In the days before the Winter Solstice 2011, I was fasting in a hut in the Laos jungle, and on the day of the Winter Solstice, a beautiful woman came and led me to a feast celebrating the birth of a child in the village, revealing how in touch Laos is with the  annual cosmic cycle of death and rebirth!

The Aquarian Goddess embodied in the women from Laos…

A year later, it is clear that time I spent at the Vanvisa Waterfall, which I renamed Aquaria after my rebirth experience in the village.

I surrendered to the Aquaria at the Waterfall named after her…at the Vanvisa Healing Center outside Lupang Prabong in Laos.  Here I am wearing the magnificent national costume of Laos made by Vandara, owner of the Waterfall at Vanvisa.

This year, I had the darkest Winter Solstice of my life, as I have been in Berlin, with diminishing light due to its location so far north on the European continent.

The view from my window in Berlin — Kunsthaus Tacheles. Originating as a department store, it became a Nazi torture center, and after the Wall fell, it transformed into an arts center. It was closed in September 2012, a month before I moved across the street, leaving it as a silent profound relic of the power of creative transformation for the New Berlin.

I have spent the past week on a semi-fast, channeling energy day and night, sending healing vibrations to Newton, a town I used to visit prior to meditation circles celebrating the Moon cycles in Danbury.  From what I gathered from press reports, it seems  that tragedy was the result of the repressed feminine energy blocking a conscious understanding of the cycles of life death and rebirth.  Jose Arguelles never intended 2012 to be an apocalypse, but rather a massive change in orientation, where the polar opposites of masculine and feminine would finally come into balance. 

This is due to the emergence of the bipolar Aquarian Age Goddess…who is EMBODIED under the yod configuration ruling the Winter Solstice 2012.

The Yod symbol forms the foundation of the Aquaria jewelry line channeled by Aquaria… The Y is in coral, representing both the Yod and Aries, surrounded by a Mandorla birth form, consisting of silver and bronze, integrating the symbolism of the Venus Transit on June 6, 2012 and the subsequent Moon/Venus conjunctions serving as Gates for the Embodiment.  The six transparent strands represent the sacred marriage balance (six) of the Aquarian archetype.

However, the lasting effect of the world’s focus on December 21, 2012 and the focus on the Mayan mythology surrounding the Great Year beginning at the Sun’s alignment with the Galactic Center, a new understanding and appreciation for the cycles of life/death/rebirth.  This is the basis of the paradigm shift from mechanistic linear thinking.

From now on, your life is what you make of it!

The New Beginning is reflected in this astrology chart for the Winter Solstice 2012 in Berlin, where I have been doing my final preparations for a New Beginning reflected in the chart below…

...which culminates with the Aries line-up for the Spring Equinox!  It happens at dawn in New York City, where the Sun is ascending on the eastern horizon to join the Mars/Uranus conjunction reinforcing the power of personal initiative to make changes that will impact the world.  The mystical power of the Yod configuration, which is like a cosmic tuning fork (shown in the green triangles in the charts),  is balanced by the physical embodiment commanded by the Saturn and Pluto mutual reception.    This means the change will be deep, at the structural (Saturn) collective body and soul (Pluto) level, and the Moon in Cancer opposing Pluto in its natal house means the feminine energy will take form in the culture!   

This is going to be a wild three months!!

The cosmological configuration points to a massive change in the human vibration, providing access to a multidimensional reality, which means the quantum leap is finally happening in the mass consciousness.

The change is taking place on the cellular level, within the human DNA and our task is to make space for Her arrival…

The natural home for Aquaria — the transparent crystalline blue water of the Vanvisa Waterfall…

Aquaria, the Goddess of the Age of Aquarius that emerged from under the Vanvisa Waterfall!

The Transit of the Sun is truly revolutionary in Paris, with Uranus rising in Aries.

Information received causes one to reflect on what happened on a personal and collective level during the five horns of the pentacle in the seven year transit of Venus since the last, companion passage across the Sun on )8 June 2004.

Here are the five horns of the pentagram:

08 June 2004: Gemini

13 Jan 2006: Capricorn

20  August 2007: Leo

26 March 2009: Aries

31 October 2010: Scorpio

06 June 2012: Gemini

The Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, National Conference: “Creating the Chalice: Imagination and Integrity in  Goddess Studies

San Francisco, California, 2012

Ana Castillo’s KEYNOTE

THE ASTROLOGY OF 2012

Mandisa Wood in “TranscenDance”, an ASWM performance in San Francisco, May 11, 2012

Sid Reger, co-Founder (with Patricia Monaghan, Ph.D.) of ASWM and co-Chair (with Anne Key) of the 2102 National Conference: “Creating the Chalice”

California Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality: A Gathering of Wise Hearts. Top row: Letecia Layson, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Z Budapest.  Bottom row:  AfraShe Asungi, Marguerite Rigoglioso (sitting in for Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum), Macha Nightmare.  Morning Glory Zell, not pictured, was speaking at the podium.

