Missing Witches - MW Mayumi Oda - I Opened The Gate, Laughing

00:00:00.000 If you want to support the Missing Witches project, you can do so by buying our book, reviewing it on Amazon and Goodreads, using offer code MISSINGWITCHES when you shop at Foxglove Farm, become a Patreon patron, or pick up some Missing Witches merch at TeePublic. 1.00

00:00:17.220 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:23.660 You must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:25.060 As ever, we witches watch for the signs, listen for messages, delight in the receipt. 0.67

00:00:34.980 This episode is one of those times.

00:00:37.660 I had chosen my three witches for season five, and then I discovered that one of them has a posthumous memoir coming out this summer.

00:00:43.940 So I went back to Risa and my ever-swelling list of witches we've found, and Mayumi Oda's name leapt out.

00:00:52.000 I myself discovered Mayumi via Star Goody's Goddess in Art series.

00:00:58.180 The web expands.

00:01:00.120 So I decide Mayumi is my third witch.

00:01:03.220 I examine her catalogue and order a few of her books.

00:01:06.740 A couple days later, we get an email from a coven mate,

00:01:09.760 and the listener humbly suggests an episode featuring Mayumi Oda.

00:01:15.280 She's got one of her books and can send me some scans if I like.

00:01:19.060 I thank the universe for this message of validation

00:01:22.000 and reply that I had just already ordered the book,

00:01:25.540 but thanks and yes and all that jazz.

00:01:28.900 I try to get my books secondhand from indie sellers.

00:01:32.580 This has its pros and cons.

00:01:34.820 One of the books never arrived.

00:01:36.680 I waited three months before requesting a refund.

00:01:39.500 But which book do y'all think went missing?

00:01:43.420 That's right, the very book that Coven Sis had offered.

00:01:47.040 So, we dedicate this episode to goddess voices, inner and outer, to our friends we call Queen, and our ancestors we call Witch.

00:01:59.260 We are dedicated to the ever-expanding web, a mind map where connections reveal themselves one at a time until, one day, hopefully, the whole spider tapestry is visible.

00:02:15.460 Through Mayumi's lens, we connect the garden to the land, war and nukes to paint and silks,

00:02:24.740 art to activism, Hindu gods to Buddhist monks, birth to death, and in death we return to the

00:02:33.140 garden. Let's start with the three treasures of Buddhism, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Mayumi

00:02:40.420 mentions Dharma, especially, a lot, so we'll take some basic definitions with us as we go.

00:02:48.700 The three treasures, aka the three jewels, are the Buddha, the fully enlightened one,

00:02:55.000 the Dharma, the teaching expounded by the Buddha, and the Sangha, the monastic order of Buddhism

00:03:02.040 that practices dharmas. In Hinduism, Devin Kowalczyk wrote,

00:03:07.480 Dharma is a word without direct translation, but implies religion, duty, and righteousness.

00:03:15.100 Dharma derives from a Sanskrit root word meaning to uphold or sustain.

00:03:20.460 The concept behind Dharma is anything that upholds or sustains a positive order.

00:03:27.620 The concept of Dharma can also be found in Jainism and Sikhism.

00:03:32.400 Again, there's no direct singular definition, but can we absorb it for our purposes as divine

00:03:39.560 wisdom and goodness? Purpose that flows with our sweat and encouragement toward justice

00:03:47.040 and harmony? Here's an example of how Mayumi uses the term.

00:03:51.660 Through working in the garden, I felt the deep dharma moving through. We encountered impermanence

00:03:58.240 and interconnectedness, nature's great teachings as everyday truth.

00:04:04.940 In her book Saraswati's Gift, Mayumi introduces herself thusly.

00:04:10.460 I was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1941, and when I was four years old, atomic bombs were detonated

00:04:18.360 above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seeing news coverage of blackened, ash-covered bodies

00:04:24.700 and shadow images of people imprinted on concrete with no trace of their flesh or their lives

00:04:31.940 was a horror that affected me profoundly.

