Lilith Refuses the Anthropocene: What My Mother Taught Me
(Two Jews-one Biblical, one Sephardic, a Buddhist Monk, a New York Shaman, and a Quaker Abolitionist Hunchback “Little Person” walk into a bar…)
www.carajudea.com/korea-bed/
Self-Portrait Theater of Space, Capsule #22, South Korea, analog c-print
Parts[1] (Reanimate, Sacred, Voice, and Community) are discrete but interconnected offerings…
Part I: Reanimate.
Postscript to Tastes Like Mangoes: Collectively Resisting Kakistocracy (a system of government which is run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens) with a Spanish translation on APlaneta:
Weary and wary of contributing to disaster tourism. How useful is it for me to describe the scenes of mountains upon mountains of trash, mattresses slumped over guard rails, arrested as they tumble in a landslide, fish lying on asphalt roads? Is it helpful for me to describe to you: Entire forests now supine, mass arboreal graves. Indiscriminate cadavers. Trees. Humans. I can’t help but think of Pinochet’s 1970s Chile.
And then there are hundreds examples of reclaiming the Commons, extensive networks of care, hazard mitigation—from the pop-up Flood School (an extension of Zazu’s school) to the support for local farmers whose crops were destroyed by Hurricane Helene (this includes helping to feed communities who were dependent on those farmers).
Currently I am an hour from Asheville, offering temporary work exchange at the Southern Dharma Retreat Center. (Farcically, it is here among the Buddhist meditators that I am required to use a smart phone for the first time in my life—this is an example of me “softening” my voice, temporarily—see below). I wait to be able to pick up Zazu and bring him back home to Colorado; again, only to return to North Carolina next month where I will be exploring my two artist residency fellowships at Penland School of Craft. My collaborative photography project, “Alchemy: Collaborating with the Unknown” will be about weaving relationships. The word “technology” comes from the root techne, “to fabricate,” “to weave.”
Weaving the detritus (offcuts/ scrap piles) from other residents’ art studios to build my photography palette, my visual toolbox will develop in relation to the other artists’ material production at Penland. Focusing on how taken-for-granted objects/ materials can be gleaned and repurposed, I will reanimate fragments of others’ “refuse” to create improvisational, unexpected juxtapositions in my photographs—an unanticipated collaboration. My project highlights how craft-making is rooted in interdependent processes.
A dialogue between the artist’s body and the artist’s materials generates objects that tell stories. These objects are grounded within infrastructures of storytelling (i.e., supply chains: where did the wood, metal, clay/earth, textiles, + come from? Where are they going?). Following nature as my guide in which there is no waste, these reclaimed collages/montages will explore how what is deemed disposable is actually valuable, depending on how it is perceived and used. I will include the images I take at Penland in Unlearning What We Think We Know: Radical Art in Action, my forthcoming book (Vernon Press, December 2025). The theme of my book is how to embody a supply-chain consciousness in our daily lives. The theme of the images I will shoot at Penland will reflect this process by weaving together, thus hopefully (albeit temporarily) reanimating objects that are considered waste.
Waste. Accepting the “inevitable”? I cannot. Instead, I continue to look for ways to reanimate our individual potency through unanticipated intimacies, our fertile social webbings of interrelatedness. I am reminded of both sangha—community, the third jewel of Buddha’s Three Refuges and the extraordinary rule-breaking swimmer, Diana Nyad who declared: “It looks like a solitary sport, but it takes a team.”
http://www.carajudea.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CollectiveFaces.png / http://www.carajudea.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/CollectiveAnimals.jpg
Paintings by Micaela Amateau Amato for
Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era
Part II: Sacred.
In my attempt to make sense of the relentlessly, infinitely, suffocatingly nonsensical—how to parent in the midst of hyper-normalized climate chaos—I decided to enter the spirit realm—the realm of the unknown, magic, non-rational, non-linear, intuitive…certainly uncivilized. Ha! This sacred zone of surrealism (see my “Thirteen Surrealist Provocations: Embodied Sacred Activism—We Shall Overcome”) has been central to my color photography practice for over 30 years—but that is another story.
Out of the blue (perhaps!), I receive a message from Betti Rooted Lionheart of Braided Root Waters Healing Sanctuary and Sacral Transformations, a mother of two boys living off-grid in upstate New York when we first met. Seven years ago, when Zazu was about five and we were living at EcoVillage Ithaca, Betti and I began to collaborate to create a nature school called BREATHE: Bravely Return to the Earth. Jenn Feingold (who had wanted to use my intergenerational, cross-cultural climate justice book, Zazu Dreams as the foundation of the curriculum) did get it off the ground, but Zazu and I had already gone west. Lifetimes pass and Betti re-enters my world just as Hurricane Helene hits Western North Carolina.
Through shamanic spiritual practices, Betti suggests we explore the anguish I am experiencing as a mother trying to raise my child with an acute embodied sense of creative responsibility. Following much discussion, Betti reads my previous essay about Zazu being smack in the middle of Hurricane Helene in the context of the “embodied experience of trauma” (see Resmaa Menaken’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies) and our family’s practice of Apocalyptic Parenting.
During Betti’s shamanic narration of her “diagnostic journey” followed by a “healing journey,” among other beings and interspecies relationships, Lilith emerges in various forms, including a dead tree or a tree in winter without leaves, without visible life, upon which I lean—literally, she’s got my back.
Part III: Voice.
On the precipice of our quarter of a cyborg-century, as we collectively transition from the staggering disorientation of 2024—Lilith enters. Lilith: Goddess of the Apocalypse, rendering the ob-scene (the off stage) apocalyptic, making the unseen seen, the private public, the personal political. Activating the dark to illuminate the absurdities of what we think we know. See Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene, my critical philosophy, interdisciplinary art book that explores the vulnerability of the body as a strategy for social justice.
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Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.
― Elie Wiesel, Dawn
לילית Lilit means "little night" in Hebrew. Lilith is the wild haired (head and hirsute) chaos of creation, the timeless, untamed, unapologetic, beyond categories, orgiastic Goddess of Darkness, Goddess of the Night…
How often have any of us been in a community gathering—an academic lecture, a spiritual sangha, book reading, theater performance, even a political protest or rally—when the term “darkness” has been equated with evil, or at least negativity—a realm to be obliterated by, sanctified by the purity and goodness of light?
Over the years, I have gathered the courage, and I hope grace, to speak out and offer an alternative to this language that our structurally racist culture takes for granted. When I have asked those in question (again after much internal deliberation about how to generate dialogue, not shut anyone down) to consider using other words besides “dark” and “black” to describe danger, suffering, and BAD,[1] defensiveness is often what surfaces. Don’t word police me, I am told.
I am again reminded of my Sephardic family’s Ladino[2] proverbs: Avlar kero, i no puedo, mi korazon sospira (I want to speak, I can’t, my heart sighs)
When Zazu was in 5th grade, the only multi-racial, Black child in his Waldorf-inspired school, he played the Egyptian god, Horus who spoke of the “Prince of Darkness, the Prince of Evil”). My child was supposed to represent dark as “evil.” I must speak out (and I did—the script was altered) about the embedded harmful implications of such taken-for-granted language.
During Betti’s process of “soul retrieval,” a “shamanic extraction of intrusive energy,” an attempt to reset habituated patterns (my contentious relationship to consumptive digital technology; anxiety of witnessing our children as collateral damage (see my “Techno-Dystopias Breed Children as Collateral Damage”), Betti visualized my medulla. It turns out, which she consciously did not know, but intuitively perhaps did, the medulla part of the brain is where the vagus nerve originates. Other names for the vagus nerve are the soul nerve! and the wander nerve! I cannot help but meander back to Lilith in exile—the origin of the wandering Jew. Additionally, I have referenced the remarkable vagus (soul, wander) nerve for decades with my Iyengar yoga students, but hadn’t realized how fundamental it is for our larynx to function. To give voice. Betti also witnessed my luminescent turquoise throat chakra.
I feel acutely conscious of stealthy anxiety—my fear of being judged…do you, dear Reader sense I am deluded by my own “spiritual bypassing” or perhaps by my audacity to bind myself to Lilith? Or am I attempting to invoke her presence? To conjure her strength and wisdom to guide us through seemingly inescapable converging avalanches of oppression; guide us through our individual and collective sufferings?
If my tone sounds particularly cautious, it is because I have recently returned from a Buddhist workshop: With Awareness Comes Choice at Southern Dharma Retreat Center. Not surprisingly perhaps, I found myself inwardly and outwardly asking many questions related to “spiritual bypassing” …Precarious words to utter during a spiritual retreat—whether in an anonymous gathering of silent, no-eye-contact meditators or in my direct community back home—a familiar, motherhood village of my neighbors. In both cases, I trip over myself with urgent curiosity.
Back home, I beseech my women neighbors to imagine collective transformation through consciousness interconnectivity and collaborative parenting choices to not succumb to the “inevitable”: digital technology consuming our children as they consume it. Within the teepee around the sacred fire circle, I read to my neighbor women, most of whom are mothers, quotes from Deb Chachra’s How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World. I ask them to consider the parental/maternal implications of Frederick Jameson’s (infused with Mark Fisher and Slavoj Žižek) idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world, then it is to imagine the end of capitalism. And wasn’t that the tagline of this Village gathering? “come BE in community to VISION a more LIFE centered world.” Yet, our habituated fictions, our habituated obedience to the “inevitable” permeates. “Activism” is framed as someone telling someone else how to do something. One of the mother’s bumper stickers reads: “Ask A Farmer, Not an Activist.”[3]
Since when are farmers not implicitly activists? Whether they are explicitly so is irrelevant.
