Goddesses in the Dust: The Red Shoes

Unearthing the divine feminine, one archetype at a time...

Since I was little I have always worn red shoes.

Not until I was older did I realize there was a whole mythology surrounding them. Hans Christian Anderson's telling of the fairy tale is the most famous, but the psychologist and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes recounts a version handed down from her Aunt Tereza's Magyar-Germanic roots. As she says, The Red Shoes is a cautionary tale that highlights the precarious state of a woman's wildish core and the self preservation necessary to avoid the myriad traps in life that will lure her from keeping true to herself. 

Red shoes have had starring roles in a couple of movies. (Who could forget Dorothy following the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz?)

The Red Shoes was made into a film starring Moira Shearer. 

The story starts as it often does, with a poor motherless girl. She has very little, but she fashions her own clothing, including a pair of red shoes, sewn from scraps. They are not much, but she loves them because she made them herself, and they serve to keep her safe and warm as she navigates the thorny woods. But an old woman comes along in a fine carriage and offers to take care of her. The price she must pay is throwing away her old clothes, including her beloved red shoes, in exchange for fine clothes, living in a mansion....and doing what the old woman tells her to do. The girl is sad, because no matter how many riches she is surrounded with, the humble red shoes gave her the greatest happiness because she made them by hand.  

One day the old woman takes her to a shoemaker. The old woman's eyesight is poor, so she doesn't realize that the girl, driven by a hungry soul, picks a pair of shiny patent leather red shoes instead of the black ones she is instructed to buy.

The girl wears them to church and all are scandalized - even the statues peer down on her with scorn. But an old bearded man winks at her and suggests she dance, which she does. Once her feet begin to move they cannot stop and she cavorts across the hills. The old woman's coachman goes after her and after a great struggle her feet are calmed. The old woman in a fit of anger takes the shoes and hides them. 

You can imagine what happens next. The girl continues to take the illicit shoes, dancing out of control more and more, and the old woman continues to hide them, forbidding her from wearing them. But the old woman falls ill one day and the girl once again puts on the red shoes. This time she cannot stop the dancing - it is out of control. She dances across hillsides, through graveyards, finally into a forest where the town's executioner waits with an axe. "Please!" she screams to the the executioner and begs him to cut off the shoes and free her from this living hell. He cuts through the straps but the shoes stay on her feet. Finally she cries to him that her life is not worth living this way any more so he must cut off her feet. This he does, and the red shoed feet continue to dance away, off into the distance, disappearing into the forest. And now the poor girl is a cripple and has to make her way through the world with only one thought in her head: never again does she wish for red shoes.

So what's the moral of the story? Red shoes symbolize life's blood, groundedness - and sacrifice. As Estes says, "The psychological truth in "The Red Shoes" is that a woman's meaningful life can be pried, threatened, robbed, or seduced away from her unless she holds on to or retrieves her basic joy and wild worth. The tale calls our attention to traps and poisons we too easily take onto ourselves when we are caught in a famine of wild soul. Without a firm participation with the wild nature, a woman starves and falls into an obsession of "feel betters," "leave me alones" and "love me - please." 

She goes on to say that "the loss of the handmade red shoes represents the loss of a woman's self-designed life and passionate vitality and the taking on of a too-tame life." It speaks of the out of control nature of addiction women encounter when they are so starved they can no longer tell how much is enough. It speaks of sneaking a secret life to escape one's shadow self. It speaks of how a woman goes dead when she tries to take the shoes off too late. But is also speaks of the rebirth possible when a woman tries to make her way back to life. When she once again begins to fashion her own red shoes by hand. They may not be as shiny as the fancy patent leather ones in the store, but they are her own. 

At my daughter's engagement party (who says the mother of the bride to be can't wear red?) 

Estes says, "Dance in red shoes, but make sure they're the ones you've made by hand." 

No, I didn't make these little numbers by hand. 

But I revel in the metaphor of wearing red shoes and the meaning behind them. They remind me to stay connected to my deepest self, to stay true to my artistic vision and creative power, and most of all, to remain grounded in myself. 

