A Season for Contemplative Action

Japanese Crane 

Here in the northern hemisphere, Winter Solstice approaches like the whispering sound of bird wings. Soon we will teeter on the edge - the shortest day and longest night  - before falling into the infinity of returning light. Winter Solstice is my favorite holiday because I am in love with light and the silent moment by moment increase of light fills me with hope precisely when I need it most – during the cold and darkness of winter.

Moreover, the solstice is that moment in time when the opposites are held in tension: light and dark, long and short, winter in the northern hemisphere and summer in the southern hemisphere, youth and age. Each has a unique energy. It reminds me, a lover of light and of uplifting experiences, that life is about holding the opposites in the sort of dynamic balance one sees in certain Japanese prints.

For a quarter of a century I have been celebrating a ritual of 12 Days of Christmas – a time of gifts of self affirmation as I celebrate the divine child within each of us. This year the season of the solstice has announced itself differently, calling me to celebrate a Season of Contemplative Action.

Freedom of Religion is protected by
the US Bill of Rights.

A Season of Contemplative Action

I heard this call when a certain self-proclaimed demigod and presidential candidate denied a fundamental underpinning of American democracy – the right of religious freedom. The first European pilgrims to the shores of North America came because they sought freedom from religious persecution. Thus they enshrined religious freedom in our Bill of Rights.

When I read that this man - I refuse to lend energy to him by even saying or writing his name - is advocating the exclusion of Muslims from our multi-cultural society, I said, “Maybe I should retire to a contemplative convent and pray for the souls of such deranged fear mongers.”

Then I realized that as a solitary person, I already live in a place of contemplation. I do not need to go somewhere else to perform acts of contrition. Thus began the making of lists for a season of contemplative action.

Photo from Central Asia Institute's Pennies for Peace.
The education of girls is the surest road to peace.

12 Life Affirming Acts

Honoring others with gifts of gratitude for their presence in my life and for the gift of life on earth

Probably because I have had a gratitude practice for a number of years, it is fairly easy to see the small acts I can do to honor nature, my neighbors, my family, my friends, and benevolent organizations such as Central Asia Institute and The Malala Fund. Many of these acts - such as feeding the birds, caring for a public garden, and putting up lights that my neighbors can enjoy - give me joy as well.

12 Calls to Turn My Life Around

 Standing present to my shortcomings

Acknowledging my personal transgressions is a difficult list to face. Clearly I harbor harsh feelings toward political reactionaries and fundamentalist religious fanatics. Though I know better, I still pollute my body with sugar and dairy products, by not drinking enough water, and not eating enough green leafy vegetables. I have a terrible habit of having my head in the clouds when I walk, leading to four falls in the past decade. Not to mention my lack of patience with rule-bound ‘service’ providers and institutional bean counters. Many of you could provide me with more suggestions for how I can become a better member of the human Community!

Photo from Central Asia Institute's Pennies for Peace 
program in which elementary children collect pennies
and send them to help girls receive an education.

12 Calls for Intercession

Dedication to the alleviation of suffering near and far  

Your list of places, people and issues that require attention and care would no doubt be slightly different than mine. But perhaps we can agree that it was heartening that 195 nations around the world signed the Paris Accord, committing to reduce the amount of carbon with which we are polluting planet earth. Having Russia, Syria, United States, Arabia, and Iran agree to look for middle ground for ending the civil war in Syria is certainly a welcome sign toward peace on earth.

What would be on your lists? During this time in which darkness submits to light may each of us contribute to ...

Peace on Earth

Good Will Toward All

A Sense of Inevitability

The earliest known illustration of the Silk Road. A caravan is crossing the desert
of Chinese Turkistan, the camels laden and the merchants on horseback.
This is from the Catalan Atlas, a Spanish illuminated world map prepared in 1375.

