I don’t have a cabinet of curiosities but if I did, it would look something like this.
Red Serpent dances across 
the chakra of my heart.
‘Let the grief of love lost
become the joy of love known,’
whispers the fiery breath.
The Red Serpent energy dislodges old griefs and traumas. Anger surges, the body twitches and shakes , tears flow.
‘Let go of the pain
of past traumas,’ urges
Red Serpent.
‘Release the energy
that is trapped there.
There is a theory that blockages in the heart chakra can be a contributing factor in chronic fatigue. Drawing energy into my heart I find myself stuck. Stuck tight at my own personal wailing wall. A lifetime of laughter and crying, fighting, winning and losing, striving again and again has bought me here .
Here to life I never thought I’d lead in a town I never thought I’d live in with a illness I never thought I’d have. Stuck. Waiting.
Move the energy up through
your spine, whispers Red Serpent. 
Take it higher.
Breathe
Relax
Go deeper and deeper.
Enter the Theta brain wave frequency.
Relax
Meditate
This deep state stimulates the pleasure centres deep in the amygdala – that part of the instinctual brain that responds to stress by signalling the endocrine system to release adrenalin. Many medical scientists hold the view that dysfuction of the amygdala is a causal factor in chronic fatigue.
In the deep peace of meditation alpha brain waves spread out from the amygdala to the hippocampus. The endocrine system is stimulated to release endorphins. A sense of well being fills my mind and flows into my body.
In metaphysics the endocrine system is seen as the physical interface of the Chakra system. The amygdala and the hippocampus correlate to the Crown Chakra.
‘Let the energy flow,’ whispers Red Serpent. ‘Let it flow from the Crown Chakra through the upper Chakras and back into the Heart Chakra.’
Warm breath of Red Serpent licks at the wall of stuckness. Soothing gentle heat dissolves a little of the rigidity. Slowly, over time, in meditation after meditation, a sense of ease grows in the calm. Old hurts gradually dissolve creating room for new loves and new joys to enter my heart.
Red Serpent breathes fire. The licking flames consume the blockages to growth.
‘Find your passion.
Do the things that express who you really are.
Do the things that make your heart sing,’ hisses serpent.
Tabitha’s posts about finding a home have made me examine my own unsatisfactory housing situation. For over a year I’ve known the place I live in is not doing me much good but I’ve been repressing the knowledge.
There is good here. The garden is great. Right now the driveway is lined with wild Freesias. Their perfume reminds me the gardens I knew when I was a child. My lounge room is like a cave and closes around me protectively every evening. The view of the mountains from the back yard lifts my spirits.
There is also a lot here that is not so good. The road outside is busy and there is a major highway a block away. The sound of trucks often wakes me up at 4 am. My neighbours on both sides are unpleasant (that is definitely understating the case!). Over in the next valley lie major industrial and mining activities. The air is often polluted and smells strange sometimes. Getting healthy is in this environment seems like an impossibility some days.
Following Tabitha’s lead I have decided to use my Hestia Journal as a visualization journal. I’m raiding my magazine stash and cutting and pasting words and pictures that represent my dreams, hopes and ideas. I accept that it could take me up to year tochange my circumstances enough to be able move by my levels of negativity about this are so intense I need to use the Journal to clear my thinking.
Here’s two pages I ‘ve done already.
The Past Preserved
Life in the box has not been kind to these photos. They all bear scars and stains from the experience. In a way the photos themselves represent times of scarring and of staining. The invisible, inner kind.
The post war bride is my mother. In the photo her face is innocent and excited. Looking at the sequence of photos where she holds me I can see how her face in the third one already shows the strain of the mental illness that dogged her for the most of her adult life.
The happy hippy bride is me – delirious on love, peace and happiness. I find it hard to identify with that girl now. The marriage was short lived. A road accident claimed my husband a few years later. As I look at the photo of me that an insensitive relative took not long after that event I realise the words ‘the smile did not reach her eyes’ applies to me at that time.
I remember still the warmth of the love I saw in my husband’s eyes. For so long it felt like part of me died when he did. Now as I look at the photo of him and remember the innocence of our young love I realise we had something many people go their entire lives looking for. That’s special.
