Dear Friend and Reader:
Its been awhile since I’ve used that beginning in my articles. Recently though, in a conversation with Eric about writing, we came to the agreement that a good blog is really a letter from the heart, which often begins with “Dear.” I liken this one today as a letter to home.
When you look at the planetary snapshot of present time — Jupiter and Saturn in opposition, Uranus and Pluto leaning into their historic 90-degree meeting — what do we see? To me, this looks like the balance between exuberance in the new and unexpected and the limitation and constraints of our reaction — or relationship to that new experience. The Aquarius Moon, as Len points out, reminds us that right now these feelings of duality are shared on a community scale.
Maybe right now you are feeling a little lost at the moment, like a taxi you’ve been riding has left you at the curb of an unknown neighborhood — maybe the landmarks are different, the people have changed. The lack of familiarity — the exit from routine — leaves us at a loss as to who and where we are. Add to that a vague sense of threat from something unknown but powerful and one cannot help but feel helpless, far from home. But what is home? Who is there?
The current nature of the times we live in is that change is coming in waves in our personal and global experience. Sometimes days like these can scare me shitless too, because I don’t know how to react. There is no gauge from previous historical reference to begin naming the new experience. If you have no words to describe how you feel at the moment because the situation and the feelings and reactions it invokes are unfamiliar, how could you verbalize or share what you’re experiencing with others? How can you get some comfort that you are not alone?
When our theater company develops new work, we usually start by having a meeting, checking in on where each on of us is at. Since we work with women from highly sensitive communities — incarcerated women, women with life-threatening illness — the answers to the question, “Where are we at?” take on a life of their own, becoming the prima materia — primary matter — of the art we create. It’s in those meetings that we confront personal stories of our demons and redemption, fear and astounding courage in the face of life and death. As a group — a coven of women — we work to throw these thoughts and feelings into a crucible, creating stories, poetry, song and dance. We transmute mud and lead into gold by naming what scares us most, confronting it, and in the process losing our fear.
Some people call our kind of theater art therapy, relegating it to a form of cultural second-class citizenship among denizens of art and culture. But that’s a refusal to recognize that most great art comes from answering the hard questions of the world. There are others who do understand the importance of the ancient traditions of storytelling, when tribal shamans found ways to characterize and guide their community’s comprehension of a new experience. That way, they helped heal the tribe of their fear of the unknown.
My recent article “Reclaiming Radical, Nanny and Pussy” was actually the starting block on discussion that’s long overdue. How do we stay real with ourselves, our feelings, our reactions — our authenticity — when so many want to strip it from us? How do we hold onto it now that the old and familiar of the world is radically changing? Dictatorships are getting toppled, old forms of energy are being overhauled that were long overdue, the actual value of money is worthless, and the planet herself is reacting violently to everything we’ve built for over a century. We each need to ask ourselves what does this actually mean to us as individuals and as a global community. A planet and its people: These are not two separate units, but one. All of us are affected, no matter where you are. So where are you at? How are you feeling? What do you need to feel safe, happy and whole? What are you doing to attain that? Will those needs and attainment of those needs hurt someone else?
I know I am throwing you all the questions that require more than a simple multiple choice answer. But it’s time. There are many out there who are unsure whether or not we have a future, let alone gauge what kind of future we’ve got. They don’t know where to turn, and can’t decide what to do. But perhaps the answer can be found in the quandary itself. The one tool we need to appear that may help re-assure the future is your choice. Your choice. There is power in those words. I’m writing this letter to you as a letter to home and family, my dear ones, because each and every one of you is. You are all a part of this planet, all a part of our human family, all a part of what is home.
I want and choose for my home to be filled with art and learning, loving, music, good food, a clear sky and sweet water. Maybe it’s overly optimistic — Jovian — to do so. But Saturn is there to temper my choices to the most basic and essential needs. I choose to get down to basics. I will write and talk and sing and dance to rev up the best energy possible to make it so, because this is what I’m good at and choose to do. I hope it makes a difference. But I don’t want to do this alone. I need you, me and us. We need each other to make our choice together, choosing for the beauty and safety of this world and our people in our future; choosing to do whatever it takes to make it happen, and going the distance all the way home.
Yours & truly
Fe Bongolan
San Francisco
Hazel, there are definitely greens in my garden. Please come and enjoy them. You will always be safe there. and loved.
Beautiful, Fe. Thank you.
Liz xx
Many of us derive comfort from your musings, Fe. But when we wish to convey our appreciation, even though it might not necessarily be rubensienly articulate as the season `pulitzer`cabal pieces, we are denied a voice by…
A fine illuminating reminder. Thank you, Fe.
hi again B.River,
I am partial to your garden analogies and your eloquently delivered message-
but most of all
Thank You for sharing-
am going to remember the OURSELVES vs. oneself…nice..
be well.
Burning:
If your garden has greens that seem on fire in the sunshine and make the eyes tear up with some overwhelming emotion, then I may have your garden as one of the “movies” in the background of my head.
