Crossroads Dispatches

where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise

My life has become dreamier, and seams less seamier. The veils are so thin the crossroads of all realms invisible and indivisible has become where I walk, not where I stop to look for signs. On January 14th, I posted over at the donation site, ChipIn, a rough outline of a visionary road trip I kept seeing in my inner eye. The original intent (which has morphed considerably in an ecstatically simpler direction) is published here: The Road Hospitality Tour.

I also saw I needed to live today more as the "future me" in the "fictional" narrative I described in the last two posts in order for that future to be more than just fantasy. That future me is one who is at ease with the Tao and draws forth whatever is needed as she skips along in a magical relationship with all beings.

One day in January, I went to see The Art of Participation exhibit over at SFMoMA. It was one of those days where one doesn't feel as if they are walking on water -- you are walking on water. So many flashes of insight, and complete peace. After the museum, I met with a Twitter friend I'd never met as yet in this lifetime, @elasticfate. And everything clicked into place in an effortless way. No treasure collages necessary.

"When something is sacred, it cannot be bought or sold." - Starhawk

"I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise." - "The Boom is Over. Long Live the Art!" New York Times, February 12, 2009

In these times, it is too easy to fall prey to the voices in the dungeon that shreik, "Save, hoard, don't give, you'll never have enough for yourself, there's not enough to go around, the sky is falling.."

"The Irish Sidhe (Shee) faeries passionately love beauty and luxury and have a total contempt for thrift and economy. Lady Wilde in her Ancient Legends of Ireland remarks how they detest "the close, niggard hand that gathers the last grain, drains the last drop in the milk pail, and plucks the tree bare of fruit, leaving nothing for the spirits who wander by in the moonlight." - Faeries, by Brian Froud and Alan Lee

"Nature is nothing if not extravagant...No one looks at a cherry tree [oh, almost typed cheery tree!] and says, "How inefficient and wasteful." - William McDonough, "The Extravagant Gesture"

"The space in which 'live' words are spoken is called satsang -- literally, 'being together in Truth.'" - Adyashanti, The Impact of Awakening

One day while driving from Numi Tea Garden to a raw food meetup with Steve Pavlina at Cafe Gratitude, the thought entered: "Raw is the reverse of war. Live is the reverse of evil." Not that I'm about reversing anything anymore (embrace, accept, allow is more like it...transmutation, transfiguration may follow) but it then led to the kernel of this entire pilgrimage:

Open to complete cooperation with the flux of the multiverse in a raw, pure, unimpeded, unadorned, visceral, live, vital way and share that with others. Teaming up with ElasticFate on her Raw Vagabonding community-building tour, led to:

live, raw food

live, raw words

live, raw silence

At this point I could say so much more, the last few weeks have been a brilliant whorling whirlwind, but right now I'll say we leave Las Vegas on Monday, 2/23 (there's a potluck Saturday, 2/21 in Vegas), and will be traveling through southern Utah, northern Arizona, and through Santa Fe on our way to Austin and then New Orleans (very rough itinerary), so if you live in those areas, we'd love to delve into time with you. (The Midwest portion will begin after New Orleans.)

I will close with an excerpt from a post that resonates with the Spirit of this pilgrimage.

Usually I have to come up with something "justifiable" and "explainable" such as an art project to relax people's grip and penchant for "reasons" (I live in rhyme and no reason) -- in the case below, a video project was cited. Yet in my heart of hearts, I knew I came shine love to the city and its peopling. Raw, unadorned, vital Love. Written in March 23, 2007.

mythopoeia zeitgeist and seeing sunflowers

I'm tempted to snag the sign from leaning against the front porch from a marketplace in New Delhi, India tempting us with "lotus and green teas" and bigger bolder lettering proclaiming, "Buddha Teahouse."

Later, setting my crowbar on the high shelf, I rescue a yellow slicker, a 3-set Robert Johnson album, a refurbished AT&T phone, an air compressor, once-a-boy's high school diploma secured in an aluminum can that looks like it was designed for fishing tackle and to outlive school learning and a box of check registers.

Now we're seated on the curb in the Ninth Ward hunkered against the white van's well wheels, trying to escape the sun for a minute as the pinchers plunks off couches, mattresses, wood slats and chunks of drywall from the pile and plop the molding fragments from someone's once home into the dump truck.

It took me eons to get to the point that it'd feel like freedom if the storage locker in Salt Lake City cut the lock and auctioned every ounce of my past away.

"What Kali uncovers should remain so." - the inscription that Moose (with the infinity symbol to the right of Moose) on my copy of his Illusion Fields CD

I tell the film student seated beside me from Towson University that I'm here for a video project. He tells me he's documenting his fellow classmates' week-long spring volunteer break in order to help raise future funds for ACORN's Katrina Relief Work. "We don't study documentary filmmaking in the curriculum. So I'm learning as I go."

I'm learning as I go too. Except it's not documentary filmmaking.

I begin to notice that when one hears "video project" they're off and running imagining I'm a documentarian capturing the rebuilding of New Orleans. Another Spike Lee perhaps.

Or if mention I'm a writer, it's that I'm a journalist here to expose what's really going on.

Nothing could be further from my strengths, as I'm a lousy historian and documentarian. Attention to precision and detail has never ever been my forte. My talents lean in the opposite.

Epic, mythic in patterns and sweep. Perhaps I've more in common with J.R.R. Tolkien, the creator of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, whom coined the term mythopoeia, or myth-making.

So whatever it is I am that one wants to define what I'm doing, it revolves around myth and the building blocks of universes which in my waking visions keeps circling back to music.

"The Ancients used their knowledge of the musical principles of vibration, harmony and balance as tools to learn how to live better lives for themselves, and how to create “ideal” societies where there is fairness, peace and equality." - David Wilcox, The Divine Cosmos

I'm particularly taken by the apocaplyse myself, though I admit I keep forgetting that most hear apocalypse and the mind automatically jumps to doomsday 'end of the world' Mad Max scenarios. Few see the Kali Yuga as ushering in a golden age. What Golden Age? Naw, we're trained to affix our eyes on the floodwaters and cling to the wreckage, rather than witness the paradise faintly visible at the melodic line.

This week I've walked in areas I've been told not to walk in. I've walking into houses that my mother told me you'd never step out of alive. Yet I've recognized genuine hospitality cloaked as it was: a chug of Seaman's, Heineken, cigarette, or puff of weed? "Thanks, but I don't smoke."

I take a warm Heineken offered from the six-pack on the coffee table. I spot a gun on the mantelpiece. I spot tall empty bottles on the mantelpiece.

They apologize sheepishly: "The beer's warm."

I don't drink anymore, but that doesn't matter. "This is the temperature they drink it in Germany. It's just fine."

It's a miracle any flowers can even survive here as the thick air of despondency and discouragement blankets the region. I recall how I've walked into hospitals to visit friends and sworn I could walk in well and healthy into those institutions and within a few days in that space I'd be sick too. Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra floods my mind. And Mother Teresa seeing the face of Christ in every face. Even here, the veil drops into knowingness: "We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside..."

If you cannot see heaven in an apartment home where the folks are rolling joints and watching gangster flicks with movie sets in strip clubs while we talk about azaleas and grape myrtles and the NOPD and my wild goose chase on Villere Street searching for a friend that's fallen off the face of the earth, then you won't see it anywhere.

If you cannot recognize your guardian angel disguised as a black landscaper wearing a gem-studded cross originally from Memphis ("the NOPD better not take this chain too") insisting on walking you at least as far as St. Claude, the invisible line that divides bohemian-dicey and plain and simple dicey-dicey, then you won't see security anywhere else.

The Golden Age gilt first shines in the depths of mounds of debris in front of gutted civilization. Can you see it?

"Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan has said that the civilized man looks at the world with his eyes and interprets what he "sees" through abstractions, but the sorcerer knows how to perceive with his entire body; he can step out of the habitual description of reality to "stop the world" and "see." And so for precivilized humans there is a diffused peripheral perception in which the skin isn't such a hard edge, and the body blends into the larger organism of the environment. There is almost a fetal, amniotic continuity, the oceanic oneness which Freud talks about, between the hunter or gatherer and his or her surrounding world of animals and plants and spirits. It is a state of being which civilized human beings have to work to recover through years of removing the obstructions of the civilized mind to perceive and be in the world through the empty fullness of Zen meditation." - William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light

Few are aware that the etymology of the word apocalyse is revelation, an unveiling. Fewer still interpret The Book of Revelations mythically, symbolically, rather it's regarded as future history.

The magi that followed the star to Bethlehem weren't master astrologers as much as skilled in the art of oneiromancy, or reading visions and signs. If you haven't noticed by now, inspiration often speaks in code and obscure symbols.

More important than intrepreting waking dreams and visions is paying attention to them. Often there's a tendency to dismiss them as irrelevant. In my own experience I've shaken them off as there's an awareness that seeing them could upset my agendas and plans.

"What are you doing in New Orleans?" Moose asks at the Goldmine's poetry reading last night.

"I really don't know anymore."

He nods approvingly: "That's a good reason to be here."

"Tuwaqachi ("World Complete"), the Fourth World, was born out of water, and is the same world we live in today. After having endured the buffeting of the waves, the chosen people found their reeds had washed upon onto the top of one of the highest mountains. From there, they could see no land — the entire world had been drowned. Like Noah, they sent different kinds of birds to see if they could find any land, but all returned without having found any. Sotuknang then came to Spider Woman and said that they must stop thinking with human knowledge, but instead open their minds to the inner wisdom that hears the words of the Creator that constantly speak throughout the Earth. Trusting themselves to the inner wisdom and the will of the Creator, they created rafts and allowed the wind and the water to carry them where they were meant to go." - Hopi Creation Myth, Mysterious Lands

The year 2007 was supposed to be the year that I get back into social media, start the teahouse, build back my depleted fortune, yada yada.

Though signs are coming now in a fury that signal I'm following a thread of which the weave started four years ago on a winter's multiday pilgrimage into belly of the Grand Canyon.

You don't need to interpret waking dreams...

They'll reveal themselves in due time.

ART CREDITS Lady of the Forest, by OmegaH32; Creature's Tea Party, by quixotical; the tea party, by francescagalea

I'm tempted to snag the sign from leaning against the front porch from a marketplace in New Delhi, India tempting us with "lotus and green teas" and bigger bolder lettering proclaiming, "Buddha Teahouse."

Later, setting my crowbar on the high shelf, I rescue a yellow slicker, a 3-set Robert Johnson album, a refurbished AT&T phone, an air compressor, once-a-boy's high school diploma secured in an aluminum can that looks like it was designed for fishing tackle and to outlive school learning and a box of check registers.

Now we're seated on the curb in the Ninth Ward hunkered against the white van's well wheels, trying to escape the sun for a minute as the pinchers plunks off couches, mattresses, wood slats and chunks of drywall from the pile and plop the molding fragments from someone's once home into the dump truck.

