​We have to go through “Ugly” on the Way to our Creative Vision
In some of the doll making groups I have led, there is often a point at which participants talk of their dolls being “ugly.” This is especially true when they are making needle felted faces. When you put together a needle felted face, there is a stage where you have to turn the face inside out, add the nose and upper lip, attach it to the forehead and stretch it out to create a realistic face. It looks monstrous and ugly. It is an awkward process and it takes time to manipulate the face into something even distantly resembling life-like. It is so easy to get frustrated at this stage. 
But the reality is that our hands, if they are unfamiliar with this process, need to learn the movements and gestures to make in order to effect this transformation of the face. And our minds need to learn to be able to tolerate this messy stage, which is such an import part of the creative process. 
 
In any case, no matter the medium, making faces is arguably the most difficult part of creating a doll, and this may have more to do with psychology than anything else. The face is the first thing we respond to when we see a doll. It looks back at us and when we are the maker, we know unconsciously that this face is reflecting something of ourselves back to us. There is something nakedly truthful in this process. And we often don’t want to be faced with this truth. 

​Why do We have this Gap between our Vision and our Results? (at least at first)
We are, as humans, pre-programmed to, in the creative process, see in our heads how we want something to turn out, and it can be so frustrating as part of the learning curve, to not be able to realize that vision. Ira Glass, of This American Life, puts it this way:
 
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be. It has potential. But your taste -- your taste is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. 
 
“A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting creative work went through years of this…It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions. It’s gonna take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
 
This isn’t exactly my main point in this article, but it is relevant. In life and in the creative process, we need to accept the whole complex mess of who we are, of what our creative message is. As a member of the human race, we also need to accept all stages of development, including the awkward stage of adolescence, the “ugly duckling” stage, all the way up to old age. And in old age, that means accepting age spots, wrinkles, weird humps, and all the ways that bodies change as we age. As I approach 65 this year, this last has become truer and truer for me. 

​The Loathly Lady
I have been fascinated lately with the story of the Loathly Lady that comes from the Celtic tradition. I was introduced to this powerful ancient woman from the writings and teachings of Sharon Blackie, “whose work sits at the interface of psychology, mythology and ecology.” In her book, Wise Women: Myths, Stories for Midlife and Beyond,” Blackie introduces us to the neglected stories of elderly “hags,” “crones,” and “wise women,” in their role as teachers, guides and shape-shifters. She was drawn to pull together this collection of tales, as a response to the ways in which elderly women are only depicted in folk and fairy tales as either dangerous, threatening figures or shadowy, weak figures in the background of the story. 

I have written elsewhere about a doll I am currently working on, who is a “loathly lady.” At least for now. I usually don’t know what my dolls are going to be about, what their stories are going to be until I finish them. Sometimes it is months or even years afterwards that I discover their true meaning. Or sometimes the meanings shift. But at least for now, and I have a feeling the meaning is going to stick, this doll is a loathly lady. Blackie has a story about the Loathly Lady in the ”Wise Women” story collection, called “Kissing the Hag.” In this story, all the brothers of a particular royal family go on a journey into the woods and encounter an old hag who is guarding a well. Not only is she ugly but she is truly loathsome to look at. 
 
“Instead of a head of hair, she had a gray, bristly mane like the coarse hair along an old boar’s back. Her teeth were green, crammed unevenly into a mouth that stretched from ear to ear. Her nose was crooked, and her nostrils gaped. Her skin was spotted with pustules, and her legs were twisted and set at unlikely angles. Her knees were knobby, her ankles were thick, her shoulders were huge, her nails were filthy, and the stench of her breath was enough to fell a horse.”
 
Each of the brothers are disgusted by the hag and refuse to kiss her and thus are not allowed to drink from the well that would have quenched their thirst. Until finally the last and youngest brother, Niall, who has a completely different reaction to the hag. 
 
“Niall threw back his head and laughed, then roundly declared, ‘I’ll do more than give you a kiss—I’ll lie with you, if you like!’ and he drew a deep breath, pulled her into his arms and kissed her heartily.” 

​The Reward in “Kissing the Hag”
His reward then is that the hag is immediately transformed into “the most beautiful woman in the world.” And he is allowed not only to drink water from the well but to take some back to his family and more importantly, he and his family are given sovereignty over Ireland. She is the Sovereign of Ireland, freed by his kiss. 
 
In other stories of loathly women, the hag isn’t transformed into a beautiful woman and the Loathly Lady in other stories, sometimes chooses not to transform herself (as in the story of the Loathly Lady and Sir Gawain seen below.) But that wasn’t the point here. Niall was clearly ready to accept her as she was, not expecting in any way for her to transform herself. One way of looking at this story, it seems to me, is that in kissing her, he shines a window on her inner self, revealing the beauty within. 

​The Long Tradition of “Ugliness” Being Transformed
If you look back at fairy tales, there is a long tradition in which ugliness is transformed into something else. Ugliness often signifies evil but it also can signify something hidden beneath the surface. A truth that only the wise or brave, or especially the one who isn’t seduced by the norms of their society is able to see. Or sometimes the one who encounters “ugliness” is unwittingly invited to go beyond the surface and see what lies beneath. I think of stories such as The Frog Prince, where the beautiful maiden is forced to kiss the frog, in return for his kindness to her in retrieving her golden ball that had fallen into the well. In older versions of the story, she is throws the frog against the wall and he is transformed this way into a prince. 
Then there is the story of Medusa, whose ferocious ugliness not only puts people off but kills them. I have written elsewhere about the way the Medusa story was manipulated, even at its inception, to implicate Medusa herself as evil, when in fact she is the true victim of the story. But even without that back story, Medusa remains a powerful figure, forceful and strong, a symbol, embraced more and more as a representation of fierce femininity. 

