Lady of the Moon

Lady of the Moon. I sewed this simple robe from a swath of beautiful lilac shantung silk for my private Goddess worship rituals in the 90s. I'd surround myself with a circle of pebbles from my cottage, and candles. I had an altar with spirals and sacred stones and Green and White Tara figurines, and the four elements - sand, incense, water in a shell, a burning candle in a 5-pointed star holder - behind which I hung my painting of the Sri Yantra. I followed rituals from books, both Western and Eastern, and I'd meditate and commune with the angelic forces... Bringing the robe out from the back of the cupboard flooded me with memories today. Perhaps we all pass through spiritual currents of one sort or another in our lives. This robe saw me through a particularly spiritually rich time. The memories make me smile inwardly.

I took the photo to show my fellow poets at our Performance Poetry evening tomorrow night as a possibility for a costume for some minimalist dance/creative movement to go with one of the readings. We are rehearsing tonight, and so will decide what works and what doesn't.

John and I already met for a jam to see how his music and my poetry might go together. Then I thought to offer some movement or dance to his reading in return. He thought that was okay. Yesterday morning, we each read through our poems and recorded them and sent each other the recordings along with the full text of our pieces so that he could think of what sounds to use with my poems and I could get a grasp of the images, image patterns, emotional undercurrents and the expressed emotions, as well as the heady stuff for moving creatively to/ dancing to his poems. Tonight we are meeting with Luciano to see if John's playing and me doing a minimalist, stuttering, shoulder-oriented dance (that centres around the larynx) in the lilac shantung robe with the split mask might also work to add a performative element to Luciano's poem. The actor who was going to perform with Luciano during his feature is out of town, so I am hoping to create something else so that our poems and their presentations adhere to the theme of the Poetry Salon: A Poetry Performance evening.

While unrelated to the Poetry Performance evening, as I was writing this post, I thought of a video I made, Shadow Cave, a dance with a voiceover based on one of the meditations I did in the 90s and which I wrote of in detail in my journal at the time. I thought you might be interested to see what sorts of things I got up to when I wore that robe:

direct link: Shadow Cave

And it is interesting that in the vision a woman is cave painting, and now the experts are saying that the hands on the caves of paleolithic and neolithic peoples are small, and likely womens'. (That said with a chuckle!)

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