Household Spirits

Little Tiny Elf

I've been working with two young researchers, ages 6 and 3½, on these cascading changes taking place.  They confirmed my speculation that because we are spending so much more time in our homes, there are indeed more opportunities to encounter spirits of the household. The older colleague described, at great length,  her encounters with "Penny" or Penelope,  the ghost of the woman who lived in the house in the mid and late 20th century.  Penny was generally a good ghost because she had been a human; there are others who are not so kind to humans because they are and have always been pure spirits. She confirmed that they do indeed hide things and knock things over in the home.
The younger team member seems to specialize in Central European Household Deities.  Yesterday she encountered a "tiny little elf", who stayed visible long enough for her to make this record.

I am not as facile with field work as my colleagues and I have spent my time researching their finds. It sent me to the work of Professor Claude Lecouteux, and his many books on just this subject. I'm just starting to go through a few of them.
There's quite a rich developed body of knowledge on Slavic Household Deities.  Here's a place to start.  There are many more to find.  See if any are familiar.
These spirits are definitely a force to reckon with and I, as a public responsibility, have been collecting information on ways to stay a safe as possible now that we are more likely to encounter them.
And you?  What experiences have you been having in this cracked open world?
I'll let you know how our project develops.

Thursday, April 23
I've come upon the work of Brad Wigger, and his research into children and their imaginary friends.
Let's allow "imaginary" to include quite real experiences of presences and energies that others, (adults?),  have likely lost the ability to perceive.

the invention of invisible friends can be seen as an exercise in the understanding of others’ points of view, imagination used in the service of social maturing. “Appreciating the knowledge, desires, intentions, or perspectives of another is ultimately an act of the imagination,” Wigger points out. “By playing with mind, by imaginatively representing other minds—even when invisible—children are fine-tuning their ability to understand others” (p. 107).

I've always liked Brian Froud's work in this world:

Wanderings, Fractals of time in quarantine

Kaleidoscopic
With this loss of routine and structure, there's a flutter.  I find myself, more than usual, not talking or writing in full sentences. Lots of bits and pieces, rising to the surface and disappearing down. Like April weather. Old leaves blowing around. Some are real-time-in-nature activities; some are memories, others are internet explorations.   A few from the last few days:

"Holzwege" popped up.. From German writer Martin Heidegger meaning broadly "Wood Ways".  The Woods (Nature) has its Ways. You can strive to control them or dance with them.   More Here

Jessica Davidson's Blog: The fearsome astrology behind COVID

I thought of The Sorcerers Apprentice

James Hillman's 1992 book The Dream and the Underworld made it off the shelf.  A few underlined thoughts:
Epistrophe: a reversion, recall, a return to multiple possibilities.   No longer does just ONE system hold, or things just having opposites.  It's the emergence of multi-faceted reality.  (p.4)
Heraclitus: "Nature loves to hide".   "Invisible connection is stronger than visible"  Our task is to penetrate down, to be brave, to discover, encounter, be with the less visible and the invisible. (p26)

That book sent me to the Blog of Robert Sardello

Still coming to appreciate the Changes that are revealing themselves:
The power of The Organic.  That word used to be a marketing device for expensive food.
Now it's the power to look out for.  It's sidelined our technology, our illusion of control.
It's mocked the tidiness of our capitalistic ways.
It's worth collecting Organic Words, and concepts, as pathmarkers to help us find our ways.
I'll start with a few gerunds: emerging, composting, grazing,
And Organic models of time and space: Tidal, Seasonal, 

A call for Covid Haiku.  Response to what's happening in 17 syllables.
Here's mine:

some ways are not done

forsythia blooms, birds nest

flies die on the sill

Again, and again, I'm struck by the Shifts in Time.  Things have gotten shorter, and longer.  Not the same.  Haiku-thinking helps get right to the core.  Things do make sense in bits, bites, as bait.

The longer part  actually has to do with slowness. I've been meaning to get gas for the last four days.  There's a loss of urgency that used to be so present. 

Words, Ideas I want to learn more about:
Indira's Net

Life as Kaliedoscopic; same pieces jumbled and reordered.

Fly's Eye View of the World
More, More

The Tidal Hudson River:  I collected beach brick pieces near Newburgh and have been
carving them--intuitively- seeing what emerges. Lots of swirls, spirals

It's Happening

It’s Happening! 
An Alchemical Approach to COVID   

Alchemy = balanced use of head, hand and heart; 
It keeps changing!
Re-balancing Body, Mind, Spirit.