I find myself scanning the eyes in the photos of my mother and realise this practice comes from my childhood. At some early age I developed the habit of scrutinizing her face for the telltale signs that her mental illness was going through a florid phase. Sometimes her eyes seemed to be set askew in her face. I would know then to expect mania and verbal abuse. Other times it was her smile that was lopsided. Often that twisted mouth would herald a suicide attempt, a frantic rush to hospital and then months in institutions. When I reached my teen years I was expected to keep house and mother my baby sister during those times.
Now as realise I am attempting to assess the moods of a woman who is no longer alive I wonder if my habit of staying in the background and assessing life, of never being quite sure if I can trust it, stems from my relationship with my mother.
Looking at the eyes of the children in the photos I see softness. I am carried back through the years. I remember the strange milky smell of their baby bodies. I remember what it felt like to hold them close. Now we rarely touch – physical distance inhibits it. There are stories behind these photos too. Sweet stories mostly. Life’s antidote to the heavy stuff – but still also there is sadness.
The oldest three were all so quick to fly off from the nest. Without a backward glance it seems. “We are really independent because you did such a good job,” they say. Maybe, maybe not. Who can say. I know other women who have the same experience – raise the chicks just to have them scatter to the four winds. It’s hard to come to terms with though. I know I’ve clung to the youngest one too much as a result. Now the time is coming when I must give him a shove out of the nest. It’s not healthy that he’s still around. It’s time he spread his wings and took flight.
It’s time too for me to turn the page. To move on into my future. First though I have to get out the past and into the present. I have more personal archaeology to do but right now the debris I have lifted to find the stories behind the photos on this page is weighing me down. I feel I am becoming buried in it. Somewhere I once read that laughter is the final alternative to despair. As a philosophy it works for me. There is often a funny side to see, it just has to be be discovered.
When she was well my mother a wicked sense of humour. In so many ways she was the best mother I could have had. She introduced me to literature, she taught me to sew, cook and even to paint. Through her indomitable spirit she taught me about endurance. In later years the mental illness burnt out and her mind stabilised. Instead it was her body that suffered as the rigours of Parkinson’s Disease took hold.
The photo on this page was taken five years before mum died. It is as if the camera has seen something those of us around her at the time did not see. In the photo she seems to be translucent,as if she is only half in this world. Although she stayed with us for another five years she slowly faded away until her skin became parchment like.
My mother could cut me to the quick sometimes but she taught me a lot about love.
Maybe as well as being about scarring and inner stains these pages are about love.
On the page ‘The Past Preserved’ there is a photo of one of my daughters when she was very young. We had spent the day at the Annual Show looking at the animals. At the end of the day we were standing by a pen that contained a number of baby goats. While we were looking at the animals a young journalist rushed up and said to the attendant, ‘I need to take a photo of a child with the animals for tomorrow’s newspaper.’
‘There’s a child,’ said the attendant pointing to my daughter.
The journalist grabbed my daughter and plonked her down in the animal pen. The attendant pushed a baby goat towards her. Within an instant my daughter and the animal bonded. The journalist snapped the photo and my daughter was returned to me. The photo featured in the paper the next day with the caption ‘Two tired babies at the Show.’
Maybe the bond my daughter and the goat shared for that brief moment says something about love. It happens. It is an experience. It comes and goes, comes and goes and the world is richer for it.
The Red Serpent’s
fire breath hisses
‘Listen to your body’.
There is a theory that chronic fatigue can occur when the mind dominates the body. The body’s messages to stop and rest, unwind and slow down are ignored as the mind’s ambitions and will to succeed lead to driven, extremely goal orientated behaviour. Learning to listen to the body is the first step to recovery.
‘Shed the skins
of the past,’
says the
serpent.
The glowing eyes of the Red Serpent burn into me. All self deception withers in that gaze. ‘Shedding old skins isn’t just about letting go of old traumas and ancient hurts,’ it hisses with sibilant sarcasm. ‘It’s about letting go of self images that are no longer relevant.‘
Coming terms with the lifestyle changes that occur with chronic illness means letting go past ways of being. Accepting the restrictions the illness imposes and changing your expectations is necessary. Research indicates that the older you are when you get chronic fatigue the less chance there is of making a full recovery. People who cope with the illness best are those who come to accept they may not recover while retaining the hope that they will.
