BLACK EYES MATTER

This has been such a strange year with the pandemic and odd political behaviors that Christmas flew by like the silent wings of an owl. Taos Pueblo is shut down and there was no feast day at Christmas, nor will there be a Turtle Dance for the New Year. PQ and I curiously did not miss anything. We are living in a timeless zone. I imagine, people who look forward to Christmas all year and are heavily invested in exchanging gifts and family dinners had their own celebrations, but we have been in a quiet bubble, peaceful but not connected socially.

In New Mexico’s native world there is an important social mirror that appears on feast days in the form of sacred clowns. In Taos they are called Black Eyes, so named for the black paint across or around their eyes. They come from a different world and thus see human behavior as something of a cosmic joke. In the tribal world they offer an outsider viewpoint. They are not constrained by human rules, traditions, or authorities. On pueblo feast days, people try to avoid being noticed by them, but one must also not be obvious in avoiding them. No one wants their attention.

Black Eyes are something of a social and personal cleanup crew. They barge into houses without knocking, are unapologetically greedy, and generally ignore human rules and niceties. They also make fools of themselves without embarrassment, and protocol means nothing. There is a reason they are both black and white. They reveal both the reason there are social rules and the weaknesses of those social rules, as well as exposing the ways that humans conspire to help themselves at the expense of others. They often do this by being opportunists themselves in such an obvious way that they cannot be ignored.

Sacred Clowns may put their shoes on the wrong feet, have no social graces and may try to swim on dirt and walk on water. They exploit systems and authorities because it makes no sense from where they come, but it can be fun. Donald Trump is a sacred clown by these standards.

The year 2020 is almost over! Most people find that comforting, but I do not think it’s the end of craziness. It revealed our weaknesses, fears, and paranoia, but also vulnerabilities in our concepts of who we are as a nation and as individual’s in this nation. Personally, I have been shocked by how myopic and self-serving much of the population is. Even the people mesmerized by the Trump slogan, “Make America Great Again”, seem to be thinking, “make America more selfish and isolated.” I have become aware of how incomplete and challenged America is when judged by the intentions of the founding fathers. Perhaps it was necessary to open the closet door and let the skeletons fall out. The United States of America has become the ununited state of America.

Perhaps the second decade of the two-thousands is a time of exposing the holes in our union and the dissonances in many of our systems. The obvious disharmony between unfettered capitalism and equal opportunity and freedom, is one of the big ones. Free enterprise became a free-for-all and then a bully take all. Only a pretend democracy can survive in that environment and will become a means to justify its power grabbing nature. Everything Donald Trump does is for himself alone, sometimes under the pretense of patriotism and is the shadow side of the American ideal. “Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all”, says the evil stepmother in Snow White and the seven dwarfs. One could say, who is the richest. Donald Trump isn’t that rich or powerful and makes a mockery of those who value those things. The image has turned out to be as effective as the reality. The Trickster is at play.

For a democracy to work, the people must know and be responsible for their government. The desire for a Messiah to take care of us and rescue us from exploiters and our own folly creates a dangerous opportunity for a want-to-be dictator. Donald Trump knows how to attune to the frustrations of many people who feel deceived and exploited. They have created him without realizing it. I hope that at least some will look in the mirror and see the real magician.

People fear dragons they cannot see as much as dragons that puff themselves into monsters, but these dragons are the creation of their fears and frustration that then takes on the shadowy shape of secret conspiracies. We are the dragons we fear.

There are conspiracies but they are not as hidden as conspiracy theorists would have us believe. Donald Trump the dragon slayer is also their own creation, and they give him credits he does not deserve However, as a Sacred Clown, albeit an unconscious one, his rise to center stage for both haters and slavish lovers is remarkable. The time was right, and as he said, “I am the chosen one.” His medicine brought out the cracks in America and helped turn them into gaping canyons.

What we do not know, can hurt us a lot, beginning with our own habits of thinking and perception. So much hurt comes from fear. Fear and its product powerlessness can blind us to the dangerous conspirators that we know so well that we do not notice them. They live in plain sight and in fact, demand our attention constantly. They use media to create an alternate reality in favor of their politically filtered agendas. The advertisers seduce with things we do not need, or cannot afford using the constant propaganda that you are not good enough, sexy enough, rich enough and lack the latest technology that would make your life easier and your image cool, or hot depending on your generation. I’ve always been puzzled about how technology becomes more sophisticated and all pervasive while its consumers become sillier and dangerously small minded like children playing with a bomb.