As an “activist,” I don’t devise “solutions.” I can only plant seeds. And seek others who plant seeds. The Sōtō (farmer!) Zen Buddhist facilitator (he chooses not to identify as “teacher,” choosing to be in a non-hierarchical dynamic with us, his “students”) distinguishes between “content level” and “process level”; the what versus the how.
Václav Havel echoes the how of vitality at the “process level”: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” Havel’s call-for-action is reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They used their imaginations because they had to, because they had to live with integrity, not because they would win: “This affirmation of life by way of a sacrifice and combat with no prospect of victory is a tragic paradox that can only be understood as an act of faith in history” (Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism). When we commit to the Apocalypse, when we reveal, not by shining light, but by consciously entering into, embodying the darkness together, we develop faith in the field of awareness of our communal body, our cultural somatics.
During the Dharma talks, in this case, “dialectical conversations” among the Buddhist meditators, we explicitly and collectively break our vow of silence and no eye contact. I flounder as I try to discern between self (the conditioned mind) as a fiction and US democracy (the conditioned system) as a fiction. Again, with as much decorum as I can muster, I try to articulate the connection between his teaching: practice to become aware of how our behavior is being controlled by conditioned mind, pre-determined agendas, automated programming and my contextualizing his teaching within a social justice frame.
When he asks us “what world are we creating that is not real?” Part of me silently responds “the world of consumer-convenience culture in which we live in total denial of the consequences of our actions—the opposite of Lilith”. When he shares “If we don’t know we believe it, we believe it,” I think about whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg speaking in reference to the Vietnam War and President Nixon's “Pentagon Papers:” “They hear it, they learn from it, they understand it, and they proceed to ignore it.” Why is centered awareness, a counter to the fictional self, rooted in accepting what is—Saṃsāra? Accepting the actively transforming converging horrors of our contemporary world? The Buddhist facilitator shared that the urgent survival voice embeds us in illusions and leads us to suffering rather than being present and living life as it unfolds. The more he describes urgency that compounds fictions, the more urgent I feel.
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Sean Feit, Buddhist teacher and student of Jack Kornfield, as well as the model in my 1994 analog photograph “matter adheres to matter,” writes this in response to my urgency: “I read you as pointing toward a deep systemic suffering in our sociopolitical system that plays out in our most intimate realms—the erotic, parenting, family, and the fertile interior contacted in meditation. …”
As for my friend who asked what I learned from Zazu during his experiences of Hurricane Helene: During her shamanic journey, Betti heard my presence state: “I am open to softening my voice with Zazu.” Flexibility. Gradually I am developing the muscle that distinguishes between deference and acceptance. Can we accept “what is” (the spaciousness of equanimity), and still speak out, speak out softly, gracefully but immersed in risk-taking, unapologetic dignity, exquisite determination?
Part IV: Community.
I dedicated Viscous Expectations to both my son (Zazu) and my mother: To my mother, Micaela Amateau Amato, my collaborator, editor, and co-conspirator, you labored with me over every last word, again and again. I am forever grateful for your astounding clarity and your sense of the absurd. From you I learned the courage to trust my intuition. I treasure our intimacy
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My mother, Micaela Amateau Amato, is both my primary collaborator and my best friend. We are allies in the most profound sense—supporting one another as Sephardic, relentlessly passionate, outspoken women. My relationship with my mother grows out of a co-implication of exploring and pushing our own expected limits and unexpected possibilities. Our collaborations interrupt self-destructive dichotomous, reductive thinking because they demand that we both give up ownership and explore unfamiliar territory—expanding within the space of the other. For decades our visual-art and written collaborations have focused on confronting fossil-fuel addicted economies/mentalities by infusing our work with a Sephardic ethic.
Not until I read Marcus Rediker’s enchanting The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist did I learn about anti-authoritarian antinomians (such as Levellers, Seekers, Diggers, Quakers, and Ranters—what a delight!) who believed that “no one has the right or power to control human conscience” (15). Benjamin, like Lilith and my mother were/ are antinomians—practicing what “the ancient Greeks called parrhesia—free, fearless speech…” (2). In addition to being targeted as “the irrepressible antinomian rebel who had tormented them with debate and disruption” (48), Benjamin was also accused of inhabiting and disseminating darkness; his fellow Quakers on both sides of the ocean considered him “to be in a ‘Dark disordered Condition’” (38).
