Rocking Horse with Soul

Rocking Horse with Soul

Anavami Center
Rocking Horse with SoulPaintings imagery most often arises of its own impetus, only later informing me of content. The space between things gets wider with awareness. Shamanism is woven through the lives as those who go between realities. Artists of all disciplines as well as children, until they learn better, naturally connect to the life energies around them.

This image takes me back to Chejudo, the Japanese name of a small island off the southern coast of South Korea. Basaltic stacked boulders as fences crisscross the terrain where trees grow horizontally in the wind. At the center the island is a huge volcanic crater. From the rim you can see the sea on all sides with agile mountain goats dancing on the rim. The wild horses there were brought to island in ships by Genghis Khan in the Goryeo Kingdom, 918-1392.

When I was there staying there in a Buddhist temple, adjacent was an indigenous woman shaman who I found as I wondered at night looking for the chanting ritual of the nuns. She was a mudang who performed her nightly rituals by firelight. Like shamans all over the world, the mudang shape-shift into animals for knowledge and power. Later in a thatched house with basalt bolder walls I found something like a shaman museum filled with dust and spiderwebs. The fish-shape objects in a variety of carved materials is similar to Yin or Yang of that iconic symbol. It is a shape that finds its way into my paintings. I can feel the smooth polished shape, that represents the soul, in the palm of my hand before I recognize it in paint.

Majio
 
Samurai Bird

Samurai Bird

Anavami Center

Late one night in Kyoto at a public bath in the entertainment area of Gion, in a beautiful old bathhouse a wall was constructed down the middle, compliments of American occupying troops, to separate the men from the women. Some women must have recognized the voices of the local yakusa as they shout for them to come over to our side. After much taunting and conversation back and forth a couple of young gangsters came over in loincloths to display their ear-to-toe tattoos. Even the older women clapped and hooted in delight.

Japanese gangsters represent the underbelly of an ancient structure where exhibiting bravado with a particular flavor identifies oneself.  This ruthlessness is juxtaposed to the practice of traditional tea ceremonies where brush calligraphy and even sword work are said to embody the same principles. Today, arising from the warrior’s code, suicide can be considered a morally responsible decision. There is an archaic stance that can for a moment flash in a small boy, a shopkeeper, a policeman, or even an animal.

In this three-paneled painting, the bushido bravado that is ever present in Japan yet mostly invisible takes the shape of a raven opening his wings to expose amulets of power. The four-legged red creature is highlighted from outside the frame— young, innocent, and vulnerable. This creature has appeared in my painting for decades taking on various guises. This time a catalyst to the underbelly of the Raven-warrior.

Samurai Bird

Majio
 
Horse Leaping with Hopi Rattle

Horse Leaping with Hopi Rattle

Anavami Center
Horse Leaping with Hopi RattleOnce more a spacious desert-like expanse, but this time, a net stretches to the horizon. This mysterious net connotes connection, but also emptiness. Could this net infer a game? The word tennis is said to be derived from the French “take this,” when one player would serve the other.

The horse, an animal in a willing relationship with humans amplifies power, speed, and beauty. This red horse responds to a ritual Hopi rattle, one of the oldest living cultures to have lived continuously on the same land. They are a people deeply religious, with ritual ceremonies guiding most aspects of their lives. This rattle was made for a baby to call for protection from the ancestors.

This painting arose from a family trip through the Southwest.

 

Majio
 
Divided Bathtub

Divided Bathtub

Anavami Center
Divided BathtubIn a dream, I am invited into a hot bath, with no way of entering the tub except folded up as if entering a funeral urn. The tub is supported off the checkered floor by four green frogs. In the dream, shivering in a red towel I am shocked as to how this could happen and what I can do. In the space crouched are three dark menacing beings murmuring. They remind me of harpies symbols of death, fear, and the underworld. A small wild red horse is reminiscent of the light under a bushel basket. The harpies are held at bay by the horse.

The checkered floor always suggests the world of duality. It is promising in that frogs of transformation at the base of the tub are intermediaries of the bathing device on the floor, but I cannot enter the place of relaxation, cleansing, and ritual because it is divided. Still, the bath is asking for some action on my part.
 

