Nature’s Light: Arts as Healing in Juvenile Justice 

Ongoing Painting Exhibit at Monterey Regional Airport

I have been extremely privileged to expand my teaching efforts in the community to include outreach with youth in the juvenile justice system through a California State grant-Jump StARTs.  Some of the work is now on display at the Monterey Regional Airport.  Travel through and experience the journey of self-expression from a different perspective.  The exhibit is accessible and open to the public-no tickets needed.  

Each object in this important show “Take me Back,” reflecting Monterey County’s history through the magic of museums, has a specific story to tell.  The Youth Art exhibit is a collection of visual stories about our incarcerated youth first learning to create naturalistic imagery and the transformation that began.

            

Our Youth Gallery exhibit, Nature’s Light: Arts as Healing in Juvenile Justice takes us back to our Youth Center resident students’ first major effort to create naturalistic paintings during a

Summer arts intensive in 2013.

This was a pivotal point in our collaborative arts program that led to student creation of 6-foot long group paintings depicting “Windows on the Outside World” now hanging in the County Office building.  Further building on this, by the end of 2014 our resident artists were working on the completion of

400 square feet of Naturalistic Murals for the Secret Garden in their own facility.

In 2015 after exhibitions in the community, they received a Senate commendation for

 “Creating outstanding art that will be on display in Monterey County”. 

Monterey County then received the National Association of Counties (NACo) 2015 National Arts and Culture award for Solutions and Innovation based on our collaborative design and impact of our arts program in achieving “life-changing” results.

Retreat Ojo Caliente, New Mexico October 2015

I have been asked at the studio for more follow up on the different retreats, tours and workshops that Studio Anavami offers. This fall Ghost Ranch retreat went through a complete metamorphous-changing everything that could be changed: dates, place and even some participants. We ended up on an organic farm near Ojo Caliente Hot Springs for nine days in the magical triangle between Santa Fe, Abiquiu and Taos. We formed the retreat and quest literally and figuratively around the famous Ojo Springs with their unusual sulfur-free mineral waters of lithium, iron, soda and arsenic.

Using Angeles Arrien’s Four-Fold Path our intention was to call in the fundamental archetypes of the cardinal directions: visionary, warrior, teacher, healer, we added a fifth archetype reflective of a personal magician/artist shaman representing the direction of center. Four days of the retreat were used to travel in the cardinal directions, working with the archetypes among the diverse terrain of Rio Grande Rim, Red Cliffs of El Rito, a yellow aspen grove and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Plaza Blanca. The springs at Ojo was home of our directive archetype and also the center for meditation, integration, and rejuvenation.

We did less painting than we usually do on retreats as our creative expression took form in mask making, small figures of archetypes, sand painting, mandalas, poetry and specific ritual in the land to explore aspects of our personal and collective mythology. The overall purpose of the activities of Transformational Painting Process is to create pathways between the three cosmological worlds, allowing us to live and create more consciously.

The under or lower world can be considered those parts of our being we are unaware of, but are in constant play in our lives. On the other side of the spectrum is the upper world, which relates to our higher self or super consciousness and crosses all time and space. This world is connected to our spiritual guidance and it was sprinkled liberally throughout our journey in personal ways. The middle world is usually reality as we know it, what we live in from day to day, or our waking consciousness. This but middle world we had entered for our retreat had an amplified spin. In fact, all the worlds in this area of the country are particularly permeable. See what you think from a couple of our stories.

In the first moonless night our place of lodging greeted us with the manifestation of a double- headed Cerberus (guardian of the underworld) in the form of Angel and Choosy, two white pit bulls. They are only menacing when they don’t know you, which they didn’t that night. Their run behind the house was filled with bloody bones of an elk carcass further darkened by constant screeches and black and whites flashes of the magpies vying for their share. Yes, we were in the Wild West, often feeling like another country or time period, creating a backdrop for our explorations of the lower world.

