Netflix and Beyond

Yeah. So I haven't blogged for a while. I've been settling in to Life in Portland, Oregon, and ignoring my greater responsibilities. Sorry.

Since I last checked in to Blogger I have acquired 5 viewers! What a surprise--welcome. I feel motivated to continue writing, now that I see folks are reading. It's very exciting.

What Kieran and I have been doing lots of, is watching movies on Netflix. We don't own a television machine, so we watch movies on the computer.

So...my plan is to now and again post a review of a movie that has a particularly shamanic theme. Shamanic themes in movies, if you will.

Tonight's selection is the the Spanish movie, "The Orphanage." Old-style orphanages seem to have died out sometime in the 1970's, but this movie, despite its anachronisms, plays upon the very fertile spooky possibilities of orphanages and the poignancy of neglected children. (Even though in this film, the wife is currently 37 years old, she appears to have grown up on an orphanage last decorated in 1910.)

A middle-aged couple with a young son purchase and move into an abandoned 19th century villa, with the intention of opening an exclusive center for a small group of special-needs children. The villa had formerly served as an orphanage at which the wife had grown up until she was adopted around age seven. The couple have adopted an adorable HIV-positive son, from whom they keep the knowledge that he is adopted and (possibly) terminally ill. This seven year-old has invisible friends, and begins to add more of them to his life when they move to this villa, which his parents find unsettling. Supernaturally-tinged things start to happen: spirits appear to move objects and inform the son of his situation, despite the parents' best intentions of keeping him unaware.

During an opening party for the center, the son disappears, and the parents begin a months-long search for him which involves local police searching for his body along the beach, as well as mediums who can feel the presence of unhappy children on the grounds. The medium (a fluent-in-Spanish Geraldine Chaplin!) reveals to the wife the importance of setting belief before evidence, and tells her to use her intuition to find out what happened to her son. Meanwhile, a strange former employee of the orphanage provides a logical backstory for the events which ultimately gets buried in the otherworldly elements of the story. What gripped me was the last quarter of the film.

Emotionally unable to take any more weirdness, the husband leaves, and the wife asks for just two more days in which to find out what happened to their son. Making use of the medium's advice, she follows her intuition to create a shamanic/theatrical ceremony in which she calls forth the spirits of the abandoned children with whom she grew up. The movie shows better than any other, to my mind, how the wife enters a shamanic state of transcendent consciousness brought about by sustained grief, desperation, and sleeplessness, which she works with and sustains in order to contact the spirits who alone have the ability to inform her of what has happened to her child. She both enters an altered conscious state, AND makes it physical: truly, she walks between the worlds. She creates a sort of (dumb, in the traditional speechless sense) meal to call forth the missing children, and then she engages in a childhood game during which the spirits appear and lead her to to hints that reveal what has occurred in ordinary reality. She enters a sort of shamanic-metaphoric situation during which she goes underground into the cellar (a classic underworld journey) to both discover what happened to her child, and retrieve his soul.

The movie takes a Catholic turn, focusing on self-sacrifice and redemption, which I won't reveal to curious viewers. However, the film was quite interesting in how it expressed the possibility of communicating with the dead through consciously-created ceremonial ritual, and how the Spirits can reveal to us what normally remains unseen.

Queen of the Sun

There is a new documentary out about colony collapse syndrome called "Queen of the Sun." I found out about it while walking through my new neighborhood in Portland: seeing the posters for Queen of the Sun had been tacked to every possible pole on Hawthorne Street. Queen of the Sun plays through this weekend locally, but I had also seen the Craigslist ad for a marketing person to spread the word about Queen of the Sun a couple of months ago, but didn't apply since my computer-skillmind still can't quite fathom Twitter.

