The Bridge to Shamanism and Other Archetypes

Last year at this time, a dove made a nest in the evergreen tree outside my kitchen window.  This coincided with a burgeoning depression and seeing that dove land on the sideview mirror of my truck in the mornings gave me hope.  When another dove landed on the fire escape railing outside my therapist's office while I was in the midst of dissecting my demons, it seemed more than a coincidence.  When it happened again for a second visit, I started to suspect something was up.

The portal to shamanism for me was meditation.  During the first session, I listened to the drum beat, and my feet sank into the earth, but it was nothing like being buried alive.  It was a trap door to my unconscious and the myths and archetypes that live there.  I touched down somewhere in the Salem Woods, where I used to roam with my dog, Ralphie, and that's just who showed up to greet me.  I thought about a kinder, more nurturing god then.  Crows coagulated around me and the light in the sky was squashed by gray clouds, but it was nothing ominous.  I felt at home.

Shamanism began with the primitive hunting people; their work can be found in caves in France, drawings that depict a person wearing an animal mask, dancing joyously in front of a troop of animals.  The shaman was drawn with an erect penis--an emblem of desire and passion: he was the animal master in charge of sending and receiving animal souls.  He sent them to the tribe to be hunted and killed, then raised them up to linger in the underworld.  It is the first religion we know of.

For the second journey, I touched down in Sedona, at a chapel in the hills.  I had visited this place on a cross country trip with my brother and mother.  Ralphie greeted me again, only this time he was panting anxiously.  What's the matter old boy?  I asked.  I followed him down to a room excavated in rock and bones; he lay down on the cool dirt floor.  I went to sit in one of the pews to pray and noticed an altar at the front with candles burning.  After a few moments, Ralphie got up and went toward the altar and I followed him.  My father was sitting there behind the altar in the dark, and he looked worried.  What?  I asked him.  Anything not of the Church is of the devil, he said. 

I left my father and followed Ralphie, who was still panting anxiously.  He lay down a second time to rest and shed his coat.  There before me stood a nobleman-- at least that's what I interpreted him to be-- a man with a robe and a papal tiara.  The nobleman turned into a copper statue of a robed figure with birds around his head.  The drum stopped beating and I left, apprehensive.  Is this shamanism or is my imagination's prowess getting the best of me again?  And when the hell am I going to stop caring what my parents think?

That night, I had a dream I was in my parents' basement with their friends, the Schmidts.  I told them our house was haunted and proved it by sitting cross-legged on the floor and allowing myself to be pushed from one room to another by an invisible force.  It was a queer thing to be manipulated like that, to be powerless for a few moments; I felt as if I temporarily blacked out.  Afterward, I went upstairs to tell my mother.  It's the shamanism, she said.  You called them into this house with that devil magic of yours.  And then my mother started to levitate and move across the room as if she were flying.  I chased her around the dining room  (which was not our dining room at all, but one from a catalog or maybe a movie) shouting into her face, GET OUT!  The words were difficult to say, and somewhat jumbled, as if I were pushing them through water.  I was trying to exorcise the fiend from her.  And that's just how I woke myself up, shouting GET OUT!  

Later that day I told my mother about the dream.  Well I don't believe any of that Native American spirituality is of the devil, she said.  Those people were healers.  And with this, I felt reconciled.

Is there a meaning to this story?  I looked through pictures of my trip to the chapel and found the green copper statue; it was an artistic interpretation of Saint Francis, patron saint of animals.  Saint Francis is the perfect bridge from Catholicism to shamanism.

I researched Saint Francis online and found the story of the wolf of Gubbio.  In the town of Gubbio, Italy, during the time Saint Francis lived, a wolf was eating the townspeople's livestock.  When the mayor of the town sent guards to slay the wolf, he killed two of them and wounded the third.  The mayor asked Saint Francis to go to the wolf and solve the problem.  Saint Francis went into the forest; when he came upon the wolf, he made the sign of the cross and the wolf cowered at his feet.  When asked by the saint why he was killing livestock and men, he told him he was wounded and his pack abandoned him.  He preferred to eat deer, but they were too quick for him; livestock were easier to kill.  What was he supposed to do?  He was hungry.  He ordinarily left men alone, but when the two guards attacked him, he let his instincts take over.  Saint Francis ultimately made a deal with the wolf and the townspeople: the townspeople were to feed the wolf and the wolf, in turn, would protect the town.  And peace was made.