And there is the story of the “Ugly Duckling” who is mistakenly raised in a duck family when in fact he is a swan. This story reflects to me the way in which ugliness is so much related to context. And it also speaks to the awkwardness of adolescence, that almost all of us had to endure. I know I definitely did. To me, this story also reflects the adolescent stage of the creative process that I was alluding to at the beginning of this essay. In the creative process, as in life, we have to go through that initial stage when we don’t fit in, when we, especially when we are meant to grow into something large and expansive and true, take a long time to find our way. ​

​Sometimes it is all about Context
We can see the importance of context in fashions/trends and new ideas in any field. How often is it that a new idea is rejected at first as awkward and ridiculous, because it is too big for the sensibility of the time within which it is born? I especially love Oliver Sacks and his writings about science (and I really miss him-he died in 2015.) His work with “locked in syndrome” inspired the Robin Williams movie, “Awakenings.” Sacks wasn’t afraid to experiment and explore ideas in a creative way that didn’t fit within the dry, clinical approach of the scientific community of the time. 

​The movie, based on a book he wrote of that name, describes his treatment of patients who were suffering from “encephalitis lethargica” and were in a sort of “locked in” state. Professionally isolated at the time, Sacks experimented with a drug L-Dopa, treating these patients who were mostly written off by the medical community. His results were dramatic and surprising, causing the patients to suddenly “wake up” from their frozen state. The results were not long-lived-most of the patients ended up having side-effects to the drug and were not ultimately cured. And yet, Sacks’ approach heralded a change in the way science and medicine was written about and conveyed to the public, in a way that honored marginalized patients and neglected communities. I have always loved his writings, and have very much appreciated the way he is able to take dry, remote medical stories and phenomena and make them vivid and real through his expressive and empathic approach. And he, who was at one time a sort of ugly duckling in the scientific community is now mostly lauded for the changes he brought about in ways of seeing and understanding the patients he treated. And there is something magical and fairy-tale like in the story of the waking up of these neglected patients, like something out of the story of Sleeping Beauty. 
 
Accepting Ugliness as Part of the Whole Picture
As I was thinking and mulling over what I was going to write in this rambling essay, the phrase “ugly crying” came up. What do we do when we “ugly cry?” We cry with abandon, not caring or perhaps caring but not being able to stop crying because the emotions are so strong. We relinquish the smooth-faced perfection-epitomized in the need for facial surgery or the use of Botox-and instead allow our faces to squeeze out like a sponge, surrendering to the wash of strong emotions. We surrender to a force stronger than our small selves. 
 
This kind of crying transforms our face, making it “ugly” but more importantly allowing the release of deep feelings that overwhelm us. Once we allow ourselves to cry like this, we are left afterwards with a sense of release and freedom. Both in that we have allowed the strong waves of emotion to wash through us and also because in the end, we realize that it doesn’t really matter what we look like when we cry. We give ourselves permission to be “ugly” and in the process, allow ourselves to be whole. 

Hello and thank you to my readers...
​I have to be honest. It has been tough in the last few months to get to words. My communications have been mostly visual, through making dolls in my studio and working into my intuitive journals. Both of these practices always help me to process difficult feelings and emotions. But lately, words have been coming to the surface and in this blog post, I share some recent thoughts. And I am grateful that you are reading what I write here. Because of course, art-making is a conversation. It doesn't really feel like I am fully expressing myself if there is no conversation with my viewers, my audience I guess you can call it. I will try to write again soon,  but I am not promising anything. But I do promise that I will try. 

Using the "Domestic Arts" as a Tool of Subversion
I remember watching a 2014 Spanish movie, "The Time In Between," that tells of a dressmaker who by stitching morse code into dresses, and selling them as high couture to Nazi wives, manages to covertly communicate messages to the British. She has to work closely with and spend time with people who she despises and whose values she abhors. Yet in her way,  she is able to help save some lives and this makes a difference. Later I discovered that in other parts of Europe, women used knitting as a means of covert communication, using the knit and purl language of knitting to spell out morse code and send messages beyond enemy lines. Apparently they would sit on railway platforms knitting. They would knit morse code symbols into their knitting, thereby communicating with passing soldiers or others who were helped by their messages. These stories may be apocryphal but there is a power in them. Who would ever suspect women who are engaging in the "lowly" domestic arts to be working as spies? 

A pattern of those who are oppressed being able to use their invisibility as a means of subversive communication
How often do/did those who are oppressed find ways to communicate and make statements that would be understood by others within their group, in a way that was invisible to their oppressors? And why didn't these oppressors see what was happening in plain (yet hidden) sight? Is it that they don’t value those who they perceive as “under” them, don’t see them as intelligent. Or is it that they don’t understand the context, history, meaning of the messages being communicated? Probably it is some of each. This kind of subversive communication can happen on a variety of levels, from the less risky to a life-threatening level of risk. I am in awe of those who were courageous enough to take part in these forms of resistance. 

Subversive stitching in ancient Greek history...(graphic content warning for this paragraph)
In Ovid's Metamorphosis, the story of Philomena is told. She is abducted and raped by her sister's husband. After this abuse he tears out her tongue so that she cannot communicate what has been done to her. But she finds a way.  She stitches her story into a tapestry and tell the story of her violation, even though she isn't able to speak. What courage and resourcefulness this must have taken. Below is an image of her story. In my Mother, Maiden, Crone, Death class, we spoke of Philomena's story an example of one of the many ways in which women were forced to submit, were repressed and worse. The aim in retelling these stories was to bring them to light and to transform them into stories of courage and strength. 

Fictional Examples of using Cronehood as a form of Subversion
Moving from the graphic to the pastoral, I love heroines such as Jane Marple in Agatha Christie's mystery series, who lives in the tiny English village of St. Mary Mead, where on the surface, nothing much happens and all is calm. To all appearances Ms. Marple is an innocuous kindly old woman, harmless and invisible. And yet, she is able to harness that invisibility to dig under the picture-perfect surface of her small town, to reveal the evil underneath. Kindly and hidden in the background, she manages to outwit the perpetrators of crimes. They would never imagine that this smiling woman, knitting or gossiping with other villagers, would be clever enough to discover their crimes.  