00:04:35.620 My family had been evacuated from Tokyo before the bombings,

00:04:39.240 and when I returned home six months later, we saw survivors of the atomic bombs,

00:04:43.680 as well as severely wounded soldiers begging for alms on the streets.

00:04:49.380 Some carried photos of the horrible aftermath of the atomic bombs,

00:04:52.860 And from these pictures, I imagined and could even feel these horrific events.

00:04:59.340 I could smell death and hear the screams of survivors crying for help, for water, for anything to relieve their pain.

00:05:08.520 Mother, they would wail.

00:05:10.160 I saw this in my mind's eye for years, and when I was seven, I finally understood what had happened.

00:05:16.760 I knew the inhumane and grotesque destruction of an atomic bomb. 0.60

00:05:22.020 This reality of war and nuclear holocaust was the unceasing nightmare of my childhood

00:05:29.940 When J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project

00:05:34.260 Had seen the first atomic fireball rise into the sky

00:05:38.480 At Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945

00:05:42.400 He quoted from an ancient Hindu Veda

00:05:45.500 Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds

00:05:50.780 Mayumi wrote,

00:05:54.100 My earliest memories are of tremendous anxiety.

00:05:58.740 She spent her early childhood terrorized by the constant threat of explosions,

00:06:03.780 in a bomb shelter that her father and grandfather dug under their lotus pond.

00:06:08.660 When evacuation became inevitable, the family went to stay with an aunt in the countryside,

00:06:13.300 temporarily escaping the burdens of war.

00:06:15.640 They left the city, Mayumi notes, on a spring equinox.

00:06:20.780 After the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese emperor announced that the war had been lost.

00:06:26.300 Her imperialist grandfather wept.

00:06:29.640 But the emotion Mayumi recalls in that moment is relief.

00:06:34.220 The war, she thought, is over.

00:06:37.340 Mayumi and her family returned to Tokyo on an autumn equinox

00:06:41.280 to find the crumbling rubble of their former city.

00:06:45.560 Resources were few, food was scarce.

00:06:48.100 And yet, in time, Mayumi's mother managed to put aside just enough money for some paper and crayons to foster Mayumi's gift, an avid artist since age three.

00:07:01.480 It is amazing that even as infants we have a primal instinct toward art-making, scribbling, dancing, singing, finger-painting, treating the senses.

00:07:12.940 The skills can be taught and nurtured, but the instinct is primordial.

00:07:19.180 Even in their poverty, Mayumi's mother recognized that it was important for her daughter to draw.

00:07:26.000 Mayumi notes humbly and jovially that her art style hasn't changed much since then.

00:07:32.720 Mayumi wrote,

00:07:33.740 I know that compassion and creativity can bring transformation and salvation.

00:07:41.740 My life and Japan's history reflect both the brilliance and the shadows of modernity,

00:07:47.720 and both have led to our current impasse. 0.93

00:07:50.520 I have been an environmental and peace activist for decades,

00:07:54.500 mostly in the US but also in Japan and elsewhere,

00:07:57.720 and I believe we are on the edge of a cliff,

00:08:00.860 standing on a precipice between global disaster on one side

00:08:05.040 and a paradigm shift that can lead to immensely positive transformation on the other.

00:08:10.940 The outcome is up to us. I am grateful to be alive with you at this time.

00:08:17.600 She says of her book Sarasvati's Gift,

00:08:20.420 This book is a wake-up call, a call to young people, a call for hope and action.

00:08:27.540 Are you listening? The grandmothers are with us.

00:08:32.520 So who is Sarasvati? And what was the title gift that Sarasvati delivered?

00:08:38.380 There is a vast Venn diagram of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shintoism.

00:08:45.020 Shintoism is the most specifically Japanese, but Mayumi invokes deities from across these

00:08:51.180 traditions in her work.

00:08:53.140 Sarasvati is the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, art, speech, wisdom, and learning.

00:09:01.960 Sarasvati's gift to Mayumi was a message.