Crack! Different energies released, 
swirling, spiraling  
Membrane thinned out, 
passage open in both, many directions    

gods re emerging: Pan, Lethe, daimones, fairies                         

House-Bound gods, Household Deities: 
there are many

Loss of Control: Not in Charge in the same ways

Change in our  PUBLIC presences: 
What’s Lost? Gained?

More Vulnerable Open, Prey 
to emotional, unpredictable weather fronts

Challenge to develop a patient, compassionate relationship with yourself.      
                           

Experience the Indifferent, Amoral quality of Nature. Where’s Mother?

.

How are you Coping?  with Distress /CRACK     Aware and wary?

Magical thinking, flee, numbing, soothing activities, night vision, denying? 

How are you en-trancing, soothing yourself?         

How else might you react?   Less news, less talk, More Making

1. Notice/Make Note of En-Trancing, Coping Activities

    And encounters w Non-Human, Feral  via Glimpse, chance,

    The Fleeting, accident, casual, transient, fugitive Ambiguity,

    Everchanging, Dreams, find Clan, The Deferred

2. Allow/Invite/Develop Encounters w small gods,

    EMERGING archetypes             The Numinous,         The Sacred               

    Versions in, per,extro, intro          What Stories are Appearing

    Events/Practices of Order/Disorder, short/small , The BackSeat   

                            

3. Be Alert/Brave to inevitable Political/Personal FX/Reactions

    New Ways to See and Sort Stuff. There's a re-prioritizing. 
    A different "mesh" presents for  filtering what's "important."        

4 Seek Ways Review/Update, ReInvest Energies  

 

5. Find Appropriate Activities, Practices, Tools, Lenses 

   Here are some. Details at The Casual Alchemist

   Can be done alone + with others

A. Be as Present and Aware  as possible.

   Create a Thumbnail/Snapshot  of NOW Make notes about your changing  interests, disinterests,

   Daily routine?  What’s persisting, what’s withering, Acts of ORDER?

B. Play     Look up that list of Surrealist Games 

C. Start a Deck of Homemade Cards SMOKEY LIFE/SHADOW           
    your Other times/ways

    SUITS/foci: birth, family       NEEDS awe, play, stories, shadow

    Shapes, Colors, Textures         BODY scars,  risk, habits 

   What you do ALONE              Deceits,   Reactions to Tarot, others   

  

D.Make Objects

E. Gift and Share Things   Find your ways            Share Pictures of What You are Making

Cosmic Artist in times of Pandemic

Roles for Cosmic Artists in times of Pandemic

Sharing what we know about how to do, see, be

1. Describe what’s happening from the energy workers point-of-view:

Using our practiced ‘other’ sensibility, (Imagination) to help us understand and

describe Life before, after, during, instead of and beyond The Facts       

There’s been a Flutter between figure and ground,

It’s an unexpected gift/shift in time/space. Jumbled Order/Disorder 

“The Center does not hold”    It’s Interstitial!

It feels like a Kaleidoscope, a Mandala, a snow globe

Oh, The Ambiguity of it all!   

           

2. Work on your Book of Shadows, that record of encounters with Life Force    

Welcome Emerging Archetypes; Thank the Receding Ones   

Speak to/Listen/Watch your feral/liminal mind. It’s raw, vital, maybe perverse.  

Honor The Ambiguous, that which is many-at-once

Practice and explore what it means to be “Pro-Passive” ie knowing when and how to Wait.

also called “non-doing”

3. Model/Practice/Teach skills/attitudes of Solace, comfort, beauty, solitude,

Community, ritual, surprise, delight, gifting, updating,

Offer help making Creative Distractions, holy amusements, profound Play

Using Loose Parts as empowerment

4. Make Public Altars, in unexpected places, to the emerging small gods and household deities;
Invite others to add or take. Always looking for ways to surprise, delight, involve, Share           

5. Empower Others, (not just jonesing for recognition, catharsis or money)  

Encourage them to explore how they are taking care of their Big Four Needs: for Awe and Wonder, for Story and Community, for Contact with Nature and the Feral and The need to Make (and unmake)

Encourage them to consider all their “Versions” There are at least 18:  How are you: extroverted?, introverted?, perverted?, What’s your relationship to subversion?, etc