Dearest Fe and all,
What you have written and dreamed through your words and actions today especially, but ongoingly since I started reading the Planet Waves blog, are calling to so many parts of me that I want to get out my dictionary (what is the root of therapy anyway–who marginalized that word? cf. art “therapy”), (doesn’t the root for Healing mean becoming whole? what is the root of Whole?) But as I sit and type, (connecting my brain to my body, Yeti) right now, present here, and only here, with my keyboard and R Carlos Nakai’s sweet flute vibrating around me, it seems to me that each of us is like a garden and as we speak and write we invite others to walk through the parts we have cultivated and love of our lives.
And we are reaching out not only through this blog, but also through our communities and random contacts with others, through our meditation and spiritual practices, and we are creating paths between one anothers’ “gardens,” thus creating a web of energy, of kinship, that actually truly flows from each of us to one another around this globe of ours-and it is ours–to care for, for if we have a body and are here there is some piece of earth we are touching in some way– (all right you who live in boats, and space stations, but you KNOW what I mean).
Our plot is where we are standing, here now. around the globe. And as we are tracing paths to one another’s garden-souls– the places from which we connect to one another over the miles and spaces– we are each at the same time still digging and planting in our own true soul-homes, Ourselves. (Notice, I say OURSELVES not ONE’S SELF)
Some days we invite you to look at our magnolias, other days it is the parsley and oregano that are coming up. Other days we are weeding and asking for a hand perhaps.
The thread we have in common, as I see it, is our connection to our sweet green Mother Earth on this beautiful blue planet. And finally for many of us our awareness is growing beyond our love for ourselves and “ours” into tolerance and willingness to see other’s with their own differing viewpoints, realizing their might be a possiblity they might also be willing to see ours (thank you Len).
I live in belief that eventually we All will face and come to love our connection to our source–the ongoing source of all that we are and have. We are spirit but we are also lead and clay. Our source is both Earth and Spirit, and we are cultivating the gardens of our souls as we also are learnimg to create paths to one another’s gardens.
I heard Gloria Steinem say recently at Oberlin University–we have to be doing NOW what we “want to create”. If we want music, poetry, dance, love, laughter, nurturing, fulfilling and meaningul sex, gladness, creativity, poetry, (gardens), (connection) (etc etc all good things) at “the end of the revolution”, we must be practicing them now. (Nod to us all who blog here)
I want to be one of the path-makers who keeps creating these paths as I cultivate my own garden and invite you to visit. To me. these paths are real. And eventually they will be very necessary as we help one another through the transition which has begun.
Thank you all for sharing the beautiful and amazing gardens of your souls with me through this blog.
Thank you, Fe. As beautiful as you and your truth.
For me, it has been more about grief than fear. The grief was so deep I could barely put one foot in front of the other. I finally just stopped everything and cried my heart out one night. I have felt much lighter since then and some quotes have come to mind that have helped me:
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Theodore Roosevelt
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Reinhold Niebuhr
“Now is the time to live.” Mary Burmeister
Jan, Hazel and W Yeti:
Your words and your observations, your everyday lives and your thoughts are so lovely, painful and real.
There are times I feel like I can’t even bring myself to enjoy how amazing the magnolia flowers are on my tree, or how lovely the cymbidiums are that I’ve got going. I can’t bring myself to imagine and feel beauty, and that is the first sign of a stress-related illness to me.
What brings me back to sanity is writing. I’ve been feeling more and more that it is my medicine, my vitamin and my food–at least for my soul, which feels full of weight. Writing irons out time for me, makes me want to clean up the cottage so that I make a great work table and canvas for my writing warren. Makes me furiously jealous of my time for me. Makes me feel like I am truly here.
I have a collection of small Moleskin notebooks that I keep on me: in my purse, my briefcase — to be there whenever I have the urge to write — a note, an observation, a thought that I need to remember for later. I recognize what writing does. It makes my blood flow, charging it with electrons.
And yeti:
I totally get what you say about music. Its a slipstream, a full soul space and I believe a primary power of Creation. Whenever we go there, we return to an essential well, and get refreshed.
Well, thank you for the chance to respond, Fe. Earlier today I was thinking of Emily Dickinson poem, “This Is My Letter to the World”. These have been arrhythmic days for sure (Uranus op Saturn?). Even though I am an artist and not a writer, I always turn to the written word when I feel crisis and have been writing little poems or vignettes. I like the satisfaction that comes from working with my hands — painting for sure but also washing the fancy dishes and wine glasses after dinner guests have left along with the simple act of drying them and putting things back in order or tackling a long overdue housecleaning project. Joking around with my husband, who has a big Scorpionic sense of humor, can be a way that we air our fears about nuclear meltdowns or death in general. Listening to music is healing. Gershwin comes to mind now. Watching nature is cathartic. Yesterday I saw “Chuck” our local groundhog stand on his back legs under our bird feeder. After a discussion about the high cost of greens at the market, our neighbors brought up the idea of planting in the vacant lot nearby. That is something to look forward to. As I read WY’s comments it occurred to me that many people might be able to experience some basic contact with nature in a garden or just outdoors raking or picking up sticks. We are meant to witness spring coming in. It is here. Tender shoots and daffodil stems are showing off their green. My young niece left the planet three years ago today. What a strange and precious place this is.
