Love is the Permeable veil

This painting could easily be called Grief and Enlightenment. Or Grief and the Opening Heart. This is the second painting in this series as I paint my grief for my mother’s passing. I ponder the nature of death. I wonder, where is she? Busy, engaged, happy? I think so. I do believe in life after death. George Emery always said, “There ain’t no such thing as dead life.”

What has surprised me the most is the mystical nature of these first few weeks of her passing. I have read a lot about grief and loss. I thought I might understand it to some extent. But no, at least not in my own unique experience. One night I woke from a sound sleep and my dark bedroom was pulsating with soft light in small orbs. Quiet, tone on tone color, moving very gently. I thought, how in the world would I ever paint this? It was a visual experience without insights or emotion.

What I sense is an opening of my heart. I can feel the old emotional barriers coming down. I cannot explain this. I am experiencing transformation. Perhaps as my mother was able to drop the severe limitations of her ending of her last months of life, I too am freed up of those limitations.

It is my sensing that it takes nine months for a human to come into form, and it takes nine months for the energetic body to dissipate after a person passes. I suspect their energetic field is what we carry in close memory for that person.

So back to the painting, bright pink or magenta is my mom’s favorite color. I painted the sheerest of veils. When we communicate with those who have crossed to the other side, what connects the two sides is love. Love IS the permeable veil.

Landforms and Emotions: Can Landscapes have an inherent personality?

Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal

November 22, 2020

I am currently touring the American West: first, California, then Nevada, Utah, now Arizona. I first noticed that a landscape can have a distinctly unsettling effect on me at Whitney Pocket, Nevada, which is in Gold Butte National Monument.

WHITNEY POCKET, grotesquely distorted rock forms

The mountains there are violently twisted, and no two grotesquely distorted mountains are similar, even within a one mile area. The earth seems like it has been ripped in  every direction just yesterday. I know the mountains are old (the red Jurassic sandstones are 180 million years old), but the force required to tear them apart feels very present, as if the dust had yet to settled. 

Paleozoic limestones form most of the ridges in the northern portion of the monument. There were deposited on the shallow sea floor during the Paleozoic Era (between 540 and 250 million years ago). Generally speaking, these are the same sedimentary formations that are exposed in the Grand Canyon. The key difference is that in Grand Canyon the layers are horizontal while in Gold Butte they are tilted. This tilting occurred when this region of North America was pulled apart by tectonic forces roughly 10 to 15 million years ago, during the Miocene Epoch.

This fascinating landscape is endlessly interesting. At first, I was transfixed by the range of hues, the extremes of color from vermillion to corals, to dove gray to black. I saw so many opportunities to paint. 

After three days, we started to leave camp frequently. Yes, we were exploring the area as there is lots to see. Then I realized that I was psychically uncomfortable. I did not feel threatened by the landforms, but they unsettled me and made me oddly unable to focus. I stopped painting, and it felt like time to move on. My husband also felt restless, and we agreed that we didn’t need an explanation. We broke camp.

WHITE HOUSE CAMPGROUND, Paria Breaks, Utah

I compare the Whitney Pocket location with the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness of the Colorado Plateau, where we camped for a week. The wilderness is composed of broad plateaus, tall escarpments, and deep canyons. The Paria River flows through the wilderness before joining the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry in Arizona.

The  landforms in the area we explored are smooth, reflecting white, the blue of the sky, and red orange. I perceived the energy there as ancient, calm and sacred. I wonder at the contrast between the two landscapes and the dynamic ways they affected my eye and mind and spirit. 

Neither area has been greatly impacted by human presence. It was something else that moved in me in ways both unsettling (Whitney Pockets) and grandly peaceful (the Paria Breaks). In both areas, I felt these to be energies not to be ignored but to be respected. I see now more than ever that certain natural areas are not, as we might say, vibrationally resonant with humans and others profoundly are. I respectfully let Nature have her space in her own way. I do not have to understand.

Walker Creek, Camp Verde, Arizona

Currently, the day after Thanksgiving, we are camped outside Winslow, Arizona, in an area very like my home landscape of eastern Washington. Rolling foothills rise up to become mountains. Our camp is surrounded by juniper trees and creosote bushes, prickly pear and rocky dry washes. 

This feels like home to me, and I am painting every day.

My plein aire set up at Walker Creek

Evening Walk in vermillion and blue

I am walking alone down a wash, a dry river bed in Southern Utah. The sun is low enough to cast a vermillion glaze of color over the highest rock formations.

My route takes me along an increasingly rocky dry river bottom. It is late in the day and I walk in the shadow of the canyon walls. My husband and dog are well ahead of me. I can hear only my own breathing and silence. 


The canyon walls are gouged and violently ripped by recent  flash floods. Ten foot piles of dry mud and piles of sharp shale, ripped off the canyon wall block my way. I navigate crossing with my alpine poles with relative ease. I am careful. A fall on the sharp rocks would not be good.

