Here are 39 mandalas compiled in two volumes, representing works from 2003 to 2023. Volume One has been amended since its first debut in 2011.
All mandalas represent the artist’s inner process in minute stitching, meditation stitch by stitch of her intent to what C.G. Jung expressed: the creative movement to the center of being. Many of the mandalas correspond with books ideated, written and produced at the time of embroidering.
See mariannepress@blogspot.com and mythicthreads@blogspot.com
Marianne Press
Presents
Hand Made Hardcover Edition
The Gospel of the Desert Mothers
160 pages
INTRODUCTION
Gospel of the Desert Mothers is the thirteenth book in an ongoing mythological
autobiography that has taken many forms over a span of 30 years. It began when I left
Gospel
of the Desert Mothers chronicles a 21 month journey—sometimes reckless, sometimes
shattering, yet always meaningful.
Characters of the previous books are now rediscovered as alive and
well-embodied in the emergence of the Feminine principle via the desert mothers
as I heard them.
Others will hear them in their own
way—from the deserts, the tropics, the cities, the mountains, the plains, the
oceans, the shores. The Feminine voices inform
us that no matter where we live, no matter what we do or who we are, we are
living on a planet in transition, the great enantiodromia, the important shift
from one age to another.
It is my hope, as merely one listener in
this spectrum of possibilities, that The
Gospel of the Desert Mothers may
provide one aspect of heralding a new age to our world as I foresaw it in the
epic poem La Chanson de Pamé La Calmette, 1992:
And as I
waited, I sensed the presence
Of my
ancestors,
A host of
women from the caves and goddesslands,
And they
were crying,
And their
tears were bitter.
They came
into form naked and branded,
And their
flesh was sore.
Some of
their heads were bare-shaven,
Others
had hair singed at the edges;
Some
tresses were matted with blood and with sweat;
And their
eyes had been weeping
And their
tears had been sweetened
By a
beauty
Borne
from the centuries
Of
suffering to wisdom,
Of love
unrequited,
The
sorrow of Mother unheard.
And now the Mother is being heard. And She is rejoicing.
May this little book be a validation that
in 2023 we are beginning to hear and intuit—all of us in our individual
capacities—to the Mothers as they
have just begun teaching us their new gospel, the truth of a newer age that is
emerging before our eyes.
Pamela
Preston
Pelican
Cove, 2023
