~LIZBETH RYMLAND~

DANCING BAREFOOT IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF EGO DEATH:
An Introduction to Multimedia Artiste Lizbeth Rymland

Lizbeth Rymland is a multidimensional talent: a writer, researcher, producer, speaker, poet, mythographer, anthropologist, counselor, consultant, networker, alchemist, performance artist and ecologist of mindscapes and atmospheres. Much like the Grail King, Liz and the land are One, at least the “rymland”. She embodies what she articulates and tries to ground it as culture sprouting from wilderness everywhere she goes.

Her imaginary worlds are simultaneously fertile and desolate. She articulates non-linear spatio-temporal perceptions suggestive of sensual intelligence and new social and evolutionary vistas -- a feedback circuit for communication technology.  There is a synergetic relation between landscape, instinct and imagination that rekindles all as a unified field that is the mycelial root of sacred places of heart and mind.

Worldbeat Fusion in Alien Lands

She walks her talk, what it means to relate to this world, this Earth. She is a global denizen, a free spirit at home in the grassroots of every continent she visits - even those of the unfettered hyperdimensional imagination. Imagination itself is marginal territory. The imagination is her Liminal Park; she advocates reenchantment of the world. Even her creative pathologizing is “land-based” – Demetrauma, reflecting our primary trauma of disconnection from nature.

You are just as likely to find her in the chic salons and galleries of New York City as desert kivas, or trekking the earthy hinterlands of her soulful pilgrimages. Each and every place is a rippling implosion of sacred meaning. After all, wilderness is simply any unfamiliar place or state of being. The pictures she paints for us are no less vivid than those of her notable brother-in-law, Alex Grey. They express not a visual representation but the Truth of Beauty and the irony of the wild.

Rhythm and Interval

Rymland has dabbled in many subcultures from transpersonal therapies, to indigenous activism, to ecosophy, and ethnobotany. She captures these soulscapes, which become fused with her primal essence in her written and performance work. Her labyrinthine experiences permeate her creative life, which is uncompromisingly autobiographical yet mythic in scale.  Each provides us with vicarious teaching tales – image as integrating force.

This scintillating multidisciplinarian imbibes the spirit of each geographical and metaphorical landscape she surveys, often leaving her own pro-active mark. She has no social mask, but as an authentic culture shaman she brings the boon of her journeys back to share with us all. And she shares freely. From the very fabric of her soul, she reveals her experiences of soul-wrenching to luminous moments. Wandering off the path of hypermodernity, we are arrested, trapped in her magically woven web of poetic resonance.

Traveling Without Moving

"Sister Lizrd" currently enjoys rural living among the majestic redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains. She continues to expand her over-the-horizon radar in a wide variety of intergenerational collaborations and approaches to life, art, wisdom and spirit.  She makes spirit matter with descriptive motion.

We suspect her best borderland writing is yet to come for this soul turned inside-out. We need bigger stories and Liz gives them to us with her intimate prismatic insight. Landscape is a provocateur. Liminal places connect outside with inside across all experiential domains.  She speaks for their unspeakable immensity that reminds us we are truly small.

The Singing Wilderness

She gives voices to mute places. Narrative gives a grounded sense of self. The margins are the center of the imagination. Reflecting her own cavernous interiority, she transforms inhospitable, harsh terrains into inviting primordial parks and riverbeds flowing with the imaginal. We yearn to float downstream; reverie moves us forward. Yet Liz also shows us how to be in Place.

Rymland is no “accidental tourist”, but a very intentional traveler, a rhythmic pilgrim, even when she is not moving. Her oracular journey through the gaps, cracks and fissures of awareness is toward the Center. She hunts the future in Presence, the essential nature of her ideas. Join Liz on her riverine ecospiritual pilgrimages into the primordial world of soul, tracking cyptological energy bodies. 

Rebirth of the Wild-Maid

A de-commodifier, Liz is a conspiracy of one, performing the revolutionary act of mythologizing.  She conveys an implied message in a kaleidoscopic fusion of the senses, the inverted articulation of attunement to the echo. Even her ritualized movement and silence speaks volumes, reverberating with future frequencies, opening interiority and ecstatic communion. Her ego deaths open into a heightened sense of self, expanded connection with the community of beings

Hear the sacred call of body, soul, and spirit as outward journey meets inward quest, reverberating in her poetic tales that weld mythic and profane. View her freeze-frames of the ground of Being. Listen to her wild pen crying in the desolate wilderness and view her astral portraits of Anima Mundi in immediate action.

Come to the Threshold of the Wild

Rymland is a medicine-woman and her medicine is the Light she sheds. Follow her phosphorescent tracks to dismantle yourself.  Tremble with the fierce magnitude of the mysterium tremendum as you re-member. Your own spiritual quest takes place in the wilderness of your soul. What bedrock is your humanity grounded in?

Keep your twinkling Third Eye on this hyperdimensional sprite and her ethereal reports from the self-revelatory creative edge of consciousness...where strange evolutionary flowers bloom year round. You will find her there serenely gazing right back at you, reflecting your own sublime luminosity like a Full Moon!

