Build Altars

By guest blogger Emily K. Grieves

I am in the final days of finishing up 21 paintings for a solo exhibit of my work at the Museo Gonzalo Carrasco at the Casa de Cultura in nearby Otumba. It’s a huge deal for me. I only ever had a solo show once before, at the lovely Art House Gallery in San Francisco when fellow guest-blogger Mary Swanson kindly gave me the opportunity back in 2003. It rocked my world, set a fire under my butt, made me think outside the box, and I was so proud of the completed show even as I imploded from the tightly held container of so much creation closing at the end of it. Then I moved to Mexico, painted on walls, and studied so much Teotihuacano imagery and Catholic religious art that I was no longer sure of what I wanted to paint or how to paint it.

A big period of limbo began where, sure, I painted lots of little things to sell, but nothing that really fulfilled me or felt like it had been created in a grand download from the divine. Oh, and I had this human baby to take care of. The human baby took over all of my creative energy and time. Oh, and my husband and I built 2 houses in a space of 2 years … that consumed huge amounts of creative energy and time as well. Painting was this little worm in my brain that ate at me, and I’d occasionally walk past my washing machine, past the laundry lines in the dark low-ceilinged room that is my “studio” and look at the forlorn empty easel. And no ideas or images would ever come. I’d always walk away and dream up some excuse, all the while whining about how “I want to be an artist.” Then I thought, damn it, I have to put my nose to the grindstone, I was teaching shamanic creativity workshops after all – those workshops were as much for me as they were for the dear participants who showed up to them.

The first little baby step to waking up my creative flow was when I had the opportunity through a group of friends (together with our dear Heather Sullivan!) to study Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with Wolves. I never made it past chapter 4, I think – fascinating book but so dense with juicy information that you really have to take it slow, but what I read was enough to give me the nugget I needed, which was the concept of taking something seemingly dead and breathing life back into it. Like an act of magic, you place a hard bean in water, and from within its dead shell a little sprout begins to unfurl with new life. You can breathe life into the bones. This idea inspired me and pushed me to create the first painting of this current body of work I will be presenting, entitled exactly that, “Breathing into the Bones.”

Then on June 12, 2011, my father-in-law’s father passed away, and I swear his soul arranged this set-up where the gallery director of the Casa de Cultura sat down next to me at the wake. It must have been about midnight or so, because the rosaries were over and everyone was just sitting in the presence of the casket, chatting quietly and sipping coffee to pass the time. The director and I got to talking about a lot of interesting things and he asked me if I would be interested in doing a solo show. I said, gulp, “sure,” in my insecure little “I’m not a real artist” voice. He said, great, it’ll be in February. Oh wonderful, plenty of time to paint 21 paintings. I think I waited until about Sept. to get started, and the less time I’ve had as the calendar days tick by the more productive I’ve become – fascinating how that happens! And fascinating how a sad event like a wake could give life to me, breathing into the bones of my creative self in the presence of a very real death.

In July, not long after the wake, two things happened that solidified my “artistness” and eventual capacity to bust out these paintings. The first was that my husband gave me a great piece of furniture for my studio, a big cupboard to store all of my supplies that had been on the floor in cardboard boxes. This awesome gift motivated me to organize the studio, clean it up, hang curtains dividing the room between laundry room and studio, and generally gave me the thumbs-up from my husband – we all need a little nudge, a little “it’s ok” from our partners to boost our confidence sometimes. The second thing that happened was a Shamanic Creativity journey I led here in Teo with my friend Iva Peele, which was majorly creatively juicy, and I had an “a-ha” moment during it holding up 2 special crystals that one of the participants had just given me, when all the images “downloaded” into me. I just knew it was what had happened. Sounds kind of science fiction (or fantasy!) but I truly knew that all the images came streaming out of wherever images come from (God, Life, Light, the Heart of Creation) through the crystals and into me simply because I put the intention out there for it and asked for the images. Ask and ye shall receive. I couldn’t have told you in the moment what the images were but I knew they were in me now, and I would one by one be able to bring them into life and into being. And that is exactly what happened. Now when I’d go into the studio, things began to flow, I’d see the image forming on the canvas almost as soon as I’d start. As soon as I would come close to finishing one canvas, I’d start to get the image for the next one. I’d lie in bed at night, and I’d see the finished piece I’d work on the next day.

