It’s very powerful to know from whom you come. I met an artist in Denver this weekend, Alissa Hansen, who has found a beautiful and powerful way to keep a girl tethered to her feminine, maternal lineage. I wrote more about why this might matter to girls, how it can help them be more powerful in the world, in Maternal Lineage, several years ago.
Christiane Northrup, in Mother-Daughter Wisdom, writes about an exercise she does with women, asking them to call for the wisdom, power and positive energy of the mothers and grandmothers who came before her. The exercise asks women to call forth the assistance of their maternal lines by name. She says the women find a source of extreme power, guts, courage, and wisdom they never knew they had access to before. These women and their energy, she says, are out there willing us forward, rooting for our wins and giving us a little helping hand, this will become more true a we learn to rely on it and ask for it.
Alissa traced her family line back for six generations through her mother’s genealogy. She found out where the women lived, what kinds of lifestyles they lived, and conceptualized them in a series of Ancestor Portraits.
The details of the art are meaningful. The background is a map of the ancestor’s home. The body of the woman is the page of a book or hymn that the woman loved, or might of have loved, maybe a special page of the Bible which brought her great peace. Alissa then fills in the blanks and paints a portrait based on a portrait you give her, or conjure up with your imagination based on what you can find out.
On the sides of the 3×3 piece, you can’t see it here, are important dates from the woman’s life: birth, death, marriage and date of her daughter’s birth. The pieces are hung vertically on the wall, so the women are hung in order: great-great, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, daughter.
Often there was no photography of the women in Allissa’s own line of grandmothers, so she imagined these farm women from Nebraska had one really fine dress and imagined, based on the fashions from that time period, what that dress might look like. As census information began taking on more color and information – like whether the women were literate, what their incomes and professions were, her pieces took on more color and meaning. She was very excited by little pieces of information she might garner, like that one of the women had red hair.
Alissa only needs to add herself and her wonderful daughter to her collection.
Imagine, as a girl, walking by this beautiful lineage of women, imaging what their lives were like and knowing on some level that these role models have her back when the going gets tough.
Alissa will do Ancestor Portraits on commission, collecting and gathering information from you and making each one unique and honoring to your family line. Each piece costs $75.
Delaware Republican Senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell literally had to run an ad clarifying, “I am not a witch.”
Which would be hysterical, you know, if women who had the audacity to seek power, spiritually or politically, hadn’t actually been branded witches and been burned at the stake for it for centuries. And if our ancestors in these United States hadn’t, you know, hung women and teenage girls for “being witches” at the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.
I’m no big fan of the Tea Party, nor of the Republican Party really. But, I don’t need women to be branded Witches, so I have a reason not to vote for them – their politics is enough.
I used to think Xerox Art was super-cool. Because it is.
I painted this, with oil, from a framed Xerox of my face while in college.
I spent my 20s in a bit of angst. I had pretty decent reasons, boyfriends were all druggies with a tendency to knock me around, stalk me or be otherwise addicted psychotics and I tended to have overly-dramatic relationships with pretty much everyone. I think I believed that the more extreme emotions were more valid than less extreme feelings, like peace. Thank God I’ve changed that thinking.
Now, I wonder how much more fun it would have been to be one of those happy, go-getter sorority girls.
I’ve been excited to hear about the 100 women who claim authority as Catholic Priests in the United States, as in this Time article.
While there is evidence to suggest that women were equals and held authority in early Christianity, The Church – Catholic, Mormon, Protestant – have spent the last two thousand years eradicating femininity and authentic feminine godliness from its rituals and hierarchy.
It appears that it takes quite some time for women, who have been slaughtered throughout history for being “witches” if they believe in their own authentic spiritual power or exhibit any of God’s power and authority, to stick their toe out and reclaim this inherent authority.
Interestingly, while Rome is using the same verbiage against these Womenpriests – delictium gravius (grave crime) – as it used against the many pedophiliac priests, it is only excommunicating the women who claim God’s authority and not the “legitimate male priests” who abuse God’s authority and molest children. This, itself, is delictium gravius.
Time reports that 59% of U.S. Catholics favor ordaining women.
I’ve long thought that any church or religion with waning membership, especially among the younger population, should look first to its gender issues and its rules about authority. Perhaps there were generations of women who would do the heavy lifting of the church, yet be denied religious authority and spiritual powers, but these young women coming up in a world of increasing gender equality consider such policies delictium gravius.
