Mandorla Rising

 As soon as they began to work, the work taught them how to create, and the blessing of the Holy One inhabited their hands. —Zohar 1:74a

Full Circles
Mandorla Rising combines scholarly study, autoethnography and creative praxis. Its emergent design allowed the Project to grow intuitively and organically from my ever-deepening communion with myth, imagination and the Living World. In wonderful and unanticipated ways, the process brought me full circle to reflect on the Poetics of Imagination (2020-21) course journey, particularly:

• Oral Thought

• The Muses of Greek mythology

• Medieval Celtic mythology and the cadences of its ‘cinderbiters’ and mystic poets

• The lineage of Contemporary Romantics from the 17 c. to current day

Each day—as I studied, found words, unearthed rocks, soil and soul-awakening treasures, received songs from Hawthorne and Maple trees, improvised odes to peonies and sang with robins, squirrels and frogs—I attuned to and gratefully felt myself in the good company of the rigor and vigor of those who came before.

Emergent Design I — Oral Tradition Practices
As an improviser as well as a careful crafter, my most sustaining and satisfying art-making experiences are relational and therefore, ever-emergent. My creativity upwells in response to prompts, requests, the needs of community and the impulse to love, heal or help find a solution. For this and other reasons I will soon mention, I framed my Project’s forms as ‘emergent:’ held with strong intention yet with sufficient openness to allow spontaneous creative expression.

As I followed what was ‘pushing through’ in Spring and coming ‘into season’ in Summer, I received confirmation, time and again, that my ‘languages’ of creativity thrive in rhythms with the cycles of the Living World and the eternal. Although I have been a life-long folk musician, I can now say without question that my ‘way,’ the ‘place’ where I most flourish and find expression as a person—and as an artist—is in the oral tradition. This confirmation is one of the key findings of my research, albeit a personal and interior one.

Note to the Reader: If you have come to this page of the website before entering the content pages, either via the recital video or the images and gallery experience, I encourage you, in the oral tradition, to go back and dive in there, at least ankle-deep, before reading the rest of this academic back-story. All will make more sense if you ‘live into it first, think about it after!’[1]

PHASE ONE: PREPARATION and DISCOVERY

'The Other Within Now'

I began with a broad, open-ended research question: ‘In what ways are the themes and associative leaps in Daniel Deardorff's The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture and Psyche particularly relevant today?’ I found many conclusions, some of which I share below and many of which I have shared through the work elsewhere on this website. From the start, I knew I was ‘on track’ as my question resulted in more questions than answers. This was good. A fertile question, well-enough posed, is a mirror for anything held up to it. I would be studying Trickster, after all, a deity who, Deardorff tells us, ‘makes the correct mistakes.’[2]

Whichever path I followed, whichever way I turned, I would be led to where I needed to go. 



Multivalent Approaches
I envisioned conducting considerable research for this Project. First, I would closely read at least a half-dozen authors whose books—with Deardorff’s often marvelous handwritten notes in their margins—perched beside me on his library shelves. Then, I would generate a body of new creative work—writing new songs using approaches I already knew how to use—in response to a given chapter, theme, or characters in his book. As I write this, in retrospect, I laugh. For the first time in this four-month process I hear Daniel interjecting here—in perfect imitation of his mentor Robert Bly’s faux-gruff voice—‘It’s not going to happen!!!’

Ha! For me to only hear/receive this humor now means that either I was not listening fully all along or, much more likely, that all this time Daniel Deardorff was being patient with me as muse, much as he, with fidelity, let me find my own way in our earthly intimate partnership.

Note to the reader: For the sake of this report on research I will, from here on, zigzag between using ‘Deardorff’ to denote the public/scholar-artist and ‘Daniel’ when I speak of him in the context of our personal lives. Both ‘Daniel Deardorffs’ were—and are—fully present here.


