Mother of Milk, 2003 from Brenda Clews on Vimeo. (It takes 10-15sec to begin.)
I recorded this reading of "Mother of Milk" in my studio in Vancouver for ARM's 'Mothering, Religion and Spirituality' Conference.
Breastfeeding my two children until they weaned themselves, a total of five years, I went from filling my time with constant doing, a consumption of time, activities, ideas, to being able to be with the vast silence of the interior stillness. In this learning of a deeper rhythm which seemingly encompassed the discordant ambiguities, difficulties, discontinuities, traumas, and irreconcilable aspects, as well as the joys and unities, of my life my spiritual understandings and practices underwent a profound metamorphosis. While I would emphasize that there are many spiritual paths, and that all are equally valid, the particular path I found myself on arose directly out of my experiences as a mother-of-milk as I subsequently explored the concept of the ‘Divine Mother’ in ancient mythologies and modern religions, through meditation in a yoga tradition, and privately before my small alter at home, so that, while still emphatically a ‘woman in process,’ my experience of a feminist, goddess-oriented, empowering way of being could be be described as an ‘embodied spirituality.’
Videotaped in Vancouver, 2003
Copyright 2003 by Brenda Clews All Rights Reserved
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This is the DVD cover.
This was a personal essay, or perhaps prosepoem of a certain point of motherhood, and I recorded it in my studio in Vancouver (where I lived at the time) for a conference on "Motherhood and Spirituality" in 2003 in Toronto. The viewing was well received. Afterwards the CD went underground, and was in at least one art show, in 2004, at the Ayer Lofts Art Gallery in Massachusetts where it was one of the features of a video evening. Oh, and the prestigious Mothers Movement Online published it as an essay around that time too, and it's still online.
With my new iMac (ok it's almost a year old, but still feels "new":-) I found I was able to save this video as a .DIVX file, shortening it from the Quicktime 1.4GB .MOV file to 172MB .DIVX while not losing clarity in the smaller screen (as happened with the .MP4 file), and, even though it's 21 minutes long, was able to upload it, not to YouTube (which has a 10 minute maximum) but to Vimeo (which has no limit on the length of a video, only a size limit of 500MGs a week).
Because of Google Sites html limitations I can only embed a teeny tiny flash player that plays the reading at my new Art & Writings Website, it's real cute!
i really enjoyed this very much. i particularly liked the conversational style which felt very real and honest and which allowed me to know more about you and how you operate internally. i am more affected by that style than i am one of dramatic flair which can be seen in some of the poetry readings. i pay more attention to what i am seeing, feel like something real is being transmitted. this was intimate sharing, a window into your life and feelings, and an educational tool as well. very good work! i am sure the participants of the conference really enjoyed this as much as i did, brenda. so glad you shared it here.
ReplyDeleteWow, you watched all 21 minutes? Thank you, I am honoured. I'm putting together some of this work I did on my experience of the maternal body for younger mothers and/or those working in the area of maternal studies, which ranges widely across many disciplines (because I keep getting asked for permissions and to provide images, etc., now I can point folks to my website *easier*). Though I emphatically add that we each have a mother story-as daughters or mothers, it's there, part of our inner psychic selves.
ReplyDeleteThat you found this reading 'conversational' is interesting, Sky, since it was scripted - I'd written the paper 10-12 months before (which was the version that Judith Stadtman Tucker, the editor of MMO accepted & published before we met later that year at the ARM conference). Since I wasn't sure I could afford to travel to Toronto for the conference, I taped a video of the paper. I printed the talk in a huge font so I could read it without reading glasses but realized after a couple of tries that one must look at the camera, who is the future audience, otherwise it falls flat.
Thank you so, so much for your beautiful response, and, once again, I trust your insights and can see that developing readings in the direction of the more intimate, personal style is a better way to go.
xo