feminine power is still confined by those very terms. 

The imbalance has been focused on male, light, linear thought, hierarchy and force.  We are witnessing its final stages.   It cannot be tamed, let alone fought , with more of its own .  A receptive, dark, female energy encircles it and tames it, not with force but with unimaginable power.  This happens on every level of human activity, from the most intimate to the most public, through personal relationships to political struggles.  All we need to do is look to nature and spirit to bring our human world back into balance.  Starting with, but not stopping at, ourselves.

Female is reception.  It is Yin.  It is the stillness in the center of the storm.   It is the heat from the center of the earth.  

That is where I enter.  

Night Vision

In the earliest hours of morning our thoughts connect 

 two worlds.  Dreams open doors into a fluid world. In daylight the thick shell of the world hides from 

us from the truth we seek. 

We forget the stars are still there. 

This is my story of remembering.  It is one of many, for when we are not forgetting, we are remembering.  And each story tries to remember, but in the telling it falls short.  So the Storyteller is born again.

In the middle of November I was not sleeping well.  One particularly windy night I lay in bed, staring into the darkness and listening to the forest howl outside my window.  As I drifted between waking and sleeping a vision began to form, one I did not welcome.  I saw a darkness surround all beings, enveloping the earth.  It was thick, a cloud of deep thick charcoal fog.  I entered into it and saw with my heart its fullness.  Suffering.  So much suffering.  It was not just suffering to come, it was suffering that had been and it was suffering that is.  It was all existing in one place and one time.  I saw it with my entire being and I lay in bed weeping.

It was 3 in the morning and I was sobbing, trying not to wake Dale.  I lay there for an hour.  All beings, humans, animals, trees and the earth itself all wept with me.

Untitled Work in Progress

This was a pretty dark place, even for me.

After an hour I knew I had to get out of bed and go into the woods. I woke Dale.  He was concerned when he saw that I was crying. I told him. He said, “Take a flashlight.”

At first I didn’t turn on the flashlight.  I wasn’t in a hurry, so I thought I could just step slowly and carefully, letting my vision adjust to this very dark night.  It was a Wisconsin November.  So there were dry brittle leaves everywhere, and, on a windy night like this, they tend to pile up.  So, my first fright came when I stepped into a pile of leaves that wasn’t there the night before.  My foot lifted the leaves, taken up by the wind, farther than I would have imagined. I was surrounded by the sound of rustling leaves and my pounding heart.  In the blackness I stood frozen, hearing movement all around, and I decided I wasn’t so opposed to the flashlight after all.

The Wind

At that point it occurred to me that I would rather see a creature of the night before stepping into its space, so the light stayed on as I carefully made my way to a special spot in the forest of pines.  It is a place where a large tree has lain fallen for years, so much so that younger trees grow through it.  Animals take shelter in it.  Moss grows on it.  I have always loved this spot.  When I got there it took me awhile to find a comfortable seat.  The woods feel ominous at night. I chose to have my back against a young tree, something to lean on, and it gave me a small sense of protection. 

The wind was still blowing fitfully, shaking the trees and loosening their dead.  Before turing off my flashlight I scanned my perimeter for potential Widow Makers, or in this case Widower Makers.  Then, with a touch of my thumb, total darkness.

House of the Woods

Oh how hard it was to keep that light off.  A breaking branch a few feet from me was enough to make me freeze.  For what seemed like hours, but was more likely 30 minutes, I sat frozen.  My eyes were wide open, but, at first, I saw nothing.  Slowly I began to see.  There seemed to be a substance to the air, as if every single molecule was coming out of hiding.  The air, the trees, the leaves and I were all tiny dots vibrating in and out of my sight.  Looking up I saw a falling star.  In this light the trees are the negative space, and the distant stars are the positive space.  For a moment I was neither light nor dark, I was only perception, as everything around me changed from one to the other.

Molecules

For an hour at least my thoughts bounced back and forth between wonder and terror.  Of course I could calmly remind myself the biggest danger that night was a coyote.  But a noisy rustle in the black space around me made me imagine more.  Believe it or not, this was the first moment I recognized a connection between my choice to sit in the woods and the story of Siddhartha.  As the account of his becoming the Buddha is told, Siddhartha despaired at the suffering in the world.  His search for an answer led him to sit under a Bodhi tree, meditating outdoors for seven days and seven nights.  My 2 hours in the cold on a fallen tree paled in comparison to his 168 hours. I laughed at all the times I sat on a comfortable cushion in my heated home to meditate.  Nature is essential to awakening us to this life, and we humans so often hide from it.  In a terrible separation from the earth I had forgotten the lessons it has to teach me.  In my darkest moment, I remembered, and I stepped outside.  To be inside of our deepest consciousness we have to be outside in the Natural World, not inside of the Manmade World.  To the degree to which we the Modern Humans have violently torn ourselves from our connection to nature, we have suffered.

I swear I remember there being a moment in the story of enlightenment where a giant cat approaches Siddhartha.  So, I thought, maybe I needn’t be quite so fearful.  A lion or tiger would be bad. Back to fear. Forgetting.

Deep Sleeper - Intermediary

Of course the point wasn’t Lions and Tigers and Bears.  We do have occasional bears and wolves and even the rare cougar sighting in this part of the State. I knew there was a reason I was out there in the cold and it wasn’t to try to guess which wild beast would eat me for dinner.  I could fear the wind, the animals, even the possibility of a human in the woods, probably most dangerous of all.  I had to let it all go. The most frightening part of being alone in the darkness in the woods was also the most awakening.  Remembering. 