Autoethnography

My choice of autoethnography as a primary methodology allowed me to draw upon and honor my intimate knowledge and communion with Deardorff as both scholar and beloved. It also helped keep me focused on my own creative work as central (See Artist Statement). Initially, I was concerned that exploring my and Daniel’s life and artifacts as source materials would sully or commodify them on the one hand or become maudlin or emotion-drenched on the other. Fortunately, my ethical decision to not oversimplify or decontextualize what I found, provided a sturdy rudder through inner waters and through the ever-present real dangers of societal patterns. One paradox which Deardorff held and taught was that while the benevolent presences of the Living World are always listening, watching and speaking to us, the unseen presence of what he called the ‘free floating autonomous repressed material of the entire culture’ awaits any opportunity to swoop in, overtake and do harm to our psyches and society. A relevant power of Trickster agility, he taught, is the ability to navigate both/and, with twin approaches of awareness and cluelessness, acumen and innocence, or, as he often said, cunning on the one hand and grace on the other.[3]

I had many epiphanies and revelatory experiences as I explored Daniel’s keepsakes, ritual artifacts and letters for this Mandorla Rising project. Only some resulted in creative pieces in its collection. Others, including a small passel of Bly’s letters to Deardorff on early drafts of The Other Within, remain, for now, private.


Poetics of Form

As noted, the sheer volume of Deardorff’s appetite for learning and his generous synthesis of wisdom was great. His book weaves insights from nearly one hundred thinkers and artists into less than two hundred pages. This abundance, coupled with my own penchant for following threads and tangents—sometimes for days on end before re-tracing them in fruitful reverie back to their origins—made one thing clear: The scope of my plan was unwieldy. Over-fulfilling M.A. requirements, I had learned, ‘would not fly.’ Therefore, emphasizing depth rather than breadth, I narrowed my reading list. Along with Deardorff, I studied:

• Philosopher Gaston Bachelard. His work on de-forming images was foundational to Deardorff’s articulation of the function of ‘otherness’ and the Genius of Deformity (See Glossary). Having read Bachelard all year and cited his work in two essays, his thinking was full of orienting principles for this Project, especially on reverie, verticality, the poetics of space and one’s relationship to—as his translator Joanne Stroud put it—‘the world’s stuff.’ 


• Physicist David Bohm’s theory of the Implicate Order (also known as the holo-movement), was foundational to Deardorff’s theory of the Implicate Identity (See Glossary). I have long been interested in the confluence of physics and art and had begun exploring practical and metaphorical implications of space, time, transmission nodes, oscillating currents, electro-magnetic pulls and other implicate/unseen processes in relation to the Muses, the mandorla and creativity. Synchronistically, a new film about Bohm’s work, Infinite Potential, was released as I began this Project.

Deardorff’s Four Pillars of Insight
In his talks about ‘The Other Within,’ Daniel Deardorff outlines four key ideas:

• The Hierophany of Betrayal (The Gift in the Wound)


• The Implicate Identity (building on Bohm’s Implicate Order)

• Adoptive vs. Adaptive Mythos (See Glossary)

• The Genius of Deformity (building on Bachelard’s work on image)


As I worked with these themes in Deardorff’s book and thinking—as they stand alone and entwine—, more of his key teachings became the grounded context for my Project:

• The Mandorla

• Trickster Wisdom

• Holding Paradox


• Generative tension resulting from relationality of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum)

• Myth’s role in transforming culture and psyche

• Seeds and expressions of identities, interior and exterior and the sowing and distribution of these seeds, below and above, within and without

Meeting the Neighbors

As I embraced constraints, I began to experience their paradox: freedom. Having swapped reading in favor of physical ‘making,’ relationality increased.

• I tended the land:

  • ‘Met’ my tree and plant ‘neighbors;’ discussed their health walking Mossy Rock’s half-acre with Daniel’s brother David Deardorff, a botanist, and with a local arborist

  • Set up my 2021 picnic table garden, pleased that most of 2020’s flora had wintered-over well. After a permaculture gardening workshop, I realized the sunniest spot for vegetables was rock, rose and blackberry scrabble; this led to the Mandorla Garden [4]

• I tended inner spaces:

  • Inventoried sacred artifacts and mementos

  • Organized Deardorff’s studio/library as my daily workspace


  • Slowly gathered and sorted his digital (music and artwork) archive, got over (some) intimidation about using a few of the hundreds of apps and files in his iPad studio (DAW)[5]

After a year of book study and writing, the physical realm had asserted itself as central. I found myself refreshed. This Project was holding ‘medicine’ for me on a visceral level. It wanted to be grounded in body, soul, hand and heart. The cerebral could sit back and observe, along with the ancestors, palpable yet patient.