Majio
 
Three Fruit Ladders & Hopi Rattle

Three Fruit Ladders & Hopi Rattle

Anavami Center
Three Fruit Ladders & Hopi RattleThis image arose from a family journey through a Southwest Navajo reservation when our daughter was small. The inhabitants there wondered about my husband’s tribe for his extreme height and facial features. He told them his tribe was the Japanese tribe and they nodded.

In the painting, we are positioned precariously on the top of a fruit ladder in the wind. We are considering moving across the country to construct a Zen Buddhist temple in Taos with local adobe and traditional Japanese temple carpentry. A decision of a radical life change. Again, a Hopi rattle flies through the air activating instinctual indigenous culture across time that feels more like a personal tutelar guide in the threat of modernity.

 

Majio
 
Tennis Court with Pig and Fledgling

Tennis Court with Pig and Fledgling

Anavami Center
Tennis Court with Pig and FledglingA jester kneels dressed in gold and black stripes from the dark corner shining a light over the net of a silver court. Court jester, holy fool and trickster is the only one to speak the truth to the king and get by with it. He shines a light on two unlikely companions.

Up close the pig aggressively complains to a fledgling eagle focused on something outside of the frame. Perhaps both are in the fledgling stage before flight. The Flying Pig is a creature with origins in Greek mythology, legend and folklore, originally a winged boar offspring of the Gorgon Medusa and brother of the winged horse Pegasus.

The three signal a crossroads which I can feel in my body with the psychopomp shinning the light across the court catching this earthy angry sow looking to an  awkward baby eagle without much power but incredible potential.

Majio
 
Mother Talking To Owl

Mother Talking To Owl

Anavami Center
Painting Blog, Mother Talking to Owl with FishOne night walking with my young daughter on a country road a white owl silently streaked across our path. All else fell away in the soundless gust across our stunned faces. We were dumbfounded by the abrupt wingspan as wide as the road. This mother converses with an owl eliciting a wind like a school of fish. Mothers do things beyond a children’s understanding. The child is absorbed by a cat, who has his cat-business to attend. Life of the sock carried by a cat, the package under the child’s arm and the owl. How different the world when everything in it is alive and available for conversation.

We had recently come from the animistic country of Japan where everything is alive. A child on a train carefully takes off her shoes before standing on the seat. She arranges her shoes knowing how they like to stay together rather than achi-kochi. All gardeners know the spirit of a sick tree can be moved with some coaxing to a healthy tree before the tree is cut down. Throughout the country not one grain of rice left is ever left unfinished in a bowl of rice. Just as Rumi knocks the chickpea back into the soup pot to continue the alchemic cooking for which we have all signed-up.

Majio
 
Personal Archetype

Personal Archetype

Anavami Center

Archetypes are universal, across all cultures, yet have a deeply personal essence to be explored as we often do not acknowledge, consciously or unconsciously, those with which we are most intimate. These constructions of our basic drives, foibles, and potentialities are core to human behavior. Greek myths offer classical expressions of archetypal behavior, some convoluted and dramatic and some more subtle, all have psychological truth in the context of the human psyche. In marking we are particularly interested in the archetypes that govern us and our culture as they are the currency of all the arts.

Personal ArchetypeIn the studio each of us began a practice by acausal means, like picking a Tarot card, to reveal a personal archetype specific for this time to prime synchronicity, assisting to loosen the collective paradigm as we develop a deeper rapport with the relational-field and trust alternate ways of knowing, his is a part of our on-going discussion of the overarching archetypal forest-of-art with its enchantments, perils and opportunities for transformation. We are cultivating what Josh Schrei in his Emerald Podcast on the Forest calls the “protocols or attitudes and procedures for safe passage”. We are learning that these protocols require deep attention, heart investment, commitment, care, love, work and awareness of the web of relations in the animistic universe.

The images accompanying this text may help to illustrate the protocols that developed in the creative process. The first image, a toothy non-descript animal flanked by a young girl shadowed by a red fox, with her hands on the beast’s jaws was an odd painting of several years ago. It was cartoonish and I painted over it several times, once even taking an electric sander to the surface. The icons, however, kept reasserting themselves.

Personal ArchetypeWhen I pulled the Strength card from the Tarot deck, symbol of inner strength, I realized this image had a message. It was the image of a young woman opening or closing the mouth of a lion. In my image the primal power of the beast seems to be from another dimension. It was transparent and on a different plane, legs dancing above the grass. The figure of the Red Fox is a personal daimon which sneaks into much of my work, extending like the young woman beyond the picture plane. None of this was intentional. Eventually in the last iteration a tri-fold figure was enshrined within the animal revealing itself as the Hierophant, which, according to the Tarot, is the spiritual aspect of the masculine. It emerged from the Beast signifying an intermediator or what I think of as the organizing principle or higher guidance. This was not only important to this image but shed light on several other paintings where this tri-fold image has appeared.

Personal ArchetypeThe dynamics of the organizing principle is one of the most important protocols in the forest, for it speaks to a higher principle to which we have allegiance. In an OEITH Podcast by Duncan Barford he refers to the Hierophant via Paul Verhaeghe saying, the difference between power, a two-party relationship, and authority, three parties, is that the Organizing Principle is the representation of goodness and truth and the renunciation of personal power. The Hierophant is not a figure of authority but, rather, a figure that knows where authority is to be found. Through research, reflection and physically marking, this understanding was brought home in a way that was before just conceptual. This process stimulated the important understanding from where inner strength comes. Other experiences in this endeavor confirmed that one of the perils in the forest is the blinders of personal aesthetics which can stop or stall the development of the work in its tracks. Here, we are practicing as not the sole agent but allowing other forces to work, to trust the images that arise and give freedom to become a navigation of the forest. This kind of process leads to a wealth of insights, lending flexibility and curiosity that allows the emergence of what exists. Thus, painting is not a product but a process that belongs to a greater mystery.

 

Majio
 

Blog #5D & #6A: Shapeshifting through Trance Induction and Story Telling

Anavami Center
Shapeshifting through Trance Induction and Story Telling

Dream of Fossilized Oyster Found in the Desert

This week we experienced shapeshifting field-trips: Robert guided us to feel into stone-ness, Marjorie had us holding a regret as we ran our finger through water offering a subliminal catalyst for release. Carolyn spoke in the first person as the tumbled rocks and shells of the tide line at the ocean and called forth the details of that rhythm. Lainie brought us through a delightful romp as a chipmunk who dashed and looked, leaped and listened, tasted and stashed gathering nuts and savoring the squirrel’s sunflower seeds.

Shapeshifting through Trance Induction and Story Telling

Unreconcilable

Lucy, surprised us with her contribution by reaching back to the bard tradition as she brought us into deep participation in her story. She began by having us crawl around on the floor moving as cats, feeling the shoulders and hips initiate the movement of the limbs. She showed a short of the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit as his feet stepped along the steel wire. Then she began the story of his participation in 1987 walking aerially over the Valley of Hell between Palestine and Israel. This dramatic portrayal, 25 meters above the roaring crowd, was an occasion when there seemed to be a possible resolution between the two states. Her presentation included a lively portrayal of a confused white dove released from a piece of silk choosing to instead of fly to freedom land on Philippe’s head then the end of his pole and then walked behind him on the wire, almost mimicking his movements. All of this ended in the dove taking flight as Phillippe reached his destination.

When one actually imaginally embodies other, the experience brings emotions, information and insights very different from thinking about something. It was from this state that we undertook our Marking bringing forward powerful images from all of the journeys.  You can get a sense of that from the markings that appear after this blog.
 

Majio
 

Click on thumbnail to see full size image. 

