ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These are some of the people of spirit in my life who offered help or who told me stories of times when the wise earth spoke to them.
Joan Annsfire
Kathy Barr
Jeanne Clark
Bob Coates
Maury Cooper
Sherrill Crawford
Pat Cull
Alix Dobkin
Mari-Marks Fleming
C. B. Follett
Emilio Gonzales-Llanes
Barbara Karthman
Luke Kreinberg
Isabelle Maynard
Arlene Melon
Madeline Moore
Doreen Prieter
Sarah Usher
Jerrie Wacholder
Sheila Wells
Katherine Westerhout
Celeste West*
* Celeste West's work appears courtesy of Booklegger Publishing, San Francisco.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biedermann, Hans, Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them, Meridian: Penguin Books, New York, NY 1994. The power of symbols and their origins.
Bruce-Mitford, Miranda, The Illustrated Book of Signs and Symbols, KK Publishers, New York, NY 1996. Illustrations and description of signs and symbols.
Busch, Phyllis, Wildflowers, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, NY 1977. The stories behind the names.
Carroll, David M., Trout Reflections, St. Martin's Press, New York, NY 1993. A poetic fisherman's tales of fishing.
Chetwynd, Tom, A Dictionary of Symbols, Paladin Grafton Books, London, England 1982. Guide to the language of symbols.
Chevalier, Jean and Gheerbrant, Alain, The Dictionary of Symbols, Penguin Books, London, England 1969. A rich inventory of symbols.
Cooper, J. C., An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, England 1978. Symbols to open up levels of understanding.
Dunning, Joan, Secrets of the Nest, Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, NY 1994. Variety of birds, nests, and egg stories with lovely illustrations.
Follett, C. B., Beside the Sleeping Maiden, Arctos Press, Sausalito, CA 1999. Poems of the earth by Marin County poets.
Fontana, David, The Secret Language of Dreams, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA 1994. A visual key to dreams and their meanings.
Fontana, David, The Secret Language of Symbol, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA 1993. Visual key to symbols and their meanings.
Emerson, Dr. William K. and Old, William E., Seashells of North America, Golden Press, New York, NY 1968.
Golomb, Elan, Trapped in the Mirror, William Morrow, New York, NY 1992. Journey back to the self.
Gordis, Daniel, God Was Not in the Fire: The Search For A Spiritual Judaism, Scribner, New York, NY 1995. The spiritual in Judaism.
Hogan, Linda, Dwellings, W.W. Norton, New York, NY 1995.
Ions, Veronica, Egyptian Mythology, Hamlyn Pub Group Ltd, New York, NY 1973.
Jones, Alison, Dictionary of World Folklore, Larousse, Edinburgh, England 1995. A dictionary of folklore from all over the world.
Leach, Maria, Folklore, Mythology and Legend, Harper and Row, New York, NY 1972. Stories from around the world.
Linden, Eugene, The Parrot's Lament, Dutton, New York, NY 1999. Amazing true stories of animals.
Line, Les, The Audubon Society Book of Insects, Abrams, New York, NY 1983.
Matthiessen, Peter, Sand Rivers, Bantam Books, New York, NY 1981. Safari into the last wilderness.
McEwen, Christine and Statman, Mark, The Alphabet of Trees, Teachers and Writers Collaborative, New York, NY 2000. A guide to nature writing.
Mercatante, Anthony S., Who's Who in Egyptian Mythology, Clarkson N. Potter, New York, NY 1978.
Mighetto, Lisa, Muir Among the Animals, Sierra Club, San Francisco, CA 1986. Naturalist John Muir's description and love of animals.
Milord, Susan, The Kids' Nature Book, Williamson Publishing, Charlotte, VT 1989. Suggestions of activities and experiences with nature.
Modrzk, Stanley, Turning of the Wheel, Red Wheel/Weiser, York Beach, ME 1993. Descriptions of Wicca holidays and rituals.
