07.30.2009 | 10:19 am | Mosey the Midway
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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05.11.2009 | 6:57 pm | Mosey the Midway
“In Coyote is the preservation of the soul. That howl, had I let it rise up into the dark night sky like a prayer, would have grounded me. And at the same time, it would have gotten me out of the house, nose to the ground, loping circles until I found my way. There would have been no map, and I would not have followed any sort of marked route. And it would not have been white tile and gold streets I’d have found. It would have been untrammeled desert– a landscape of faith, desire, and imagination–the landscape of the Other. Scattered across it would be bones, old bones, stained an ancient red. Among them would have been a most original skull, not too large, with a pointed muzzle and sharp teeth. Male or female, it wouldn’t have mattered. It would have been the face of God.
Pray or crawl. I never imagined the choice as anything except either-or. But really, for thousands of years they were one and the same.”
-Trespass: living at the edge of the promised land
by Amy Irvine
I have dreams of ancient bones. The tree of life engraved from the base of the skull branches and flowers over the eye sockets. Tiny triangles mark the lower edges of the eyes, like stylized lashes. An elaborate dragon climbs the spine, his vertebrae and spiny mane wrapping around each stepped joint from sacrum to base of skull. Scrollwork along each fingerbone. Suns, moons, stars, waves, mountains, trees, rivers, tridents, spirals etched into the large bones of the legs, and geometric designs mark the ribs. In places the bones have been stained with color: indigo on the shinbones, ocher and gold on the skull, green along the dragon’s scales. These bones have been carefully parted from the beloved body that held them, cleaned of flesh and sinew, bleached in the sun, incised and chafed and blown on, polished with the oil of loving cheeks and foreheads, sung to, taken to a dark grove and reassembled into a skeleton that could support the body of a God. Those that rubbed and sang and sweated the bones take turns sitting not far from the relic, facing away. The bones uphold the world.
When I dream of transformation, my ribcage is split open, or my skull is bisected (vertically or horizontally, depending on the dream) and the softer parts are removed, wrung out, beaten against trees, soaked in black tea, left to hang dry, given to the animals to eat. And lately there’s a heartbeat that squeezes through me, sometimes matching the beat of my own heart and twisting up my spine like a grinning dragon.
When I ask my body to tell me something, it can only say; I’m old. Older than the earth. At least as old as your immortal soul, that shiny object you are so taken with. I have been here since the beginning before the beginning of time. Come into your bones, and see the Creator delighted with Creation. I uphold the world. You do not have to stand guard over me, except to make your self feel better. I uphold the world. Impale yourself on me. I will not let you go until I bless you. I will not let you go until you let me bless you.
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04.17.2009 | 4:16 pm | Mosey the Midway
Susan singing on You Tube—
Please use the link above, and please comment! The Midway wants your input!!
And may you make YOUR audience ROCK.
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04.14.2009 | 10:58 am | Mosey the Midway
…Here is some great soulful art work by Lester Ancheta. His website is great, and check out all the video clips on his blogpage!
the joyous lake
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03.29.2009 | 10:33 pm | Mosey the Midway
Really I think it is better than doing mushrooms. The hangover is cleaner, though it does the same number on my digestive system, but. In the dark, sweating and drooling (I confess) and stomping and jumping and swooping and bumping into other sweaty divers-in-the-dark for hours, well, that’s some childlike wonder for you. Wonderful things happen to balance, both in it and out of it. Outside of one’s own balance. The crude innocent being that emerges from that place. Not to mention when you end up being gently guided back out into open space after getting a little too groovy with a wall. Not to mention the walls that come and go strictly in your own psychic space. Is this wall inside or outside? Clumsily sometimes just shake and shiver and flap your hands around and notice that you are actually hanging from the ceiling. And that everybody else is up there with you. Or stomp your feet, and pant like an overheated puppy. The drums and your breath and the breath of everyone and the breath of the planet and the beat of the blood in your head and the heat and dissolving and the bruising of feet with stomping. Loosing any sense of where you are, feeling absolutely in place. And when you come to rest, the tenderness of your body, and the bodies of your companions. Newly hatched from the shell you tore open together. May I experience the essence of myself, in body, in joy. May I be brave to experience myself in the presence of others. May I be a loving witness to the unfoldment of others. May we all know peace. May we all rock.