PHASE TWO: QUOTIDIAN CULTIVATION

Emergent Design II — Strategies

Good is the new awesome. —Dr. Claire Zammit, Ph.D.

Generative Questions

All creative projects are puzzles. Choices about ideas, form, aesthetics, resources, habits, willingness, courage to gather and obstacles to address are the territory. In addition to researching my subject, my challenges included meeting three realities that required attention and influenced the Project’s form in process and outcomes: multivalence, embodiment and interiority.

• Multivalence. As I narrowed my scope, what forms—in process and in public presentation—would honor the kaleidoscopic, holographic nature of Deardorff’s work and the prismatic imagery that comes through in the old stories, the Other Within and in my own work? How might the Muses dancing around me be of help? All artists deserve encouragement. I worked with Eric Maisel’s book Fearless Creating and drew courage from J. R. Carpenter’s prolific responses to the quotidian.

• Embodiment. In addition to setting a realistic pace for myself with focus on the physical (above), I am always committed to access and inclusion. My Project would need to provide several ‘ways in’ for participants/readers/listeners. Grief—my own journey of bereavement and the ongoing uncertainty and prevalence of death, denial and awakening in the world amidst the Covid-19 pandemic—impacted my physical and emotional ‘weather’ and made the mythic resonance (including katabasis, the journey to the underworld) that much more potent and catalytic. And then, time would be a design factor. How could I address all these elements and ensure the work got done? A slow reader and methodical writer, I chew on thoughts as one does medicinal roots; I savor sweet musical passages with repeated listening. I like to read (others’ work and my own) out loud. How could temporality, non-linearity, horizontality and verticality be held in my awareness and translated into the Project? This suggested a mandorla (although I didn’t consciously see it until many weeks later).

As I began Phase Two, my quotidian practices were already bearing fruit yet thick mists of Mystery about my overall Project prevailed. My dissertation supervisor Dr. Tracey Warr asked me what I thought I needed to succeed. Beyond ‘trust the process,’ I had a simple answer: devotion.

The ‘Bucket Work’
Even before the dissertation period, my Poetics of Imagination journey had brought me to a very wide lake I call ‘the Conundrum of Enoughness.’ By time I finished Phase One’s clearing, my rhythm of daily practices (Fig. 4, left-hand circle) were bringing about a transformation: devotion to my own creative work was changing my relationship to deep inner emotional work I had been doing all year. My daily practices had become spiritual scaffolding: body and vocal warm-ups, meditation followed by a single page of free writing. Sacrality was expanding with structure (a la ‘chop wood, carry water’). Approaching my Project in a ritual manner, I had left familiar shores of worry, doubt, vacillation, delay, self-judgement, perfectionism and thinking that I knew, or was supposed to know, how to do things. I sensed that confronting dregs in the lake bottom might bring back a missing part of myself (as in the Bornean story of the ‘Half Child’). Might I find out if the monster I feared in its depths was truly awful or benevolent and under a breakable spell?

One day, about 20 hours into digging in the garden, unearthing amazing amounts of petrified wood, I was listening to a recording of Deardorff telling ‘Iron John’ to an audience of men. I realized that, like the man in the story, I was doing what Bly calls ‘the bucket work:’ The entire lake must be emptied to get to its bottom and face the monster therein. I got it. Beyond the psychological, or metaphorical, working in the garden was a holistically and marvelously tactile katabasis: I was deep in the ground, holding 15million year old rocks, just six feet from my front door and I was in another world.[6] Friends who attended my zoom garden party (kick-off for the Project in May) likened the experience of the garden—then barely in progress—to an art installation. This was not anything I’d ever dreamed of making. Tracey assured me it was artful enough. I had a somatic breakthrough working with two healers during this time. Everything was taking shape yet slippery and elusive. I must be on track!

PHASE THREE: THE HEART OF THE HEARER[7]

By early June, I had been singing daily with the Living World—and with my food before eating it—for a month.[8] I noticed that one of the Hawthorne trees was resplendent with flowers. Stepping up closely to look, through the lens of my iPhone camera, I received a song.