These examples are heartening to me in these times of confusion and chaos (especially, living as I do in the heart of Washington DC.) It is so easy to feel powerless (and I am outing my political leanings here, can't help it) in the current climate of bumbling, "bull in a china shop" patriarchy that we find ourselves in. It gives me some clues as to what we as women, as crones, as makers who use fabric, stitching, knitting needles, can do. We can speak out in our art, in a dramatic way, following the lead of artists such as Jenny Holzer or Judy Chicago. Or, just by quietly expressing what is deep in our hearts, we can serve as a conduit for what others might struggle to express. Our work can be a quiet witness or a forceful beacon of hope. 

Subversive messaging in Doll making
The image at the top of this post is a detail from a flip doll, The Living Earth: Healing Dark/Nuclear Light,  that I made a while back.  In this doll, I tried to work through my feelings of despair about the state of the earth.  In the detail above, if you look closely, you can see the lone polar bear on her shrinking ice floe. You can see burning and decimated forests and overheated oceans. However, it can also be read as aesthetically pleasing patterns and colors. It takes looking closely to see the message being conveyed. To see more about this doll, click on the image above. This side of the doll, the light side, or "Nuclear Light" depicts the damage that overheating and too much light can do to our earth. On the flip side of the doll, one can see the benevolent effects of "Healing Darkness." 

Messages in some of my most recent dolls:
All my dolls tell stories. It's just that sometimes I don't know the stories yet. In the above images, you can see a smaller doll, "Coco," made of cloth over a stick armature. Her story is below. 

"Coco" wears simple clothes and a necklace of skulls. 
She can appear scary if you don’t know her, but
If you know her, you understand that she is 
Fierce and loyal. A protective spirit, she will guard 
the edges of your life, the places where your fears 
call to you and she will bring you the courage
that comes from ancient wisdom. 

When I first made the doll, (see image on the left) I considered leaving her without a head. But after consideration, the doll let me know that she wanted a head. She also holds a small basket which could contain additional messages and secret surprises. 

"Wild Spirit/Fox Woman"
The message of this recent doll taps into a fierce and wild life-force as well as the ability of women to shape-shift throughout their lives.  
Here is her story:

The "Wild Spirit Fox/Woman" will not
Ever let go of her fierce love and
Her passionate belief in being alive. 
She harnesses the wildness of the 
Fox in the service of helping you to live
A life full of passion, creativity and  
Magic!

​My dolls speak to me in a subtle, you could say subversive way. I usually don't know what they will be about once I start to make them. I enjoy allowing them to speak to me, and hopefully to the viewer, using their own language and metaphor. Sometimes it can take me a long time, a year or even longer to truly hear their messages. I am grateful that they have allowed me to share some of their stories here with you. And I am so greatful to be able to have this way to express what is inside. It is a true balm for me and my wish is that in reading about them and hearing their stories, you can receive this balm as well. At least that is my hope. Thanks for reading. 

With the help of this doll, Vasilisa is able to take on challenges set by Baba Yaga, such as separating grains of rotten corn from sound corn, and separating poppy seeds from grains of soil. The doll also guides Vasilisa as to when to ask questions of Baba Yaga and when to remain silent. Thus, not only is Vasilisa allowed to live, unlike most visitors to Baba Yaga's hut, but she is also rewarded for her bravery and restraint. Because Vasilisa overcomes the challenges,  Baba Yaga gives her a flaming skull, a symbol of truth and fierce righteous anger. This skull ultimately kills her wicked step mother and step sisters. In this way, the maiden, having first received the wisdom and guidance from the mother in the form of the intuitive doll, now receives the protection and assistance from the crone, in the form of the flaming skull.
​
There are so many layers of symbolism to this story, including the scene depicted in this painting. In class we talked about how the transitions from maiden to mother, from mother to crone and crone to death can all be seen as a kind of birth into a new self. We are born anew as different women many times in our lives. This cycle of renewal mirrors the cycle of life death and rebirth that our ancestors would have known and trusted in. For our ancestors, who lived closer to the earth, there would have been a visceral connection to the changing seasons, each bringing its challenges and rewards. The transitions in life, becoming a woman, marriage, even dying, would have been recognized with ritual close to the home and amongst family. In revisiting these stories, we can reconnect to the deep meaning of life's transitions, large and small. 

In class, we also talked about how the maiden, mother crone and death are truly not separate from each other. Like nesting dolls, they each live within the other. As mothers, we know the face of the newborn baby girl, who seems to hold the wisdom of the wise crone. The mother within the maiden guides and protects her. The mother within the crone allows us to birth into new experiences and identities. ​And for those of us in the crone years, we hold both the maiden and mother within us. The maiden gives us the energy and fire to continue to take on new experiences and live fully. The mother within our crone self is a loving presence holding us, blessing us and enveloping us in her love. May we be blessed with these stories and connections as we reflect on these powerful ancient stories and on the stories of our own lives as well. 

What does it mean to be a "maiden" nowadays?
The focus of my work is with women in the crone years or apprentice crones at least. So how to talk about the Maiden part of the Maiden Mother Crone archetypes of a woman's life? I have been giving this a lot of thought lately, as we are focusing on the Maiden this month in an on-line course I am facilitating. To that end, I have come across some interesting writings on the subject.

A maiden is pure in that she is true to herself and her vision
One is the writing of Christine Valters Paintner, of the wonderful Abbey of the Arts. In discussing the maiden she mentions another antiquated-seeming concept, that of the virgin. Not in the old sense of the word, as someone who has never had sex, but instead as a woman who answers only to herself in her life. Someone who has a purity and single-mindedness of focus that has nothing to do with who she sleeps with but instead to do with how she leads her life. In the course I am teaching, we are re-visiting the stories of some maiden goddess archetypes. We are reclaiming their true stories from how they had been diluted and manipulated by history. And in this way, we are rediscovering our own true maiden fiery true selves. ​It is the passion within the maiden that motivates her and it is this passion of the maiden within the crone, that motivates us still, though we may be in our later years. 