Lately I’ve been exploring my past. In fact its been getting more and more difficult to get past the past into present. In an effort to clear my way I decided to make a photo album. All my family photos have been jammed together in a box for years. I’m not one for having photos on display or even keeping an accurate record of family occasions. This is pretty much a family trait. We are forever getting to the closing stages of family events when someone says ‘We should take a photo of this.’ Invariably no one has remembered to bring a camera. When someone does take some shots they are usually out of focus or have tiny people being dwarfed by a vast, exceedingly boring, landscape.
I couldn’t come at the idea of a conventional photo album so I decided to do some kind of altered book. Yesterday I was looking at kids books in an opportunity shop and found one called ‘Archaeology’. Perfect, I thought. As an added bonus it only cost ten cents.
When I got home and started sorting out photos I discovered I had such a random collection it would be impossible to make any kind of chronological sense of them. Huge sections of time were not recorded at all. I decided instead to try and group the photos by themes and use the printed headings on the book I’d bought as creative prompts.
Using the heading on the first page I made this spread. I intend to write a family tree that is relevant to my kids in the blank area. The ‘official’ family tree printed up by my father only recognises two of my four children because I have had more than one partner.
I discovered I couldn’t establish much in the way of themes so used the typed heading ‘Jigsaw of History- the past is a puzzle, a mysterious jumble of unsorted clues that must be pierced together before the history can be fully understood’ as a prompt for this spread.
.
Making these pages put me in the weirdest mood. I began wishing all the people in the photos could come together in a great big reunion. Then I realised that could never be. Some of the people have died, one has disappeared into dementia, another into profound mental illness. Distance separates the rest of us. Some are on the other side of the world. One is too fond of a drink and can be nasty… Time separates us all. Many of the children in the photos have children of their own. One is gay and would find it hard to mix with some of the people.
I started to get really depressed then I realised that most of the people in the photos are living full and exciting lives. Most are following their dreams. Most are happy in their own way. Most were happy when the photos were taken. Somewhere along the way as I made the spread I resolved some of my nostalgia for the past and my yearning for a future that can never be. More than anything I came to the conclusion that life always goes on, relentlessly so in fact. There are always new paths to tread, new laughs, new sorrows etc. etc. It all just keeps on keeping on.
I found this little snapshot of me while I was going through the photos. Its from the mid 90s. I was at a demonstration and obviously didn’t agree with what the speaker was saying. Still, although it’s an extreme moment, the photo does represent something of my approach to life. I’ve aged a lot since then. I think I;ve got a bit kinder, a bit more tolerant. My current illness is teaching me that. Still there is a part of me that is always standing back, looking on, never quite sure.
Then again, there is also a part of me that just can’t take this whole business of being alive too seriously. After all, as the saying goes, there are none of us getting out here alive. To put myself in a better mood after my historical jigsaw I went back to the idea of themes and made this spread.
The writing reads ‘Decoding the past – Deciphering the mysterious symbols yielded a wealth of information about the life of ancient peoples.’ Sometimes at family gatherings my extended family sound like a bunch of apes and chimps – like they are not long out of the trees. It was fun to play with the idea in a gentle way.
There are loads more photos to sort and pages to fill. I’ve started one with the title “The past Preserved”. I’m putting old black and white photos on this one and it’s looking very sedate and organised. There’s another page titled “Lifting the Layers” where I plan to paste in all the sepia photos I’ve got of known and unknown ancestors. All this archaeology is exhausting though and for now I’ve packed the photos back in their box to await another day. It’s an emotional rollercoaster being a family archivist.
I know I have forgotten my soul cape when the supermarket lights pierce my eyes like lances, the sound of the traffic roars like a tornado past my ears, people look at me askance and I cannot remember what it was I came out to get.
I return home and huddle by the hearth. I say a prayer to Hestia as I light the fire. ‘Shelter me,’ I pray. I realise I have been without my soul cape for the longest time. I left it behind years ago as I rushed out to climb career ladders and leave my mark upon the world. Now I can no longer recall where I left it. Outside my house the wind howls. All morning violent squalls of rain have been sweeping up from the south. Each one arrives with a wild burst of pelting rain and tearing winds. Inside the fire blazes warming me. I drift into a trance as I gaze at the flames.
I hear drumming and see a shaman from another time and place circling me. The stamping of his feet is hypnotic. It pulls me deeper and deeper into the vision. The sound becomes a pounding. I feel fear. Is it the pounding hoofs of soldier’s horses as they ride to war? It draws nearer and I see a herd of buffalo charging across a grassy plain. Their humped backs are like a brown wave across the green turf. They charge on and on. So many. Countless hordes.
