WAXING MOON WITH EMILY GRIEVES: The Mystery of the Moon Itself

Dear Red Madonna Sisters of the Waxing Moon –  The Virgin of Guadalupe’s mystery deepens as the seasons do.  Days shorten, light is crisper, afternoons still heat up under a penetrating sun, and the nights yawn into frost as we take refuge in bright constellations and hot tea.  A growing crescent moon hangs like a tin ornament from the draped velvet indigo of the nocturnal autumn sky. October tips us towards the dead, with marigolds shooting up orange heads in garden corners, guavas tumbling from overstocked market stands, and grinning sugar skulls staring from grocery store counters, all in preparation for the massive festivities that mark the Days of the Dead on Nov. 1 and 2 in Mexico. The season practically reeks of mystery.  The heavy sweet white smoke of copal resin wafts through homes and streets, purifying and cleansing, as if smoke alone were to thank for the mysterious opening and closing of whatever portals and veils the spirits move through from one dimension to another. The invisible becomes palpable, not through some newfound sight, but through a simple faith that we are not alone, that nobody is ever lost, and that love is eternal.

Many years ago, I attended a seminar called “Art and Shamanism” taught by Franciscan friar and iconographer, Robert Lentz.  I had long admired his work (and I encourage you to check it out), and was struck by the seeming paradox of a monk teaching a class on shamanism, but learning about his life story shed light on how the depth of his calling as an artist had illuminated his spiritual understanding far beyond typical church doctrine.  From the beginning of the seminar, Brother Lentz referred to God as “The Mystery.” There was something about naming God “the Mystery” that really resonated with me. It immediately deactivated any cultural programming around who we think God is, it wiped away any image of God as white bearded male, it removed any notion of God as either judgmental or benevolent, it even removed God from the realm of duality altogether, and it made God who God should be – a Mystery. In his discussion of the Mystery, Brother Lentz likened the artistic process to that of the shamanic process. Both the shaman and the artist work on behalf of their community, know how to open portals and move into the world of the unmanifest in which they “wrestle with the Mystery” in order to gather information and gain understanding, bringing it back through the portal into physical reality and giving it form, as a healing or ceremony, in the case of a shaman, or as a work of art, in the case of an artist. The idea of wrestling with the Mystery seems to pretty much sum up living life, whether you’re a shaman or an artist or any human being. 

As we walk through the portals into the Mystery to bring back understanding and convert it into form for the sake of healing in the community, we learn directly from the Mystery how to move through fear and into a greater experience of faith. In the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Juan Diego finds himself in this learning situation, in which he confronts the Mystery, represented by the Mother, and through his interaction with Her is confronted with his own fears, doubts and insecurities, and is given the opportunity to “wrestle” with the Mystery as he attempts to complete his mission. As he deals with the Bishop and other figures in the story representing the voices in his own head, the critic, the judge, the liar, Juan Diego comes to a place of peace and understanding with the Mystery. He arrives at his own faith.  And he brings his understanding (represented by the roses he gathers on the hilltop) back through the portal and gives it form. The sacred image of the Virgin on his tilma is that form, something he can share with his community for the benefit of all. 

As we contemplate the sacred image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, we acknowledge that every aspect of Her is an emanation of the Mystery. She is a messenger from the Mystery come through the portal from the realm of pure divine possibility and given form here in our physical human world. Everything we’ve been talking about these past 9 months in the context of the Virgin’s story and image are both the signposts of our journey from fear to faith as well as a manifestation of the Mystery in our reality. For many, the Virgin of Guadalupe represents the mysterious woman from Revelations 12:1, which declares: “A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet…” We see in the sacred image the rays of sun beaming out from behind Her form, as if She has just emerged from the portal of the Mystery and the Divine Light has followed Her through into the world, as if clinging to Her garment and trickling into the mundane of our experience. Beneath Her feet, which follow the dance steps of the ancient indigenous tradition of stomping prayers into the Earth, we see a dark crescent moon sustaining Her.

The moon under Her feet is one of the biggest mysteries of the entire sacred image to me.  There are so many versions, often conflicting, about what it means symbolically.  One thing that is fact is that in the year 1531, the new moon fell on December 8th, and first quarter waxing moon was on December 16th, so the days of December 9 – 12, the dates when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego that year, would have been the nights of the waxing crescent moon. In the winter months, the waxing crescent moon would have been lit from below due to the tilt of the earth, so the moon would have appeared like a thin sliver of a crescent moon laying on its back with the appearance of horns pointing up, just as the moon is beneath Her feet in the sacred image.

If we return for a moment to Revelations 12:1, to the great sign in which a woman appeared from heaven clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, if we dig deep enough, one prominent interpretation of the woman who appears in Revelations is that She represents Israel (with Israel being the “embodiment” of God’s law/Torah), and that the line “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head” represents Israel’s “first family” – the sun is Jacob, the moon is Rachel, and the twelve stars are Jacob’s sons.

However, many interpretations of the crescent moon beneath Guadalupe’s feet based in Catholic church tradition focus on the moon as representing evil, in much the same way the image of Mary crushing the serpent beneath Her feet did.  For some, the horn-like points of the crescent moon refer to the horns of the devil. These types of beliefs are reinforced by the dark or black color of the moon. There is some evidence supposedly that the moon was actually originally silver but has faded to black or oxidized over time – of course proponents of this apparent evidence mention it in an effort to disprove that the image is miraculous or divinely created, instead looking for signs of a fallible creation by human hands. No matter what the original color, there is reference after reference to the dark moon under Guadalupe symbolizing Her defeat over indigenous Aztec deities such Quetzalcoatl, the Moon god Tecciztecatl, Lunar deity Metztli, or Moon goddess Coyolxauhqui, or Her vanquishing of Satan and the devil in general, making all things feminine and/or indigenous out to be evil.  The moon accentuates the Virgin’s immaculate purity by contrast as She rises above its baseness and its “black”sin.

