(Sun in Virgo, Moon in Aquarius, Scorpio Rising)
The Right-hand version: Jenny is the visionary who started
the whole process, legal owner of the property, and president
of Neskaya, Inc. She has been creating seasonal celebrations for
the past 30-odd years and teaching International Folk Dance in
Franconia NH since 1980. Jenny has written "The Feminine
of History is Mystery" a book about the two hemispheres of
the brain, the sun, the moon, and archaeoastronomy. It arose out
of her interest in astronomy, in which she has a degree, and her
extensive travel in the British Isles.
The Left-hand version: Jenny is also an eclectic shaman from the
mishap lineage, following the path of the recovering artist, initiated
by brain chemistry. She is well-versed in the symbolic languages
of dreams, Tarot, and Astrology. A Priestess whose religion is
celebrating diversity, she is a guardian of the Sacred Calendar
and Keeper of Neskaya. At Neskaya, Jenny has been able to bring
her interests together in "Dancing the Sacred Calendar",
as well as holding regular dancing circles and many special events
which have brought inspirational international circle dance leaders
to the North Country.
FOR A FULL HISTORY, INCLUDING RELEVANT LINKS, READ ON...
In 1964, Jenny got a degree in Astronomy, went to Stonehenge
for the first time, and read "The White Goddess" by
Robert Graves (about the Celtic tree alphabet and calendar). In
the very last hours of 1964, she was dancing Greek folk dances
in Paris with some Greek friends. These four threads: Astronomy,
Stonehenge, Sacred Calendar, and Folk Dance continued, sometimes
hidden, sometimes obvious, until they all reconnected in Sacred
Circle Dance.
Dancing the Sacred Calendar
The
Feminine of History is Mystery
Trip to Callanish
House
Paintings
ASTRONOMER
Jenny received a degree in Astronomy from Wellesley College in
1964. She has lectured and taught classes in Planetaria (that
machine that projects the stars on a dome) in Cincinnati, San
Francisco, and Portland, Maine. During a trip to the British Isles
in 1964, she was lucky enough to visit Stonehenge before it became
popular, and this inspired a continuing interest in archeoastronomy.
While in England she also read a book by Robert Graves, The White Goddess, which sparked a quest for
the astronomical basis of the dates of the "Fire Festivals"
or Cross-Quarter Days. (Little did she know that the answer was
at Stonehenge.) For seven years, at the College for Lifelong Learning
in New Hampshire, she taught a course for adults in "Observational
Astronomy" which was based on keeping an observing notebook.
Her focus was, and continues to be, how much we can learn about
the amazing universe in which we live from our own observations
with the naked eye. She continues to offer occasional evenings
of star-watching through The Rocks and other local organizations
in Littleton NH.
WRITER
At the age of 17, inspired by the diary of Anne Frank, Jenny started
writing a journal and has been doing so ever since. In Brunswick,
she took a dream class from a Jungian teacher, Charles Ponce.
This made her aware of the major archetypes of the Sun and the
Moon, with the Sun representing all that is linear, logical, rational,
masculine, and yang, and the Moon representing all that is patterned,
associative, intuitive, feminine and yin. These major archetypes
are also represented in the two halves of the body: no matter
WHICH hemisphere of the brain is involved, our EXPERIENCE is that
the right side of the body is more straightforward and active,
the left side is more inclusive and receptive. At the same time,
Jenny had become interested in dowsing, ley-lines and other aspects
of "earth energies", the idea that the planet earth
has an energy body with meridians and energy flows, similar to
the Chinese understanding of the human body.
Putting these ideas together resulted in the inspiration for a book to be written with "right-hand" and "left-hand" pages: the Righthand pages contain a linear narrative, complete with footnotes and bibliography, the Lefthand pages contain dreams, visions, entries from a trip journal, "channeled" writings ("I made those up"), celebrations, poetry, etc. As part of the research for the book, Jenny made two trips to the British Isles in 1977 and '78, to visit the megalithic sites and other holy places. The book, entitled "The Feminine of History is Mystery", was printed in 1985 by a local press because of the the difficulty of coordinating the righthand and lefthand pages.
DANCER
Jenny has always loved dance, but relegated it to a low priority
in a life devoted to teaching and writing about science. When
she lived in Brunswick Maine, she began dancing with a local International
Folkdance Group. She was aware that the dances were feeding her
soul in some way, even though the other people who came seemed
to be unaware of this possibility. While dancing a simple Breton
dance to the music of bagpipes, her Celtic heritage (one Scots
grandmother, one Irish grandmother) emerged and demanded a larger
share of her life energy. While at Maine Folk Dance Camp, she
heard a woman from India, trained in classical temple dancing,
say: "Dance is my spiritual practice." Jenny had been
doing Buddhist sitting meditation for many years with more or
less success, but these words opened a door: dance could be a
spiritual practice, and it was hers.