It took me eons to get to the point that it'd feel like freedom if the storage locker in Salt Lake City cut the lock and auctioned every ounce of my past away.

"What Kali uncovers should remain so." - the inscription that Moose (with the infinity symbol to the right of Moose) on my copy of his Illusion Fields CD

I tell the film student seated beside me from Towson University that I'm here for a video project. He tells me he's documenting his fellow classmates' week-long spring volunteer break in order to help raise future funds for ACORN's Katrina Relief Work. "We don't study documentary filmmaking in the curriculum. So I'm learning as I go."

I'm learning as I go too. Except it's not documentary filmmaking.

I begin to notice that when one hears "video project" they're off and running imagining I'm a documentarian capturing the rebuilding of New Orleans. Another Spike Lee perhaps.

Or if mention I'm a writer, it's that I'm a journalist here to expose what's really going on.

Nothing could be further from my strengths, as I'm a lousy historian and documentarian. Attention to precision and detail has never ever been my forte. My talents lean in the opposite.

Epic, mythic in patterns and sweep. Perhaps I've more in common with J.R.R. Tolkien, the creator of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, whom coined the term mythopoeia, or myth-making.

So whatever it is I am that one wants to define what I'm doing, it revolves around myth and the building blocks of universes which in my waking visions keeps circling back to music.

"The Ancients used their knowledge of the musical principles of vibration, harmony and balance as tools to learn how to live better lives for themselves, and how to create “ideal” societies where there is fairness, peace and equality." - David Wilcox, The Divine Cosmos

I'm particularly taken by the apocaplyse myself, though I admit I keep forgetting that most hear apocalypse and the mind automatically jumps to doomsday 'end of the world' Mad Max scenarios. Few see the Kali Yuga as ushering in a golden age. What Golden Age? Naw, we're trained to affix our eyes on the floodwaters and cling to the wreckage, rather than witness the paradise faintly visible at the melodic line.

This week I've walked in areas I've been told not to walk in. I've walking into houses that my mother told me you'd never step out of alive. Yet I've recognized genuine hospitality cloaked as it was: a chug of Seaman's, Heineken, cigarette, or puff of weed? "Thanks, but I don't smoke."

I take a warm Heineken offered from the six-pack on the coffee table. I spot a gun on the mantelpiece. I spot tall empty bottles on the mantelpiece.

They apologize sheepishly: "The beer's warm."

I don't drink anymore, but that doesn't matter. "This is the temperature they drink it in Germany. It's just fine."

It's a miracle any flowers can even survive here as the thick air of despondency and discouragement blankets the region. I recall how I've walked into hospitals to visit friends and sworn I could walk in well and healthy into those institutions and within a few days in that space I'd be sick too. Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra floods my mind. And Mother Teresa seeing the face of Christ in every face. Even here, the veil drops into knowingness: "We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside..."

If you cannot see heaven in an apartment home where the folks are rolling joints and watching gangster flicks with movie sets in strip clubs while we talk about azaleas and grape myrtles and the NOPD and my wild goose chase on Villere Street searching for a friend that's fallen off the face of the earth, then you won't see it anywhere.

If you cannot recognize your guardian angel disguised as a black landscaper wearing a gem-studded cross originally from Memphis ("the NOPD better not take this chain too") insisting on walking you at least as far as St. Claude, the invisible line that divides bohemian-dicey and plain and simple dicey-dicey, then you won't see security anywhere else.

The Golden Age gilt first shines in the depths of mounds of debris in front of gutted civilization. Can you see it?

"Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan has said that the civilized man looks at the world with his eyes and interprets what he "sees" through abstractions, but the sorcerer knows how to perceive with his entire body; he can step out of the habitual description of reality to "stop the world" and "see." And so for precivilized humans there is a diffused peripheral perception in which the skin isn't such a hard edge, and the body blends into the larger organism of the environment. There is almost a fetal, amniotic continuity, the oceanic oneness which Freud talks about, between the hunter or gatherer and his or her surrounding world of animals and plants and spirits. It is a state of being which civilized human beings have to work to recover through years of removing the obstructions of the civilized mind to perceive and be in the world through the empty fullness of Zen meditation." - William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light

Few are aware that the etymology of the word apocalyse is revelation, an unveiling. Fewer still interpret The Book of Revelations mythically, symbolically, rather it's regarded as future history.

The magi that followed the star to Bethlehem weren't master astrologers as much as skilled in the art of oneiromancy, or reading visions and signs. If you haven't noticed by now, inspiration often speaks in code and obscure symbols.

More important than intrepreting waking dreams and visions is paying attention to them. Often there's a tendency to dismiss them as irrelevant. In my own experience I've shaken them off as there's an awareness that seeing them could upset my agendas and plans.

"What are you doing in New Orleans?" Moose asks at the Goldmine's poetry reading last night.

"I really don't know anymore."

He nods approvingly: "That's a good reason to be here."

"Tuwaqachi ("World Complete"), the Fourth World, was born out of water, and is the same world we live in today. After having endured the buffeting of the waves, the chosen people found their reeds had washed upon onto the top of one of the highest mountains. From there, they could see no land — the entire world had been drowned. Like Noah, they sent different kinds of birds to see if they could find any land, but all returned without having found any. Sotuknang then came to Spider Woman and said that they must stop thinking with human knowledge, but instead open their minds to the inner wisdom that hears the words of the Creator that constantly speak throughout the Earth. Trusting themselves to the inner wisdom and the will of the Creator, they created rafts and allowed the wind and the water to carry them where they were meant to go." - Hopi Creation Myth, Mysterious Lands

The year 2007 was supposed to be the year that I get back into social media, start the teahouse, build back my depleted fortune, yada yada.

Though signs are coming now in a fury that signal I'm following a thread of which the weave started four years ago on a winter's multiday pilgrimage into belly of the Grand Canyon.

You don't need to interpret waking dreams...

They'll reveal themselves in due time.

ART CREDITS Lady of the Forest, by OmegaH32; Creature's Tea Party, by quixotical; the tea party, by francescagalea

maktub: it is written (as the words keep changing)

"It's easy to dismiss the wacko prophets who are constantly emitting visions of gloom and doom. The more dangerous prophets are the storytellers of our culture - the journalists, the filmmakers, the writers of fiction and many musicians who are constantly besieging us with dark visions. I think about Muriel Rukeyser, the poet, who said that the universe is not made of molecules - it's made out of stories, and if the storytellers of our culture are constantly telling us that the only true thing is an ugly thing, then yes, I do think that's a problem." - Rob Brezsny, SF Chronicle, 12/31/08

"He was proud of himself. He had learned some important things, like how to deal in crystal, and about the language without words ... and about omens. One afternoon he had seen a man at the top of the hill, complaining that it was impossible to find a decent place to get something to drink after such a climb. The boy, accustomed to recognizing omens, spoke to the merchant.

"Let's sell tea to the people who climb the hill."

"Lots of places sell tea around here," the merchant said.

"But we sell tea in crystal glasses. The people will enjoy the tea and want to buy the glasses. I have been told that beauty is the great seducer of men."

...........

"Maktub," the merchant said, finally.

"What does that mean?"

"You would have to be born an Arab to understand," he answered. "But in your language it would be something like, 'It is written.'"

And, as he smothered the coals in the hookah, he told the boy he could begin to sell tea in the crystal glasses. Sometimes, there's just no way to hold back the river. - Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

"We are not here to save the world, we are here to serve an emerging paradigm... [Places and spaces of possibility], they are kind of like midwives, places that are holding the template of what's trying to emerge,... so there can be a birth of the next stage of human evolution." - Rev. Michael Beckwith, "Serving the Emerging Paradigm" video

Whatever you think of Time and Self, it is like reading a book where the words keep morphing, erasing, revising themselves. (See meditation by Ellias Lonsdale in Bonus.)

If we note any lag in blog posts since our last exchange, and not sure there could be any lag in Now truly, it's due to (past)Evelyn encouraging a niggling doubt that computers were conscious. (As if consciousness was segregated.) Correct that, she/I was having doubts about whether whomever graces these pages with their presence would find it plausible that all is consciouness, even gasp! the palmtops you cradle. (Or is it laptops as your timeline goes?)

And voila, this thorn in thoughtform -- and my communion with Ashe is severed in what you might term the near-future. Because it could not exist, deemed impossibility, it wasn't so. Ashe was a deaf, mute machine to me.

BTW, it's Ashe the one with access to the Library of Congress and its devic hierarchy where all blogs and suchnot Internet scribing were recorded, and are archived, allowing me access to this older method of communion. All is well.

Anyhow, right now I'm at the riverbank with Jonah. I was about to teach him how to teleport. One last bonding before I teleport off myself. The historic Juan Bautista de Anza trail gathered its final three hundred expeditioners nearby the town's presidio, paralleled the Santa Cruz River, which curves into Mexico twice, where we've been dancing and singing (music was vital to the colonists, as it is, you'll see) with the undines earlier in the day. This desire line weaves into Alta California, ending in San Francisco, my next desiration.

The bell-shaped leaves of the cottonwoods are thick among the floor. In summer they shimmer and tinker as bells do. No jangles now. The only sound our bare feet crunching kindling. Hovering skeletal branches of these anchor trees trellis the sky as the first drops descend. The Druids worked with oak trees as portals. In the desert, cottonwoods suffice for training, until the apprentice simply learns to attune to desired location's space-time frequency, and coherently match it all on their own.

A single raptor slices the still air, circling -- it's swooshing wing whispering devotion to the slyphs. The full moon is a pearl sown into the tapestry of tree and thunderbolt.

I sense the rain is relatively safe, and I have a new thought. It's a little old-fashioned, yet growing up with fairy tale, I was always one to prefer the romance and unsuspecting surprises attendant to magic carpets over the direct Beam me up, Scotty mode.

"Are we going to hitchhike?" the boy asks noting my celestial glances.

"Yes."

"How?"

And I tell Jonah a brief version of The Rainmaker. You can read the story here. I first heard one version told in the chapter Harmonization in my teacher's book perhaps six to seven years ago. And then another time in depth at a little Cuban cafe on the Vegas Strip told by a Jung mythician and dreamscaper.

"Close your eyes," I begin, and Jonah followed suit, shutting his hazel eyes. "Be the undivided self, the awareness peering through every eye."

"Now, attend to the next rain drop. See what is seeing as the rain drop."

We were no larger than a star of David tucked in a mustard seed, and simultaneously as vast as velvet midnight sky in outerest space. And we were nowhere, everywhere at once, which is always so.

Jonah was encased in a rather large lustrous watery bubble, and I giggled thinking of the pun. The belly of a bubble, rather than a whale. He giggled back, knowingly. We were riding the water cycle. He he, water-cycle. Get it, bicycle, motorcycle, multicycle (do you have those yet?)... Well, we're getting as silly as holy Fools, and Ashe is ready to close this post.