There are stories related to the black crescent moon that go all the way back to the original Virgin of Guadalupe in Extremadura, Spain.  It is said that the original figure of Her was carved by none other than St. Luke and taken to Extremadura where it resided for centuries before the Muslims invaded Spain in 711 A.D., conquering the land and converting churches into mosques. The figure was hidden by Her faithful near the Lupe (wolf) River, which the Muslims referred to as a wadi (oasis) – hence the name Wadi Lupe – Guadalupe. She remained hidden during centuries of fighting between Catholics and Muslims, passing into folklore, until a shepherd had a vision of Her in the year 1326 A.D. showing him where the figure was hidden. The shepherd told the bishop, who send a team of priests to dig Her up, followed immediately by miraculous events and happenings.  In fact, Her rediscovery and development of Her new sanctuary into a major pilgrimage site gave rise to new impetus for the Spanish to fight back against their Muslim invaders. Muslim dominion of Spanish lands came to an end in 1492 A.D., with kings and leaders giving thanks primarily to the Virgin of Guadalupe for what came to be called the “Reconquista.” A major symbol of Islam, and one that has flown on the flags of Muslim armies throughout time, is a crescent moon, hence the interpretation of the moon under Guadalupe’s feet as Her defeat of Islam and the eviction of Muslims from Spain. Coincidentally (or not), Bishop Juan de Zumarraga, the bishop who received the tilma with the sacred image from Juan Diego in Mexico, began his priestly life as a monk in the Sanctuary of Guadalupe in Extremadura, so he would have recognized the story and the visual symbolism from that point of view. 

It is perhaps difficult to understand how the Spanish, who had lived in a conquered land for centuries in their battles of the Reconquista, who upon finally gaining their land back, turned around and began the Conquista of the New World. I imagine it as a vicious cycle in which the abused become the abusers, the oppressed become the oppressors. The iconography that defined the Reconquista was that of a heroic saintly figure defeating the Muslims, or the Moors, known as Santiago Matamoros (St. James, the Muslim killer), and was transferred directly to the iconography of the conquest of Mexico and American lands – he became known as Santiago Mataindios (Indian killer), and was portrayed in the same way crushing and trampling indigenous people instead of Moors.  A portrayal of Santiago killing and dismembering Aztec Jaguar and Eagle knights was hung in Tlatelolco, the very church where Juan Diego went to “be counted at mass” and to convince the Bishop of the truth of his mission. Bizarrely, to this day, Mexican village patron saint festivals include an elaborately colorful 5 hour long theatrical dance called “Los Santiagos” portraying the battle between the Catholics and the Moors, obviously a “teaching tool” the Spanish brought from their country as they forced conversion upon the native people. The dance is finished when the Christians have “slain” all the Moors and driven them out.  The dancers representing the Moors often wear capes with “evil” pre-Hispanic deities, eagle knights and jaguar knights on them, everyone apparently unaware of the implications this dance has for their own roots and ancestral history.  Such is the somnolence and amnesia of colonial religious and cultural brainwashing.

As we have seen in the Mystery that is the Virgin of Guadalupe, two or more conflicting stories can exist within Her, with the believers of one story not having the slightest notion that another story exists right in plain sight.  Part of Her mystery seems to be the ability to make everybody happy so they stop killing each other.  The crescent moon under Her feet is one such story.  The indigenous worshippers would have undoubtedly seen the moon as a symbol of the divine feminine. The Aztec (Mexica) named the giant pyramids they found at the ruins of Teotihuacan after their most important deities – the Sun and the Moon, with the pyramid of the Moon occupying the main focal point of the primary ceremonial Avenue that runs from South to North as a central axis through the entire city. The moon was of utmost importance and she was a She – feminine.  The waxing moon is a symbol of growing feminine consciousness, but also of growth in general, fertility, and abundance. Across cultures and throughout time, the horned points of the crescent moon have been likened to the connection of the uterus to the ovaries via the upward curving fallopian tubes, again tying the moon to the fertile female and the fertile land, Mother Earth, and all things that germinate, grow, and give birth. The dark black color is a symbol of feminine mystery, the underworld, that rich dark place of incubation and growth in the womb of the underworld from which all creation arises. Together with the light of the sun, it is a symbol of balance, of union in duality, of Ometeotl.

The name Mexico actually derives from the moon. Mexico means “In the Navel of the Moon,” or “In the Center of the Moon.”  “Me” is from Metztli (Moon), “xi” is from Xictli (Navel), and “co” means place – merge them together and you have “Mexico.”  When you think of the way the Virgin of Guadalupe is standing in the center of the waxing crescent moon, dancing Her prayers into it, it becomes evident that She is praying for the land from which She arose, and that the land supports Her just as She sustains the land. There are rich pre-Hispanic myths about Metztli. In one, the deity Teccitztecatl sacrifices himself to end an eternal primordial darkness, but is so scared of fire that instead of becoming the sunlike daylight he had intended, he turns into Metztli instead and illuminates the night as the moon, a cool reflection of the sun’s fire that had frightened him so.  He becomes a feminine deity in the form of Metztli, goddess of the night.  What does a story where day becomes night and male becomes female teach us?  It teaches us that the natural order of things is balance and Ometeotl, duality in union. The goddess Metztli is one of the most important deities in the Otomi culture, represented as a vessel enclosed by a black crescent and containing a rabbit, a common symbol for lunar myths both in Mexico and around the world. Ancient peoples observed not only the appearance of a rabbit-like shape on the face of the full moon, but also that the voluminously fertile reproduction cycle of rabbits aptly symbolized the fact that women ovulated in perfect timing with the full moon (back in the days before artificial lighting tampered with natural female cycles).

From whichever angle you contemplate the moon under Her feet, you will find duality, as with any symbol. You can interpret every symbol from the Catholic perspective or from the indigenous perspective or from any other perspective, seeing any symbol on a range of divine, good, bad, and evil.  Ometeotl, the divine energy of duality merging into Oneness and one of the primary teachings of the Virgin of Guadalupe, happens when we recognize that every symbol, every story, every deity, every human, every experience, every prayer even, inherently contains duality within it, and we accept it as such. When we are attached to one perspective or belief being the “right” one, according to us or the institutions of power where we’ve invested our energy, then we are often trapped in our fears and insecurities and doubts, just as Juan Diego initially was in his interaction with the Mother and with the Bishop.  Juan Diego’s willingness to walk through a portal and wrestle with the Mystery gave him an amplified understanding of the nature of the Divine and of Ometeotl.  When he got to a point where he no longer cared what the Bishop and his servants thought of him and his truth, then he moved from fear into faith.  His faith was as visible to all as his fear had been, and so truth was also recognizable to all as he became the embodiment of his understanding, an embodiment of Ometeotl.

When I have been in big movement in my life, for example when I moved to Mexico 12 years ago and confronted not only the many logistical challenges but also simply fear of the unknown (that is often code for “wrestling with the Mystery”), I was filled to hyperventilating and panic attacks with fear. But I kept going in the direction I knew I was supposed to go in spite of the fear, summoning all my faith. During the whole process (and to this day), I never stopped being afraid; fear didn’t cease. I just shifted my attention as often as I could from fear to faith, because faith was always walking side by side with fear. Whether I was aware of fear or faith in any given moment just depended on where I placed my attention.  Sometimes (oftentimes) I was in both at the same time, and I realized they’re not mutually exclusive. They almost fuel each other. The more I followed my faith, the more fear I felt; and the more fear I felt, the more I felt connected to and embraced by my faith.  They were like parallel spirals in a double helix, an innate part of my DNA, so both are just naturally there, part of the Mystery. You can’t get rid of either one – fear won’t “fall off” due to wishing, nor will faith vanish due to neglect or wearing it out. We live in the little protein strands that join the two helices, as if our great task in existence is to accept that both fear and faith just “are.” Ometeotl!

