05.14.2010 | 9:05 pm | Uncategorized
The CV loves the trees! There will be more of this random beauty...
This morning a friend of mine and I drove up to the Hoyt Arboretum to dance the Ceremonial Vehicle in the Redwood grove up there. It was a beautiful morning and the road was clogged with cars and what seemed to be every single stroller in the city of Portland. We found a spot by the side of the road and headed down the Redwood Trail, me in the Vehicle and my friend solicitously warning me of rocks and roots and overhanging branches. Once on the path there were very few people around, and after I got used to the otherworldliness of the view from the Vehicle, and settled in to a slow walking rhythm, it was just us and the trees. And the sun, and the birds, and the breeze. Quiet. The drapery on the Vehicle floated and flapped as the wind took them. The shadow and light from the dance between the trees and the sun gave the inside of the Vehicle a kaleidoscopic beauty. The sound of my feet got loud.
I remember camping in the Sequoias in California when I was a teenager. We got up really early one morning to be in the forest at sunrise. It was magical, even to my self absorbed 15 year old self. My father was so moved by the light slowly growing out of the trees and the trees slowly shaping themselves out of the light that he was brought to tears. He said that he wanted to bring George Winston, a pianist that he loved at the time, to the forest, with his piano to play for the trees. To give something of their own beauty back to those amazing beings.
That’s what I felt this morning in the Arboretum. The Ceremonial Vehicle is many things. Today it was an expression of love to the world that created it. I felt the forest turn towards us as we passed along the trail. There was a mutual recognition going on.
Eventually we ran into some kids on the trail. Three kids, and we actually emerged into them… They stopped in their tracks- bodies, voices, eyes- and we looked at each other as the Vehicle advanced. They didn’t know quite what to do or how to respond, but the shortest one said “cool….” sort of under his breath as we passed by. A man in the Redwoods wanted to take a photo and said, “Gives me goosebumps!”
I know that if I was out walking in the woods and I saw the Vehicle floating towards me through the trees, I would pee myself with delight. I guess that’s my goal, to make people pee with delight, or more politely, ooze delight out of any orifice they choose. Radiate Delight. In one split second attain Delightenment.
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05.5.2010 | 10:41 pm | Uncategorized
Alberta Street, summer 2009
The Ceremonial Vehicle will be making its 2010 debut at and around First Thursday tomorrow night! Look for the Vehicle circumnambulafying around the Everett Street Galleries around about 8:30 or so…
Only the first of what will be a wonderful summer of Ceremonial Vehicular Shennanigans.
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07.30.2009 | 10:19 am | Uncategorized
Ceremonial Vehicle
My favorite thing as a kid was a stick horse that my mother made for me. It was beautiful: brown corduroy with soft dark brown pinto markings, reddish brown yarn mane and exotic silver coins for eyes. There is a photograph of all the kids in my family–cousins, my little brother, myself– lined up biggest to littlest in front of my Grandmother’s house in El Paso, with their new stick horses. I am the biggest. I am also in what I call my “Fully Upright and Locked Position”. My brown pinto is inserted between my legs, also upright, also ready to take off into the sagebrush. I am staring at my horse with a glazed kind of reverence. I am completely in love. That thing my mother had made was fully alive to me, endowed with the speed, grace, power, and beauty of all the horses of my horse crazy dreams. I wound up spending hours in the back yard riding my horse, training it for dressage, hunting, running wild over the hills, charging into battles. Finally I turned 13 and felt the shame of puberty that wouldn’t let me gallop around on a wooden broomstick with a stuffed horse’s head tied to it in full view of other people anymore.
Recently I saw a exhibit of beautiful Japanese Ainu and Northwest Coast Native American ceremonial robes. In front of one robe was a placard that said: “This Ceremonial Robe was danced by _____ at the ________gathering in Vancouver BC, January, 2003.” I left with the image of a garment, a created object, “being danced” by someone at a specific time and place of importance. This phrase wouldn’t leave me. It implied that the robe itself had a unique presence, or intention, that was inherent to it, and needed a human interaction to be expressed.
I have constructed a one person mobile puppet stage called a “bag theater”. It is an object created with the intention to combine my impulses as a performer and my intuitions as a healer. Amazingly, as the theater neared completion I realized that this object was fully endowed with the same sense of presence that I had known in my stick horse and had seen in the ceremonial robes. It is its own entity as surely as a shaman’s drum, or a totem image. I have named it a Ceremonial Vehicle. In traditional cultures the shaman rides a spirit horse to other worlds to confront mysterious powers. Often the shaman literally rides a long board around the room as the spirit rides through dimensions.
The compulsion to mark an object with the signature of a reality that hides behind -shines through- this reality has been with us from the emergence of human life on earth. The need to share intuitions of other realities is a fundamental part of the human experience. Children do it all the time, as do artists, mystics, shamans, and visionaries. Just as I did when flying over the prairies on my beautiful horse, I feel the mystery dancing me as I dance my Ceremonial Vehicle for the benefit of all beings.
www.blessingstonehealing.com
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