When we listen to an enthralling symphony or see an inspiring piece of visual art, we have a sense of inevitability about these creative expressions. They could not be otherwise than as we experience them in the moment. In fact what we experience was not inevitable but is rather the result of a composer or artist being willing to take an arduous and even torturous path of trial and error.

In the eight-year process of developing his inevitable sounding fifth symphony, Beethoven produced 17 sketches for one section alone. From these he chose the one he felt worked best. He also created three different endings. He thought his first draft of the ending was too brief. So he did a longer version. That did not work either. But it convinced him that the problem with his initial short version was that it was too long! So he created an even shorter ending, the one that we hear today.

Persia Today

Laying out possible images for use on the Iran part of
the Southwest Asia alcove of Eve's Imprint.

A couple of weeks ago I began working on the Arabia and Iran section of the Southwest Asia alcove of Eve’s Imprint. I posted that moment on my newly created Facebook page. The Arabia and Iran section will hang to the left of the India and Pakistan section I began several months ago. Remember my tiger? For Iran, I had located maps, pottery sherds, and rock art.

Iran is a remnant of the vast Persian empire that once covered most of the Middle East as well as parts of India and Central Asia. The geographic region of present day Iran was one of the first stops after Arabia as our ancestors migrated out of Africa. Its rock art goes back to Paleolithic times. For me the pottery sherds represent the Neolithic revolution of agricultural settlements. Right next to Mesopotamia, Iran played a role in the spread of agriculture to Eurasia. During the middle ages, Iran was an important way station along the extensive Silk Road, resulting in the spread of Zoroastrianism which has several contemporary derivatives.

The Technique of Image Transfers

A page from LiDona's Book of Errors showing two of my
transfer experiments.

Because I want Iran to have a sense of fragility, I decided to use transfers of my selected images. However, my first attempt to transfer a map fragment showing a Silk Road caravan was only mildly successful and I ended up scrubbing it out. This experience led me to pull out LiDoña’s Book of Errors, a sketchbook in which I recorded a series of experiments.

Materials used for transfers.

Reviewing my transfer experiments helped me recall critical aspects:

• type of medium - Extra Heavy Gel works best
• size of the piece being transferred - smaller - about 3” x 3” – rather than larger allows greater control in assuring complete contact between the image and the gelled surface
• type of brush for applying gel - an old bristle brush with lots of broken ends seems to work best
• amount of gel applied - a liberal amount applied to both the surface receiving the transfer and the image being transferred
• how to insure complete contact - cover the image with a paper towel and brayer over it
• how the process sets up - a wet cloth over the transfer enables the transfer of the ink into the gel
• how long it needs to dry once the cloth is removed - until the paper is completely dry

• how best to remove the paper on which the image is printed - a slightly wet toothbrush does the heavy lifting and rubbing one’s fingers removes the remaining fuzz. 

So I made a new attempt. This time I did two small transfers – images of two Iranian pottery sherds.

I love the soft green in these two potter sherds.

Now the Fun Begins

These were more successful so I decided to cut my Silk Road Caravan in half to have smaller pieces with which to work. In doing so I decided to eliminate the Chinese-looking men behind the camels.

A transfer gives a mirror image. Look at the caravan above
to see how these camels were headed originally.

The transfer of the camel half of the image came out pretty well, but the half with the horses did not work. Even following optimum procedures, sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t! As I reviewed my results, it occurred to me that I would like for the camels and the horses to be headed in different directions. What if the camels appeared to be coming from Arabia and the horses appeared to be coming from India and China?

Although I wanted a fragile look, this was a
bit more than I was looking for.

I decided to paint over my transfers and make another attempt. Luckily, I had made several copies of the Caravan in slightly different sizes since I wasn’t sure what I would need. I decided to have the transfer of the camels image touch not just Iran, but also Arabia and Iraq, the teal area that I will include in the Near East alcove of Eve’s Imprint. I really liked this result.

I like the way the teal surface under the left part of the transfer
creates a soft green similar to that in the pottery sherds.

