Patricia Damery's Blog, page 15

Jung and Steiner Seminar in San Francisco

On Saturday, October 18, 2014, I will be presenting a seminar at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco on The Spiritualized Earth, Birth of the New Consciousness: Jung’s Analytical Psychology and Steiner’s Biodynamic Agriculture: What Might Save Us. 

Since the Fall, mankind has been separated  from experiencing the Divine in the natural world. In this workshop we will be experimenting with a method of perception that offers hope of restoring balance within the human psyche, with each other, and with the natural world.

Although contemporaries,  Jung and Steiner never met. However, both share a common bedrock in the work of Goethe. The overlap of both disciplines brings fertile ground for a process of perception that has promise of changing our relationship to the earth and to ourselves, restoring the experience of the Divine in an evolving consciousness.

I hope that you can join us! The workshop is the second of three (the third being offered all day on November 15, also at the Institute, Wounded Earth Wounded Psyche). Register for both and get a discount.

The post Jung and Steiner Seminar in San Francisco appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Charlie Toledo: On Fun and Wholeness

When I was interviewing Napa therapist and water activist Charlie Toledo, Executive Director of the Suscol Intertribal Counsel, this week, we had a conversation not directly related to the drought and water that I found particularly healing. She told me that in pantheistic times, people had more fun.

Charlie Toledo and the Napa River

“When I speak to elementary school kids, I always ask them, ‘How do you think the California people used to pick their chief?’  And most little kids will say, Oh, the meanest one, or the toughest warrior.  The one who was the strongest or the best hunter.  I tell them that the Northern California people used to choose their chief by the one who kept everybody laughing, the one who knew the most songs.

“First People around the world spend a whole lot more time celebrating,” she continued.  “If you go to places like Bali, they celebrate all the time. They’re celebrating something  every day. Everyday is a holy day. Every three days they’re having parades and feasts and flowers and candles in the river.  There’s this whole thing of honoring the earth, being in balance with the earth.  They’re not into the consumption and the accumulation of material goods. Because really, we don’t need that much.”

Charlie said that First People in our area (Napa County) used to spend two hours a day meeting their needs.  The rest of the time was spent in celebration, and singing, dancing, basket weaving, art:  “You know, creating art, creating dances, creating feathered things, having gatherings. ‘Gathering’ is another word for ‘partying’.”

“They would come together, all these different people, and party.  They traveled all the time, from Napa to San Francisco, San Francisco beyond. Young people would go on these long trade runs from the very north part of Alaska to the southern part of South America. People would spend the younger part of their life doing those trade runs, and going out to see the world, literally running back and forth and meeting people.  There’s obsidian from Napa Valley way down in South America. So it got traded through these trade runs. People were spending a lot of time having fun. And we’ve lost that.”

Sabien this year.

This reminded me of an experience two years ago this last August, August 7, to be exact. I was driving home from my son and daughter-in-law’s home in Petaluma after spending the afternoon with my then two-year-old grandson, Wesley. Melissa was very pregnant and probably in labor. On the drive home to Napa along Old Adobe Road, I came across a runner along the side of the road, a young woman in traditional dress carrying a feather, and then a few miles further on Route 121, a young man in running shorts also carrying a feather. It felt like an omen: my second grandson was on the way!  And sure enough, a few hours later, I was be driving this same road back to Petaluma, shooting stars announcing his imminent arrival. In the early hours of August 8, Sabien was born! Such joy!

Later Charlie told me that these runners were part of a four year event, running from Alaska to  Tierra del Fuego and that in 2012, they were running for water. My hope: this grandson of this generation, in his own way, will be one of those joyful runners who weave us together, honoring Earth.

Charlie told me another story in this conversation, a story of wholeness and beauty.

“Once I told one of my godsons about how we see the darkness as the grandmother that holds the stars in place, that’s female energy and that it’s so big that we can’t imagine it. We were out by a fire, and he stayed up all night looking at the summer night sky. And when the dawn came, he said, ‘I see it!  It’s the grandmother.  She’s holding us.’  The darkness, the stars, he could feel the movement. He could hear the songs.