Hey, notice the flagrant SEO ing of this post? Yes indeed, to have it score in the world, the phrase Queen of the Sun must be repeated over and over, up to five times. I hope the movie is great...it's made by the same people who created "The Real Dirt on Farmer John."

http://www.queenofthesun.com/ 

while you're at it, check out the remarkable documenary group

http://www.collectiveeye.org/

Taken With the Wind

Visionary, self-taught folk artist Vollis Simpson has stopped work due to advanced age, and his collection of intensely detailed whirligigs (aka kinetic, wind-driven constructions) are going to be sold and redistributed.

http://www.reflector.com/mixer/artists-famous-whirligigs-be-moved-new-home-42093


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38311137/ns/travel-destination_travel/


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/arts/design/06vollis.html

"The main part of doing anything that turns 

is to get it centered." 

– Vollis Simpson, whirlgig artist

Weird Emerging Sicknesses

In the shamanic traditions in which I was trained and raised, illness is the perfect expression of some part of the human body that is experiencing disconnect and denial by the human personality residing there. Experiencing any kind of discomfort, disturbed human response, lack of energy, et cetera, is always related to what one is carrying in one's field of energy that is asking for attention and integration. 


I bring this up because there is a heap of information being spread around in the light-leaning spiritual community that everything uncomfortable, shocking and difficult that folks are experiencing right now is "perfect," and not to be afraid of, and that one must trust Spirit and simply endure it. 

There is not a thing that makes us uncomfortable that is just something that Spirit is imposing on us, forcing us to endure for some unknown "greater good." It is never required that we endure difficulty and pain to satisfy Spirit (unless we believe or are implanted with beliefs that we must). 

at left: Susan Jamison, Lovelace
We ourselves open the door to enduring difficulty when we decide to refuse to lovingly and ruthlessly do the work to know and transform ourselves, despite being given constant hints and clues as to who and what we have allowed ourselves to become.

Now that we're in the Changing Times, illnesses that people could bear and build for centuries undetected are now showing up, demanding to be acknowledged and integrated/cleared. Each person is at a crossroads of evolution, and if they don't shift their reality and take action, they may bring forth these very obvious forms of sickness.

We know that everyone who was born during this time and place entered into the agreement knowing (certainly their numinous self knows) that they would be given plenty of hints and wakeup calls and opportunity to come alive to themselves and clear their morphic fields. The strange sicknesses now coming into reality are the final, most undeniable signal that the person has consistently neglected inner calls to shift their perception. 

Even though we call it cruel to "blame the victim," actually no human being is capable of getting sick unless his energy field is holding energy patterns created by his alignment with that form of reality in thought, feeling and action. Sometimes a pattern of sickness is magnetized when a person consistently chooses the same kind of experience, refusing over the long term to challenge herself to experience it's opposite...becoming overly developed in either the deep dark or the expansive light, not balancing her spiritual portfolio, so to speak. 

Whether patterns were magnetized in this life or thousands of others, or in the lives of our genetic relations, has no bearing on the truth of their existence. If it's in the field, imbalance will sooner or later take shape.

A friend wrote my dad, asking for his thoughts about some Youtube videos that show folks experiencing a sickness whereby their skin erupts in sores all over their bodies, and out of these lesions emerge small threads or minute insects. It's all on disturbing view at Youtube. Search for "Morgellon." 


There are also many clips showing dead bees carrying these threads, and anecdotal accounts of these mysterious threads quickly killing honeybees by contact resembling electro shock. One theory suggests that these errant fibers come from genetically modified cotton. Not a coincidence, then, that the spiritual tradition involving the honeybee is intimately and numinously related to the threads of fate and spinners of destiny.

Susan Jamison painted this featuring the spider.

The thread sickness is deeply symbolic, shamanically and mythically. In both Native American (Spider Woman) and European traditions (the Norns or Three Sisters), the spinner/s of fate, are the beings who tells us daily, if we acknowledge it, what our balanced place is in the web of life, and also that we are connected to all others. Chronic distraction and chronic overvaluing of individualism may be at the root of this sickness. Chronic refusal to keep one's spiritual weave intact and stay connected. The threads of connection in these humans are broken and scattered and the human has refused to acknowledge, energetically, his place in the web, refused to take responsibility for his experience as a human connected to the universe. These broken threads have no choice but to float to the surface and come out.