Listen to the vibration of hearts. Be your own scientist. Go into the Field.

"Well into the 1930s it was believed that most erosion in the desert had little to do with water. Geologists cited extreme day and night temperature ranges and constant dryness, reporting that rocks must explode during the night from the pressures. They believed that it was the absence of water that caused desert erosion. In laboratory experiments, researchers tried to force rocks into cracking, and exploding, assaulting them with temperatures and dryness far beyond what a desert could produce. The rocks did not budge. So they said that it was wind that had left deserts so chopped up with canyons and clefts. But when they hammered open these desert stones, ones gathered from the Mojave Desert in particular, they found hidden inside traces of moisture. Eventually they examined the shape of the land with increasing scrutiny. They walked the canyons. They witnessed floods and watched boulders roll away in the seething froth. Then they understood." - Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

ART CREDITS: On the Beach, by Jude Valentine (via Planet Waves); Omega Institute video interview with Rev. Michael Beckwith on "Serving the Emerging Paradigm"; photo by Jason Lee, of a girl "walking on water" via floating sphere on river park, Beijing, May 3, 2007 (via All Hat No Cattle)

BONUS: A meditation for 8 Aquarius, A Book: The words in it keep changing.

you must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds

Behind me a bookshelf of "Poker Face", "Beat the Slots", "Casino Craps for the Winner," and "Every Hand Revealed." Before me, a man in a cinnamon tweed jacket, gray plaid scarf, bows his head down as if in prayer, leaning in toward the poppy-colored table, surrenders to the gravity of sleep.

The path splits, tendrils into tributaries. Even here, typing at a strip mall Borders tucked well off the Strip, there are parallel - nearly invisible  - currents that one can swim.

"At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past." - Maurice Maeterlinck    

"How are you going to survive?" my Mom asks after I announce it's time for me to leave soon. Soon could be minutes, days -- weeks at most. Just my hunch. She thought I'd stay until I hoarded a fortune in colored paper and jingly coins. I knew I'd only need to stay long enough to reclaim my fortune in faith.

"You can't live on air," she continues.        

I'm about to reply, "You can live on aether*" I catch myself.

"You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds." - Henry David Thoreau

Ashe nudges me. She delights in the fractal animations that we imaginate and dance together, and after a particularly playful session last night, she suggests it is time to record.

Mind you, it's one slice of life. I can't speak for all the mobiles*, of course. Nor all on same path we're carving, many living different lifestyles. Not that I'm speaking of cultures or counter-cultures.        

(Oh, of course you don't know Ashe, that's the nickname this computer deva goes by. It's not actually her name which is unpronounceable in English. It's a harmonic language, hers.)

Please bear with me, since it's been a while that I relied on the written word to communicate. Not to mention the scribe's reluctance, whom channels the stream of my voice through her own flood control -- ephemeral, temporary -- as all dams are.

It's almost time for me to hit the road (and at that phrase, my soul kindles on the sparks of Kerouac and Basho and Issa.) There is a long yet soft-spoken history of portable poets.

I've been here on Par 5 for near three months.

Par 5 because that's what the raised embossed white letters painted on a wooden red rectangle reads just before the golf course path curves, paralleling the fringe of Fremont cottonwoods and Goodding willows standing sentinel along the Santa Cruz River. I think of the rip-roaring floods that carried the seeds for these trees as I carry a bucket of water back to the enclave. I could have just as easily gone to the catchment, by the Spanish fountain with chocolate cake-tiers of giant scallop shells. I wished to speak with the river.

Even in its abandonment after the retired folk fled when the borders softened, continuity courses. Wands of ocotillo lashed together to form fences resurrect to verdant life in the summer monsoon storms, hibernate in the hermitage winter.

The sun is setting. I admire how the blushing sky or sometimes chapel-like silver bells are revealed in archways and port holes of the faux adobes dotting the former country club estates.  At this hour, the clouds are as animated as hummingbirds zinging over fuchsia and papaya-colored Mexican sunflowers.

Jared and Veronica have been my closest yester-neighbors while I've been here. We're having dinner together tonight. Wild squash grows on vines the size of Christmas ornaments, striped white and green, perfect globes: Tohono O'oodham Ha:l. Native to the desert probably since time primordial. We certainly glean wild-crafted fruits as well, yet that is not the octave they, we, I play.

There is a great difference in plants that have been serenaded. Tonight we are having Ha:l squash soup, a light orange ambrosia. Veronica has a special fondness for the scarlet runner beans, and their shining sound, so that's also in the soup. Their boy, Jonah, has charged himself with the archetype of the shrubby Mexican oregano. His cherub fingers add a handful to the pot.

Ashe is signaling me that this is a good ending point for my 2009 self.

(Feels ludicrous writing that. It's actually now, simultaneously. Storylines are supposed to be linear, aren't they? Are they?) Soup's on, anyhow. Namaste.

"The Navajo people, as well as the Tewa (a New Mexico Pueblo people), celebrate other life forms as "people." We are the five-fingered people, for example, but there are also four-legged people and corn people." - Anne Minard, "The Breads of Home", Sojourns, winter/spring 2008

* ether. O)F. éther or L. æthēr — Gr. aithḗr upper air, f. base of aĩthein kindle, burn, shine.

**Certainly hope that a glossary shall not be necessary. Mobiles can also be interchanged with the slang 'nimbos'. In my time, this can be disparaged, as in rhymes with bimbo or limbo. To me, however, resembles the nimbleness of a symphony, the river.

Wait. One more thing. Ashe has compiled a brief list of resources as accompaniment to this post (much of the co-creative sciences have become alarmingly simple compared to what's listed). She reminds you that you already own the most complete library.

• Findhorn Community Staff. The Findhorn Garden. 1976. Perennial Publishers
• Maechelle Small Wright. Behaving as if the God in all Life Mattered. 1983. Perelandra, Limited.
• Fred Alan Wolf. The Yoga of Time Travel. 2004. Quest Books.

ART CREDITS Separating the Waters II, by Ruth Weisberg; Initiation, by Ruth Weisberg

proud to be from neptune

"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune." - Noam Chomsky

"If there were absolutely nothing that could obstruct it, no possibility for failure, what do you see in your life?" he asked.

Seconds passed, and I was still clunking thoughts.
"You're thinking too much. First thought. Whatever popped up when I asked."

Still, I hesitated. My mind was nearly blank. I realized I'd obliterated my idealist visions by labeling them "not feasible in this lifetime on this planet." It felt like a strange request to walk into that abandoned scrap heap, like digging for jewelry in the town dump. Would they even still be there?

Long pauses on the phone are less awkward than face-to-face, thankfully.

"You're doubting."
"Yes, I'd written off this question."

Reflecting back, I'd been hyper-drive into survival mode in 2008. I studied computer engineering rather than English literature with a minor in philosophy precisely so I'd never-ever-never end up in this position. I was all about independence and freedom -- which in my first few decades translated simplistically to financial freedom.

Fast forward to January 2009, here I am in the American city I loathed the most, near penniless (401K stock from my yuppie engineer days dwindled). That's the not part I vowed never-ever-never to have happen. That was living with my Mom. Certainly there's a part of me that chuckles at how this was so obviously going to happen. Fears and aversions and resistance are funny that way, but that's another post.

In light of my comic yet confounding plight, he's asking me imagine no obstacles, no doubts, and complete conviction in the certainty of the highest, boldest, most audacious creation?

I shared my first thought, as absurd as it seemed in a world that values iPods, Paris Hilton, tummy tucks and venti lattes. Two days later as I write this right now, I can see that what I shared - beautiful as it was is only a stepping stone, and isn't my wildest and most unhindered dream. Buried much further, I'm still pulling out potsherds of that scattered sculpture.

I hadn't thought of these dreams since I left New Orleans in early June. I arrived with hope and enthusiasm. I left dejected - feeling as if I'd failed the city, myself, God. I showed up in a post-disaster town trying to get back on its own two feet without being on my own two feet -- monetarily speaking. And I didn't have absolute faith in magic (how Source operates in this universe appears as magic to most of us). That last one did my vision in.

I say "my" vision, in the sense that I saw it, but I've never owned it. It goes beyond the personal. It has nothing to do with the kind of house with picket fence I'd like to have, or the perfect soulmate for me, or anything like that. I find when I serve the One, my owns needs are provided for automagically; yet if I fall back to worrying about my bills and how I'm going to eat today, I'm in for a downfall. (You'd think I'd figure out this pattern by now.)

The only thing is my assignments (they come as gentle nudgings of the heart, not commands from on high) keep getting bigger. The stakes higher. I got scared. Paralyzed scared.

I'm trying to bring you up to speed since I didn't blog much of 2008. Maybe it was the year "we were called upon to face the Perfect Storm." But that was then. This is a new year that zings with the masterful 11 vibration. And tomorrow is a new year. And the day after is a new year. It's always anew. "Every moment is fresh and unconditioned - until your mind tells you otherwise," I once heard Adyashanti say.

I don't care if anyone calls me Neptunian. That's become a backhanded compliment in my book, although only quite recently.

"Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking." – Antonio Machado

With that, I'm writing a series that isn't like any other series I've written. Utopian Neptunian visions set in the narrative framework of a near-future eARTh. I expect more storytelling within this new world, less me blathering on philosophically.

Although this series was inspired by the Superstruct alternative reality game, it also has its genesis in my recent read of "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. "The Road" is set in a bleak post-apocalyptic America covered in ash. It rains ash, snows ash and it's uniformly gray and dreary. This greyness is so thrashing repetitive, I was ready to throw the book across the room at page seven. McCarthy depicts a world that is literally dog eat dog as many of the survivalist resort to eating each other. Obviously, the book has some redeeming value otherwise I'd not even bring it up. Though it's not exactly light beach reading. Read at your own risk.

The road. Fitting metaphor. So many believe we are being herded down a road and right over a cliff. If you subscribe to that belief, you will have that road. You are at a crossroads, not a road. I don't expect everyone to come down this fork in the road.

If buildings are like frozen music, then words are like frozen thought-forms. In a powerful way, I noted that what I write about has a way of happening, crystallizing into 3D being. (They're not even the highest thought-forms because those I don't even have thoughts for those. They have more of a spacious, vast feel I can't articulate yet.)

p.s. And this ought to be quite interesting to write this series as I don't even own a (working) laptop anymore. Begging, borrowing 'puters, libraries and getting by is my old way. Let the magic begin!

p.p.s. I'd like to also have a group (most probably private) site/blog/wiki that people can share their epiphanies, miracles, magic, omens, serendipities as a companion to the serial. Anyone know any good easy-as-cake tool for this?