“So when you think that we’re a very small part of this very large web of life that extends through the infinity of the universe, it’s pretty amazing not to think of how rich we are, and what a wonderful place we live in. If we keep ourselves in balance, then it’s all good.”

Of the recent Napa earthquake, she added:  “Occasionally the earth dances and moves. My three-year-old grandson was saying, “How come the earth has to be shaking?  That was bad!”

” I said, ‘No, that was good.’  I said, ‘Do you like to sit still for a long time?’  He goes: No, he doesn’t!  And then I said, ‘Why would we expect her to?’

“I keep telling people the night turns into the day, the day turns into the night, fall turns into winter, winter turns into spring, spring turns into summer.  People are born, they get old, they die.  Everything is constantly in flux.”

After this interview, I slept well, perhaps because Charlie’s stories brought some inner balance, the mark of a true healer! The earthquake, whose tail rests between the house and the goat barn, shook our foundations, scared us. Fear polarizes. Love—and joy— returns us to wholeness—to being held by Grandmother.

The post Charlie Toledo: On Fun and Wholeness appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Charlie Toledo: The Earth is Alive!

This week I had the good fortune to interview water activist Charlie Toledo about the upcoming election ballot measure Proposition One that provides funds for alleviating some of the water problems in California.

We are in our third year of drought. Suddenly the general population is acutely aware of the implications!  There are some big changes happening, and this interview, along with one that I did in February 2014, outlines not only a very different approach to Water, but also to Earth.

Recently we had a 6.0 earthquake in Napa that damaged a number of our old buildings in downtown Napa as well as several hundred homes. Of course, this came up in the course of the conversation. People are jumpy!  There is a great deal of collective fear: will we have another devastating quake? Will the rains come this year? Is this all a part of something much larger?

During the course of the interview, Charlie told me a story about the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. She said that her then eight-year-old daughter ran outside, yelling, The Earth is alive!  The Earth is alive!  This is in sharp contrast to my own reaction in this last quake!  I thought we were going to lose the house and perhaps our own lives in the process. I wonder at how much fear separates us from Earth, polarizing us. Charlie talked about how the earth was regaining a balance through the quake. To listen in another way to the lack of rain, the shaking of Earth, is to be in relationship to Her.

I felt some healing after this conversation about Earth, Water, and earthquakes. The Earth is alive and has her moments and her needs, of which we have been pretty oblivious for at least a couple of hundred years. When we view her as the living entity that she is, we are bound to make different decisions about how we treat her.

Please enjoy these conversations with Charlie. May they bring a healing gesture!

Charlie Toledo on Water Legislation

Charlie Toledo: The Drought: February 2014

 

The post Charlie Toledo: The Earth is Alive! appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Drought, Racu and the Rainmaker

Although Racu has moved on to greener pastures, and in his place, less cantankerous llama Hijo guards, this true story about a rainmaker at another time of severe drought has never been more relevant. The blog first appeared in June 2011 at the beginning of California’s drought.  

Watchful Racu (a buddha of a llama!) and his buddy Boris

At first no one noticed the Buddha I had placed in the forest by the winter creek— except our llama, Racu. Racu sees everything! His job is guarding the goats. He witnesses what moves in the forest near their pen, alarming with his horse-like whinny if an intruder happens to be nearby: a mountain lion, coyote or perhaps a neighbor. On our walks he examines the hillsides. Although alert, he has a peaceful, aloof look to him, like he has been a meditator all his life.

 The morning in question the goats, Racu, and I walked on the driveway past the Buddha I had placed just the day before, 50 feet away among some brush. Racu immediately stopped, stepping closer. He nosed the statue a full minute before deeming it innocuous and continuing on.

Forest Buddha that Rocu was the first to notice!

Oddly, his countenance reminds me of a story about a rainmaker. It is said that C. G. Jung told this story many times. He first heard it from Richard Wilhelm, translator of the I Ching, who was living in the province of China when it occurred.

After several months of a great drought and attempts to bring rain through various religious rituals, the community called in a rainmaker. When the old man arrived, he asked for a quiet hut and locked himself up for three days. On the fourth day clouds came and there was a great snow storm with a lot of accumulation at a time of year it did not usually snow. When asked how he made the snow, he said that he wasn’t responsible for it.

