Resacralising the Sky

The unity and coherence of the metaphysical ideas of … ancient peoples become more accessible if we are aware of the limitations of our own minds in approaching them. If earth and sky were resacralized, it might be easier for us to rediscover the ‘language’ of the goddess.

(1, my emphasis)

*

When I read it in The Myth of the Goddess the above idea about the resacralisation of earth and sky stayed with me. That, and the lunar focus of ancient cultures, is what has led me to create a number of ‘sky images’ in my art over the past two years (see Messenger of the Invisible, Rainmaker, or Our Lady of the Stars). However this has made me feel uneasy, seeing as the sky/air is so often related to mind, spirit and transcendence—and the concept of transcendence, in particular, does not sit well with me. I would much rather be making earthy, grounded images instead, but with the exception of The Broad One or Beneath the Mountain, which do peer downwards, I seem to have my head in the clouds.

As I said last year in my post about Matrix, the aim of my art is to synthesise numerous influences into symbols that have meaning for me (and hopefully others too). This synthesis is how my writing came about also—though perhaps that is how all art works and I am merely stating the obvious. Yet it seems very important, the sifting I do through what I read, the images I seek and return to, and how I then put things together to try to come to some understanding of what is, from my own perspective at the margins of things. 

I am all too aware of the limitations of my own mind due to illness, and how difficult it is for me to understand these speculative concepts, let alone write about them (parts of this were written a year ago, then abandoned), but perhaps making art is how I am attempting to figure things out.

I’ve known for some time that the way I think, and even feel, about some things takes on a kind of spatial quality—illness, for instance, has a circumference—and so it makes sense that I would also explore this visually. So far this has manifested as an exploration of verticality, and the interpenetration of different worlds and substances: sky and earth / water and earth / spirit and matter / above and below. 

But this constant looking skyward bothered me, until I realised that all of my sky images emphasise a distinct downward trajectory—the movement of water / rain / energy / spirit / lunar light down and into the earth.

This is, in a sense, how I am attempting to resacralise what has been disconnected and desacralised, to reconnect the sky with earth once more.

I am reminded of David Abram’s words about the atmosphere being an integral part of earth:

The air is not a random bunch of gases simply drawn to earth by the earth’s gravity, but an elixir generated by the soils, the oceans, and the numberless organisms that inhabit this world, each creature exchanging certain ingredients for others as it inhales and exhales … Perhaps we should add the letter i to our planet’s name, and call it “Eairth,” in order to remind ourselves that the “air” is entirely a part of the eairth, and the i, the I or self, is wholly immersed in that fluid element. (2)

In reading Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018) I have also learnt that geological processes have an effect on the atmosphere too. That the seemingly solid stony structures of the earth move and breathe in a long, slow dance with the shorter, faster dances of living beings.

The truth is that everything is connected, and everything is here. 

I’m not entirely sure what this means, or how to understand it in my bones, my flesh and blood, but it’s what I wish to represent in my work.

It’s all about connection—nothing exists alone or isolated. Everything is in relationship to something else, everything else, consciously or otherwise. Matter cannot live, cannot be, without the existence and commingling of spirit, nor spirit without the embodiment of matter. A constant exchange is taking place, and spirals—a symbol found in the art of cultures all around the world—evoke that: the constant energy, movement, and process of life–death–rebirth. 

To pay attention and make offerings to that process, I think that’s one of the reasons why I am making art. To be part of it, when consciously, and physically, I do not always feel part of it.

I’m on the edge of life. 

Though the edge is also the frontier, where creativity and innovation takes place. The edge is where dualities interweave. 

And it’s all sacred.

As Wendell Berry has written:

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places. (3)

References

1. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, Arkana: London, 1991, p. 104

2. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, Vintage: New York, 2010, p. 101

3. From Wendell Berry’s poem ‘How to Be a Poet’

Wise Words: Constantly Transforming

… finitude and limitation are rooted in the structure of our lives. There is no permanence in our finite lives, there are no absolutes, there is no one person or thing we can count on to provide meaning in our lives as we move through time and change … I believe that women’s spiritual quest and feminist thealogy are drawing all of us, women and men, to accept finitude and change, to live in and through it, without trying to escape it. Thus the “deformation” of mystical language I … am proposing is that we give up the quest to ally ourselves with a transcendent source or power which is beyond change, which is unaffected by that which comes into being and dies. For me the goal of the “mystical” quest is to understand that we are part of a world which is constantly transforming and changing.

(Carol P. Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest, second edition, Beacon Press: Boston, 1986, p. xiv)

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)

Messenger of the Invisible

It has taken me some time to complete (and then photograph) this new painting, mainly because midway I experienced (I suspect) some kind of fatigue-inducing virus, which meant—to my frustration!—that I did almost nothing for about a week. Also, it was initially intended to be nothing more than an ‘experiment’, but clearly I need to have a little more faith in myself and what I can create, for I am very pleased with the results.