I shared it in raw form with several friends and fellow POI students and was quite moved by the positive response all had to this tender song. They taught me that the Hawthorne is renowned in myth and in herbal (and allopathic) medicine as a heart-healer. I did not know this when the song to heal my heart was given to me by the tree.

From this point on I trusted my ability to hear and had increasing faith that the very introverted, personal aspects of my process—if I dared to share them in public—might be well-received, indeed confirming. Similarly, when I shared new work at the Dartington ‘Ensemble’ retreat in mid-June (a test-run about the shape my public presentation might take) there was unanimity: response to my most tender work was strong, far more so than the cerebral pieces about themes from the Other Within. With all this in mind, I entered Phase Four.

PHASE FOUR: INTEGRATION

‘You make an altar in your heart for the one that has flown away.’ —traditional Irish

Emergent Design III — PREPARING the PRESENTATION
At summer’s height as presentation-time neared, new design constraints and realms for emergent process, form and revelation arose. My interiority re-focused on the public (Fig. 4, right-hand circle):

• Digging in dirt yielded to digging in my QOD journal for connective threads and nascent pieces

• Warm-ups and explorations morphed into rehearsals and experiments with presentation sequence

• Technological tools for creation became platforms for communication and archival documentation

My public event would be online (again via zoom, an arena I now think of as a playground).

I and my guests had greatly enjoyed my May ‘zoom garden party launch’ and the creative exchange that took place at that four-hour open house. This event would be more brief and more formal.

Mandorla Rising: Paradoxes Abound
To determine the shape—and suitable title—for my presentation I went back to my original research question: What is the relevance of The Other Within now? A stream of insights came. I saw that I had:

• Integrated many of the book’s themes and received wisdom from its mythic creatures and stories

• Conceived ‘the book’s relevance’ as cultural and societal but was surprised to find its first relevance was to me, personally, viscerally, not in relationship to Daniel the man, but to the book’s content

• While I had re-read the book (most of it out loud) and had lived with its ideas for 18 years, I was in a whole new relationship to its substance, as I was becoming its spokesperson. This process, not required for the Project, was necessarily concurrent with it, as I had signed a contract for the 3rd edition of the book and completed my author’s questionnaire for its new publisher in mid-July[9]

• Authenticity now required me to translate my private revelations beyond the page to people, live

The ritual manner with which I had held the Project, had allowed it to hold me. I wanted to extend this experience to my audience/participants/readers. I was also aware that the public event would become, in whatever form I edited its documentation, an archived Project in the Dartington library.

How could my performative event meet these goals? The presentation would have to be a journey.

Curation-wise, I took to heart some ‘original instructions’ from Deardorff’s oft-told old stories:[10]

If my Project were to provide for others even a taste of what it had provided me, it would need to:

• Offer what Deardorff and Coyote in the story ‘No Song’ call ‘an efficacious stew’

• Include only choice elements and not ‘give away the gold’ too soon (‘the Devil’s Sooty Brother’)

• Not take as truth my, nor others’, appearances or assumed strengths (‘Coyote and Bear,’ ‘Stone Shirt’)

• Be true to the work and humble, following the calling to create beauty with devotion and without concern for it being approved, seen, or understood by others (‘the Girl Who Married Coyote’)

• Trust visibility. Allow the work to be finished and go beyond me ‘to market,’ that it may have positive impacts for community, without expectations of results, whether or not its perceived value enriches or brings a ‘return,’ for my people/the Project’s lineage (‘the Girl Who Married Coyote’)

These teachings became spider-swift guidewires as I brought my poems, images, video, songs, art, memoir, heritage, mystery—the finished and unfinished—together into consideration as a collection.

Recital as Journey
Constraints were now about time, space and—for the first time—resources (energy, funds, skills, other people’s time). I felt into the experience I wanted to offer the public for the live recital and the archival documentation it would generate. I would need some trickster wisdom to ensure that the journey and its destination would be efficacious both for me and the public.[11] Thus, sprang up the idea of a recital rather than a performance. I had only had two formal recitals in my lifetime: a piano recital in first grade and a poetry recital in college.[12] Both had been fruitful, celebratory and foundational, bringing me to a new level of artistic work (and skill). In a recital, I might find the same presence and improvisatory freedom I felt on radio, in the studio and in workshop facilitation.