“But what have you done these three days?” the people asked.

“Oh, I can explain that,” he replied. “I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order, they are not as they should be by the ordinance of heaven. Therefore the whole country is not in Tao, and I am also not in the natural order of things because I am in a disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao, and then naturally the rain came.” (1)

Going within to bring energetic balance is a practice our extraverted American culture knows little about. Yet this story would imply that inner balance is critical in the face of the turmoil and catastrophic tragedy in our world. It is so easy to spin out into anxiety, grief, denial, blaming ourselves or others, getting waylaid by unworked personal issues.

It is not that there are not real outer dangers; there are. But the story of the rainmaker suggests another paradigm: our inner state synchronizes with the outer, a “mysterious parallel between the implicate and explicate realms,” (2) and balance returns.

Llamas are not usually aggressive animals. They warn if there is danger, but mostly they watch. Any coyote stupid enough to intrude would get a warning spit, and if that were not enough, be stomped to death. But that has never happened here. In fact, I have never seen a coyote or bobcat even approach the pen.

Like all of us, Rocu does have his “issues.” He has spit in my face because I made eye contact while giving him a treat. But most of the time he has a peaceful, composed presence. One wonders if this quiet presence creates a resonance that affords less aggression? Do we have something to learn here?

1 Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934 by C. G. Jung.  edited by Claire Douglas. Princeton University Press, 1997. p 333.

2 The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung, edited by Meredith Sabini. North Atlantic Books, 2002. p. 211.

The post Drought, Racu and the Rainmaker appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Is There a Biodynamic Lifestyle?

Engaging our child selves in learning to perceive.

In a radio interview this last week, I was asked, “Are there ways for people who don’t want to be farmers to live biodynamic lives?”

This question cuts to the chase. “Yes,” I replied, and suggested practical actions, like joining a Biodynamic CSA (Community Supported Agriculture, in which you subscribe and get a box of veggies every week during growing season). When you purchase a product, you are supporting the system that grew it, I explained, so supporting farmers who think about balance and the earth, not just profit and how much can be extracted, is important.

But this question leads to the core issue: that consciousness that is supported by a “biodynamic life”. This is an examined life,  an analytic lifestyle, in the language of my Jungian analyst profession of  analytical psychology. It means paying attention to what you don’t want to claim and project onto others, what Jung termed shadow, or the refuse farmers call manure—and it means composting that, applying a kind of tapas (attention) or heat, to it to transform it from a dung heap to fertilizer.  We are more psychologically mature, conscious people when we accept even our rougher parts, taking responsibility for our less desirable traits: meanness, envy, gluttony, you know! the seven deadly sins.  It means being conscious of our motives.

A biodynamic life necessitates a receptiveness and willingness to perceive what is present. Too often our realities are defined by what we think we know. Certainly this process of learning to listen within is what sorts out Jungian analysis from more adaptive, problem-solving therapies (which also have their place). But as a culture, we have adopted a kind of strong-arming attitude toward the psyche. The idea of receiving what comes in dreams or learning to listen to impressions and intuitions, and to pay heed, is too often eclipsed by the need to “be normal” or “acceptable” or “to feel good.”

In farming with biodynamic techniques, we have learned that our attitude toward our ranch influences everything on it. (My own story is told in Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation.) We are part of a web of life, and that web includes not only ourselves, but also the earth beneath our feet, the vines, the lavender, the coyotes that yap in the early hours, the forest, the rain that comes or not, the neighbors next to us.  It is important to keep the whole in our hearts, to develop awareness of the relationship of one thing to another. We have also learned that when we interact on energetic levels with the ranch through the biodynamic preparations, prepared and stirred in meditative, conscious ways, things thrive, and we do as well. (Our ailing vineyard’s grape production doubled as we began farming this way.)

A biodynamic, examined life is one that becomes sensitive to one’s place in the web, and then takes responsibility for what one does that causes trouble. This is true for farming, and it is true for the personal psyche. The environmental crisis is truly a crisis of consciousness. Learning to perceive one’s place in it (a biodynamic lifestyle!) is critical to our survival.

The post Is There a Biodynamic Lifestyle? appeared first on Patricia Damery.

