Words of wisdom have never made so much sense:
Roses and Thorns
"When you speak of roses and thorns, the paradox within one beautiful flower, the marriage of the male and female, the crown of thorns, with Jesus and Mary Magdalene being known as the rose, I thought that all of us at some time in our lives experience a sacred marriage of sorts and I truly wanted there to be in the garden a place for union. In all of us, there is a love. In all of us, there is another piece, a mirror piece. Yes, of course, within. You have to find your own twin flame within your being, but there is someone, and sometimes it is more than one person, that you go into sacred marriage with. And I explore it in different songs on this record, especially Marys of the Sea, which is about her journey out of Jerusalem, and fleeing and when she gets to the south of France, she takes on a ministry herself. The gospel of Mary Magdalene was something that I had heard about but hadn't read until I was much older. My mother, a minister's wife, read it for the first time very, very recently, and she looked up with tears streaming down her face, and she took my hands in hers, and her name is Mary, and she said, "Darling, why oh why has this been kept from me my whole life? I am not someone who isn't exposed to literature, particularly Christian literature," My mother was a literature major. And she said, "Yet this is something that has not been available." And I said, "Well, I think that is the key question. Why 2000 years later would the gospel of Mary Magdalene be hidden from the masses?" Now to me, that is the greatest story NEVER told. And I explore this greatest story never told in Marys of the Sea.
Herbs and Elixirs
Elixirs and herbs is a place that the passion that this woman has for her beliefs, for the man that she loves, for the direction that humanity is going, is very much where she's exploring. And allowing herself to not only heal what are wounds, but to allow her wounds to express themselves. And this doesn't always have to be a place of victimization, this sometimes is a place to be able to confront something is out of balance, and it's an ancient practice that the bee shaman have been working with for thousands of years. They work with a tradition that forces you to look at those places that may need to be stung. And there is a song on this record in the Herbs and Elixirs garden called Sweet the Sting and in order for you or I to gain the sweetness, wisdom does not come without the sting.
If we can all begin looking more at our lives like a garden, and within a garden it has different shapes, I mean, yours may not be based on a hexagram concept. The beekeeper is however, mainly because the cells of the hives itself are based on the principle of the hexagram. From my wisdom, and my sort of tree of knowledge to expand, I chose to follow my heart, so I followed my husband down to Cornwall, welly boots and all. This would not have been my first choice. I enjoyed living in cities, but now, over the last few years there's a different rhythm here, and the weather is very much a character in this theater piece of my life. It is a huge part, and the power of it, when the gails blow in off the Cornish coast. There's a song, Jamaica Inn, that I wrote as I didn't get trapped but I was just driving down on a beautiful, quote unquote beautiful, you know it was raining, it's England. And, all of a sudden, the gails started to come in and my mind started to wander and I pulled over on a cliff, and I started to think about this story I had been told by some of the locals. where the wreckers would come in when a ship would run aground and take everything. And I started to think about this story that was taking over my car. In that moment, Jamaica Inn walked in to my Saab, and she said, "You might not like my story, because I'm not going to tell you how it ends yet, and you need to travel it with me. And we're going to have to explore your deepest fears." And I think my deepest fears come down to betrayal in love, friendship. It's not death, that's not my greatest fear. Tragic, if it's untimely, but it's going to happen to all of us. What always stops me is betrayal, and if I betray someone, that scares me too.
The Desert Garden
The desert garden is very much about the crossroads. It's a place where you must make choices, grave choices. This is where our garden of Sinsuality differs from the garden of Eden because in a place where the creator is the feminine scribe telling the story, the bart, in our book of Genesis, in our beginning, we as women were encouraged to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, because that's how we could help our pride or tribe. And if we don't, then we will be subservient, and unequal to the male and therefor cannot help him, and cannot serve the pride. As a songwriter, and someone who chronicles time, I have to feel the pulse of what is current. I was able to include General Joy on the record because I wrote it in July 2004 and recorded it and it was relevant then and it's relevant again now. We are still at war as of this taping, and General Joy is very much a current figure, or not because there are not a lot of Generals that we would call General Joy and that's the point. General Joy has lost his boys and they've been left behind. He needs a soldier girl now that liberty has been gagged.
The Greenhouse
Parasol is a song about deep betrayal, and how this woman survives this experience without becoming victimized in the end by being able to transform herself. And as the song says, "If I'm a seated woman with a parasol, I'll be the only one." There will always be someone who feels trapped in a situation like the seated woman with a parasol. There is a song called The Power of Orange Knickers that really kind of explores the idea of the word "terrorist," so I put on a pair of orange knickers one morning and I decided that if I'm going to stalk the idea of a terrorist, without having a picture of what one was, then I'm going to need my orange knickers. And as I started to walk over to the piano, I started to think about words that rhymed with terrorist, and this song kept drawing me in and drawing me in, deeper and deeper and deeper, and it said, "Yes, it's easy to see the enemy if it's in another country, it's easy to see the enemy in another culture. Find the enemy in your own culture, then find the enemy in your own being." And she's there. We all have this part of ourselves that will choose to obliterate an idea instead of negotiate with it, because it takes great skill to negotiate with ideas. It doesn't take a lot of skills to obliterate, unfortunately...and I began to understand how the opposites, if they don't have an understanding and a respect for one another, and hold it into balance, then the whole thing begins to bring chaos.