For the last almost 25 years the New Mexico area for me has been a place of healing, but it has also been a place of vision, inspiration and realization of hard realities. It is curative but it teeters on the edge of a vertical plunge into either the lower world or the upper world. There is an unadvertised invitation here into the depths of relationship to ourselves, to each other, and to the collective. Typically we are grounded in the middle world, even to the point that it seems that is all that exists. But it is only one third of the picture and in Northern New Mexico the lower, middle and upper worlds overlap as do many other worlds.

The Taos area in particular is an interesting middle world where Anglos, the most recent to arrive are in the minority. The Spaniards, who do not identify Chicano or Latino speak an archaic version of Castellan. So we have an ancient Pueblo people, an infrastructure that is much like the 1950’s and yet not too far away a sophisticated internationally competitive contemporary art market in Santa Fe. Our group of artists saw quickly that although this was the perfect place to access the three worlds and directional archetypes we could only scratch the surface, which sparked the commitment to make trip annually.

Although many of the painters have done archetypal work, this journey assisted an opening into personal experience. One of the participants, a painter and workshop leader, said that it was the first time that she really felt the archetypes inside of her. Another participant expressed her Magician/Priestess, who has been in and out of her life for thirty years, seems to have settled in for good with advice like, “Did you notice how just now you did not have FEAR available when you really needed it and earlier were fearful when it was not necessary!” She knew exactly to what was being referred-leading into the exploration of other archetypal shadow work.

The shadow it is considered the blind spot in our awareness. Like in astronomy when a celestial body is not seen but still creates a gravitational pull that points to the unseen planet or star, the shadow shows up in our charged reaction to others. One shadow aspect of the Warrior is the shadow-rebel, which for many of us who lived through the sixties we carry as a banner. The Rebel is an important archetype on its own for revolutionary change. The shadow-rebel, however, is that part of ourselves that we act out unconsciously by projecting on to others because it has been disowned. In my case, I have an attitude concerning medical institutions, large corporations, the education system etc. But like others on this journey there was an integration of shadow-rebel. And I at long last felt that constant edge of resistance relax a little and I witnessed new decisions and perspectives on my return without the sixties chip on my shoulder. The incredible phenomenon of shadow work is to release what has been tied up in attitude for use in creative endeavors.

My grandest vision for this excursion was to stimulate other creative expressions in our lives, not necessarily products but avenues of exploration in the expressive arts. I will share those with you as they emerge from myself and the participants.       Majio

Winter 2015 WWW11

Skeleton Woman Story, Life/Death/Life Force as Metaphor for Transformational Painting

There are many versions of Skeleton Woman, this is the condensed Inuit story told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Jungian analyst, poet and story teller. I roughly follow her breakdown of the story to illustrate how the story is rich in various parallels in life, is a metaphor of creative process and how it particularly relates to Transformational Painting.

In the Inuit story of Skeleton Woman, a young woman is thrown into the Artic Sea by her father, and eventually is turned into a tangled mess of bones. It is significant that no one remembers why she was discarded into the icy depths, only that she offended her father.

In time, she is hooked by a fisherman’s line. He thinks that he has caught a great fish. When he turns back with his net and sees her mossy bald skull rising from the water attached to his fishing pole he is terrified and paddles like a demon for his life. Clutching his pole the whole way he hears her at his heels. He hits land at a dead run until, at last, he reaches his village. When he dives into his snow house he breathes a sigh of relief thinking that he has been saved, but as he lights his whale oil lamp he sees that she has come home with him 

Slowly he recovers from his fright and, in the soft light, our fisherman reaches over and begins to set her bones in order. Singing as he works, he finishes by wrapping her in warm furs. Completed, he then crawls into his own sleeping furs for an exhausted sleep. In the depth of night Skeleton Woman arises and crawls close to him to drink the one glistening tear of his longing, thus satisfying her thirst of many years. She then reaches into his chest taking the drum of his heart to sing on her flesh. After calling forth "all the other things a women needs" she returns his heart, undresses him and joins him in his furs to spend the night together, “as men and women do”. Thus joined it is said that they lived prosperously and happily together until the end of their days.