The Sale of a Small Family Farm

A farm sale is a funeral of sorts.

When I saw the recent missed call on my cell phone, I grew worried. I had just spoken with my sister Judy several hours before. Something must have happened. I didn’t reach her until late in the afternoon. “I received the first payment,” she said. “The farm is gone.”

We knew this was coming. I had encouraged her to sell the house, barns, and acreage she had received in the settlement (the rest of us had sold our portions long before), as none of her children wanted to take the farm and it was deteriorating. Furthermore the buyer was a cousin who really wanted it. It was staying in the family, just in another line.

But today this was no comfort. I remembered scenes from my novel Snakes (were these premonitions?) which turned out to be my own grieving process of the farm. Grief is like that. It simply has to be borne, and my way is often through writing. (How many of us write fictional accounts which later turn out to happen?)

1976: One hundred years of family farming

My great grandfather bought the land from an early settler in the middle 1800’s and built the East Lake style farmhouse after a good year. He died in that house, as had his wife and ten year old daughter Della before him, as did my grandfather and grandmother. My father was born in the house and he and my mother lived there after his mother died.

“I think it is the Irish in us,” Judy continued. “Land is an anchor.” And we both sat with the swell of grief for the passing of this anchor.

As I have said before, Snakes is a novel—fiction—with one exception: the farm sale scene. It was my eulogy for the farm we loved.  The characters, of course, are different, but it is almost a word for word recounting of that sad day we sold my dead father’s farm equipment. In my own tribute to the sale of our family home, I copy it here. May we each internalize the love we had for every square inch of that land and transfer it the the earth under our feet.

Jimmy decided to sell our family farmland to Marvin Hobbs whose own land abutted the north forty, negotiating what he felt was a fair price. He set a date to sell the farm machinery at public auction in February, a time before spring work began. The notices put in the papers for miles around brought buyers from 200 miles away. “Jim Galway attended many auctions and kept everything,” the notice read. “Something here for everyone!”

These days a farm sale is a funeral of sorts, not only for the farmer who is selling out or has died, but for the continuing of the small farm as well. Everyone who comes knows it. For most, it is only a matter of time until their own farm machinery and land will be up for auction. Each sale, usually a consolidation and the loss of a farming family, leans on the economy of the small town nearby. The main street in Flat Rock is lined with darkened storefront windows, like lost teeth. The Flat Rock schools are now consolidated with Macon’s, our basketball rivals when I was in school, and Flat Rock no longer has a grocery store.

I returned with Kristen the week before to help Jimmy prepare and to be with Mama. Dorothy came too, and although Jimmy really was the one to do the sorting, Dorothy and I helped arrange smaller items on flatbed trailers: wrenches, hammers, shovels, bolts and nails, your wood working tools, chains, grease guns, gear pullers, vices, battery chargers, bench grinders, and antique tools of Gerad’s and his son, our grandfather. We got a dumpster and filled it with the obvious trash, but most of the items would sell.

Meanwhile, Jimmy pulled out the farm machinery and parked it along the driveway and around the cribs: the 1928 “D” John Deere, the 1976 John Deere, the disk, the harrow, the chisel plow, the grain drills and barge wagons, the 500 gallon pull sprayer, trailers: all archaic in this day of industrial farming.

Mama cried easily. She was still living in the house, although she was preparing to move to a small two-bedroom bungalow in town. Jimmy and Kate would move into the farm house. Mama and Jimmy decided to keep the tractor that you bought when you and Mama were first married, which Jimmy would use to farm the acreage we were keeping around the house; we would keep enough implements to do this minimal farming. All of the rest was to be sold.

The morning of the sale, the church ladies arrived at 7 A.M. and set up a coffee and snack stand in the garage. It was overcast and bitterly cold. People began arriving almost as soon as it was light, snug in insulated coveralls, the only dress reasonable in the grey chill, biting winds, and occasional snow flurries. They milled around the barns and examined the stuff on the flatbed trailers, which we had pulled into the implement shed. By the time the auction started at 10 A.M., cars and trucks were parked a quarter of a mile in all four directions, marking the corner of our generational farm. Right here. This is where it was. X marks the spot, if you see it from the air.