00:09:05.760 I sat in morning meditation in front of my Sarasvati statue, and I heard her say in a loud

00:09:13.540 voice, stop the plutonium shipment. I was stunned. I took a breath and said, I can't do that. I'm

00:09:22.180 only an artist. She answered, help will be provided. The voice was so vivid and strong,

00:09:30.320 I couldn't resist, and so I determined to do something. My children were grown and on their

00:09:36.740 own, and I had saved money from the sale of my goddess prints in the 1980s. This seemed like the

00:09:42.820 right time to use my gifts to help the world. I determined to stop painting for a time so that

00:09:49.820 I could focus totally on anti-nuclear activism. Let's trace Mayumi's path for a minute with some

00:09:57.760 key markers. In Japan, she met and fell in love with an American. They shared many values that

00:10:04.420 were in contrast to Mayumi's largely imperialist upbringing. She wrote,

00:10:09.200 The 1960s brought student revolution in reaction to post-war resentment and the lack of democracy

00:10:15.520 in Japan, and my friends were passionately involved in radical politics. Mayumi and John

00:10:21.740 were, to quote Mayumi, young, and we inspired each other. They married and had an exhilarating

00:10:29.180 life together, including two sons, relocating from Tokyo to New York City. She wrote,

00:10:36.320 When I became pregnant, my quest for the goddess began. My small body was changing every day to

00:10:43.360 give birth, and I had a strong urge to create large-breasted female figures. I was making 0.52

00:10:49.620 etchings, and from the black aquatint background, goddess emerged. In the Star Goody Goddess in Art

00:10:57.540 interview, Mayumi explains that despite being well-versed in goddesses of religion, the work

00:11:03.360 of Maria Gimbutas and other goddess scholars had not reached her yet when she started creating

00:11:08.020 these goddesses in that primordial image. This was pre-internet, so information moved a little

00:11:15.120 bit slower, Mayumi had a strong urge to create something that she would later discover echoed

00:11:22.020 within an ancient and eternal cavern. Goddess images informed much of, if not most of, Mayumi's

00:11:30.240 oof as a visual artist, rendering male gods as female, messing with time and space, goddesses

00:11:38.020 riding bicycles and talking on telephones. Mayumi allowed her imagination to reinterpret

00:11:44.780 her traditions and her beliefs. In doing so, she established herself as an artist.

00:11:52.340 I will note, though, that she doesn't have a Wikipedia page.

00:11:55.880 Can one of our wiki witches get on this, please?

00:12:01.780 Missing witches find each other and support each other. And one amazing way of doing that

00:12:06.820 is by supporting our friend and ally and soulmate sponsor at Foxglove Farm.

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00:13:10.620 Mayumi wrote, 0.85

00:13:40.620 ending her marriage. She said, I was raised in a Buddhist family in Japan during and after World

00:13:47.300 War II. My childhood revolved around seasonal Shinto rituals and Buddhist ceremonies. After

00:13:54.360 the war, we were very poor and had very little material comfort. But as a child, I didn't know

00:14:00.380 any different. Living in the outskirts of Tokyo, surrounded by nature, I had a very rich life.

00:14:07.900 The Buddhist ethics of compassion were very important growing up in my family.

00:14:12.840 My father, who was a Zen scholar, always told me that I had a Buddha nature,

00:14:19.260 meaning that I could always find the person and the place within myself that I could trust.

00:14:24.460 How could I find that place now?

00:14:27.820 For the first time in my life, I found myself living alone with my two sons.

00:14:32.600 I was very sad, yet I also felt ready to know who I was.

00:14:39.680 In my studio, I sat for many hours, watching the shadow of the walnut tree,

00:14:46.020 and my own breath, asking myself, am I all right?

00:14:52.460 Once in a while, the woodpecker's pecking interrupted me, and I remembered I had work to do.