So here we have a story within a story.  The dove, Saint Francis, the wolf, even the erect penis, all have secondary meanings.  The dove is the peace I longed for during my depression: it was an oracular consciousness of sorts.  If nature communicates with the the body's DNA through natural selection, then the divine --spirituality--communicates with the mind through archetypes.  The dove is an archetype, a universally-known model of peace.  Saint Francis is an archetype, the Catholic model for shamanism, the wolf is an archetype, symbolizing all that we interpret as evil is just misunderstood.  And the penis, well the penis represents rapture, what we feel when we are closest to nature.

The Art of Untying a Knot

You've seen them, knots, tight like a fist, complicated, seemingly impenetrable.  They tie boats to docks, keep hot air balloons from floating away.  They can be useful and yet they can be a nuisance as well.  When you touch them they feel as stiff as oak tree bark and you wonder how such a thing could possibly become undone.  Knots form in the mind as well.  Thich Nhat Hahn talks about such knots  in his book Peace Is Every Step.  Knots are "internal formations," problems our minds circulate around in the absence of clear understanding.

For instance, a person experiencing panic attacks at work may conjure up a hundred different medical diagnoses when the real issue is she is in the wrong career.  Her knot is the dissatisfaction with her job, and these other ideas are adding to the problem, making it more of a tangle.  TNH says of knots:

<They> need our full attention as soon as they manifest, while they are still weak, so that the work of transformation is easy.  If we do not untie our knots when they form, they will grow tighter and stronger.  Our conscious, reasoning mind knows that negative feelings such as anger, fear, and regret are not wholly acceptable to ourselves or society, so it finds ways to repress them, to push them into remote areas of our consciousness in order to forget them. 

If the person with the panic attacks is mindful, she might take some time off to let the underlying issue rise to the surface.  If she doesn't and continues to push until her nerves start to unravel, she might make that knot even tighter and create a bigger problem for herself: perhaps she might develop an ulcer or descend into a depression.  TNH says "our internal formations are always looking for ways to manifest as destructive images, feelings, thoughts, words, or behavior."

Lately I've been having anxious dreams; it's as if my younger, knottier self is governing my nighttime state of mind.  In one dream I am wandering the halls of my high school (which isn't really the high school I attended, but a surreal place with an Olympic size pool and a food court) looking for my trigonometry class.  The bell has already rung and every door is shut; I am not only lost but late.  In another, I am in the backseat of my father's car; my brother is in the front seat.  We are driving along one of those long bridges in Florida that connects a chain of islands.  In one moment I am looking down to the aqua marine water below and the white sand, in the next, I am looking through the windshield into the belly of a tsunami wave.

I told a friend about the dream of the wave and she said, "dive through it and come out the other side."  And I thought of Good Harbor Beach and the waves there, how in late July, they can be quite intimidating.  You watch other people do it, dive into that smooth place at the nape of the wave and blip out the other side.  They make it look so easy.  But with every wave, there is that lack of faith, that it will pummel you.  When I was younger, I was obsessed with the wave of anxiety inside me, with bodily sensations, tightness, fear and dread.  I thought of failure and death a lot and had very little faith in anything.  I tried therapy, but talking made me feel worse.  I tried drugs, crystals, alternative medicines.  I left my job as an engineer and became a catering waitress.  I dated the wrong men and  had very little confidence.  I wrote one thousand and one pages of terrible prose.  With every decision I made, I tied my knots even tighter.

But when you're young and naive, taut, convoluted knots are part of the journey.  In your twenties, your untied knots link with others' untied knots forming long chains of pain.  When you're older, you don't want to deal with this headache anymore.  You want to untie those knots as soon as possible.

Recently, I read an article in the Chicago Tribune about untying knots.  The journalist, William Hageman, interviewed a knot researcher and historian, Des Pawson, who runs the Museum of Knots and Sailor's Ropework in England.  He says of knots, "try pushing some slack into the knot" and "once you get some movement there's light at the end of the tunnel."

One would think this is an intuitive thing, pushing slack into a knot.