I should mention that when you do transfers, they appear in reverse of the image you are transferring. In order to visualize what I will get with the transfers, I use a tracing of my basic composition. By reversing the tracing paper and placing my images underneath, I am able to get some idea of the result I’m going to get. This is especially crucial the further you go since there is less space with which to work.

In the Iran section, you can see that I drew around the
transfers that had already been done so I could tell where
to put the rock art.

Changing Direction

In order to get my horses going in the opposite direction, I scanned a smaller version of the Caravan image, took it into PhotoShop, and flipped the image horizontally. When I printed out the flipped image on my home printer, it appeared too light to transfer well. So I opened it in Preview where I discovered that I could do several of the things that I normally use PhotoShop to do, including color saturation. For good or ill, I now had an image that was slightly different in size and in color tones from the one I used for the camels.

You can see the Chinese men I eliminated behind the camels.  

Using the tracing paper to help me with placement, I decided to have the horses transfer overlap the lower pottery sherd and Pakistani rock art.

Remember that with the transfer my horses are now going
in the other direction.

Hodgepodge of Images

Next I turned to transfers of Iranian rock art. Using the tracing paper composition was essential in placing these transfers. You can see that for now Iran is a hodgepodge of images. I don’t think I’ve done 17 sketches yet, but I may well go beyond that before this area is resolved. Before I can tell what is needed to bring Iran together I need to go on to Arabia and the Horn of Africa.

A rock art human now stands between the camels and the horses.
I don't care for the yellow behind the horses so I will have to
figure out how I'm going to change it.

In speaking of the number of materials he tried for producing electricity, Thomas Edison said, I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. Who knows? It may take 10,000 attempts to get the Southwest Asian alcove of Eve’s Imprint to the coveted sense of inevitability.

Love Is Blind

Red lines show female migration routes from tracing mitochondrial DNA.
Blue lines show male migration routes from tracing the male chromosome.

Our Maiden Migrations

Following the first human migrations across the southern end of the Red Sea about 75,000 years ago, some of our ancestors settled in Yemen which at that time was greener than it is today. Others sailed on along the coasts and again, some people settled on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula while others sailed on to the Persian Gulf.

I don’t know how many generations these migrations took, but there was a continuous pattern of both settlement and further travel: those who stayed and those who moved on. The settlers inhabited the land adjacent to the coastline and began venturing inland. The travelers sailing along the coastline reached what is now Pakistan, India and India’s neighboring islands. From there they went on to Southeast Asia. No one knows what navigation tools beyond the stars and oral history were available to those who first took to the sea.

Islands As Steppingstones

Many generations passed and the ice age had to end before Europe and Asia were reached. As populations expanded, islands such as Ceylon just southeast of the tip of India and the Nicobar islands farther to the southeast became trading crossroads. Others such as the Maldives to the southwest and the Andaman to the southeast were sparsely settled and remained quite wild. In creating the pieces for the Southwest Asia alcove of Eve’s Imprint, I decided that including the islands would help people grasp the waterborne nature of these first ancestral migrations. 

Map of Sulawesi serves as cover of Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond. 

Because I’m in love with the maps in Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond and the multiple and changing perceptions they reflect, I decided to use a variety of maps on the island panels surrounding India. The maps can be confusing because there was no standard orientation. Some early map makers put east at the top, some put south, and some put west. Many mapmakers used the ocean and sea areas on their maps for depictions of the objects being traded. Others emphasized the boats and ships carrying trade goods. Still other mapmakers pictured the winds that were critical for boats to move.

I’m sure that during the Middle Ages when these maps were made there were farmers in the fields of Europe, the Near East, and China who did not know of the existence of these maps and the new worldview they presented. Most people went about their lives as they always had, some believing the earth sat on the back of a large turtle and others that at a certain point ships would fall off the edge of what they perceived as a flat earth. But for traders, sailors, and an educated elite these new art forms were as provocative as Paleolithic cave paintings had been for people of that era.