In the story, as in the creative process, you cannot go from finding accidental treasure to love making in one fell swoop. You cannot go from beginning a painting to a finished piece by skipping the chase, the untangling, the tear or the fleshing out through heart as in the story. In our contemporary culture we are bombarded with stories of the magical union where a couple meet and go straight to bed and thus all is complete. We have come to expect a fast-fix, from food to medicine to information and we expect satisfaction as soon as we engage. We have carried this expectation over to love and art making. Transformational Painting offers a way to reestablish that essential path of development and provide an avenue to reclaim the other kind of satisfaction that is received from fully engaging in the process. 

The Call. The treasure we receive from creative process is equal to our willingness to enter into the depths of the psyche. The portal into our essence demands curiosity and wonderment and a release of the unfolding images of our deeper being. Like the fisherman in the story, we are unaware that we do not know. Also like him, we are hungry for relationship to our creative self but may not recognize it. So we search for a way to catch the big fish. We coast for a while and think that we can play around, unaware of the profound journey that awaits us. There may even be a ticket in our fist at this very moment, but we cannot know the scope of the journey nor the price it will entail.  If this is more enticing than frightening you may be a candidate yourself. 

Answer to the Call. If all parts of the story are indeed us, the fisherman must answer the call as well as the Skeleton Woman. He puts her bones in order out of compassion and covers her in furs. He trusts her as he falls asleep letting his deep tear of feeling escape and begin the transformation to meet her in lovemaking. She makes the agreement too, as she is being dredged up from the depths of the ocean floor to create an existence bigger than everyday life. That is what art is about. It is the soul that answers the call. The poet David Whyte defines this as “the largest conversation (relationship) a person is capable of having with the world.”  Our Skelton Woman story tells us how to have that conversation. She is the Life/Death/Life force beginning as disused and misused and resurrected again by answering the call. Creativity is set free when we  make  her ally, lover, and teacher. She will guide us through our wounds if we give ourselves wholeheartedly and begin our own life/death/life or creation/destruction/creation cycle.

The Vertical Alignment. Poets as artists help us to understand creative process and even more so Transformational Painting. Deena Metzger, poet and author, contrasts poem and story, describing poem as a penetration into the essence of something. A poem expresses the inexpressible adventure deeply. While, she says, story and prose, spreads out, wanting to speak to the mind, to the intellect. The horizontal gathers information, technique, momentum, while the vertical is outside of time, it changes our life as participant. Jane Hirshfield, Poet Laureate, tells us poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being. Poetry creates a vertical experience, an evocative and in depth exploration that is mirrored in the methods used during Transformational Painting.     

continued with The Shadow, The Chase, Organization of the Bones, Sleep as Rebirth & more.

Northern New Mexico Retreat

JULY 17-19 Wild Woman Workshop

In this workshop we will consider the Unuit story of SKELETON WOMAN as a guide for creative process. Creativity can be sustained and is most inventive when the feminine principle is in balance with the masculine. In the story there are underlying themes of trust and expectations around relating to the masculine principle. This is reflected in our personal stories, but also most dramatically in the world in which we live.

To be clear, it is not male but the masculine part of all of us that holds the structure of the rational, expediency and the material. The feminine principle brings in the heart and the intuitive. Both are needed to cultivate and sustain creative process.

In Skeleton Woman, a father throws his daughter into the sea or the unconscious out of anger or in some stories he sacrifices her to save himself. In our world the feminine has been sacrificed in the name of production and commodity and we are paying globally for that imbalance of resources of the planet.

