Since July 2017, the beautiful book you sent had been tucked away in the closet. I could hear its muffled voice calling out, for days and years, as it remained in the box it came in. The luxurious pristine blank pages triggered a serious case of artist block. Nothing quite like a white sheet of paper to intimidate and even more so, a bound book with many blank pages.
As COVID-19 began to impact our lives in early March, we began sheltering-in-place so my art practice moved closer to home — we don’t go out much. I am using just the materials I have at hand. I was longing to return to my roots, my deep love of doing portraits. But, since we rarely see anyone, and someone sitting for a portrait is not possible, I turned to a group of plaster portraits figures ’84-’87 that are now standing in as my models. They are perfect because they have been holding the pose for years and are intent on holding it for-ever.
These ghostly sculptures titled Pieces of I (individuation) were done during a time I was experiencing much physical pain coupled with the difficult struggle to find my artistic voice. The heads were first shaped in clay then cast in plaster. The malleability of the clay was the perfect material for expressing the anguish and transformation I was experiencing. The casting in plaster was a laborious and physically demanding process that involved heavy lifting and much repetitive chiseling that contributed to my pain. But in a certain way the pain, amplified my commitment to my artwork — reinforcing the story of the suffering artist.
Although to some, the twists of the faces may have looked tortured. They may have been difficult to look at. Nevertheless, they struck a nerve. In August of 1984 three of the sculptures had their debut at the 38th Annual Arts Commission Festival at the Civic Auditorium. In 1985, the San Francisco Women Artist Gallery selected myself and painter Marshall Crossman to be the “Emerging Artists.” This distinguished honor, this first real show, gave me confidence and set me on my artistic path.
The press release described my “insight into the continual struggle of the individual to remain unique while becoming, of necessity, a part of the whole, is well expressed in Selby’s sculptural forms. United by the material, differentiated by the shapes, the inner turmoil of the evolving being is being played against the tension of the group. The smooth, confident exteriors are stripped away to reveal the anxiety of personal transformation.”
The headaches and body aches, feeling my head both large and throbbing and constricted like head on a stick, all in Alice in Wonderland way, made me relentless in my search for a treatment. I went through every known medical test to try to find a reason and a cure: biofeedback, drugs, hypnosis, on and on it went. Fortunately, along the way, I was directed to Somatics, an embodied philosophy with a system of exercises that taught me to re-educate my body and posture that saved me and helped me to finally live pain free.
FAST + FORWARD TO TODAY
Today, as if in a life-drawing class, I set-up a sculture standing in as my “model,” direct light on the figure to emphasize the shadows, clip paper to my drawing board, grab my pencil, my stub, and my seat. I am working free-hand, harkening back to the marvelous years of study with Joseph Query that I described in History of Drawing: Lesson Five.
With The Rev as my in-house spiritual guide and art critic, I am heeding his chiaroscuro advice emphasizing the tonal values. It is glorious and intimidating to try to limn a likeness of these formidable figures. As I look anew at each countenance, the expressions on the sculptures seem now even more fit for these tumultuous times. Now the whole planet is in crisis. Personal pain is now politicaland now planetary. I am drawing as if my life depends on it and it does…
Mind Games offers “Alice’s Game,” a guided meditation where one learns to experience a flexibility of body and body image. This exercise plays with being large and small, thick and thin, arriving at a full feeling of being embodied. Listen here:
My rapture with the image of The Tetons reflected in Jenny Lake became three-dimensional when I hiked with a pal Chris, up and around and back down — the Peak of Grand Teton.
Chris and I were at the end of a year-plus trail of experimental “life style.” Our little band of communards had just broken up when we set out on our “Hike.” We’d driven all the way from Cape Cod. We were to rendezvous with the others in the Tetons but checking in by phone to make final the meet-up itinerary…“We’re not coming…” long empty hiss then silence.