So now I am days away from taking the pieces to the museum for their installation, and I’ve been pulling weeks of all-nighters to finish on time. But fatigue never felt so good. I took about half the paintings to be framed, a luxury in which I have never been able to invest, but prices are accessible here and these paintings deserved frames. My husband helped me pick out nice frames because I couldn’t even see straight anymore. When I didn’t go right away to pick them up, the framer showed up at my house with all the pictures in his truck, having asked around the village where the gringa lives to find me. He said he brought them because he was worried about having them in his workshop, but I think he also was so proud of how the frames work with the paintings that he wanted me to see them right away.

I’m not finished painting, but I will complete it all. On February 12, when I am at the reception for the show, a dream will have come true to see all of my paintings hung on the wall, to hear the pride in my son’s voice when he announces to strangers “My mama is a painter.” I will give thanks to all those who made the moment possible along the way, because there are many. I will also thank myself for a moment, take a moment to be proud of myself, to acknowledge that I persisted, that I kept at it, that I pushed myself those late nights, that I went for it, that yes, I could breathe into the bones and bring them back to life. I think this moves me because it means we all can. If I can do it, you can do it, we all can bring dead bones back to life. There is hope. We don’t have to ever give up. And even if those paintings just have a public life for three weeks and never see the walls of a gallery ever again, it still will have been worth it, because I love each one like a baby for the mere fact that it took a breath of life.

Image: The Queen of Heaven, Acrylic on canvas, Emily K. Grieves, 2012 (you may remember my photo from last month’s blog … gratitude to my model, hoping to have honored you by breathing life back into your bones and feathers …)

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By guest blogger Emily K. Grieves

We are in the doorway to a new year, 2012, a year that many people have awaited with great anticipation, emotion, worry, and excitement for a long time. And many people have many different versions of why they have waited so anxiously for this year … because on December 21 the Mayan calendar ends. This is according to some versions of the calendar, there being a fair amount of controversy surrounding it. I suppose it wouldn’t be a great spiritual event if it wasn’t surrounded in controversy and mystery of the unknown. Ancient oracles and prophesies have foretold big planetary events for the year. The planet and the sun will align with the center of the galaxy as only happens every 26,000 years. The poles will shift. Controversy over the potential of catastrophic planetary events aside, it appears that there is consensus that beginning in 2012, we have an opportunity to choose a new path into the future, to awaken, to leave suffering behind and create our own paradise by changing our perspective. We can choose to change our ways of living, and above all, change our ways of loving, acknowledging our fellow humans and our planetary mother as all part of one source of light and loving each other in accord with this new perspective. 2012 – a year of many questions for which we hope to find answers very soon.

I have been giving it some thought during the holiday season, as Christmas always puts me in a nostalgic sentimental sort of mood. Here in Mexico one of the primary holiday celebrations is a novena (nine day period) of daily processions prior to Christmas called the “posadas.” Every evening the familiar church bells rings happily at 7 p.m. to call people to church to accompany the figures of Joseph and Mary, riding on a donkey, through the streets of the village as they look for room at the inn (posada). A litany is sung as “Joseph” knocks on a door asking the inhabitants for shelter. The inhabitants deny him, tell him to go away, tell him they can’t open the door to strangers. As both sides sing back and forth, Joseph convinces the innkeepers that they come in peace, that he brings the Queen of Heaven, Mary, and that the Christ child will be born, until the innkeepers open the doors, inviting the pilgrims in to take shelter. In the street processions, the people living on that street build a shelter of pine boughs, strung with Christmas lights and glittery baubles, to house the saint figures during the evening’s festivities. When all the prayers have been said, songs sung, and candles blown out, the neighbors hand out hot guava sugarcane punch and string up piñatas for the kids to bat away at while folks hang out on the sidewalks.

