Strange Sanctuaries
I like to start many new endeavors off with a good bibliomancy. I have a strange and fortuitous configuration in my living situation right now. I live above a puppet studio next door to a house that looks like it could be from Middle Earth, or perhaps a Germanically inspired country hunting lodge in the mountains of Paraguay. Out my door, I walk along a path through a small Japanese garden under a tori gate and down the stairs to the office, where there is an archive of papers from the estate of the late Joseph Campbell. The archive is kept in file folders, much as it was when it was first placed there in the 1980s. Today I opened a random file folder as I often do. Out fell a typed schedule for the International Conference of Transpersonal Psychology in Bifrost, Iceland. I note that the conference begins on the exact day I was born, May 31, 1972. Who attended this conference in 1972? Gene Erdman, Joseph Campbell, Stanley Krippner, Stanislav Grof, Lester Fehmi (one of the pioneers of modern biofeedback) and many others. After finding these notes, I strolled in the neighboring house to share my findings with Robin, who has attended many transpersonal psychology conferences. "Ahh" she said, smiling. "I think that may have been the day that Joan Halifax met Stanislav Grof." These folks in Iceland are beautiful people, elfin, dark eyed, connected to the land. I loved it there! Her eyes glinted. She asks if I can help fold puppet costumes for a moment. The blue cloak for the puppet called "Winter King" has just come out of the dryer. We take the cape, stretch it out evenly and fold it up for storage. Owl cliff house is a strange sanctuary. This afternoon I awoke from a nap after many errands out to prepare for a workshop presenter who is arriving tonight. Opening my eyes, I lay in bed, looking out at the sunshine shimmering through the leaves, the view of the rocky cliffs behind them. I can hear the fountain in the middle of the lake, and behind it, the waterfall. The setting is a dream itself. Some mornings the horses wander below us in the meadow, looking for the sweetest, greenest grass at the edge of the woods. One of our sanctuaries here is the bottom of the waterfall, where, I'm told, visitors from the Caribbean have left offerings of honey and copper pennies. What other shrines have I visited? I've built some. In high school, a deer skull with horns on it came to me from somewhere or other. I had a carved bone or horn crone from Africa that I had found in a thrift shop, and a print of some Egyptian writing. I carved an ankh from wood with my pocket knife in about sixth grade. My love for hieroglyphics led me to astound and annoy my classmates with a made up language called "ltap" in fifth grade. When everyone else was obsessed with whether or not they were wearing Izods or Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, I was furiously copying keys to this new language, so we could all write notes to one another. The alligator and the swan were, I suppose, alchemically significant to my classmates. Who's to judge? Its what they were given to work with. My grandmother's house was a sanctuary. My father's parents are well traveled and for many years lived in a relatively modest home in suburban Philadelphia that felt opulent because of the objects that they had picked up on their journeys. A carved, wooden, two chambered flute from Yugoslavia had a wistful tune. When I was a teenager Grandma and Grandpa went to India and Kashmir and brought back a Tibetan prayer wheel, a soapstone figure of a lady, and a small scrap of yellow silk that was always displayed on their end table. I would feel the silk - it was some of the softest fabric I'd ever felt. Grandma opened the prayer wheel to show me the scrolls inside and then demonstrated the correct way to turn it..clockwise. And then there was the necklace... When I was fourteen my Grandmother and Grandfather were headed of to India and Kashmir. Grandmother called and said "Is there anything you are wishing for?" Skulls. I replied. Something with skulls on it. My mother didn't like it, but my Grandmother understood. So after the journey was done, Grandma sent a book full of pictures and her travel photos. My parents weren't interested. She had taken a photo, near the town of (...), of a lady with a giant bundle of textiles that she was carrying on her back through the passes of the Himalayas. I remember that woman's eyes, the fierceness and the strength, to carry that bundle. Grandma had brought me a necklace of shells made of yak bones. There were bowls at a monastery we visited shaped like shells, too, she said. "But I didn't think we could get them through customs." So I wore the skull necklace to school in suburban Cincinnati. Some of my classmates started the rumor that I was worshipping the devil. I told them the necklace was from my Grandmother. Last year, I packed the last of my belongings into storage, after selling the contents of the house I had lived in for thirteen years. I found the photo of the lady in (...). I put her in a larger box, wrapped in a beautiful scarf. Strange Sanctuaries 2013
4 Comments
Meesh of Collins
3/2/2018 06:43:48 pm
Let’s find out how the Celtic tattoos we’re used as maps of the acupuncturesque points needed to heal the wearer.
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Tall Bald Mike
3/5/2018 09:23:28 pm
Just reading through this helped calm my stormy mind down a little bit. As much as I enjoy the digital age, it is the analog creatures and creations that make life worth living.
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Ken Mokry
11/7/2018 01:20:13 pm
Heather,
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All dressed up...with nowhere to go.
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