It was a moment on the life journey when the trajectory shifts. Abruptly. The hopes for a future filled with a happily-ever-after commune had been dashed. Happily living on the land, living a life off the grid, at least off the grid enough to feel some separation from the detested world of eco-destruction and the soul-numbing fog of advertising. It was wishful thinking…that we could solve the world’s problems, with lifestyle alone. In grad school for sculpture I had minored at the AG school in vegetable production working on my merit badge for self-sufficiency. On Cape Cod, where we had rented a big house to fit us all, I learned the rudiments of old-time construction, specializing in post and beam barn raising. I was ready for the “New Age”, my new age anyway. My tool kit ready.
We didn’t know it, but you could (kinda) have felt it. The Aquarian “Wave” had crested. Ten million dollars worth of Huey helicopters were shoved off the flight deck of the USS Midway. Nixon was a month from resignation. Gas prices tripled overnight.
On our 3-day backpack trip, we would hike up to a lake behind the wall-like front of Grand Teton Mountain and back down Cascade Canyon. It was a moment for deciding, We vowed to ourselves the hike would decide if we would push on to the California Promised Land or go back East. It turned out to be a tricky trail both the journey west and the hike up the mountain. A psyche in its mid-twenties carries a lot of goof-ball enthusiasm slathered with hubris. Our bibliography included Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, The Strout Realty Catalogue, Be Here Now, and some volume or another in the Carlos Castaneda library of shamanic mysticism. Journey to Ixtlan comes to mind. We ran into a couple of snowy impasses and then a rocky tooth where we had to haul our packs on ropes up and over. “Just don’t look down!” On the trail up, we saw one hapless chap, shouldered by his companions, cross-eyed and stumbling with the effects of a concussion from a bad tumble.
On our first overnight on the mountain we were refreshed from the crushed travel in our VW counterculture conestoga, The hard hike got us charged-up; with that mini-triumph getting us to the backside of Teton Peak. The adventure getting us through the pass, kicked open the doors to a little Shangri-la. A series of alpine glacial lakes, aqua and milky from the ice grinding the native granite to powder, invited us to linger and lunch. Breathtaking breathtaking breathtaking, swim in ice-bound water, washed our disappointment at the dream differed, up into the cobalt sky.
It came unbidden, sitting there on the shoreline.The vision of ribboned gift boxes rising out of the lake, one after another. In school, I had counted on visions like this, and learned a secret or two for getting those hidden fish of the mind to rise hungry for chum, now here comes a year of carrying cement block and cutting 16” beams slapping the vision right out of you. A year of hard-labor blew my smokey visions into tatters. And now just like that, Ta Da ! A line of unending presents waiting to be opened… “just what I always wanted”… and going on forever…
In 1962 on a family car-trip west, I had seen in Jenny Lake the sublime scene of mountains reflected in still water which transformed into a riveting vision. The saw-tooth peaks doubled in the mirror of a lake became the toothy maws of two dogs, mouth to mouth. In school I had seen this vision transform to become an opening into another world. That ridge line, doubled in the lake, described, pretty well, a gateway into another world. The line, thin, like the cambium layer under the papery bark of a twig, or maybe the surface tension on water—the thinnest of lines separating one world from another.
Sitting by the mountain lake, in my mind’s eye, I saw a slip of writing hidden, in the first box landing opened lying at my feet. “Lake Santa at the Edge of Never…” This is what came to me… “Lake Santa at the Edge of Never…” Then the gift box rose up and lifted into the clear blue at 9,500 feet, followed by another and another, winding around Grand Teton Peak, floating off all the way to California—a cavalry of marching surprises gaily wrapped waiting to be opened.
It’s taken me some fifty years to figure out the depth of that Lake Santa experience. Fifty years of climbing up over around through various stones and rockfalls, and into caves, maybe, blocking my progress. It seems over coming obstacles is a kind of Pilates of the spirit, finding your way via the pictures in the mind, the core of the mind getting in shape…and… if impediments to progress are seen as strengthening, you can approach a wall, knowing it is there to help you—eventually you get to recognizing the mind as a self-generated personal trainer.
So to hold the mystery of the unseen, what you see when you close your eyes. So this very vision came to me, sometimes it seems pretty flimsy in its pretense, but somehow it holds tight to an alcove in my mind, explicated with this interpretive sign. So here we go, let’s journey to The Edge of Never.