In conclusion, I offer you a quote by Diane Ackerman: “It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”   As you wrestle with the Mystery and move across the landscape of fear and faith, where do you find beauty? Where do you find balance? Perhaps you find yourself in awe of the Mystery as you look up at the sky and notice the stars sparkling in the night, the crisp crescent of the moon pointing its horned tips toward heaven, sustaining the weight of all that Mother energy as She emerges from the portal of Light into our savage and beautiful world.

Image #1: Ofrenda for Days of the Dead, photo Emily K. Grieves

Image #2: Christ Sophia, by Roberto Lentz, O.F.M.

Image #3: Virgin Mary, “A Woman clothed in the sun, with the moon beneath her feet”

Image #4: Waxing crescent moon, winter months

Image #5: Rachel and Jacob meet at the well, by William Dyke, Scottish, mid 19^th century

Image #6: The Virgin of Guadalupe, Extremadura, Spain

Image #7: Santiago Matamoros, image from the Reconquista

Image #8: Santiago Mataindios, image from the Conquista, Tlatelolco, Miguel Mauricio, 17^th century

Image #9: View of the Pyramid of the Moon and the Avenue of the Dead, photo by Emily Grieves

Image #10: Metztli, from the Otomi tradition, Codex Borgia

Image #11: The Virgin of Guadalupe, acrylic on canvas, 2014, Emily K. Grieves

Image #12: Oil pastel on amate bark paper, by Emily K. Grieves

READERS: PLEASE NOTE! THIS POST IS PART OF A YEARLONG PROGRAM CALLED RED MADONNA FOR WHICH I WRITE A MONTHLY POST OF TEACHINGS ABOUT THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE. I AM POSTING THIS MONTH'S TEACHINGS ON MY PERSONAL SITE BECAUSE THE CLASSROOM SITE IS DOWN. APOLOGIES FOR ANY CONFUSION THSI MAY CAUSE FOR READERS WHO ARE NOT PARTICIPATING IN THE CLASS. I WILL REMOVE THE POST ONCE THE CLASSROOM SITE IS BACK UP AND RUNNING. THANKS FOR UNDERSTANDING!

Lovingly reprinted from my article published on Red Thread Nation!  See the original here at http://redthreadnation.com/in-defense-of-frida-kahlo-and-the-healing-power-of-paintbrushes-2/

In defense of Frida Kahlo and the Healing Power of Paintbrushes

Emily Grieves
Teotihuacan, Mexico

Have you ever had a conversation that made you come to the conclusion that you would do everything to defend the value of what you do?

I had one of those conversations recently. It was actually a brief conversation, but one that has left me pondering what I do, and the value of it, for days.

I had just visited Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul house in Coyoacan, an artsy colonial old neighborhood in the South of Mexico City, with some family members. We each moved through the house, where she was born and raised and later lived for many years with Diego Rivera and which has been turned into a museum, at our own pace.  Some of us read the signs more thoroughly than others, each of us taking in the items on display in our own way and in accord with our own tastes and varying knowledge of her history. The house is filled with, to me, fascinating objects. Aside from all the original beautiful everyday household items (her kitchen is from heaven!) there are many original paintings, photographs and documents that reveal myriad aspects of how Frida and Diego lived. There are her dresses, jewelry, plaster and leather corsets and back braces, her Revlon nail polish, her prosthetic leg with a red Chinese silk shoe and jingle bells on it!

I lingered for a long time in her studio, as I have on the several previous occasions when I’ve visited, taking in the energy of her creative space, her easel with a wheelchair parked in front of it, her brushes (she had brushes made out of feathers!), her pigments, her crinkled tubes of paint (as if she had tried to squeeze out every last drop), her box of pastels, her glitter collection (for real, she had glitter!).  I took in the soft midday light that fell diffused and tepid through the window panes, and thought, really, it’s not such good light for painting, but it’s an awful lot like the light in my house, the light that falls across my canvas, and I felt that pang of connection with someone who died many decades ago but who continues to be a larger-than-life ALIVE presence for so many people, female artists in particular, around the world.

From Frida’s studio you move directly to her “Day Bedroom” which has her famous bed in it, the one her mother had made for her after her accident that has a mirror under the canopy so she could look straight up and paint self-portraits. Her bronze death mask lies on the bedspread wrapped in a shawl, as if to make her presence in the bed all the more real and palpable. The next room, the “Night Bedroom,” is filled with old medical paraphernalia, and you can imagine her screaming in pain to her sister to inject her with more morphine as she declined to her final days. Her ashes are in a pre-Hispanic urn on a small table in the Night Bedroom, and my son stood before it and prayed for her. I half-jokingly said, “I don’t think she’s around anymore. She’s long gone.” I thought about her famous quote, “I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return.” She is gone, and yet she isn’t. She is more present than ever, not just in the energy of the place and her things, but in the way she has grown in popularity since her death as she has been recognized not only as an artist, but as a personality, identity, cook, poet, thinker, dreamer, social mover and shaker, fashion designer, creator, iconic figure representing a time period, a nation, a people, a gender, and extrapolating her iconography beyond any of those categories. She has come to represent all those who have ever sought to express themselves from the inside out.

Later in the day, after my son and his cousin had enjoyed decorating Frida paper dolls with fabric scraps, ribbons and beads, after we’d had a cup of coffee in the museum garden, after we’d taken funny photos posing as Frida and Diego outside the dress exhibit, after we were home …

Sometimes an opposing perspective can help us validate that which we stand for.

I had a conversation with a person who had not been on the day’s excursion, and the subject of Frida came up.  He made a comment that he thought that Frida was no more an artist than he was a doctor (he’s not;  in other words, he felt that she wasn’t an artist at all and that she wasn’t even remotely qualified to call herself one) and that she had just ridden to fame on Diego’s coat tails … that she had no technical skill and that the only master in the relationship was Diego…  that she was just a big show and had gained fame only by garishly displaying her personal dramas.  I was quite taken aback by such a strong opinion that was so opposed to the enjoyment I’d experienced that day reveling in her energy and her spirit so evident in her house.

