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<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n On the righthand side, the patches start with a galaxy, then Stonehenge<\/a>, then Neskaya<\/a>, and the Red Woman<\/a> in the center.<\/p>\n On the lefthand side, they start with nature, then my journal (half on the back and half on the front) followed by Journey Into Courage<\/a>, also ending next to the Red Woman.<\/p>\n Above the Neskaya patch is one which is a drawing that shows the geometry of the building<\/a> on the ground, which also matches the Sacred Calendar to some extent.\u00a0 Inside the figure are eight tiny dancers (worry dolls from Guatemala) representing Sacred Circle Dance, and the eight holidays of the Sacred Calendar<\/a>.<\/p>\n Above the Journey patch is part of a painting I did to represent words written in blood. The story I told from the stage in Journey is about myself, during my time of greatest pain, cutting myself and writing with the blood.<\/p>\n Between these two patches is a picture of \u201cLittle Jenny with the Dar Gorani Look<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n At the top is a picture of a tree with seven roots forming the trunk.\u00a0 The seven roots refer to the seven pictures on the bottom.<\/p>\n Finally, on the back, joining the two lines of patches, is a picture of Maypole dancers.<\/p>\n The story of each patch and how they relate:<\/p>\n Right Side: ASTRONOMY — at age 14 I was out in a frozen field with a flashlight and a star chart, trying to figure out which was the Big Dipper.\u00a0 I went on to major in Astronomy, visit Stonehenge for the first time in 1964, became interested in archeoastronomy, ancient astronomers, and observing the sky with the naked eye.<\/p>\n STONEHENGE \u2014 understanding that the people who built it had excellent knowledge of the motions of the sun and moon.\u00a0 The \u201cStation Stone Rectangle<\/a>,\u201d earlier than the familiar circle, is aligned with the summer solstice rising of the sun (the short sides) which is also the northernmost rising of the sun, and with the major standstill of the moon (the long sides) which is the southernmost rising of the Moon.\u00a0 That these two sight lines are 90\u00b0 apart is a function of the latitude.\u00a0 A few miles north or south, and these lines would no longer be at a right angle.\u00a0 The location of the moon\u2019s minor standstill, which the sun passes through on its way between the solstices and equinoxes, determines the dates of the cross-quarter days, the four intermediate holidays in the sacred calendar.<\/p>\n NESKAYA was built as sacred space for movement disciplines that are also spiritual practices.\u00a0 One of the things we do here is celebrate the holidays of the Old Nature Religion of Western Europe, which are the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days.<\/p>\n The GEOMETRY patch is showing these relationships more clearly.<\/p>\n Left side:<\/p>\n NATURE was my refuge growing up in an alcoholic family.\u00a0 There were acres of woods behind our house, and I spent a lot of time out there.<\/p>\n My JOURNAL was started when I was a teenager and lost the boy I had a crush on to my best friend.\u00a0 I wrote to ease my pain.\u00a0 At first I didn\u2019t write a lot, didn\u2019t write everyday, but gradually I put in more and more.\u00a0 I would also go back and read them over, learning in the process.\u00a0 At one point I read Julia Cameron\u2019s book The Artist\u2019s Way<\/a>, and began to write 3 pages a day.\u00a0 Later I started typing everything up, intending to use what I had written as raw material for a book.\u00a0 In a talk with my ex, I saw that the real reason I was trying to produce a book was \u201cto prove that I deserve to live, even though my parents were disappointed in me.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 I was horrified at seeing my motivation.\u00a0 I immediately stopped typing up what I had written.\u00a0 I thought I might stop writing, but the practice had become very important.\u00a0 I started typing up the \u201cGuidance<\/a>\u201d passages in 2000, and gradually typed up more.\u00a0 Now I type up about half of what I wrote, and I use it as raw material for my blog.<\/p>\n In JOURNEY INTO COURAGE my opening monologue was about writing in my journal all the reasons I was deeply unhappy with myself.\u00a0 Finally I became so desperate that I took a razor blade and cut myself and wrote with the blood.\u00a0 During the five year period in my life when I was cutting myself I made several paintings and also wrote words.\u00a0 One of the pieces I still have.\u00a0 It says \u201cWho if I cried out would hear me amid the hosts of angels.\u201d\u00a0 It is the first line of Rilke\u2019s First Elegy<\/a>.<\/p>\n The patch with WHO IF written in very wet red paint, is about that piece of writing.\u00a0 It was only very recently that I realized that I cut myself because it was a real pain, I could see that I was in pain.\u00a0 My emotional and spiritual pain was invisible, no one saw it or asked about it, so it seemed that it wasn\u2019t real.\u00a0 Cutting myself was real. \u201cWho if I cried out would hear me amid the hosts of angels\u201d expresses very well how I felt as a traumatized infant. \u00a0 \u201cI cry out but no one hears me.\u201d<\/p>\n The Red Woman is a quite extraordinary painting I did \u2014 or maybe it\u2019s truer to say that it painted itself through me \u2014 at Aviva Gold\u2019s \u201cPainting from the Source<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 The first version was a series of concentric circles, like the stumps of trees that had been cut down.\u00a0 I had seen those stumps at a retreat center and been painfully moved.\u00a0 But the painting of concentric rings didn\u2019t go anywhere.\u00a0 I had a body work session, and the masseuse told me that the energy was stuck in my elbows.\u00a0 She said I should use my hands.\u00a0 But I was<\/span> using my hands. \u00a0Then I realized that actually I was asking myself \u201cWhat would look good.\u201d\u00a0 So I blindfolded myself with a bandana, filled a paper plate with different colors of paint, and began to paint with my hands, not my eyes.