An Ode to Brain Fog

I can’t remember where I put my mind 

what thought I was last thinking 

left unfinished, open-ended 

dangling 

over the edge of 

nothing

I can’t remember what it feels like to be 

fully awake and alive 

knowing there is a path to follow 

scattered with experiences and emotions

There are a great many things I can’t recall 

or just don’t care to acknowledge at all

The spark’s gone out and I can’t see a thing

My life’s gone dim and I don’t know when I’ll live again

But life’s a funny thing for it just keeps going 

even when the going’s rough 

because at the core of it there is 

something

(A little seed of defiance?)

There must be a reason for this fog 

for the dimming of mind 

for the enclosure of self into 

a small space 

all fuzzy round the edges

I don’t understand 

but I let things be

Meinrad Craighead 1936–2019

Today I learned of the death of the artist-mystic Meinrad Craighead at the age of 83.

Born Charlene Marie Craighead in 1936 in Arkansas, she lived a remarkable life, teaching art in Albuquerque, then Italy and Spain, before spending fourteen years as a Benedictine nun in Stanbrook Abbey in England. It was there that she took the name Meinrad, after her mother’s great uncle, who had been a monk in Switzerland. (He is said to cure people.) In 1983 she returned to the US, settling near the Rio Grande in Albuquerque. 

The Moons of the Vernal Equinox (from The Litany of the Great River, 1991) 

It is only in the past year or so that I have discovered Meinrad’s art, and watched the short videos made by Amy Kellum, Praying with Images and God Got Bigger, which I know I will continue to return to whenever I am feeling particularly uninspired. They do not fail to invigorate me, to show me what is possible, to make me want to keep seeking, keep trying, to be receptive and ready, and to create from that vast space of openness.

Though Meinrad seemed a small, unassuming woman, she was intimately connected with the wild, with the spirits of animals and the land around her, and the often overwhelming nature of God the Mother, who is certainly not just sweetness and light. Her work is beautiful, strange, and sometimes confronting in it’s depiction of birth and death, dream and transformation. It links spirit, woman and nature into a seamless weave of divine immanence.

Crow Mother Over the Rio Grande (from The Litany of the Great River, 1991)

What I also love about Meinrad was that her studio was a shrine, and her art practice was ritual. Her approach to her work, as a sacred calling, as a communication with the many spirits she was in contact with, is an inspiration. 

She wrote:

My personal vision of God the Mother, incarnated in my mother and her mother, gave me, from childhood, the clearest certainty of woman as the truer image of Divine Spirit. Because she was a force living within me, she was more real, more powerful than the remote Fathergod I was educated to have faith in. I believed in her because I experienced her.

…

I draw and paint from my own myth of personal origin. Each painting I make begins from some deep source where my mother and and grandmother, and all my fore-mothers, still live; it is as if the line moving from pen or brush coils back to the original Matrix. Sometimes I feel like a cauldron of ripening images where memories turn into faces and emerge from my vessel. So my creative life is itself an image of God the Mother and her unbroken story of emergence in our lives. (From the introduction to Meinrad Craighead, The Mother’s Songs: Images of God the Mother, Paulist Press: Mahwah, New Jersey, 1986)

I feel so lucky that I have two of her books (which are mostly out of print and difficult to find). I will treasure them and remember Meinrad every time I return to their pages for inspiration and guidance.

Farewell, Meinrad. Journey well on the next stage of your being. 

Throne (from The Mother's Songs: Images of God the Mother, 1986)

Wise Words: The Sacred Image

We cannot know or even imagine the nature of the consciousness which is the universe. All we can do is formulate an image of what we conceive as divine in relation to the limitations of our own consciousness. We do not know how or when the goddess-or-god image first arose, whether from dreaming sleep or from waking vision. All that can be said is that the experience of divinity exists in the soul and that the soul insists on making an image of it because, through that image, it feels itself related to something greater than itself. The image is sacred, for it is this above all that binds that part of the psyche incarnated in time and space to the unseen dimension that enfolds it.

(Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, Arkana: London, 1991, p. 484)

Rainmaker

Rain has fallen recently, out west in the drought-stricken places, and the early weeks of autumn in the mountains have been cool and damp. 

From thoughts of rain has come my latest work of art: Rainmaker. 

Rainmaker, watercolours on gesso prepared paper (2019)

As I slowly read The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas recently, two images of Neolithic figurines stood out and combined to form a vision of blue and watery life-giving. The first is a masked figure—I love her face!—from southern Italy (c. 5300 BC); the second is a figure with streams flowing down her body, from north-east Hungary (c. 5000 BC).

 

In my own way, I united these figures, and included: meanders, which symbolise water and the Bird Goddess; Snake, as life force (amongst a host of other meanings); tri-lines/the number three, which represent totality, abundance, triple sources and triple springs, along with being associated with the birth/life-giving functions of the Goddess; and the open mouth as the Divine Source.

As Gimbutas writes, ‘the realm of the Goddess is the mythic watery sphere’ (p. 25) and ‘The Bird Goddess was the Source and Dispenser of life-giving moisture’ (p. 29). 

This work did present some challenges. I had to discover how she wanted to be depicted, which meant some exploratory drawings; and then I needed to work out how to paint her, which was something of an adventure in itself. In the end, I’m so happy with how she has turned out. 

May rain continue to fall where it is needed, and the wellspring never run dry.