You knew the auctioneer well, Brady O’Connor. It was with sympathy that he greeted Mama that morning. Mama was brave, I tell you that! She made two pies for the church ladies to sell, put on her blue parka with the fir hood, and took the pies to the garage. The church ladies greeted us, “Oh, you needn’t have done that!” But they knew that she had to do what she always had done: contribute. They offered us hot chocolate. Then Mama stood with Dorothy and me to watch the auctioneer, linking arms. Occasionally she wiped a tear before it could freeze.

The coveralled buyers averted their eyes, knowing what this meant to us. And we watched as the physical proof of our family history was dispersed: Brady would call out, “Here is a woodworking set, complete, good shape, who will start the bidding? $75? Do I hear-75? 75! Do I hear 80? 85! Okay, 90!” He was fast and pushed the price. “Gone! For $95 to the man in the blue hat!” and he moved to the next item. After the smaller items were auctioned, his auctioneer’s wagon was pulled around the property from implement to implement, from piles of lumber to antique doors, until everything had been auctioned. People carried off 150 years of history, as if it had never happened. Farmers and collectors pulling trailers loaded tractors and antique wagons, augers and grain drillers. By 3 P.M. it was over. Now, like ravens, scrap metal people picked clean all that was left.

As it was growing dark, we sat around our old kitchen table with Brady, and he counted the profits: $40,000. That is what it all added up to. None of us could stop it; it had to go this way. There simply was no other cure. (from Snakes, pp. 137-140)

Pope/Damery Family Farm

 

The post The Sale of a Small Family Farm appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Lilith–Serpent Dragon Wakes

Serpent line of Earthquake

When a serpent dragon wakes, beware! In the early hours of August 24, I woke to the slam of an earthquake which rocked the house and then kept going, increasing in intensity, for a full 45 seconds. Outside the sky lit up, confusing my sleep-drugged mind. Was this a thunderstorm—or had a bomb just dropped? In the flashing blue light (a rare earthquake phenomenon) I could see our home’s masonry walls waving and shaking violently. It was as if we were on the tail end of a game of crack the whip! There was the sound of glass breaking as cabinets dumped their contents onto ceramic tile floors, chards skating until they hit pools of olive oil and wine. My husband Donald, reading in his chair, was flipped upside down while still in his chair,  this turtle-like position protecting him from the books and other objects pelting him. Wood stoves, butcher block tables, the couch and overstuffed chairs, the grand piano—all moved two feet west.

And then, it stopped. My son and his wife had spent the night, and suddenly we were calling to each other in the dark, fearful that there would be no answers. But we were all alive, essentially unhurt, and now looking for shoes and flashlights. Then, gathering in the relative safety of the courtyard, we watched fires light up the Valley below. With this scale of destruction, it was clear we were going to be  relying on our own resources.

Needless to say, we have been occupied with the concrete details, no pun intended!  We have sweep up, mopped up, thrown away, helped friends, assessed damage. Our town of Napa is gravely impacted, many of the government buildings red tagged, including both post offices and at least 100 homes. Even without structural damage, many of the homes on the west side of town experienced the breakage of almost every glass and plate. We now know the ancient West Napa Fault has come alive. Roads buckled and cracked, tracing Her path, including the three inch wide, several hundred foot long crack in the ground just west of our house. Our feeling about the solidness of the earth has been shaken.

One evening this week we sat overlooking the meadow south of our home, golden in the late sunlight. The earthquake gash runs through the middle of the meadow. The meadow is a place that I have known to be sacred, a place I have written about. Its graceful stretches beaconed to us 20 years ago, and Donald and I decided to build our home here. When you walk into the cup of it, time becomes irrelevant. You may be there a minute or an hour, they are both the same. It is a site that has almost certainly been used ceremonially for centuries, if not for millennia.

Living on edge of the meadow has changed both Donald and me, preparing us for the Shift. Several have pointed out the synchronicity of my recent blogs on Lilith, the first wife of Adam, and now this Lilith like event! Lilith is often depicted as the serpent who tempts Eve with the apple, getting both Eve and Adam evicted from paradise. She is fiery and sexual, full of rage and feared, she-who-will-not-be-subordinated! People have worked throughout the ages to contain her energies so as not to be infected with such qualities. (She has gotten a bad rap!)