I worked first on the island of Ceylon, contemporary Sri Lanka, using a map that depicted products and landscape. The colors went well with the shaded part of my tiger (map of Goa). Sri Lanka has a beautiful tear shape that appeals to me and I wanted to emphasize that so I blew up the map to make it fill the 4” x 4” panel. 

The later addition of a blue river, an elephant, and a touch of green from the Sulawesi
map, linked this panel to the one to its right and brought this panel to life. 

To give the panel some dimensionality, I took another smaller map of Ceylon and placed it on top of the blown up one. I knew the composition was too “flat” but I left it while I worked on the others.

I spent a lot of time finding maps and images of the Maldives, a series of small islands to the southwest of India that are disappearing as a result of climate change. After several compositions came and went, I decided to use a blowup of one map as a base and to cut out pieces from a lower scale blowup of another map to put on top of the monster map.

Rising water due to climate change is covering
the Maldives. I wanted this 4"x 6" panel to suggest the
beauty and cultural diversity that are being lost.

I found a tiny snapshot of a traditional Maldivian boat sailing on the Indian Ocean. I really liked the graceful shape of the boat and the sail that mirrored the tear shape of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). I blew that snapshot up 800% to get the boat to be the size I wanted. I debated about using a tracing of the boat or drawing and painting it, but decided against those ideas. The base map for the Maldives blends nicely with colors in my India tiger.   

To the east of India and lying along the coast of Burma (Myanmar) and Malaysia are the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. They may have been part of what were called the East Indies; that’s a guess, I really don’t know. Early mapmakers were confused about where one set of islands ended and the next ones began. I found three maps that I liked and decided to use all three on this panel, one on top of the other. The base map is the same one that served as the base for my India tiger.

The pale map with colored edges shows the coastline best
while I liked the drawing of the islands (pink) from another map best.

Letting Nonessentials Go

Since the Nicobar Islands were a steppingstone to the riches found on the islands of Indonesia, I allowed my love for the map cover of Mapping the Silk Road and Beyond to get the better of me. The book's cover is a map of Sumatra that is oriented with west at the top. It represents the battles fought between indigenous people and greedy European traders.

Even though I loved everything on this panel,
you can see how busy and lacking in cohesion this was.

I took the most dramatic section of the map as my base for the Nicobar panel and glued cut outs from a map of the Nicobar Islands on top of it. I added European ships from elsewhere on the map to show the conflict. However, once I put that panel in place I could see that it was totally competing with everything else, including my tiger. There were too many queens and too few commoners. 

I tried some minor adjustments, such as covering one of the two very dramatic elephants. That didn’t work, however it gave me the idea of adding a lower scale section of the river and one of the elephants to the Ceylon (Sri Lanka) panel to tie it to the Nicobar panel. Ships often stopped in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) before and after trading in Sulawesi (Indonesia). This added the dimensionality that I had felt this panel lacked.

After making my sketch, I saw immediately that the second ship
to the left was too much and eliminated it.

I decided it was the whole lower section of the Nicobar panel that needed to go. I traced that section and used the tracing to cut out sections from the book cover map and from two other maps. 

As much as I loved this section from the book's cover, I could
see that it did not fit with the other island panels or my tiger panel.

I tried using a section of one of the maps I used for the Andaman
Islands. That didn't work but it gave me the idea of using a
section from the base map on the Andaman panel.

The colors in this map brought the Andaman and Nicobar panels
together and were more in keeping with my tiger.

At the top of the panel, I changed the size of the Nicobar header and
added more of the Anbdaman base map to cover competing colors and shapes.

On an artistic level, the island panels need to integrate with each other and the larger surrounding panels. Therefore, I added a couple of ships to the Andaman panel to connect it with the Nicobar panel below. Over and over as I worked on these island panels, I had to confess that love is blind. Things that I loved on their own did not work in relation to each other.