 

Blog #5C Become-like Cloud, Fear, Fingers and Raven

Anavami Center
Blog #5C Become-like Cloud, Fear, Fingers and Raven

Fingers of Fire

This week our field-trip guides who took us into shape-shifting were creative and innovative in their choice of subject and how they induced the state of mind to be receptive to becoming like something other or something we push away. Jess began with a complex hand mudra. She asked participants to gather a variety of materials and to interact with them by feel. She had us become like the tips of our fingers exploring and getting information through body sensation. My fingers became a fire gobbling up everything within touch leaving only ash of residual sensation and wispy smoke of memory.

Blog #5C Become-like Cloud, Fear, Fingers and Raven

In the Jaws of Fear

The venture that Margie stimulated was a journey into fear. She set the stage ahead of time for everyone to choose a strong memory of being in abject fear. Carol chose a more traditional journey taking us into the body of Raven with the breathing pulsing the wings in flight. Lorrie used the form of paradelle to induce the state of becoming-cloud, which will follow.

Majio
 

NOTE: “The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d’oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only those words.” Poet Laureate Billy Collins, as it turns out fabricated the form.

Shapeshifting Clouds

Wade into a sea of clouds and swim with the Sun
Wade into a sea of clouds and swim with the Sun

I look to the sky the clouds stretch across weaving into many shapes.
I look to the sky the clouds stretch across weaving into many shapes.
Travelers conforming, changing, disappearing without beginning or end.
Travelers conforming, changing, disappearing without beginning or end.
Beginning to stretch into sky conforming the travelers or disappearing shapes.
Weaving across clouds I end many without changing the look.

So soft they appear I wish to wrap them all around me.
So soft they appear I wish to wrap them all around me.
They are wind clouds but I am enticed by their warmth.
They are wind clouds but I am enticed by their warmth.
I appear soft but they wrap me around their wind.
Wish clouds they are so enticed by all warmth I am to them.

Floating by like feathers I hug them to my heart.
Floating by like feathers I hug them to my heart.
Whiteness, softness, delicate movement I am looking at my Soul.
Whiteness, softness, delicate movement I am looking at my Soul.
Looking at my heart movement floating whiteness I am delicate.
I like Soul feathers my hug to them by softness.

The clouds are weaving my delicate Soul by wind movement so I am.
Soft whiteness stretch them beginning into shapes I appear without end.
Changing or floating across my heart they hug me to them.
I wrap warmth by softness around all travelers.
They enticed me but wish I am looking at disappearing.
I look conforming the sky to many clouds like their feathers.

Wade into a sea of clouds and swim with the Sun
Wade into a sea of clouds and swim with the Sun

By Lorrie Bogner as induction for Cloud Shifting

Click on thumbnail to see full size image. 

 

Blog #5B COLLABORATIVE EXCHANGE Lorrie Bogner and Majio

Anavami Center
blog #5B COLLABORATIVE EXCHANGE Lorrie Bogner and Majio

Majio’s Original Markings


blog #5B COLLABORATIVE EXCHANGE Lorrie Bogner and Majio

Lorrie’s Contributions


Blog #5B COLLABORATIVE EXCHANGE Lorrie Bogner and Majio

Majio’s Completion

This week we are taking a break from meeting in circle before we dive into shape- shifting. This gives us an opportunity to show some of the collaboration work that we have been doing between participants. The format is that someone works on a piece, diptych or triptych and then passes it to another member who works on it to be handed back to the original artist to finish it, taking notes on personal insights of process and/or content.

This adventure brings up many issues. One is completion, for it is courteous and respectful to not over-do your part. When working on another’s piece you need to stop for different reasons than usual. Lorrie and I took several weeks of looking at the piece in all stages, not to strategize but simply to take-in and trust in an authentic response. Rather than the usually slap-dash delight of random, I needed to listen intently at each stage. I carried the piece inside me during that time alert to a markings that wanted to participate in Lorrie’s piece. After Lorrie’s work, it seemed to need something very small and subtle for completion. I waited until a Xerox transfer of cobblestone caught my eye. I knew that was it. But again, I waited to see if the flirting developed into a relationship of some kind. In the end, I put it into the white space and as there was not enough of the print to fill the space, I continued with drawing to repeat the pattern with colored pastel pencils.

