Trees are beautiful and diverse, gifting the world each day with their presence, providing oxygen, habitat, shade, soil integrity, and food. Trees are symbolic, metaphoric and metaformic[i], providing relationship, meaning and inspiration. Cross-culturally, trees are associated with the feminine principle, as well as with knowledge, life, cycles, time, and the connecting matrix between earth, water and sky.
Trees are deeply embedded in human consciousness and, physiologically, embodied within the womb of pregnant mothers... The amazing placenta! With its tree-like morphology it's the only organ a human grows when needed - in order to support, nourish and sustain a human life - then releases after it has met that need. 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.
It has been said that the human placenta "looks like" a tree...
Artist and women's spirituality scholar Nane Ariadne Jordan takes this concept further into the development of what she calls ‘Placental Cosmology’.
She says, "Extending the direct morphological[i] connection between trees and placentas, I want to push beyond the idea of 'connection' to how we embody trees, to how the human baby is nourished from this tree within the mother. A placental cosmology extends consciousness towards a body parable rooted within the placenta (which brings oxygen and nutrients to the baby from mother) and trees (who oxygenate the atmosphere from the earth) as life."
Once an apprentice midwife, Nane's research and teaching explore women-centered birth and education, women's spirituality and mothering. She works Placental Cosmology into scholarship, art and performance ritual... using red wool cord, Nane weaves through both cloth and forests alike:
"We ritualize, through our bodies, gratitude and interrelation with trees.."
Thank you, Nane, for your inspiring and educational work!
Songwriter & Percussionist Tara Greenblatt graces us again in this exhibit with another beautiful song, this time a song about a tree called Ms. Hand.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.
"Her gray skin draped loosely over wooden bones / thin, spindly finger bones two hundred years old / She is touching the ever-moving ribbon, the liquid in the vein, snaking through the moss / as if there is a woman standing in the sky, invisible to my eye whose sleeve has fallen shy, to reveal her ancient hand extended / She touches down to Earth."
-Tara Greenblatt, from the songMs.Hand
More on Trees and the Sacred Feminine!
Another artist/scholar/author whose work gifts us with beauty and education of the Sacred Feminine is Lydia Ruyle, 70 year-old mother & grandmother who has been pursuing Goddess research with body, mind and spirit for several decades. Since 1995 Lydia has been creating representations of Sacred Feminine icons from many cultures. Her "Spirit Banners of the Divine Feminine" have hung at sacred sites, in museums, at conferences and gatherings around the world! Here are two of the 150+ Goddess banners Lydia has created that are associated with the Tree of Life...
MAYAHUEL, Mayan Goddess of the flowering maguey who gifts fibers for clothing as well as food and drink. Source: Codex Laud
We'll be seeing more of Lydia's Goddess Icons as the Sacred Feminine Exhibit at the Museum of Motherhood continues...
Thank you for visiting!
Polly Wood / Tree of Life Installation, Blossom Birth Service, Palo Alto, CA
[i] From Judy Grahn’s Metaformic Theory, a new origin story which posits that human consciousness and culture arose from menstrual rites.Grahn, Judith Rae, Blood, Bread and Roses – How Menstruation Created the World, Boston, Beacon Press, 1993.
[i]Morphology is the study of shapes and forms of things.In biology it is the study of how living things grow and are structured.Jordan, Nane Ariadne, excerpt, A Poetics of the Placenta: Placental Cosmology as Gift and Sacred Economy presented at A (M)otherworld is Possible: Gift Economy and Matriarchal Studies The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) embedded conference, Oct 2009, YorkUniversity, Toronto, CANADA.
