bird goddesses
The Neolithic bird goddess is associated with water, the primordial element that is able to produce life, stimulate its growth, and nurture it with damp warmth. As I concentrate my thought on this ancient bird goddess, on her fluid energy and damp warmth born from the primordial waters, the water in the clay manifests her forms. It is her form that speaks her language and directs my hand to make marks. Like the Neolithic rites that gave form to clay and scratched markings, my marks are always emerging, unique and evolving, not scripted by a system of fixed symbols. I don’t expect to translate these marks into alphabetic statements, but to experience this language in my body as an energetic force from which this entire universe is created.
The language of this goddess is creative, sexual, erotic, and playful – a fluid language that naturally forms clay into vessels that manifest as the female form. The female body is the ground for all expression; she gives physical form to the world out of herself and takes dead things back into herself to be renewed, so that everything living is her divine substance. She is fruitful simply by being.
I wanted to know more about this fruitful goddess. She reaches far back into the Neolithic yet she is still arising from the depths to guide our senses to the fundamental meanings of existence. Could it be that she still presenting herself after 8000 years, to do the same for people today?
To find out, I plug a computer cord into this bird goddess made of clay. The computer cord too, is a material and a mark as real as the clay regardless of its technical manufacture. I’ve been plugging and unplugging phones and now computers my whole life and it is the most natural thing I can imagine to plug into the bird goddess. Plugging the computer cord into the clay ritually plugs me into the unknown borders of this goddess and amplifies her emergence into the modern world. The computer cord is my ritual initiation into the deeper mysteries of the bird goddess.