Another Form of This

What Covid has Shifted

There's a loss of level footing to even talk about what's going on.  Artists/Energy workers are quite familiar with fractured, fragmented truths:  the image of the Kaleidoscope as the Vision Tool/Metaphor of our age.  Same Stuff, Jumbled  and Re-Ordered over and over.
Another image is The Grasshopper Mind

The Four Shifts:

TIME SHIFT      Slow!   Waiting, Allowing for things to appear in their time

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared. A where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars. Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?     Milan Kundera  Slowness, HC 1995 p3

 

(Yikes, I just saw that I also posted this poem in 2013, a few post below!)
Keeping Quiet             Pablo Neruda   

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go

Learning to consult, wait, listen.  Resist the nudgy lure is to immediately organize and create new systems, to be Pro Active too quickly.  If disappointment, frustration presents. Just be with them for a while.  They are often disguised forms of something more interesting and nourishing.

SLOW reactions: have their own ways.   “Organic” Implications  always shifting, seasons  Rhythmic, tidal, seeping, oozing, fermentation, techtonic 

Artists/Energy Workers have to develop and extend our capacity to be “propassive”  ... Championing the virtues of not being Active too soon.  Pro Passive is related to the Positive NO

Another Time Shift is the shifting of expected and real time between Contact and Response. In the previous well-tuned world, IMMEDIACY was expected. Oops. days go by...

SPACE Shift   Layers are emerging. This Social Distancing…  Six Feet, Six Feet, 

Most Interesting is the Re-centering on the House, The Home   Before it was generally a waystation.  Now it's a Center.  Other Cultures, particularly older, slower ones knew something of Household Deities, small gods, helpers and tricksters at once. Creating both Order and Disorder

Since we are now At Home so much more, our encounters with these small gods is evermore likely.  Get to know more about them.  Here     and      Here 

POWER SHIFT:  SENSE OF SAFETY  CONTROL, DIRECTION  

Our Old ways, Categories, Labels, Sorting, Mapping don’t work as well or at all . We are vulnerable, 

We worry  Basics: food, toilet paper, ammo, but deeper ones: Awe , wonder, Feral, Stories, Making ..  Covid has forced its way into consciousness. From Where?  Other times? Other responses: Covid is only a manifestation of some inner turmoil we have felt.   Entrophy. 

LANGUAGE-BEHAVIOR SHIFT contagion,  social distancing, Drive through testing, Not Enough, binge shopping, hoarding, 20-seconds, isolation.  Please add your new words to this list

Drafting Artists and EnergyWorkers

Like many of us quarantined at home, I cannot make ventilators, nor sew masks very well.  How can this be a time to experiment with Other Ways. 

Practices in times of transition    an adaptation of The Casual Alchemist

That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. 

Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower.

We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.          William Wordsworth

For those of us who have not yet been designated Essential Workers: It’s a good time to step back and explore this unexpected gift and shift of time/space/distress.  What are our skills, practices and attitudes that may provide solace, insight, direction?  

But first, how can we just describe what’s happening?                         

Jolt, seismic, fissures opened.   The airlines have been helping us understand this for years with kind, but firm warnings of  “Unexpected Turbulence” and “Things May Have Shifted”. Did we listen?  

The portals have moved. There's an Imbalance. There are changes in mood, sleep, body, vision, hearing, memory, centrality, responsibility, visibility; a hunger for something more, yet different.  The Third Eye blinks?    Who am I when I am no longer doing, no longer productive, no longer indispensable to so many others? No longer wearing the masks? Where does my attention go? Am I shedding objects, clothes, books, body?   Am I grumpy, angry, annoyed, foggy, sad?”  

As poet W. H. Auden  put it:    We are being lived by powers we pretend to understand    

MARKINGS: a leaderless workshop

2.25.15
As these six weeks come to an end,… it’s been like there’s a chalk circle, a spider web… a dream that we’ve had access to.
This “teaching from the middle” that I’m been experimenting with has its echo in what it’s like to “learn from the middle.  Assume that this “course” was
just a remembered dream:
List those parts you can remember: Travel, Health, Music, people, ideas, activities, animals, birds, stuck songs...Try to recall coincidences, accidents, items from the margins of your regular life.