Ponter, Anthony and Laura, Spirits in Stone, Ukama Press, Sebastopol, CA 1992. Photographs and history of evocative sculptures of the Shona people in the heart of Africa.
Tresidder, Jack, Dictionary of Symbols, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA 1997. An illustrated guide to traditional images, icons, and emblems.
Smith, Miranda, Living Earth, DK Publishing, New York, NY 1996.
Walker, Barbara G., The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Harper San Francisco, CA 1983. Rare opportunity to see our cultural heritage in a fresh light and draw upon the past for a more humane future.
Walker, Barbara G., The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, HarperCollins, New York, NY 1988. Fascinating guide to the history and mythology of female-related symbols.
Willis, Delta, The Sand Dollar and the Slide Rule, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, New York, NY 1995.
1. MUD BODY(mud)
“Oh mud mother, sister, aunt, where are your white gloves and tiny shoes?”
JAN ALICE PFAU
A SCULPTOR FRIEND says that making mud pies is the closest she ever got to cooking. I know that following footprints in the mud when playing Sardines or Hide-and-Go-Seek is the nearest some of us ever got to becoming a private eye. There is something about mud that begs fun.
Mud was always considered a feminine material, sacred to women because it was their substance—earth—out of which their babies were made. Pottery has always been considered a woman's art because of this time-honored association.
In ancient myth, it was said that we emerged from mud. Tom Chetwynd tells us in A Dictionary of Symbols, “Mud is the malleable substance of our being, full of potential for growth and transformation.”
Photographer Cindy Sherman often creates still lifes from objects found in the natural world. Her Untitled #173 is a 5 × 7½—foot photo of dark and glistening mud. Look closely and what do you see in its deep brown body but mud, sticks, candy wrappers, a potato perhaps. It is gorgeous in its shine and detail and size. But is it garbage? Is it just mud of the earth with human life nearby? Is it a statement of beauty and ugliness living together? What she does is ask us to think of the symbolic meanings we associate with the little worlds she creates. It's as if she's asking, what does all this mean to you? Of course your particular associations with mud will make all the difference to how you answer that question.
I have always thought that my spirit lives closer to the mud than to the heavens. So many times as I live my life as a woman in this culture, I have wished to shed all the images of what I am supposed to be and just wallow in the mud. After many good rolls, I would shower outside and forget the uncomfortable shoes. I would be the woman I want to be: more authentic, comfortable, natural.
As a therapist I can see this desire to get down in the mud as part of owning the various aspects of ourselves—our need to be clean yet be “earthy” our need to be strong and accept weakness; the knowledge that we are both good and bad, wrong and right. To be mature, we must learn to integrate these aspects into our unique selves. When we are honest with ourselves, we are aware that we hold these contradictions within us. Perhaps you can remember a time when you were aware that a wrong deed could have been done by you but for a bit of grace. This is an example of understanding the contradictions that live inside of you but are not necessarily acted on. It is a compassionate way to understand that any evil act could have been committed by you but for the grace of your wholeness and your ability to set boundaries with shadow impulses. That self-compassion shows that you honor your “mud self.”
Mud is the part of us that can be shaped or molded. When we look at our life and see how difficult it is to change our patterns as we move toward more spiritual living and thinking, we can rejoice that we come from the shapeless mud and still have the potential of shaping within us. We can leave limiting and unkind beliefs behind and ask our spiritual self to help us live in flexibility and generosity.
Mud is often used as the symbol of the unaware man and woman. This is the self that comes from the earth but does not know sophisticated ways. This is also the self that is often seen as base and closer to an animal nature. We can incorporate the best of the self that links with the earth and animal ways.
Let us enjoy dirt on our feet and our instinctive nature. Let us enjoy a healthy lust expressed in sexuality. Let us be at home in the world of mud and earth and animal ways.
EXERCISES:
10. SWEET REST(night)
“The Earth rests, and remembers.”