Many refinements are needed on these small island compositions. But for now, I am ready to leave the islands as they are and go on to the Arabian and Persian sections of Southwest Asia. Only when I have the total configuration of panels will I be able to see what other changes are necessary for the islands to complement and not compete with the major panels.

Talking Stones

 No water – that’s why we left Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the base of Dalatabad fort in Maharashtra India, pueblos in the American Southwest, Once-Green Arabia. Place after place no longer able to sustain life. Where will we go? We must go … to stay is to die … to leave is to hope. Menaced by hunger and thirst, we journeyed on the maybes of hope. We are all refugees, migrating from our once home into a vast unknown. Where can I drink? Where can I sleep? I choke on the dust. The sun blinds my eyes.

Using a 1986 map from National Geographic, we plotted the sites
that would give us the best picture of Ancestral Pueblo Culture.

Ancestral Pueblo Culture

In mid-September, my friend Nadine Cobb and I made a trip to explore the Ancestral Pueblo Culture of New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. The trip was a chance for Nadine to get an overview of the region she now calls home and for me it was an opportunity to do on-the-ground research for Eve’s Imprint. Please note that the word “Anasazi” is a misnomer for this early peopling of North America. It is a Navaho word meaning “ancestral enemies.” To use it shows disrespect for descendants of first Americans. The preferred term is 'Ancestral Pueblo Culture.'

Our itinerary took us in a loop northwest from Albuquerque, north to Colorado, southwest to Arizona, and then southeast back to Albuquerque. Our stops included:

• New Mexico - Chaco Culture National Historical Park and Aztec Ruins National Monument  (misnamed by Spanish conquistadores when they stumbled upon evidence of early settlement)
• Colorado - Mesa Verde National Park
• Arizona - Canyon de Chelly National Monument
• New Mexico - Acoma Pueblo, Petroglyph National Monument, and Bandelier National Monument.

The highly symbolic T shaped doorways found in
Chacho Canyon and as far south as northern Mexico
may symbolize lakes known to exist under mountains
where cliff dwellings are found.

While I read several books in preparation for the trip, the one that gave me the deepest understanding of the ‘Stonehenge of North America’ was House of Rain by Craig Childs. Searching for why people left their highly developed culture in Chaco Canyon and where they went, Childs unveils an ancient understanding of and symbiosis with the hydrological cycle. He has suggested a possible symbolic meaning for the T shaped doorways, as noted above.

Survival Involves Perpetual Motion

From time immemorial, for beasts of earth and sea as well as birds and bees in the sky, the drive to survive has driven hourly and daily life. Homo sapiens learned from their predecessor primates and other animals, including their predators, where to find and secure food. As hunter-gatherers, our ancestors followed schools of fish and herds of mammals to the best sources of water, forage and salt.

This prehistoric hunter has snagged a long-horned goat. 

And so it was that peoples of many ethnicities found their way through and over the Bering Strait into North America at least 12,000 (probably more) years ago. Amidst their seasonal rock shelter campsites they left traces of their wanderings. About 7500 years ago, two factors prompted these roaming family clans to hunt smaller animals and collect edible plants: drier and warmer climate as a result of the recession of the glacial sheet and the near extinction of large grazing animals by natural and human causes.

Staying Longer

Roving bands of basket makers began to stay longer in regions that provided a year-round supply of water. Over time, they built small pit houses, partially underground, and their highly portable baskets were supplemented by the pottery they learned to make. As a sedentary lifestyle took hold, they made improvements on their pit houses and developed above ground structures. They did not abandon the safety and community feeling of the old pit houses. Instead they turned them into kivas, places of ceremony, ritual and retreat.

Pit houses were entered through a smoke hole in the roof. As they evolved,
adobe became a preferred covering for the above ground part of the structure.