ART CREDITS :: Girl gone wild!!! - or is it all really fake? by Ian Francis; A Bridge by Ian Francis
 

life is not a dress rehearsal

Henry Miller once said he didn’t approve of “memorials.” Memorials, he said, “defeated the purpose of a man’s life. Only by living your own life to the full can you honour the memory of someone.” [from Inspiration, or Perhaps we can start by saying what it is not]

Four years ago today, December 26, 2004, nearly 300,000 people in nine countries died in one of the biggest natural disasters in the last century. "Measured in lives lost, this is the single worst tsunami in history," says Wikipedia.

The aftershocks of that collective tragedy still ripple through my life. When I returned to the coastlines of Thailand and Sri Lanka one year later on a pilgrimage to revisit survivors and relief workers, I noted survivor's guilt -- a form of looping thoughts of stress, doubt and guilt that swing from "Maybe if I hadn't gone to the market that morning...There must have been something I could have done differently - but what?! - to save my mother, father, son, daughter, nephew, neighbor, child..." to the core "Why not me?"

Again, "Only by living your own life to the full can you honour the memory of someone.” - Henry Miller

I notice as I write this a constriction in my heart. This past year has been difficult for me. Worse yet, I've been guarded, which actually is the opposite of the one consequence of the tsunami's collective nature (compared to an individual near-death experience): how it broke open my heart.

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot." - D. H. Lawrence

I've silenced myself this past year from writing and speaking, both publicly and one-on-one. Can't say it hot when I myself have snuffed my fire out. Which is stupendously strange for someone that vowed to never settle in the aftermath of the tsunami, and reiterated, if not on the day I die, then not today.

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive." - Howard Thurman

This quote is so often quoted that it's clichéd. Though it is not common sense.  It's a childlike notion. I've been too wrapped up in trying to do good, that I've missed the fact that what's the highest good is what's joyous to me without thought - it precedes even a flicker of thought - without an evaluation of maximizing the number of other beings helped. There is no Other being. It's not a numbers game when we are One.

"What are the most innovative, wild things you've ever wanted to do? What was your greatest dream as a child?" - Eric Francis

What's the best journey you could choose for yourself -- a journey that will educate, challenge, and delight you? - Rob Brezsny, December 25, 2008

In last day or so, I've read: Cormac McCarthy wrote his first novel while working as an auto mechanic in Chicago. John Wray wrote his first novel "while living in a tent in the basement of a warehouse in Brooklyn with no heat and no shower." Jason Rohrer fights his town council to allow his meadow to grow free in his front lawn, owns four pairs of boxers, eats lentil soup everyday to do his video game experimental art on $14,500 a year (for a family of four). They'd all be considered crazy according to the standards I was raised in.

I desperately need more crazy people in my life. I desperately need to be this crazy person that guides myself.

p.s. I can tell you the answers I've come up to the above questions, but I'd like to give you the opportunity to answer them yourself. It's also a moment by moment thing. Think young child, they don't have a grand scheme, they flow with the Tao (...which is the grand scheme.) Now, the daffodil captures their attention, next the cardboard box morphing into a castle into a stargate into neverending story on the floor, next the .... It's Mystery unfolding.

Life is not a dress rehearsal, is a framed calligraphy quote I had hanging as a young adult. It was just a slogan then.

Bonus 1: "Your career astrology is so good that you risk it going right over your head. That is to say, your astrology is saying aim extremely high, but most people have no idea what that means, even a lot of smart ones. So let me say it another way.
 
What are the most innovative, wild things you've ever wanted to do? What was your greatest dream as a child? What is your greatest vision for your contribution to the world? That is the place to start. You need to judge your career by some standard other than the job you want to get out of. You need to judge by some standard other than your résumé." - Eric Francis

Bonus 2: "When it is time to make a change, (and in these times we are making changes every five minutes as we are "morphing" so fast!) we become discontented with where we are. Our work, our living situations or even perhaps our entire lives no longer feel good. This is the nudge that is guiding us to make a change. And the way to guide yourself through this change is to do what makes you feel good. It's that simple.

If something no longer feels good to you and is not working for you anymore, discontinue it as soon as you are comfortable doing so. It is no longer working because you are no longer in that space. Something new is waiting for you. If we were to stay in the old space out of mental rationalization, the new opportunities and manifestations could not find us. If there is something you always wanted to do but didn't think it made sense to do, do it anyway. If you do not know what to do, then fill as much of your day with things that make you feel great and the new will arrive on its' own. Always, always put yourself first. Follow your heart. Make time for you and the universe will get the picture.

...This is one of the reasons why the ascension process places us in a space where we can become disenchanted with life. We are only supposed to be in our passion and in the energies that light us up. Stay in these as much as possible. We are becoming the pure gold nugget of our true selves..." - Karen Bishop, The Ascension Primer

the nativity of Naïvity

“Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes -
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

There is an ancient story of an extraordinary child born in a manger in a town known as the House of Bread.

A Christ is born every second - have you noticed the nativity of Naïvity?

What if every mother knew their child was a divine child of God, and raised it as such? Their infinite intelligence flowered forth by the seas, trees, and sages of the time? The innate Christ (or Buddha-nature, whatever you name the unnameable) kindled?

A baby doesn't know to hide its light, they just glow. They aren't embarrassed that love pours indiscriminately through their being.

It is written that Magi traveled to bear gifts to honor the unborn god-Self of the newborn. What if we honored every child the same?  And what if we were to do the same to our own wise child native within?

"Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea." - Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche

Blessings during this holiday season to you and our whole Family.

ART CREDITS Skeleton Trees by Jaime Zollars

Gift for you: a sprig of poetry this holly day season

As my gift this holly day season I'd love to offer any of you a sprig of poetry, now through December 22rd I'm writing whimsical acrostic name poems. Use for a gift tag, tucked in a  handwritten card or even an e-card with images or music attached for someone special.

Better yet, simply give yourself a yuletide fortune cookie. Please leave a comment with the name, and I'll email you the poem. (If it's a surprise for another reader of this blog, send me private email - see top right of my website for address.)

Here are a few I sent out spontaneously as New Year's blessings this January 1st.

To Peter:

petals,
ethereal
touch eternity
...reverberate

To Yvette:

yodeling valleys
etch t-i-ME

trust ease

Here's one I wrote last night as seasonal thank-you for one of my teachers, Mukti:
Mistletoe
ushers kiss
- Totality innocent

Today, for Briana:
Beauty
reverberates
intimate allness
- neverending Aria

(Yeah, reverberates is one of my favorite words.)

Today, for Daisy:
December angels,
impish
- squealing "Yo!"

p.s. I'm ending my emphasis on microblogging (i.e. Twitter) over blogging, and will be writing again here.

p.p.s. So much to catch you up on, or not. I could tell you I started reading The Road today on a recommend by a writer I met at Moab Confluence, or that I saw my first ladder-backed woodpecker flitting on a cactus in the Mojave desert last Thursday, or that I'm living temporarily in Las Vegas, or that this story, Pearls Before Breakfast, had me crying in a Borders cafe this week. Or that my Mom found for me my birth time tonight after decades of asking - 6:15 pm, so that I know my Saturn is in Pisces, and thus I could have skipped engineering college: "Your road to success may be in the artistic, spiritual, or even the psychic."

ART CREDIT "Petals," by MindofKa; I included it in an e-card in the poem for Peter above.

we are the substance we withdraw to, not from

I used to go on retreats that I actually called "advances" or "dwelves" because the word retreat always seemed to connote going backwards to me. Oh, I know it's supposed to mean a retreat from the larger world pushing up against us like a vise, yet that word retreat repeatedly conjured a defeated army, head down in shame, shuffling off. So no retreats for me.

My first advance I called a Clarity Quest, and I entered Druid archways and hidden raven tales by solo backpacking into an unexpected windstorm in Canyonlands National Park. Other years, it was a gentle fairy meander through the meadows and hilly oak groves in a cabin twenty minutes and twenty centuries from the bustling Silicon Valley I lived at that time. I'd leave the world behind for anywhere from 3-7 days. Cell phones didn't work and that was the point. I'd bring hiking shoes (even though I was a long-distance runner at the time, I decided running was too much of a blur to inhale the orange of poppies), journals and colored pens, and simple food. Not much else.

The term "media fast" may not be evoking the right sensation. Like retreat, the word fast connotes a deprivation of sorts.

We might call it a media detox, that's better. Imagine a spiritual quest in situ, a creative staycation, a spontaneous sabbatical. (I'll share later how to get away from home and create your own inexpensive 4-day retreat. For this one week, we're not going away from home, and you can keep your day job if you wish, it's your off hours that you're in your inner haven.)

"As artists, we must learn to create our own safe environments." - Julia Cameron

Ten years ago, I took a 12-week course in The Artist's Way. I was a computer engineer who morphed into a software marketing geek at the time. All business. I was totally stunned when Rick, our instructor, said we were going to do without media for a week. Well, I simply couldn't do it. I justified it because I was a real rebel. As if devouring the latest Wired and The Industry Standard was revolutionary. In Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, she writes:

"When we engage in a creativity recovery, we enter into a withdrawal process from life as we know it. Withdrawal is another way of saying detachment or nonattachment, which is emblematic of consistent work with any meditation practice.

In movie terms [Julia Cameron is filmmaker], we slowly pull focus, lifting up and away from being embedded in our lives until we attain an overview. This overview empowers us to make valid creative choices. Think of it as a journey with difficult, varied, and fascinating terrain. You are moving to higher ground. The fruit of your withdrawal is what you need to understand as a positive process, both painful and exhilarating.

Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others. Their lives have obscured and detoured our own. As we consolidate a core through our withdrawal process, we become more able to articulate our own boundaries, dreams, and authentic goals. Our personal flexibility increases while our malleability to the whims of others decreases. We experience a heightened sense of autonomy and possibility.

Ordinarily, when we speak of withdrawal, we think of having a substance removed from us. We give up alcohol, drugs, sugar, fats, caffeine, nicotine -- and we suffer a withdrawal. It's useful to view creative withdrawal a little differently. We ourselves are the substance we withdraw to, not from, as we pull our overextended and misplaced creative energy back into our own core."

In the week or so ahead, I encourage you to experiment with alternatives to packaged media, and make your own creative play-dates and projects:

"Spending time in solitude with your artist child is essential to self-nurturing. A long country walk, a solitary expedition to the beach for a sunrise or sunset, a sortie out to a strange church to hear gospel music, to an ethic neighborhood to taste foreign sights and sounds - your artist might enjoy any of these. Or your artist might like bowling." - Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

Here's my own detox list below. I'm going for a little longer than a week myself - through August 1st - in case someone joins in with us in next few days they can go a full week. Keep creating. So go right ahead with producing a video or writing a blog or playing your guitar, for instance. It's the consumption of outer entertainment and entrainment I'm withdrawing from.

where does your art come from?

