Monday, April 24, 2006

What's up with that?

I've been meaning to record this for a while now:

I was driving to Hogwarts, I think it may have been to Organic Inquiry. Our car was rear-ended a few months ago by a drunk driver who threw a beer-bottle out the window while speeding off after slamming into the back of my car and causing over $7000 worth of damage to a beautiful car. Although the back was screwed up, nothing like this had ever happened, before or since, and we don't even use the trunk anymore but while I was on the freeway it flew up.

I pulled off at the next exit at a gas station and closed it with no problems.
On the way home that afternoon, 8 or 9 hours later, there was a sedan in the lane next to me whose trunk flew up so they had to pull over to the side of the freeway to close it.

Hmmm....

Thursday, April 13, 2006

March 1, 2006: A Dream

I've written down a number of dreams and other private journal entries this semester and they are usually on loose paper or in my spiral notebooks and I pile them on my research altar or stuff them into my spiral notebooks. Eventually they will find their way into a single manilla envelope in a filing cabinet.

But this dream definately pertained to archeomythology so I am willing to include it here.

After praying for healing dreams, revelation, epiphany - this is what I woke up with,
(last night, yesterday, I was studying rock art, petroglyphs, pomo baby rocks and finding some correlations to the archeomythology of Europe...)

Wish I could remember the first part of the dream better - but to keep it short I was in a certain house with a certain person...

There was a mysterious "rock" in the house a little bigger and longer than a bowling ball, coral colored, flesh colored, with "cupules," impressions a little more shallow and on a smaller surface than the ones I was studying last night.

I was poking around on it, kind of afraid of it (not in a negative way, just more of a healthy respect, I sensed power within this thing.) Didn't know what the thing fully "was."

Either before or after the water scene, I picked up photographs and if I would look at them longer than a second, some special power kicked in, probably my third eye, and the picture would start to move and I would see a moving scene like a little movie. I picked up a (dream) picture of my partner about 8 years ago when I first met him. We were camping with friends and he was cooking and jumped into the water or something - like the water that I dreamed about. It was kind of a black and white photo movie.

I picked up a color picture of my sister when she was little, in an old house, and watched it move. Then the movement would stop and it would freeze into another picture. It was like I could will it to start and stop.

Also there was a part where I was hiding from an antagonist (I was in danger) and I thought I was blending into a rock but then I remebered they had heat-sensing radar from the sky.

So I'm at a small pond, maybe 6 ft. deep. Its got some grass around it, maybe part of an old broken fence or something and I'm poking at a creature like the coral-colored "stone" that I originally described. My partner warns me to be careful - that I might get bitten. I was surprised, thinking it was more of a curious rock on the bank of the pond- when it jumped into the water, in the middle of the pond just like a fish! I had the sense that it was the same exact stone/creature from earlier in the dream.

Then the antagonist energy returned (I was in danger) and I was trying to get out of the pond and over the fence and into the neighborhood ans was hurrying fast and went
a little too far down the street to the end of the block and turned around and went back into the building that I was wither "supposed to" go into or "wanted to" go into, not sure, how I knew to go to this place but there was a crowd gathered there and lots of chairs like people were going to watch a movie and I was relieved to be off the street.

There was a boy of about 10 or 11 from what appeared to be the Himalayan region, like one of the child actors who played the Dalai Lama in film. He seemed really familiar, and was smiling and serene. I felt connected to him somehow. He reminded me of my son also.

The "fish" / rock seems to be some sort of representation of the Divine Feminine.

A synchronicity

At the beginning of this semester I was cleaning out an old box because its taken me years to unpack after moving and moving and moving for so long and going to school full time for so long. I had a little space for the first time in a long time to go through a few boxes and throw away alot of stuff. I've also spent the last few years purging my life of everything but the bare bones essentials. So I'm pretty close to me goal in that regard.

Anyway, I came across a prayer that my old acquaintance, Maura M., wrote about 8 years ago when she was in the same Women's Spirituality program that I am now enrolled in. I hadn't seen her or the poem since, but she gave it to me and inscribed it to me.

Prayer and Self-Blessing

Goddess bless me for I am your daughter
Hold me and carry me as I hold you and carry you within

Bless my crown in connection to you
Bless my third eye for clarity of vision
Bless my eyes that I see you in all, that I see you in me
Bless my throat that I hear your voice in my words and your words in my voice
Bless my heart that it remain open and filled with you
Bless my breasts with the power of nurturance, that I learn what to give, and what to keep for myself
Bless my solar plexus, my mind, my intellect. May it always work in conjunction with my intuitive knowledge, my heart and my spirit in connection to you
Bless my belly with the gift of intuitive knowledge and sacred pleasure
Bless my vulva for it is the root of my being in this world
Bless my knees with humility, may I always bow low before you with Thanksgiving and adoration
Bless my legs and my feet, may they always tread carefully in your pathways
Bless my arms and my hands with healing and creativity in your name

Bless me mother for I am your daughter
Hold me and carry me as I hold you and carry you within
Blessed Be!