Jean Shinoda Bolen, author of “Goddesses in Every Woman” who is pioneering a grassroots initiative for a UN sponsored 5th World Conference on Women

Mara Keller with her multi-media presentation “Goddesses Around the World”

The lauded poet Annie Finch dramatized her breakthrough book, “Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams”

Lydia Ruyle filled the conference space with the vibrant force of her colorful spirit in her person and her world goddess banners.

Vicki Noble, a mystic healer co-creator of the Motherpeace Tarot delivered a paper on “The History and Development of Matriarchal Studies in the USA.”

Midwife healer Arisika Razak “Calling in Our Bodies” during the evening festivities hosted by the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology: May 11, 2012

Chief Luisah Teish delivering the Opening Invocation: “Honoring the Ancestors of the Dead”

GRRRL BRIGADE presented by Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco

Zelda Kaplan, 95, in a photo taken moments before she collapsed at a fashion show.

It was a fitting end to a New York fashion icon.

Zelda Kaplan expiring in the front row of a fashion show.

On the day of the Jupiter/Venus Conjunction!

In her death, Zelda Kaplan met her life’s dream: to be on Page Six.

It was a fitting way to go for this fashion icon who inspired a movement dedicated to the embodiment of the spirit in the material.  We met in the wake of the Jupiter/Venus conjunction in  Taurus in 2000.

In an effort among her friends to propel  Zelda into the position of media style icon that she became in death, I accompanied her to the then hip spot, Bungalow 8 on Sex and the City night.  It was the first time, Zelda ever watched the show and she was not only disgusted but affronted by what she saw. “Those girls are too skinny,” she said.    ”How can they do that to the English language?”

Zelda was the inspiration for my own quest to merge my love of travel with fashion while honoring the sacred tradition of women weaving the world over

The winged Sky Goddess dress designed by myself and Vandara from her hand spun natural dyed Laos handwoven silk.

As the singular person I met at the time who fit right into the art theory I would be developing in New York City art world for another 12 years, she inspired a book proposal, “Zekda, the New York Style Icon”   Here is an excerpt.

For Zelda Kaplan, dressing for herself every morning reflects a forty year journey of transformation of materials discovered in her travels.   “I know what I feel comfortable in,” she says.  “I try to design things which show off my better parts and hide the bad ones. Because I am short, I try not to have breaks in the lines.  If I have enough cloth, I have the jacket cut on the bias.”

Zelda buys exquisite handmade cloth direct from women in countries that most of us never even heard of.  The woman in these countries generally make 9 or 10 meters of cloth to wrap around their bodies; Zelda purchases the fabric and has it made  into custom “couture” on the spot by a tailor.  She walks away with an original form of global fashion that integrates authenticity with innovation.

In transforming her own expression through handwoven material, Kaplan is also contributing to the transformation of those who make the fabric.  Active on the World Affairs Council, Zelda works hard to protect the rights of women around the world.  She always tries to complete the monetary transaction by putting cash directly in the hands of the woman of the house.  “A man will go out and spend the cash on drink while a woman will use it for the running of the house,” she says.

Vandara at the Vanvisa Aquarian Waterfall in Laos. December 25, 2011

Susan Streitfeld with the “Sacred Marriage” gift from Shaman Gail.  

These spreads are made for the marriage bed and put out for honored guest (below).

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THE JUPITER VENUS CONJUNCTION TAKES PLACE EVERY TWELVE YEARS.

\VENUS IS SUNK LOW IN THE SKY FINISHING UP THE SCORPIO CYCLE BEFORE

DISAPPEARING IN MAY TO BEGIN A NEW CYCLE IN GEMINI

Kundalini's DaughterWalking the Labyrinth at the Huntington Library is an apt pre-Spring Equinox ritual

The 2000 Venus/Jupiter conjunction prompted a ritual recounted in my book,Kundalini’s Daughter  that ushered me into the New York art world.  Twelve years later, the Jupiter/Venus conjunction brought me full circle back to Los Angeles with my sister Susan Streitfeld.  At the Huntington Library in Pasadena, we celebrated the conclusion of our mutual search for the “sacred in the material”.

She received it with such reverence, embarking on a spontaneous performance with the sacred material which has the mythology of the hieros games embedded in its embroidery.  It was given to my sister because, within its first, embroidered border is a pair of twin birds.

History reveals that a new constellation of energy enters into human consciousness is reflected in the discovery of a new planet.   The image of the twins is a reflection of Makemake discovered in 1995.  The so called Planet X, or “dwarf planet” was recently named by its discoverer. Michael Brown.I came across the myth of Makemake, the God of Easter Island, when I was in an arts residency in southern Chile.  As the double name reflects, it has to do with the search for the mirror image as the path of wholeness.

