Recovery Series by Artist Janis Kirstein

Igneous Formed Dreams
c Janis Kirstein

There was another bad car accident. It occurred between our apartment and my husband’s deceased mother’s house. Then, I was walking out of
the pile of vehicles, and I was walking with Jesus.

by
Joyce Lynn

Elegant in an emerald green blouse, artist Janis Kirstein sat,
incongruously, in a swivel chair, before her bleak wall-sized
expressionist painting. Large swathes of black interspersed with small
patches of gray filled the canvas. Iridescent color — purples and
pinks — tinged the intersections, offering hope. The painting evokes
Robert Motherwell, the renowned New York School/Abstract Expressionist
painter. Kirstein in portraiture summons artist Frida Kahlo.

Seven more Kirstein canvases cover the walls of the main gallery. In
the back room at Zephyr Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky, the first
Friday of July 2010, Paul Klee-like drawings Kirstein created while
lying on her back, the only position she could find not unbearably
painful for her, command one wall. These pieces emerged as automatic
writing/drawing, prophetic pictographs of her journey.

Fearful she might never paint large again, Kirstein created the 5′ by 6′
“Under the Knife” paintings in two months. Those 60 days hung
suspended between a diagnosis of degenerative disk disease, the
debilitating residue of a life altering event 26 years before, and
emergency surgery scheduled for less than two weeks after the show
opened. Kirstein’s doctors told her the surgery was mandatory if she
were to ever stand or walk again.

On December 14, 1984, Kirstein and a fellow Kentucky Arts Council artist
were returning to their homes in Louisville on the Western Kentucky
Parkway when engine trouble caused them to turn back toward Benton.
Less than five minutes later, an escapee from Eddyville Prison in a
Ford Impala sedan plowed into the rear of their VW bug.

A Jaws of Life extracted Kirstein from the mangled car, which had flipped
over 16 times.

When she regained consciousness in the Benton Hospital, crushed car
metal chunks embedded in her snarled hair, Kirstein suffered memory loss.

“I forgot who lots of people were,” she remembers now.
“When someone would call, I had no idea who they were, but I could remember the feelings attached to that particular relationship, just none of the facts.”

Regaining her memory was one of many challenges facing Kirstein, so smart she read Sigmund Freud’s book on dreams when she was 12 years old.

SAVED

Dreams are also the bookends of what Kirstein calls her “walk of life.”

A few months before the accident, a Tarot reading yielded the death
card. Just as in a dream, death in a reading does not necessarily
signify death of the body; a part of the Self may be dying. Soon
afterwards, a dream reinforced the Tarot reading:

A guy with red hair on a white horse rode up to me and picked me up and delivered me to safety.

So, Kirstein believed something drastic was about to happen, but she
would be saved. Heeding the warning, she prepared for disaster. She
bought health insurance (although not enough), physically built up her
body, and said a prayer daily to the Saint Patrick Breastplate she would
survive the unknown future.

Since childhood, Kirstein has experienced premonitions. “I see things,”
she says as naturally as the sun rising every day. The seeing is different than the physical act of viewing with the eye and its retina, cornea, and lens. Rather, it is the metaphysical activity of perceiving. “To some, it seems crazy, but it is rather regular for me.”

The two plus decades after the accident were an emotional roller
coaster, sometimes studded with anger, for Kirstein. “Something was taken away,” she told me at lunch between the exhibition opening and the surgery.

Her surgery was pronounced successful within days and within a week,
she was at home, walking around her tree-shaded neighborhood.

Then, she remembered another dream in which she emerges from another car wreck, this time walking with Jesus. She would capture this spiritual aspect of her recovery in Igneous Formed Dreams, an expression of her powerful post-surgery dream and physical and emotional healing.

At first, Kirstein feared the dream foretold another car accident.
Then, she wondered if the Hollywood-like scene might reflect the
destruction in the world from war and greed. On a personal plane, was
she walking away from the destruction and disillusionment of her life
in the aftermath of the 1984 Kentucky Highway devastation, beginning
yet another recovery process?

Now, she now lives from a renewed place of forgiveness and love as she
confronts the challenges in her resurrected landscape.

During the weeks after her surgery and the walking with Jesus dream,
Kirstein began painting another series. The paintings in the series
titled Recovery are softer, the grays more glowing with larger
splashes of color. They hold remnants of the past but also offer
prayers of gratitude for the present and patches of prospects for the
future.

For Kirstein, her RECOVERY series reflects “the feeling of regaining
what I lost, a renaissance/rebirth from a near death experience.”

New York was burning, smoldering. I remember flying over and circling above the Statue of Liberty, looking down on it. I could read the book in her left hand. Instead of the numerals on the real statue, the word “union” was inscribed on the tablet.

