man's Inhumanity to men, women, children

We are taught to see Eurocentric patriarchal history as victorious.

Governments call people to war usually for conquest, resources, vanity in self serving justification.

Masses of soldiers come forward to fight, die or be wounded; families held hostage.

Those that have fallen, suffered due to the chess games of the powerful;

We remember.

But is continuous violence the answer?

Carnage:

There are imprints on the land;

Of grief and pain.

I see this, feel this, hear the tears, sometimes.

It overwhelms me.

It took me until my teens to realize everyone else didn’t feel the

Agony of others;

Past, Present, Future…

It’s in the cities.

I could not bear the frustration and anger

Imparted unknowingly.

I wore the pathos of children’s lives,

Unable to thrive in daily fear;

Too acutely in my heart.

Tears in my body, tears in my art.

Over the plains one day

I just started to cry for hours,

Fragments of feeling left on the land.

Filled me with mourning…

Ghosts of beautiful people, animals..

A land now devoid of life.

For even shrubs cannot grow in grief.

These silent emotions,

I know them as my own.

I can almost touch the transparent memories

That are so real to me.

How can others not perceive?

It is so loud, so clear;

This song of sorrow.

Because these imprints

Unfelt by many,

Still sleep in the unconscious

And filter into lives unknowingly,

To harm us all.

Just to verbalize, record

This is what went weeping

In despair…

Those unswift deaths;

Lives that were stolen,

By history celebrating conquest.

That caused such human suffering

Fresh and old;

Blood still lies on the land.

In the strokes of human gain,

People died and survived a terrible pain.

Now all over our suffering earth

Our Mother World grieves

As I do.

And anyone that can hear this carnage still;

Speaking so loudly in silence.

T.Truesdale copyright 1998

Sky Dance

Sky Dance

by Toni Truesdale

In this series that celebrates the four elements

Earth, Air, Water and Fire.

The sky dance is the most rapturous.

It evokes the essence of Candomble;

which is sacred transport into the world of spirit.

Communication with the divine is one of

our most elemental longings

and exists from our most archaic traditions.

Earth Dance

Earth Dance

by Toni Truesdale

In celebration, many folk people,

Still dance in ceremonial thanksgiving, passages;

Spring welcome to the earth for sustaining life.

For traditional cultures still follow

The paths set by ancestors;

 Back to the ways of original instructions,

Brought by intermediaries between the Creator and humans.

Dancers are seen in the first art on stones;

For reverence is shown the rhythm of prayer, ritual and dance

All over the world.

Copyright 2013

Tonitruesdale.com

Transformations

“Master Teacher Geng “

Woman Alchemist



by Toni Truesdale



“ I burned my Life, that I might find

A passion wholly of the mind”

The Alchemist

-Louise Bogan



Master Teacher Geng was a Tang Dynasty alchemist in Chinese ninth century court. This adept was a woman “fang-shi” (there were also several other women alchemists from the Six Dynasties Period). Master Geng, a Taoist, was so famous that her portrait was preserved on a Ming Dynasty scroll. Her story was recorded by Wu Shu (circa 975 A.D. ), in his account she mastered creating elixirs and transformations. Master Teacher Geng’s greatest achievement was spinning snow into silver at the request of the emperor.



” I dealt a word of Gold

To every creature-that I met-

And Dowered-all the world”

 -Emily Dickenson

Singing Down the Moon

“Singing Down The Moon”

by Toni Truesdale

Songs of the southern Machi

Signal alliance to the Spirit World.

Lyrics for the health of the community,

Protection and fecundity;

Chanted to the psychic footprints

Ascending and descending the

Sacred Tree of consciousness

To the warm voice of the moon;

Speaking of the close passages

In the spiral of time

That charts the cardinal directions

Of ancestor archetypes that

Map celestial paths, Blue and white;

Into unspoken patterns

Heard by the similar singing

Sami cousins across the world.

Truesdale copyright 2010

ToniTruesdale.com

At the turn of the seasons we honor our First Mother Earth.

Cailleach

The Spirit of the land in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the Isles is female.

The ancients believed she wove the landscape, poured the rivers, carved the mountains,

Controlled the elements, spiraled with the seasons: She is Cailleach.

Divine lady reborn in each yearly cycle as child, woman,

and elder; the first sacred trinity.

Cailleach, of the Earth, eternal, ever changing her quarterly colors;

Cailleach honored in the standing silver stones of Callanish;

That silently dance with light and shadow

 To the maximum of the moon cycle until it pauses each 19 years.

For the last 5000 years.

Cailleach whose last shrine is in the heart of Glen Lyon to remain as the seed,

To bring the past into the now, as the sleeping woman stirs…

And we remember to honor again, our beautiful and sacred Earth

Some have called Cailleach.

T.Truesdale copyright 2014

ToniTruesdale.com

The Imprint of the human Species is female

“The Source”

by Toni Truesdale

The Imprint of the human species is female;

For women are the source of life.

In female hands is the vital essence, water;

Our fecundity and the renewal of the generations.

In ancient Egypt the ankh is the symbol of Water, Woman

and Life,

Eternal.

T.Truesdale copyright 1998