\u00a0 Of course very soon I wanted to see what was happening, but since I had learned not to ask \u201cWhat looks good,\u201d all went well.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t see the woman\u2019s figure in the center, until I came back after a break.\u00a0 I just made her hand and her feet and her face more clear.\u00a0 The box on the right side happened because on the wall where my first piece of paper had been taped there was a square plate with light switches.\u00a0 So I made a box.\u00a0 The first thing I put in it was a small statue of Tara, next the seedpod of a sumac.\u00a0 The painting hung on the east wall at Neskaya for a few months every year, so the contents of the box changed periodically.\u00a0 The next item was a dried pomegranate skin, cut open, with red beads held together with black yarn to represent the seeds.\u00a0 Recently, I put a big artificial Red Rose in the box.\u00a0 When I started thinking about the patch, I realized that the box was an essential part of the painting, tho I couldn\u2019t say why.\u00a0 I thought about the different things I had put in it, and realized that the pomegranate is from the story of Demeter\u2019s daughter Persephone<\/a>.\u00a0 There\u2019s an earlier version from before the patriarchal version that is familiar to us.\u00a0 In the early version, the maiden, Kore, goes down by her own choice, somewhat like Inanna<\/a> \u201ccasting her ear to the great below.\u201d\u00a0 Like Inanna, she spends time in the dark underground world, and when she comes back up, she is now Persephone, Queen of the Underworld.\u00a0 I too have spent a long time in the darkness.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t see myself as having come up, and certainly not as \u201cQueen,\u201d but this work with the patches has shown me that I have demonstrated some form of mastery of the underworld.\u00a0 Somewhat like a PhD.\u00a0 You won\u2019t stop working on the subject, but you are now recognized as having reached an important stage.\u00a0 This is what \u201cGrandmother\u201d means in the ceremony.\u00a0 You are now an Elder.\u00a0 I am now an Elder.<\/p>\n Above the RED WOMAN is LITTLE JENNY.\u00a0 The \u201cDar Gorani<\/a> look\u201d is from a dance we do to Armenian music, which we think of as the prayer to the lost homeland. There is a gesture of looking off into the distance, followed by a gesture that says \u201cbut we are here.\u201d\u00a0 The copy of Little Jenny that I had been using is a copy of a copy, not a high quality image, but I had lost the original photograph.\u00a0 Recently, going through all my pictures, I found an original photograph.\u00a0 I have been looking at her a lot, and what I see is not just the look of seeing a better way to live but she\u2019s not there now, I also see resolve.\u00a0 She is determined to get there.<\/p>\n Above LITTLE JENNY is a patch of a tree.\u00a0 This is the only patch whose image just came to me.\u00a0 It has seven roots, one for each of the lower patches.\u00a0 I actually made it in fabric, but the completed patch was much too big to fit the space, so I took a picture and made a patch from that.\u00a0 I see now that this tree represents my creativity as not being cut off by trauma, like the first picture under the RED WOMAN, but instead making a strong massive trunk and branches which are putting out lush green leaves, even though they are very small.\u00a0 It strikes me as I am writing, that the big trunk represents the depth and richness that the leaves can draw upon.<\/p>\n There were also pockets.\u00a0 The one that is part of WHOIF happened because I ironed the patch too close to the selvage, and had to fold it to make it big enough.\u00a0 The pocket holds the quote from Rilke, a poem I wrote called Blood and Stone<\/a>, and a quote from Jacqueline Winspear<\/a> about Soldiers with PTSD: \u201cThere were men who … would cause themselves injury, as if to feel, physically, the wounds that lay in their souls.\u201d<\/p>\n The one that was made by the STONEHENGE patch was \u201caccidental.\u201d\u00a0 I had somehow sewed the other patches in such a way that there wasn\u2019t room for the whole STONEHENGE patch.\u00a0 I was very upset about it, until I was showing the dress to my friend Lynelle, and she saw it as a pocket.\u00a0 Of course!\u00a0 That gave me a place to put the quote from my book<\/a> about a solstice celebration at Stonehenge, and that quote goes with the MAYPOLE patch.\u00a0 The picture is actually of dancers on the banks of the Charles River on May 1, the traditional cross-quarter day of Beltane.<\/p>\n The MAYPOLE patch happened because Erica, when shown the patches, wondered if I would join them where they come close together on the back of the skirt.\u00a0 The quote and the picture immediately appeared together as they do in Sacred Sites<\/a>.\u00a0 The quote is because I had started to write a description of a celebration at Stonehenge early in its history.\u00a0 As I wrote about the people my heart went out to them.\u00a0 The rest of the passage wrote itself.<\/p>\n In the pale light before dawn, the people begin to gather.\u00a0 Wearing animal skins and festive clothing, carrying drums, flutes, tambourines.\u00a0 Dogs bark, children laugh. \u00a0There is a moment of solemn silence at the sun\u2019s first flash.\u00a0 Then they will sing the ancient songs, and take hands for the thousand year old dances \u2014\u00a0the people from the north and from the south, the people from the old world and from the new. \u00a0 \u2014O my people, what a sense of loss I feel that I am not there too.\u00a0 Are you the past or the future?\u00a0 \u2014We are both the past and the future, we are where the circle meets itself, never fear, you too are enclosed by the circle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We were going to do a \u201cGrandmother Ceremony\u201d at Neskaya in May.\u00a0 One of our dancer\/teachers was going to be 70 this May, so she spent a lot of time putting together the event.\u00a0 Alas, two of the four of … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n