My mom was very ill this year. I was having to realize that I was not willing to let her go at this time. So what do you do? Well then you go to the beekeeper, don't you? So, in the song, The Beekeeper, I travel to find the master beekeeper, who is really sort of the master shaman keeping everything together within the gardens, making sure everything is pollinated, making sure there is life, making sure that when and if there's disease, that that is extricated from the garden. It wasn't guaranteed that my mother would survive. But the master beekeeper explained that "Of course she will wake. Don't you believe in infinity? Don't you believe in the shape of infinity? That's the bee's dance. That's what the worker bees do; that is their dance. Don't you believe in the mystery of the Magdalene? Don't you believe in this lineage of Damider, the endless of cycles of mother and daughter? Because wherever she awakes, she is still your mother, even if it's not on this plane, she will always be your mother."
The Orchard
Mother Revolution is core because the album centers very much around this idea that in order for there to be a continuance of life for the next generation and the next generation, and the next generation, the songs begin to speak about if the masses didn't chose to listen to the needs to the next generation, then the mothers would need to make a choice, which was were the mothers okay sending their sons off to a war that they may not believe in. And I began to understand an internal revolution that is more powerful than thousands of soldiers, that there is an artillery of the soul, and a resolve that I have seen in a concerned mother. The masters have spoken about the complexity of the hives that love living in the orchards. I was drawn to it mainly because of the vine and the fruit and the transformation of life. Becoming a mother has brought me my greatest teacher. She is four, and we're in communication, we're in harmony, we're in a balance of mother and daughter, not me as the authority or her as the precocious child that's totally in control, which is true sometimes. But when we're in balance, we're sharing this dance, this sonic dance, that the songs have been trying to show me since I was little, but she, through her love of music is beginning to show me. And that lives in the orchard along with the Tree of Knowledge. Ribbons Undone is a song that really I guess explains a mother's love, and a father's love, for their daughter. They see their little girl running in the fields with their ribbons flying, as they're little flashes of lightening that go by, especially in the back field here, and you can run and run and run and run, and catch butterflies, thinking that you can fly like one. And I was watching Tash run and I started to remember something my mother said to me. She told me years ago, we would look in a mirror, and she said, "This woman that I see, that you see, this old, wrinkled woman, is a stranger to me." I said, "You're the most beautiful woman I know." And she said, "That's...don't get distracted by what I'm telling you." She said, "That is a stranger to me. Inside, I'm running. Inside, my legs can carry me. I don't have a heart condition. I'm not someone who is in a wheelchair. I am someone who catches the butterflies in my mind's eye." And when I watched my daughter running, I saw my mother and I began to understand that this case is a distraction sometimes, and it tricks us because it can start making us believe that we are old of spirit, not just that the violin case is beat up, but you can begin to believe that the violin has no music to play anymore. And that is where you have to go to the Tree of Knowledge and I tasted my mother's wisdom looking into that mirror. And I see her running now, and my mother will always be running, next to Tash, together, hand in hand, and Ribbons Undone is something that I hope one day to see myself running alongside them.
The Rock Garden
I don't necessarily see it as barren, the rock garden, and I think the songs take us into a place that I certainly didn't expect. There are little surprises that I find all the time. There's a song called Witness, the gospel choir is on that. We go back to the gnostic gospels and the techs talking about being a witness, and did you witness Christ's teaching. I started thinking about judge and jury and I started to think about crimes against humanity, against each other, stripping it away to a very personal place of crime. And the gospel choir becomes very much the jury. Do you ever start screaming in the car, having an argument, reliving an argument, "Why didn't I say that? Why is he so stupid? Why can't he understand?" And you go, "What is it gonna take? What language is it going to take for us to communicate on this issue?" So I decided what is the language that this guy understands? So I decided to become a car, one with a stick, that he can put his hands on, and maneuver, and he can polish my rims. And he can step inside me, and feel himself become manly, and have a conversation with his car. Then I decided that I could also become a guitar, and he could pick me up and play me, and I could listen to what he was trying to say, and if I could just change my shape, we could maybe get through this because it was never was the cars and guitars that came between us."
--Tori Amos
Start your own garden. Find joy in your life and make up your own mind. Find what makes you happy, find what makes you sad, because it is all what makes you. Realize what parts of your life occupy which garden, and watch it grow, expand, multiply, die off, and start its own revolution.
