My dear friend, of two intense, revelatory years of intimate and prolific communication
Tag: Mother
dream: morning of 9.2.2023
i had a baby —
i kept forgetting to completely nurse him
he would latch and suckle, but because i was distracted, i would never fully feed him, and he was malnourished, but this sweet baby never cried / nor complained
he was happy and content with what i gave him, smiling always at me
but then
i lost/misplaced him somewhere
they/all assumed he had been taken/abducted
but i felt sure i had just misplaced him /
it seemed we looked everywhere in and around our home
and the second time searching the house,
i found him in the refrigerator on the top shelf
in the back
his white skin and pastel clothing blending in with the milk and pale juice jugs
he was there on that shelf all along
i had apparently placed him in there with the milk — perhaps so he could eat/
he had died in there
from asphyxiation
it was an accident,
and i understood that
i was unwell, forgetful, incompetent and losing my mind [although in my dream i don’t know the exact concepts of postpartum or postpartum psychosis]
everyone else does not understand that it was absolutely an innocent act, a tragic accident
they are disgusted with me, violently angry with me and
want me to be punished, arrested, sentenced to prison or maybe put to death
for accidentally forgetting my baby, for misplacing and inadvertently killing my baby — in the refrigerator
“[S]he floats like a butterfly …”
marker, paint, glue and chunky gold glitter
on 12”x12” square
gold metallic cardstock
These two gorgeous, requested works by the most gorgeous and extraordinary artist and person Mz. Lajuana Lampkins of Chicago.
You might find her making her art in the late night scene of her favorite spots in the Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhoods of Chicago — or reach out to her on Instagram at Lajuana.Lampkins1 and peruse her art, her process and her community.
Lajuana Lampkins has had her art exhibited to great praise; she is a prolific and widely collected street artist; and she has edited and published a book of her late son’s essays, poetry and letters: The Collected Works of Prince Akbar AKA Jus Rhymz.
She is also a sister, aunt, friend, poet, community member and activist, writer, rapper, historian, archivist, fashionista, paralegal, social commentarian and modern philosopher — but most proudly, a mother, grandmother and great grandmother
— and to me, she epitomizes the Crone.
Muhammad Ali
Champions aren’t made in the gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.
Mz. Lampkins works may be exhibited again in autumn 2023 in a community art show that she is hoping to create and develop —-and she aspires to publish her next non-fiction book in the nearer future.
She is also the subject of the forthcoming documentary “My Mother is An Artist” which follows Mz. Lampkins’s journey from 2019, eight years post-release from a 30 year incarceration as a wrongfully prosecuted and convicted young woman and mother —to 2023, as a working, locally-renown and yet-still-struggling artist living in these American systems of modern oppression and exploitation.
Continue reading ““[S]he floats like a butterfly …””roses : maiden, mother, Cɾσɳҽ
the holy trinity of feminine archetypes
Cronehood: the imperative, work, province and privilege of becoming truth and living truthfully in the depths
Ageing is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose:
the fulfilment and confirmation of one’s character.
- James Hillman
“Life is a farce if a person does not serve truth.”
- Hilma af Klint
“A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, “the emperor has no clothes,” but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or “spin” to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with."
— Jean Shinoda Bolen
by a queen crone,
Lajuana Lampkins
"Women's most feared power over men is the power to say no. To refuse to take care of men. To refuse to service them sexually. To refuse to buy their products. To refuse to worship their God. To refuse to love them. Every therapist knows that sex can be forced, but no power in the world can force love from any woman who wishes to withhold it."
- Barbara Walker
“The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power.
Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.”