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03.24.2009 | 8:42 pm | Mosey the Midway
The fields are snowbound no longer;
There are little blue lakes and flags of tenderest green.
The snow has been caught up into the sky–
So many white clouds–and the blue of the sky is cold.
Now the sun walks in the forest,
He touches the boughs and stems with his golden fingers;
They shiver, and wake from slumber.
Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls.
Yet is the forest full of the sounds of tears…
A wind dances over the fields.
Shrill and clear the sound of her waking laughter,
Yet the little blue lakes tremble
And the flags of tenderest green bend and quiver.
-Katherine Mansfield
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03.19.2009 | 10:43 am | Mosey the Midway
He must have fallen off the back of some old truck, ripped off of his tree trunk on its way to a sawmill. It was our first night in the Altai, and it was almost dark. The town was dustyish and biggish and soviet plopped down in a low mountain valley. Altai Gornaisk. Or Ooh La La in the local dialect I was told. A few of us were walking down the side of the highway back to the new little hotel/hostel owned by proud Altai folk. There was the circus strangeness in my head at the miles between me and home and the fat man by the river who hugged me three times when he found out I was from America. I picked him up off the gravel roadside without thinking–I’m a beach comber that way. I held on long enough to get him into the light and wash the dirt off of him, then oh, how I crowed! Having fallen in love with the Altai Larch trees I found out that he was indeed of the larch, a protector. He smiles at me and I am overcome with gratitude and memory. The absolute benevolence of his mustache. There is a universe behind his half hidden face. I have seen it, flown through it, reached out and been embraced. When I ask him what he wants to say, he says nothing. But his smile says all things come to their end. Then you might get picked up brushed off and loved beyond anything you could have imagined.
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03.19.2009 | 10:39 am | Mosey the Midway
Line Drawing of Larch Spirit
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03.15.2009 | 9:21 pm | Mosey the Midway
The Midway
Color
Oompahs
Cotton Candy Cacophony
Excitement
Excrement, greed, skill
Expansion
Mothers
Molesters
Beauty, BBQ, diesel fuel
Dust, deformities, crushed grass, sunset
Rotgut, elixirs, hope
Violence, cigar smoke
Shrieks
Crying
Lovers Erotica
Exhausted carnies, bitter disappointment
Dancing, vomit, laughter
Speed
Hurdy gurdy
Sweaty dingy red velvet
Carousel horses, twinkly lights, the past
Cheap perfume, freaks, fried food, sales pitches, deals on the side, emptiness
Sentimentality Lies Mirrors Awe
Fireworks, death, paste and tinsel, dreams and glee, glamor, broken gaskets
Axle grease, callused hands, starry eyes
Popcorn Bribes
Vague notions, sex, songs, stink, mediocrity, cynicism, tradition, virtuosos
Bad breath
Innocence
In The Dark
The Light
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03.11.2009 | 5:09 pm | Mosey the Midway
Welcome to the Vibrational Midway
– Lightning fast transformation is the stock in trade of the traveling show, and this one is no exception. As is common in the circus world, the Vibrational Midway rises from the ashes of Be and Special K’s Cosmic Sideshow. We honor the past, even if it was only yesterday, and hurtle towards the yet-to-become.
The Vibrational Midway is dedicated to LIFE. We are all here to experience our being: the totality of creation. Shiny distractions and deep space, shape shifters, alternate realities, universal intelligence, hucksters and angels. They can all be found on the Midway.
As Above, So Below.
Love Has No Opposite.
I am a child of God
Who believes we are all children of God
And we are part of each other.
May we all know peace.
-Thich Nhat Hahn
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