I responded to this negative commentary initially with some important points about the history of Frida’s life and work as I was aware of them, and then decided better to just simply change the subject rather than engage in an argument.  However, the conversation has been gnawing at me …. Why?  Because I consider Frida Kahlo to be the grand matriarch of the art movement within which I work.  This person’s criticism of Frida’s artwork felt in some way like an indirect criticism of my own artwork.  As my mind has chewed on this negative onslaught toward Frida Kahlo, I have to respond that she actually had a quite a lot of technical skill. Considering that she never had formal art education but was entirely self-taught, painting with major physical limitations, her work has a very high level of technical skill. But unlike many artists, creating a technically adept painting was not the outcome she was after in her work. Technical skill simply supported the path to what was so obviously her true mission, which was to express her inner world, to use artwork and creativity as a way to intentionally and consciously work through her thoughts and feelings. I don’t think she could help it, actually. I think if she hadn’t had her artwork, she probably would have gone crazy from her suffering.

Frida stated about her artwork, I don’t paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

That her reality included a unique perspective and way of viewing the world is undeniable.  I believe that she was able to view the world as much more than just the typical physical reality so many people perceive, and that is the only reality some “technically skilled” artists are able to portray.  She opened the door to the possibility that dreams and nightmares can actually become your reality depending on your choosing. Using intentional creativity as her method to process both her physical and emotional pain certainly gave her a unique perspective on the suffering of the world in general, one that shows in her artwork and one that I believe makes her work so universally understandable. At the same time, she never let her understanding of suffering limit her in any way in experiencing life.  To the contrary, she used it as a springboard to live life to its fullest, making every moment a creative act.

By opening the quality of one’s perception and accessing other realities through creative acts, one has the power to choose a new experience in life.

It is said that in her life, she showed her friends primarily her happy bright side, the Frida who loved to throw parties and to socialize, probably innately understanding from an early age that harping on her pain and suffering publicly wouldn’t gain her much friendship and popularity.  She said “Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.” Knowing that she lived a turbulent life , particularly the unstable but deep passions of her relationship with Diego, is probably more knowledge gained in modern times from films and books made about her, than was likely such common knowledge about her during her lifetime, so it is unfair to say that she gained fame by playing up her dramas.  While she had some 30 surgeries during her life, she had very few exhibits (and only one in Mexico which she attended from her bed shortly before her death), so it is unfair to say that she rode Diego’s coattails to fame.  Her fame as both an artist and an icon largely came posthumously, as modern audiences, and I’d dare to say women in particular, came to discover the intimacy of her vision and our ability to relate to it.

How many of us women have looked into the mirror and seen our own image at times as dreadful, torn and frayed, our core a broken column seemingly beyond repair?

What if we were to re-imagine as Frida did and use Intentional Creativity to help us see differently, to see ourselves as whole and healed?

What if we chose to look again into the mirror and to see our image as a woman growing from the earth framed by dark foliage and vines and wild animals peering back at us from our own eyes?  Then to look once again at our reflection and to see the compassionate all-embracing mother of us all living as a spark within? How many of us have seen our own duality?  Our inner twin selves, she who plays by society’s rules and expectations and she who defies them, she who loves and she who loathes, she who dreams and she who follows, she who feels divided and cut apart at the core and she who has hope still? How many of us have bled out from our internal doubts and battles, and then pieced ourselves back together again?  Frida’s images speak to all the parts of us, the good, the bad and the ugly.  She offers us a reflection in her paintings, one that inspires us to our own work of using creative process to see the truth of ourselves revealed.

The simplest inspiration offered by Frida in her life is that she painted and wrote privately with no real attachment to whether or not it would ever be seen by others. While she always valued the sale of a painting, she made her paintings for herself as her own healing.  Whatever confronted her in life, whether public or private, she took it to the canvas, to the paper, to the paint, to work it out.  There is no more powerful way to heal than to give your healing form and color, to make it real, palpable and permanent. This is precisely the way I’ve always made art and the way in which I was taught in my Intentional Creativity Movement teacher certification course by Shiloh Sophia McCloud of Cosmic Cowgirls University and Red Thread Nation – this is the way of creating that I’ve discovered really helps people and makes an impact in their lives.

Since Frida Kahlo opened the possibility for women to express themselves in this way, through the decades of rapidly unfolding creative expression in general in our world, and through Shiloh’s lineage that was passed down to her via Sue Hoya Sellars, I give all my gratitude for the Intentional Creativity Movement and for the fact that I, as a woman working in Mexico in 2015, can teach intentional creativity to local village women who have never been to Frida’s house just 40 miles away.  I consider Frida Kahlo to be the grand matriarch instigator of the Intentional Creativity Movement, and I thank her for having the guts in her era to do what she had to do to express herself the way she did and for leaving such a rich legacy to inspire future generations of women around the world to look deep inside themselves and to pull out their darkest shadows and their brightest light from their interior worlds and to paint it all out on the canvas. I give thanks to Frida for blazing such a brilliant trail of symbols and surreal soulscapes and magical realities – in doing so, she has given me my most powerful tools today for myself and for offering women a true path to transformation and healing – a paintbrush and a jar of glitter.  I’ll defend the value of paintbrushes and glitter until the day I die.

Images: photos of  Museo Frida Kahlo taken by Emily K. Grieves in Mexico City.

Emily Grieves received a BFA degree in art from the University of Montana in 1993, followed by study of art history in Berlin, Germany, as a Fulbright scholar. She lived in San Francisco, California, for 10 years where she began exploring symbology, mythology, and ritual in her artwork. She has been a practitioner of shamanic healing and hands-on energy work for over 17 years. As of 2004, she makes her home in Teotihuacan, Mexico, where she guides groups into the powerful energies of the pyramids, has painted murals at the Dreaming House spiritual retreat center and has created a body of artwork influenced by the cosmological imagery left in the 2000 year old pyramids. Emily is a certified coach and teacher in the Intentional Creativity Movement developed by Shiloh Sophia McCloud.  She founded Taller de Arte El Refugio, an art studio in Teotihuacan, where she offer painting classes to local women and girls and provides them with a much-needed place of refuge, relaxation, and creative expression. In her art and healing, it is Emily’s intention to create portals to the sacred and to open hearts. You can view her artwork and get more information about the journeys and workshops she offers at www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com.

