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The Kuan Yin Oracle

30/3/2012

Kuan Yin and her oracle in Gloucestershire

I enter the Kuan Yin temple in Singapore. I’m the only Westerner here, and I try to move quietly, unobtrusively in case I breach any detail of temple etiquette. Statues of Kuan Yin and other gods and goddesses in varied sizes and forms are grouped on shrines and in niches. The predominant colours are red and gold; the air is full of the smoke of joss sticks, varied altars are piled with offerings of fruit and flowers, and donation boxes are regularly stuffed with notes. I notice how many young people are here worshipping at the shrines, consulting the oracle, and invoking their own personal encounter with the deity.

But later, when I find out more about Kuan Yin, I discover that here is a lady who cannot be pinned down by religion or culture. She slips from one to another, from Buddhism to Taoism to Shintoism. She has connections with Christianity, and the ancient religion of Egypt. She may be revered as a goddess or as a spirit, a bodhisattva (a Buddha-to-be) or an immortal who was once an exceptional human child. Kuan Yin goes by other names, too, but they all mean one thing in essence: She Who Hears the Cries of the World. She is a listening ear, a saving arm, a calming presence.

And she has an oracle. More than that, her temples in the Far East are full of men and women seeking advice on a personal problem or significant question by consulting this oracle. The oracle consists of 100 numbered sticks which are shaken in a brass or wooden cylinder, vigorously and noisily, until at last one jumps out. The number corresponds to a reading, which in turn is a poetic reflection, augmented by an interpretation of what this means in individual life. Here, the seeker hopes, is the wise advice which will help to resolve their query. To me this is an extraordinary validation of divination as a part of spirituality, connecting it to sacred space, whether a temple or a church – something all but lost in the West.

I first ‘met’ Kuan Yin in her famous temple at Penang in December 2011, while Robert and I were working as lecturers on a cruise. I seized the chance to explore her domain, and witness the oracle in action. Then at Singapore, one of our next stops, came this second chance to visit one of her chief temples. Here I tried out the oracle for myself, and was given a copy of it in translation as a gift from the temple, something to be treasured.

I’d had a copy of her Oracle for some years, in fact, in the form of a book by Stephen Karcher, produced in an accessible version for Westerners but faithful to the spirit of the original. But discovering the living tradition in those two temples spurred me on to find out more about her, and to acquire my own set of oracle sticks. This I did in a shop close by to the Singapore temple – but then how on earth was I to decipher the Chinese numbers? A helpful site on the internet finally gave me the tools to do that. http://www.mandarintools.com/numbers.html.

Then I fancied having a statue of Kuan Yin. I was due to present an evening to my current Nine Ladies group (see my book ‘The Circle of Nine’), exploring the Kuan Yin archetype, so there was something of a deadline. Could I find a figure in time that pleased me, and which didn’t cost a vast amount?

Kuan Yin’s chief symbols are the moon, the sea and a dragon. She is a patron of sailors, and there are many temples to her on the sea shore. She is merciful, and it is said that just as her heart is open to all, so should one’s own heart be open when approaching her. Elaborate rituals and paraphernalia are of little importance compared to that. Still, it would be nice to have a visual reminder of her. I hovered over bronze statues of Kuan Yin advertised on the internet, depicted with the crescent moon behind her, and a dragon at her feet, but in the end chose a relatively simple one in white porcelain. The image of her as a ‘white goddess’ has appeal to me, perhaps because it carries a quality of universality, of the archetype behind the archetypes of the feminine. So that’s what I went for – delivered from, of all places, a Bonsai centre! http://www.got-bonsai.co.uk/ For around £45 I received a speedy delivery of my white Kuan Yin, nestling safely in a cheerful Chinese patterned cardboard case.

She was described as ‘blanc de Chine’, which meant nothing to me until I looked it up and found, to my delight, that this figure had been made in Fujian province in China, and stemmed from a centuries-old tradition of making Kuan Yin and other sacred figures there. Ah – the People’s Kuan Yin! Lineage means more to me than lavish originality; this little figure has provenance to me. Excellent essay at http://www.holymtn.com/gods/BlancdeChine.htm!