With recital as strategy and Project title choice suspended until it became evident (week 14 of 15), I circumnavigated triple-threats and fooled:

• My Inner Perfectionist habitually stressed out about any performance of my musical work

• My Inner Contrarian, the one who refuses constraints and rejects following instructions

• My Stick-to-it-in-granular-Detail-Monger who hides from wilder unknowns by playing things small

Further, My Inner Producer could rest easy knowing the recital would be edited, ensuring:

• Freedom of expression

• The most natural recorded ‘live takes’ in a casual atmosphere

• Privacy of all who attended[13]

Thus freed, the preparations became fun! (Sssh, puh puh puh, dare I admit this?) (See Glossary)

The Collection Emerges
Bringing my skills in radio, concert performance, record production and convening together and saying yes to the Mystery, I slipped in new ‘QOD practices’—video editing, poetry revisions and rehearsals, review of work in progress—to replace prior ones (See Fig. 4). As I re-read my daily journal pages, I began to cull keywords. While fascinating, this process would not directly add to my completing the current collection. It did, however, give me strands and sequences that grew into the final pieces. Likewise, I had started many yet-unfinished songs; reviewing these helped me choose which three garden videos I would now edit. I set a date and sent invitations, choosing Wednesday (in Norse tradition, the day associated with Odin, God of the Poets) for the recital day. For more than ten years, Daniel Deardorff had invited the community to join him at the hearth-fire in the mandorla hut at Mossy Rock for story night on the last Wednesday of each month. I decided my final documentation would take the form of a website. I secured a designer (the wondrous Isabel Bay Design) and the domain mandorlarising.net. I was nearly ready. It is lovely when fear becomes excitement.

Finishing Touches
Catharsis was present at each still very private, creative turn. Yet there were a few gaps to fill in the overall story for others:

• ‘Passages’ called me to be more explicit. As the peony faded one Sunday morning and winds picked up, I spent an entire vigil-like day filming at intervals as its petals fell

• Humor from the Living World insisted on ‘making the cut,’ thus, hummingbird and frog

• The Recital Journey would be marked in alchemical colors of black (the Journey), white (Katabasis) and Red (Love, Homecoming and Confirmation)

• Ritual fire would frame the time with Daniel calling (his last) fire on a video I filmed and edited, accompanied by his song about carrying fire. My invocation ‘A Prayer to Tatewari,’ arose from my QOD journaling with two days to spare. These two pieces with photos would call in the Journey

• Four of Deardorff’s songs—performed, produced and three written by and one for him—would set the larger context adding buoyancy to the ‘lobby prelude’ time for those who wished to arrive early

• Technology aligned: My iMovies would work on Apple Keynote (Microsoft PowerPoint-type app), uploading them to Vimeo would allow embedding on the Mythsinger Legacy Project’s Squarespace website

• The Project title, Mandorla Rising, came in the last week before the recital; the strap line—adding ‘and my life with…’—only in the final day

• On the day, before the recital, I was still brooding about a lack I felt about the Katabasis section. Tracey and I had discussed the World Tree segment and I had rehearsed it as a scripted spoken word piece to be said over slides of the mandorla images I had created building upon Deardorff’s artwork. I had drawn my own pastel ‘Mandorla Creature’ when I couldn’t find more words

But was this enough? (Ah, that question again). I longed for something more experiential.

Dropping Down
In his teachings, Deardorff often said of ritual: ‘If the soul is not convinced, then nothing has happened.’[14] I had learned from him (as he had learned from Malidoma Somé) that to make a strong ritual container, one needs to be clear about the beginning and the end and leave the middle open for Mystery. How could I create this kind of an experience as a master’s dissertation recital online? The center would need to be known, wouldn’t it? And the time minded. As I sat for my QOD meditation and journaled, a meditation to meet the Other Within came through. At first, I hesitated to include it, knowing I would have to limit the number of poems I could share in the recital timeframe. Yet my pastel ‘Creature’ and the part of me that appreciates participation urged me to risk it.