00:14:58.280 The happiest parts of Mayumi's childhood were spent in those rural outskirts where a persimmon

00:15:04.640 tree became a friend. When I felt sad or lonely, she wrote, I used to climb the tree and put my

00:15:11.240 arms around its trunk. Sometimes the tree felt more like a mother to me than my real mother.

00:15:17.880 It was always there when I needed it. Oh, Coven. I relate to that. When you're a kid,

00:15:26.500 your space isn't yours. Under their roof, it's their rules. But that tree in the yard? That

00:15:34.680 was mine. Climbing that tree was like going home. My home. 30 plus years later, I'm trying

00:15:43.400 to remember what I did up there. I think I just sat. When Mayumi asked how could I find

00:15:52.120 that place now. That's the place she meant, I think, in the arms of Mother Nature, who sometimes

00:15:59.060 wants you to get to work and sometimes just wants you to sit in her branches and watch her shadows

00:16:05.460 trace a path across the grass. The place she found was California's Green Gulch Farm. She and John

00:16:13.520 had visited there before moving back to Tokyo. Mayumi began to sense reflections in her feelings

00:16:19.380 about both her homes, Tokyo and John. The frantic and fragmented city life of Tokyo and my own

00:16:28.760 confusion made me miserable. I was no longer comfortable in my own country. I was also

00:16:34.700 beginning to realize, sadly, that my husband and I were on different paths. I felt that John was

00:16:41.700 pursuing life outwardly in his successful career, and I became increasingly interested in my

00:16:47.940 internal life. We no longer had the same values. I often thought about that peaceful zen farm I

00:16:55.020 had visited in California. One day I dreamed I was living at the farm. As many of our missing

00:17:01.180 witches have done, she had a dream, so then she did it. She moved to Green Gulch Farm, built her 0.67

00:17:08.600 studio, which she calls Spirit of the Valley, and lived there for many years. Each day we noticed

00:17:16.440 the changes of the moon, she wrote. Now I understood why I was here in California

00:17:23.440 practicing Buddhism with American and European friends. In Japan, Buddhism for me was like the

00:17:30.160 dusty sutra books on the altar. Here it was alive, taking new form. The ancient Buddhist teaching

00:17:38.140 of interconnectedness is enriched by the Native American tradition of reverence for the earth.

00:17:45.280 I want to see the blossoming of this new hybrid flower, and I know that we at the farm are all

00:17:52.420 part of this process. Mayumi has said that art making is the thing, that her paintings are a

00:18:01.600 byproduct of a life lived through art. As Whitefeather Hunter put it in one of our chats,

00:18:07.740 it's to value process over product. The material piece, the painting, the poem, the song,

00:18:14.680 is a secondary result, unintended but inevitably produced in doing or producing something else.

00:18:24.060 Byproduct. Some people hesitate to take on the label artist in the same way some struggle with

00:18:30.500 the word witch, haven't earned it, may be intimidated, may be bound up in definitions

00:18:37.100 and expectations. Under capitalism, we've been trained to focus on the monetary value of our time,

00:18:44.680 and to assume that we should only do things professionally, or if we are good at them.

00:18:52.360 I want to tell you about my mother-in-law, because maybe she is you.

00:18:56.440 She and I bonded over art.

00:18:58.640 Our first dates were always in galleries.

00:19:01.380 She worked weekends in her suburban library's basement gallery.

00:19:05.580 She is always suitably shocked and inspired by my takes on the provocative art we've seen.

00:19:11.420 Last year, my in-laws moved out to the country near us.

00:19:14.680 And mother-in-law retired from the basement gallery.

00:19:17.380 So it was clear to me that it was time for her to start painting.

00:19:23.060 After all, legendary folk artist Grandma Moses didn't really start painting until she was 78.

00:19:29.880 For Christmas, we got her a full set of everything she might need to start her journey.

00:19:34.260 Paints, brushes, canvas, sketchpad, and charcoal.

00:19:38.820 Months have passed now, and I've stopped bugging her about it.

00:19:42.180 But I have to think of Terry Tempest Williams.

00:19:44.600 My mother-in-law's canvases were blank.