But… I have a feeling memory for a moment. I recapture the feeling of being twelve years old again and full of unconscious faith in my own body. I feel once again that I am strong, confident and capable. 

And I remember that I was raised for this connection, this integration with nature. My family spent every available hour in wilderness. I was born to this. Rare, lucky, visionary parents. 

I continue walking the canyon riverbed. The cerulean blue banding in the cliff looks like clay. I touch it and I distinctly feel the presence of a native woman harvesting the clay for body paint. I can see the red earth and the blue clay on her face and on her pony. They prepare for a ceremony. 

The canyon opens into an amphitheater, lit vermillion by the ever lower sun.

The air in the canyon begins to chill and I pause to add a sweater. I hear the jingle of Juneau’s tags on his collar. He has come to herd me more quickly toward Tom.

I can see the white rock forms near our truck. There it is. We pile in, comparing the rock collections of the day. Our trailer is only three miles away. The sun is nearly down. 

A passion for a plant: Sacred Datura–a new painting emerges

A year or two ago, I returned from a trip to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico with a head full of ancient Native American history and a mysterious sensing that then is still now.

 While I was in that wild place of ancient civilization, I saw and photographed the flowers of the Sacred Datura. They were growing in a dry, weedy area in an alley behind a small town restaurant. They didn’t look like much, but I was beyond excited to see them.

Sacred Datura carries both myth and fact. It appears to be deadly poisonous to contemporary humans and animals, yet it was used extensively in puberty rituals by the tribal people of southern California. It is said that Lucrezia Borgia was the last Westerner to be able to control the dosages of datura accurately. Witches were said to apply datura vaginally with a broomstick, so witches “flying on broomsticks” derives from this ancient practice.

However, the ancient ways of controlling datura dosages seems to be a lost art. For 21st century humans, Datura is deadly, and kills hundreds of people a year, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Thousands of others, the group says, are treated for Datura poisoning each year. Consuming Datura is something you do not want to try at home…or anywhere else.

And of course, no discussion of Datura, no matter how brief, would be complete without a nod to the great painter of the West, Georgia O’Keeffe.

Sacred Datura blooms at night when it is pollinated by the Hawk Moth.

Today as I began my open-ended journey across the American West with my husband Tom and dog Juneau, I hiked along the American River and spotted large white flowers in full bloom among the bike trail.

I knew what they were right away, but, I wondered to myself, how could it be that the Great Spirit was showing me a night blooming flower in the morning? My guess is the smoky October skies in California reduced the light enough that the flower was running late. 

This is my original watercolor done after that now far-away journey to Chaco Canyon, and I feel it only partially expresses my fascination with Sacred Datura and its companion the Hawk Moth.

Now I have begun a new painting to ask myself, “What secret is Sacred Datura still trying to say to me?”

These are some images from my emerging process with a new painting exploring the powerful source image of the Datura flower.

Finding Lost Things

By Cheryl Renee Long

“Snowy Owl.” Watercolor by Cheryl Renee Long.
I see owls  as messengers between worlds. I call this space between worlds “parallel reality.”
This is my story. 


I went out of my way to see and hear popular poet David Whyte. I could read his poetry in his exquisite backpack book, but no, it was his voice I wanted to hear.

David Whyte’s mother was from Waterford, Ireland. and his father was a Yorkshireman. He attributes his poetic interest to both the songs and poetry of his mother’s Irish heritage and to the landscape of West Yorkshire. 

I fought rush hour traffic that day to see him and to hear him read his own work. I wanted to understand his internal path to his unique ideas. Perhaps he is informed by his mother’s ancient Irish tradition; I don’t know, but he takes me new places.

David Whyte arrived to a full house, and he read my favorite poems. For over an hour, his hypnotic voice filled the room. People paid rapt attention-writing in tiny journals, falling under his spell.

Excerpt from David Whyte’s poem, “Consolations”

When he finished, 300 people started to breathe again, looking at each other with amazement in their eyes.  After the reading, David signed books, standing to greet people close up, face to face. He had an exchange with each person including me.

I commented that the theme of the evening seemed to be children. He agreed, and I gave him a warm smile of thanks.

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”

David Whyte, The House of Belonging

As I stepped away, my hand moved to the collar of my hooded coat. Precisely at the moment I left David, my hand found a long lost silver feather pin under my collar, a precious pin, given to me with love that I thought I had lost.

Finding lost things…like this silver feather pin…

I thought: a magical intended coincidence!

In the next moment my hand went to my pocket, and there I found a long lost turquoise bracelet.

Finding lost things…like this turquoise bracelet…

It might be easy enough to say, “Well Cheryl, you only wear this dressy Pendleton coat a few times a year.”