I began to look each fear squarely in its face and release it.  I soon found myself remembering them all, from paralyzing terrors to the less obvious ones. The ones that linger for days, muted and pale but persistent in their nagging.  People who had frightened me, I saw their fear.  People that had hurt me, I saw their pain.  People I had frightened and people I had hurt, I saw my blindness.  I saw fear and pain passed on from parent to child, from master to slave, from teacher to student.  Acts of violence replacing the wisdom of old with inherited pain and terror.  Victim becomes perpetrator and the lamb becomes the hungry beast at the door. There was no bad, no good, no dark, no light. Only attaching and letting go.  With each passing fear I felt an infinite lightness that cannot be expressed with words, although LOVE is a good one to try.  This was a special kind of night vision.  Seeing through the dark.    

Artic Spirits

It was at this point I realized the woods were becoming more and more visible in the earliest light of the day.  As I had passed through the darkest hour of the morning I had seen through at least some of my blindness.  As the trees became solid, once again I could connect each sound with its source.  I looked up at the sky.  Not a single star in my sight.  I would have to go on memory.  Remembering.  I got up, a little stiff, and walked toward the house.  I would put on some coffee and try to talk about this.  The things the darkness commands us to know. Fears are only passing moments, but we give them strength when we try to suppress them.  In their suppression they are squeezed and wiggled into our souls and the passing darkness takes a solid heavy form.  This heavy load is so light in its release.  Walking back to my warm house I knew I would struggle to find the words to tell this story. And in the telling they would fall short. And the storyteller is born again.  

Visionary Painting

Visionary Painting is a very broad term that many people claim.  In my opinion they are all valid but they are all not the same.
I am not borrowing other's philosophies that speak to me and making illustrative collages with known images in order to communicate my cause.  This is fine, it is a form of communication and it can spread ideas. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not what I do.
I am not envisioning an ideal world and painting it.  This is a valid process and can stimulate awareness and even change, but... not what I do.
I am not looking at the world outside of me and painting my vision of it, art like this can be very beautiful and stirring, but it's not what I do.

What I do is something different.  I am not the only one, but I think we're not very mass-market popular.  We are not commerce driven because this work isn't pretty and it's a hard sell.  We are not academic because we rely on our intuition and mysterious processes much more than our intellect.   We sometimes don't mirror the accepted academic stance on issues, we sometimes do. Sometimes I have no idea where we fit, but I know it when I see it.  We do our work in private, making sense of the world by listening to the muse of the spirit world giving us messages that are difficult to decipher. We "put them out there" when we deem them ready.  I have had to remind myself over and over again not to comprimise this, even if I never get recognition, attention or money for what I paint.  When I remember that, I am rewarded greatly by the process itself.   

So, why share it at all?  I guess I just get pretty excited about it.  I feel like a consciousness talks to me when I'm painting and I get very enthusiastic about that.   It feels like a wider and more expansive consciousness that I have in other areas of life.  So it's sometimes hard to understand completely, especially when I first hear it.  It's a bit like dreaming while awake.  I want others to look and maybe see it, maybe not.  At this point 90% or more  of you may be dismissing me as delusional, flaky or both.  But I'm ok, I function as well as most.  I am not convinced my thoughts are always clear or realistic, but they are not any more delusional that anyone elses belief systems.  (in my humble opinion)

I actually feel these "conversations" help me function better.  But only when I keep them balanced wth the rest of my existence.

When I was a very young child I dreamt I was on a boat, heading to a big destination with my family.    I think we were moving our residence.  During the trip a psychotic doctor was turning everyone into skeletons.  I hid and was able to escape, but I was terrified.  The rest of my family were skeletons.  I was torn between trying to save them and staying hidden.  I had no idea how to save them.   I didn't want to be a skeleton.  I woke up with the dilemma unresolved, a fearful wakening in the middle of the night.  I will never forget it.  

This symbolism is the subject of this painting and of a solo show I have scheduled for a year from now.  (The show is at UW-Fox Valley in Menasha, WI)  I have decided to name the show "Usha" after my imaginary alter-ego I developed when I learned my Hindi name.  

Usha is a character who resolves issues for me through stories.  They are stories I have never shared publicly, but they mean a great deal to me.  Literary World-wise they are not ready, well-written or completely resolved enough to publish, in my opinion.  But they really help me think...

This particular painting finds water and oil interacting.  The skeleton is from my dream, and my skeleton drips oils from all it's limbs.  I don't yet know where Usha fits into this, but I know she will.  She is coming out of the many layers, like the dresses I make.  She is hiding behind the ancestors, she is flowing in the water.  She wants to save the skeletons but she is afraid.  It just takes time.  For now there is water and it runs through the skeletons mouth, trying to bring it back to life, but it seeps through and waters the wheels of a great and powerful machinery.  The thing is that the water never stops flowing, even after the machines have stopped.

The ancestors keep watch.  They are witnesses to it all, but they cannot be heard by most.  What is it they want to say?  Can we listen?

I believe Usha will appear and she will help me once again understand my role.  It might be in a dream.  It might be a story that comes to me.  It might be the next time I am painting this.  I hope I have the answer soon, because I feel helpless and afraid sometimes, not knowing how to act and not react to the times and events we are all living through. 

I feel that I know more than I knew before I had the vision, but I certainly don't have any answers.  Just feelings, images and more questions.