00:19:48.100 I told her it doesn't have to be good.

00:19:50.640 It doesn't even have to be a thing.

00:19:55.620 I told her about needing a background for a graphic design piece.

00:19:59.040 The hour I spent just painting pages green.

00:20:02.380 Two or three would have sufficed.

00:20:04.400 I was having fun. I made twenty.

00:20:06.900 Art doesn't have to be anything. 1.00

00:20:10.160 But mother-in-law refuses to take up space. 1.00

00:20:12.600 even on canvas, refuses to express herself even in the silent howl of visual art.

00:20:21.800 Is this you?

00:20:24.160 Sandra Huber talked on the show about automatic writing.

00:20:27.980 If you have a blockage when it comes to the art-making process, try automatic painting.

00:20:33.100 Gather whatever materials you can find, no need for fine pigments and horsehair brushes here.

00:20:38.340 close your eyes and just paint or draw or sculpt play-doh with no notion of a final product.

00:20:48.720 In this way, you cannot fail. If you try to draw an apple and it doesn't look much like an apple,

00:20:57.180 you can feel defeated. But if you set out to draw an amorphous message from the universe,

00:21:03.360 there is no wrong answer. If you sit down to finger paint, get lost in the flow of joy and

00:21:11.220 freedom and creativity for an hour, then hold up the finished piece and don't like it, don't find

00:21:17.300 it aesthetically pleasing, and declare that it sucks, then you've lost the point. The magic was

00:21:25.120 in that hour of creation, not in the split second of judgment, there is no wrong answer.

00:21:36.380 Only a million questions unfolding through the viscous squish of colors and imagination.

00:21:43.600 I'll tell you again, I love painting. I am not a good painter, but I have a good time.

00:21:51.980 I've often said that both in art and life, I'm more of a Jackson Pollock than a Syrah.

00:21:58.260 More likely to throw a bucket of paint than to spend years meticulously pointilizing a beach scene from teeny tiny dots.

00:22:07.360 I want you to open this gate laughing.

00:22:10.380 Not with fear or judgment.

00:22:13.180 Laughing.

00:22:14.820 You may find Dharma there.

00:22:17.480 In the laughter.

00:22:19.180 In the squish.

00:22:20.020 The magic in the making 0.95

00:22:23.500 Imagination by necessity preceding invention

00:22:28.520 Mayumi wrote,

00:22:31.620 Nearly all the inventions we use in our everyday life date from the last half of the 19th century.

00:22:38.340 Typewriter, phonograph, automobile, train, etc.

00:22:41.920 The kind of lonely struggle these inventors went through must have been extraordinary.

00:22:47.460 I can feel the excitement and the disappointment they must have felt,

00:22:52.460 and admire their persistence in making their dreams a reality.

00:22:56.860 We talk about the interplay between dreams and reality a lot around here,

00:23:01.560 but Mayumi reminds us this is the basis for all technology.

00:23:07.080 Making dreams reality.

00:23:10.740 One of her paintings is of Samanta Bhadra, a bodhisattva,

00:23:15.420 a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save

00:23:22.240 suffering beings. Naomi wrote, Samantabhadra is the shining practice bodhisattva. She turns

00:23:31.100 meditation into action and dream into reality. We tend to think there is someone out there to

00:23:37.940 help us do this, but unfolding the path completely depends upon ourselves. When we become Samantabhadra,

00:23:45.420 herself, we can freely ride this wheel of dharma and receive wonderful support from people,

00:23:52.860 friends, and teachers. Mayumi is probably harvesting daikon at her current home, 0.54

00:24:01.580 Ginger Hill Farm in Hawaii, as we speak. There she holds goddess workshops and continues her

00:24:07.720 battle against the plutonium trade, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in 1947,

00:24:13.400 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, echoing in her personal and global history.

00:24:20.780 She has come to be known as the Matisse of Japan.

00:24:25.040 Normally, we end these episodes with a quote from our featured witch.