Giving Birth to Angels - Part I

Since I was a little girl I’ve felt like the world was going to end during my lifetime. That might sound like grim doomsday fatalism, but quite frankly, the news shows my sense to be largely true every day. Ok, so the world might not end, but rather the “World as we know it” will end.  Global climate change, the slow poisoning of the world’s population by governments and corporations via chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified organisms, toxins in the air, water, earth and food we eat … the list is infinite, as are the ways in which people, plants, and animals are sickening and dying. The world will surely continue long after whatever is going to happen happens. It will look very different, though, I think. This dying out of civilizations and cultures is not a new thing. Populations have abandoned their lands in ancient times for similar reasons – drought, flooding, climate change, ice ages, over population, war. But the scale of what is going on now is unprecedented, as is the fact that this is in large part self-inflicted by humanity. We have nobody to blame but ourselves. I don't know if I should learn all I can in the shortest amount of time to attempt survival through some sort of solar-powered organic self-sufficiency homesteading revolution only to fail because the bees and butterflies are all dead and it doesn’t rain anymore, or whether I should simply sit back with a glass of port and a box of chocolates and watch it all happen. The problem with both of these scenarios is that neither takes into account that I have a six year old son.

I think I resisted having a child for so long because I couldn’t conceive of bringing a child into a world that was going to end anyway. But alas, I fell in love with my cute Mexican husband who is 10 years younger than I am, and I had a child anyway at the age of 37. I actually worked sort of hard to have him, too. I did not get pregnant as easily as I thought I would in a post-wedding bliss. It could have had something to do with having had surgery on my cervix days before the wedding, but in any case, I had to start counting days on the calendar, making note of subtle shifts in menstrual cycles, checking viscosity of fluids, not getting up in the hopes that a horizontal path would help those little trooper sperms find my big old (literally) egg that month. It became an obsession, this need to get pregnant.  Being a shamanic type of believer, I finally dreamed up that I needed to “call in” the spirit of my to-be child. No baby spirit was just going to show up in my uterus without a serious invitation, especially since I’d spent my whole life believing the world was going to end. Seriously, what baby wants that downer? So one night I laid down in the dark of our little tiny house, reached my senses out into the cosmos and extended the invitation to the spirit of my offspring to please come on and take up shop in my womb. I felt this being coming from far far far away, as if flying in from a distant galaxy or star system. And to my greatest shock, I immediately recognized this being from another time in my life. I recognized this being’s archangelic presence, light, energy, auric colors of royal blue and rich gold. This spirit saved my life once.

Many moons ago, in 1995, I was living in Atlanta, Georgia, in a daylight basement apartment in Midtown, with a partner who was an alcoholic and drug addict. It took me 2 years of co-dependency and a cross-country move to realize I was in love with her potential rather than who she actually was, but in that moment my world was very small and very dark. It wasn’t just the waking up surrounded by empty beer bottles and a dead-weight body pinning me down, or the snorting crystal meth just to keep up, the stringing together of lame minimum wage jobs to pay for a night out clubbing till 6 a.m. No, I was frustrated by something else much deeper – trying to wrap my slowly awakening consciousness around the nature of “realities” – yes, plural – that there was more than met the eye, but a little consciousness like mine couldn’t do much awakening in the toxic environment in which I was living. It was almost a vicious circle – the more I lived in the toxins, the more I became aware that something inside me wanted light, and the more I awakened, the more frustrated I became with the toxic world, and the more frustrated I became, the more self-destructive my behavior became to try to dampen the frustration and pain. All of this led me, as it had led me many times previously, to wanting to commit suicide. This is very complex and there are no simple ways to explain the thought process leading up to a suicide attempt of which I had had several a number of years earlier. It cannot be explained as simply as “I believe the world is going to end, so I may as well end it for myself.” 

Looking back now, twenty years later, what I remember is sitting in the dark in that daylight basement in Atlanta, on a folding chair at a card table in a bland kitchen, feeling sure that I wanted to end my life. I had reached the bottom and still kept falling. I had been in this place before, and would learn from my past failed attempts. I was going all the way this time. I don’t remember how long I sat there thinking those thoughts but what I do remember clearly is that from one moment to the next without warning or change in my thought process, I suddenly felt a strong presence behind me. In those days I wasn’t really savvy to what “energy” is, but describing it with the terminology I know today, there was suddenly a big energetic presence standing behind me. As soon as I became aware of it, the presence reached around me, through me, into me, in what I can only describe as a giant light-filled hug. I was aware of royal blue and gold colors in the presence, in the hug.  The whole thing may have lasted only 10 seconds, maybe 10 minutes, I have no idea, but when the “being” released me from the hug, all of my pain and darkness and suicidal thoughts were gone, evaporated, released from me in the same moment that the being evaporated and disappeared. I immediately thought, that was an angel. It was clear as day to me that an angel had just saved my life. For the past 20 years, I’ve always remembered those colors, that light, the moment my life changed really, because forever after that, I pursued a path of healing for myself and others, inspired to do my best with the chance I was given that day. That doesn’t mean I haven’t returned to very dark moments, but it does mean that I’ve sought out new ways of dealing with those dark moments, remembering above all that change is always certain, and that however I feel in this moment, the way I feel can and will change in another moment.

So yes, the same angel showed up when I called in the spirit of my child. Some things are best explained in vulgar terms, so you can really understand their effect … so , yes, I was shitting myself. Foremost on my mind was, oh, did you save me so I could be your mother some day? How can I possibly mother an angel? How can such a gigantic force of Light possibly come to inhabit my womb? In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken at length about this story until now, if I’ve ever mentioned it at all to anyone, maybe my husband. And then I thought, oh god, if this is the spirit that is going to inhabit this baby, this baby is going to have his work cut out for him. He’s going to have a big mission, one of those earth-shattering life-changing missions. This isn’t just some random baby-being passerby deciding to flit into a body for a while, for a breezy whirl at life. No, this is going to be a biggie. Oh geez. Of course it would be this, because I believe the world is going to end, so of course I’d give birth to a baby who is going to have to deal with a big end-of-world mission. And of course it would be the angel who prevented my own world from ending one day way back when. 