Postcards from the Underworld: Buenos Aires, the Tango and Advice from Al Pacino

One of my favorite films of all time is Scent of a Woman, starring Al Pacino. Anybody seen it? If not, rent it on Netflix - it's a winner. Al Pacino plays cantankerous Lt. Colonel Frank Slade, an ex Army Ranger who is responsible for his own blindness in a drunken grenade accident. Depressed and down on his luck, Slade secretly plans suicide, but not before a final blow out trip to New York. Needing someone to accompany him, he hires Charlie, a scholarship student at a nearby tony boy's prep school.  Returning to the school after the trip, Charlie, played by Chris O'Donnell, is about to be expelled for not revealing which of his classmates damaged the headmaster's Jaguar - a prank Charlie witnessed from afar. Pacino, in an epic speech in front of an all school assembly, vows to "take a flamethrower to this place," chiding the headmaster and the disciplinary committee for not recognizing Charlie's integrity in refusing to rat on his classmates. 

But the movie's softer focus is Charlie's growing compassion for Frank's plight. The two characters help each other out of their respective tough spots in life and in one of the film's lighter scenes Frank dances the tango with a young woman in a swank New York hotel. Refusing to let his blindness get in the way, Frank asks Charlie for the floor dimensions before he embarks on his dance, and that dance becomes a metaphor for dealing with life's problems. When Charlie loses faith that he will find a way out of his predicament, Frank gives him a pep talk. He tells Charlie whenever he is struggling in life,

 "If you get tangled up, then tango on." 

Traveling in Buenos Aires a couple years ago, I snapped these shots of couples performing the tango.

Seeing the concentration and precision in their actions reminded me that life is one big movement. 

We continually get ourselves wound up in problems, many of them in our heads, 

and it's liberating to see that we can unwind ourselves. 

Whenever I find myself embroiled in a problem that I can't immediately see the solution, I try to remember Pacino's character's advice:

If you find yourself getting tangled up

tango on

On a sad note, this film also starred a young Philip Seymour Hoffman as a classmate of Charlie's. Hoffman's portrayal of a privileged prep school boy is spot on, as were all the roles he played. The world is poorer for his loss. 

Goddesses in the Dust: Kalliope and Finding One's Voice

Unearthing the divine feminine, one archetype at a time...

Urania and Kalliope, Simon Vouet, 1590 - 1649

Kalliope, eldest of the nine muses. That's her on the right, holding a copy of The Odyssey and sitting with her sister Urania. Known as the muse of eloquence and epic poetry, her name means "beautiful voice."

Kalliope, 1869

Kalliope, Giovanni Baglione

Finding one's voice. We hear it a lot, but what does it actually mean? It doesn't refer to just the act of speaking. More to the point, it refers to the ability to express one's self, one's wishes, one's desires, one's needs, one's deepest beliefs. It is equated with being authentic. And the path towards authenticity is an ongoing one.

I believe we all come into this world with our voice intact, with knowing how to use it. It is only through our upbringing, no matter how well intended, that our voices become trampled by our elders - our parents, our teachers, our bosses. You name it.

Voice is something writers talk about a lot. The ability to have inspiration and the ability to communicate that inspiration freely and abundantly. More often than not, writers fear that won't happen - the inspiration won't come or the ability to communicate freely won't be present. Alexandra Fuller, author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, has perhaps the best advice:

I think you have to write about a million words to clean out the pipes. I think we are afraid of our own voices and are very self-censoring, and we write as if the book is going to publish and be read by people. Once we realize we're never going to get published and we just write; that's our voice.

