To Find the Blessing

One of the blessings of being severely underemployed just might be that one is required to spend 5 days being “under-payed” and blessed, beyond measure. On my feet for 8 hours a day, flagging cars and literally running down the ones who choose an attitude of “I’m not paying for parking!” Bear in mind, that this is a parking operation generating funds the education of our most precious resource: our children.
For me to come out of the desert on an unknown mission and find that I am going to get payed to work with some really great people and laugh nonstop for 5 days is pretty sweet. Laughing at everyone and everything under the sun (or snow as the case may be) ourselves included… is a deep and powerful blessing and generates a tsunami of healing energy.
There are some aspects of the healing process which can only be addressed in the holy practice of mundane daily life: The struggle to pay the rent. There is salvation in falling in alignment with a seemingly random team of perfectly imperfect humanity and falling together, in love. Faith grows, in walking the talk of willingness… in faith. Hearing the inner, intuitional voice of the heart and allowing it to trump logic; builds heart muscle. Allowing magic to disprove science allows God to live: becoming so real that everywhere you look you see Them. Seeing half a dozen laughing Buddhas, here, and knowing you are one, is living divinity. Realizing 3 or 4 Ganeshes are moving things around on the periphery, there, is realizing Gods power in us all. Seeing a gaggle of baby Jesus’ and little holy Mary’s under the tutelage of one earthly Quan Yen or Krishna is bearing witness to the sanctity of humanity.
It’s just Old Man Coyote refusing to pay for His Parking and making you run Him down on foot (beep, beep) or showing up for work drunk so you can work on your supervisory skills and give Him the boot! It’s the holy practice of being human that is so much fun for the Gods.

Cathie Jo aka Shar Shk Buk (Roadrunner)
February 14, 2013

Pit firing with nature

With three days of winter under our belt it looked like the first pit firing of the season was a go. And then yesterday summer returned… but the weed/fire control was undertaken successfully on a cool calm morning. In August we were living in a jungle of green thanks to a wild monsoon season: which means we are now living in a jungle of dried weeds and grasses. Surely winter will return. I am planning the first pit firing for November 28th.

The Elephant Spirit pots will be the first offerings into the marriage of earth and fire under the full moon.

Tree Woman

Tree Woman is many things; so many that it is not possible for me to speak to all of them at this time. So, I will speak of just a few. First of all, she is a tree, as a tree she is a symbol for all of nature. Secondly, she is woman inseparable from the rest of nature. In this aspect she is a symbol for the human animal. She is also divine: a Goddess immanent in nature. These three symbols as one actually function as a portal into the reality she represents.
Tree Woman speaks of the beauty and bounty of mother Earth and the rebirth of our conscious participation in the web of life. She speaks volumes of gratitude to all indigenous people of this planet who hold this sacred ceremonial space, generation after generation, generation after generation; as the majority of humanity has lost their footing: their rootedness in Mother Earth.
She is also a self-portrait: that most personal of genres of the artist. She is me. I found my true mother early on waiting for me every day in the yard of my suburban childhood home. She was an enormous old Apricot tree. She fed me year after year, in many ways, as I grew to adult hood. At that point the greater tree nation called me out: I was beckoned to Alaska where I lived in the woods for thirteen years. It was there that I became Tree Woman.
As we all stand upon the threshold of rebirth we have a glorious opportunity to reclaim our birthright as Tree Women: women, men and children; partners in creation as evolution.