This drum was commissioned by a woman who does shamanic healing work. She chose the images and colors, a 3/4-facing white bird surrounded by four crystals of turquoise with some light purple. The slideshow depicts the last two stages of its creation.
It has a beautiful sound. During its birthing, I watched this drum wake up twice: first as I tied it, and again when I painted the light in the bird’s eye.
Elections having just ended here, the outcomes that both please and distress us are naturally on our minds. But even California’s Shakespearean machinations for gleaning shekels from the pockets of the people can’t compare to what just happened in Romania.
According to the AP, the country is desperately seeking new sources of revenue. They’ve raised sales taxes and slashed the wages of public servants (sound familiar?) Nevertheless, the Romanian Senate recently rejected one revenue-enhancing proposal – namely, a proposal to regulate and tax witches and fortune-tellers.
The bill, introduced by by lawmakers Alin Popoviciu and Cristi Dugulescu of the ruling party, would require witches and fortune tellers to produce receipts for their professional services. Wait, there’s more: from now on, they would also be held financially liable for wrong predictions!
A famous Romanian witch, Maria Campina, told the media that practitioners’ erratic income from these endeavors would make record-keeping difficult.
This is likely true. But the bill’s sponsor Popoviciu thinks that the opposition actually arose not out of enforcement concerns but from lawmakers who were afraid of having curses and spells put upon them.
<<<…and Margaret Hamilton’s cackle echoes throughout the land…>>>
Not a bad strategy, eh? Wonder if we could get our corporate raiders to fear spells?
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I was first alerted about this newsworthy item by Chuck Shepherd’s most excellent column, News of the Weird. Each month, Shepherd collects legit but odd news items from the mainstream press and offers them as excerpts. (Yes, I did search, and easily confirmed this piece with original sources.) I read NotW in my favorite newspaper, Funny Times, to which I subscribe. Sometimes it comes quite late and rather wrinkled: I suspect that the post office workers are having their way with it before it reaches my box. But that’s okay. They likely need it, and besides, I’m saving my curses for the truly worthy.
Who or what would you like to be today?
These are works of art, but not only for passively hanging on the wall.
Each mask is initially made from plaster bandage material molded right on the face of its intended wearer. While anyone can wear them, they fit one person perfectly and are comfortable to wear for hours on end, even while dancing.
I love this half-mask style which allows the wearer to freely speak, drink and eat while keeping it on. They are also cooler this way (temperature-wise, I mean!)
Water mask
Horse mask
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Raven mask
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Jaguar mask
This woman was browsing at the Wearable Art Show in Reno, Nevada when she came upon my booth and picked up the Jaguar Mask.
Isn’t her outfit perfect?!
Some things are meant to be.
Rrowr.
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If you would like a mask of your own, contact me!
Special masks can be great not only for Hallowe’en but also for rites-of-passage rituals at times of life changes, theater pieces, cosplay, Burning Man, science-fiction/fantasy cons, as a documentation of the lovely pregnant belly (belly mask!), shamanic ally work, or mythopoetic play with alter egos in your own psyche.
Also available for group work with adults and teens, and children. I have experience with children as young as first graders as an Artist-in-Residence, with adult community theater troupes, with pagan covens, dancers, and celebrating individuals of all sorts.
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Tonight I go alone
to the Stone-People-Lodge
To the drumming in the lodge
To the people calling, chanting
down the bones of ancient eagles
and the deities of granite near
a pregnant fir tree humming,
offering sap that danced out freely
in the Dreamtime of our mothers
who perceive us in their future
which is Now, as we are waiting
in their lodge of seven colors
like a rainbow bridge of feathers –
insubstantial in our bodies;
only present in our yearnings
in our brayings
in our dreamings; there
our bodies they are gleaming
with the cleansing
and the healing
and the long-awaited joining
with the elder tribal peoples
sister raven
grandma mugwort
So then will come the sound of angels
tying all our lives together
in the falling of their fire
and the raindrops in their wingsong
Burning breathing
smokedeyes squeezing
as the tears release from from spirits
at the deaths of all our baggage
We are joined by silver navel cords
to all of Our Relations
we are dancing in the Moebius strip
of despairing elation
Dance the memory of Realtime
Dance the flow of sap in pine trees
Dancing out of sacred lodges
in the sun,
never alone.
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This poem was written to the sound of an internal rattle while waiting for a ride (in a shopping mall, of all places) several hours before I was to go into my first Inipi ceremony with the late Wallace Black Elk. Everything that came in the poem also later came to pass in the tipi. It was nice of the spirits to provide a program!