And finally, on the green in Danville, Vermont, as part of the Dowsers Conference, she found people doing "Sacred Circle Dance" to celebrate the fall equinox. They were doing dances she already knew around a simple altar/centerpiece of a scarf, a candle, and tokens of earth and water. "Well, of course, I always knew the dances were sacred." She had already been teaching Folk Dance to a small group in Franconia NH, where she moved in 1980. Now she went to the first circle dance workshops in New England, given by teachers from the British Isles, who were introducing this new/old way of understanding traditional dances. She did a teacher training workshop with Peter Vallance from Findhorn in 1987. Continuing to teach Sacred Circle Dance became the most important thing in a life increasingly darkened by clinical depression.
PRIESTESS
While living in Brunswick, Maine, Jenny joined a women's group
which ran a small counseling and referral service. As a new member,
she did one of her typically innocent things, following the path
of the Fool in the Tarot, who steps blithely off the cliff...
The meeting was the night of February 2, there was a big gibbous
moon in the sky, and she took candle and goblet with her. When
the business meeting was over, Jenny said "It's Candlemas,
and I want to do a ritual." She lit the candle, filled the
goblet with water and passed it around the circle, reciting the
words of the Prophet Odo (from Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed):
"You cannot make the Revolution, you cannot buy the Revolution,
you can only BE the Revolution." When it was over, one woman
sighed deeply and said "This is what was missing." Another
said "Blessed Be." Jenny had never heard those words
before, and only much later understood that she had just come
out as a witch.
Her training followed a similar serendipitous path: the inspiration and writing of a book, which with hindsight turned out to be both justification and process for shifting her life path from that of Western scientist to sacred artist, a class in "how to create your life" which gave practice in the principles of manifestation, a series of "shamanic journeys" from various disciplines (active imagination, imaginative writing, therapy, guided meditations, etc.) Even before she was found by Sacred Circle Dance, she had been leading more or less informal seasonal celebrations, and learning to put together a ritual with whatever comes to hand in the moment. From a journal entry: "The power is not in the candles, crystals, etc, the power is in me!"
She continues to be hesitant to call herself a priestess, or shaman, or witch, because she has not been trained in any recognized lineage, nor does she follow any one teacher or teaching. Whenever she asked Higher Self for a teacher, she was told "You must be your own teacher." Probably her most important teacher was clinical depression. She struggled with depression and anxiety most of her life without knowing what was causing it. Again with hindsight it is possible to see that in a culture that does not acknowledge the shamanic world and has no place for shamanic teachers, one of the ways to be initiated into a shamanic path is through an abusive childhood, and some such confrontation with Fear, Death, and Despair as is provided by childhood trauma. Her priestess name, Tarashtri, came to her directly in a workshop given by Jalaja Bonheim. She continues to make pilgrimages to sacred sites, to conduct the seasonal ceremonies, and to function as the Keeper of Neskaya.
VETERAN OF DOMESTIC WARS
Jenny was the oldest child in a family where both parents were
alcoholics. As a typical "hero", she was an overachiever
in school. After graduation from college, she moved to California,
was swept up in the whirlpool of the counterculture, protested
the War in Vietnam, refused to pay taxes, dropped out of graduate
school, but was too suspicious of drugs to complete the transition
to a hippie lifestyle. She had a "nervous breakdown",
and was hospitalized for a few weeks. Her on-going struggle with
anxiety and depression began at this time, age 28 (the year of
the first Saturn return). She spent years in and out of therapy,
trying to figure out what was wrong with her so she could fix
it, but nothing really worked until 1984, a watershed year when
she was submerged by a second major depression, diagnosed with
systemic yeast, and found out about Children of Alcoholics.
Children who grow up in alcoholic families have been damaged by early years spent in a chaotic and unpredictable environment. "For the first time, I saw that the problem was not who I was, but what I had learned." A very restricted diet (no wheat, no sugar, no yeast or yeast byproducts, etc.) and continued work on COA (Children of Alcoholics) issues both in therapy and at workshops, helped her managed the depression & anxiety without addressing the root cause. By this time, she was married and living in Franconia NH.
JOURNEY INTO COURAGE
In 1990, a friend told her there was a "drama class for victims
of domestic violence" in nearby St. Johnsbury VT. Being interested
in theater, and needing to speak out about her childhood, Jenny
joined the group which was mostly women who had left battering
husbands. Eventually, their work became a theater piece, "Journey
into Courage", written and performed by women survivors of
domestic violence. Jenny saw her role as helping to break the
cultural denial of the enormous damage caused by alcoholism, and
especially to point out that alcoholism of a parent is automatically
abuse of the child. Journey into Courage was performed in different
venues, mostly in Vermont, and different incarnations: a total
of eleven women performed over the years from 91 to 94, in groups
as small as 3 and as large as 8. There was a short segment made
for Vermont ETV, and a video of how Journey was put together and
how the women's lives were changed by it. The video is still used
in the state of Vermont for training of police and other service
professionals who deal with domestic violence. For Jenny, Journey
into Courage represented "the artist in me coming out of
the closet."
NORMAL BRAIN CHEMISTRY
After the last performance of Journey, Jenny slid down into the
worst depression yet. A series of "coincidences" led
to finding the right therapist, and the right medication, and
finally in the summer of 1997, a whole new life, or perhaps it
would be truer to say "Life at last." "What I had
before medication was NOT a life, but I didn't know the difference
because I couldn't remember being normal. Normal brain chemistry
is a gift of God for which I am grateful every day." When
her brain chemistry was balanced, and she was able to actually
begin building a real life for herself, her husband of 18 years
left her for another woman. Although this has been a source of
a lot of pain, she also found the freedom to allow her creative
life to grow into its full depth and power, and realized she had
been holding back to keep the marriage together.
ARTIST
As a creative child growing up in an alcoholic family, Jenny was
not given guidance or support for developing her talents and giving
expression to her creativity. She was either exploited ("Why
don't you make decorations for Mrs. Jones' party") or invalidated
("You'd better clean up that mess before your father gets
home.") Many dried out sets of oil and acrylic paints and
half finished blank books testify both to the power of her creative
spirit, and the power of the negative messages in her psyche.
Normal brain chemistry helped a lot. Workshops in creative process such as Contemplative Dance/Authentic Movement, Shawn McNif's "Art as Medicine", and Aviva Gold's "Painting from the Source" enabled Jenny to learn skills and develop her own creative style. Dancer and Red Woman were done in Aviva's workshops. Neskaya, built by Jenny and her husband before they separated, was a venue and an inspiration. She created Spirits for the four directions, and an ever changing display on the East wall. Bursts of creativity alternated with bouts of depression.
HEALING FROM TRAUMA
Having grown up with addicted parents made Jenny very resistant
to the idea of being dependent on medication. She tried more than
once to get off medication. In August 2000 she reduced her medication
to 30 mg of Imipramine, after a maximum of 120 mg which she had
taken for nearly two years. The attempt to lower her medication
was a disaster. Skills for keeping depression at bay had become
denial of depression, and the condition was so familiar it was
hard to recognize what was happening. Terror again became a daily
companion. On the advice of a friend, who was being helped by
his work, she read Peter Levine's book "Waking the Tiger".
He describes his studies of trauma in animals and his development
of "Somatic
Experiencing", a method for healing trauma. In the next
four years, she worked with 4 different practitioners. Each came
to the work with a different slant, all were helpful.
In February 2004, a cry for help to the Circle Dance e-list resulted in a little booklet, Circle of Hope. During this period Jenny found ways to support her art making process. At the beginning of 2005 she started seeing an art therapist to provide moral support for getting through the negativity threshold. To combat perfectionism she gave herself the assignment to create "100 ugly pieces". This series, hard work at first (and still unfinished), helped pull her out of depression. Another project that helped was the World of Diversity, which started with the attempt to make a worthy background for a Peruvian tapestry. The tapestry was dense with color and texture, an appliqued village with tiny dolls in a circle around a tree. It's about 16" by 20" and the background became a 6 foot world, with oceans and continents of fabric and animals and plants made of polymer clay.
In the fall of 2005, Jenny began to feel like a whole person with a real life, and she was beginning to see things with a clarity of perception that she had never known. It was clear that some kind of trauma, probably in infancy, had been at the root of her depression and anxiety.
In the winter of 2005-06, events conspired to push her back into a depression as bad as any she had ever had. At the same time she was afflicted by severe lethargy. Raising medication did not immediately affect how she felt, but she could tell it was working because she was able to haul wood, shovel snow, walk the dog, and cook food for herself. Meanwhile, the severity of depression and terror forced her to do a piece of work involving a part of herself that might be called the "Inner traumatized baby." She had to recognize that this part of herself needed gentleness, comfort, and patience, not pressure to "shape up". Taking this issue seriously and committing to changing her attitude toward herself changed everything. At first, she didn't feel any better, still felt "sad & scared" most of the time. But now she came to her fear and sadness with compassion. She was also strengthened by a deep commitment to the practice of lovingkindness.
In February 2006 she went to Dr. Vreeland, a chiropractor in Norwich VT who had been able to help people who couldn't be healed by standard medical practice. She was astonished when he said her thyroid gland had been underfunctioning for years. He started her on supplements to address the problem and after a couple of months she felt better than she had ever felt in her life.
In May of 2006, Jenny went to the stone circle of Callanish on the Island of Lewis with a group from Findhorn. It was her third trip to Findhorn, and her fourth to Callanish. All her earlier trips had been darkened by depression and terror, this time she was able to fully enjoy herself. See trip journal.
The winter of 2006-07 brought another sojourn in the underworld. In the spring, Jenny emerged like Persephone from the land of depression/terror. June 2007: "Ten years ago I found out what it was like to have normal brain chemistry for the first time. Now I feel confident, grounded and happy, and it's lasting. I feel so lucky."
A book that has been enormously helpful to my journey is Belleruth Naparstek's Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal. She validated my experience in deep and comforting ways.