HELEN HOOVER
THE BALANCE OF LIGHT and dark in the skies can be a reminder for the balance we need in our lives. The skies can tell us to take note of how we spend our time, to rest and play, not just to work and sleep.
As a youngster I used to love to wake at night to hear the sounds of my family sleeping, my sister's breath, my father's soft regular snore heard through the thin walls. I liked the furnace turning on and off as a signal that it was cold outside and we were warm under our quilts.
Later, as a mother of an active toddler, the night was the only time I had to myself I would wake in the night and make tea, read, and write for a few hours. I loved the quiet with my loved ones sleeping nearby. I listened to the trees touching the house in the night wind. Sometimes I could hear a high shriek of an owl. Most of all, I loved writing without interruption.
When my son was a little older, I lived on a wooden boardwalk on the Corte Madera Creek in Larkspur, California, where the shacks edged over the salt marsh that was an egret sanctuary. It was the darkest place I ever lived. I wondered if moonless nights were “double dark” because the land was so flat and still. Or if it was that here nature and the surroundings were so present that the dark really shone. I could hear the grasses whistle just a bit if the wind over the water was high. The creek followed the tides of the ocean and could drain, flood the marsh, or overflow the boardwalk. When it rained, I could hear rain all around.
In this tiny, two-room shack, I did the most vivid dreaming in my life: dreams of night movies with heroines dancing on bamboo trees and dreams of darkness that held great danger for hay fields and playing children. I remember an especially vivid dream when my spirit called me to lay huge red eggs in moss-covered trees that turned into snow-covered mountains. I woke up hearing the words, “Get your winter coat.” Dreams of magic turned to literal practicalities.
According to the Hasidim, an ancient, pious Jewish sect devoted to mysticism, Mother Night gave birth to all the gods. She stood for the darkness of the womb, in which all things begin. If we pay attention to the night, we know that it brings good to us in creative ideas and dreams that lead to deeper knowing. An important part of our spiritual path is created in the darkness of night.
According to Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant in Dictionary of Symbols, “The Greeks regarded night (nyz) as the daughter of chaos and mother of the sky (ouranos) and the earth (gaia). Night also gave birth to death, dreams, sleep, vexation, friendship, and deceit. The gods often lengthened the night by halting sun and moon, so as the better to achieve their ends. Night moves across the sky, veiled as darkness on a chariot drawn by four black horses and followed by a retinue of maidens, fates, and furies.”
Night is the image of the unconscious, and in the darkness of sleep the unconscious is set free. Night often symbolizes a time of germination, a time when dreams can come to light. It can be thought to hold all our potential, and we must go into the night to learn from the darkness, our nightmares, and our monsters. Like all symbols, night displays a twofold aspect—that of the shadowy world of the brooding future, and that of the prelude to daylight when the light of life will shine forth.
When we simply accept that part of our time is spent in darkness, we can bring our day and night into balance, allowing our day-mind to relax and our night-mind to reflect. “Night is the first skin around me,” says Oneida poet, Roberta Hill Whiteman. Rather than feel terror in the unknown, we might feel protected by the night and trust in what we cannot see.
In a poem called “Wide Arms,” about love helping us feel our spirits, I wrote:
Whether it is the warming day or the licorice night,
a spirit tugs at you while you turn
your head away. You know this is true
because you have felt it those nights
you lay steadied by love.
In the evening, without our even knowing it, our bodies begin to prepare for our dreaming time. When we write before bedtime, we have the opportunity to create a richer dream life, often finding that what we dream about is connected to what we wrote about before sleep. Meditating, visualizing a soulful future, or praying before bed helps. Light a candle to pray, and then write if you wish. Whatever you choose to do, end your day with some kind of recognition that you value the time of day when you rest.
EXERCISES:
11. REBIRTH AND THE MANY MEANINGS OF BEES(bees)
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
MUHAMMAD ALI
BEES ARE PART of the good memories I have as a child making clover chains on a tourist house's lawn somewhere on the east coast. It was cooling to lie on the grass and stretch my legs after sitting all day in the back of a car. I liked the bees company in my solitary game of making nature's jewelry.