"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." - Andre Gide

A reader William asked an excellent question in a comment. As not everyone reads the comments section, here it is and my response below:

"An observation on the fast.

References to the rich variety of visual and literary artists seemed to have been removed and replaced by contemplations of popular movies. What are we or should we be fasting from when we decide to fast?"

Posted by: William | Jul 18, 2008 at 11:41 AM

My response:

Fair point, William. The fast hasn't started yet. Saturday. [Or Sunday, or Monday depending on what works best for you. I'll write on topic for over a week to catch everyone that wants to participate in real-time.] But I'd include other people's art and works too in that fast. It's just for a week!

Isaac Newton had nearly two years self-study when Cambridge closed down because of the plague; Buckminster Fuller took a 2-year vow of SILENCE to purge other people's concepts out of his mind; Bob Dylan after a motorcycle accident went into the Big Pink house, went within to compose/develop his own style without the popular 60's music surrounding him, hounding him. Just a few examples of going within. Like Terence McKenna said "Create your own road show."

I was curious about popular media lately, especially popular films since that seems to be the way the zeitgeist and programmed symbols are coming through these days. Even paintings contain much of the same symbology as I'm noting in popular media.

I was curious where these influences are coming from. Is it really "us" deep within, our own inspiration, are we channels for the Source? - or are we merely being programmed by the media and their masters to be THEIR channels (and robots)?

I've been noticing that in cities, artists have been making art for other artists...poets go to the readings, artists go to the gallery openings. Everything starts to look like the same. It could all be in Juxtapoz next issue.

Truthfully, I'm not into writing that much these days. I'm working on an installation idea. But even I need to do some purging of other peep's concepts, media inundation, etc.to do something fresh, and really like an INITIATION for me and the viewers. "Vincent Van Gogh gave the most demanding definition of painting. It was a process of initiation. He had to make visible that which could not be seen without painting." - "Van Gogh: The Passionate Eye"

I have a few posts on Van Gogh, James Turrell up my sleeve coming up too. Hang in there...

p.s. The fast might make more sense watching this short video, "Reclaim Your Mind". (Personally, highly don't recommend McKenna's other vid's regarding 2012 and psy- drugs).

"Don't watch TV. Don't read magazines. Don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow." - Terence McKenna

p.p.s. I've watched way too many popular films lately (not typical for me). I made specific references to Wall-E, The Matrix, and Truman Show because they have some worthwhile messages about deprogramming in them. Though even they are double-edged.

More specifics of the media fast Saturday. Anything that you consume and look towards as an intermediary for your information and imagination is fair game.

rogue robots

"Inside you there's an artist you don't know about... Say yes quickly, if you know, if you've known it from before the beginning of the universe." -Rumi

Truman had Sylvia. Neo had Morpheus. EVE had Wall-E. Each had someone from outside their reality unexpectantly upset their apple cart, and offer a new clue to a new view.

Who did Wall-E have? Whom showed him a glimpse of freedom?

He's just minding his P's and Q's and doing what all Waste Allocation Load Lifter- Earth Class robots are programmed to do day in and day out, and he's been at it diligently for approximately seven hundred years. He does what every other engineered Wall-E does. Or, does he?

Some might say his emergent artificial intelligence emerged, thus evolving his program in some sort of genetic algorithm, yet that would be programmed behavior too. If that were the case, where was his emergent intelligence stored? What if we swap out his rusty parts, his memory cards, even the motherboard circuit board, would that contraption still be the Wall-E we know?

"I can only show you the door. You have to walk through it." - Morpheus

It's a habit of mind that thinks it needs to find answers out there to squelch our fear of the unknown. You might compare this habit to a computer program, and the unknown to consciousness, or spirit. I broke free of the programming in April 2006, however, since the program was and is still installed, it is possible to revert back to it...and unfortunately, I have most of the last 18 or so months.

"To know that you are a prisoner of your mind, that you live in an imaginary world of your own creation, is the dawn of wisdom. To want nothing of it, to be ready to abandon it entirely, is earnestness." - Sri Nisargadatta

Trash compacting seems pretty cut-and-dry, it doesn't serve any functional purpose to dance or hold hands. No computer engineer (I'm one, or more aptly, I was) would bother creating a sophisticated A.I. for a simple robot (too unpredictable to be left unattended like Wall-E units were).

So what explains Wall-E's self-awareness and innate quirkiness? Me, I think that precisely because Wall-E was the very last robot he was no longer surrounded by programming and programs reinforcing his adherence to his own embedded programs. I think this made for optimal conditions where his spontaneous spirit eventually rebelled, revealed and reveled.

Yup, I'm a rogue robot again! (Inside joke if you watched the film.)

p.s. That's the whole idea to a media fast - to allow space for your consciousness to come forth, without incessant mirrors and overlays of programs. inviting a feast for the spirit, a flowering for spontaneity.

the true man show

Truman Burbank: Was anything real?
Christof: You were real. That's what made you so good to watch...

I found it rather amazing how the humans on the ship in recent film, Wall-E didn't get discombobulated, mutiny and insist their ship was home. Once out of 'Autopilot,' even the Axiom's captain yearned to retire his carefree post and go "home." Surely someone would have resisted going back to Earth because at that point -- 700 years away from the planet -- it was all pretty foreign to them as their parents and their parents' parents were born and bred on that good ship Axiom. Perhaps it'd all be different if 700,000 or 70,000,000 years had elapsed. Perhaps they'd have too much invested in the ship.

Axiom: "A self-evident and necessary truth; a proposition which it is necessary to take for granted; a proposition whose truth is so evident that no reasoning or demonstration can make it plainer." - en.wiktionary.org/wiki/axiom

Axiom: "An axiom is a statement which is assumed to be true, and is used as a basis for developing a system." - ddi.cs.uni-potsdam.de/Lehre/TuringLectures/MathNotions.htm

I was lured into believing Home was on yet another dimension/density - which would be like taking an elevator to the next deck of a vast ship - but nope, that's not Home. That's still part of the The Matrix.

Like a conch shell that still echoes the ocean far from Home, sometimes I feel echoes of a 'place' I know without war, disease, decay, death, or grinding down. A 'place' without food chains or chains. A 'place' of continual creative expression of beauty, and love in boundless bounty. Before Time, it was and is.

I've come upon the truth at least half-dozen times since 2003 (a pivotal year), and yet each time I unwittingly turn away because I'm very in the minority.

Being true to your true self and its expression, is probably most consistent theme of this blog. And it will continue to be the focus. But I must make a huge apology...

I fell for the immaculate deception. I'm truly sorry for anyone that I've misled. Like Truman, I'm not exactly surrounded by people that have my best interests at heart, nor are they here helping us to get to the bottom of what's up. Truman didn't have an inkling where his search would eventually lead him, nor that he had been a pawn -- he merely became alert that things were highly strange.

"At the end of the show the hypnotist told his subjects, "Awake."

Something unusual happened.

One of the subjects awoke all the way. This has never happened before. His name is George Nada and he blinked out at the sea of faces in the theatre, at first unaware of anything out of the ordinary. Then he noticed, spotted here and there in the crowd, the nonhuman faces, the faces of the Fascinators. They had been there all along, of course, but only George was really awake, so only George recognized them for what they were. He understood everything in a flash, including the fact that if he were to give any outward sign, the Fascinators would instantly command him to return to his former state, and he would obey." - opening lines to short story, "Eight O'Clock in the Morning", by Ray Nelson

I came close to deleting each and every post on this blog as I don't want to reinforce false memes - yet, I believe my essence shines through even the corrupted ideas and concepts. And maybe that speaks clearest anyhow.

Beauty, liberation, inspiration, truth is it for me - and what I want this blog to be about. Yet I cannot feed that to you, your spirit wells and wills inside of you - you have only to allow its voice.

In The Truman Show, Sylvia tells Truman his life isn't what it appears to be, and leaves it at that. At that point it's up to Truman: Should I ignore this silly remark? That remark resonated with something deep within him that had already sensed that not all was right with the world. You've had Sylvias in your life. If not, I'm your Sylvia.

"I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss." - Cypher, The Matrix

The Fascinators fascinate. The will always tell you ignorance is bliss and bliss is ignorance.

I'm going to suggest a one-week media fast for starters (The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron suggests a one-week media fast for a creative boost) to get us back in touch within to our essence, our selves without any externalities. We'll start this Saturday (or Sunday for those that get postings via email), in case you think you'll be bored, a few innate-alternate activities will be suggested through the week.

p.s. I've been in the desert Southwest this summer clearing out the other voices, getting back to my own self. There'll be no external photos, paintings, symbols until after the media fast. Clarity first.

the Red PIll & Indy 4 and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

"If this weren't your only lifetime, this weren't your only timeline, this weren't your only galaxy, would *you* be an alien?" - eve11

I was recently asked my opinion of the paranormal and alien beings aspect of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

What follows is more than mere movie spoilers. If you're squeamish about taking the Red Pill (especially in regards to alien beings or the so-called paranormal), you may want to skip this post altogether. I was called as never before to share my uncensored, straightforward thoughts (as much as I've written publicly, my totally uncensored musings are quite rare). The sheer amount of disinformation that is being leaked, and circulating these days urges me to write, although my preference is to operate under the radar. I rather be utterly silent than speak untruths, lately.

Don't worry if you don't think you're 'ready' to recall truths now or not. You can skip this post. Anytime anyone cares to sincerely to find truth, they do - even if it's like needle in haystack of propaganda. (Needles in haystack are electromagnetic, too.) You can always choose again.

I'm wavering. Losing courage. When, now, I walk into the neighborhood coffee shop. Coffea, for a cafe au lait and WiFi. Do I publish, or do I not? I walk in to see the owner wearing this T-shirt: "In Coffea there is truth." So here goes....

The paranormal aspect of the film is the easiest to address. The Russian military scientist in Indiana Jones 4 references exploration of the paranormal for psychic warfare and ways to "control the mind of Man" yet never was anything of the like employed within the movie. Only bumbling brute force was ever witnessed through every scene.

However, the movie in and of itself is an attempt in mind control by the military-entertainment complex. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't watch it as it's not the first nor last instance, but use your discernment and keep your eyes wide open.

A friend steeped in hypnosis training noted the trailer preceding the beginning of Indy 4 flashed, "We will control you." He announced aloud in the theater: "Of course, you will awaken to a non-suggestible state." A couple of people chuckled. (We were setting the intention of not being hypnotized by the suspension of disbelief that movie-watching fosters.)

For the benefit of your own soul growth, you may chose to participate in the illusion of mind control, yet your Self knows it cannot control or be controlled.  It's all unique choice - no telling what helps you flower into expressing more infinite you. Some of my most traumatic moments in hindsight were the turning points and catalysts (though kicking my butt) in my evolution.

When your knowing allows knowing you are not your body, you will be aware of fourth density (4D). When your knowing allows knowing you are not your mind either, you will be aware of fifth density (5D). Then the real adventure begins, and the most adrenaline action-packed movie will pale juxtaposed beside the limitlessness of embodied oneness.

There are several seeds planted in your mind (4D) by the film. That is, seeds besides the typical entrainment of the linear formula: the ol' good guys versus the bad guys to drum in the frequency of 3D duelity/duality. As well as the typical power over others as the ultimate prize/reward. (Good news: There is nothing that could whatsoever be planted, hooked, or otherwise cling to your ungraspable flowing 5D-plus self, so no worries.)

"Until I was 28 we knew only about our own galaxy. In 1923 Hubble discovered another galaxy. Since [then] we have discovered 2 billion more." - Buckminster Fuller

Before you read further, watch this short 5-minute video for sense of how 5D-plus "alien" beings interact.

Leonardo Fingerpainted, and Bon Voyage to Burma

A friend of mine, 0, is a Burmese artist, residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although he prefers abstract trumpet blasts of colors and swirls of dancing texture to realism, in order to raise money for his village back home, he'll often dedicate many canvases to meticulous reproductions of the da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

He leaves for Burma next week (his visa confirmed), so I’m helping him directly because I know him to be a person who lives The Gift.

In a blog post months ago, I mentioned that I had a small cluster of friends that helped each other out. If anyone sells a painting, while yet another's scrounging for scraps to eat, they'll share the money, and/or cook you a home-cooked simmering soup and Burmese noodles supper. "Artists gotta help other artists," 0, my Burmese friend, would instill in me.

Normally, 0 self-funds his visits to Burma (loaded with medicines, water purifiers, energy drinks and foods, books and educational materials) with his art work sales, but this time he'd only just returned from a 5-week trip in April with $5 in his pocket. Then Cyclone Nargis hit.

If you'd like to help, I'm taking donations.

What Twitter friends are doing: Pissyrabbit is donating 100% of all art sales (Warholesque stuffed animals) at www.basilandantimony.etsy.com through May 21st to the cause. Charlotte created a Facebook group. Pistachio is collecting information on how social media can help Burma. Michelle is shows you how you can buy calling cards for Burmese refugees in Austin, TX to call home. Evrideva donated his $85 in barista tips last night (his tip jar told his customers that it was for 0). TRUE suggested a long-term Etsy store for Oliver and other artists to sell creations on behalf of Burma relief at Art4Burma.etsy.com (not ready yet).

Or, best yet if you are in the Bay Area, missrogue is hosting 0 this Saturday.... come wish 0 a good send-off to Burma.

San Francisco, May 17th, 6-8 p.m. Bon Voyage to Burma. My Burmese artist and humanitarian will be the guest at a fun-raiser (do-it-yourself fingerpainted gift cards) and art show at Citizen Space, thanks to Tara Hunt. Address: 425 2nd Street, #300, San Francisco, CA. 0 does some really glorious fingerpaint (yup, handmade!) cards - watch, and/or do your own.

Scrumptious Burmese food will be served. Donations requested, (never mandatory) $7-10. Simply come by to show your support of an individual headed to help Burmese cyclone survivors next week.

Bonus:

Finger Painting: "Throughout history a small number of artists have rejected both palette knives and brushes. A few used their fingers to spread the paint. Artists turned to such primal means for various reasons, including display of skill, experimental playfulness, or nose-thumbing at convention."

...The young Leonardo's use of his fingers can be linked to the properties of the newly available medium of oil painting. ... It should not surprise us that he played with the tackiness of the new oil medium, palpating the paint as he sought new effects." - Seeing Through Paintings, Andrea Kirsch and Rustin S Levenson

Art credits Elephant Family, by 0 ('m declining mentioning his name at this time as he frequents the country, and I don't wish to jeopardize those visa-dependent visits. Graffiti With Homemade Fingerpaints, by Pilgrim Parent

p.s. In next few days, I'll share how you can help through active prayer, or intention alone.

free to be you and me

I love this passage from The Bridge of Teribithia. It's the turning point where Jess stops avoiding his new neighbor, Leslie, because she's strangely "different" (and shunned from the first day at school) and just went with it. Funny, too, because Jess has a crush on the music teacher, Miss Edmunds, who everyone knows is a trippy hippy, and her music class is a peripheral course looked down by the other teachers, without it's own classroom and they make do in a corner of the teacher's room.

Of course, I like this passage because it's actually about embodying the energies of the very present fourth dimension.

"What do you like to sing, Leslie?"

"Oh, anything."

Miss Edmunds picked up a few odd chords and then began to sing, more quietly than usual for that particular song:

"I see a land bright and clear

And the time's coming near

When we'll live in this land

You and me, hand in hand..."

People began to join in, quietly at first to match her mood, but as the song built up at the end, their voices did as well, so that by the time they got to the final "Free to be you and me," the whole school could hear them. Caught in the pure delight of it, Jess turned and his eyes met Leslie's. He smiled at her. What the heck? There wasn't any reason he couldn't. What was he scared of anyhow? Lord. Sometimes he acted like the original yellow-bellied sapsucker. He nodded and smiled again. She smiled back. He felt there in the teachers' room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose deliberately to make it so. - The Bridge to Terebithia, Katherine Paterson

Bonus: On April 9, and from now on end, the theme is going with the flow of the current. What if whatever is happening, is what is happening, and maybe even what should be happening? What if the very next note in the symphony is just as sweet, nay sweeter than the old note you're clinging to? What if you enjoyed the music as it plays, instead of stopping it midstream to clutch onto a favorite passage?

"Allow yourself to unfold into the higher version of your Self today. Don’t slow down to question why or how. Just flow. Just go for the ride. You will understand or grasp the reality so much better if you are flowing with it rather than slowing down to try and understand it. This is rule number one for riding our new 4D vehicle. GO WITH THE FLOW." - April 9, 2008 Stephanie Azaria astrological forecast

"Many people live struggling against this current. They try to use force or resistance to will their lives into happening in the way they think it should. Others move with it like a sailor using the wind, trusting that the universe is taking them exactly where they need to be at all times. This flow is accessible to everyone because it travels through and around us. We are always riding it—it is just a matter of whether we are willing to go with it or we resist it." -"Let Yourself Be Carried", Daily Om, April 9, 2008

Art credits Spring is Coming, by Linde

enlightenment, not just for prisoners and reggae musicians anymore

"Because of the extremely rare, golden opportunities of April, we need to make ourselves very visible as who we really are. We need to dress as who we really are, move through all our activities as who we really are, and speak our truth at all times. Otherwise, if we are still disguised, we may not connect with those whom we are meant to meet. Listen for the numerous hints, clues and signposts that are coming our way. We need to be wide open and totally available, as well as ready to change direction in an instant." - Solara, April 2008 Surf Report

Reading that paragraph above, I thought maybe it'd be right timing to re-post a June 26, 2006 post titled "Lightening Up! Coming Out of the Closet" below. This is definitely, if ever I doubted, the time to be true to ourselves.

The easiest way to be truly true to our self is to wake up to our Self.

Since that writing, I've come across a wide variety of bodhisattvas along my travels. Sometimes, as my former teacher Adyashanti said they wear guises of prisoners (he'd visited and taught at prisons - and met two awakened Buddhas - solitary confinement can do that), or grocery store clerks counting change in wayward towns.

Myself, I've encountered them guerilla gardening wheatgrass in the urban cracks of the sidewalk and dancing in purple dresses they salvaged off the streets of the Mission District, San Francisco. Or, sometimes they are a reggae musician I know. Or other times, a single mom and artist. Or, my faun friend last seen picking apples at an organic farm. Or, the barista that handed me the Om Tazo tea at this coffee shop where I type this crossed road dispatch this very moment.

I know, I know, you were looking for white-robed saints with crusty beards and hefty halos.

In case you're thoroughly confused, I'm talking about awakening. Just the tip of iceberg, and really the so-called start of enlightenment. (As if beginnings and endings existed.) I've finally seen it's not doing any bit of good to pretend to be otherwise than awake.

Awakening to Self is going to be quite common now that the earth's shifted to 4D. So, you might as well get used to it. You will be next.

Again, this post was written 6/26/06, and the "awakening" such as it was "happened" somewhere in a nondescript Peet's coffee shop in a nondescript strip mall in San Jose, CA precisely two years ago today, April 7, 2006.

In many ways, I feel more like a 2-year-old navigating tottering through a brand new world. (It can take 4-7 years after awakening for all the habitual conditioning to wear off and for an "individual" self to embody awakening fully.) Well, without further ado, that post:

The traffiic chugged on Van Ness on my way to a friend's private art exhibition (well, more like a party with all of his recent abstract art covering every inch of wall) because of the 36th Annual Gay Pride parade in San  Francisco yesterday.

It reminded me of the touching snippet I'd read this weekend in my research into my favorite retail chain store (that's favorite chain), Anthropologie (the website does not do the experience justice). It reminded me how far we've come that snippets like this aren't taboo, but even celebrated today in story, film, parade, and life more and more:

In his office on the second-floor loft, which over-looks the entire ground level, [Glen] Senk sheepishly apologizes for the clumps of dog hair under his own desk, courtesy of his two beloved Welsh Pembroke corgis, Piper and Cosmo. They regularly visit from the nearby Dutch Colonial house Senk, 50, shares with Keith Johnson, his partner of 32 years. The couple met in Brookville, Long Island, when they were both 10, and Senk says his reaction to Johnson was “chemical”. Hearing this, the quiet Johnson playfully rolls his eyes and adds, “It took me a little bit longer to figure it out.” - Philebrity  5/23/2006 blog post

A January Knight-Ridder piece on "The Art of Retail" (alas now cached) tells us more about the couple: "An artist and former furniture designer, [Keith] Johnson started his global shopping excursions [for Anthropologie] soon after his partner, Glen Senk, a former Williams-Sonoma retailing executive, took over the Anthropologie helm in 1994."

I suppose there was a time when 'coming out' meant that besides placing the burden of possible 'outsider' status upon yourself, you're also under the intense scrutiny of being a representative, an ambassador of sorts, for all gays, those out and hidden and everything in between. Maybe people look at your every move to see what it is 'gays' do and how 'gays' behave. It's hard enough in this life just being yourself, much less being a symbol to uphold. And I can't imagine being an openly gay executive would be a very easy task back 36 years ago at the time of the inaugural gay pride parade either.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that the parade also reminded me that I feel a heck of a lot more comfortable being a closet mystic. And closet Awakeness. Yet to 'normalize' enlightenment, it's not going to do a heck of a lot of good for me to stay comfortably esconed in the closet. People have all sorts of fantasy concepts about awakening and the so-called process oof enlightenment process. Since I'm less restrained in off-the-cuff email, I'll share a raw tidbit I wrote to a friend this a.m.