Joan of Arc, a maiden warrior and mystic
In the Maiden Mother Crone Death class, we are talking about Joan of Arc as an example of a maiden archetype. Her story is a tragic one and yet she stands out as an example of one who fought passionately for her ideas. In our times we have our Greta Thunbergs and Mala Yousafsais. fighting for the environment and for girls rights to study at school respectively. In the image above, Joan of Arc showed up in an intuitive painting in a 1950's Science book I have been working into progressively. Here she is in her warrior form, though in a way in this image it looks more like the two figures are dancing rather than fighting. 

How can we as older women or crones, tap into our own fiery inner maidens?
I believe that we, like nesting dolls, contain all our younger selves within us. If however, some of those younger selves have felt shut down, belittled or ignored, it can be difficult to access them in our later years. Carl Jung said that the work of our later years is to begin to integrate all of our selves, with a goal of finding wholeness. So, even if we have spent our lives in forward motion, not looking back at who we were before, it can still be important to revisit and if necessary befriend and tend those younger selves. Personally, always having been an inward looking person, I have always looked back, but perhaps to the detriment of times in my life when it would have served me better to look ahead. But, yes, it feels important to me to revisit these earlier selves, not to wallow in past sadness and losses but instead to reclaim the best of who we were then and to allow these younger selves to animate our beings as older women. To inspire us to be fully alive. Ursula Le Guin is a great example of how to do this....

Inspired by the great Ursula Le Guin, who never lost the spirit and energy of her younger self
I've been thinking a lot lately about the wonderful and celebrated author, Ursula Le Guin. She was described as a writer of "speculative fiction, including science fiction." I’ve been reading her wonderful book, Space Crone, and marveling at the way her young energetic self shines through, no matter what her chronological age is, and even now, though she is no longer with us.  In these photos above, showing a young and old Ursula Le Guin,  you can vividly see the way in which her young self lived through her older self.

​The young and the old Ursula Le Guin in conversation with each other
In these two photos, the older Ursula seems slyly to be looking at us, challenging us to meet her gaze. The older self looks more confident and forceful. the younger self more shy. It is almost as if the younger self looks to the older self for reassurance. And it is this way with all women who have aged well, never allowing their younger selves to leave them, but instead being able to tap into all the ages they have been, making them the complex beings they are now in all their wisdom. I hope that I can be even a bit as strong, creative and full of life in my later years as Ursula Le Guin was in hers.

Being willing to revise old ideas and even throw them out, in light of wisdom gained in later years
One of the things I love about reading these essays in Space Crone is that Le Guin is very willing to revisit all of her earlier thoughts and beliefs. She includes talks and essays from all the phases of her life in this book and in some of them, she greatly revises earlier versions of her essays. She doesn't rest on the laurels of earlier successes but is always willing to revisit them in the light of what she has learned in later years. And in this way she, as an older woman, has the best of both worlds, the freshness of vision of her younger self along with the wisdom of her older self. In looking back at her earlier essays she grows in her understanding of what it means to be a feminist. For instance, one of her essays, written in 1988 "Is Gender Necessary (Redux)," she almost completely revises an earlier essay of the same title from 1976, in light of what she had since learned about the reality of being a woman in a man's world.

The mark of a true crone enlivened by her inner maiden
To me, this is a mark of a true crone enlivened by her inner maiden, someone who is willing to revisit all of her earlier ideas, to bring a freshness and new eye to them, even if this means questioning herself and making herself vulnerable. We can bring this same freshness to our lives and to our relationships, though it is not always easy. As older parents, we have to be able and willing to listen to our young daughters and allow their new visions refresh and enliven our older ones. I am grateful for this reason to have a young adult daughter who challenges me at times and helps me to see where I have become old and stale. Not always easy but helpful if I want to stay as fully alive and awake as I can be.

Finding Mrs. Who, Mrs, Whatsit and Mrs, Which
One of my favorite books to read as a child, when I was home; sick with ear infections, colds or fevers, was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle. My attention was caught from the first lines of the book, “It was a dark and stormy night. In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind….” Onward through the magical story of wise and mysterious crones, a mother with her own lab right in the middle of their house, and a quest to find her father, I was hooked.  I identified most of all with Margaret, the way she didn’t fit in at school because I always felt that way myself. I loved the three crone-beings in this story-Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Which.
 
Yearning for a Fierce Connection to Meaning
Later as an adult, I learned about the author, how this book was practically channeled in the way it came to her, and how L’Engle was a very religious woman and how her spirituality influenced her writings. But, as a young girl, none of that mattered to me. What mattered most was following the story of this young girl (and the Oprah movie didn’t come close to capturing the magic and truth of this story, not at all, sorry to say) on her quest to save her father and the world, from darkness and evil. 
 
What is this yearning that we feel as young girls, and then hopefully still as women, for a connection to meaning, true and deep, a fierce connection so deep that we aren’t afraid of danger? And not only that, but to feel that we are have agency and can have a positive influence on the world around us. And especially if we are feeling, as I did back then, that we don’t fit in, that our existence doesn’t make sense in the day-to-day world around us? 

Wisdom of the Crones
​It makes sense to me now that I would have been drawn to these stories back then. How reassuring to experience vicariously the story of a young girl who courageously battles darkness and evil. And to find the help of powerful crones, elder women who seem connected to the wisdom of the universe? As a young girl, I was always more drawn to elders than to my peers, so Margaret’s trust in these elders made sense to me. Just as in a dream, where all the characters in the story are a part of us, so in stories, we are able to identify with all the characters, the wise, the courageous, the fearful, the evil. As a child, I identified with the main character, Meg, but now I know that I would also have been identifying with these wise elder women.