I remember lying on my back in a field overlooking the Mississippi after taking a salt shaker to the tomato patch at the side of my grandmother's house on a hill in Moline, Illinois. One of the strongest memories I have from vacations at my grandmother's is the buzz of the bee, the good, fresh smells in the air of mown and wild grass, and the sun hot on my back. This is when I learned that writing gives two lives: the one with the pencil in hand to linger over during cold winters and the one now living. Sometimes I recognized I was challenged to do something so I could write about it later. Ah, I thought in my not-so-young child's mind, I was creating more life.
It wasn't until three bees entered a soda can from which I was drinking one Memorial Day several years ago that I learned to guard myself from their venom. Three stings on the top of my mouth and left eye swelled closed. A trip to the emergency room. A change in feeling about the sweetness of bees. Something I didn't want to remember or write about but a reminder none the less that life happens, and we cope.
Once I had a neighbor who raised bees for their honey. Her little girl was a frightened and nervous youngster who was allergic to bees. I thought it strange to take such a chance with a child's health and wondered what was really going on there. It reminded me of the makings of a Joyce Carol Oates story or something Anne Rice might use in a chapter called “Bees for Harm.” I felt protective of that child and was glad to be her neighbor.
As in the spirit of all sentient beings, a bee is given specialized structures that help them gather and prepare their food: featherlike hairs for picking up pollen, pollen baskets and combs, tubelike tongues for sucking nectar. They actually taste nectar through their legs, which then act to spread pollen. Bees can also be respected because they are nature's most important pollinator, vital to plant and human life. Many cultures honor bees as a symbol of fertility.
The Greeks believed the souls of the departed entered bees. I was recently intrigued by a story that supports this idea written by my brother's girlfriend, Barbara Karthman, who hasn't read the Grecian myths. She writes about stepping on a bee on a day she called her Brahman Day, a day when everything was so clean and in its place that even the stones lining the driveway didn't seem dirty. What is so special about the bee in this story is that it started its life in Iran as a princess. Upon turning twenty, the princess escaped from her father, the Shah, to come to America. On the trip, the princess fell into a death state and became the bee on which Barbara stepped. The princess was used to magical things happening, so she didn't think it odd that she arrived to her destination as a bee. The sting in Barbara's foot completed the cycle of the princess finding her human form in the land that symbolized freedom.
Once I kept a small tablet in my purse and watched for a spiritual message each day. I'd jot it down and then in the evening explore the idea. Watching for a spiritual message and writing about it more in depth in the evening helped bring consciousness of spirituality to my life each day. It would be fun to start a “bee journal” and record messages from the sky to the earth and its creatures.
Bee keeping has been documented in Egypt as far back as ca. 2600 B.C. Humans have been gathering honey since prehistoric times, which helped the continuation of life. Honey's nutritional use has been long known. Honey has been used as a sweetener by queens and commoners. It's a marvel to see a honeycomb and the bee's activities and to learn of the queen and the drones. We can see a community of insect life working in harmony. We can use the community of bees and take some time to write about the challenges of belonging to a religious or spiritual community.
I have a friend, Jeanne Clarke, who, over the December holidays, invites her friends for scones and honey and a variety of teas. We sit in a circle munching and sipping and tell what we have been grateful for the past year. Then, we perform a new-year ritual. It's a lovely afternoon of appreciation with pretty china cups and the sweet honey. We, of course, are the queens.
Alison Jones, in Dictionary of World Folklore, defines bees as a cross-cultural symbol: “Traditionally (the bee is) a symbol of wisdom and industry in European belief. In Egyptian and Christian lore the bee is said to have sprung from the tears of Ra the sun god and Christ respectively. In ancient mythology bees were known as messengers of the gods, and in some places the tradition survives of telling the bees of a death in the household, so they can report it to the gods. In Ireland especially, bees are taken into confidence over any new enterprise, a superstition which presumably originated with the desire to secure divine aid, and in Scotland bees are proverbially wise…. In folktales bees often display a remnant of their ancient role, acting as God's spies.”