A witch flies across the full moon on a broomstick. This is a classic Hallowe’en image; nothing more.
–Or is it?
Note how happy this witch looks. Then look for four entheogenic plants semi-hidden in the design.
Can you identify them?
Some say the use of such plant mixtures is how those witches, our European ancestors, actually went ‘flying.’ The broomstick provided a handy applicator of the “flying ointment” – a.k.a. witches’ brew? – to the mucous membranes. (I am not making this up.)
My favorite thing about this drawing is the glee she exhibits. I get so tired of seeing witches depicted as evil, scheming, or just grumpy in their warts. I mean, really. When I was a little kid of nine or so, a teacher asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. The book suggested things like “nurse” and “fireman.” I wrote in “Philosopher. And witch.”
Silently flying out of the window at night by moonlight, knowing the world’s unknowable secrets, casting spells, healing people with wild materials free for the taking, talking with ravens?! Yee-haw! It’s good to be a witch.
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And now, a shameless plug:
If you like this image and think, “wow, I sure wish this was a card! I’d love to send it to my witchy friends,” you’re in luck. I currently have an extremely limited edition of notecards featuring this image available for sale — 34 14, to be exact. Amaze, enchant, or horrify your friends with this esoteric knowledge in visual form!
The cards measure 4-1/4″ x 5-1/2″ and are blank inside, awaiting your own message. Price: $3.50 each plus postage. Optional: Have the cards inscribed with a brief, personalized hand-calligraphed message of your choosing, for a mere $1 for up to 9 words (not including “antidisestablishmentarianism” or anything in Welsh.) Postage discount will be given for bulk purchases sent to one address – I’ll only charge what I’m paying. Or if you’re local, come on over and pick them up. Not only do you avoid postage costs, but I’ll make you a cup of hot brewed tea.
* Please contact me directly to order: tfields8 [at] yahoo.com *
If you’d like this same design on a t-shirt or mug, you can get them via CafePress.
A single-color version of this original pen-and-ink drawing was the official t-shirt design for the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference in Seattle, WA.
Thanks for your interest (or endurance)!
As humans, we have many capabilities, some of which we mistakenly seem to think set us apart from the matrix of other beings; yet other animals, our elders, possess interesting capabilities as well. Yearning after these too, we’ve applied what Janine Benyus termed “biomimicry” in order to create airplanes, scuba gear, velcro, and many more very useful and fun tools.
Over the years, I have enjoyed asking my friends, students, and random acquaintances made at bus stops and the like,
“If you could add three attributes to yourself
from the animal, plant, or mineral kindoms,
what would they be?”
Not surprisingly, most people choose attributes of other animals, even though photosynthesis is among the coolest abilities around, seeing as how a being with that can bypass the entire messy business of eating and shitting in favor of simply extracting the body’s needs straight from loafing around in sunlight (aaahhhhh!)
Personally, if I had the chance to add three new attributes, I’d choose wings, gills, and soft, waterproof fur like a beaver’s. That way, I could go anywhere I liked, exploring and feeling at home in any realm – on land, up in the air, or underwater – and still be warm.
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Here are a few more of my own and others’ choice attributes, some of which begin to sound like superpowers:
My eminently practical friend Alan Winston says, “There are some attributes I’d really like to be able to summon when I want them, but which’d be inconvenient the rest of the time. Wings (and supporting musculature and lung size, etc. to make them functional for flight rather than merely decorative) would make it pretty hard to sit in cars.” I was going along with that, laughing, when I suddenly realized, if you had honking great wings, why would you *need* a car?! Emissions problems solved!
We are clearly not the first to yearn after these things, as witnessed by these ancient shapeshifting sculptures from Europe, the antlered man on the Gundestrup Cauldron and the bas-relief of Lilith with owl feet and wings, both surrounded by related allies of other species.
What attributes would YOU like to add,
should the Sudden-Evolution Wish Fairy appear?
Feel free to respond in the comment box below!
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– Of course, this may go both ways. Sometimes the nonhuman relatives might wish for our attributes (as well as our cuisine):
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My Animistic Architecture post showed you the venue for the conference I recently attended, the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, aka SAC. This is a group I’ve been part of for the last 15 years or so (omg!) This one will give you a taste of what it’s like to be there.