​Wisdom of all the Ages
A Wrinkle in Time was ahead of its time in this way, providing so many strong wise female characters, not only young but also old. As young women, we want to be able to imagine into a future where we could be wise old women someday. Not helpless, sad and voiceless creatures as too often still older women are depicted in too much of the media and news today. 
We know on a visceral level that we as women are all the ages within us, the young, curious and full of life girl or maiden, the adventurer, lover, sovereign even, or mother, queen. And the wise, complex, creative and resourceful older woman, or crone, full of stories. Looking back now, I can see that this book, among many others, was the inspiration for the work I do today. 
 
One more Thing... that Tesseract!
And if you have read this book as I did as a child, didn't you love the idea of the "tesseract?"  Apparently there is a real meaning to this term as a mathematical model, but L'Engle creates something new and magical in her book. The tesseract* is, the ability to fold time and jump quickly from one place to the next. I remember in the story how it was explained, as if you could fold a string, letting the loop fall down so that an ant, crawling across the string, could step across the top of the two folded loops. Time can fold back upon itself. What a joy to imagine this as a child.
And yet, could you suspend judgment and imagine a way that this could also be true in our world?
Don't we all, within our bodies, hold the bodies of all those who we have been before? If we are older women, or crones, don't we hold all our younger selves within us? In this way, maybe we can suspend time, imagining ourselves all ages at once.
​ 
*in the book, the explanation goes like this: The fourth dimension is time. And if you square that, you get a tesseract. "You add that to the other dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words...a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points." page 78, A Wrinkle in Time

Seeing Yetis and other monsters...
The image of Yetis and dinosaurs came to me in response to a page in the 1950's science textbook that I have been working into. The process is to find new imagery, using the pages of the book as inspiration. At times, I work into the pages first with more abstract “background” imagery and use that for inspiration.  This page had dinosaurs in a prehistoric landscape. 
 
Anyway, when I started to work into these pages I saw these Yeti-like creatures and it occurred to me to wonder, what if Yetis were real and dinosaurs were not? In this image, one of the Yetis seems to be grabbing at a girl or perhaps a woman, who is dressed in a green fuzzy suit. The woman doesn't look too worried about this. Perhaps she knows that even though the Yeti looks scary, he isn't really going to do her any harm. That year, I kept hearing about Yetis, in a doll that a participant in one of my on-line workshops made, in a story I saw on the internet. What was this about? I was being visited by monsters but also being asked to question whether or not they were really monsters. In the stories of others, the Yeti was also a helpful rather than scary soul. 
 
Noises in the Night, Dangers on the Street...
I am and probably have always been interested in this topic of whether scary things were really dangerous or not, from when I was a small child and imagined that noises in the night outside our New York City apartment meant that danger was coming. This was in the 1960's upper West Side of Manhattan and truly, it wasn't the safest time to be in the city. We saw real scary things and did have to be careful. My mother tells a story of when she was at the playground at the end of our street on Morningside Drive. I was probably 4. My next youngest sister was almost 3 and my mother was very pregnant with my youngest sister. She saw a man trying to break into a car just up the road from the deserted playground where we were standing. Not thinking this through very clearly and filled with that material fierce energy that we all hear about, my mother ran up to the man (probably dragging me behind her by the hand and pushing my sister in the stroller) and she yelled at him, "Get away from that car!" And he did run away. It was only later that she realized what danger she might have been in.  I don’t think at the time there would have been much conversation about experiences such as this, and so as a small child I worried at night.  

​A visit with the Morrigan, ancient Celtic crone “monster”
Last year I did a guided visualization in which the Morrigan appeared. The Morrigan, briefly, is a Celtic crone who has a very fierce aspect and was at times associated with warriors and wartime, and death. In this vision I did not recognize her as the Morrigan.  I only found out later from a tarot reader who saw a dark fierce figure in my reading and I mentioned my earlier vision.  The next day, I got an email from the tarot reader saying she had heard what sounded like “Maura, Morri…something.” She wasn’t familiar with the Morrigan but had looked her up and discovered that the word she had been hearing was “Morrigan.” 

Taking care of "dirty jobs"
In my vision, the Morrigan appeared over the edge of a mountain path, along a stream where I was standing at the top. First I saw her headdress of what seemed like a huge bunch of sticks, then large iridescent, blue/ black wings. I couldn’t look at her face when it appeared, except to tell that she had a bird-like appearance. I started to cry and looked at her feet, since I couldn’t bear to look into her eyes. Her feet were also birdlike with three toes, very big, strong and solid. I sensed her connection to the sky and to the earth, perhaps drawing both energies together. And that she had the potential to destroy, to tear trees out by the roots with one hand and at the same time, the potential to heal, with the touch of her hand. She had several messages for me, one of which was that I needed to make a representation of her, a painting or a doll.
 
A few days later in the tarot reading, the reader said “she may be coming through because of dark energies you are working with.” She said “she is a predator and she is looking for you, even more probably than you are looking for her,” and “she likes to take care of dirty jobs, she likes to clean things up.” She also saw several companions including a wolf, a fox and an old woman with a crow and owl companion. I’ve been working with the Morrigan energy ever since that vision and reading, in meditations and writings. 
 
Side note: I haven’t yet made a large representation of the Morrigan. Sometimes people ask me when they visit my studio, how I make my dolls. Where do my ideas come from and how long does it take to make them? Well, this is an example of why it can take a long time. I may have a vision or a strong inclination to make a certain doll but it takes a while for me to be able to come to a place of being able to bring it into reality. The dreaming and mulling sometimes is the part that takes the longest. However, I did make a small Morrigan doll for my Wheel of the Year that hangs in my meditation area. I think I have shown her in my newsletter before. 