The main thing that’s happening for me today is that I have several daydream “movies” running in my head in the background of the regular “movie” that is regular life for me lately. These are like memories that aren’t mine, places I’ve never been, walking down streets that I don’t know, but in the “dream” I know them really well. It’s nice to get a vacation from New Mexico, where the humidity is about 10% on a good day lately, to someplace that’s so green your eyes burn to look at it, in the “dream” it’s either a road near Morristown, New Jersey, (according to the information from the “dream”) or some place in England, where I’m walking past these neat stone houses and honest to god, it’s so green it tires the eyes to look at it. This is all while I’m awake, doing my normal stuff around town here, just a background mental vacation thing I guess. I’ve always had this happen with me, but this weekend and today it’s really vivid. So am I running away from “home”? Or am I enjoying other “homes”? Has the cardamom I put in my tea all the time finally taken a chemical toll on my mind? Does cardamom even DO that?
Thank You!
Riding the waves…this week’s opposition between the two biggest gas giants orbiting our local star form a T-square with my Capricorn Sun. I feel as confused as everyone else at times, but when I look around at the structure of my life and consider how circumstances beyond my control have taken things from me like a house fire I feel like the things that are still with me are tools that can help my community when I use them with compassionate intention.
Since I don’t have a day job I use most of my time to practice my crafts. It’s been music in the Jazz tradition, Chinese martial arts, and astrology. Through a combination of my internal skills and external circumstances I still have a computer to calculate charts and track transits, shelter, electricity, and lots of free time. The city I live in has lots of parks and cafe’s and places to play music.
Music has been relegated to the role of mere entertainment in our culture, but it’s traditionally one of the most powerful tools in the shaman’s toy box. To play a musical instrument is to transmit the vibratory frequency of your internal space via sound waves that physically and viscerally stimulate the bodyminds of others. It’s also a trans-cultural medium that can bridge language barriers and serve as a doorway into more respectful and egalitarian ways of relating to people whose outer forms differ from what we’re used to.
Astrology I see as more than an oracle, much like the I Ching which is the philosophical tome informing the head-brain level of the martial arts I study. These systems are like a library of ancestral memory. The stories and mythologies that go along with the planets, signs and houses or the trigrams and hexagrams of I Ching are more than just entertainment just like music. We may live with unprecedented challenges in our time in some ways, but the fact is we still live on the same planet with the same kind of physical bodies as the people who invented astrology and I Ching.
Astrologers are lore keepers, a kind of lore that proprietary materialistic capitalistic ballistic science doesn’t bother to track. The practice of astrology then personalizes the ancient stories through the birth chart, progressions and transits. As for I Ching the medicinal, martial and aesthetic aspects of the martial arts are all personally cultivated applications of an ancient system.
Innovation and creativity are important skills, but I think the modern trance that goes along with technology and mountains of materials that we think of as garbage and don’t know what to do with but throw it “away” leads to ignorance of the past which leads to repeating past horrors through nothing but a lack of mindfulness. Even in the case of music where my previous knowledge of history ended at the Beatles has opened up greater facility with my instrument through being able to hear the African influence on American, and then British interpretations of American music.
In the West where the current technological trip was born we had long ago edited out so much of our humanity, basically everything below the neck. The West is a head trip. Caroline Casey often points out in her podcasts that the conquerer unconsciously needs the medicine of the conquered. The Taoists didn’t hack up reality like most of my ancestors did so I find medicine there. Africans didn’t have written language except for the places where Islam took root. The polyrhythms, blue tonality and freestyle creation of African music traditions gave Jazz a root that Classical music had long ago severed.
Working in gardens, getting my hands in the dirt, cultivating a compost heap are a part of building a root. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m right, probably somewhere in between. I think the best of what humans can do is yet to come, but in order to get there we have to re-connect our head brains to the rest of our bodies and even further than that become aware of the reality of the qi field. Sensitivity to life is required for us to move beyond the hostility to life that has characterized the Age of Empires. I think a deeper sensitivity to our whole forms, rather than being imprisoned in worlds made entirely of head-brain symbols can enable us to re-tool our technology to serve life rather than use life as its slave. So my arts focus on the internal transformation of the human organism that is the precondition for healthier expressions of our humanity. At least that’s how my head brain interprets what’s going on.
Great article Fe. I, too, choose for beauty, as you say. All the upheaval you describe is surely reflected by the season. Spring (here in Denver) is changable from one day or moment to the next. One day it’s warm which pulls me outside to enjoy the green changes, then it gets cold pushing me back inside. This morning it was snowing. Now the sun is out helping my rose bush in its seasonal return to life. There is no balance during this changeable season so the best I can do is try to appreciate it.
Tricia