I learned from my mother that when you learn something you do something about it. Simply by being who she is, my mother taught me that to live as collective beings in relation to one another means we speak up. It’s like breathing. Having grown up in the era of ACT UP and Silence=Death,
having grown up understanding that if people hadn’t taken mind-boggling risks my father would not have survived hiding in a closet during the Holocaust, having grown up where no matter what, my mom encouraged me to ask questions, to invite and consider multiple perspectives, to speak out in solidarity with those whose voices are censored.
I honor this ménage à trois: my mother Micaela and the Jewish “little night” Lilith resounding with the “apocalyptic outrage” of the Quaker “little person,” Benjamin Lay, who very vocally believed complacency was “sinful.” Apocalyptic Revelation was the cornerstone of Benjamin’s personal-political passions. “Conscious of the hard, exploited labor that went into making seemingly benign commodities such as tobacco and sugar, Benjamin” staged radical public protests in the form of guerilla theater. “He sought to awaken his brothers and sisters to the politics of the smallest, seemingly most insignificant choices” (61).
Horace of Rome wrote:
The just man who is resolute
Will not be turned from his purpose
Either by the rage of the crowd or
by an imperious tyrant.
How do taken-for-granted norms maintain their status quo? “Benjamin [Lay] wrote his book [All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates—which Benjamin Franklin published in 1738] at a time when slavery seemed to many people around the world as natural and unchangeable as the sun, the moon, and the stars in the heavens…an unchangeable foundation of society” (3, 71). Norms ranging from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to contemporary ubiquitous digital technologies—themselves rooted in modern Trans-African slavery. For example, the mining in the Congo of tungsten used in the vibration mechanisms in cell phones. Conflict minerals such as tungsten, gold, tantalum, and tin are present in almost every single piece of technology so many of use daily. Profit-driven digital technology today reflects the hypernaturalized cult of individualism: institutional, corporate dependencies that naturalize ecocide, the annihilation of human communities and wildlife habitats.
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In Andrea Juno’s Angry Women, Avital Ronell (my dear friend, mentor, and yoga student) questions another way in which women might not internalize phallocentric discourses and systems of representation as we accept what is:
Could there be a feminine intensity or force that would not be merely ‘subversive’? Because subversion is a problem-it implies a dependency on the program that is being critiqued-therefore it’s a parasite of that program. Is there a way to produce a force or an intensity that isn’t merely a reaction (and a very bad and allergic reaction) to what is? (1991: 128).
I hope to offer a mirror to many of you, an invitation for collective empowerment—witnessing how we already may be that which we seek—reminiscent of Stephen Hawking’s everything we need to know is already within us just waiting to be realized; driven towards Ronell’s “feminine intensity”—an eco-erotic ethic that reconfigures how we experience radical citizenship—how we inhabit our bodies in our everyday lives.
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Paintings by Micaela Amateau Amato for
Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era
Told by mother to daughter, generation after generation, the story of Lilith’s revolt and how she did not succumb to being demonized for her courage and independence, offers a model for confronting and transforming phallocentric culture. Lilith guides me as I apocalypsize (highlight, reveal, render the ob-scene seen) the Anthropocentric tendency to exile both objects and people who are deemed useless to smooth operations of normalcy.
Just as when certain objects are deemed superfluous, certain voices transgress boundaries and exceed their “appropriateness” for group think. Individual people/particular populations are too often reduced to a state of exile. For example, Lilith was deported from Eden because she stood up against sexism/ patriarchy and Benjamin Lay was outcast from his Spiritual Community because he stood up against racism/ slavery.[4]
We are not waste. We are not “human dust.” (Ben-Gurion’s 1948 reference to the populations of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews arriving to the forming state of Israel).
We are a conscious Lilithian village of seed planters...listening for our collective agile voices.
[1] “Parts” refer to Internal Family Systems.
[2] See the video clip from the Prison Library (Dictionary) scene in the Malcolm X movie by Spike Lee, an article on structural racism and the English Language from Bustle, and the Harvard IAT on Race or Skin Tone. I am grateful to Aaron Watkins, head of Dark Skies Paonia these references.
[3] Ladino is the language of my Sephardic ancestors. Spanish Jewish/ Sephardic exiles of the Diaspora of 1492 wove Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, Italian, French, Farsi, Portuguese, and Arabic into their 15th century Spanish. Ladino is the ultimate polyvocal, hybrid language—a reflection of the Diaspora; embracing difference.See my UCLA Keynote, Quantum Entanglements: ReAnimating the Embodied Language of Ladino for 11th Annual LADINO Judeo-Spanish Symposium Poetic Pasts
[4] According to CNN interview with Scott Calloway, NYU professor of Marketing, the biggest female demographic who voted for Trump were mothers.
[5] Ironically, community was at the core of Benjamin’s passions: “What Lay had learned of solidarity as a sailor laid a foundation of sympathy for the plight of the enslaved” (57).