Well, slack is the opposite of tension.  Of stress.  Slack involves a sort of finesse, a confidence.  It might involve a tool or two and it most definitely involves compassion.  In untying a mind knot, one must be compassion with oneself and/or seek out compassionate persons.  For me, this person is my meditation teacher, who, through the mechanism of compassion and guided meditation, saved me from my own erroneous belief system.  I told her I wanted not to tie (tight) knots in my mind any longer.  I wanted to dive through the belly of the wave.  Whatever is churning in my unconscious, I want to identify it and be done with it.  I want to illuminate it with understanding and not obfuscate the situation with over-thinking.  Her advice was simple and complicated at the same time.  She said, "trust yourself" and "practice mindfulness." 

Here is the landscape: it is stark and gray, the trees are stiff, lifeless veins, the road is powdered with salt, the crows are haunts that ramble on, the snow has turned to old ice caked with sediment.  It is cold, still, but in the morning, the air is alive with light and the birds are drunk with spring.  I wake early in the morning from a jolt.  It has all the signs of last year's depression, but I've untied that knot.  Here is my blessed breath in a small box around my mouth; this is my sacristy.  TNH claims it is the Holy Spirit, (spirit meaning breath); God breathes through us.  This is why it is a sacred thing, to acknowledge the breath.  To be mindful.  It falls away in a few moments, the illusions, the knots, the waves, and there is nothing but the me I have always known, in stillness.

Reflections on Deviants and Virtues in Literature and Art

I was teaching a World Literature class one semester when a student raised his hand and asked why the stories we were reading were so depressing.  He seemed agitated by this, and I did my best to answer his question.  “Because there is a lot of stuff in sorrow and suffering.  Happiness is pretty straight forward.”  It was a stock, oversimplified answer and from the expression on his face, it seemed not to suffice, but we dropped the topic nonetheless.  Now some years later, I’m organizing the syllabus for my Intro to Lit class and I am having the same reaction.  This has me thinking of how art and literature are generated and the state of the ethos that receives them.

            It could be the snow, the cold, the winter doldrums, cabin fever, rendering me particularly impressionable.  Perhaps these benchmarks of literature (think: The Story of an Hour, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Lottery, Madame Savage) are all too potent to be read together when in the throes of a winter semester.  Most of these model stories were written during the late nineteenth, early twentieth century when there was a need for a good long wake up call from the facades of propriety.  But these days we’re constantly in the throes of human calamity and dysfunction; it’s lurking on every device we have access to.

            In an art magazine I bought for a friend, there was a painting of a woman carving out her own viscera a la grand guignol.  Cathartic?  Perhaps if one has dyspepsia.  One has to wonder how a piece like this would be received: whether it would be novel and useful to a society over-staturated with gore.  Would it promote contemplation or desensitization?  And then there’s that picture of a young Adam Lanza dressed in camouflage with rounds of ammunition draped across his toddler legs.  The image is just as revolting as the grand guignol painting, but it is also heartbreaking.  We reached a new low with the Newtown tragedy; it is an indicator of a particular rampant mental lethargy and level of dysfunction in our society.

            I understand that artists and writers create art for personal reasons and I don’t want to dictate what they should and should not create.  What I am saying is that we need to be mindful of what we are releasing to the public and how it might contribute to this already dire ethos.

            This brought my thinking to the Renaissance and how, perhaps, we could use one right about now.  Just as the artists and writers of the Renaissance chose to revive Western Europe from its mental lethargy with ancient Greek and Roman texts on humanism, so too can we emulate particular works and redress our seemingly dire culture with new thought.  I’ve been compiling a list of works with the theme of compassion  because I believe it to be one of the most crucial of virtues, one whose power has been sadly underestimated.

            Just how, exactly does the mechanism of compassion work in literature, for instance?  Stories can inspire us. The writer presents a round, dynamic character with whom the reader can sympathize and draws forth the virtue through her actions and thoughts.  For example, the character Kitty Fane in The Painted Veil by William Somerset Maugham.  When we are first introduced to Kitty she is having an affair with a local politician.  Upon discovering the affair, Kitty’s seemingly stoic, intellectual husband Walter blackmails her into accompanying him to a cholera-infested village in China for her penance.  Here Kitty is transformed by witnessing her husband’s tireless efforts to better the lives of others and experiences the emergence of her own compassionate tendencies when she volunteers at a convent school.  She transforms from a shallow, immature woman to a model human being; one a reader can aspire to be.  A few months ago I had watched the movie version of The Painted Veil and revisited Kitty’s transformation.  My reaction was none other than relief; it is always a gamble as to whether someone will be open and aware to the good in themselves and the world and when one chooses it, it’s someone to root for.  And that’s what Kitty had brought out in me, relief and rooting.