~Iona Miller, author of The Modern Alchemist and Magical & Ritual Use of Perfumes
http://ionamiller.org

Sister Lizrd has one book printing in early December (Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn) and is quickly writing another. Check back for drop dates and pre-publication releases.

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Check out Liz's unique style in a sampling of her poems and writing here;

or find her at

http://lizrymland.zaadz.com

Zaadz online spiritual community. 

Strange Evolutionary Flowers by Lizbeth Rymland
ISBN 1-933132-21-3   $13.00 US   |   $16.95 CAN    
  $13.00 US   |   $16.95 CAN    

Liz Rymland has truly lived her life as an inspired poet, studied her life like a bone-throwing oracle, and understood her life as the alchemical odyssey that it is. Strange Evolutionary Flowers is a visionary autobiography flowing straight from her bewitching stream of consciousness -- glimpses of family, friends, scoundrels, lovers, landscapes and dreamscapes. Each serve a deeper and deeper self-remembering, and give birth to the shamanic journey poem of a most refined and illuminating soul.    ~Alex V. Grey, Author of The Mission of Art and The Sacred Mirrors, The Visionary Art of Alex Grey

Lizbeth Rymland's Strange Evolutionary Flowers is a fascinating slice of the world, as well as the dream, in which we are now living. As you set sail across the vibrant ocean of her life adventure, be prepared to discover islands of sudden, fierce clarity accompanied by deep insights into the nature of just about everything. ~Hank Wesselman, PhD., author of Spiritwalker and Medicinemaker

Part Zen poet, part temple priestess, Liz Rymland writes with a style reminiscent of Jack Kerouac and Alexandra David-Neel. Strange Evolutionary Flowers is the diary of a stand-up alchemist on the prowl. These are fabulous tales, the stuff of fables. Liz Rymland, take a bow, you're a star-goddess in the making. ~Thomas Lyttle, "Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, "Psychedelics ReImagined"

Lizbeth Rymland's Strange Evolutionary Flowers is part poetry, part memoir, part spiritual autobiography, and wholly, utterly unique. It is a book of vision (singular) and visions (plural) and a great deal more. There is another world, or at least new ways of perceiving this one. Read this book!   ~Thomas Lux

http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/fiction/strangeevolutionaryflowers.htm

http://www.amazon.com/ Strange-Evolutionary-Flowers-Lizbeth-Rymland/dp/1933132213

Psychedelics Reimagined

Lyttle, Thomas (Editor) (2000)
Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. ISBN: 1-57027-065-1

Description: Paperback original, 256 pages.

Contents: Editor's note, Foreword by Hakim Bey, Introduction by Timothy Leary, 13 unnumbered chapters, periodical and book reviews, Psychedelic Networking: A World Directory, afterword, notes on contributors. Illustrations 134-145.

Contributors: John W. Allen, Joan Bello, Chris Bennett, Hakim Bey, David Christie, Donald Peter Dulchinos, Philip H. Farber, Jochen Gartz, Dale Gowan, Desmond K. Hill, Timothy Leary, Thomas Lyttle, Paul Meyer,
Iona Miller, Bartlett J. Ridge, Lizbeth Rymland, Otto Snow.

"Huantaj 3: Into the Datura Realms We Go" by Liz Rymland

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COLLABORATIONS

WEBSITE BY DIGITAL DIVA 2006:
IONA MILLER http://ionatopia.50megs.com


ENTRAINMENTS 1 with David Dunn
Entrainments 1 began with an initial interaction where square-wave oscillations were projected into the performance site in order to both stimulate response in some fashion and to explore the inherent resonance characteristics of the space. This interaction was recorded for subsequent manipulation. I then recorded a performer's stream-of-consciousness speech describing real-time events and observations of that environment. Both recordings were eventually merged with a pitch-to-voltage converter such that the speech sounds became tracings of the environmental sounds while modulating the overall timbral spectra of the environment. Four layerings from this procedure were played back into the original location and rerecorded. Realization of the work took place at Azalea Glen, Cuyamaca State Park, California, from May to September, 1984. Electronically altered speaking voice – Lizbeth Rymland

Antiphony #11
Lizbeth Rymland
Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 33, No. 1/2 (Winter - Summer, 1995), pp. 114-128
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-6016(199524%2F22)33%3A1%2F2%3C114%3AA%23%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

BACK BRAIN RECLUSE
BBR publishes some of the most startling and daring SF currently being written, and has developed a cult following around the world through a policy of emphasizing the experimental and uncommercial end of the form. Fiction by Mark Rich, Don Webb, Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Di Filippo, Darick Chamberlin, David Kerekes, Tim Nickels, Brooks Peck, Stratford Kirby, and Lizbeth Rymland (imperfect copies only remaining) (A4, 96pp p/b) RYMLAND, LIZBETH. * Flagellante’s Search for the Eelgirl, (vi) Back Brain Recluse #22 1994