And she has a secret resource: an internal reservoir which can be filled with water, and which then drips ‘blessed Dew’ for several minutes. It took me a little while to discover that you don’t look for a hole in her head to pour it into – you pour it into the hole at her feet, then turn her upside down to feed the reservoir before setting her the right way up again! That little challenge solved, she became a beautiful and serene model of a spirit, deva or deity – call her what you will – who presided over a very successful evening of discussion, meditation and oracle consultation in our front room last night.

Books:

The Kuan Yin Oracle: The Voice of the Goddess of Compassion – Stephen Karcher
Bodhisattva of Compassion: the Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin – John Blofeld
Kuan Yin: Myths and Revelations of the Chinese Goddess of Compassion – Martin Palmer, Jay Ramsay & Kwok Man-Ho
Divination: The Search for Meaning - Cherry Gilchrist

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Dymock Poets & Daffodils

24/3/2012

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Today we set out in search of the Dymock daffodils. Three neighbouring villages host daffodil weekends in this slice of countryside between Gloucester and Herefordshire, and I’d heard tell of the walks that pass through myriads of wild daffodils. It was our first visit to Dymock and we were drawn there in particular because of the connection with the Dymock Poets – a loose-knit group that included Robert Frost, John Drinkwater, Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas, poets who lived in and around Dymock just before the First World War. Robert and I are especially fond of the poem by John Drinkwater called ‘Cotswold Love’ as it was read out at our wedding three years ago this April.

In Dymock village the pub was doing a roaring trade, and the brilliant, hot sunshine had brought out the straw hats and the daffodil hunters in their droves. Watching a purposeful young couple stride out along the Poets’ Path, I felt as though we were launching into some kind of medieval pilgrimage, heading towards a golden goal.

Actually, the daffodils weren’t much in evidence for the first mile. Then we found a vast field studded with clump after clump of the delicate yellow and white wild daffodils, where we sprawled blissfully in the sun among them. A celestial carpet.

The idyll lost its lustre just a little as we headed back through a field of rusting caravans, towards the sturdy, pyramid-style steeple of Dymock church – a Herefordshire style, I think, in contrast with the slender spire of Gloucester Cathedral, a few miles off. But our enthusiasm revived as we spotted other fields, orchards and banks with liberal scatterings of these delicate, ethereal flowers.

They’re in full bloom now, with the hot weather, so it’s an urgent mission if you want to catch them before they go over. Dymock hosts its own official daffodil weekend on Mar 31st, so if you’d like to join a merry crowd and have tea in the church, go visit. http://www.dymock.org.uk/

A field full of daffodils at Dymock

Cotswold Love
John Drinkwater
Blue skies are over Cotswold
And April snows go by.
The lasses turn their ribbons
For April’s in the sky.
And April is the season
When Sabbath girls are dressed
From Rodoboro’ to Capden
In all their silken best.

An ankle is a marvel
When first the buds are brown,
And not a lass but knows it,
From Stow to Gloucester Town.
And not a girl goes walking
Along the Cotswold Lanes
But knows men’s eyes in April
Are quicker than their brains.

It’s little that it matters,
So long as you’re alive,
If you’re eighteen in April,
                                                                                                   Or rising sixty-five.
                                                                   When April comes to Amberley                                                                                                                    With skies of April blue,
                                                                                                    And Cotswold girls are briding
                                                                                                     With slyly tilted shoe

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Firebird Russian Arts – Where did it go?

18/3/2012

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Love - Russian style

To anyone who might find themselves here rather unexpectedly, having typed in www.firebirdarts.co.uk:

My website of Russian lacquer miniatures is no more. Twenty amazing years of visiting Russia and selling traditional art, through exhibitions, a gallery in Bath, and in recent years through the website, have come to an end. Russia was great – I made 59 visits, and grew a deep love for its people and its culture. But the picture was never going to stand still. Russia has certainly changed since that momentous post-Soviet era, and I have too! I feel that I’ve distilled the experience of Russia through my book The Soul of Russia (also published as Russian Magic), and that the privilege of delivering three lectures to the Temenos Academy in London in 2011 has rounded off the experience. So I’m in from the field, and am focusing now on my work as a writer and a tutor. Thanks Russia! And thanks to everyone who visited Firebird either on line, or in person, during the years since 1992.

I may drop in a blog about Russian culture from time to time. If you’d like that, why not let me know? Here – via Twitter – or by email. What shall we have? Nature spirits – the art of making toasts – or the magical Russian fairy tale? Let me know your preferences!