Yet she also knows the language of the animals and plants and is described as “the soul of all the beasts of the field and every living creature that creepth.” Perhaps this is why spirit of place, the genius loci, has been depicted as a serpent. Were my writings about her premonitions to her return? That evening as we were immersed in the kind of beauty that drops you to your knees, She was basking in the last rays of sunlight, a little pleased with herself, I might add! I felt like one of those dog people whose beloved companion has just trashed the house. It is clear we are having a maturing moment: we are living on tremendous energy!  And as the aftershocks rumble and roll, it is clear that it is time to learn how to be related to Her!

This week in a podcast interview with Joanna Hartcourt-Smith, we discussed earth energy and Lilith, the Serpent Mind, and its relevance to the larger issue of climate change, the environment, and our relationships with each other, a conversation we will continue in the future. You can listen to this podcast at futureprimitive.org. And please offer your own thoughts.

 

The post Lilith–Serpent Dragon Wakes appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Dousing, The Serpent Mind, and Lilith

Modern dousing instrument my father never used.

In exploring Lilith’s qualities reflected in being depicted as a serpent, I want to refer to a description of her from the 13th century Cabalistic text, The Zohar. Lilith is described as “the soul of all the beasts of the field and every living creature that creepth.” As such, she can talk with plants and animals. What is the consciousness she represents that knows the language of the natural world, a language that I have come to think of as that involved with the snake mind?

I grew up on a farm where water dousing was used regularly.  We lived on land that had been drained by burying clay tile pipes so the land could be farmed.  At times the tile would get clogged and my father would have to locate where it was in order to know where to dig.  His friend Bill would douse to locate new sites for wells.  When I was a child my father would test us all for this ability. Some of us do it more naturally than others, although with practice the skill can be developed. He would place coat hangers bent into L shapes in each of our hands, each kid having a pair, and have us walk over a water pipe. When directly over the pipe, the wires would cross.

Brain waves have been measured of people in the process of dousing.  Normally we all have four basic kinds of brain waves:  beta, 14 and 30 hertz, the frequency we most often think of as everyday consciousness; alpha, 8-13 hertz, associated with tranquil and relaxed states of mind; theta, 4-7 hertz, found in dreaming sleep states and where creative ideas and instant solutions to problems flourish; and delta, 1/4-4 hertz, a state in deep meditative trance or deep sleep. There is also a fifth brain wave that has been measured during times the brain is putting together pieces of information from different parts of the brain, gamma wave, a fast-moving brainwave above 30 hertz that signifies inspiration.

When beginning dousers were hooked up to an EEG to measure the electrical activity of their brain, the alpha frequencies became more prevalent.  As they developed their skills, the theta waves increased, along with alpha and beta.  And most interesting, those master dousers who have developed their abilities have a mixture of all four brain waves going at once in a conscious state.

In The Divining Mind, Richard Wright and T. Edward Ross discuss the “resonating cavity” that we live in on earth, that cavity that exists between the ionosphere and the surface of the earth.  By dividing the electrical charge of the ionosphere by the distance to the earth, the fundamental frequency of this cavity (the atmosphere) is arrived at,  7.8 hertz.  This is the frequency at the seam between alpha and theta.

Much more can be said about this but for my purposes here, what is important is that by entering this meditative state,we become attuned to the frequency of the cavity we live in (7.8 hertz).  In this resonance we apprehend the instinct that Barbara Hannah says  “knows what interests the gods, and makes us do it.”  This is where we have access to a vitality that restores us.  This is healing, this resonance of being at-one-with. It is also a resonance that animals may well orient by, and especially the serpent. This meditative state incorporates older parts of the brain into a consciousness that is not only that of the neocortex, a consciousness that Hannah likens to the snake in that we are then able to react on “a much broader and consequently more creative basis” than one overruled by the newer parts of the brain.

Is this the revolutionary evolution that Lilith points us toward in her encouragement of betrayal of the old order, the unconscious union with the divine?  In this state of resonance we know the language of the animals and plants and our ambitions to dominate release. We again know the animating Spirit because we are at one with It.

