I see a time and a place where:
        we embrace ourselves with respect and compassion;
               we  meet each other with respect, curiosity, and compassion;
                        we find pleasure, healing, and joy in our play together.

Healing

I recognize and acknowledge the suffering and hurts that have led the way to this place:

the millennia of culture and customs through which many have walked as commodities, as toys, as objects from which others took profit and pleasure;

the demands of culture and custom through which many have been driven to take profit and pleasure which were not willingly or freely given.

I honor and give thanks for the glowing threads of inspiration and support that have woven themselves together to nurture our Vision in BendableGlass and Belle’s End

RedBird

Mirth and Reverence

Belle, who has persevered to mastery in her craft and inspiration in her design to create these beautiful wands, has shared her vision with me and challenged me to describe the functional quality of these wands without suggesting the specific uses to which our customers were prone to put them.

I am wondering who we might talk into being photographed happily licking chocolate syrup, or maybe honey, from the curves of a wand.

Ah, Baubo! Hail, Baubo! You have been an inspiration to me since I encountered you in Women Who Run with the Wolves.

Baubo, who is mentioned in the Eleusinian Mysteries (and sometimes known as Iambe), evoked the sacred belly laugh in stressful situations with jokes and antics. When Demeter was pining for her daughter, Persephone, who had been abducted by Hades, she was so distraught she didn’t tend to the seasons as usual and the crops were failing. Baubo came to her telling risque jokes, to no avail. The miasma was broken by Demeter’s sudden belly laugh when Baubo, like a shy little girl, pulled up her own skirt to cover her face.

Baubo is usually depicted as just with her head and face just above her pubic area, with just her pubis and thighs constituting the rest of her body.

Dad was prone to telling risque jokes and delighted in provoking the sudden laugh one can’t suppress, thus derailing tense situations and losing the train of the argument. A useful, if embarrassing, gift. Laughter heals.

What is remembered, lives.

Flower Power

Flower Power, as we Boomers knew it in our years protesting the Vietnam war, became our symbol of passive resistance and nonviolence in the face of the Draft and other perceived misuses of power over us.

Once Belle became adept at enclosing color spirals in her wands, she stepped up to planning the color work to produce flower heads at one end of the wand, with stems and leaves flowing the length, bringing a disarming ambience to the product.

The term “Flower Power” originated in Berkeley, California, as a symbolic action of protest against the Vietnam War. In a November 1965 essay titled How to Make a March/Spectacle, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg advocated that protesters should be provided with “masses of flowers” to hand out to policemen, press, politicians and spectators. The use of props like flowers, toys, flags, candy and music were meant to turn anti-war rallies into a form of street theater thereby reducing the fear, anger and threat that is inherent within protests. In particular, Ginsberg wanted to counter the “specter” of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang who supported the war, equated war protesters with communists and had threatened to violently disrupt planned anti-war demonstrations at the University of California, Berkeley. Using Ginsberg’s methods, the protest received positive attention and the use of “flower power” became an integral symbol in the counterculture movement.

Wikipedia on Flower Power

Hail, George!

George Harris sticks carnations in gun barrels during an antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon in 1967. Photo Credit: By Bernie Boston — The Washington Evening Star Photo

What is remembered, lives.

Flowers, Guns and an Iconic Snapshot

Sunday, March 18, 2007

The most lasting image from the last big march on the Pentagon, on October 21, 1967, survives in the collective memory as summing up an era. Carnations in gun barrels were the essence of Flower Power. “I knew I had a good picture,” says photographer Bernie Boston, 73, who took the photo for the Washington Star. His editors, not imagining the significance, buried it deep inside the A section.

What became of the young demonstrator? By most accounts, he was George Harris, about 18 years old, a young actor from New York. He was on his way to San Francisco, where he would come out of the closet, take the name Hibiscus, and co-found the flamboyant, psychedelic gay-themed drag troupe called the Cockettes, according to filmmaker David Weissman, who made a critically acclaimed documentary of the group in 2002. Harris died in the early 1980s of complications from AIDS, at the dawn of that epidemic.

So Boston’s iconic photo, so emblematic of one era, was also secretly a harbinger of another.

— David Montgomery

© 2007 The Washington Post Company