That last part about never going to be published is a hard one to hear. But it is a necessary obstacle to overcome mentally. If we write to please someone else, to serve a certain demographic, we are doomed. Because that isn't our voice - that's a voice that's bending to the authority figures. As Joseph Campbell says,

When I'm writing, I think of the whole academic world: I know how they think about this material and it is not the same way I think about it. I just have to say: Let the guillotine come down. You are still going to have this message. I always feel as if I am going thorough the Clashing Rocks, and they are just about to close, but I manage to get through before I let that thought overcome me. It's a very strange process: actually holding that door open and getting the sentences out. Do not think about the negative side. There will bw negatives that are going to come down, but you have to hold the door open if you are going to do anything that has not been done before. You have to suspend all criticism to do your work. In writing, you have to do this all the time in order to get the sentence out. Suspending criticism is killing the dragon Thou Shalt. 

Kill him. 

I've completed my manuscript. I've read it over countless times, polished and edited it to where I feel it's ready to go. This book is my voice, and I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that my protagonist is named Kalliope. I didn't choose the name because of its meaning, it just came to me. Serendipitously. The Universe always seems to be nudging us towards what we need to learn. And so we must learn to not be afraid of speaking our truth and being heard. We must begin the work of rediscovering our voice. It's down there, somewhere, waiting for us to reclaim it.

Me, with my voice intact at an early age

Postcards from the Underworld: Rooftops of Dubrovnic

A chilly November morning

Dubrovnic, Croatia

Memories of walking the medieval wall

surrounding the city of Dubrovnic

overlooking a sea of coral rooftops

 

and another sea

the gray blue Adriatic

pounding below

Goddesses in the Dust: 11:11 - Avalokitesvara and a Spiritual Window of Time

An archaeologist unearths the divine feminine, one archetype at a time...

It all started innocuously enough. I would get into my car and see the clock read out:

Looking away from a TV show for a moment and glancing at the cable box:

Reheating soup in the microwave:

Picking up my phone to make a call: (yes, my precious, 16 1/2 year old Airedale is the wallpaper on my iPhone)

After a week, maybe 10 days, I began to take notice (yes, I can be a bit of a blockhead at times.) Why was it, every time I looked up to check the time, it was inevitably 11:11? Sometimes this would happen twice in one day. It caught me so by surprise that one day I decided to Google it - what did it mean -  if anything - that one would see 11:11 all the time, every where? And was this happening to anyone else?

The answer was surprising. Yes, it was happening to other folks. And the single answer boiled down to: the spirit world was trying to break through - Pay Attention!!!! It was just as if the Universe was reaching out to me, like a child tugging on my coattails, and demanding me to open up my perception. For weeks, maybe months, I had found myself in a bit of a slump. I had begun to send out queries about my book and had heard nothing back. It seemed as though no one was listening or paying attention to my work. So when the elevens started to happen, I took notice. Was there a bigger lesson I needed to be learning here? I was so invested in getting others to pay attention to my work, but I was neglecting my own writing. What were my reasons in wanting to have an agent? To find an publisher, of course. And what were my goals in getting published? To have my work read by others, naturally. But was it also about acceptance? Ego stroking? Maybe even fame?

Nothing wrong with any of that, but on some level I realized the heaviness I was feeling was that I was focusing too much on becoming accepted by others and not so much becoming accepted by myself. 

That's where Avalokitesvara comes in. As the Buddhist goddess of compassion, she is ofter referred to as the Goddess of Eleven Faces. 

The eleven faces have many interpretations. One story is that the goddess was so moved by the suffering of humanity that her head split into ten more in order to minister to them all. Another states that the eleven heads refer to the eleven stages of enlightenment, yet another says eleven refers to all the directions of space and that the goddess needed another ten heads to reach all planes of existence.

Seeing 11:11 everywhere has reminded me that we need to enjoy the creative process, enjoy the play, to be who we are, as there isn't anyone else like us on earth. To not be afraid to bring forth our gifts, as the world is in need of them. To work on our craft and relish in the play of creating. To send out our jewels into the world without expectation, but with clear intent. The results are not in our hands, but the Universe's. Elizabeth Gilbert says:

Your job is only to write your heart out, and let destiny take care of the rest.

Meditating on the goddess of compassion is not only to deepen our compassion for the world 'out there', but - because each of us creates our own world - we most of all need to invite the compassion of Avalokitsevara for ourselves.