​If you have been paying any attention to some of the feminist retellings of ancient stories of  “monsters” in mythology, religion, folk or fairy tales, you probably know that there is more awareness of how these figures have been distorted by a “patriarchal” culture. Women writers in all the above areas are revisiting stories such as the Medusa story*, (see link below) to reclaim the complexity of her nature from a reductionist description of her as an evil monster.  
​*www.byarcadia.org/post/off-with-her-head-medusa-and-feminism
Fear of the unfamiliar and strange
And these don’t have to necessarily be only feminine “monsters.” It has more to do with the common reaction to anything dark, unfamiliar and strange. The Yeti tends to be seen as masculine, though who knows? I’ve been interested in transforming what often get identified as monsters into something much more complex, and perhaps even helpful. This curiosity comes up in my Befriending Our Shadow course and to my Tending Your Inner Garden course. In the first, it is getting to know our own nature from dark to light and in the second it is getting to know the cycles of nature. I’m searching for to an acceptance of nature (inner and outer) in all its manifestations, from the fiercest to the gentlest.  

As always, I learned so much from writing this. I hope you might have been inspired as well. This is probably the first in a series of articles on this topic. Thanks for reading. 

A bit of a rambling ode to green....

Green is the heart, is F#... is the life force...
Recently, I had the luck to visit a friend who is a gifted energy healer. She demonstrated to me how our chakras, (the energy centers that go up and down our body) are related not only to colors but also to musical notes and to corresponding healing sounds. It was fun to play with the tuning forks she had for each chakra, and to make the sounds associated with each. 

I remembered that I had been told by another energy healer, Donna Eden, that my "life colors" are salmon and grass green. So it was interesting to learn that the colors associated with the "high heart" (an additional chakra that my friend told me about and that I had never heard of) were green or pink. My life colors! And the note associated with this chakra was F # and the sound, "Ahhhhm," if I remembered that correctly. ​

What Hildegarde von Bingen has to say about green
​I've written about Hildegarde von Bingen here before. She is one of my heroes. In this earlier post, I said of von Bingen:
​
​"I’m reminded too of Hildegarde of Bingen, a mystic who lived at the turn of the first millennium, in a time that in some ways was much like ours. Her joyful vision of life centered on the idea that to be awake is to be “filled with greenness.” To her, every being on earth, not just humans, could potentially be filled with a spark of life, “for no creature exists that lacks a radiance, be it greenness or seed, buds or beauty…otherwise it would not be a creation at all.” (p. 67 Matthew Fox, Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen.) Each element of our living earth is a potential portal into aliveness and gives us an opportunity to experience our fullness and divinity."

​

Green is Aphrodite's color...
I have been absorbing the stories and wisdom of Donald Kalshed in his latest book, Trauma and the Soul. In one of the many moving chapters, he talks of a woman who had been severely traumatized but it was through her inner world of archetypal images that she was able to be healed. These showed up in dreams and in stories. In one of her dreams, (pp. 222 and 223 in the book) she describes a cold, dying world in which everything is grey and soulless, except for a tiny bear cub wrapped in a  slimy blanket. The blanket disgusts the dreamer, especially when she realizes it too is alive. 

She is moved to take both and the cub back with her to a more inhabitable world. But first she is asked by an "emissary" hidden behind a wall, if he could hold the blanket creature "..one more time. I am achingly moved... The emissary tells me to step close to the wall, a smooth metallic surface in which there is a round opening. I step forward, and a bright green tentacle comes out and waves around searching for contact. "
She is horrified but lets the tentacle hold the blanket and the cub, realizing that the emissary is a green monster and that is why he is hidden. 

Kalshed goes on to say that the greenness of the tentacle is a sign of hope, "the only hardy life-form in this grey world. He quotes Jung saying "green is Aphrodite's color... and older still, the color of Osiris, the reborn Egyptian god. Green is also the color of Sophia and the Holy Ghost, the color of life, procreation and resurrection. Greenness also connotes the benedicta veriditas, the 'blessed greenness'...the secret immanence of the divine spirit of life in all things...Green signifies hope and the future. 

Green is hopeful. especially in the midst of a grey world. Below I share the greenness in some of my paintings and dolls. Some of them are monsters and yet, from Kalshed's (and Jung's) perspective, and mine, green is aliveness! Greenness is wholeness. And that is what I seek in my journey into the shadow and in leading others in shadow work. 

A memorable dream of circles and squares…
Recently, I had one of those memorable dreams.  I want to try to share it and I will do my best. But please forgive me, like all dreams, there is so much lost in trying to put something like this into words. The dream felt like a working out of some deep questions that I didn’t really understand. It seemed to address some of the big questions I think about in my life, including how to navigate a world of challenges, deadlines and tasks, while at the same time keeping roots in the spiritual world that lives beneath all things. ​ 
 
The dream
In the dream I have the sense of the four directions.  People are grouped according to each of the four directions. They are experiencing some sort of challenge involving different levels of experience. They are “singing their way around the four directions.” The dream takes place in the forest (and at the same time, in a subway car!) 
 
The first person in line for each of the four directions achieves something. One man “achieves a square” and gets the message that the next level is open to him. There is great joy and connection along with this accomplishment. I feel like I am quite close to this next level but not yet there. I get information for signing up for the next level. One of the others gets the same message as me and the last person gets a less clear answer. 
 
It is obvious to me though, from another perspective, that at a higher level, none of this means anything. And that in addition to this “square” way of being, there is also a “circle” way and that in this circle way, surrender is key. The circle way is open to all. It’s paradoxical. Surrender is the circle and this surrender is another, equally valid way of making it “up” the square.

​Looking at dreams in a new way
I woke up from this dream with a strong feeling of contentment. In the Hagitude, year-long course I am taking, we are looking at dreams in a way that feels very familiar to me, from my past experience as an art therapist. Instead of trying to analyze and put meaning into the dream, we try to experience it as it is, taking in the symbols and metaphors as living beings. Just as, when I was an art therapist, we tried to help our clients or patients live into the meaning of their art work. 
 