But I know, during the time with David Whyte, something in me slipped through into a parallel reality. My new year cycle initiated just then.  The old  year ended, and the new year began with recovering something invisible yet visible and sacred.

With his signature charm and searching insight, David Whyte meditates on the frontiers of the past, present and future, sharing two poems inspired by his niece’s hike along El Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference.

The Heroine’s Mandala Journey Begins

On Friday, April 19, 2019, two lines of possibility crossed over out of the nowhere into the Now Here: my friend Merrill offered me the chance to join an emerging group which would be a women writers support group.

I was tempted, but then within a couple hours, I got a text from another friend, Sandy O’Brien, inviting me to join an on-going Heroine’s Journey Mandala Class.

This is a completed mandala by my workshop leader, Sandi O’Brien. Every detail has a story, a dream, a memory or reflection behind it. I particularly love the central iris image.

I’ve had a long standing love affair with all things Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey progenitor, and Maureen Murdoch, who wrote The Heroine’s Journey. 

I have done mandala and shield work before, but nothing as in-depth as this promises to be. I said yes to this opportunity because it can include writing but focuses on, as Jung says, “memories, dreams, reflections.”

I arranged to meet Sandi, and on the way, I saw I was following a car with the license “OBrien” on it. 

Robert Moss, author of The Three Only Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination, says that “the world is a forest of symbols” (113) and like Jung, encourages us to trust the unexpected coincidence and to allow “those patterns to reveal themselves” (114). 

The license plate that only flashed before my eyes for a few seconds, appearing then disappearing out of the chaos of traffic, seemed to me an exclamation point that I had chosen the correct path of the two that had appeared to me.

Gouache. Personal Mandala made in a Heroine’s Journey Class by Sue Teutschell Davis.The process begins with the outer circle, which is called “The Fire Ring.” If you compare the Fire Ring on all of the mandalas, you can see the wide variety of possibility with just this one element.

On Saturday, I met with Sandi O’Brien in her beautiful, art-filled home in Creswell. Oregon, and got to know her and the class materials better. 

The physical object to be created is a mandala like the ones by Sandi O’Brien shown here. The process is long–she says up to eighteen months or two years. 

Each ring and sub-section of rings is a separate meditation or inward reflection or dream recorded, considered, discussed,  distilled to its essence and added to the piece.

Each mandala is a journey by the artist through a period in her life where she is looking back, looking into the Dreamtime, looking forward and drawing all the threads of her life together.

At our first meeting, she and I split a large sheet of Arches watercolor paper. If you mingle blood and take an oath, two people become “blood brothers.” The two Sandies have split a piece of paper to make our mandalas on; we are “mandala sisters.” The two halves of the paper will continue to speak to each other over time.

The very last element to be added to the mandala is the centering image, which is called forth in meditation or dream by the artist at the end of the long process of bringing the piece into being.
Gouache mandala by Sandi O’Brien.

Threshold

For every change in my life, I have stood on a threshold, momentarily paused in my forward action. Birth is the first threshold, and death is the last. In between are a thousand moments of transition where I stepped from into a new stage, times when I left an old habit behind, or moved beyond old ways of understanding, experienced new gowth, or achievement.

I wanted to do a series of photos inspired by these threshold emotions. I knew I wanted some dreamlike effects, so I chose a lens that would be variably sharp and blurry (Lensbaby Sweet 80 on Olympus OMDEM 5 mio 4/3rds).

I also wasn’t up for any self-portraiture, so as I often do, I turned to my doll collection to see who wanted to stand in for me: a very old Apache woman with a dark, dried apple face stepped forward, as did my small carving of Dzonoqua, the Wild Woman of the Woods, my muse and mythic persona.

On a day when I was very tired, after a long drive home after Spring Break, I took dolls and camera out into the back yard. I had some ideas, but both the camera effects and the dolls themselves took over the shoot. Here’s what happened.

Inside every child is the full grown adult on the threshold of birth. (Detail of a painting by my husband Peter Jensen on the side of our house called The Anasazi Grill.)

She stands on the threshold of the Longhouse waiting to enter the Winter Dances, the Realm of Heightened Power.

After a long winter hibernation, she stands on the threshold of spring. She is stunned by the light, her mind still swimming in the shadows of dreams.

We are as children to the gods, and we caper on the threshold of Dream/Not-Dream (Image: Detail of house painting by Peter Jensen)

 

 

She is Very Old Age and waits on the threshold of the future. She has no face because the Very Old are not seen. Their faces have changed so much, they often don’t see anything of themselves in that murky mirror, behind which waits Death, that patient Black Dog.

 

This one is my favorite because she is most like me right now. She stands, as I do, on the threshold between the last spring snow and the adventure ahead. She is old yet still strong and eager for what is to come.

What threshold do YOU pause on right now?