More and more, foraging turned into farming and the former wanderers tucked small fields into canyon corners and on mesas. People domesticated the turkey. As they figured out how to channel water to the fields, they could count on a consistent supply of squash, beans, and corn (a plant introduced from the south). Using yucca fibers, people made sandals and wove turkey feathers into blankets for warmth in the winter. Across the landscape of the Americas, dispersed households, large granaries, and public structures began to emerge.

Populations increased, a diversity of crafts emerged, and trade intensified - not just among diverse clans in the region but also with people as far away as Mexico and the west coast. With trade, new ideas percolated through existing patterns. In addition to occupying new areas, different ethic groups began to converge into small villages, increasing opportunities for social interaction, trade, and ceremony.

Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon was one of a series
of great houses where people gathered to trade, to learn new skills,
to organize public work projects, and to hold ceremonies that
included use of McCaw feathers and copper bells from Mexico.

Cultural Enrichment Flourishes

Chaco Canyon in western New Mexico became a gathering place and spiritual center for many dispersed settlements. People in the canyon coalesced astrological wisdom that must have guided the hunter-gatherers of old. They wove this wisdom into ceremonies celebrating the movement of the sun and moon. Public structures built in Chaco are aligned with the movement of the sun and with the cardinal directions: east, south, west, north, above, and below.

Even with the Chaco River as a source of water, Chaco Canyon was an unlikely place to build large-scale kivas, great houses, and a vast network of roads. One can only surmise that a cross section of wise leaders and creative thinkers somehow arrived in ‘the middle of nowhere’ at the same time and sparked a cultural revolution. After about 300 years of expansion and amazing architectural feats, people began to leave Chaco Canyon and were virtually gone by 1200 CE (current era).

People moved from Chaco to Aztec Ruins and emulated its highly skilled masonry
 structures. Archeologist Earl H. Morris conducted excavations and studies at
Aztec Ruins for many years. One of his last contributions was to supervise
reconstruction of the Great Kiva according to all that he had learned.

Most likely a series of droughts forced Chaco's burgeoning population to disperse to better cropland and more abundant water. And disperse they did: to the north to the four corners area (Aztec Ruins and Mesa Verde), to the south (Rio Grande valley and beyond), and to the west (Canyon de Chelly and further west). They took the Chacoan culture with them. However, dispersion meant that all the skills, crafts, and wisdom that made Chaco great were no longer available to each group of migrants. The synergy of many creative minds was broken as settlers became migrants once again, but memory of Chaco’s accomplishments has never been lost.

Talking Stones

From the first hunter-gatherers who followed herds through North America to tribes from Canada that descended in the sixteenth century into regions left by Chacoan peoples, human beings left messages on the rocks and canyon walls through which they passed.

The central figure in this rock image from Utah
is startlingly similar to the Wandjina (creative force) image still
painted and revered by Aboriginals of Australia.

Some of the earliest rock images in the four corners region are similar to ones found in Southwest Asia and Central Asia. For example, a longhorn goat at the end of a long spiral closely resembles similar petroglyphs in Iraq and Iran. Were some of the wanderers into the American southwest descendants of, or related to, those who followed herds through Mesopotamia and into Central Asia? Photos of pictographs in Utah are startlingly similar to ones painted by Aboriginals in Australia. Did the coastal ramblings that took some of our early ancestors to Australia also continue north up the coast of Asia and across the Bering Strait?

Whether chipped or painted, rock images convey the human impulse to share one’s meaningful experiences with others.

• This is the place through which I walked.
• Mark this place where hunting was good so we can find it again.
• Here in this auspicious place, let’s create a ceremony to the creator celebrating the gift of water when we were thirsty.
• Maybe if we record our ceremony, we can hold it in our minds as we travel on.
• If we make an image here, we can track the progress of the sun across it and predict when it will be best to plant our crops.

Recording of a ghost dance.

Our ancestors experienced all of the same impulses that drive us to send an email, post on Facebook, or keep a journal. Rock images remind us that we are them and they are us.

Except for the map, all photos are from Google Images.