Spirit Tapestries

To begin any undertaking, it's auspicious to call upon the elephant-headed lord, the remover of obstacles, Ganesha. He’s is a pretty jolly fellow because one of his lordship activities is to open the way for new ventures, all comings and goings, even just for in the door, or out the door and down the road.

Practically every Hindu taxi driver in India has a picture of Ganesha (also known as Ganapati) on the dashboard, along with the deity of choice. These drivers know that before you pray to Shiva or Lakshmi or Hanuman or any of the gods of the Hindu pantheon, you pray to Ganesha first, because he clears the pathway, even for your worship endeavors. And maybe he’ll even open up the wall-to-wall traffic jam. You never know.

Just to make sure Ganesha hears me, I call on him with this mantra: "Om Sri Maha Ganapatayae Namah."

I’ve recently inserted the keystone into the archway I’ve been building over the last fifty years. The blocks chiseled and carved from years of study and inner work, the mortar a mixture of sand and clay from the countries I’ve lived in, the people I’ve known. Now I walk back and forth under the archway, a bit in awe, that I have indeed set the wedge-shaped stone at the top, in the center, the stone that allows all the bricks to rise into an arch and form a solid portal.

The metaphor of keystone is the story of how this mix in me of artist, writer, astrologer, monastic, spiritual seeker, psychological counselor, hospice volunteer, and traveler finally coalesces.

To start at the end of the tale, I am once again a tapestry weaver, as well as author. For each commissioned tapestry I draw from many threads--shamanic or meditation visions, archetypes evident in the person’s astrological horoscope, knowledge of ancient cultures and mythologies, my psychological studies. Even my self-inquiry while in Hindu ashrams in India and USA informs how I approach a weaving. Perhaps you might say that act of weaving is like an archeological discovery of the soul of my clients, that can be used in the same way as a mandala, something to be contemplated.

Now, about the bricks that form the portal. A Bachelors in Art/​Art History from Mills College. Peace Corps Volunteer working with weavers and spinners in the Peruvian Andes, 12,000 feet above sea level. Master of Fine Arts in Fiber Arts University of Washington and a year-long teaching position there. A Fulbright Grant in Denmark, studying Prehistoric Danish textile techniques to incorporate into my tapestries.

A spiritual emergency while in Copenhagen led me to study yoga and meditation there, because I’d heard that through yoga one can learn all about the self.

Back in the USA, I taught fiber arts at Moore College of Art, encouraging students, empowering them to rise to who they were as artists. At that time, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant awarded me the chance to study Tantric art, to delve deeper into this yoga that promised to bring me to center of myself, that had touched me deep enough for me to know it could.

I continued to feel pressed to get at the core, a terrible ache or an itch or a sorrow, unreachable, a dark or light force pushing, pulling, wouldn’t let me go. Yet it eluded me. I abandoned my college teaching position, my international exhibiting role, my rise to the top, and took up the life of a monastic at an ashram in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Up at four in the morning, yoga, meditation, scripture study, gardening, cleaning latrines, scrubbing pots, baking bread, austerities of fasting and silence, tapestry weaver-in-residence, and learning to teach all that I was taught. Highest joy and deepest despair, I found there. My emotional pendulum swings did not stop—only for those brief, timeless pauses in eternity, and then again, back and forth.

After a few years I got thrown out of the Pennsylvania ashram--too independent, too out-spoken, too observant of abusive transgressions on the part of the bogus guru, too angry, too sad, too unfulfilled. Booting us out was how that American guru dealt with those of us she didn’t know how to handle.

As soon as I got tossed out of the ashram, I opened my own yoga and meditation center in Tucson, Arizona. I started out with a rental space and an ad in the Penny Saver for yoga classes. Eventually I bought an adobe home with an enormous “great room,” perfect for classes, on three acres of land in the Catalina Foothills, with a resident great horned owl that hooted in the night, a Siamese cat that climbed giant saguaro cactus, and a jovial black old-English Sheep dog mix. I trained several yoga teachers, held workshops, worked with medicine women, hosted trance mediums and psychics, and took visiting friends on shamanic adventures into the desert.

While running the yoga center I studied for a Masters in psychological counseling and opened a private practice. To find out how to go deeper with clients and with myself, I completed certification in Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful technique for entering altered states of consciousness, with Stan Grof. At that time, I also did a round with 12-step programs, wondering if dealing with adult children of alcoholic issues was the key to my recurring unrest; in some ways it was. After several years, still not quite “there” with my inner probing, I longed to move to the ocean, to perhaps wade in and loose myself into Neptune's realm. But instead I sold my yoga center and moved to another desert, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and opened a counseling practice.

In Santa Fe I met a bona fide guru, the Indian humanitarian Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi), also known as the hugging saint. I had wanted nothing more with gurus. But with Amma I found myself dissolved in longing for truth and inner peace, and for bathing in an ocean of love. She embodied all of these qualities.

After meeting Amma, I put everything in storage and took off for her ashram in India for four months, and spent months at a time there every year for the next ten years, including following her tours through Australia and around the USA. In the midst of all the traveling, I eventually moved into Amma’s ashram in Santa Fe, in the foothills, and lived there for five years along with twelve other Amma devotees.

In 2003, feeling burned out and disenchanted with the down-sides of ashram living, I left the Amma Center of New Mexico, with all its beauty and sorrow, and moved to Maine, near Acadia National Park, to the ocean, to moisture, and to the pleasure of meandering down wooded trails, along lake shores and streams.

When that inner gnawing and emotional turmoil re-surfaced, including thoughts of merging into the sea before my time, I entered counseling with a psychologist of Jungian persuasion--a perceptive, non-egoistic, gentle, no-nonsense man, who knew how to listen well, and used my horoscope as his map. I did sand tray work, dream work, art therapy, and a down-to-earth, practical, behavioral psychology.

From him I learned how to stop escaping into spirituality and the highs of it. I found out that striving for enlightenment didn't need to be a desperate grind, but a quiet underpinning. I learned how to remain inside my body, to sit and breathe into my feelings, no matter how painful, and to let all of life live inside of me and run through me, like a river.

The whole mix of me feels interwoven now, and the keystone in place—-the tapestry weaving that expresses the all of who I am. Yes. Finally the portal, the archway is complete. I still get up at four in the morning to do my spiritual practices, except on lazy mornings when five or five-thirty feels about right. Then, filled with anticipation and wonder at what might appear under my fingers as I weave, I sit on the bench at my loom, in my meditation room, creating tapestries for others, and then writing the stories.

Who knows what the future will bring. It's all a mystery.

This site is dedicated to my guru Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (known also as Amma or Ammachi)