2000/Lynn Pentz/Event Producer/New York City

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

by

Joyce Lynn

Editor’s Note: To date, the 9/11 Citizens’ Grand Juries are models. However, communities in the U.S. and in the 82 nations, which lost citizens on 9/11, can establish their own Town Hall meetings and elect their own Citizens’ Grand Juries. PDJ also encourages readers to listen to their dreams and consider the legal remedies they might reveal. PDJ encourages readers to listen to their dreams and consider their guidance about using your special gifts to create a more peaceful world. Let us know; we support viable peace efforts.

When Lynn Pentz dreamt this tableau, she linked it to her “hot and heavy” romantic relationship. The dream, she believed, signaled “it was time for me to move out of New York, out of the relationship.”

Lynn, life change consultant and producer of transformational entertainment events including Live Aid, Hands Across America, and the Bicentennial Celebration of the U.S. Constitution, moved to Los Angeles. There, in the aftermath of 9/11, she co-founded Los Angeles 9/11 Truth and guided it to prominence in the global 9/11 grassroots movement. A cornerstone was Lynn’s resurrecting the constitutionally guaranteed People’s Grand Jury and applying it to redress the U.S. government’s involvement in the crimes of 9/11.

Without realizing the political significance of her dream, Lynn initiated action, this time toward preserving a union, this time, the union of the United States of America.

As evidence mounted of government complicity in 9/11 and a government/media cover up with no justice for the perpetrators, Lynn and 911TruthLA.us, convened a “Citizens’ Grand Jury on the Crimes of 9/11” in 2004 and 2005.

“It is necessary to reestablish the citizens’ grand jury if the great American experiment is to survive,” Lynn believes.

At Town Hall meetings at Patriotic Hall in Los Angeles on October 23, 2004 and on August 27, 2005, experts and elected jurors formally rejected the legitimacy and conclusions of the Kean-Hamilton 9/11 Commission and declared the Official Story “physically impossible, contradictory, implausible and fraudulent.” In both cases, the jurors found “probable cause to indict” at least 20 individuals “at the highest level of the US government, military, and private enterprise.”

In June 2008, after learning how dreams fueled the activism of 9/11 family member Ellen Mariani and peace activist Cindy Sheehan, Lynn considered the smoldering New York union dream in another way.

“I’ve always been steeped in U.S. history and spiritual, but never thought of my role as political,” said Lynn, a descendent of the legislator who cast the deciding vote for Virginia’s adoption of the Bill of Rights,

The Statue of Liberty is a gift from France to the U.S., commemorating the centennial anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Modeled after Libertatus, the Roman goddess of freedom, the classically robed woman holds a lit flame in her right hand and a tablet, symbolizing knowledge, engraved with the Roman numerals for July 4, 1776, in her left hand,

One of the most famous icons in the world, the statue rising from the New York Harbor testifies to freedom from tyrannical governments.

Lynn wrote of the Citizen’s Grand Jury: it was “the Framers’ intention that We the People are the Fourth Branch of Government assured in our First Amendment right to Petition our government for Grievances and our Fifth Amendment assurance of independent Grand Jury Presentments - designed for investigations of governmental wrong doing separate from interference from federal prosecutors. ”

Supreme Court Justice Powell stated in 1974, “The institution of the grand jury is deeply rooted in Anglo-American history. In England, the grand jury served for centuries both as a body of accusers sworn to discover and present, for trial, persons suspected of criminal wrongdoing and as a protector of citizens against arbitrary and oppressive governmental action.”

In theory, the grand jury is a body of independent citizens with the power to investigate any crime or government misdeed brought to its attention. The Grand Jury can make its own presentment — a formal statement of the grand jury’s independent assumptions, fact-findings, and conclusions.

Lynn’s Statue of Liberty dream with the word “union” inscribed on the icon’s tablet embodies not only the historic founding of the Union, but also her spiritual definition of union, her logo — UNIR1 — the unification of consciousness — You and I are One.

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For the complete findings of “Citizens’ Grand Jury on the Crimes of 9/11: The Case to Indict”

(Recently, the “management” style of several leaders, notably women, reminded me of the first dream I ever remembered, its message,  my (intended) ground of being, and a wise mode of being for all healthy, positive relationships.)

My black and white etching of five women

entwined in work and play appears.

The women pulsate with life.

In placid stillness

moving effortlessly

combing hair

serenading

drawing

writing

reading

Whispering/singing/whistling

Sunbursts, bold stripes, wavy lines

unfold horizontally

Daisies mark the scene.

The women, different nationalities,

yet interrelated,

interconnected.

The women powerful simply because

they do not seek power.

They seek to empower themselves.

They seek to empower each other.

– from Plum Dreams Diary by Joyce Lynn