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Eaostar/Ishtar/Esther/A Star

This entry is linked to my Community Service BLOG, since there is some overlap:

Today during moontime I just needed to do art and not think for awhile, so I was doing community service hours and combining archeomythology study by painting Easter eggs for the Community Garden Easter Egg hunt on Easter with symbols from The Language of the Goddess. We had previously prepped the eggs by poking a small hole in each side and then blowing out the raw egg into a jar. We've then used the eggs in the jar at a later time. We also have a number of plastic eggs that you can open and put things inside.

I was inspired to see if Gimbutas' book had anything to say about them or their significance and came across "ch. 19/Egg" in The Language of the Goddess.

As my beloved consort continued to paint, I read...

I read that egg symbolism emerged in the earliest stages of the Neolithic and has continued to survive in folk customs around the world up to and including, "the ritual use of eggs at New Year's and Easter in European villages...Eggs painted with red and black whirls, spirals, snakes, crescents, and plant motifs are carried around and given to each family in the Baltic and Slavic countries to celebrate the coming of Spring. To ensure the renewal of vegetation, eggs are placed in the ploughed earth."

This was amazingly synchronistic news. First of all because 1/4 of my Cherokee hubbie's lineage goes back into the region Gimbutas described and he was the one who came up with the Easter Egg hunt idea in the garden. Also the collage I did for Organic Inquiry had a central, National Geographic-style 2-page, photo-spread of a family in Lithuania (where Maria Gimbutas is from) gardening, and it describes the significance of the land to those people. Our own community garden land is what originally inspired my Organic Inquiry project, as well.

But what was really crazy was that we were painting some of the eggs with red and black paint (although on some of the eggs we added yellow, and even made orange, and blended textures and designs; surprising what you can do with 3 colors.)

I only wanted to use two main colors for my bodymap in Archeomythology: Red and Black, with just a bit of Yellow for the solar-disc/owl eyes. I chose red and black because I was inspired, through my studies and inuition, that they were feminine colors of life and fertility, so that was all the paint that we had and here we were doing exactly what the book said people had been doing probably more or less continually in some parts of the world (either consciously, like in Europe or unconsciously as in our case) since Neolithic times!

After this I read,"the egg plays a role in feasts of the dead and is placed as an offering in graves to prompt regeneration."

I just about fell off my chair! I flashed back to hearing the brilliantly inspired scholar of ancient manuscripts, Glenn Kimball, once say that "the three Mary's brought eggs to the tomb of Jesus" [!!!]

The text continued and so did the serendipity:

"This is an ancient association; from the eraly Neolithic onward, burial pothoi (jars) are egg-shaped, symbolizing the womb of the goddess from which life would re-emerge.

Egg-forms - circles, ovals, ellipses - as meaningful symbols go back even further into the upper paleolithic. In Magdalenian art, circles and ovals are engraved over female buttocks and the bodies of bulls" and then the text cites a picture of a bull painted on a cave floor from the "Middle Magdalenian period, Pyrenees, Southern France, circa 12,000 B.C.E."

It just can't be a coincidence that someone decided to name an archeological age based on caves and cave paintings that still survive in the same region where well-known legends persist about Mary Magdalene was mediating in caves in the very same region, later in her life. [Note to the reader - I had read all of the source material for the Da Vinci Code a decade before the book even came out, just so ya know.]

Further significance of the coinciding of all of these events is that Easter is still to this day calculated according to a lunar formula.

And one of my greatest (sweet) secrets is tied up in the word "Easter."

Friday, April 07, 2006

clouds

My honey and I were in the best place in town to watch the sunset - the EC Garden. The night before this we had seen a bright halo around the moon at the Garden.

We were hangin out in lawn chairs looking to the west and I noticed that there was a halo around the sun. A cloud formation that looked like a white water-bird. My honey thought so too. A bit later we looked at it again and it looked just the same but like it had turned a bit. Next time we looked at it, it looked like it was turning a literally flying away. We watched it for quite awile. It kept its form and looked like it was flying away.

Then I noticed that little black clouds had formed a row of patterns that looked like the "palm prints" that Lucia Birnbaum mentions in Dark Mother and in her archeomythology lecture. It was a row of perfectly shaped handprints. A cthonic sign of the goddess. Even my honey could see it. We were really feeling hooked in at that moment. I percieved that nature was percieving me.

Bodymap

The more I read the Language of the Goddess the more I wanted to incorporate this symbolism into the Bodymap.

I am increasingly drawn to using as much of the bird goddess symbolism just because so many significant spiritual experiences seem to be with this very ancient bird goddess, from the ceramic owl that I made at 7, to dreams and mystical experiences with real birds, to symbolism obtained from a meeting with a Cherokee medicine woman, the bord goddess and the owl goddess come up more and more for me.

I thought it was interesting that before I dove into the Gimbutas book, when we first traced the outlines for the Bodymap, I posed with one arm up and one arm down. Gimbutas interprets this ancient sign as a symbol of regeneration associated with the bird goddess (page 17), which of course I didn’t consciously know at the time, so it looks like I am right on track.

The two bees sewn into the center of each spiral/breast, is a representation of the seven generations of bee priestesses on my mothers side of the family. The bee symbol is documeneted to go back on some of the family lines, on both my mothers and my fathers side of the family, for nearly 2000 years.