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The mother at the centre of the world

11/3/2012

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Meeting the mother stone on Easter Island

On Mother’s Day, in March 2008, I met the ancestor mothers of Easter Island. My husband Robert and I were lecturers on a cruise sailing up the coast of South America, and the ship (Voyages of Discovery) made a six day trip out into the wilds of the ocean to the most remote inhabited island on earth: Easter Island, home of the giant statues, known as the Moai. And more, we discovered.
Since then, I have gradually begun to join up the dots between ‘ancestor veneration’, worldwide, age-old cults of honouring the ancestors, and family history research as we know it today. We too, I now believe, are looking for ways to experience a connection with our ancestors.

Here’s a shortened version of how I wrote about it in Growing Your Family Tree.

Day two of our brief visit, and something has tickled my imagination in a guidebook: a mention of an ancient round stone representing ‘the navel of the world’. Te Pito Te Henua is one of the other names for Easter Island and that in itself means the navel and uterus of the world, so this stone would therefore be the navel of the navel. Robert agreed: we should try to find it.’

We hired the only the woman taxi driver on the island, mainly because she’d been recommended as helpful. But she turns out to be crucial to the plan.

‘Ah, so you want to go to the place that we visit for energy,’ she says. She takes us over to the north coast of the island, turning down an unpaved road to a small and completely empty beach. Among the rocks above the sea line, a round wall of stones and boulders has been created, about three feet high and eight feet in diameter. Within the circle it encloses, a huge, and beautifully smooth ovoid stone has been placed, like a giant egg. Four similar but smaller stones are set around it at regular intervals, forming a square. It has a Celtic feel about it - we could almost be on the West Coast of Ireland, or in the Hebrides – but here we are, over two thousand miles away from any mainland, and over eight thousand from home.

It is first and foremost a place for women, our driver tells us. She first of all invites me alone to accompany her into the circle, and seats me on one of the smaller stones, encouraging me to place my hands on the great stone egg in front of me. She sits opposite and does likewise.

‘Put your hands on it gently,’ she says. ‘Relax.’

Women of the island have been coming here for hundreds of years, she tells me. They come to pray for help, for a safe childbirth, and even for the delivery of their babies. The stone is the mother, their mother, and the island’s mother.

‘What do you feel?’

I feel as though the stone is not a stone at all, but an egg with the shell stripped away, and the delicate but all powerful pulse of life moving within its membrane. I sense the women who have laid their hands here, and the ancestral mothers whose spirit is contained within the stone itself. Currents of energy seem to be running up my arms.

I tell her some of this, and she is satisfied. She steps outside the circle and invites Robert to come and join me. Now I can suggest to him how to sit and place his hands, and, rather to his surprise, he also experiences waves of energy.

We leave the enclosure. It’s time to get back to the harbour and board our ship for another six day voyage, back to the coast of South America. Both of us are reflective after the experience, and feel privileged that one of the islanders trusted us enough to teach us about her sacred site. We first met the father of the island in the myriad forms of the Moai male ancestors, but now we have also met its mother, the one stone representing all the female ancestors.

This is a Mother’s Day that I won’t forget.

From Growing Your Family Tree Piatkus 2010

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A Cotswold Spring

8/3/2012

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After all the words in my previous posts, I felt it was time for some refreshing images. So here's snippets from my collection of Cotswold spring photos. They're built up over a few years, as you might imagine. (It will offer to play slide show if you hover over main pic)

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Who are your real ancestors?

7/3/2012

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Last night I got an email from cousin Debra in America. We’ve pooled our family history research for years, and share the same 2x gt grandfather. Now the identity of his father Edward Owens of Abbeycwmhir in Wales, is in question; someone on a genealogical forum has cast doubt our right to claim him. It could be very hard to unseat an ancestor I’ve invested time and care in revealing: dear Edward who, as a young married man, threw up his life as a shoemaker in the Welsh Borders to join Wellington’s army and travel to Ireland, Portugal and Sicily. He fought in the battle of Corunna, was awarded a medal, and was finally made a Chelsea Pensioner. And this also – if true – would undermine my delicious 3x gt grandmamma, born Maria Kinsey, who didn’t sit around waiting for her soldier husband to come home, but joined him for part of the time at least, giving birth to a daughter when they were stationed in Sicily. I view Edward and Maria as the restless, travelling ones who started a whole chain of further restless travellers in our family; some emigrated, and my direct line consists of 3 subsequent Baptist Minister grandfathers who moved out of Wales, into England and America. I like to think that my love of new horizons, along with a thirst for new ideas, comes from them.