This "course" was an attempt to see what the powers of minimal attention are. No Full Frontal Attention. 
This started when I was on the Olympic Peninsula meeting a first granddaughter, Ava.  So there's that Life Transitional thing going on:  

What!?? Grandfather!  No, No, he's that old man who visits on Sundays


Look Below for what I described as hypnopompic and hypnagogic...
That's dream stuff.  The Celts call it the Fifth Province, the Land of No Land.

I happened on a 1989 Bob Dylan Album: Oh, Mercy.  Songs from it are still stuck in my head

Far away where the soft winds blow
Far away from it all
There is a place you go
Where teardrops fall

Far away in the stormy night
Far away and over the wall
You are there in the flickering light
Where teardrops fall

We bang the drum slowly and play the fife lowly
You know the song in my heart
In the turning of twilight in the shadows of moonlight
You can show me a new place to start

YouTube Bootleg from Dublin

That SNOW!  I liked Randall's Colored Icicles and Joanna's Shadows
I like Kim's Sky Views and Land Veins

 

I continued working with Kindergarteners on Faery Houses

Crows were around a lot. But one day,
two Turkey Vultures visited and set the crows a cawing:









1.25. 14
Hello travellers,   Congratulations! I heard from nobody for the last week, only an updated email address for Kim:   As you see, this engagement for these six weeks, is as much an experiment in form as content.   We can use email and/or I can put our exchanges on this Wayward Blog… or you can do it here as “comments.”   It’s a chance to alter our more comfortable forms of  in and out.  This experiment is tipped towards being more alone, but with the vague consolation that there are six others trying the same thing.

OK,  the start was just having the “intention” to be tied in time and digital space to these other six people…. And keep the expression of the Cards available to see what happened, what presented. I headed off to the lush, outrageously beautiful Olympic peninsula for the last six days.

I held the intention that I was part of a temporary web with others (that’s you).  I was waiting and trusting that something(s) would emerge from the common, the expected,  to share with this momentary group (that’s you). 

A few things presented during this week:

1. I realize that I am focused on the issue, the details of ADJUSTING: how things are changing, what my options, limitations are. It’s not totally “aging” issues, but transitions.  They can be provoked by many things.  So most everything else was done against that atmosphere. 

Did you have theme or atmosphere of the week?

2. Before even seeing my new granddaughter, I stopped at my favorite beach, Eagle Creek, and bored myself by looking for what I always look for on that beach. Yawn.  Of course, I found it: Driftwood Horns.  I was happy/greedy and also self-sedated by my obsessive agenda: “Always Stop at Eagle Creek for Driftwood Horns“ (image enclosed)

 

3. I got a bit guilty a day later that those Cards weren’t really working for me.  So I pulled one out from a few years ago and added a feather to it.  OMG! If I hadn’t already bored myself enough!  So after little artistic self-loathing, I put it away.   More knee-jerk defaulting to a already tried (and worn-out) self expression?

Later, I helped load a truck of junk for the dump and then notice the low tide edge of the Hamma Hamma River. 

Hey, what’s that white stuff?  OMG Teeth!  
Salmon Jaws. Oh, how they stink! 
Oh, there are so many of them.

4. Finally on the plane yesterday, I pulled out two sheets of card stock (5”x7” four cards worth) And started to put a few things on them… nice dark black corners. I had the idea that we could all work on the same cards, Exquisite Corpse style,  Maybe I’ll mail these to  Katherine and she mails them to… OR, this morning,  I thought of just scanning my two 5x7s and sending them to you to print out that way and allow for more interactivity.

And You??

1.19.14

One core interest in this Markings is how influence (and power) flow around in a creative environment.... How much direction, of what nature,  when, why...  is appropriate.  Time to experiment!          My interest is leading from the middle.  

I have good hunches on what to do, how get get us all going.... without telling you exactly what to do.

I want to use the Card format. So let’s start carrying a few of those cards as flypapers for what cross our dream-world paths... during the day

Take it out at a lull in the day, to blot that spilled drop of coffee, to doodle.   
OR NOT    (the “or not” is as important as doing it!!)

Assume the card is  a Petrie dish and your helping/watching something grow... Your big job is to Be Present and Wait and Hold the Space.  It’s a liminal, numinous---elusive activity, illusive?   nonetheless real.