First gift from Lake Santa
The fact of me drawing again is a tremendous gift. I’d had a twelve year layoff first, because I was too busy with the business of being impresario to other artists, busy enough to slow production of my own hand-made stuff to an ooze. And then, with increasing disability via a nerve disorder, I gave it up altogether. “Hey, Gramping, why are your hands are so wiggly?” It was OK, I had plenty of discards and abandoned scraps to arrange and rearrange to make my stories. “I don’t draw anymore.” was my motto and mantra and now, the first gift from Lake Santa comes the gift of me drawing again. This is not a great drawing, or maybe not even a good one, but the fact of it says to me, ”go ahead.” What a gift…for true.
The Well Body Book (1973) is the perfect segue from Mind Games (1972). Both have been life-long guides; with valuable lessons that have stayed with me nigh on to 50 years. Mind Games uses guided imagery to bring into mind a relaxing and receptive consciousness. The Well Body Book uses guided imagery to invoke an imaginary doctor to serve as a healing guide.
Months after graduating college, completing the Mind Games exercises and working with my healing guide, my then partner, Michael and I headed north, eager to get out of LA (from Claremont, really, in the LA smog basin). We had caught the drift of dirt (compost, really) and wanted to get to someplace country where we could sink our hands in.
Just get off of those LA freeways without getting killed or caught….Guy Clark sang it and we belted it out too. Since those lyrics express one of my most important life events, mention was made of that sojourn and the song in The Future of Art 10. Utopia.
I did get off the LA freeways without getting killed or caught but it was on the Alcan Highway in the Yukon Territory that I bit the dust.
On a mission to get away from the smog and traffic-filled Los Angeles, we adventured forth, on the lookout to find a new place to settle and live the back to the land dream. Along the Alcan Highway our car hit the skids and rolled over and over down an embankment. It had rained the night before, making the dirt road super slick. While rounding a curve our tires did not hold and over we went.
As soon as we escaped the car, crawled away for fear of a gas leak and explosion, I realized I was injured, badly; bleeding. Michael reminded me to invoke my Well Body healer guide, remembering that my body is a 3,000,000 year old healer; that the forces would rally — mighty white blood cell were already on the way to the site of injury.
Like a mantra I began to whisper to myself, over and over again:
— my body is a 3,000,000 year old healer.
— my body is a 3,000,000 year old healer.
— my body is a 3,000,000 year old healer.
These words gave me the strength and the confidence to let the healing begin.
After an almost a two hour wait, an ambulance finally arrived and I was rushed (as rushed as one can travel on that treacherous road) to the hospital in Whitehorse, Yukon, 5 hours away. Without even a question about my ability to pay, ER staff gave me expert care. As I was rolled on the gurney in to the emergency room, as if in a dream, I heard the radio announcer reporting a news item about an accident that had just happened, describing the slick road, the roll over and the injured passenger.
Days later, fitted with a neck brace and a cane, I left the hospital and joined Michael who had set up camp on the banks of the Swift River where for two weeks in the fine company of bears and mosquitos I continued to heal.
Since our car was totaled, once I could manage a wearing a backpack, we continued our journey, sans car, thumbs out. There was no going back, we would go, onward on our way North to Alaska, onward to Anchorage. It was easy! Sympathetic drivers, seeing my neck brace and cane, would screech to a stop offering to help us. But, by the time we reached Anchorage, we were short on cash. We heard that canneries on Kodiak Island were hiring. In a leap of faith we used our last $7.00 for the passage on the 9 hour ferry ride from Homer. During the shrimp season there were jobs aplenty. We worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, making double and triple time pay plus all the shrimp we could eat. We soon had pockets full of money. Days after the first snow fall, burrrr!!!! we had enough money to fly home to California.
From the Alaska Historical Society, the shrimp pick line, 1972. I’m not in this pic but I could have been.
My healer guide not only got me back on the road again, I was headed for home.