Living in a Circle or Square Way
Since this dream, I have been musing on this idea of living in a circle or square way, along with the idea that either way is just as legitimate as a way of being/living. Maybe you can relate to this too? I’ve talked in other newsletters here about my fascination with different ways of tracking time. One the one side, the square (or rectangular) calendar with its neatly organizing time into days, weeks, months, years-so essential for getting things done, achieving goals, remembering dentist appointments.

​​The Circles/Cycles of the Season
On the other, the circles/cycles of the seasons, where goals and achievements have less relevance. In the circle way, repetition is key, seasons reoccur, stories are told and retold, gaining meaning and depth with each repetition. All harkening back to the central stories that our ancestors would have told, to give meaning to the seasons-the old Goddess/crone of winter dying in the spring and the young Goddess/maiden of spring taking her place. The birth of the young god of winter, growing into manhood, and his union with the maiden in summer and then his being sacrificed in the fall, as the fullness of the harvest is reaped. Over and over again. 

​Our Collective Stories
We are drawn to these stories, even if we don’t tell them, because they are in our, what psychologist and mythologist (is that a word?) Carl Gustav Jung, called our collective unconscious. In the midst of our rushing from medical appointments to work to social events, our lives feel more deeply meaningful when we are able to listen to, even in the slightest way, those deep bass notes of archetypal meaning. By this I mean, our daily, surface stories, resonate at all times with the deepest stories, outside of time, running beneath ours. 
 
The Web of Life that Connects us All
We live within the circle that is the web of life, connecting us to each other, living and dead and there is no distinction between someone who has lived a life of great achievement and someone who perhaps has led a quieter, less “consequential” life. And we are connected in a way that transcends time, as in the words of Donald Kalsched in his new book, Trauma and the Soul: A Psychospiritual approach to Human Development and its Interruption, “there might be a dimension of consciousness that transcends time and space and includes the pooled memories of our ancestors.” (pg. 37) We can tap into these dimensions at any time, but it is the “circle” time that seems to make this connection easier. And in the tapping into deeper meaning, we are at the same time sending down deep roots into our “square” lives, paradoxically making it easier to function in our day-to-day lives. 

​In a recent conversation with a fellow artist, she mentioned something about using her art to deal with the overwhelm that comes up sometimes, when we are faced with the real evil that is in this world. This set off a whole series of thoughts and conversations that I had with other artists and creatives. How do we hold or contain the evil of the world that is really there? Is this a ridiculous goal? Can we use our art to contain it-even just a little bit? 
 
If you don’t know this already, I often use my art to tend to my inner demons…
I can’t speak for my artist friend about what she meant by using her art to cope with evil, but I know that I turn to my art when I am overwhelmed by the dark forces in the world. If you take even the slightest look at my work, here on the gallery page, (Transformative Healing Dolls), or even more here, on my new website in progress (erikaclevelandart.com), that includes my more recent intuitive paintings, you have probably figured this out. In my art, I am often trying to work out a way to deal with inner demons, but what I am talking about here are those outer demons. In reality it is probably unrealistic to try to separate inner and outer demons-they are closely related, as I will explore here. 

​The shadow and evil
The question of evil is a huge topic, the topic for a whole book, probably, that maybe I will write someday. In the meantime, another creative friend, a writer, directed me to the book,  Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, by Mary Louise von Franz, a Jungian psychologist. Knowing my interest in the shadow, those of you who know me will not be surprised to learn that this book was right up my alley. After all, I have been offering a course called Befriending the Shadow over the past three years. I am diving into von Franz’s book slowly because there is a lot of richness there. And, again, it is a huge topic. 

Why “living in the light” isn’t always the best goal if we neglect the shadow 
Evil isn’t all that popular a topic at the moment in spiritual or “New Age” circles. There are whole communities that try to base their whole reason for being on, “living in the light.” This is a noble and understandable goal. However, the intention to live in the light can unwittingly lead to the opposite effect that what is intended. It makes me think of Carl Jung’s words, “what we resist, persists.” ie: whenever we push against something, and try to hide it in the shadows, it tends to show up even more strongly somewhere else. 

It also reminds me of what one of my mentors, shamanic healer, Sandra Ingerman says about her workshops such as “Healing with Spiritual Light.” (These workshops are amazing.) Sandra always says we have to watch for the shadow in workshops that focus on light. Because from her long years of experience she knows you can’t work with the light without also acknowledging the dark. She talks about how things would go haywire halfway through the workshop when, in the earlier days of her offering this workshop, she didn’t set aside time and space for the shadow. Though it might feel uncomfortable to make room for (and have to think about) the shadow, it is worth the discomfort and extra effort. 

​Why evil can’t be pinned down in fairy tales (or anywhere else)
So, back to von Franz’s book. Von Franz explores the meaning of evil and also looks at how we can work with evil and find ways to cope with it. One important discovery she made in looking at evil in fairy tales was that there are no formulas or rules to deal with evil. The author found out that the only constant in dealing with evil is inconsistency. It is actually quite funny, she discovers, how inconsistent the “advice” and conclusions are in fairy tales with regard to evil. For instance, one tale recommends, if an evil character has a secret, you must always face it head on and ask for the answer. Then the next tale says, avoid secrets at all costs, if you know what is best for you. And so on…
 
Always listen to the animal guide
The only consistent advice was, always listen to the animal guide, or the nature guide, the helper that is encountered along the way, even if it is giving contradictory advice. What does this mean?  Her conclusion was, always follow your intuition. The animal or nature guide in fairy tales is a representation of the intuitive voice. And this makes sense to me. While it is easy to follow our intuition when our intuition matches the outer world, it is much more difficulty to follow when that intuitive voice seems to go against common sense. 