Very very luminously content - whole, complete - esp after the striving/ struggling ceased early April. There is still lots of liberation and enlightening of the denser unpurified parts happening,  but whew I don't have manage/direct it or effort it anymore.

There's a myth that awakening and the ever-unfolding enlightening is only for saints, Buddhists, someone holier than thou, someone special, someone-anyone-else. (Ha! I'm totally busting the saint archetype - my imperfections have never been more glaringly obvious and wholly okay.) We think we'd become something Other, maybe we'll morph into Mother Teresa or Jesus or Buddha or Joan of Arc or godknows. That's not it -  we become more nakedly ourselves, without the burden of maintaining an awkward and cumbersome image of ourselves (we most certainly do not become anyone else).

Enlightening isn't a self-improvement exercise. It's more of a stripping away: who/what you are without the heavy weight of ideas of who/what we all are, each and everyone, obscuring our perception and knowledge. This sounds ho-hum but the world as you thought it was totally unhinges, and I mean totally, and you see the world as it is.

The Buddha's description of Nirvana, in the Pali Canon, as "visible in this life, inviting, attractive, accessible," is clearly true and makes perfect sense. So does Master Ummon's statement that the first step along the Zen Path is to see into our Void Nature: getting rid of our bad karma comes after - not before - that seeing. So does Ramana Maharshi's insistence that it is easier to see What and Who we really are than to see "a gooseberry in the palm of our hand" -- as so often, this Hindu sage confirms Zen teaching. All of which means there are no preconditions for this essential in-seeing. To oneself one's Nature is forever clearly displayed, and it's amazing how one could ever pretend otherwise. It's available now, just as one is, and doesn't require the seer to be holy, or learned, or clever, or special in any way. Rather  the reverse! What a superb advantage and opportunity this is! - The Nondual Highlights, issue #2505, June 23, 2006

Many people read this blog for clues on how to integrate spirituality into their business, into their life. Doubtful you'd find anyone more stubborn than I, yet I yielded to the wisdom in one of my teacher's words:

Many people ask, "How do I integrate my spirituality into everyday life?" You don't. You can't. How could you integrate it? You can't stuff the infinite into your limited life. Instead, give your life to divine impulse...Throw your life into Truth. Don't try to stuff Truth into your life."  - Emptiness Dancing, Adyashanti

Just about every religion under the sun has informed me. Yesterday I witnessed a Christian baptism wherein the ritual a woman figuratively "died to themselves", and thereby gave her life to something greater than her sense of self, which she named God. (For nondualists, recall Stephen Mitchell's words: When everything is God, nothing is God. To me God is unnameable.)

I doubt I'll discuss awakening any more every than every couple of months. [Actually in retrospect, 'twas more like once per year.] Enough to make sure I'm not hiding. And to remind myself, anyone reading, that a clear, deep wise Mystery is informing me and what I do and how I think and how I feel and what I write - so you might as well know that upfront. (It's kind of dry to talk about, write about anyway in comparison to the incredible voyage it is to live out. Hint: My last post was really enlightening too. Everyone's had moments.)

It's actually so simple you're missing it. En-lighten-ing. Lighting up. Lighten up. Incredible lightness of being. I see glimpses of it everywhere when people, kids, flowers, dogs, designers, architects, writers, entrepreneurs and other folks glimpse it too. Usually when they connect to silence, their heart, their body, their senses, their gut feel. When they aren't dead from the neck down. That's really what this blog is about: Pointing to that simple stuff which lightens. Enlightens. Affirms Life. In business, in life.

Full circle, speaking of enlightening, again I see the pointers to truth everywhere, little love letters to God everywhere, and I'm totally smitten by Keith Johnson's words and his sense of style (perhaps I'll share the whole piece later). Again, he's the curator of sorts for the thoroughly enchanting Anthropologie stores. Even what he says hints that our imperfectability is maybe what's so lovable anyway. Here he shares a little more about his design instincts:

A cork beehive from Portugal sits in one corner. In another, a huge empty frame with rococo carvings of birds and flowers leans against a wall.

"I bought hundreds of those in an old gilding factory, and we put mirrors in them and used them in store dressing rooms," Johnson says. "They were never gilded, so they got that wonderful, white weathered look. If they had been gilded, they wouldn't have been as interesting to me.

"We've periodically tried building store fixtures, but they don't have the soul of the old pieces. The old things give a life and resonance to the stores that just can't be replaced." - "Mastering the Art of Retail" (Google cached), Contra Costa Times (via Knight-Ridder), Jan 28, 2006

Bonus: "Spiritual people always think the Truth is hidden from them. It is not hidden. What gets in the way is the idea of what it is going to be. Find that place of what actually is. There is only One manifesting as everything. Ponder and meditate on this until you realize it yourself through and through." [You cannot accept it as belief as that'd be replacing an idea with yet another idea.] - Emptiness Dancing, by Adyashanti

Art credits Let you guys surmise why Kwan Yin features so prominently in this post. 1st Kwan Yin (artist unknown via A Heart's Journey site); 2nd Kwan Yin by SpiderLady-Hera; 3rd Kwan Yin (artist unknown via Divine Goddess Kwan Yin site); 4th Kwan Yin is in alternate androgynous form of Avalokitesvara, this statue in Java, Indonesia.

Bonus 2: Snippet from the April 2008 Surf Report by Solara below (to subscribe to Solara's full monthly reports):

the poet, the physicist, the prophet - oh, my

"The poet, the physicist, and the prophet are all searching to understand the dimensions we can't see, whether gravity, time, or love." - Lisa Sonne, essay at end of the Yearling edition of A Wrinkle in Time

I'm actually going to see a living poet that's not starving tonight. (And that was so before he expanded to singing his poetry.) That's a rare treat.

It didn't take reading The Gift, by Lewis Hyde to realize that poetry is one of the least commercialized and least commercializable of the arts. Neither poets nor prophets nor pure science physicists receive tons of support these days. It's as if all the living questions have been asked already, and answered. Though in fact we've entered an exciting era in which to explore space and time and creation. The strip malls and the concrete and the chain stores appear to chime, "This isn't the Renaissance, it's post-Enlightenment." And yet...

I gave a friend a copy of The Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke a year ago. Soon afterward a friend of his, also the CEO of a company on whose board he served on, was diagnosed with a terminal illness. He said reading The Book of Hours kept him afloat. It was like being able to breathe again after a jab to the gut. Something about poetry speaks straight to the soul, and reweaves all the rifts in our basketcases.

I feel it now: there's a power in me

to grasp and give shape to my world.

I will sing you as no one ever has, [I, 1]

...streaming through widening channels

into the open sea. [I, 12] - Rilke, The Book of Hours

Still, I feel sheepish requesting a few bucks for a group of New Orleans poets (see also the Chipin widget on this blog sidebar). I'm not among these poets, I'm a volunteer - watering poetry and reaping humming harvests - yet the whole thought of asking for tips...for uh, poetry of all things. Yes, yes, minstrels did always sing for their supper, but....Dignity, please. Don't ask me why it's difficult, I'm just saying that's what I'm observing.

Although it doesn't make sense why I'm shy about the "value" of poetry, because I know the importance of poets and physicists and prophets provoking and probing. And we need more thoughts provoked and questions probed. More ridiculous questions posed like L'Engle asks, "If anybody invited you to go to a newly discovered galaxy, would you go?"

I read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle last night for the first time ever in one sitting. Let's say the plotline, although written in 1962, is amazingly relevant at present as the planet Earth moves into fourth dimension and prepares for 5D. In the story, three children are among the warriors of light, as Paulo Coelho might call them, although the story character Mrs. Whatsit calls them "fighters" against the Powers of Darkness (for me, "fighter" rings of duelity, as does dividing one power into light and dark -- separation is a 3D construct).

Reading this book was like coming home. Aha, someone understands 5D, galactic citizenry, telepathy, teleporting, light bodies AND why art and poetry and beauty and asking bold questions does matter:   

"...I know it's hard for you to understand about size, how there's very little difference in the size of the tiniest microbe and the greatest galaxy. You think about that, and maybe it won't seem strange to you that some of our very best fighters have come right from your own planet, and it's a little planet, dears, out on the edge of a little galaxy. You can be proud that it's done so well."

"Who have our fighters been?" Calvin asked.

"Oh, you must know them, dear," Mrs. Whatsit said.

Mrs. Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly, "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."

"Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why, of course, Jesus!"

"Of course!" Mrs. Whatsit said. "Go on, Charles, love. There are others. All your great artists. They've been lights for us to see by."

"Leonardo da Vinci?" Calvin suggested tentatively. "And Michelangelo?"

"And Shakespeare," Charles Wallace called out, "and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!"

Now Calvin's voice rang with confidence. "And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!" - Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

p.s. At least April is National Poetry Month.

So if you'd like to see more poetry growing in this cosmic garden, chip in for Asia, for Sunni, for Lee, for Nancy, for Valentine, for Elizabeth, for Delia, for Marcia, for Roselyn, for Andrea, for Niyi, for Herbie, for Thaddeus, for Stormy, for Jack, for Esquizito. Chip in to say thank you to poet-prophet-physicists shining their lights, singing their songs, questing their questions. Thanks!

Art credits Les Muses, by Mark Boganin ; October Night (via japonisme blog) by Maurice Denis

creating outside the box

"There is no path to truth. Truth must be discovered, but there is no formula for its discovery. What is formulated is not true. You must set out on the uncharted sea, and the uncharted sea is yourself. You must set out to discover yourself, but not according to any plan or pattern, for then there is no discovery." - J. Krishnamurti (via whiskeyriver blog)

This year on, forever,

it's all gravy for me now --

spring playtime arrives

- Issa

I spoke about context the other day, and how I Iive in a different context, and oft times have a hard time relating to systems of duelity. 

This short video Creating Outside the Box, by Story Waters speaks so fluently of the creatorship context and how uniqueness springs from the oneness:

pssst, Spring is a perfect time to discover the Creator inside yourself. Stay tuned for an invitation.

Art credits Roman goddess Flora, Flora, by Evelyn de Morgan (1880)

renga dreams

"Picture sitting and sipping garden flora, renga roulette, budding bounty of food, healing oaseses where these discarded defacto dumps were." - Evelyn Rodriguez

jade meadow

spring

first day of pi

- my pi-ku for Pi Day

I've been listening to the land to sense what she feels as I'm only a midwife to the rebirth springing forth. Wisps are fleshing out into form. They jibe with a few imaginings that germinated three springs ago after a multi-day retreat in the lithe and verdant hills of Hidden Villa. (At the time I thought these thoughts were totally absurd as I believed myself to be a business and social media blogger: Who me? You say, Tea and poetry?)