In any discussion of imaginary healers Cherry Ames deserves a mention. As a girl, I poured over her how-to first aid book (1959). In her mystery series ala Nancy Drew I followed her rise from student nurse to army nurse (she pitched in with the WWII war effort). I wanted to emulate her expert sleuthing and her gentle beside manner. She was an influential role model. Harriet Forman, editor of Springer Publishing’s Cherry Ames editions, in a New York Times article says: “She was modern. She taught you that you could do anything. She was smart, and she was courageous, and she had a dedication to her calling. She would never, ever leave the side of her patients, even in a bombing raid.” Who wouldn’t want to emulate that except maybe the part about being steadfast during the bombing raids?
We can appreciate spirit guides and sensitive, skillful nurses but it’s the miracle of the life force itself and the healing properties of the will to live, the body as a 3,000,000 year old healer, that fills me with utmost gratitude. When suffering a cut, the body just gets going…automatically rallying the forces…you don’t even have to think about healing that cut, just clean the wound and set the stage where the action can begin. Sounds simple but just look at this video, a visualization of what’s going on in one cell:
The Inner Life of the Cell
Here is my voice reading The Well Body Book instructions on how to imagine your healer. It might not be in the guise of a medical doctor. It may appear as a trusted friend, an old teacher, even a being from outer space…what ever shape or form, it will give you strength to follow your inner voices of healing.
Every three weeks or so my parents would escape the gravity of our parochial small town, and like moths, would make for the big cultural lights of Chicago. Kankakee, two counties south of the big city, had been on the Vaudeville circuit, where Harpo and his brothers had played, but by the 1950’s the last remnants of live entertainment had played out with a once-a-year visit from the Grand Ole Opry. Chicago had first run theatre, night clubs, the Art Institute. My folks liked things that looked good, sounded good and tasted good. Escape velocity gained from the tedium of provincial life, they would high-tail it to their box as season ticket holders to the “Great Performers” series at Orchestra Hall: Van Cliburn, Andres Segovia, Jascha Heifetz. We’d get taken to a “children’s” concert a couple times a year: the Moisiev Dancers, (Yikes!! Communists!!) Judy Garland and Ray Bolger doing their Dorothy and the Scarecrow routine, live, on stage.
As life-long members of the Art Institute they’d spend long weekend afternoons trying to parse out the confusions of modern art. At breakfast one morning they reported on an Art Institute lecture the night before. Allen Kaprow had come to talk about “Happenings” and when asked to define his terms (we were told in excited detail) he hauled a weighty suitcase up to the lectern and opened it, spilling its full load of marbles skittering, bouncing into the hall. Shirlee reported a wag from the audience shouted…”he’s lost his marbles!”
When she was 17, my mother won an audition to become the decorator of the splendid and sumptuous windows at Marshall Field’s anchor store on Michigan Avenue. Ever true to the good life, even in death, my mother’s ashes are scattered in the courtyard of the school of the Art Institute.
Restaurants came with the deal-me-in-to-beauty, like the super glamorous Fritzel’s, where flambé cookery, rustled up table-side, lit the twilight dimness into a theatre of good eats. Fritzel’s was where celebs in town were seen to be seen. Gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, Chicago’s Walter Winchell/Herb Cain, had his own table at Fritzel’s. The Maitre d’ Paul, greeted my father—who always palmed Paul a $20 — “Hello Doctor.”When we got old enough we’d sometimes tag along, to attend their church of pleasure, attendance required as we got older, but as youngin’s Mrs. Leuth would show up to tend my brother and me. Mrs. Leuth fit my parents agenda of expanding our universe — she was a retired 5th-grade teacher. She’d gone to college.
Her hairstyle was vintage 1940’s — a chignon with what they called “Victory Rolls” — hair rolled up in a penumbra around her head. Victory Rolls, so-called to keep hair clear of war-time Rosie the Riveter machinery. It became a style signifying you took the world’s woes seriously and you were not to be messed with. It became the look of choice for 1950’s school teachers. In the movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Big Nurse Ratched’s white cap rides a crest of Victory Rolls. Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine, the prim Ma Bell operator appeared in Victory Rolls.