So what’s to be done, if Edward isn’t my kin after all? It’s true that we don’t have unquestionable proof. But, on balance, I do think we have ‘reasonable evidence’, which I’m about to collate and present to the doubters. It still raises a huge question: what does it mean if your cherished ancestors have to be rubbed out of your tree? When you go gathering up your ancestors, you don’t just gather names and dates. You find real people and their stories, and in some sense, they come alive for you. All the research I did among other family historians for my recent book Growing Your Family Tree confirms that I’m not a sad isolated case in having this experience. And communing with the ancestors has been a part of human culture worldwide since earliest times. There is a kind of link that is forged, and a resonance generated between earlier generations and our present lives.

However, if the evidence against proves incontrovertible, then I’ll have to relinquish Edward and Maria. I think we should never invest quite so much of ourselves in our ancestors that ‘losing’ them diminishes our identity. Facing uncertainty in any sphere – science, relationships, religion – is all a part of the quest for knowledge. In family history, there’s always the issue of whether a father really is a father. I’ve come across studies which say that as many as one in three children are not the product of their named fathers! The links you make, in family history, may sometimes be to the ‘wrong’ people in terms of the DNA. And you may – I may in this case – just have to accept that, and go reconfigure. But in this case, I hope not.

See my article Voices of the Ancestors in the current issue of ‘Mind Body Spirit’ (www.watkinsbooks.com).

And more on the meaning of ancestors in our lives in Growing Your Family Tree.

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The Alchemy of Spring

4/3/2012

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Earth, water, fire and air
Met together in a garden fair
Put in a basket bound with skin.
If you answer this riddle, you'll never begin (Incredible String Band)

The elements are running free…. Sharp rain, blustery wind, even pelting, sleety snow before intense sunlight breaks through again. Clouds gather and clear. The earth is making its own demands; too wet to garden today, but my hands were in the soil yesterday. I grumble about the back ache of weeding, but some part of me craves it. I crouched back on my heels, and watched a peregrine falcon circling high in the sky, pursued by an angry crow. The ravens were calling from the tallest tree in the churchyard opposite: messenger birds, according to Irish lore.

Spring has not just one face, in this country; it can be warm, soothing, raw, challenging, or exhilarating by turns. It goes forwards and backwards and that’s why it is so prolonged, and so beautiful. At the moment, it’s the elemental side of it which is working its magic. Tonight it’ll be back to the element of fire again, as it’s not quite time yet to give up cosy evenings by the woodburner.

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Spellbound watching The Dead!

2/3/2012

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I am always late catching up on films, music and books– possibly the last person to discover Nick Drake, and to go round telling everyone they really should read Barbara Kingsolver and ‘The Poisonwood Bible’. Maybe I enjoy discovering treasures later on, by which time they have almost become archaeological relics.

Last night it was ‘The Dead’, a DVD of the film from 1987 directed by John Huston, which held me spellbound. Thanks to my daughter for a late, much hinted at birthday present! Two of the creative courses that I teach online happen to have James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ as a set text, and to rally students who complain about this collection of short stories being too pessimistic or old-fashioned for them, I’ve suggested they take a look at two Utube clips from these short stories – for Araby http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3pUH1MfC9I and for ‘The Dead’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6isUZAw0CQQ Some have been moved to tears! (and that’s just the men)

So I finally got round to seeing the whole film, and was mesmerised by the great characterisation, unhurried pace and exquisite cameo detail. The poignant atmosphere of a Dublin household at the turn of the century, with its decaying gentility and folorn hopes is beautifully captured. Along with a steely hint of trouble to come on the Irish political stage, and a heritage of enchanting music (here’s another weepie, The Lass of Aughrim at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1CP5Lz2iHE ). It also left me eager to trace the poem which Huston inserted into the film, but which is not found in the original Joyce text: ‘Donal Og’, translated from the Irish by Lady Augusta Gregory, who was a friend to the poet W. B. Yeats and closely associated with the magical order of The Golden Dawn. But that’s a later post, and another story!

A quick search, and there it was at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19457

Here’s the first verse:

It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

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Cherry Gilchrist

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