My ‘Creature’ would serve as a visual guide to the meditative journey-within-the-journey. This would allow each person to connect with something private and meaningful for themselves. I took special care to hold this segment lightly: people respond differently to guided meditation and to ‘getting personal’ about otherness, especially at an event not advertised as a healing workshop. (With a bow to Baba Yaga, my invitation to participate would include both free will and compulsion.) Once I added this segment, my experiential puzzle solved, I discovered an extra satisfaction and sense of balance, of wholeness: my facilitation ‘social practice’ skills were now part of the mix.[15] After the recital, responses to the meditation were largely positive; some said it added a layer of meaning. Following feedback from the less enticed, when I created the edited version of the recital, I added an animated video to accompany the meditation, giving viewers more time with the ‘Creature.’

Finale: Recital, Love, Homecoming, Confirmation
Years ago, at Martin Shaw and Deardorff’s workshop ‘The Bones of Initiation,’ I had learned that severance from one’s originary source (Earth, cultural origin, spirit, the old stories)–a lack of rootedness in underlying reality (the below) and disconnection from verticality (rising to the great above)–was a major cause of society’s current ills. As we discussed initiatory journeys–be they by choice, illness or accident–I asked Shaw to say more about madness (mental illness). His response has stayed with me ever since: When one returns from an initiatory passage, torn yet victorious—or strong yet broken—one must be confirmed. This is society's responsibility not just up to each one of us to provide for ourselves. When confirmation is missing, that is the root of madness.[16] When reconnection is made possible, as it can be, aided by proximity to the Living World, old stories, the tellers and efficacious ritual practices, a ‘tectonic plate shift’ (my image) of healing can take place. Wholeness, I have found—and have had confirmed through this Project—emerges with the Earth’s songs.

As the homecoming was all about love, I would give Daniel the last word through song. My ritual finale was his beautiful ballad ‘For Now,’ with its lesson in holding paradox and the twin wings of ‘love and trust’ that makes it possible for people to fly. I had found his illustration of a winged mandolin and made my final mandorla for the Project with this image at the center.

With a closing moment of burning embers from the same storyfire that we had lit at the start, I gave thanks and welcomed those who could stay afterwards to ‘feed the story;’ this would serve as a time of additional confirmation.[17]

Emergent Design IV — Encore: Website and Video
My last tasks were to translate the recital into a permanent, archive quality format. While a book or catalog, as in a museum installation or exhibit, had been my initial impulse, I chose to create a website, accessible through, yet distinct from, the main ‘house’ for Daniel Deardorff’s legacy projects: mythsingerlegacy.org In creating this site, as noted above, I added three video segments to accompany still images from the recital presentation and recorded audio versions of two poems that had not been initially included due to time (‘Beyond the Hermit’s Door’ and ‘Butterfly Girl’).

In keeping with the ‘both/and’ nature of this Project, the website is designed to be accessible and multivalent. One can move through the work horizontally or vertically, at one’s own pace, print out several downloads and interact with the site as one would any website that has expandable images, embedded video, audio, and active hosting. (TRT of the recital content is approximately 1:10:00 with 30-45m additional to read the Artist Statement, Glossary, Bibliography and this History, optional.)

The design is intended to conform to requirements for the Poetics of Imagination M.A., to serve the future of The Other Within, 3rd edition and to be an ongoing ‘home’ for the part of my work which is ‘at the crossroads/in the mandorla’ of my own creative expression and Daniel Deardorff’s legacy.

Once the M.A. assessment is complete, new pages including responses to ‘Feeding the Story’ and other Mandorla Rising-generated musical, filmic and poetic works (yet in progress), will appear here.

The site will launch on the last Wednesday of August 2021, Odin’s day. It will be an active part of future festivities including the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Daniel Deardorff’s birth on 12 February 2022 and the publication of the 3rd edition of The Other Within by Inner Traditions International in late 2022.

Throughout the project, whenever I was overwhelmed, Theodore Roethke’s words held me:

What is madness
but nobility
at odds with circumstance?[18]

These words inspired my corollary question, one I am now living into daily:

What is health
but willingness
to face circumstance
with presence?

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

With love,
Judith-Kate Friedman
Port Townsend, WA, US
Traditional lands of the Coast Salish people on the Salish Sea 

FOOTNOTES