Ursula Leguin

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and
sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather
stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the
treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the
terrible boredom of pain. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to
embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost
lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any
celebration of joy."  

"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", Ursula Leguin 

For any of the perhaps 10 people in the English speaking world who may not know of Ursula Kroeber Leguin, allow me to introduce a national treasure.  Her site opens with a map of Earthsea,  a realm of enchantment I've spent many years visiting.   I was delighted to see, at the lower left corner of the map, a little spider with her thread running off the page and off the map............ah, yes, Ursula is a great Spider Woman indeed.  She's probably been the greatest "Saga" in my life, the storyteller and weaver of words and worlds,  whose worlds, and words, I've returned to again and again.
 
There is a kind of synchronistic personal mythos in this for me.  As a young art student at Berkeley,  almost every day I trudged past the Anthropology exhibits, fascinated by the magical  arrowheads and woven fabric in display cases, on my way to the painting studios in Kroeber Hall.  Kroeber Hall was named after her famous father,  anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber.  I was not to discover Ursula Leguin's worlds until many years later - but in every novel, I always see the  eye of the anthropologist's daughter, creator of the star wide "Ecumen", with it's many complex cultures.  Alfred L. Kroeber is especially known for his study of Ishi, the last survivor of the California Yana.  Ishi's story was told by Ursula's mother, the writer Theodora Kroeber, in her famous  book Ishi In Two Worlds.    

"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains"   ....Ursula K. Leguin

Reading  "Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences", or "Always Coming Home", or for that matter all of her stories, I always see the anthropologist's daughter, her profound respect and understanding for lost worlds of people like the Yahi, and her insight into the complexity, creativity,  and infinate possibilitiy of human cultures.  

One of my favorite stories of all time is "May's Lion".  Here the author contrasts the stories of two old women, living alone, but in different eras.  Each is visited by a dying mountain lion.  "May" lives out on the edge of some small town, perhaps in California.  She talks to her cow, she loves her bit of land.  "Rain's End" lives in another time.  The lion has come to both old women to die.  Rain's End knows this, and sits with the lion, offering prayers for it's journey into the next world.  May also sits with the lion, transcending her fear.  But her grandson arrives and shoots the  lion.  In some way she cannot fully understand, May knows something important has been lost.

"There are no right answers to wrong questions." ...Ursula K. Leguin

To  add a footnote to (my own story) I returned to Berkeley to open a gallery in 1998, and became friends with Arjuna, a storyteller and Tuva singer who had opened a performance space just a block away.  He created a powerful play and songs based on the story of Ishi, and for years  gave performances on the anniversary of his death.  Arjuna continues to make his wonderful music in the California desert (for information visit his website Harmonic Fuzion).  When I left Berkeley in 2000, he gave me a tape of "Ishi" and a Tibetan singing bowl, and I left him a copy   of "Always Coming Home", by the daughter of the man and woman who inspired his music.  

Circles. Sometimes I wonder, how are the stories we love and the stories we end up living really separate? 

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerant uncertainty: not knowing what comes next"  ......Ursula K. Leguin

http://www.opb.org/programs/artbeat/segments/view/876

For 7 Generations

"Gaia Shield" (1994) (with Duncan Eagleson)

Here's a wonderful site I felt like sharing:

For 7 Generations: the Indigenous Grandmothers Film

Mitakuye Oyasin, "all my Relations".

As I sit here considering the audacity of writing an application for a Guggenheim (well, what the heck. It's kind of like buying a lottery ticket, only it takes a lot longer)..........I try to articulate what my theme of a "Webbed Vision" means ..........foremost, it is participatory in practice, and vision: like a web, everything is meant to expand outwards from a center. By enacting and exploring the theme of "weaving a webbed vision", through cross-disciplinary shared art process, it would be my hope that a vision of interdependancy.....could become personally articulated, and practically conceived, as participants engage in a collective conversation.


Dr. Keller's quote has been a long meditation for me. It was the basis for the group sculpture that hangs now in the hallway at Wesley, "Weavers". Dr. Keller derives her term from the name Penelope, which actually means in archaic Greek "with a web on her face", indicating that the name's origins probably derived from the oracles or fates of ancient times. To see world through the lens of a "web" is to see the world within a paradigm built of relationships: interwoven relationships between all things, from the intimate ecology of a community vegetable garden, to Gaia Theory, to family systems, to particle entanglement. "Good Relationship" thus is a spiritual practice that keeps us connected to a higher order. The "Web" is the underlying truth of being.

"What is the new mythology to be,
the mythology of this unified earth
as of one harmonious being?"

Joseph Campbell

Crop circle, Avebury, 1994

" The new myth coming into being through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and the ecological movement suggests that we are participants in a great cosmic web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field. It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other. In our essence, we are one."

Anne Baring

Artists are myth makers, but we all have the capacity to be artists; and we all participate in the weaving of today's mythology. The time to think of art as some kind of isolated activity performed by macho, heroic, alienated "genius" is over. I have always felt ill at ease with many "art world" assumptions I got in the course of my education, which is why I so much admired people like Judy Chicago, Daniel Dancer, and Alex and Allison Grey, people who stepped way outside of the "rules".