 Imagine the politicians, corporations, News Casters, Political Analysts, TV producers, Screen Writers, and pharmaceutical company CEO’s, with black and white stripes painted on their bodies beneath their suit and tie. The truth is not to be found on the figures in politics and media, because the other side always seems nefarious, or blind. The truth can only be found on the inside of each of us. What do we fear, and why? What do we hope for? How do we handle uncertainty? The answers will never be found in the outer world via a political party or leader. They are after all, a reflection of the inner world. Become your own leader first, or you will be chased by dragons at the service of wanabe saviors. How we see the world is the world we live in and we have a choice.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a worldwide test. It is as if humanity is getting a kick in the behind with this challenge to stay cool and avoid panic or denial. This is how teachers work. And this earth life is a school. Don’t worry, if you fail this time, the class will be offered again.

 

MAN OF MANY COLORS

Our dear friend, producer Mark Gordon is currently working on a sequel, "Man of Many Colors," to his award-winning documentary “Awakening in Taos” on the life and influence of Mabel Dodge Lujan and her Taos Pueblo husband, Antonio Lujan. Tony was the first Taos Pueblo native to marry a white woman. For this he was both admired and reviled, depending on one’s point of view.

 Mabel was no ordinary white women. She was a New York heiress with many high-profile connections in the worlds of Art, Literature, and social change. Although Mabel and Tony did much to put the small mountain town of Taos New Mexico on the world map and fought to improve the government’s treatment of Native Americans, they also stirred up controversy. Growing up in their shadow as my husband, Blue Spruce Standing Deer did was socially and psychologically complicated.

The sequel, “Man of Many Colors” is the story of Tony's great grandson, Blue Spruce Standing Deer. After the first film was completed, we talked it over and decided that the story didn’t go to sleep after Mabel and Tony left this world, but continued to affect both the town of Taos, Taos Pueblo and more intimately the great grandson of Tony Lujan.

  INDIGOGO LINK

Blue Spruce Standing Deer is now an artist and composer/singer of native songs. However, because of a unique background split between a deeply traditional Taos Pueblo life and the eclectic international cultural world of Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan, he had a complicated early life. Also, do to the help provided to Standing Deer’s father with farm equipment and land, he was often an object of envy and resentment by other tribal members.

Standing Deer remembers Mabel and Tony very well and for that reason he was an invaluable resource of information for “Awakening in Taos.” Yet, there was another life so far from Mabel’s international salon that it was as if they existed on different planets. Standing Deer’s father became a traditional medicine man who knew the herbs and ceremonies for healing and spiritual cleansing. As children and adolescents, Standing Deer and his friends played in the mountains and hunted and fished in traditional ways. There are remote areas on the reservation even now where the raw power and peace of nature causes the modern world, only a few miles away to fade away like a fuzzy dream.

By the time Standing Deer graduated from high school, Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan had passed on and his personal conflicts were conveniently shelved by an offer to go to San Jose California for vocational training as a welder. At that time, the Bureau of Indian Affairs offered vocational programs as part of its cultural assimilation agenda. However, Standing Deer seized on this as an opportunity to break free from all his internal and external problems.

He became an accomplished welder and for the first time had plenty of money to play with. Standing Deer went rogue with his new freedom. He says that he has little memory of the details of those years. He found it easy to attract women and spent most of his money partying. He was seldom sober. His employers valued him as a versatile master welder, and he found it easy to get good paying jobs. However, he always came home to Taos for tribal holidays. This went on for years until one night he had a dream. “I could hear my father’s voice say, “it’s time!” “That’s when I knew I had to come home to Taos. I knew that I belonged to my tribal ways. When I walked into my father’s house at the Pueblo, he looked up and said, “So you got the message?”

His return to his Pueblo Home and the Town of Taos brought  him into confrontation with the old conflicts and the cultural dissonances that lay in wait for his return. After his parents left this plane, he found himself the family elder charged with representing tribal values and traditions within his family.  In recent years he has been further challenged by a progressive lung disease and the limits of mortality.

This film follows his journey into discovering himself as an artist and then an elder in his tribe, at first unwittingly and finally consciously honoring and embracing the path between cultures carved by Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan.