Metaformia

Restoration by Queen Nzinga Maxwell, Art From My Womb Series

Tree with Red Skirt by Dianne Jenett

Placenta: The Tree of Life by Polly Wood

Rites of Passage by Shiloh Sophia McCloud

Restoration
Medium: Menstrual blood, Chinese acrylic ink on canvas
By Queen Nzinga Maxwell, Art From My Womb Series

"Restoration" is a very special peace. Its energy is the ashe of the orisha Oya'Yansa, who strongly came to my defense at that period in my life from 2002 through 2006. She is the Beautiful Warrior who grows a beard to go to war. She restores the universe with devastating winds of change and with her tornado she rips the foundation of unjustice and uncovers the dark, moist, and fertile soil of truth.

-Queen Nzinga

Tree with Red Skirt
Photograph by Dianne Jenett

In the states of Kerala and Orissa in India, if not in other states as well, banyan trees "menstruate." I could not understand how this is, so I asked our teacher, the author Amarananda Bhairavan, who was raised in Kerala. I began with what I already knew. "I know that the rivers in Kerala were/are said to menstruate, especially as they turn red after the rainy season when they are so full, and the earth (Bhumi Devi) is said to menstruate, when Her flesh is such red earth in the hot season. But in a washerman's song from around 1910, collected by L.K. Anantha Krishna Iyer, the South Indian scholar, the banyan tree is also named as a being who menstruates. How is this true, given that the banyan is not red?" He answered that because the twining, snake-like limbs of the banyan form the shapes of little yonis all over the trunk, the people put red cum cum or other red powder in the yoni-shaped crevices to mark Her as menstrual. So it's quite intentional. "The people do it. The goddess sits right in those little crevices," he said, folding his hands to demonstrate the shape. "So then everyone knows She is sitting there, and worships Her." We wanted a photograph of such a marked banyan tree from Kerala, but couldn't find one. Dianne Jenett took a photo of a red-skirted and red-marked banyan in the state of Orissa, where the goddess who menstruates has long been revered by farming peoples and pilgrims alike.

- Judy Grahn

Placenta: The Tree of Life
Photograph courtesy of Melissa Hoffman

placentacrop

What an amazing organ the placenta is! Not only can a woman’s body create this organ when needed, and then release it when its purpose has been fulfilled (often called the “afterbirth”), but it beautifully illustrates the essence of birth with its “Tree of Life.” One side of the placenta attaches to the inside wall of the mother’s womb. The side facing the baby contains an image of a tree, with the umbilical cord representing the trunk, and the exposed blood vessels acting as branches. This placental “Tree of Life” can also be imprinted onto paper to make stunning placenta prints. The placenta can be planted under a tree as part of a baby blessing ceremony, eaten by the mother for nourishment, or baked and dried, to be used if the mother should later become ill.

-Polly Wood

This painting illustrates the wise mothers teaching the young woman about her moon cycle. They are carrying the sacred rites and information in their cloaks - symbolic of their body of wisdom. They have signs, symbols, shapes, content and code that they are passing onto the young woman who is just having her first moon. The open pomegranate symbolizes this rite of passage, and the eggs in her palm demonstrate that with the wisdom of her elders and the innate intuition of her own body, she is in charge of her own fertility cycle through KNOWING her own moon cycle. She is both in wonder, and in deep connectivity with all girls at this stage of their lives. I wanted to illustrate how information is passed on at important cycles, as a rite of passage, and that it comes from, as it should, the women in our community. She then adds the code of information to her own cloak or robe - her cosmic cloak that to those who are kindly towards her, she shares, and to those who are not - it is all a mystery. She does not 'hide' her information from shame, but celebrates it in the right contexts, and cloaks it in others. Part of the painting is also about this kind of discernment - knowing when to share your fruits, and when to hold them at your own breast. I hope this painting inspires others to consider how they might share their wisdom with the young women in their lives. And inspires girls to seek wisdom from the wise mothers. We at Cosmic Cowgirls Ink, a woman and girl owned publishing company, are currently working on a girl's rights of passage journal that will include messages represented by the painting.

-Shiloh Sophia McCloud