In the shamanic traditions worldwide, unacknowledged, unnecessary energy in the body shows up as writhing insects which the shaman can see. Infestation of this kind reflects a morphic field stuffed to overflowing with unresolved self-hatred and self-repulsion, a chronic deficit in self-love and an inability to integrate and transmute guilt. It is astounding that this universal watermark of shamanic spiritual extraction has recently become actualized in our world for all to witness.

Also strangely ironic/non-ironic at this point is that these unfortunate folks are being told they have created this, it doesn't really exist, and there is no help for them. It is a cruel denial of obvious reality, and yet: Yes, they have created this...yes, they are challenged to know what is real though previously unseen...yes, only they can change this, and nobody can make it go away for them. All of these things are true as the sickness has surfaced in our world which they have been unconsciously cultivating or carrying for eons in the other world of reality. 


I do not mean to sound so detached, ruthless and uncaring about this shocking syndrome. I myself have carried garbage and lies in my own field that I have worked mightily to either avoid seeing, or indeed, take responsibility for and transform. I have been successful, and at times I have not been, and have experienced sickness that I was desperate to change, deeply frightened of, and feeling powerless about. 


I was called to go in the opposite direction of powerlessness. To go to my power in order to find the solution. The solution is always self-and-spirit-crafted, regardless of which health professionals are helping. The solution appears always when the numinous self makes the decision at the deepest level to align with something else than what is apparent.

Our numinous selves want very much that the soul personality "get this" for once and for all. Soul-cleansing is what is necessary to evolve.

Human beings are conditioned to choose comfort, ease, and the known. How on earth do people learn to choose to align with going into the dark of the unknown in order to confront the ignorance of what they are holding? Desperate people want to go to what has worked before: the socially acknowledged experts, go to the medical professionals, to the place that says this isn’t about the numinous or the unseen. The mind wants to go to the "logical" solution.

My parents, my grandparents and me, by Frida Kahlo

In spiritual orders of old, the journey of any particular tradition had built into it work that took the seeker in a completely opposite direction of where their safe-modus-of-operation would normally go. The mind-blowing challenges meant to relieve our soul story of its accumulated content can only be activated by deciding to take them on, regardless of outcome...stepping into the void, being the innocent fool, yelling YES! no matter what.  YES! I trust that I am heal-able, that I am healed, that is is taking place, that it is real, it is done. 

So often when new diseases appear and strange happenings shock us, folks tend to align immediately with victim's story of struggle. When did humans forget that courage is necessary in the face of the unexpected, in the face of change? When did we forget to override the accustomed in order to allow new possibilities to be born? 

Whether or not we choose to undergo spiritual challenges purposely, fate’s spinners take us there anyway.  When we summon courage to surprise ourselves, we get to practice the power of intentional decision in the weaving of fate. Eventually we learn to choose all the colors and patterns and end up with a weave of our own design. I believe this is where we are headed, all of us.

New Face of Enchantment

Last year I wrote a largely supportive but ultimately scathing post about Amy and Monte Zerner's website.  While I was very enthusiastic about Amy's enchanted-intuitive process of working with textiles, I was somewhat shrill about the "purchase it now" vibe of the site overall: in this, my words and the site then mirrored each other. I felt then and still feel that the integrity and beauty of her body of work is not served by all the many 'wisdom decks' the art is turning up in.

However, I understand the two are attempting to reach as many people as can be reached to spread a very positive, loving and expansive message. I heard from Monte Zerner personally and he was very kind and level-headed despite my tongue-lashing and urged me to take a new look at what they are doing.

Well. The whole site has been re-imagined. What is wonderful is that they have shared vast amounts of images of her older work, and overall the site is extremely generous and informative. It is leagues different than the site I saw about a year ago. It simply gives more than it asks for.

Please look here to see her incredible art collection and to see how the work has influenced and pollinated art-to-wear.

Sure, overall the site remains commercial and blinky, but the lovely collage border of her art puts the emphasis where it should be: on the body of work, on a unified visual frame. Seeing the art can be a challenge: follow "art" links among the many video/interactive clicks. These many free interactive utilities: readings, videos, etc,  share techniques of self-insight and are fun besides.