I really got into this concept of looking for shelter this year in the posadas. I thought about the idea of a pregnant woman riding on a donkey and being denied a place to lie down and give birth. I thought about her husband’s concern, pleading for a safe place for his wife and soon-to-be-born baby. Perhaps the classic Christmas pageant story is nothing more than a wonderful myth, depending on our beliefs, but it is then a myth that has done its job perfectly because it really got me thinking, here on the eve of 2012, about the idea of looking for shelter, of offering shelter, of finding shelter, of birthing within the shelter, the shelter becoming a sanctuary of which others then seek the light. I started thinking of how the Earth, the very planet at the center of all the 2012 mystery, has been our shelter, giving birth to us and nurturing us, but how she also asks us for shelter, how we have denied her, how we awaken to providing her shelter and protection, how she becomes a sanctuary when we honor her light.

Once I thought about the Earth, our Mother, in the context of this little saint Mary figure on a donkey, looking for the posada, I realized we have really got our work cut out for us this coming year. Because while all of my thoughts are symbolically and mythologically grandiose, you know, “behold the revelation,” there is still life on Earth to think about, and that’s where I tend to get all stuck. I can’t quite figure out how to apply all that symbolism of the posadas, of shelter, of protection, of honoring, to real life. It becomes very tricky. We drove to Puebla the other day, a beautiful colonial city filled with art and culture and enough gold-clad churches to be able to visit a different one every day of the year, and I was struck by the contrast of all that finery and all the poverty. Perhaps I don’t notice the beggars in Mexico City as much because it’s a pretty bedraggled place as it is, but Puebla really made the contrast palpable. I’m never quite sure how to handle beggars. If ever there was a loaded trigger for the white middle class person, it’s got to be a small elderly hunched indigenous beggar woman with a tattered reboso wrapped around her head, black penetrating eyes, hitting you with a little plastic dish to guilt you into putting some coins into it. Or maybe she’s not elderly, she’s really young and she has two smudged grubby babies in her lap, and the one year old has already learned to stretch her hand out for the coins. So what do you do? Do you pretend you don’t see them after a while, striding busily down the sidewalk past them all? Or do you pour endless streams of coins into their hands, their aprons, their dishes, praying they’re not part of some beggar-pimp operation that has them enslaved and only gives them food if they make their daily begging quota? Do you deny them shelter? Or do you allow yourself to be convinced that they’re the Queen of Heaven and give them shelter? What do you do?

The Queen of Heaven must have been the woman standing in the intersection in the middle of the night, juggling, with her baby strapped to her chest and her little daughter at her side. She juggled 3 balls with one hand as she clutched her baby with the other, and she sent the 3 year old girl to the cars to collect the coins. She didn’t ever crack a smile, as all her energy was occupied with the seemingly impossible task of not dropping a ball, not dropping the baby, and praying that her little girl would be safe dashing in the dark from car door to car door between several lanes of traffic. No matter how many coins we send into the gap, we can’t stop it up. We can’t give enough shelter, or shelter simply isn’t enough … there has to be more. Our focus has to be not on the shelter, but what we are sheltering – what is worth protecting, what is worth traveling from afar to be in its presence, what is born, who is the child? The star, the light, the promise of 2012 and a new future… The “Christ” light, consciousness, awakening … All I know is that no amount of coins, or lack thereof, can change the light of that little baby looking up at his struggling juggling mother. Nothing can change the light of the little girl glimpsing smiling gringos in the back seat of a van and returning a tiny shy grin. And even that mother, Queen of Heaven, working so hard, has an equal potential of awakening to her inherent light as all the drivers cruising by in their smooth warm cars. If the mother can maintain her focus on 3 balls, a baby, a girl, a hundred cars, and her money, we all surely can maintain our focus on one thing: the light.

Image: Mourning dove, photo, Emily K. Grieves, 2011

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