In Egypt, honey from the bees was used as a preservative. The dead were embalmed with honey and placed in a fetal position to be ready for rebirth. Honey has been used for medicinal purposes for over 2,000 years. Provence in France is known as a region that makes honey oil. Last weekend, when friends and I were camping, Marjorie brought out “honey cream” to gently rub onto our faces to moisten and smooth the skin. Again, queens.
EXERCISES:
12. JOURNEY TO OURSELVES(travel)
“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”
MIRIAM BEARAD
THROUGH TRAVEL, we learn about the earth's vast landscapes of hills and valleys, flatlands, rice lands, and seeded land. We can visit places largely untouched by tourism that show how the land and people live in their own true nature. There are still places in South America where indigenous people hunt their food with blowguns and live with their ancestors' ways largely unchanged.
Some travelers go only where there is water, and water is the beauty they seek: the lake, the wildness of waterfall, the ocean coating their ears with its ebb and flow. They roam to the island of Bali to explore a spiritual, artistic culture. They feel the possibility of living a life valuing the land, art, and their gods and how this braiding can be a daily thing. Or, they choose a lake nearest to their home to swim in the expanse of blue.
Travel can be a creative act that feeds the imagination and asks us to wonder about ourselves in a new way. When we are privileged to attend a tree frog ceremony in Africa, the day when the frogs come out of the mud signaling spring and new life, we see how other peoples honor the changing of seasons. We can also be close to the earth and let it help us recognize changes in the season of ourselves.
After a journey to Thailand, we may want to make our own “safe houses” so that spirits that are alive in the world can have a place to go rather than come into our family dwelling. Just in case the spirit brings trouble! Or, after a trip to Mexico and attending a family ceremony of initiation for a fifteen-year-old girl from childhood into womanhood by giving her a white dress to wear and allowing her father to change her shoes from the shoes of childhood to the shoes 7 of adulthood, we may want to do an initiation for our daughter or ourselves. We might decide to bring her friends together and have them light a candle and talk about what was best about childhood and what they now look forward to experiencing in adulthood. The initiation doesn't matter; what matters is that we give ourselves and our children acknowledgment of passages.
“Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it,” writes Eudora Welty in One Writer's Beginning. Who are we now that we have had this experience of travel? The historical sights may give us a greater sense of time and history and appreciation for the earth and its peoples. It may encourage us to learn a new language and develop an interest in the people of the land.
A client, Yolanda, who taught English as a second language in the mountains of Cambodia, found that students there are expected to help each other on tests. From their point of view, they help the less able pass the test. Cheating is not a concept they understand. At first Yolanda was surprised, but then she found it a relief to live in a culture that was not based on valuing competition. She changed her teaching methods so students could help one another all the way through the process of learning English. Yolanda went outside with her students at breaks and sat quietly under the Bodhi tree to rest just as Buddha had done many centuries ago. Together they honored community and their physical environment and the everyday connections people and nature gave them.
On her return from a year in Morocco, a student told me she would always remember the sunlit buildings in golds, tans, and pinks as her first memory of Fez. Just as the natives of the land, she determined her daily activities taking into account the intensity of the sun during the hot season or because of the particular time of day. To live being guided by nature was a major change in her life, and at first she felt held back by it. Gradually, she accepted it to be the truth as it was: the sun was the director in many cases. Finally, she felt blessed that she had lived that year letting the sun guide her. She found she could better explore her spiritual nature when she was not so consumed with controlling her life.
The wanting to travel is often akin to the wanting to write. Travelers often want to create a world to live in. They live a lifestyle awhile that is curious, questioning, open. They take these qualities to the page, and their hand draws a trail of inked recordings, memories that shape their clay bodies and ours if we too are open. We read of the way travel gives them a full life about which to write. Sometimes this forces consciousness. Sometimes, as readers, we say, “Ah, I knew that and here is confirmation.”