- Marion Woodman
Continue reading “Cronehood: the imperative, work, province and privilege of becoming truth and living truthfully in the depths”
proof of life :
she taught me to not like
myself/
especially, my image
— in photographs and in the moments themselves
ingraining a self-consciousness in me
and in the candidness of my real life
in
play
laughter
effort
surprise
exertion
contemplation
fatigue
wonder
sadness
silliness
conversation
worry
unmade
pose, poise, posture, profile, perfect,
control
and because perfection
is unattainable,
in the eye of the beholder and in the eye of the beheld
she was absent from the photos of our lives, and so also was i,
becoming onlooker, background, photographer,
instead of subject
and, so i learned
to make myself invisible
to become invisible
to accept invisibility
there are so many ways to be a thief, mother
Kahlo, an ideal of self-possession
james, thank you.
a man who knew my father befriended me
and caused me to question the nature of my reality,
my history, its validity,
my possibly-false memories
— all, viewed through the lens
of the person
who had a vested interest in
indoctrinating me
who preferred my naïveté
under the guise of protectivity
Christmas break, age 6, Waukegan, Illinois
parents can write stories on the folds of a child’s cerebrum,
their pens go unchallenged
until they’re challenged /
their ink is like cord blood,
except it can re/generate — or damage
but it only takes one person
to crack their sky,
then, we astronomers spend
our lives asking these zealots
the non-answerable “why?”
Famêlée
This feels like an arrow
Made from a tree
That rose from
An acorn
That I gathered and stored
In another life
Scribed with a message continually
piercing my heart
I wasn’t only wounded though,
I was woke
into a clarity
that I was already sighting in my dreams,
writing with words
mortal and eternal
You once said, proclaimed or whispered
Every single thing
that I ever believed
My own truths embarrassed in the shadow of your confidence
My inner voice silenced in your animated persuasion
Believing you so completely – for the better of my years
Becoming like and unlike you because of it,
but not be-coming me,
Un-be-coming me every day
I ain’t even mad
You don’t know this – still,
You don’t want
to hear,
or listen;
Our time is running out
Even this admission
Is sure to haunt me one day,
and guilts me today
But I can’t call you confidant or crone
If you refuse to learn,
to evolve,
From this one archetype
The wide and long view
seems to escape you
You live in the moment in the least way, the worst way
And I don’t worship here or there, any more
The faith in your godliness is gone,
It is unfamiliar
For me to pity you
You, deaf and tone deaf
You had all the answers
In the morning shallows, perhaps
But evaporation revealed even those
Were anchor-less, yet stationary
An algae
Mucking up the colorless perfection of sunlit water
But in the deep, or dark, or quiet pools, you were always so lost
And in the ocean, at night
You drown even in its calm
You have ridden civil swells and storms,
I’ll give you that
But have you ever communed with waves
Allowing them to be part of you
Swallowing and absorbing the mystery
Becoming the colorless perfection of dark water
You seem to stay parched
Your belly’s hollow from impious fasting and pious thirst
You do know that’s where your heart sits?
But let’s agree to come around again, friend
We’ll swap places and next time
I’ll be the mother,
and the son,
and the husband,
and the elder,
and the babe,
and the foreign one,
I’ll become The Other One
because,
I want the chance to know
You
Wanderten Mutter
“Lief heim ins Seitelein.” Unitätsarchiv, R.20.E.36.12. Archiv der Brüder-unität, Herrnhut.http://bq.blakearchive.org/40.3.schuchard
My life seems long, I know
My body’s mostly worn
Inside, she’s just begun to live, again
A girl gone long ago
There are bottled laughs to voice aloud
New smiles to wear with these old shoes
Time to know the world, and you, and you, and you …
between these walls of peeling, muted hues
Once Herr died
My Self was ready to return
My cadence so shy and slow,
Lamenting the awkward waste of precious years
I find my voice as I write the past,
But in my book, the Tomorrow has no page
Forever winter approaches from within
These years and years upright on hard chairs
Unreal, unseen, unheard, untouched
by the world, by the womb, it may concern, Whom
I speak through and then beyond this pain of bone and life
Before the cold within brings silence of the tomb
You see, to me, my presence still feels warm, and blush
somehow, even new
My life stretched out behind me, no steps ahead
And I forestall Death’s cue, awaiting mere glimpse of you
If you can imagine, child
I love, unsaid,
I feel as just alive, as real, as you.
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 