When Tibetan monks make their beautiful sand mandalas, they are performing a ritual blessing, a prayer that incorporates symbols with a rich lineage and context. When Navajo medicine men make one, they are creating a portal for healing. In traditional societies, masks are meant to be, literally, spiritual vessels for the Gods and Goddesses to enter this world within sacred space, ritual and drama, and commune or bless those present. This was a sensibility that was very clear to me when I created the Masks of the Goddess collection; even signing my name to the masks seemed not quite right, since it was a collaboration on multiple dimensions from the very beginning. I do not know how to demonstrate this, but I see it all the time.

I think I had my first "Spider Woman" epiphany while hiking in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona long ago. In search of petroglyphs, I huffed up the mountain thinking of native American mythology as I climbed. I remember, specifically, I was thinking about a wonderful story from Ursula Leguin's "Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences" * - in the title story, a little girl goes to meet Grandmother Spider Woman. When I stopped to rest, I enjoyed the dramatic union of "red mountain meeting the blue sky". Then, gradually I noticed I was viewing the landscape through a transparent spiderweb - suspended at eye level - from a cactus and chaparral bush before me. Turn slightly, it was invisible. Turn again, there it was, just as plain as day. A "Webbed Vision".

"Spider Woman", Anasazi petroglyph (courtesy Bill Pennington, 2007)

Recently I read the following blurb from a little article slipped in between something about some media star's divorce problems, on the AOL site:

"Human activity such as fishing, agriculture and logging have greatly accelerated the rate at which species go extinct. As of last year, one in eight birds, one third of amphibians and almost a quarter of all mammals were threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature....Alroy's study looked at 100,000 fossil collections spanning hundreds of millions of years, with a strong focus on marine life. He found that dominant creatures can be dramatically affected by large extinctions."

I would think this would be terrifyingly obvious........it is amazing to me that we need, apparently, an expert to determine, from 100,000 fossils, that as "dominant creatures" who are the agent of the 6th Extinction, it just might impact us as well. Why are we so paralyzed? How have we lost "a webbed vision"?

My grandson is going to reach his adulthood in a world without tigers. Snow leopards. Prides of lions. Mountain gorillas. Oh, they'll be around, maybe, in zoos, or in nature preserves. But not in the wild any longer. He will probably also come of age in a world without seafood that is safe to eat without the risk of mercury poisoning or absorbing plastic particles ingested by the fish. A world without many of the songbirds we now enjoy, without many of the butterflies, the frogs. A world where pristine beaches without plastic debris and polluted waters belong only to the very wealthy, a world preoccupied with escalating war as resources continue to become scarce and population continues to explode.

How do we bring alive, now, this new and ancient mythos, this template of relationship ......a "webbed vision"?

“Hope now lies in moving beyond our past in order to build together a sustainable future for all the interwoven and interdependent life on our planet, including the human element. We will have to evolve now into a truly compassionate and tolerant world – because for the first time since the little tribes of humanity’s infancy, everyone’s well being is once again linked with cooperation for survival. Our circle will have to include the entire world.”

Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, "The Guru Papers"

**There is also a wonderful story in this collection called "May's Lion" in which an old woman is visited by a dying mountain lion. Leguin shares this scene from the perspective of our contemporary world, and what it might have been like for an old native woman ("Rain's End) in another time and place.........here, the lion has come to her to die, and she is honored by this, offering her presence to the lion, her prayers for it's journey into the next world. When "May", in this time and place, tentatively calls the police about the lion, they shoot it - and in some incoherent way she does not fully understand, May knows this was not right, she somehow lost something important.

The Hidden Sky

"all creation promises the thread
that pulls me in my heart
that passes through my head"

I just had to share this beautiful video from "The Hidden Sky". Threads spiral into the universal mystery as Spider Woman Ursula K. Leguin's story "The Masters" is spun and re-woven into theatre in 2010.

The Hidden Sky: Fibonacci Movie from Cara Reichel on Vimeo.

THE HIDDEN SKY

Jan. 30 – Feb. 28, 2010
at the West End Theatre (263 West 86th St.)
in the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew
music and lyrics by Peter Foley
based on the short story “The Masters”
by Ursula K. Le Guin
directed by Kate Chisholm

Science and religion collide in this sophisticated and mythic new musical. At the center of the conflict is Ganil, a young woman whose passionate longing for knowledge leads her on a dangerous journey in pursuit of lost and forbidden truths. With an eclectic score featuring lush choral singing, this compelling tale of spiritual awakening illuminates the complex dialogue between faith and reason.

“The power of Foley´s score effectively communicates the exhilaration of intellectual discovery… The melodic urgency, rhythmic variety, harmonic invention and orchestral sophistication of his music compel the attention. Foley acknowledges a range of influences from Sufi music to the rock band U2, yet what he has made of them is something uniquely his own.”
— The Philadelphia Inquirer