Mrs. Leuth + Me
Since my folks were going “out of town” it was important to hire a no-nonsense pro who drove her own car. No distractible adolescent hormone-addled teen would do. Mrs. Leuth, her significant cheekbones and high forehead gave her that just-off-the-saucer, alien commander look. She emanated otherworldliness, eyes focused on a spot just above your head. We liked her because she was a tireless bedtime story reader, with a practiced knack that was capable of holding a classroom of ten year olds quietly attentive. She could lasso up all the terror and joy lurking in a kid. Her stories of choice were Grimm’s in the original translation and Hans Christian Anderson. The Jungle Book — life and death among the beasts. No Disney-fied cutseyness, these stories were tough — full of blood and heartbreak. The little match girl lighting all her matches trying to keep warm, fearful of the empty-handed return to the ogre stepfather, dies of hypothermia. Cinderella’s step sisters end up with their noses bitten off,—”snapped off” by crows, as the story goes. No cheery, comic animated mice in sight. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi had us checking under the bed for cobras. “Nag come up and dance with death.” We minded Mrs. Leuth. “Let’s wash up for bed. Now, don’t make me cross.” — Oh, boy, that was about the last thing you’d want to do, but she emanated a big love. Something washed over her as she read, a different modulation of tone striking up the band, as characters marched through our minds. She was a homespun artist, theatrically astute — every character individually voiced. The little match girl speaking of her fear of going home to an ogre made us glad we were home in the warm wash of Mrs. Leuth’s reading — our throats tightening as the last match was lit and burned to a black stub. Death-sleep washing over our lovable little girl.
Real life characters living in our neighborhood filled out in human form, the players in the fairy-tale. Table flat, fence-less, lawns melting into one another, made for an intimacy house to house. Cinder alley-ways behind back yards were for coal, later fuel oil delivery and garbage pick-up As the front doors seemed like the face of the house, the alley seemed like the guts, the intestines connecting the neighborhood, house to house. Here where trash was perpetually burned in wire basket drums — an eternally smoldering land — it wasn’t hard to drift off into thoughts of some vivid, post-something, doom. The alley whereyou would sometimes see, slouching along in a black coat and black pork pie hat, a bent old man wracked with tremors, pulling a rusty Radio Flyer wagon. He was working the alley. On the hunt, he collected scrap metal, old lamps, anything that would turn a dollar. You could count on his pockets being full of thrillingcontraband to sell to kids with a few quarters…firecrackers, and even M-80’s that could blow your hand right off. I’m remembering him on a frigid day selling surgical tubing for professional-grade slingshot making, watching a single viscous drip of snot leaking longer and longer from his nose, a metronome keeping time with his tremors. Would it drop? Then sniff, and the foot long drip shot back into his beak, to reemerge immediately.
A block from our house was the slow, brown Kankakee River, the banks lined with Oaks and Maples. Riverview Park. On the opposite bank a five-story blond limestone clock tower loomed over the trees. It was the marker for the “looney bin” — Kankakee State Hospital. A dreary castle from a foreign kingdom, housingthe suffering “mentals.” Being sent “across the river” meant you’d “lost your marbles” (certainly not the jokey Allen Kaprow version).
Kankakee State Hospital Clocktower from across the river
In the freezing winter, when ice blanketed the river, one of the deranged might cross over, heading for our neighborhood park. (The fire department would spray the vacant tennis courts in the winter for skating, keeping kids from the dangerous river. If you were out on that ice there was a chance you could break through and be swept under by the current. A boat equipped with outsize fish hooks on long ropes tucked in the fire-station boat, sure caught your eye. It was used to retrieve the bodies drowned under the ice. Every school trip to the firehouse, the “rescue” boat was pointed out, the retrieved dead “felt like a jellied ham” we were told). The icy tennis courts encompassed by chain link, newly sprayed by the fire department, offered descent enough fun. On the icebound court, we found ourselves trapped one day, cornered as in a cage, by a guy in institutional denim wanting to sell us “candy”— what was really a rumpled pack of Chesterfields and matches. With bulging eyes, ice blue, and an extra long incisor dug into his lip, this guy was a storybook nightmare. He finally wandered away leaving us in a mist of terror. He wandered back toward the river, across our park, climbed into a car, leaned onto the horn and was soon gathered up by the white coats. “Just don’t look in his eyes next time —their eyes can make you insane yourself.”
Our Elm Street, a Norman Rockwell Post Magazine cover, had its own brand of havoc swept under the manicured carpets of lawn. Two doors down from us was Art (of the Perfect Lawn) and his wife, who had lost her marbles. In his yard was a prolific tree of pie-cherries and we were allowed to pick if we could endure the shoutied gibberish at phantoms — Art gently leading her back to the house. We’d see her laden with bags of deposit bottles going back to the store covering more distance side to side than forward, shadows of Elm leaves passing over her like in a submerged dream. A bike ride away there was a real “woods”, a woods with straight temple columns of Oak trunks. We’d park our bikes and sneak up a narrow dirt trail to a clearing to spy on the “hermit” living in a tiny cinderblock house — smoke always pouring from a stovepipe. Rarely, you’d see him out of his shack hacking away at his garden with a hoe. There was Doctor, wife and two kids, Jewish refugees from the Nazi chaos who built a Bauhaus-inspired safe-harbor — a blond brick fortress with a creeping bent lawn, golf green smooth, requiring a special lawn mower to maintain the precision. Both the Doctor’s children were musical prodigies, brilliant and a wonder to us. How did that complexof notes on a staff translate to the magic we heard? Mystery. In a horrifying accident, the daughter fell into the rattling lawn contraption, cutting her hands badly, snuffing a promising career on the concert stage.
A notorious pair of dogs prowled the neighborhood, hunting for squirrels, always coming up empty, until one day they happened on an escaped pet bunny. Pieces of the hapless rag of a thing went flying as they tore it to bits. Theterrors of the fairy tale were right at hand. You poked an opossum by the road to see if it really was playing dead. Poke poke poke and it erupted with a boiling fester of maggots.
While our parents were enraptured by Vladimir Ashkenazi or maybe Tosca, eating Steak Diane at Fritzel’s, we were in the thrall of The Snow Queen: a journey towards love, betrayal, longing, revenge. Supernatural beings, injustice, captivity and heroic rescue served up — in the casual peace of bedtime. Our dinner was prepared á la Leuth — hamburgers with ketchup mixed in before cooking. The beef mixed with the sugar in the ketchup would fry up to make a crispy crust. I still make hamburgers this way. She hated the TV and occupied us with games. Before our story time we played Sorry and Monopoly but mostly card games. She knew the meanings of the cards in a regulation deck and could tell fortunes systematically laying out the cards in a cross shape. I’m remembering her reporting that December 7 (my birthday) meant that I was a Jack of Spades, the memory master.
We knew she had magical powers and unbeknownst to our parents she had practiced as a professional medium telling fortunes, plus psychic counseling to bump her meager teacher salary. One night she practiced on my brother and me, when we had a fourth for a card-table seance — a neighbor, Ricky Wurtzel was over — with all the lights off she put a candle in the middle of the table and we imagined our dead great-grandmother (“can you think of anyone who’s passed away recently?”) appearing as a glowing shadow. We all put our hands palm down on the table and chanted in unison up table up, rise table rise, rise table rise. It rose. It really rose!
Great Grandmother Ella Greenberg
Some kind of Houdini parlor trick to be sure, and it could have knocked our young minds off base if it weren’t for the balm of her relaxed power. We were in the arms of protection, we could face the ghosty-thin beings her seance brought into our living room. Think of the nightmare spirit-world shapes by Giacometti — when I saw his retrospective (1965) I recognized them as a brilliant retrieval of beings from the other world we’d seen in the seance. Poor Ricky Wurtzel, though, didn’t feel the protection of Mrs. Leuth and whined to his folks that Mrs. Leuth was a witch. The next evening Mrs Leuth was a goner—so sad, no amount of wheedling, none of our promissory skills (we’ll do anything…) could make her return. I don’t have a recollection of what our mother said, but I can still see her earnest face leaning in to give us the sad news. The amazing Mrs. Leuth was replaced by a series of dull, chubby girls worried about their skin, from Olivet Nazarene College, uninterested in story time.
<><><><><>
A few years after the seance, I filled in on a sick buddies’ paper route… Ding-dong!… “Collecting for The Journal….” My skin shrank two sizes too small. “Mrs. Leuth!” She seemed not to know me, that horizon-line-across-the-river stare, looking straight through my skin!
Kids don’t need much of a push to evoke the mysterious, gawking wonder of the loosed imagination. These days, half a century later, it’s taking less and less time for me to unstick from mental gravity. 50 years of indulgant imagination in my studio, making pictures, has pretty much permanently pulled aside the curtains hiding the inner life. For me, Mrs. Leuth is ready and waiting, still there, commander of the creation rocket, ready to launch…
Fifty years, and I can bring the wonder we feIt, right into my chest — a nervous tightness and a flock of birds rising all at once. It makes me think of the Mrs. Leuth era as a kind of Fanny and Alexander magic time, when we were’t very far removed the Golden-Child Age, when animals could talk and strange beings lived in the patterns of the woodwork. It was clear the imagination she evoked in the stories needed her brand of generosity — a proper, formal sort of kindness. The thought of our sad, forced graduation from the embrace of story-telling fills me with with the longing I feel, the compulsion, really, to finish my own work of story telling in my studio. I often feel like I did then, dreaming of a world empty of us, as if I am standing on the edge of a wilderness mountain lake, far away from everything and anything except itself. Hey, guess what?…
It may have taken a village but, in this case, there was an unexpected and unfortunate mis-interpretation. When Hilary Clinton was writingIt Takes A Village (1996) she asked Jean Houston for help. Houston, as scholar, philosopher, researcher and one of the prime-founders of the Human Potential Movement has written some 26 books.
So who better than Houston to help Clinton realize her creative potential and write her vision of the importance of community? And who could best guide and help to imagine: What would Ghandi say? What would Eleanor Roosevelt say? Good questions when trying to gain wisdom from the voices of the past. Regrettably, this meeting of the minds was made into an incident that was spun into “seance” with Clinton speaking with the dead and Houston dubbed as the “First Lady’s Spiritual Advisor.”
Although Houston was not Clinton’s spiritual advisor she certainly was mine. With a steady hand and a guiding light she was with me in spirit as I explored and experienced altered and expanded states of consciousness with and without drugs.
Jean Houston, with her husband Robert Masters, was founder/co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research. In 1972 they co-wrote Mind Games — the Guide to Inner Space. It was not the amusement of parlour games, rather mental and spiritual exercises for building an agile and creative mind. For the altered states of consciousness set, sans drugs, it was a book to be read aloud, in a group, with one person taking on the role of “guide” and the other participants listening to inductions, receiving instructions about how to move in and out of trance.
In the spring semester of my senior year in college (1972) a friend proposed Mind Games as an independent study course. She needed to convene a group of trustworthy players willing to suspend judgement and open themselves to new ways of thinking. Since a quiet place, free of distractions was necessary, the circle of eight of us met most times at my house.
Each session takes one deeper and deeper into a state of focused attention, a “hypnotic” state of mind, a place with enhanced ability to concentrate then, gently takes one safely back to “reality”, returning with a renewed sense of being.
Find yourself a quiet, comfortable place, free of distractions where you can stretch out, relaxing as fully as you can; discovering that you can relax even a bit more. Then click the play button on this audio file and attend to the sound of my voice.
It is my hope that you will emerge from this experience refreshed, enriched and deepened so that you now can go farther on your way, without my audio prompt, knowing that you can return again and again to this tranquil place — stepping down the ancient stone staircase, finding the small boat at the edge of the dark water, drifting deeper and deeper until you arrive at the meadow where you will feel in total harmony with all things. In that mentally enhanced state, you can enjoy listening to music, contemplate the beauty of an artwork, or envision solutions to problems.
The benefits of this inner travel are many. And, especially these days, when we can’t go anywhere any way. As much as we might be longing to travel the world, we can instead appreciate the adventure that awaits just inside our heads.
Even John Lennon was a fan of Mind Games and produced an record album with lyrics expressing his philosophy of peace and love. He wanted people to continue planting the seeds of this ideal with “faith in the future, outta the now.”
——Art—Spirit—Now—— 