It can't be necessarily easy deciding how widely to peddle one's art. It seems a real tightrope walk between over-exposure and sharing it with the world, for all artists. The Zerners seem to have decided that if their time on earth is limited this time around, that rather than pump up the prestige of Amy's art by limiting its exposure, they will instead share it was widely and encourage it to be bought in as many forms as possible. Clearly they believe the New Age messages the work convey are equally important to the work itself.

I still love the work more than I do reading about what it means. I love the mystery of letting the images unfold in myself, without prompting, and I believe this unintellectual, non-mental process it is one of the core occult strengths of the art itself. All art, in fact.

But from now on I put my stinger away for the Zerners, I wish them ever-increasing success and continuing joy in their collaboration, and I will always urge folks to have a look at Amy Zerner's enchanted textile art.

Mysterious Ways I have Imagined: The Art of Gail Potocki

I found the work of Gail Potocki on the Anna Nathan (Chicago) Gallery website and was intrigued by her beautifully painted image of a honeybee. From there I found out that her November 2008 exhibition had featured several images of honeybees in surrealistic and symbolic, dream-like situations.

When I was about eighteen, I carried a book of surrealist poetry with me everywhere, and it fed my mind and dreams delicious spoonfuls of the wild dark.
At left: a study for "Thaw" in which a woman is washed up on glaciers and a honeybee hovers over her head, carrying fire

While there are many pieces of surrealist art that I can’t relate to and which make me feel cold and alienated (De Chirico comes to mind, Dali) I still believe that the surrealists have come as close as possible to the dream visions of shamans, so the work continues to magnetize me. I think I may have to dig deeper into exactly what the difference is between visionary art and surrealist art. It may be as thin as the hair of a mouse.

Gail Potocki is a masterful painter, in the style of the 17th Century Dutch masters, with just a bit of Spanish mannerist attenuation thrown in. Her images are lush and riveting and multi-layered. Visionary writer Grant Morrison says of her, “…brilliant occult portraits from the Symbolist underworld of the 21st century. More than just paintings, Gail Potocki conducts séances on canvas…” This is very well put.

Indeed, she seems to be in the act of placing moments of distilled high climaxes of Gaia's unconscious on her canvas, as if the veil has been ripped away - the immediacy of the timing of each event is baroque. She expresses more than her personal view, so her environmentally-charged images don't come off as an axe to grind - more like a clarion call to action. Like all great art, she has put down what we didn’t even know we were feeling. The way a shaman would, she sees environmental issues embodied in the mythical beings, gods and goddesses which have the contemporary faces of her models.

(I have posted here a few details of her work, since they are already posted and since it is for the purposes of education, which is within Fair Use.)

"Angel" at right, in which bees create winged presences on a red clad woman.

The HI-Fructose online review of her 2008 exhibition has reproduced some of her work in a grand scale: have a look at Red Spirals, Tiara, the complete Thaw and Corrupted Mother. Her own website details the progression of her paintings from 2000 onwards, although it hasn’t been updated for a few years. She also has had a book produced by Thomas Negovan of Century Guild.net, a surrealist and symbolist art website.

Boing Boing also reviewed her 2008 show, of which she said:

"I've addressed my concern with the plight of the honeybees quite a bit in this body of work. The mysterious loss of such a huge percentage of the bee population is one of the most alarming collapses and seems to be happening so silently with little press or media concern. I wanted to show the importance of this issue by making the bees larger than life while meeting their death in mysterious ways that I have imagined."

"Shipwrecked" at left in which honeybees are washed up against rocks from an ocean swollen with glacial melt within a stormy seascape.

The last exhibition for which I can find any information was titled “Opened Apples.” This for me was breath-taking synchronicity, as I have been lately remembering the arcane tradition and symbols of the apple in my family/spiritual heritage line.