 

blog #5B COLLABORATIVE EXCHANGE Lorrie Bogner and Majio
I was more comfortable working on Majio’s pieces than returning to mine after Majio had worked on them. I think that I was afraid of losing what Majio had added because it felt like my pieces needed her expression in them. Very interesting interaction. Lorrie

Lorrie’s Originals

blog #5B COLLABORATIVE EXCHANGE Lorrie Bogner and Majio

It is always a delight to work on Lorrie’s pieces as they call something new forth in marks, color and subtractions. It is like toning a new muscle or listening for a here to unheard nuance. It forces me to be attentive in a new way. Majio

Majio’s Contributions

blog #5B COLLABORATIVE EXCHANGE Lorrie Bogner and Majio

All participants are doing a collaborative exchange in three parts that we will be sharing in the blogs.

Lorrie’s Completion

Majio
 

Click on thumbnail to see full size image.

Blog #5A Shape-shifting as a means of Conjunctive knowing

Anavami Center
This week we journeyed into an old persimmon tree; first down into the roots to complete our inner vision of tree beyond what the apparent. Then we traveled up through time to budding of leaves, fruit. Through sensations in the body dropping of all the leaves and ripening of the persimmon. People had a variety of experiences and explorations depending on what was valuable at this time for them.

Exploration in how to powerfully shift perspectives, for information and insights has been practiced since the dawn of humanity. This month is devoted to marking through shape-shifting, with each participant taking a turn to lead the circle. The resources that emerge from this practice are outside of familiar ways of knowing in our time. They elicits an invitation into the kind of journey that like Jane Hirshfield’s poem Bees, expresses how do we not only refuse the invitation, but don’t even realize that it has been offered.

#5A Blog Shape-shifting as a means of Conjunctive knowing

Jess: Persimmon Tree Shape-shift

Bees by Jane Hirshfield

To every instant, two gates,
One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell,
Mostly we go through neither.

Mostly we nod to our neighbor,
lean down to pick up the paper,
go back into the house.

But the faint cries—ecstasy? Horror?
Or did you think it the sound
of distant bees,
making only the thick honey of this good life?

#5A Blog Shape-shifting as a means of Conjunctive knowing

Marjorie: Persimmon Tree Shape-shift

In our marking circle, In-Bodying the Field, we have committed to answer the call leading to hell or heaven, which I may add that by ignoring the call both, we end up where we are. As we all well know, for the first time in the history of our planet human beings have instrumental role in the sustainability for many life forms. We are being forced to frame things in new ways, as we also find new ways of knowing. Josh Schrei maintains that shapeshifting is an evolutionary force. It is conjunctive knowing, knowing through the body that that has been normative to most of the planet’s inhabitants throughout history until recently. If we want to shift the paradigm that is not working, we as artist cannot afford to re-hash the same old stories. Shapeshifting is another way to expand how we learn, perceive and create. It takes a committed practice to go through Hirshfield’s gates and let the newspaper lay.

The Emerald Podcast Shapeshifting by Josh Schrei

 

Majio
 

Blog #4D Devotional

Anavami Center
This week’s exploration has had a lasting impact on most everyone’s attitude towards the marking materials, as well as a new connection to the animistic field. Our marking shifted materials as commodity to means of devotion. Devotion at first felt like an old unused word relating to organized religion, but as we explored it, we realized that we are all devoted in any number of things. We set out candles and incense to create a mood and instead of our regular materials we used organic colorants like turmeric, beet powder, tea, coffee, flowers, berries, powdery sand from the playa at Burningman and whatever that would leave a trace of pigment. We used these materials devotionally, as a means of appreciation, just as colored ochre and flower powders have been sprinkled on the ritual objects in ceremony all over the world throughout history.
Blog #4D Devotional

Devotional Marking with Colorants, on paper 18” X 24”


For some of us it was like sandpainting as we sprinkled powders over wet marks then brushing the excess way. For others, the colorants were in an ink-form. For all of us at first it was difficult not to use the colorants as art materials, to be under our control. The practice of conscious breathing supported the intention to participate in the act of honoring rather exerting our ideas, personality, ego. It was obvious to everyone that it was a different experience than making something. The theme of our work was to hold in our body the feeling of a special place that was safe, comforting and grounding. Honoring this place within us through the materials.

This is one of the podcasts that we took for inspiration from: Emerald Podcast, The Shape of Art, Place, Relevance, and the Living Force Between Adorer and Adored:

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

In this podcast Josh Schrei infers that our experience of art has been formed fundamentally by our museums and art history format. He talks about art as the state and quality of interaction, echoing John Dewey’s stance that art is experience. Schrei maintains that art re-enforces the animate force of life as a gateway for the experience of the animate force.

From David Whyte’s book, Consolations we evoked both the sense of Maturity and Resting, which underscored the sense of selfhood. They also confirm the somatic sense of dropping into the relaxation of the moment with no goal. Our practice with marking is to hold a greater perspective through presence that includes contradictions, not knowing and risking.

Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once…Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon, for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.

Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also psychologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting…

The template of natural exchange is the breath, the autonomic giving and receiving that forms the basis and measure of life itself. We are rested when we are a living exchange between what lies inside and what lies outside, when we are an intriguing conversation between the potential that lies in our imaginations and the possibilities for making that internal image real in the world; we are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves lone…one state of rest is…the sense of slowly coming home…the template of perfection in the human imagination….

 

Click on thumbnail to see full size image. Majio
 

 

 

Blog #4C Axis Mundi

Anavami Center
Blog #4C Axis Mundi

Threshold, oil & cold wax with collage on canvas, 3′ X 5′

As we go into shapeshifting in the seminar, In-Bodying the Field in Marking, it is a means to explore the animate-field in which we live. As we change shapes in the imaginal realm we want some navigation tools, like a strong concept of selfhood and an anchoring in the physical body. This week we mark into the centering and grounding of axis mundi, somatically feeling it through gravity’s attraction to the center of the earth. This also gives us a sense of directionality and relationship in the cosmos. Like all our explorations in marking this is not claiming a new belief system but nudging our unquestioned one for a possibly greater perspective and insight into our relationship to life.

Our preparation for the axis mundi marking comprised of somatic exploration with guest facilitator, Carol Agnessens, as well as the evocation of several poets. Participants connected energetically to the feeling of aligning with the world’s axis relating to Emilie Conrad’s comment, founder of Continuum Movement:

It took me many years to recognize that the undulating fluid that I felt in my body…the undulating waves of primordial motion are the movements of love. Not emotional love but an encompassing atmosphere of love. A love that has its own destiny.

If that is a bit of a leap in this great time of stress and polarization perhaps David Whyte’s thoughts from Consolations would relate:

Besieged is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating and even by creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves, and most especially, a success they have achieved through long years of endeavor.

To feel crowded, set upon, blocked by circumstances, in defeat or victory, is not only the daily experience of most human beings in most contemporary societies; it has been an abiding dynamic of individual life since the dawn of human consciousness…

If the world will not go away then the great discipline seems to be the ability to make an identity that can live in the midst of everything without feeling beset…In this space of undoing, and silence we create a foundation from which to re-imagine our day and ourselves…

Creating a state of aloneness in the besieged everyday may be one of the bravest things individual men and women can do for themselves. Nel mezzo, in the midst of everything, as Dante said, to be besieged – but beautifully, because we have made place to stand….

This is the axis mundi that we are cultivating our marking.

Note about painting, Threshold. It is what emerged from the many months of marking pieces. The theme relates to exploration of selfhood, intimate relationship and ancestry which I am beginning to perceive as a plumbline or axis mundi. This piece came together very differently than from how I have been painting most my life. There was no planning or evaluating, but a kind of listening. I found myself using colors I was never drawn to before, like construction orange. It was more of a constant discovery. I was guided to overlay a fine netting and press it into the cold wax and then in several days later to take it leaving a texture. I still do not know where this marking work may lead in relation to artwork, but already it feels like deeper images are arising as collaboration with the field develops.

Click on thumbnail to see full size image. Majio