Jane Blaffer Owen - New Harmony, Indiana : like a river not a lake : a memoir

New Harmony, Indiana : like a river not a lake : a memoir — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "New Harmony, Indiana : like a river not a lake : a memoir" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...73

NEW HARMONY

INDIANA

We are a river of time, and it keeps on flowing.

JANE BLAFFER OWEN

APRIL 18, 1915JUNE 21, 2010

NEW HARMONY
INDIANA

Like a River Not a Lake A Memoir

JANE BLAFFER OWEN

AFTERWORDS BY

Anne Dale Owen and Jane Dale Owen

EDITED BY

Nancy Mangum McCaslin

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

Telephone800-842-6796

Fax812-855-7931

2015 by The Jane Blaffer Owen Management Trust

All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481992.

Manufactured in China

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-01624-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01663-8 (e-book)

1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15

FRONTIS: Jane Blaffer, Portrait 3, 1936. Vera Prasilova Scott took many photographs of the Blaffer family. Her originals are now archived in the Vera Prasilova Scott portraiture collection, MS 497, Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX, Rice University.

Courtesy of Rice University. Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

PAGE III: Fish above the Lab 1988 John Hubbard. Courtesy of John Hubbard.

ENDPAPERS: Area Map and Town Map 2013 Kenneth A. Schuette.

Dedicated to
THE TOWNSPEOPLE OF NEW HARMONY
PAST, PRESENT, AND
FUTURE.

I will never leave this house of light, I will never
leave this blessed town
for here I have found my love and here I will stay
for the rest of my life.
If this world turns into a sea of trouble
I will brave the waves and steer my minds ship
to the safe shore of love.

If you are a seeker looking for profit, go on
and may God be with you,
but I am not willing to exchange my truth,
I have found the heart and will never leave
this house of light.

Jalaludin Mohamad Rumi,
Thirteenth-century Sufi mystic,
from Rumi Hidden Music.

Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Azima Melita Kolin and Maryam Mafi, translators, (2001).

Contents

John Philip Newell
J. Pittman McGehee
Jane Blaffer Owen
Jane Blaffer Owen
Connie A. Weinzapfel
Nancy Mangum McCaslin	FROM SPOKEN TO WRITTEN WORDS
Anne Dale Owen
Jane Dale Owen

Foreword

John Philip Newell

JANE BLAFFER OWEN ranks among the most beautiful and wise women the modern world has known. I met her over ten years ago. She was already in her mid-eighties. And I fell in love with her immediately, as have countless other men and women of every age and stage. Yes, she was beautiful physically as well as intellectually and emotionally. But it was the way she embodied vision that drew most of us to her. And we who love her have come from many, many disciplines, ranging from art and culture to science and religion.

Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, said that the Spirit is a coniunctio oppositorum, a conjoining of what has been considered opposite: heaven and earth, spirit and matter, the feminine and the masculine, East and West, the night and the day, the unconscious and the conscious, the head and the heart, spirituality and sexuality, our individual stories and the one story, the story of the Universe. Jane Owen lived among us as a messenger of Spirit. She was forever weaving together what has been torn apart.

Close to the heart of her vision is the Roofless Church of New Harmony. It has four defining walls but truly no roof. It is to me one of the most prophetic sites of prayer in the Western world. Over fifty years ago, well in advance of the earth-awareness of today, Jane Owen saw that our sacred sites must not be cut off from the temple of the earth. Our places of prayer must not represent separateness from the other species and the other people of the world. The Roofless Church stands as an abiding testimony to this vision. The primary context of religion, and indeed of life itself, must be the great and living cathedral of earth, sea, and sky. If we are to be whole, we must come back into relationship with Creation.

Jane Blaffer Owen with John Philip Newell.

Photograph by Alison Erazmus, 2010.

The next day, in studying photographs of the celebration, I pointed out to her that she had been gazing around quite a bit during the procession, to which she replied, I was just counting the number of people. Jane Owen was forever passionate about continuing the vision.

At the heart of the Roofless Church is her most cherished work of art Descent of the Holy Spirit (Notre Dame de Liesse) by Jacques Lipchitz. The sculpture is of the Spirit, in the shape of a dove, descending on an abstract divine feminine form that is opening to give birth. At one level Lipchitz is pointing to the story of Jesus, who was conceived by the Spirit in the womb of Mary. But at another level Lipchitz is pointing to the story of the Universe. Everything that has being has been conceived by the Spirit in the womb of the Universe. In other words, everything is sacred. This is the vision that guided Jane Owen to commit herself to reweaving the strands of lifebetween nations, between cultures, between religions, between any of the so-called opposites that have tragically separated us in our lives and world.

Next page

1234567...73

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «New Harmony, Indiana : like a river not a lake : a memoir»

Look at similar books to New Harmony, Indiana : like a river not a lake : a memoir. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Candace ROBB

The Guilt of Innocents

Charles Major

The Bears of Blue River (Library of Indiana Classics)

Steve Johnson

Best Lake Hikes Wisconsin: A Guide to the States Greatest Lake and River Hikes

Wetzel

Limnology: lake and river ecosystems

Owen

Where the water goes: life and death along the Colorado River

Branigin Susan R.

New Harmony, Indiana

Dombrowski

Popular Day Hikes 4

Applegate Kris

Around Lake Cumberland

Ursula Owen

Single Journey Only: A Memoir

Sarah Jane Douglas

Just Another Mountain: a memoir

Mary Jane Beaufrand

The River

Sally McKinney

Hiking Indiana (Americas Best Day Hiking Series)

Discussion, reviews of the book New Harmony, Indiana : like a river not a lake : a memoir and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.