            A second way the mechanism of compassion can work in literature is more personal.  I was about seventeen when I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in an AP English class and saw myself in the protagonist Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive boy vulnerable to the glorious and treacherous aspects of the Catholic Church.  I don’t recall any big sin prodding me toward the flames of Hell as Stephen had prodding him, but I knew I was similarly impressionable and imaginative and aware of the Church’s message: Be Good or Else.  I shared that yolk of guilt and shame when the conscientious Stephen bore the blows of the Fire and Brimstone Sermon given by the preacher:

The next day brought death and judgment, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair.  The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul.  He suffered its agony.  He felt the death-chill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs…No help!  No help!

            During a depression in high school, I had felt similar pangs of existential worry: No help!  No help!  The above paragraph depicts an impressionable and creative mind turning on itself; during my depression, I experienced just that.  Here is an example of empathy at its best, when a reader and writer (through the persona of character) commune over an idea and/or emotion.  One reads and one is not alone; one recognizes the suffering in another.  The alleviation of that suffering is compassion due not only to this “intimacy”, but also through any answer that may be presented.  Fallibility, according to Joyce, was part of artistic maturation:

            A girl stood before him in midstream: alone and still, gazing out to sea.  She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird...Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy.  Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call.  To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!  A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.  On and on and on and on!

            Stephen’s “epiphany” is the realization of his authentic self- the artist.  It was my realization as well, ultimately, and I had started to peel away at the skins of my suffering.  In this way Joyce’s masterpiece is an act of compassion.  Now, I can’t know if Joyce intended to be compassionate by writing A Portrait.  But he presented the empathetic arena in which I might find compassion for myself.

            The Renaissance had the printing press; today we have the Internet.  We have the ability to flash mob on cue, tweet on command, transmit a tome in the blink of an eye.  It comes down to this: do we assemble in the name of the good and think more critically of conflict, identifying more positive outcomes or do we grab that low-hanging fruit?  In this broken and deluded world, we need compassion.  We’ve always needed compassion.

Compassion Anthology Website

The Compassion Project: An Anthology now has a website on weebly.  Visit us at www.compassionanthology.weebly.com or on facebook at www.facebook.com/compassionanthology

Wonder Woman and the Novel, Useful Power of Creativity

When I was young I wanted special powers.  I watched shows like Wonder Woman and I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, and The Bionic Woman.  Jaime Sommers was so down-to-earth, unpretentious, just a regular gal; she made special powers seem attainable.  Whenever I ran at recess, I would hear that t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t sound that implied my make-believe bionics at work.  I would smooth a strand of hair behind my ear to hear far away sounds.  Once an older girl caught me doing this.  "What, are you bionic or something?" she snapped.  Oh how I wished.  How I wished to hear what no one else could hear, or jump to the top of a building, or have remarkable strength in my right arm.  I watched the 1984 gymnastic team and Mary Lou Retton with bated breath; they were girls who could fly.  I watched Katherina Witt, the elegant figure skater known for her flawless routines.  These women were my aspirations; I wanted to transcend the banal, the normal and predictable.

I had watched my mother, a woman of tremendous potential, struggle with the vacuousness of suburbia and being a stay-at-home mom.  She instilled in my sister and me a strong sense of independence: find out what you want to do and do it, for yourself.  When I was twelve years old, a friend wrote me a poem and I was enchanted by it, this small thing of rhyme and imagery; I aspired to emulate, make up my own creations.

When I completed a first draft for a novel in my twenties, I felt the rise of my powers.  Creativity was a way to leave the surface of the earth.  The feeling I got after capturing a poetic image or complex emotion was extra-ordinary.  I learned how the minutia of life could dissolve in the presence of creativity; I discovered how a woman with a room of her own could alter her world.