SAC conferences are always more fun than ordinary academic conferences. It’s an interdisciplinary group interested in exploring issues of consciousness – in other words, a collection of really interesting people looking at weird topics in a rigorous way, a task requiring both imagination and bravery. There is also often a lot of laughter.
Besides papers, SAC always includes hands-on experientials so we can play with each other’s ideas. Among those I attended was biophysicist Beverly Rubik’s session on changing the molecular structure of water with our intentions and emotions.
Beverly Rubik. (Photo: QuantumTantra@blogspot)
It was fascinating. Rubik began by putting an eyedropper full of tap water into her GDV (Gas Discharge Visualization) machine that can digitally illustrate water molecules. (We all wanted one afterwards, of course. You too? Start saving: they cost $10,500.) She then digitized the image and projected it on a screen, showing us the various aspects you can examine. These include shape, area or size, brightness, density, uniformity, and dimension. The images were simpler than Masaru Emoto’s, being more of a computer model or kirlian photography than a snowflake-like photo, but striking nevertheless. (I wish I had a picture to show you, but I don’t.) “Water carries information via its microstructure,” Beverly informed us. “Tears of joy are different from tears of grief.”
Beverly also showed us images of other types of fluids, including blood. This was an eye-opener. Since our bodies are mostly water, and the blood most of all, it can also be looked at in this way – as another form of water. She said we are much better off drinking fresh water and eating living foods, no surprise here – but one reason is that water tends to cluster together, and therefore it gets big when stagnant (like when it’s been bottled); so big at times that it can’t enter our cells. And if we’re dehydrated, we’re compromised in many ways, including loss of the ability to regulate subtle energy.
It turns out that old Weston A. Price was totally right with his take on how a non-indigenous diet alters the physical structure of our bodies. The molecular structure of the blood of a person who ate according to those standards was beautiful and clean and strong, even though he was in his 80s. The blood of a much younger woman who drank Coke at every meal for the past 30 years (I am not making this up!) was laden with anomalies, like little microbes swimming around in there and the cells clustering together for dear life, forming snakes. I was reminded of those old maps showing dangerous territory on the edge of the known: Here there be dragons. Apparently, the blood of teenagers who visit fast food joints a lot exhibits the twisted degeneration usually seen only in a much older person. Yeesh. I went out the next day and bought a lot of fresh vegetables.
Fujiwara Dam water, before prayer. (Photo: Masaru Emoto)
Then came the fun. As a group, we brainstormed ideas of how we might attempt to alter this information, and then conducted three experiments. First, we put love into it, doing so by gathering in a circle round the water, holding our hands out to it, and chanting “aum.” (I know: how California can you get, eh? <g>) Many of us reported feeling tingly fingers and “seeing” tendrils of light move from the water to each person and back again.
The second round, we reminded the water of its original perfect nature, and expressed gratitude to it. This was my idea. I felt very sorry for the water at this moment, a bit ashamed about the dissing way we’d been speaking about it right there in front of it. I mean yes, it is city tap water and does indeed have pollutants in it, but really! Would you like all of your flaws to be magnified like that by a group? If it were me, I’d start to shrink away, forgetting that I had any good qualities at all. I wanted this water to glow, knowing it was appreciated. So I suggested that we remind it of its original pure state; how beautiful it is, and how grateful we are to partake of its essence and be given life by it. This time, we held hands in a ring and one by one, following the suggestion from my linguist friend Matthew Bronson, we spoke aloud our gratitude. I went first, and sort of went into a bardic trance, invoking its Beauty in what someone later called “a breathtaking prayer from the heart.” It did feel good. There’s something right about opening one’s throat to spontaneously sing the praises of that which gives us life! Other spoke similarly in turn. The room grew hushed and the atmosphere in the room felt rarefied, uplifted. And afterward, I knew that water was holy.
Fujiwara Dam water after prayer. (Photo: Masaru Emoto)
The third round, we did what Beverly had been setting us up for all along: to try and turn this water into wine. The blasphemy angle alone tickled the heck out of me. She showed us graphic representations of the molecular structure of Chardonnay, and we tried to replicate it in this water using our minds. The group asked if I would start with another imaginal invocation. So I verbally led them through the path the water takes to become wine: its arising to the surface through a spring high in the Sierra Nevada mountains and also simultaneously falling as rain, then the way it burbled down through the groundwater and traveled aboveground down through the various river tributaries, eventually making its way to the Eel River, down the Russian River, and into the fertile soil of Sonoma County, where young grapevines eagerly sucked it up, growing tendrils and leaves and fragile blossoms that are visited by eager bees and insects and eventually ripen into ever-growing, ever sweetening fruit, warmed by the sun and watched over by the moon, cycle upon cycle, until each grape is perfectly juicy plump and tart and is picked and crushed by loving hands, then laid to bed cradled by oak, until ahhh! finally tasted, here, by us. Well, you get the idea. Eeny meeny chili-beanie, presto change-o zap! Heeeere’s wine.
We sat back down as Beverly digitized the images and then showed us the corresponding data for each of our experiments. We had indeed changed the molecular structure of every sample of water we had “touched.” The wine was about halfway there: not as big or bright as Chardonnay, but much more than the original tap water.
Since thoughts and emotions are actually changing the molecular structure here, and this is precisely what was being tested, Beverly was concerned that during the experiment nobody was present who came with intent to prove their extreme skepticism. Despite extreme rigor of execution and documentation, this type of experiment is routinely shut down in university settings by people in positions of power with such a mindset, effectively trading fascinating inquiry for the maintenance of “turfdom and serfdom.” I couldn’t help thinking of Emoto’s images paired with Rubik’s observations about the effects of water on our health. It would be fun to show such people these images with the caveat, “This is what your snotty attitude is doing to your cells!”
Then she suggested we conduct an addendum to the experiment which had never been done before: to see if we could taste the difference between the waters. Physically, remember, it was all the same stuff: tap water from the sink in that building. There was only enough charged water in the test tubes for two tasters. Matthew and I volunteered. (I did it mostly because I really wanted that second water in my body!) We turned our backs as Beverly and her partner Harry Jabs rigged up tasting cups of each of the three and then administered them to us in random order. Matthew and I might get the same kind at the same time or we might not. All we knew is that we would each receive one sample of each experiment, three in total, with no duplication.
My strategy was to ask the water to reveal itself to me, then open up as much as possible to it in my subtle bodies – like when attempting to see/feel in diagnosis for shamanic healing – before tasting it. Each water did seem to have its own unique quality. For example, one had a tart-and-sweet taste to me, and was sort of light too, not unlike sauvignon blanc. So I guessed this was the wine. Matthew and I both reported “sweetness” in that round of samples. These turned out to be the wine for me, and for him, the sweet taste was love. Awww!
We also received “plain” tap water to cleanse our palates in between tastings. We found this delightfully amusing. But you know what? We experienced something remarkable here. The first tap water seemed quite neutral, as one would expect, but the ones in between the charged waters actually tasted bad to us. Wild, eh? I thought that phenomenon could be my mind playing tricks, so drank the third sample with that in mind. And indeed, it did not taste bad to me at first – but then it developed an aftertaste!
In the end, Matthew got one right and I got all three. Statistically, this is unlikely but not hugely significant. The wildest, most interesting thing of all was that we actually could taste differences in these waters.
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Rubik’s experiment speaks volumes about how the quality of our attention matters.We all know this and experience it every day, yet we forget. We fall into the tyranny of multitasking instead of offering our full attention to whatever presents itself. Are we listening to one another deeply, or with half our minds somewhere else – perhaps even planning what we’re going to say in return instead of hearing the original idea?
Another aspect: Objects created with full loving attention carry that special energy with it forever. Compare, for example, a handmade journal vs. one that was mass-produced by sweatshop labor and machines. Even if the former’s materials are not the finest, the personal energy and love put into its creation infuses it, conferring a subtle quality that makes it far more valuable.
When we touch a lover or small child or someone in pain, the way in which we do it; the consciousness behind the act, seriously impacts the way the touchee will experience it. A touch with deliberately concentrated love behind it can be instantly healing, soothing, invigorating; like a drink of cool water or a warm fire in winter.
Such attention can mean survival, too – for example, noticing the colors and scents of our food. Get hold of a bad fish and don’t notice that until it’s half eaten? Too late! Pay more attention next life.
Cultivating the ability to attend can also lead to terrific fun, because it means we notice things that nearly nobody else does: Gargoyles gazing down from the second floor corners; the different iridescent colors on pigeons, now suddenly recognized as beautiful; the funny way your friend says “wool.” The world is so rich with weird and interesting things to enjoy, and beauty to be found in the most unexpected places. Auntie Mame had it right: “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.”
Of course, when playing with perspective and really looking for a different angle on things, one sometimes gets more than one bargains for…
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Happy looking!
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