00:24:29.560 Today, I'm going to take it one step further and leave you with a full story from Mayumi's memoir,

00:24:34.160 I Opened the Gate Laughing, a tale called The Deer's Path.

00:24:39.140 I feel like this story truly encompasses Mayumi's message.

00:24:42.500 It's about wildness and control, nature's power and our own power, not as nemeses but as collaborators,

00:24:55.060 watching and listening and laughing, riding the wheel of Dharma, looking to our gardens as

00:25:04.360 extensions of the earth that feed our bodies and souls in a different way than the untamed beauty

00:25:10.500 of nature. We are forest. We are garden. We are artist. We are deer. Turning meditation

00:25:20.520 into action and dreams into reality. The Deer's Path

00:25:27.720 One summer day, when I went into the garden, I felt called by the creek. I put on long

00:25:35.300 rubber boots and opened the gate to the woods. The stream was almost dry and showed its pebbly

00:25:41.740 bottom, but some water was still running. I had forgotten how wonderful and mysterious it was in

00:25:49.320 the woods. The alders were as tall as seventy feet, making a high green canopy, and underneath

00:25:56.420 grew buckeye trees, hung with silver lichen and pungent laurel and elderberries. A fat grey owl

00:26:05.280 flew across under the canopy and frightened me. I waded down the creek bed and came upon

00:26:12.520 a quiet, deep pool. I took my clothes off and plunged in. The water was ice cold and

00:26:20.460 smelled like alder lye. Floating, I noticed at the muddy corner of the pool many deer

00:26:26.900 footprints, small and large, sliding into the water. A family of deer must have come

00:26:33.960 here to drink, I thought. The place felt sacred and protected, and I even thought I could smell

00:26:41.360 the musky scent of their bodies. I could see the path they used to come through the woods.

00:26:47.080 Then I realized I was following the path, through bushes, pushing aside ferns and prickly nettles,

00:26:53.960 passing old fallen trees that were decaying and turning into soil. I was amazed how moist

00:27:00.500 and soft the ground was. The path became narrow and low, and I had to bend down to walk through.

00:27:09.880 Suddenly, I was on the other side of the fence. I saw my pink house in the distance. I stood there

00:27:16.760 and saw my garden through a deer's eyes. The garden that I loved so much looked ridiculous 0.98

00:27:24.500 to me. It had the self-conscious stiffness of a proper English garden, and now, in the

00:27:31.260 summer heat, it looked dry and completely alien from the wild green of the alder grove

00:27:37.520 surrounding it, as though it did not belong in this mysterious valley at all.

00:27:43.740 I was dumbfounded. I had worked so hard for seven years, making it my own paradise, putting

00:27:53.400 a fence around it to keep the deer away. In this garden, I had felt safe and protected.

00:28:01.460 In this sanctuary, I had sewn my torn pieces back together and found my wholeness. All

00:28:08.980 these years, I had been trying to recreate the exquisite moment of utter freedom that

00:28:14.520 I felt as a child, across the river, in the field full of dandelions and clover. But now

00:28:21.420 I had taken the deer's path and had seen the other side of my fence. There were several gates

00:28:28.200 around the fence. I opened them all. I felt energy from the woods and from everywhere pouring into my

00:28:35.380 garden and into me. I was ecstatic. I did not need barriers to protect myself anymore. I started to

00:28:43.720 laugh, hard, and ran into my garden uttering thank you, thank you. At that moment, my garden

00:28:53.840 became interwoven with that timeless playground of my childhood. The whole world became my

00:29:01.820 garden. I decided to take the fence down.

00:29:06.500 you must be a witch 0.57

00:29:14.580 if you want to support the missing witches project you can do so by buying our book

00:29:21.980 reviewing it on amazon and goodreads using offer code missing witches when you shop at foxglove

00:29:28.240 farm become a patreon patron or pick up some missing witches merch at t public

Missing Witches - April 18, 2021

MW Mayumi Oda - I Opened The Gate, Laughing

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