The problem is we learn to believe that creativity is not enough.  You are not really wonder woman until other, qualified people tell you you are.  In dire times of rejection, you may replace your creativity with a pint of ice cream or perhaps reruns of Desperate Housewives, or both.  The mind, now corralled to the demands of domesticity, as well as the numbing passiveness of technology, is like a tethered stallion.  It snorts and kicks.  It stands on its hind legs.  It overheats.  That creative energy is channeled straight into anxiety or worse.  Alice Walker reflects upon this in her essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens," where she writes about her Black ancestors, female slaves who, due to their stifled creativity “were not Saints but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness."

Why is the power of creativity so fulfilling?  The answer lies in purpose according to Rex Jung, a neuropsychologist, who studies intelligence and creativity with respect to the neuroscience of the brain.  His specialty is helping people with brain injuries find meaning in their lives again.  Many of these people have lost their intellectual capacity and yet their creativity remained intact.  This is because intelligence relies on brain mass and conductivity between the lobes; conductivity is efficient with respect to intelligence, that is, minimizing point A to point B, while creativity depends on the many different, novel pathways a bio-electrical signal can take.  It is a sort of meandering.  Jung talks about Alonzo Clemons, an exceptionally detailed artist who creates exquisite sculptures of animals, horses, cattle, elephants, sheep in wood and bronze.  Clemons suffered a traumatic brain injury early in his life that rendered him mentally and socially challenged.  It is his artistry, however, that gives him a strong sense of purpose, a niche in the world.

Jung defines creativity as something that is "novel and useful".  Why was Picasso a great artist?  Because his style is novel- unique, interesting, enticing; his work is useful because it excites the senses and adds emotion and complexity to a viewing space. Why is Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse a work of art?  Its novel aspect is rooted in the stream of conscious writing that mirrors the internal workings of the human mind; we revel at the power of poetic rawness, at the spark and capture of insight before the ego and the editor overly refine it with propriety.  The useful aspect is showcasing these internal workings; we don't read To the Lighthouse for its plot twists; we don't read it to be entertained; we read it to experience empathy.

I spend most of my time taking care of my 17 month old twins and the days can be very long, especially during the winter months.  I am sure I am not alone when I say I am often pummeled by the gravity of drudgery, by the pile up at the kitchen sink after every meal, by the onslaught of diaper changing and laundry, by domesticity in general.  This past spring, holed up with the babes and waiting for the weather to change, I experienced the ennui that comes with disillusionment.  I have felt this ennui before; often times it has been a portal to depression, a place where I hold a continuous debate with myself on whether life is inherently meaningless.  Once, during one of these periods, I enrolled in a philosophy course to find out what the big wigs said about the issue, but I didn't find the answer there.  I found it in the short stories I was writing.  This is what I must remember: while writing and in the zone, time seems to stop; I enter the world of fluidity and purpose.  My mood changes from a worried, depressive state to one engaged and curious, even playful.  This is why I make time to write, because creativity can eradicate existential angst.

Now that's true power.

The Melancholic World of the Subconscious

There it was again, the white house on Horace Road, the house I used to visit nearly everyday as a girl.  The house in the dream was similar to the actual house with concrete steps leading to the front door, a mirror over the piano in the living room, but this house had a multitude of hidden doors.  I went inside with a heavy heart; I was looking for those lost to me, but once again, they weren't home. 
Aside from my visiting the white house in my dreams, I had gone back there a few years ago after my childhood friend, N, had contacted me through facebook.  We went to see N's parents; her father was alive back then.  My own father had been gone some eight years; this seemed ironic because my father was nearly 2 decades younger than hers.  I thought the visit would bring closure for me and I would no longer dream about the house, execute fruitless searches, because I had found my friend and her parents, the people who were a prominent part of my childhood.  But that wasn't the case.

I go about my business in my conscious life.  I take care of my twin babies, keep the house clean, take the dog for a walk, teach my classes.  I do one task then another then another.  Each task is a rung on the ladder that extends from morning to night.  But while I'm climbing the ladder during the day, I'm also living somewhere else- in the amorphous, melancholic world of my subconscious where I am still grieving.  The part of me that dwells there- perhaps it is the girl, or maybe the soul- is conveniently compartmentalized. My meager attempts at meditation and prayer do not satisfy her.  Perhaps this is why she is so prominent in my dreams.