A few words that have stuck with me as I’ve been preparing to do this with you:
nightsun      the moon

hypnagogic    those shoreline thoughts as you are falling asleep

hypnopompic   those shoreline thoughts as you are waking up

I’ll start doing the Cards as I’m traveling for the next five days...  Here’s a email description of cardmaking I sent yesterday to a guy (remember Everett?) working with a Vets group and is considering the Cards as a tool:

the “cards” are ways to respond—largely non-verbally—to some experience, theme, direction. They can start with words or use words... what ever the person gets comfortable with. They are small, trading card size and can be done easily in multiples to take the precious “art” spin off the whole exercise. They allow a person using them to develop several nuanced responses to the theme. So no one response is more correct. they allow for a review of the progression of the responses both within each person’s work and when viewed by the group as a whole. If they are done in a few short episodes 20 minute chunks, then reviewed, there’s a lot of collateral learning and sensitizing that goes on. It’s a great, easy. low-tech way to build and demonstrate a “community” of response  Finally, they allow for trading. Take a few of your cards, put them in a pile and let others take them...  

Here are 4-5 pages of information: http://www.danielmack.com/ITC.html... how anyone can just start doing them. 

So let's see what happens for these five days and agree to share images/scans of the Cards next weekend  and/or tales of whatever happens.  This is a field experiment in being quiet(er), in watching (more), waiting, receiving...

1.7.14
For the next few months, I'm going to explore some different ways of working with what's been called the "creative unconscious".  I invite others to join in. I'm calling it MARKINGS
It's what artists often work with, self-consciously, some of the time;
It's what everybody does some of the time;
Children have an easier time getting to it than most adults do;
It crashes in on people in transitions--grief, illness, retirement, rehab, reentry, unemployment,-- circumstances that ask for some kind of re-invention of who we are or who we think we are. We are all "vets" of something.

So for a six-week period, a small group of us will roam this territory.  The key feature of this activity is its interactive, or perhaps unpredictable, nature.  One goal of this endeavor is to become more comfortable with the indistinct, the ambiguous, the unpredictable.  There is NOT a plan or Way to do this.  It's a process. And a process you have to be an active part of

So I'll be BOTH the kindly guide, the beadle, the cicerone, the shepherd AND the trickster, the mis-director and the scallywag helping you to stumble and find YOUR OWN ways.  (Remember, it's all about You!  It's not about following my directions)

And for this, you'll pay me $25 for each week you can stand it or enjoy it.
Nope, never happened. No $$ involved . Too elusive an experience to commodify

We'll use Alchemy to inform all this.  Alchemy is the practice of encountering the world with The Heart, The Head and The Hand.  Most of us can do all three; some better than others. Markings is an opportunity to tune up and tone up those areas  that might need it.  Right-Brain/Left-Brain thinking is another form of this.

Let me emphasize the importance of the interactivity of this. This is not a book, a course, a program.
This is a time-bound encounter that will change; It's really all about getting comfortable and fluent with change...

So, I'll lay out a menu of suggested activities: (starters, entrees, sides, desserts??)  You's get to decide what you're hungry for and what would be a good place to start.    Yes, you can start with dessert!

You can and must decide on the rhythm and pace of involvement.  Perhaps you need some daily contact; perhaps not. There are always small, manageable decisions --forkings-- presenting themselves.  When you look back on the series of these you've made, you'll be surprised and delighted at what you see.

There'll be an emphasis on Distraction and its buddies Chance and Accident. (Actually, it's called Synchronicity, and it's not "random") I'm looking for ways that both honor and dissemble the routine ways we naturally have come to live.   I just found this video that speaks to a kind of letting go.  It's what the Surrealists did with the Exquisite Corpse exercises.

Specifically, I'll suggest making Cards, Imaginal Tools, Carving stones, random anonymous art moments...   We may even use the US Postal Service! 

We'll probably start a private Blog to show and share work... and I'm liking tumblr.  But no-cost lurking is possible and encouraged. 

Finally, thanks to Katherine Wilson for provoking this.  As a new mother, she understands transition, distraction, chance and accident.  As an architect, she understands the phases of making and re-making things. Katherine, and a few more of you, were involved with a 2007 version of this.
We'll start when about eight people fall for this.


COMMENTS
I thought it was fun last time to gather local materials--sending them to you and redistributing and then making something with them? Maybe creating something around a theme. Katherine

Count me in. Is there a phone conf. type meet up? or one-on-one with you over phone with pics and emails and the such?     Laurie