I got pregnant immediately. On Candlemas of 2006, on Imbolc which means “In the Belly” in the Celtic tradition, a day of the promise of the growing seed, I knew I was pregnant. I remember standing outside the village church at mass for Candelaria holding my little Niño Dios figure all dressed up for the blessings of the babies. Everyone in the village brings their Niño Dios to be sprinkled with holy water, and I remember standing in the blistering afternoon sun with my frilly sacred baby doll feeling dizzy and queasy and knowing that that valiant sperm had finally stuck to my weary old egg. I was so convinced of my pregnancy that I went to a local medical lab for a pregnancy blood test so I could give the positive results to my husband as a Valentine’s gift. I was crushed and confused when the results came back negative. I ran out to the pharmacy and got a pee test – negative. I didn’t understand how I could feel so pregnant and full of angel spirit come from afar and test negative. I waited and waited for menstruation. When another several weeks came and went, I finally went to my doctor for an ultrasound. I drank a liter of water and the doctor poked around on my full-bladder belly with that freezing cold gel-coated wand.  All he could see is that one of my ovaries was bloated with “something,” possibly a cyst or tumor, possibly an ectopic pregnancy.  When I went back to the lab for another more invasive (read: freezing cold gel-coated wand stuck up inside you) in-depth ultrasound, the dry gentleman there could only tell me that there was “no sign of life” in the thing in my ovary, thus deducing that the thing was a hemorrhagic cyst. Back to the doctor, he prescribed hormone therapy to force me to menstruate.  But still nothing happened, no menstruation. Back to the doctor yet again for another bladder-loaded ultrasound.  He peered into the blurry black and white screen for a long time and finally said, “you’re pregnant. “  Little angel spirit with a big mission must have been having second thoughts to take so long to show up. My husband was waiting out in the car resigning himself to the fact that we’d never have kids, that my cystic ovary would explode, all kinds of scenarios. He thought I was telling him a cruel joke when I gave him the happy news.  I think I was 8 weeks pregnant by that point and mostly worried that the hormones I’d had to take would have screwed the kid up hopelessly. Turned out the kid was more than we could have imagined, even with me knowing where his spirit was from.

As the baby grew inside me, he seemed to enjoy kicking the crap out of my belly as he got a feel for what a physical body was like. I could often be seen with odd points poking out of my stretched skin. I climbed up and down pyramids with him until the very last moment. Supposed labor time came and went and nothing happened. I think he was getting cold feet about this whole human experience mission he’d signed up for. I remember dawning my loose embroidered Mexican blouse over my gigantic belly and climbing up the Pyramid of the Sun one more time to see if I could stimulate labor at 41 weeks.  People looked at me like I was off my rocker. They probably assumed I was a tourist here and what kind of tourist travels to Mexico in that advanced state of pregnancy?!  No labor. Not a pain. Not a cramp. Nothing.  Could have been because of that cervical surgery I had had. Could have been because the little guy/big angel was putting on the brakes. I remembered my good friend Annie had done a channeling of the birth guardian spirit of the baby (yes, we’re that kind of family) and it had come up that I would have to “retrieve” the spirit of the baby at the time of birth. In my shamanic romanticism, I had imagined that I’d be laboring in my hard-studied hypnobirthing, and that I’d shamanically journey out into the cosmos and retrieve the baby’s soul and bring it into the physical body. Nope. It was totally literal. Retrieving the baby meant I had to submit, surrender, to the most-unwanted event of a C-section. Literally, cut open the belly, retrieve the baby. My first thought when they pulled him out was “oh my god, he’s white!”  I know, it should have been “oh my god, he’s so beautiful” or "he's so angelic" or whatever, but hey, those drugs mess with the mind a bit. At least the pediatrician had the good sense to say “He’s the most beautiful newborn I’ve ever seen” since I obviously wasn’t clear enough of mind to think something nice and welcoming to the world. When my son was about two years old, he told me a story about how he came from far away in a space ship, got on an elevator that dropped him down really far. Then he pushed a button and a tiny door opened that he went through into bright light and then he was here in this world. His version of his birth story is far more lovely than me thinking “Oh, the drugs are making my head spin. Oh, my baby is so white.” 

I remember being pretty out of it for months, I think. I remember trying to sleep in the first days home with that stitched up wound in my abdomen, not being able to tilt even from one side to the other as I laid on the bed, developing some sort of sleep apnea and the resulting insomnia producing interesting astral effects … Astral effects such as being stuck to the ceiling close enough to study all the effects of texture in the white paint while peering down on my pained sutured body next to a little chick in a Moses basket incubating under the weak heat of an ordinary desk lamp. Then came the screaming all night long that comes with the horrible realization on the part of babies that yes, they are stuck in a human body. The human body is dense and full of heavy sensation and there is no getting out of it until death do us part. I think my baby screamed most of the day as well. The world was so unappetizing to him that he quickly developed colic and gastric reflux, which basically meant projectile vomiting every time he was reminded that he lives on Earth now. I had abundantly creamy milk that I was proud as can be to be producing, but the only way I could get it into him was to jog around the 3 rooms tiny rooms of our tiny house bouncing him up and down, practically shaking him. That was the only way he’d stop crying for a second and drink up. I ended up having to give him all that anti-puke medication they give babies, but the only thing that really helped the colic was a natural remedy I mail-ordered from the States that had vegetable carbon in it.  It was quite a sight when he puked that up – black vomit – but for the most part he kept it down and it helped him relax his anguished belly.

After a few months he started settling into his body a bit more and became the most observant baby, always wanting to view the world from the safe space of the snugli pouch I’d strap him into on my chest. He loved for me to take him everywhere I went, to the veggie shop, the chicken shop, up and down the street. This is not common at all here in Mexico. People don’t take small babies out of the house much unless they’re completely covered from public view, in part to protect them from the perceived threat of the elements where a stray draft might touch the baby, but also to protect them from the perceived threat of the evil eye. I later found out the latter perceived threat was actually real, but that is another story. Meanwhile I bedecked (and continue to do so) my baby with red threads and amber, turning his undershirt inside out, following the usual order of anti-evil eye amulets and protective business while showing my baby the world he was so wide-eyed and eager to see. It is odd to look into the eyes of such a small drooling fussing pooping puking creature and imagine him to be inhabited by an angel light being.  I think all humans look at their babies and see little cherubs in their cuteness, yes, but not the vast angelic light being who had come from afar to save my life. That seemed impossible. Only time could tell, and meanwhile I was too busy changing diapers and producing creamy milk to worry too much about the world ending anymore. In fact, I was too busy at that point to think about how I would eventually parent an angelic multi-dimensional being stuck in the body of a little boy. Ah … but time would tell, time would tell. Time would challenge me to buck up and see if I could stick it out long enough without giving up on the "ending" world and give this kid a life, not to mention some answers!

... TO BE CONTINUED .... 

Image #1: The Journey, Acrylic on Canvas, copyright 2013 Emily K. Grieves

Image #2: "There there", mixed media on paper journal page, copyright 2014 Emily K. Grieves

www.EmilyKGrievesArt.com

This Light

This light, this color, this last flare of sunlight on the wall as that incomprehensible daylight savings time ends and causes dusk at 5:45 p.m. I would not have seen it if the ironworker, who makes spiral staircases and other pretty things out of metal, hadn’t knocked on my door to ask for my husband’s cell phone number, thus delaying me filling my bucket with mop water and placing me at my outdoor utility sink just in those two minutes when the wall received illumination, enlightenment. As I finished rinsing out my floor cleaning rag, that warm long light slipped behind the garden wall and down behind hundreds of miles of buildings and highways, hills and earth, slipping away. Indigo dusk clouds descended quickly as a cacophonously beautiful chorus of birds settled into the surrounding tree branches to end their day. 