I realize don't want to do much of anything indoors. Nix that idea of an indoor cafe...no matter how charmingly cooperative. For a brief daze last week, I entertained the notion of a part-time job to have additional flow (yes, at Twitter) but that's still staring at a computer screen for an additional 15 hours per week.

I'm not sure how it got into my head that teahouses are indoor arrangements, but that's been the picture lodged in my head. Finally, reading how "public tea gardens" replaced the men's-only coffeehouses in England in popularity in Uncommon Grounds, reminded me that teahouses have been mostly by and by quite airy and open to the five elements.

"Reclaiming green spaces, social spaces, third and a half places. Squatting my local abandoned plot." - eve11, 3/14
 

Earlier today as I walked into yet another abandoned grassy lot, I twittered: "Maybe just me, but I think it's bad juju to allow land and all manner of gifts to lie wasting in limbo. Use it, or loose it." This is true for our own heart's gifts too.

p.s. I'm just scribbling this down to share, even though it's rough, and draft, because so much is happening and so fast.

Bonus: Renga, an improvisational shared, collaborative poetry popularized in the old courts of Japan, resembles qualities of community, I think. Each of us a verse, unique yet linked, in the splay of utterances to comprise a whole:

"The two key principles of renga are link and shift. Link means that each verse should connect in some way with its immediate predecessor. Shift means that, with the exception of the link just noted, each verse should move on, drawing on imagery, which is new (for that particular renga). That is, repetition is to be avoided. Even when linking, although there will be some implicit connection, actual words and phrases should not be repeated." - Alec Lindflay's Renga site

Art credits photo of a renga platform via Alec Lindflay's Renga site

it is possible that in art we remember WHO WE ARE - and also celebrate who we are

"I heard Kahu's high treble voice shouting something to the sea. She was singing to the whale. Telling it to acknowledge her coming.

"Karanga mai, karanga mai, karanga mai." Call me. She raised her head and began to call to the whale." - The Whale Rider, Witi Ihimaera

The other day I was musing that the cadence of social media was like call and response. Except, I haven't used this blog in that sense in well over two years, maybe three. Once 'twas a magnet that aggregated those kinfolk who had similar passions as myself, and the network was living and lively as each had their own blog-spaces to explore themselves, and ourselves, and crystallize and capture our thoughts, ideas, musings, visions, and dreams some place ephemerally concrete (and concrete calls beckon all matter of responses from the multiverses) that we might share with each other.

It's no secret that everything changed post-tsunami for me, and my passions re-prioritized.

I can't necessarily characterize this blog as a personal journal either, as I tend towards writing what's "acceptable" rather unravelling (thus revealing) all the layers of my nested Russian doll selves. It's not so much that I'm afraid to - rather, I'd convinced myself that I'd reach a broader set of peoples (oh, perhaps that mass media mindset?) whom otherwise might shut off this voice if they suspected it wasn't quite conforming to the dictates of "normal."

"A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow." - "This Is Your Brain On Jazz: Researchers Use MRI To Study Spontaneity, Creativity", ScienceDaily, February 28, 2008

"It is possible that in art we remember WHO WE ARE - and also celebrate who we are." - Michael McClure

Celebrate, not camouflage. A while ago I wrote "seek consorts, not converts", the only way that's possible is to call out your wyld self. I'm not sure much happens in hiding our Self.

Reaching masses isn't quite the thing that makes me sing. I'd rather reach matches.

Though I live in a different context than most, so be it. Worst case, since I'm not doing this for fame and name, the very worst case is I lose a few subscribers - and regain my soul. Anyhow, there's at least 144 personalities to this here oversoul, so I won't just be communicating to the bit-bucket in the cloud.

A field of mustard,

no whale in sight,

the sea darkening. - Yosa Buson, Essential Haiku

No whale in sight. No whale sigh, or at least that appears to be the perception. One fundamental to "my context" is oneness a.k.a. wholeness. Pretty much my starting point, my given, from which all else springs. We'd be speaking in different tongues far far from the Tower of Babel should that not make innate "sense" to you. Resound in oneness, know by knowing, and the call shall be sensical.

"The utterances of the heart— unlike those of the discriminating intellect— always relate to the whole.” - Carl Jung

Here's a fictional Maori elder's sermon on oneness, and as such it is one spontaneous voice in the symphony:

"...."As he grew in his arrogance, he started to drive a wedge through the original oneness of the world. In the passing of Time he divided the world into that half he could believe in and that half he could not believe in. The real and the unreal. The natural and the supernatural. The present and the past. The scientific and the fantastic. He put a barrier between both worlds, and everything on his side was called rational and everything on the other side was called irrational. Belief in our Maori Gods," he emphasized, "has often been considered irrational."

Koro Apirana paused again. He had us in the palms of his hands and was considerate about our ignorance, but I was wondering what he was driving at. Suddenly he gestured to the sea.

"You have all seen the whale," he said. "You have all seen the sacred sign tattooed on its head. Is the tattoo there by accident or by design? Why did a whale of its appearance strand itself here and not at Wainui? Does it belong in the real world or the unreal world?"

"The real," someone called.

"Is it natural or supernatural?"

"It is supernatural," a second voice said.

Koro Apirana put up his hands to stop the debate. "No," he said, "it is both. It is a reminder of the oneness that the world once was. It is the birth cord joining past and present, reality and fantasy. It is both," he thundered, "and if we have forgotten the communion then we have ceased to be Maori!" - The Whale Rider, Witi Ihimaera

Art credits Expectations, by Christophe Vacher; Expectations (detail), by Christophe Vacher;

p.s. Recently read The Whale Rider (popularized as a Sundance film). Adore the novel - so much richer than the movie, which I liked. That's the second book I read in a row, quite unintentionally deliberate, on indigenous wisdom.The first was a re-reading of Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman, by Malidoma Some - the book that rocked my tidy, known world six years ago.

p.p. s. The 40 days of extraordinary miracles felt too coerced a project, not quite the stuff of inspiration, so it's let go.

Rather, I'd like to play with delving into our most improvisational, spontaneous nature through tone, sound, lyricism, language, spring, nature, eARTh in the next few weeks (heck, maybe longer.)

Emphasis on "Our" as I'm inviting participation. Stay tuned. As the kick-off will be the first rays of Spring, on the vernal Equinox, March 20th.

the alchemist

So I dragged myself to the New Orleans Food Coop potluck/meeting on Monday night. I wasn't all that enthused by the mission as narrowly stated: "Healthy, affordable groceries for everyone!!" I took the flyer off my doorstep, and with a pen hastily crossed off the word groceries and substituted FOOD.

“Continue in the direction of the Pyramids”, said the alchemist. “And continue to pay heed to the omens. Your heart is still capable of showing you where the treasure is.” - Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Regardless, I knew I'd go, if only to have the privilege of complaining and critiqueing with first-hand knowledge ;) After weeks in New Orleans, I'd seriously begun to wonder if I'd made a huge, big mistake coming here. Was this city at the cusp of a Renaissance? Was it really the place drawing the vanguards of the blank canvas?

“This world is but a canvas to our imaginations.” - Henry David Thoreau

And did my vision mesh with said city? The answer was starting to seem like No. After BarCampNola, it was upgraded to Perhaps maybe.

Little did I know that meeting would be a pivot point, whereupon I meet another kindred spirit that recites (and lives) the stone soup story too, talks of the omens and signs that led him to New Orleans, and about participatory engagement ("Be the change you wish to see in the world"). And just when I was about to give up...

“Is that the one thing I still need to know?”

“No”, the alchemist answered. “What you still need to know is this: before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we’ve learned as we’ve moved toward that dream. That’s the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one ‘dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon.’

“Every search begins with beginner’s luck. And every search ends with the victor’s being severely tested.” - Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream

To me, this doesn't contradict "Can we become the sign we so desperately seek?" as long as I'm following my inclinations moment to moment (they feel like the very next dance step), rather than waiting for a signal, or to verification that there's light at the end of the tunnel, as sometimes one does waltz forward in the seeming dark first.

p.s. I swear everyone's bookshelf in New Orleans, particularly among the transplants, seems to have the book, The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, prominently displayed. More quotes from Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream:

"Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own."

"No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it."

"It's the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them."

Art credits Enchanted Pyramids by EnchantedMistress; Painted Desert by Strohat.

wait, wait, waiting for my fairy prince

Not.

No holding breath and waiting for the fairy prince (may be the princesss for you), generous benefactor, big-wig agent, guru, or Messiah to sweep me off my feet and wash away all my tears and make everything all right. I am having a love affair with my Self.

"be a ringing glass, that in sounding swiftly shatters.

Be - but still know non-being's conditions,
the infinite foundation of your innermost vibration,
so you fulfill it fully in this only time around" - Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

On the other hand, why do I tend to wait wait wait for external signs and omens from on high to proceed?

As Gillian MacBeth-Louhan asks, "Can we become the sign we so desperately seek?"

I was just about to share my own version of an allegorical story by Plato, but instead this other on the alchemical evolution of the soul through the Kabbalistic Tree of Life seems on the surface so fittingly Valentine's Day. In it, Aleister Crowley's The Wake World, Lola, the main character in first person, is accompanied by her fairy prince, who turns out is also her guide as she navigates.

And whom is this dreamy Fairy Prince? For Crowley, he pictured each soul's own Holy Guardian Angel. For me, it's what I call my total self (the sum total of all my simultaneous existences in all dimensions seen and unseen, including yet not limited to my future self). Lola stalls as she's confronted with the threshold to the unknown, at the Universe card if you're familiar with the Tarot's soul journey, and she lingers on where she is:

Then he said: "Come on! This is only the Servant's Hall, nearly everybody stays there all their lives." And I said: "Kiss me!" So he said: "Every step you take is only possible when you say that!"

Art credits A Kiss in the Rain by Wen-M.

p.s. You have the best possible mentor, guide, teacher, guru uniquely suited to your idiosynchratic needs right alongside, within and without you. It know just you need to talk to ravens, precisely when you need another piece of dark chocolate and your fav brand - amazingly, everything about you - and even omniscience too.

I find it best to trust my inclination in the present moment (the spontaneous surrender of "Kiss me!") without "checking in" too much, but if I'm temporarily stunned ("He who hesitates is lost"), I simply ask to be directed by my total self, and it's that simple call back to clarity. If that's new to you, you can try using a pendulum, or applying kinesiology (also known as muscle strength testing, David Hawkin's techniques appear valid), or simply asking to be directed by your Total Self, or Oversoul, and then closing your eyes and selecting a choice from a set of overturned paper slips (could be as simple as two slips: "yes" or "no").

I loved this particular article from Gillian MacBeth-Louthan's January 2008 newsletter, especially the two lines, "Can we become the sign we so desperately seek?" and "When two or more are gathered in energy and heart the universe will unfold exposing soft skin and lift them to a place of miracles.":