The sound of my neighbour starting his car brings me into the present. The engine snarls against the kerb like an angry beast and I am back in the twenty first century god-is-dead world of the white god. ‘Oh god, heartbreak’ an old anguish within me moans. ‘Oh god, heartbreak.’ Were the buffaloes a vision from a past culture I wonder or are they in both the past and the future? I do not know. The insistent drumming hoofs seemed to come to me from the future.
Hestia’s fire crackles. The warmth enfolds me and I slip back into the trance world. The drumming returns, louder and more insistent this time. Like a heart beat but not that of my own heart. It is like the pulsating heart of the universe. I catch a brief glimpse of planets spinning then the fire crackles again. I hear the clink of clapping sticks and see faces from the beginning of time staring into the flames along side me. I feel they are with me on my quest for my soul cape.
Slowly I return to my current reality. The neighbour has driven off. The rain squall has passed and been replaced by thin, watery blue sky. I reach for my old pack of Native American Medicine Cards. I pull a card. Antelope. ‘Do it now’ the commentary says. I turn on the computer and type this. Perhaps I am weaving my soul cape anew through doing.
Just as I finish typing the door bell rings. I open the door to a beautifully dressed elderly lady. ‘I would like you to extend an invitation to you and your family to attend a conference this weekend,’ she says in cultured tones as she waves a piece of paper at me. ‘Oh yeah, what’s it about,” I say, my Aussie accent as thick as vegemite. She gives me the paper. I see picture of a happy family running into the sunset and read the caption underneath ‘How will you survive the end of the world?’ I give the lady back her paper saying I not interested. She toddles off and I get back to weaving my soul cape. Is the end of world really nigh or is that a new one is dawning? One where the buffalo roam free once more.
Unlike the other Greek gods and goddesses Hestia is not the star of any of the great heroic myths. She did not venture into the world or take part in the wars and whoring her fellow Olympians found so diverting. Instead she stayed home and tended the fire. Such quiet, retiring and self effacing behaviour is definitely not the stuff of legends.
As an archetype Hestia doesn’t seem to offer much to the contemporary woman. Sure staying home and baking bread, feeding the family and making a cosy place for others to come home to are pleasant pursuits that are often overlooked in modern life. No doubt the world would be a warmer, more caring place if we all embraced our inner Hestia. It’s certainly true that slowing down enough to keep the home fires burning and the stew pot bubbling is calming and centring. The trouble is, it gets boring after a while and there is a distinct reek of 1950s style subjugation of women.
Hestia is barely mentioned in Greek mythology. She was the first child of Cronus and Rhea and was swallowed by Cronus at birth. When Zeus demanded Cronus regurgitate his children, Hestia was the last to appear. Both Poseidon and Apollo wanted to marry her but she refused and swore on oath on Zeus’ head that she would remain a virgin. Zeus granted her permission to spend her life tending the sacred flame at the hearth of Olympia. Nothing much to relate to there, it would appear. Yet, according to Plato, the name Hestia meant the essence, the true nature of things. She was referred to as the Chief of the Goddesses and offerings were made to her both first and last at all ceremonies.
In refusing to marry, Hestia turns her back on convention. In retreating to the hearth and tending the sacred fire, she turns her back on the world. In doing both these things Hestia shows a steely determination to live by dictates of her own conscience. She does not need a man to complete her but is one in herself. Perhaps her message to us is to find a place in our lives where we turn away from the world to sit in silence and tune into our own inner purpose. Perhaps what the Hestia archetype tells us is that our first and last motivation must be to tend to the inner fire of our being.
http://dailywriting.net/imagery1.htm
One place I often find my muse lingering is in my childhood. When I looked at one of the photographs at the above the link I experienced a flood of memories about my grandmother. The photo that moved me was the small one on the left of emerald green moss growing on a stone wall.
When I was six my mother had some kind of breakdown (the first of many). Of course I didn’t realise what was going on at the time but only knew I was being sent from the island of Tasmania to stay with my grandmother on the mainland. My father took me to the airport, told the air hostess I was travelling alone and left. I remember flying high over Bass Strait and looking down to see the sapphire sea far below. I remember being mortified when I threw up into a paper bag and had to hand it to the air hostess – I had been trying so hard to impress her with my sophistication.