The post Dousing, The Serpent Mind, and Lilith appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Women, Creativity, and Lilith

In the mid 1980’s I read Judy Chicago’s commentary on women’s creativity in The Birth Project. Chicago invited craftswomen throughout the country to participate in fabricating various needlework and quilting projects depicting birth. In her book about the development of the project, Chicago included the exuberant letters from the women whose work was deemed of sufficient quality to participate, then a few follow up letters from some of these women apologizing for delays due to various family demands and finally letters returning projects assigned with regrets about not having time to do them.

At the time I was a young woman with two young sons. I took the stories quite seriously. I knew my family could consume everything I had if I let them. I also knew that my soul was making demands that only my personal analysis (psychotherapy) could meet, that this took time, and that furthermore, I wanted—no, I needed!— to write.

In short, I knew it would not work to have all my creative energy tied up in traditionally accepted feminine roles, those roles to which Eve was sentenced. Lilith, she-who-will-not be-subordinated! would have to become a more conscious force within me, or she would work unconsciously in much more destructive, child-devouring, raging ways.

Older generations of women remember when such relationships to Lilith were not an option. A woman’s role as wife and mother was embedded in the social norm. Early pioneers into the realms of incorporating Lilith also suffered the darker projections of Lilith: the rageful, devouring aspects. When we do not have access to Lilith energies, we are forced into those of Eve: the subordinated, childbearing woman. Lilith remains loose, however, in the unconscious.  When we are overprotective of our young, living too much through them, the result is often a kind of consuming of our children’s autonomy and individuality. When we live for our men, or for anyone else, we are at risk of losing ourselves.

My own mother did not work when she married because my father wouldn’t let her, even though she graduated top of her college class and had only one expressed goal of teaching elementary school, something she did not do until the youngest of her four children was in kindergarten. And although she seemed to love her role of mother, she was also sick a lot and, I suspect, a little depressed, at least during my early years. Suppression of feeling often presents through various psychosomatic disorders, or gets taken out on those we also love. The raw version of Lilith is not the version I wanted to act out!

In a Los Angeles talk I gave in July, a man asked me if I enjoyed the child-devouring aspect of Lilith. I answered that although I enjoyed relating stories of setting limits with my preschool sons around my writing time, it was tough and I did not enjoy sending them back to bed in the predawn hours I got up to write. It went against my maternal instinct!  By not subordinating my own goals to others needs, I have made conscious choices about where my creative energy goes, an important part of my own individuation process. In this Lilith has been an important guide.

The post Women, Creativity, and Lilith appeared first on Patricia Damery.

How Lilith Got Us Evicted and What It Means

John Collier Painting

Who is Lilith, really? She is often named as Adam’s first wife, cohabiting with him until he was given a soul. Then she flew off and began to cause trouble, first appearing as a serpent and tempting Eve with the forbidden fruit, then proceeding to terrorize humanity in her volatile, fiery ways. She is that aspect of woman who will not be suppressed, who devours children, has great sexual appetite and goes into rages.

And yet she is also the animating, instinctual level of being, “the soul of all the beasts of the field and every living creature that creepth” and as such, knows the language of the natural world. She offers a hope of relatedness that Adam could not provide in his  interpretation of his mandate of dominion over which has resulted in the environmental, social mess we are in. If it is true that she participated in an evolutionary paradigm shift, she may be an important resource now. We have been separated from union with the divine through eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of the opposites, and now, in order to take the next step, in order to again experience wholeness, perhaps we must re-incorporate Lilith.

In alchemy there is an operation called spagyrics in which a substance is taken apart, the parts then purified by taking them down to their essence in a way that does not destroy the connection to the living spirit behind the substances, and then these purified parts “married” back together, the substance (elixir or healing agent) now being of a higher frequency, an octave higher, perhaps. In the next blogs I will explore various aspects of Lilith.

For you, what is the purified version of Lilith? What are the toxins, the impurities, that contaminate the living substance of her? How do we as women—and men—suffer when she remains loose in unconscious realms? I would love your ideas.

 

The post How Lilith Got Us Evicted and What It Means appeared first on Patricia Damery.