Messenger of the Invisible, watercolour and gouache on gesso prepared paper (2019)

I have not been writing, and thus feel unable to say much more at present, but I am including some quotes below that elucidate some of the ideas behind this work, and what she represents. All are taken from the absolutely brilliant book I have been reading by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Arkana: London, 1991).

The bird who appears out of a distant sky has always been a messenger of wonder as the visible incarnation of the invisible world. In many Bronze Age myths the cosmic egg of the universe was laid by the Cosmic Mother Bird, and its cracking open was the beginning of time and space. (p. 13)

The bird was the life of the waters, the epiphany of the goddess as the deep watery abyss of cosmic space and as the seas and the rivers, underground wells and streams. The bird that flies high above the earth and the bird that swims on waters resting upon the earth linked two dimensions that were not the native element of human beings yet surrounded them above and below. The image of the bird at home in both dimensions brought the upper and lower waters together, offering an image of a unified world. (pp. 58–59)

The bird, since Palaeolithic times the messenger of the vast incomprehensible distance and so of the whole invisible world, was taken by the Minoans, as by many another culture, to constitute the supreme image of epiphany. (‘Epiphany’ in Greek means literally the ‘showing forth’ of the sacred, which is the presence of the divine recognized as immanent in creation.) (p. 124)

The moon was an image in the sky that was always changing yet was always the same. What endured was the cycle, whose totality could never be seen at any one moment. All that was visible was the constant interplay between light and dark in an ever-recurring sequence. Implicitly, however, the early people must have come to see every part of the cycle from the perspective of the whole. The individual phases could not be named, nor the relations between them expressed, without assuming the presence of the whole cycle. The whole was invisible, an enduring and unchanging circle, yet it contained the visible phases. Symbolically, it was as if the visible ‘came from’ and ‘returned to’ the invisible – like being born and dying, and being born again. (p. 147)

Wise Words: Shape-Shifting

For indigenous people everywhere, nature is an enlargement of your mind and body, not a curse on your soul, as the Christian West has too often seen it.

…

For Amazonian people, there are spirits or essences within reality, and this essence takes different forms—human, bird or animal—but since the essence is the same, the spirit in one form can transform into another form in a kind of Ovidian metamorphosis known throughout the forests. The same life force is in everything, animating you and the eagle, the glossy leaf and the kingfisher, the jaguar and me.

There is a tender familiarity in this, a gentle ontology. The difference between creatures is just a trick of the light, a superficial thing, for underneath we are made of the same stuff. On the surface there is an obvious difference between you and the daffodil, the catfish and the monkey puzzle tree, but what animates each is the same vibrancy and immanent energy, the one life force expressing itself in differing guises. This understanding is learned through the language of metaphor or through the intense experiences of the soul. For Amazonian people, knowledge comes from communicating with the wild world, through its plant teachers or through shape-shifting—that strange, beautiful and entirely wild way of knowing.

(Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey, Penguin: London, 2006, pp. 68 and 69)

Wise Words: Belowness

Aboriginal people talk of the land as if it is a body merely and recently clothed with the supermarket, golf course, airport or town, as if in time the body could and would shuck off these flimsy shifts and be naked again. As if “Adelaide” were as inconsequential as pyjama bottoms and a street just a scarf to be lightly tossed aside in the breeze. You may think you tame the land with concrete and pavements, but its wildness persists, primal and feral, below.

Below, too, there is an immanent world of “spirit business,” which I heard about on the slant, a scrap of paper from a diary blowing in a garden, a paragraph of tension, a look askance, a brief recollection. It is as if the land has veins under the skin, hot with the blood of revenge and power.

(Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey, Penguin: London, 2006, p. 259)

Wise Words: The Divine Womb

DERRICK JENSEN: … You quote Wendell Berry as saying, “Perhaps the greatest disaster of human history is one that happened to or within religion: that is, the conceptual division between the holy and the world, the excerpting of the Creator from the creation.”

MATTHEW FOX: Religion in the West has fallen into theism, just as science has. Theism is the belief that we’re here and God’s out there someplace. It’s a very Newtonian idea, that God is behind the universe with an oilcan. And of course the next step after theism is atheism. It’s very easy to reject a God who’s way out in the sky. I don’t know any other civilization that has invented atheism except the West. The word does not exist in indigenous languages. The spirit exists.

What I’m about theologically is the replacement of theism with panentheism, which is the idea that we’re in God and God is in us. And by “we” I don’t mean just humans, but all beings. The image I have is that the universe is a divine womb. We’re all in here swimming together. It’s an image of interconnectivity.

And it’s a mystical image. By that I mean it isn’t something conceptual; it’s something experiential. People experience the divine in their lives. They always have.

The divine is not separate from anything in nature. Aquinas talked in the thirteenth century about the immanence of God in all beings. The mystery of existence, the goodness, the beauty—all of that is divine imagery, divine footsteps.

(Derrick Jensen, Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros, Chelsea Green Publishing: White River Junction, Vermont, 2002, 2004, p. 69)

Immanence: A Poem

That I am here should be a blessing 

but I am only half here 

kept from full embodiment 

except as a dream, an ideal 

the fullness of a life that is beyond me 

yet still inside me

immanent