​Formulas and doctrines don’t work
And this is what is needed most in dealing with evil in the world. Because formulas and “doctrines” don’t work in the real world, however good they sound in writing. When we are living our lives and facing challenges, especially the dangers that true evil can present, we have to stay on our toes and react in an awake and alive way to what is happening in the moment. 
It seems to me that as soon as a doctrine is created, in terms of light and dark, right and wrong etc, it immediately ossifies into stone and becomes useless as advice. And this is especially true when it has to do with the behavior of others (this is another insight from von Franz). We can sort of/kind of make rules for ourselves and try to follow them, but once we try to apply those to others, especially groups of people, that is a formula for evil. 

Why I do what I do 
I suppose that is why I do the work I do, as inept and halting as it is. I am trying, on a very small scale to tune into my inner guidance and intuition, allowing my art, my dolls and my paintings to speak to me. The goal is for this to remain a living process, always changing and evolving as I change and evolve, and as the world changes and evolves. This means following a winding and ever-changing path along a seashore where the waves are constantly coming in and washing out my footsteps. Sometimes fog comes in and I can’t see even a step ahead and I have to slow way down. That is when I have to listen even more deeply. 
 
That is why I am drawn also to flip dolls, two-sided dolls, connected at the waist and with heads on both sides. They remind me of one of my favorite symbols, the infinity sign (which also looks like my favorite number, eight, sideways.) These dolls and the infinity sign contain opposites, leaving room to pivot at any moment.  This kind of art is my attempt to deal with life as an ever-shifting and changing canvas, day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment. 
 

Art speaks the language of moment-to-moment
I am going to make a bold statement now and say that art speaks this language of moment to moment, whether it is doll-making, painting, writing or whatever. And I’m going to make an even bolder statement to say that evil doesn’t speak this language. Evil isn’t flexible. It is what shows up when we get set in stone, whether in our views or in our actions. It is not that light is good and dark is bad or vice versa. It is that we need to find a way to create space for opposites to shift and change. And that is a dilemma when we live in this world of humanness, flaws and evil. It is our nature to at each moment to try to grasp onto what is certain and true, rather than to trust in the uncertainty of life. I feel like I am one of the worst offenders at wanting to “figure things out” and find certainties in life, so I think I can speak about this with authority. Do you use your art, whether it is art, writing, creating a garden or whatever it is, as a way to cope with evil, those unavoidable and painful realities of life? I would be curious to hear your thoughts.

NOTE: after I wrote this I came across an article in the New Yorker about an ancient Bulgarian ritual to fight against evil that seemed to fit with this topic. It also includes a video of this ritual in action. The image at the top of this page also shows this Kukeri costume. The ways in which evil is described in this article fits with my observations as well. Evil isn't fantastical or wildly different from daily life. Instead it lives in mundanities like poverty or hunger.

That sense of timelessness we get while staring up at the clouds...
​You know that deeper sense of time that you can get from nature, if you have ever lain out on the grass and looked up at the clouds in the sky, noticing the ways in which they shift from moment to moment, looking first like a bunny and then shifting into a dinosaur? Or when you have your hands in the ground, digging in the dirt, planting seeds or tending a garden? You can completely lose track of “real” time, as you let go of the need to get to a Zoom call or call the dentist. Five minutes lost in wonderment, listening to owls calling each other from one tree to another, or in contemplating the brightness of green leaves against a blue sky can take you out of time. Breathing slows down, the mind’s chatter goes away. You experience a sense of expansion-and freedom. These moments are so very important for our sanity and well-being. 

​What have we lost in our urgency to "mange" time?
Recently I read an article in the NYTimes, Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar, about a beautiful 15th century calendar, the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, that encapsulated the two different ways we keep track of time, capturing both the seasonal shifts over time and yet, measuring time in a way that lets us be able to make plans, schedule events and stay in touch with each other.

One of the main points of the article, along with beautiful images of richly illustrated calendars from many different cultures, was that we, in our urgency to be able to “manage” time, have lost the connection to another, deeper sense of time that has always been there and would continue to be there long after we as humans are gone. By that I mean, a sense of connection to the subtle shifts of the seasons, tracked in the world of nature all around us. We have, as a human race, worked so hard to be as efficient as we now are, so why would it matter that we lost track of our ancestor’s way of tracking time? We know instinctively though, that it does matter. 

Magic, and children already know about this...
​If you, like me, read books like the Narnia series, stories where the four main characters visited alternate worlds by stepping into a wardrobe, you might have vicariously experienced this suspension of time. Often in the magical worlds of books like this, the characters discover that though they may have lived a whole lifetime in the alternate universe, when they return to our world, no time has passed. Or it could be the opposite, like the Rip van Winkle story, where a man goes to another universe for what he experiences as a short time, but returns to our world, having missed several generations of living. Books like this can take us back to an expansive time, that we know in our bodies. Children know how to do this instinctively. I remember this from my childhood but if you haven't thought about this in a  while, you may need to give yourself the chance to recollect yours. 

Bone-deep healing 
It is useful and essential to have ways of tracking our days and minutes with the kinds of calendars we run our lives by. And yet, if we forget to tune into timelessness at least once in a while, we lose a very important part of ourselves. A part that brings us bone-deep and absolutely essential nourishment. A part that reminds us that we are not machines, that we are all connected to source, whatever we might want to call that, nature, spirit, oneness. And a part that reminds us that we are connected inextricably with the web of life, to every other living thing. 

Let's not make this into a critique of all that is wrong with our modern day world...
This could so easily get into a critique of all that is wrong with our modern-day world and that is not what I am meaning to do here. It's just that I wanted to share with you a delightful (and easy) way to reclaim something that you have always known but that can so easily forget in a day-to-day existence where the claims on our attention can feel so urgent and essential.

What you might find is that the rewards are great, even if you spend even 15 minutes out of your day in this different sense of time. It could be as easy as looking at a tree outside your window for five minutes out of your day. Or open up a children's book, like the Narnia series, or Alice in Wonderland, that will take you to an alternate universe. Or you can experiment with making your own calendar, tracking what is most important to you, like one I did (see above) in 2014, where I tracked what brought me joy each day. These are a few ideas.