Sometimes vision and travel leave us with a visual memory or diary that enriches our lives. I had a student who, as a child, lay on the grass in her small town in Utah studying the sunlight on the blades of grass. She studied grass at every time of year and every time of day until she could draw grass lit in various ways without seeing the scene. She knew how every ripple of wind affected the turning of the grasses. She learned to depict that in oil pastels and paints. The basis for her travel was her imagination, which allowed her to travel into the subtleties of light and form, the subtleties of the earth. With this concentration, she could see her world with awe and appreciation wherever she found herself. She brought this enthusiasm to everyone she met and enriched their lives with her passionate energy.
EXERCISES:
13. THE SPIDER'S PARLOR(spiders)
“When I'm hanging head-down in my web. That's when I do my thinking.”
E. B. WHITE, CHARLOTTE'S WEB
I REMEMBER loving the poem The Spider and the Fly and asking my dad to read it to me over and over again. It was one of my first introductions to intrigue and capture, and I found it exiting. Then I learned that although all spiders have venom glands used to paralyze the prey they trap, very few are harmful to humans, and I was somewhat disappointed. I would watch the spiders my mother's broom has missed in the ceiling corners and get a glimpse of what my mother called “the hardship of nature” as the spider caught a fly.
The spider comes in all sizes and shapes. The smallest is the size of a period on this page and the largest can eat a bird whose leg spread is the width of this paper! A spider always spins a silk thread, called a dragline, behind itself as it moves about. When threatened, it can drop to safety from the dragline. The spider's care from its maker! Sometimes knowing more information about a spider and really noticing dampens any fear you might have.
In many different cultures, the spider is seen as a heroic “mother” symbol, the spider web itself symbolizing destiny and mortality. In Jack Tresidder's Dictionary of Symbolism, we learn that spiders “can symbolize either ensnarement (by the Devil in Christian symbolism) or protection from storms, as among some Native North Americans. Folklore associations of the spider with good luck, wealth or coming rain are widespread, a symbolism that may be suggested by the spider descending its thread, emblematically bringing heavenly gifts.”
In Dictionary of World Folklore, Alison Jones explains the healing powers of spiders: “A spider in a silk bag was carried as a charm for health…. The web of a spider too was thought to have curative power applied to a wound; this is actually quite logical, since it helps the blood to coagulate, although the web is sometimes rubbed into the wound rather than simply held against it, implying a belief in its intrinsic healing properties, encouraging the skin to knit and heal by sympathetic magic.”
Jones continues to explore the theme of spider as savior: “A common motif of folklore is the spider who saves a fugitive by spinning a web over his or her hiding-place; the pursuers pass by, thinking that no-one can have entered the cave recently…. A variant tale tells how the Scottish hero, Robert Bruce, despondent in his cave, was encouraged to continue his fight against the English by watching the patient efforts of a small spider spinning its web.”
There are symbols of the spider used in many other important ways. Throughout time the spider is not a creature taken lightly! In psychology the spider has been used as a symbol of introversion and narcissism, where the individual is swallowed by his or her own center. Buddhists believe the spider is an illusion because its soul is empty of being. Of course, witches are know to use spiders in their brews.
Because the spider is both fascinating and frightening, it is an interesting symbol about which to write. Learning what the spider means to you may take you another step on your spiritual path. When I write about the spider, I realize that I am reminded of wit, capture, and freedom. My writing details the feelings trying to stay separate and yet connected to others. My writing becomes an exploration of the selflooking for a spiritual home and the need for connection.
EXERCISES:
Try writing about the feelings the spider evokes and see what you come up with that might be useful to you on your spiritual path.
How could you be the creator of joy sitting at the center of your web? How could you include others?
What role has both fate and free choice played in your life?