In this last dream regarding the white house, a former student attempted to break in.  His name is Bobby D.  I had his sister as a senior back when I taught high school; she was respectful and diligent as Bobby was when I had him as a freshman.  By junior year, Bobby started having behavioral problems; it was this Bobby who was at the door trying to get in.

Just as Bobby D was sneaking in, I slammed the door on his knee and fingers.  I succeeded in bolting it, but there were others that needed locking.  At one point, the hidden doors multiplied infinitely in both directions, like an image does when you place it between two mirrors.  Bobby was out there, looming, readying himself to break in and take things.  On a shelf in the garage, there were remotes, about ten of them, each with ducktape over the buttons; I freaked when I saw all of the overhead doors needing to be locked.  Then my father appeared.  Together we worked at closing all of the overhead doors and locking them to keep Bobby D out.

Once, in meditation, and guided by a teacher, the presence of my father was potent; it was as if he was sitting in my lap.  Tears burst through the lashes of my closed eyes.  It had been awhile since I thought of him; I had been busy.  And yet, I could feel his eagerness to come through, as if he had been waiting for a while behind some locked door.

I have learned this: the friend I thought was lost to me, still exists.  She lives her life much as I do, taking care of children, maintaining a house, keeping a job.  I have also learned that my father still exists, albeit subtly.  It is uncanny sometimes, the way he flashes across a face, be it my sister's or my son's or my brother's.  There he is, I say to myself, as I observe my son and the way he watches cartoons with his lips in a semi-smile, his eyes alighted and depicting casual amusement, or as I observe my sister and the crinkle in her brow that shows up when she is perplexed, or the way my brother regards his car, meticulously, as my father did his.  And then, of course, there are the dreams where he shows up, suddenly and I am once again, whole.

At the end of this particular dream, after the doors were locked and my father had gone, I waited inside to tell my friend that her father had died.  In truth, I was eager to tell her, not to make her sad, but to have a confidant.  Because in that amorphous, melancholic world of the subconscious where the girl resides and grief resides, it's best to not be alone.

The Compassion Project: An Anthology, Call for Submissions

The Compassion Project: An Anthology

The Compassion Project’s main goal is to bring awareness to the simple, yet often marginalized concept of compassion. As it is now, antidepressant use by Americans ages 18-44 has increased nearly 400 percent in the last twenty years.  Almost weekly we hear about mass shootings, gang murders, and cyber space bullying.  It’s the diatribe of negativity in our minds, compelled by a success-obsessed society that enforces our sufferings, our singularity.  True compassion eradicates singularity.

To cultivate compassion, we must first define it for ourselves.  We must start with what the mind clings to- images.  We are bombarded with hundreds of useless or disturbing images everyday through media and advertising.  They reel in our minds, even when we turn off the screen.  What if we can replace these images?  What if we can focus on this thing compassion through positive images, images that unify us instead of alienate us, images of the spirit and not the ego; would this be a starting point in cultivating the light that lies within all of us? Will we then begin to know compassion?  Will we then recognize the seeds of the dark before they sprout and take root?

The Compassion Project: An Anthology is a call for images of original artworks depicting compassion, be they photographs, or photos of paintings, collages, mixed media, drawings, or sculptures.  Poetry, short personal essays and short stories are also welcome.  Selections from this collection of work will be published and used in presentations on compassion.

The Compassion Project: An Anthology

Guidelines for Submissions

All entries should include:

• a word document containing an imbedded image (jpg with maximum size of 2000 x 2000 pixels and minimum of 500 x 500 pixels) of the artwork along with a statement (one to three paragraphs) on why the image included represents compassion or a poem, short essay, or short story on compassion
• name, address and email included in the heading.
• Poetry must be 30 lines or less, single-spaced in 12 point Times New Roman font.
• Prose must be 1500 words or less, double-spaced in 12 point Times New Roman font.
• If an image is accepted for the anthology, the artist must be able to send it with high resolution.
• Images, essays and stories should be sent between December 1, 2013 and September 1, 2014 to Laurette Folk at lfolk@northshore.edu; all poetry should be sent to Jennifer Jean at thisruach@gmail.com.

Artists and writers of all ages and abilities are welcome. Please visit us on facebook: www.facebook.com/compassionanthology .