I now no longer recall the details of how I was transported from Melbourne airport to my grandmother’s house. She was always one for grand gestures so I imagine she bundled me into a taxi and carried on like the Queen of England to the driver. She was a flighty artist type with flamboyant tastes and manners to match. Every time I visited her when I was young child she lived in a different house. The houses were always extraordinary. At the time of my visit from Tasmania she was living in a rambling, crumbling mansion of a place that had seen better days. The house was white and stood in a vast lime green lawn. Moody dark pines formed a dense hedge around it that screened out the outside world.
My memory of the visit is patchy. Somehow I made friends with the little boy who lived next door and we spent a lot of time together. I was a strange, dreamy child who did not make friends easily. I remember feeling an affinity with this boy. We both found life to be magical.
One afternoon we were sitting in a courtyard at the side of my grandmother’s house. The bench we sat on was white concrete. The house wall behind us was white stucco. The area we sat in was paved in white stone. In the centre of it was a disused fountain. The water in it was emerald green. It had a thick, viscous quality. As we sat there discussing this strange water my grandmother appeared bearing two tall glasses of green lemonade. Straws bobbed in the sticky liquid as she passed them to us. When she left us the boy and I exchanged a look. The lemonade was exactly the same colour as the water in the pond. I can remember us sitting there solemnly sipping our drinks as if the moment had a profound and ritualistic significance.
.
My mother had an intense relationship with my grandmother. The two fought constantly and yet spoke on the telephone every other day. Tasmania was too far away for my mother and we moved back to the mainland when I was eight. That way my mother and grandmother could be in the same room when they argued. It also meant I could be sent to visit whenever my mother had one of her crises.
By the time I was ten the white house was a distant memory and my grandmother lived in an architect designed modernist box. The house was set in an overgrown garden that pre-dated it by several decades. The project had been financed by Angus, my grandmother’s second husband. Angus had a debilitating illness that gave him an unworldly, detached aura. He rarely spoke and I was in awe of him.
On my first visit to the house he delighted me by joking around with me. My ten year old legs swung in excitement as I answered his questions. One of my hands rested on his arm chair and the other on the coffee table. As I flung my legs up and balanced in mid air my hand on the table slipped. A large pottery platter that had been artfully placed slipped and shattered on polished concrete floor. Angus and I looked at it in horror as my grandmother charged in from another room. She loomed over me and screamed ‘Stupid child.’
Terrified, I fled outside. I ran and ran until ancient trees shielded me from the house. In a far corner I came across a tumbling down greenhouse. The door hung askew. I slid my skinny frame into the gap and entered the building. A rich smell of loam and rotting vegetation overwhelmed me and I crept across the uneven floor to a hiding place beneath the benches. For the longest time I crouched there as my eyes adjusted to the strange greenish light. Fear gave way to wonderment and I crept out. For an age I wandered about investigating the contents of terracotta pots covered in emerald green moss. The light refracting through the green glass panes of the walls and roof made the place into a shimmering world of translucent green. It was as if I was underwater in a secret mermaid garden.
It was nearly dark when I returned to the world of humans. I sunk back into the house to see my grandmother fussing about in the kitchen. We gave each other a cold, measured look. I realised I must have been gone for hours. I could tell she had been worried as to my whereabouts but also that she was too proud to say so. Manners had been drilled into me by my father’s fist and no doubt I apologised about the broken plate though I have no memory of that now. For the rest of her life my grandmother and I treated each other with deep respect. It seemed my silent disappearing act equalled her raging fury.
I can still that shimmering green world. I used to try and paint it when I was young but I didn’t have the technical skills. Maybe its time I tried again.
Hestia’s hearth journal
July 27, 2009
Lori inspired me to make a little journal and use it as a place to collect some of the ideas that occur to me while doing this project.
I’m not sure if I should post this stuff under the Artwork category as it’s more like the stuff I make before I make art – my version of working drawings.
I started out with high aspirations on the title page but quickly reverted to my usual messy collage pages where I work through ideas. I do like this page though -
I got the idea from the book ‘The Goddess’ by Shahrukh Husain where the reason there are so few images of Hestia is explained by describing her as fire incarnate and therefore formless.