"I think of the apple as a symbolic representation of the earth and of course, from the story of the Garden of Eden, as paradise. In the painting "Opened Apples" for example, a woman is taking bites out of apples and throwing them to the ground. It represents humans' careless disregard for the natural world and wasteful consumption. The idea of "Opened Apples" made me think of how we have savagely bitten into the symbolic "earth" apple and left it to turn brown and rot. Also, I was thinking of the opening of Pandora's Box as a metaphor of what we are doing by "opening the apple" and unleashing unforeseen consequences."

Restoring the Oracle

William J. Broad's The Oracle: The Lost Secrets & Hidden Messages of Ancient Delphi is a fine mystery book that chronicles how easy it is to lose the thread-of-reality connecting ancient historical evidence (of narratives and description) with physical evidence when archeological and geological losses and alterations occur in the landscape over the centuries.

He describes how French excavations of the late 19th century, which failed to find an underground cavern to support an entheogenic origin of the Oracle of Delphi's visions and prophecies - instead relegating her to a charlatan despite hundreds of years of centrality to Greek culture - became the standard line which paralyzed the evolution of all other studies of the Oracle of Delphi.

For a hundred years in archeology it was simply taken as fact that the Pythia had no consciousness-altering underground cavern, no vapors with a distinctive aroma which had been repeatedly described in the historical record.

Then Mr. Broad goes on to describe the remarkable geologist and archeologist who worked together to find and mentally reconstruct the underground area of the omphalos, the fissures in the rocks and the traces of ethylene which made it clear that the pythia/priestess indeed had a bit of euphoric help in accessing her visions.

Ethylene, however, is a relatively light drug. Laughing gas: I had lots of it as a child in the 70s as I had my teeth moved around, and I remember floating about and mentally making patterns in the pierced ceiling tiles at the orthodontist's office, or staring into his freakish sunglassed eyes. I can imagine it kicking off the relaxation required to enter an altered state, but not sustaining entire prophesies over the course of hundreds of years. Having experienced states of oracular shamanism myself without any drugs, I believe the gases from the omphalos functioned as an atmosphere-shifter, rather than the source of her visions.

Humphry Davy describes a nitrous oxide trip in 1798:
"I felt a sense of tangible extension highly pleasurable in every limb; my visible impressions were dazzling, and apparently magnified, I heard distinctly every sound in the room, and was perfectly aware of my situation. By degrees the pleasurable sensations increased, I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind, and were connected with words as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas."

This is likewise the description of a kind of deep shamanic trance state, without drugs. I would only add that containing another spirit can be physically intense rather than exactly pleasurable: I felt my heart beating faster, and my entire sense of self filled with another being whose access to ecstasy was nearer than my own. I felt I was only just containing this presence.

I especially liked Mr. Broad's Epilogue where he reveals a personal message that the spirit of the pythia reveals to him. I admire that he is willing to go there. It is, in fact, his own oracular reading...however it came through to him.

"Be sensitive to the lessons of liberality, she seemed to be saying. Cherish your science but understand it as a finite guide to the immensities of time and space. It's not a religion, not a worldview. Will it save you? Can it explain my insights and actions? With Delphi, do not let knowledge of the vapors blind you to other truths, other vistas. Look far. Dance with the world rather than trying to explain it away. Consider the boat, not just the planks. Seize knowledge. But know, too, that your intellect is a small window and that its views can be surprisingly incomplete. Feel deeply. Revere truth in all its forms.
Yes, she seemed to be saying. (because she was.--ed.) You have discovered one of my secrets. I have others."

Endangered Languages

Post move...letting Mr. Davis do the Talking

We have moved from Germany to Colorado. Back to, I should say. Here is where half the family is, and where we have been for the past two months after almost seven years of exile.

It has been a culture shock, and yet also quite comfortingly familiar. The good and the bad blend, the past with the present blend, all like oils on a sheet of water when you're marbling paper. That is: they don't blend really, to make mud, but they stay resiliantly separate, swirling next to each other, constantly contrasting. What belongs there, what belongs here...what belongs no longer in either place and time.

Today. Earth Day. And I'd like to share with you one of my very favorite talks given, ever, by anthropologist and world explorer Wade Davis. More writing later. And not so vague.