The women of this Laos village where I visited continue on their ancient tradition of weaving the cosmic archetypes messengered through their dreams into the very material of their lives.  Their wooden looms are literally in the wombs of their elevated homes in the jungle.  Theses are the women who healed my hand and my spirit, by culminating my 28 year journey that brought me to the healing of the completion of the Jupiter/Venus cycle.

Invoking my sister’s prayer on the January 9 Full Moon in Lupang Prabang, Laos: 

moon growing to full on my birthday, 

bathed in my tears as the 8th approaches.  

the loss of my physical-as-I-knew-her-to-be-mother, 

the one whose body

I separated from on the evening of that day 58 years ago

to begin this journey of my own.

 

Her absence tangible, the separation tangible.

even though I know the other side is on this side too…

the loss of her on this side lowers me to weeping. 

 

please take my sorrow and shake it out in the land where you are.

spread it out among all the mothers of the land

that they will gather round

and sing to me of the joy and the sorrow,

the suffering and the grace

the life and the death.

 

The Offering

Calling in the Spirits. I'm sitting between the Shaman and his wife

Healing hands applying the plant medicine

Shaman Gail wrapping with natural fiber, cotton grown, spun and woven by the village women

Laos is the mostly heavily bombed nation on the planet.  They call them “bombes” the cluster bombs dropped by the Americans during the war.

I was invited to an isolated village, 20 km. down a dirt road, near the Vietnam border which only recently has cleared the unexploded bombs from their fields.

SHAMAN GAI wanted to do a shamanic healing on my wound.   I had an accident with my writing hand while trekking with the Black Hmong in the mountains of North Vietnam, just over the Chinese border.  They operated on my wound in the French hospital in Hanoi.

I met SHAMAN GAIL at my friend Vandara’s house in Lupang Prabang where  I was recuperating.  I knew immediately she was a shaman and heeded her call for a healing.  It was a tremendous experience.

I felt the land weeping as I arrived.  A weeping land and I never met such powerful and authentic women, all spinners and weavers, filled with such joy.

How can it be that they not only survived such atrocity but demonstrated such an intense passion for life?

Surrounded by the renegade electron I keep writing about in my Heisenberg essays, these women were the literal face of the authentic feminine I have been seeking in art.  They make art with their hands, weaving from the fiber that sustains their lives.

The gift that Gail gave me for my sister. This beautiful hand spun, hand woven spread is made from natural dye. Such a magnificent work is not typically sold to tourists. The Hmong make them for their weddings. Gail gifted me with one that had unicorns when we met. The Unicorn is the symbol for my Beloved, who embodies the ancient icon of the hieros games, the ever-present origin of my art theory.

The twin birds on the top of the spread represent the Gemini evoked by my sister on her birthday.  In alchemy, twins represent the birth of the New.

Chiron, the wounded healer, rising on the ascendent with Neptune in Pisces, reborn as the fully empowered female shaman that I experienced in the jungle of Laos, is the energy that guided this post, written with my renewed hand!

This Aries Full Moon finds us with the collapse of the quantum wave made visible by the Occupy Wall Street, now a nation wide movement.

I encountered the Boston faction directly under the Full Moon.  I left Aldo Tambellini’s home in Cambridge to go to his studio in Salem around midnight.  As I swung through downtown Boston following a highway detour that brought me in direct contact with tent city, bunkered down for the night. Occupy Boston received national attention for the massive arrests the day before the Full Moon…It struck me that Tent Cities are the wave of the future, which must be why I recently bought one.  As it was, I wanted to sleep outside under the full moon but found the Connecticut campgrounds closed for the season. ..so, I found a spot in the forest where I was overcome by powerful visions…

While Boston newspaper columnists are decrying the fact that a good number of Occupy Boston is composed of college students, they are missing the broader reality: the young are waking up to the costs of pairing to a middle-class American, cogs in the wheel of a plutocracy favoring the 1 percent of super rich Americans and are seeking alternative ways of co-existing on the planet.

On the East Coast, this Aries Full Moon is ruled by Cancer Rising, which puts Pluto on the descendent.  This indicates head on combat with the Plutocracy, as the elevated Uranus is in a tense square to angular Pluto.  The Full Moon opposition creates a Kite across the eleventh/fifth house reveals the the creativity of a collective grassroots movement converging with the emergence of an underground art movement oriented toward (R)evolution and containing the aesthetic (Sun/Venus/Saturn in Libra) of the 21st century icon: the hieros gamos.

Stay tuned!

BLACK ZERO

by

Lisa Paul Streitfeld

Village Voice Review