Within moments of evening happening, fireworks starting popping off at the church next door, a raucous out-of-tune band chimed in as if competing with the birds, and I remembered that October 28^th is the feast day of San Judas Tadeo, the patron saint of desperate cases.  Feeling desperate? Pray to him. Feel like the world is ending, going down with the sun as it slips away, going down in radiation and plastic factory fumes and cell phones and mutant wheat and dead whales? Pray to him. I’ve been feeling apathetically unreligious lately. I’ve even been feeling unspiritual.  Instead, I’ve been holding onto a thread of trying to save myself by applying essential oils liberally to my wrists and snorting that sweet smell. I’ve been watching a big speckled spider with an orange belly build a sticky intricate home on my lavender bush. I’ve been watching a modest unremarkable brown moth act remarkably like a butterfly, fanning its wings in the late afternoon sun while sucking nectar from my lime tree blossoms. And I’ve been thankful for the walls of my house, painted happy rich orange yellow, as if lifting up its face to reflect the setting sun. 

Reread 9 years later: "Mexico City - sushi and world peace"

I love rereading old stories. So in perfect timing, I was browsing through old documents on my hard drive and rediscovered "The Book," a fairly aptly named collection of old emails I sent out to family and friends when I first arrived to Mexico, apt due to its size, not necessarily its writing quality! I realized that the first of these emails, which I titled "Travel Installments" (obviously not realizing that travel would sort of seamlessly merge into living), was written yesterday 9 years ago - October 6, 2004. It was such fun to read. I saw it all now from a different perspective 9 years later. I thought you'd all enjoy it as well. Here it is:

Sent: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 20:13:53 -0500
Subject: Travel installment No. 1 - Mexico City - sushi and world peace

Hello dear ones - just wanted to let you know that I made it! Travel was relatively easy yesterday, in spite of getting randomly selected for all the security searches I possible could have.  Everyone was rather interested in my suitcase full of art supplies, and I practically ended up giving a lesson in linoleum block printing to the folks at the Mexican customs - all in good fun though!  I think it served to distract them from the turkey jerky and dried mangoes I was smuggling in!  I arrived in Mexico City to a cool but humid soft rain, just enough to make the asphalt glisten in the street lights.  

Post-work traffic had cleared out enough to allow breezing through the spaghetti of roadways, crisscrossing every which way. I wondered how people learned how to drive here, how they ever learned the roads, but the taxi driver was confident as he grooved out to some old disco tunes beneath the swaying of his rosary beads dangling from the rear view mirror.  I was a bit punchy and in shock from suddenly being deposited in this place that I've been working my way toward for so long, so when we passed the glowing orange structure of a Home Depot, I didn't take it as a symbol of American consumer imperialism but rather as a bit of comfort and familiarity.  

Arriving at Casa Gonzalez, the lady who greeted me was also familiar - I remembered her smiling face from July, and she graciously helped me struggle with my bags to my room.  I've already learned a new word - pesado - it means heavy, which is what my bags were.  My room is simple, but I love how even in the cheapest simplest rooms, the Mexicans will decorate with lovely painted tiles -little cobalt scrolls and curls to brighten up an otherwise dim and mildewy situation. When I ventured out for dinner, I was so thankful to already be familiar with the streets.  I headed down a few blocks to a little  pedestrian zone filled with waiters calling me into their restaurants and I decided to take the feeling of back-home comfort a little further and went to Mr. Sushi. A little udon noodles, avocado rolls and green tea can go a long way!  I think I'll eat there again tonight, and maybe give the tempura a try. Hey, I´ll have plenty of time to eat tortillas in the future - got to make the most of Japanese while I have it!

Today, I awoke under the full effect of altitude sickness.  I felt like there was a truck parked on top of me, with a dose of dizziness and queaziness along for the ride.  I forgot that I was suddenly at 7000-something feet, which is a walloping for my little sea-level body.  When I finally rallied up around noon, and managed to get myself out for a cappuccino with cassis liqueur in it, I finally hit the metro for the purpose for which I had come - to visit the Basilica of Guadalupe.  I had the same experience I had back in July with being the only blonde on the entire metro system. If they weren't checking me out overtly, then the locals were doing a little furtive sideways glance, probably just asking themselves what the hell I was doing there.  I have yet to figure out how other foreigners travel about Mexico City.  

At the Basilica, I was pretty much also the only foreigner there, except for a few photo-takers.  I always have a bit of an internal conflict when I enter a Catholic church, feeling like an impostor in a place where perhaps I shouldn't be, not knowing whether to go through some parroted motion of crossing myself, or just do my own sort of prayer of asking for entry.  But then if I don´t cross myself, my mind thinks that then I´ll be revealed for who I truly am, that somehow I don´t belong. So I always hesitate at the entryway, but once I cross over and feel welcomed into the sanctuary by the powers that are beyond my mind´s questions, well, then it doesn't matter anymore. I lit candles for everyone I know, for all the little prayers and big blessings, and I lit a candle for everyone I don´t know, for the vision of peace blossoming out across the globe, praying that it come soon, during our time here. 

I began my slow climb up the hill behind the new Basilica, up to the cerro where Guadalupe appeared, where the Divine Mother has lived in the center of the Earth since the beginning of time and through all the passing cultures who have recognized her there.  I walked past vendors hawking polaroids and rosaries, past young couples shielding their new babies from the sun in thick blankets, made my way up the curved stairs to my friends the Archangels who guard the top, who gaze out upon the world as sentinel and messenger of the Divine.  Ah, there was Gabriel, who was my guide this whole time, who brought me here with strict and gentle coaxing. It was like seeing a brother again.  

As I approached the very top, the blessed church with the most amazing mosaic ever, where I had been enraptured, besprinkled with holy water and visions last time, I discovered to my dismay that it was closed! A big neon orange sign was handwritten and crookedly taped to the door - Cerrado para remodelacion!  I wasn't sure what to do at first - here I was approaching one of my most holy of holies, with milagros in hand for offering and thanks, and I find a massive door in front of my face.  I guess Source is always testing us, so I just stood right in front of that door, and imagined myself inside, imagined the mosaic dove beaming its light and life blood upon me, imagined myself in the Center of all the power of La Virgencita.  And wouldn't you know it, it worked.  La Virgencita is after all larger than any stone walls or sparkling decorations.  She is at the source of life itself.  So after quite an altering experience, I humbly left my milagros on the rim of a stone font to the right of the door, not having anything to which to pin them, and wondered if pigeons would be attracted to the gold and carry them away, carrying my prayers into the wind, to be better heard I suppose.