Through the Skeleton Woman story, we will explore our relationship to the internalized masculine qualities, which do and do not support our creative process and what it takes to trust and be supported by the masculine principle. Myths, fairy tales and stories are a powerful way to explore and update our own mythology in an engaging and imaginative way.

Our workshops require no experience or skill in the arts, only the interest in reflective play and willingness to step into your authenticity.

Adventures in the LIMINAL, Transformational Painting

Very recently I had one of those dreams, the kind that supplies no contextual hook to bring it back into the waking world. It felt significant to my recent paintings, but I was left with only the feeble trace of the experience. In the dream, I was pulling a gold metallic substance, oddly similar to a soil tiller, over a canvas-like surface.

When writing down these fragments I got that AHA body-hit that the gold substance was liminal space. Then came the realization which connected, not only the title of the show at Apricity Gallery in June, A Ruby and a Single Nail…, but also the image I chose for the postcard from a Japanese Noh drama, Komachi no Sotoba. I realized through the dream, that poem and the gold paintings were connected through the experience of the LIMINAL.

Liminal is a word that is being used more frequently these days. I first came across it when trying to translate the word, tsuki ma, from Japanese into English, which means the space between things. Liminal, from the Latin limen, means threshold or the place between here and there. It is the marker where one place or state ends and another one begins.

The liminal is the archetypal state of transition, a conduit between conditions or circumstances, between worlds. People usually pass through the liminal in times of transition and/or initiation. There are, however, fragments of marginalized populations who live in the liminal, as the homeless, insane, exiled, criminal, handicapped, adolescents, visionaries and often artists.

The word threshold referred originally to the place where grain was threshed or beaten in order to release its essence, its life. True ritual uses the concept of threshold to mark the stripping away of old identity, in order to make way for the new. Threshold, in relation to the liminal, is also the place where stimulus produces a response, as in a pain threshold. Sometimes it takes spending time in no-man’s-land for the new ground to be realized.

The screen painting of Komachi no Sotoba is the story of a 9^th century courtesan of stunning beauty; a renown poet who lives her old age in homeless poverty and madness on the edge of Kyoto, Japan. Komachi, sitting on a fallen Buddhist stupa raises the ire of passing Buddhist monks on their way to the capitol. They admonish her for her disrespect. As they enter into a dialogue quoting Buddhist sutras and Zen poets. It becomes clear to them that they have the trappings of the liminal, but she lives it. They end by bowing to her, realizing her understanding of The Way far exceeds their own.

Transformational Painting is designed at STUDIO ANAVAMI to cultivate the liminal, to paint there, and to be irrevocably changed by the experience.   

                                                                                       
                                                                                         -Majio

My experience of Transformational Painting is primarily in the realm of being rather than cognition and the naming of things.  It calls forth intuition.  It cultivates spontaneous presence. The seer and the seen become interchangeable within the conscious participation in the moment of creation.  In allowing rather than manipulating, I have an opportunity to realize what is arising as inseparable within the experience itself.  My mind is no longer grasping, rather it is receiving the images as they arise from realms which open themselves to this experience.  Being one with this felt sense of painting allows the images and their meanings to reveal themselves.

Opening to the raw immediacy of this direct experience with conscious intention, the many facets, realms, and levels of this moment become more open, more accessible.  There is a feeling that the dynamic flow itself is conjuring the paint, color, form, and texture to arrange itself into a image which seems to magically arise before our very eyes. 

                                                                                                                  -Rachel Van Dessel                

Transformational Painting for me is a journey with no destination. It is a discovery of self on many levels with my soul peeking out and speaking through the creative painting process.

Painting is a tool for me to find balance in my life. I observe my painting and look for that balance. By balance I mean staying on an even keel, centered no matter what outside events happen….order or chaos….beauty or ugliness. If I choose tenderness for myself and others it will extend outward like ripples in the water from a tossed stone. My heart will hear the sacred sounds of all life and I will paint it.

                                    
                                                                       -Lorrie Bogner