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