Well, it is sushi time now, so I must depart (also because this ain't California anymore, and people can smoke wherever they damn well please, including in internet cafes!).  Tomorrow I will make my way to Teotihuacan, where the real work begins, you know, of letting go of my stories and mental structures, and reclaiming the true essence of who I am - just a little light effort, that´s all!  Wish me light! So much love to you all, and I will be in touch when I can!
Blessings and love,
Emily

Dreaming with Creation

I think it is a blue moon. It is beautiful, ripe and full, like a juicy guava rolling up the horizon, and the night is mellow and tempered, a well-lit break from weeks of chilly rain. I seem to always write on the last day of leading a journey here in Teotihuacan, precisely when I feel most tired by five days of roasting under the sun and guiding the willing and trusting people who’ve shown up here through the mysteries of ancient pyramids and into their own souls. But it is also when I feel most full of creative energy, buzzing from my dance with the refined energy and vibrations in that great sacred city, very much alive in spite of its “ruined” appearance today 1500 or 2000 years after its construction. I also feel very much alive.

Today I am inspired. I am inspired by the moon and her gleaming face watching over our fire as we burn prayers up to her and into the starry fabric of deep sky beyond. I am inspired by the sun blinking at me like God’s eye, a multicolored mandala sunbow as the iris, watching our work for hours in the pyramids. I am inspired by how lush and rich a cactus garden can be, surreal life forms offering us flowers and fruit grown from thorns, and I am inspired by climbing into the earth under the garden into dark caves where women can drum and sing, scream their pain into the soil and stone, and emerge healed, eyes bright and shining, faces glistening with sweat like diamonds reflecting sunlight. I am inspired, I am humbled by the power in the act of a woman taking pen or paintbrush in hand, stepping into the river of words and images, and allowing the current to wash over them, allowing themselves to be swept away, allowing the words and images to flow down their hands and out their pens and brushes into form.

I am inspired by creation, as if I could hold in my awareness for a tiny moment all of Creation, Creator, as if it were like this: In spirit I rise. I am light of new fire, eternal, always old. I am your heart expanded into all places, all hearts, all breaths, all motion, all sight. I am descended and ascended. It begins with you for we are here. We are here and there is only the height of the night for as far as you can feel with your heart, and there is only the bright shimmer of all the suns that are your cells. The grass blades sway with baubles of flower petals, purple and laughing at your small stories of what is, for the flowers are universes in themselves. They are reflections of galaxies made small enough for you to understand that everything petaled out from center, great sparks of pollen seeding life for lifetimes, millennia in one second. The veins in the leaves, in your bodies, in your currents of water, and rivers of stars all lead life back to the heart of it all, one great pulsing heart beating at the center of it all, beating and pulsing life into the center of it all where you are. Here you are.

Image: Sunbow/Sundala over Temple of Quetzalcoatl, Teotihuacan, 2012, photo by Emily K. Grieves

A Good Crop of Hair

I found six gray hairs on my head this morning. Actually I didn’t find them. My husband’s cousin did. We were standing on the street after dropping off our son at school when his cousin pulled up on his bike to chat a bit. He was looking at me in such a way that I thought I must be positively gleaming in the sunlight, not having showered, no make-up, without having styled my hair as usual, old funky glasses on instead of contact lenses – I was plain Jane after a late night and an allergy morning, dragging myself out of bed, dragging the kid out of bed and off to school. So the cousin nudges my husband, and says “Hey check out Emily’s hair.” My husband then looks, fascinated as if my tight schoolmarm bun (ubiquitous hairdo for the un-showered) had sprouted antennae, or as if a butterfly had landed on my head. Then they both start laughing, in a “neener-neener-neener” kind of way. Now granted, my husband is completely salt and pepper going fast to the side of salt at age 31, so he probably felt pretty righteous about it. But as I began to frantically pat at my hair, I could only think, what? Do I have a bat on my head? A spider? A cockroach? Or god forbid, a scorpion, this at the forefront of my mind because I’d found 2 scorpions in my house in the past 2 days, and for all I knew, a third had hooked itself into my bun. Then they leered at me again, and said you have gray hair! Six of them to be exact! I was like, no way! I’m only 41, almost 42, but the hair stylist told me just 4 months ago that it would be years before I’d have gray hair with my kind of hair and all… yeah, well, how did 6 gray hairs grow in a space of 4 months? What happened to 8 years?

I raced home, not alarmed, but incredulous, to look in the mirror. It took me a second to find the right angle of the light in my bathroom to reproduce the effect of the revealing sunlight, but sure enough, there were 6 gray hairs popping out of my hairline to the right of my part. My hair is what was always termed “dirty dishwater blond” so the gray kind of blends in, but it has that coarse texture that is so typical of the grays. This actually gives me hope that as my hair goes gray, I will finally have a bit of volume to my baby-fine, thin, flat hair. Now I want you to understand that I do not find gray hair alarming or distressing in any way. I stared at it in the mirror totally intrigued. I had a flash of how I would look with passing time with my hair changing a little bit more with each year until completely gray in some far away time of my life. I would wiser. I would look more grounded. I would look more responsible, more credible, more respectable. I would look more artistic, more creative. I would look like a wild wise woman, slowly making my way to cronedom and elderhood. I would match crazy colored glasses to my gray hair, big dangly earrings, and vivid wacky clothes just to make people look at me and notice my gray hair, my hard-earned new “wise” status. I would be one those “groovy” older women. Of course I mostly wear big dangly earrings already, but that’s beside the point. I think of women I know who have gray hair and while most women seem to react to the growth of it as something to be summarily covered up and hidden and dyed into oblivion, the women who surrender to their fabulous gray hair are some of the most beautiful women I know, and they fit exactly the picture of how I imagine myself with a full head of gray hair. They are women I admire, respect, look up to, believe to be wise, more grounded and mature in their creativity, their spirituality, their relationships, and their work.

Upon discovering my gray years, I went out to my garden for a bit and spent a while plucking seeds off my dried up cilantro – coriander, those aromatic little baubles that I can either plant to make more cilantro or grind up into cooking spices. Then I wandered over to my little bean plants I have been experimenting with and discovered a few dried pods on them, out which, wonder of wonders, came about 20 perfectly formed little black beans, way too few to cook, but plenty to admire, germinated and replant. As I rubbed coriander off the stocks and popped beans out of pods, I thought about how I would count each of my gray hairs over time, until there were too many to count, like an abundant harvest, a good crop, a sign of richness, of sustenance, of a full vibrant life. I will never dye my gray hair.



Image: Detail of "La Familia", Acrylic on canvas, copyright 2010, Emily K. Grieves