Crossroads Dispatches

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.":

be the miracle

Last summer when I was subletting in San Francisco (seeing if I could see myself thriving there), I saw a sticker pasted upon a newspaper dispenser on a street corner in The Mission district. It read:

"Give me an art grant."

Nice try, yet I'm not sure that's the way it works in any multiverse. No mystery that a week or so later, I read a most excellent article about artist/waiter Josh Greene, "Tipping Point", in the San Francisco Weekly, July 4, 2007: "One night a month, Greene sacrifices his tips — between $200 and $300 — as a grant to another artist in a project called Service-Works. Around 25 hopefuls a month submit pitches to the program through Greene's Web site. He chooses one lucky proposal each round to underwrite and displays the idea online."

Rather, than wait around for the art grant fairy, why not fund an artist yourself (especially when you feel you don't enough resources to nurture your own creativity)? Why not be the miracle, rather than waiting around for miracles to flow your way?

And don't diss your miracles, or your miracle-ness. They all count. For instance, ever since I realized that quite a few of the baristas at the beloved coffeeshop Coffea were musicians in The Herringbone Orchestra (pictured above), I've tipped better. I may leave anonymous thoughts scribbled in the margins of the dollar bills like: "grace hangs on a note...don't forget you are music." It may not seem like much, but hey, I still haven't paid all my January bills.

I'm really taking to heart Lewis Hyde's The Gift, and devoting my year to gift. There is much that is of priceless value in the world that is beyond the periphery of the world of commerce, and thus won't be fueled by it. Not everyone understands art that comes through inspiration, as is evidenced in an awkward scene in the film Great Expectations when a wealthy gentleman at the club asks the boy-gardener now grown up to be a young-artist: "Do you charge by the hour, or by the inch?" He is speaking in the language of commodities, not imagination. C.S. Lewis in his essay, On Three Ways of Writing for Children, rejects the question, "What do modern children like?" though he acknowledges there were writers of his day who "conceived of writing for children as a special department of "giving the public what it wants". You won't find those market-driven writers among the Tolkiens or the other classic Inklings.

Like poet Ezra Pound, I do not wish to live a segregated life, thus like Pound whom wrote to Louis Zukofsky: "My poetry and my econ are NOT separate or opposed. Essential unity." So, as I kept reading the Ezra Pound chapter, I delighted that it was those who breathed in inspiration like Pound and Hemingway, with limited monetary means themselves, who essentially catalyzed yet more creators of the likes of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. Here's one excerpt from The Gift:

"T.S. Eliot took a boat to London shortly before the First World War. He was working on a doctoral thesis. He had written some poems, most of which had been lying in a drawer for several years. Pound read them. "It is such a comfort," he wrote to Harriet Monroe, "to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914) on the calendar." He sent "Prufrock" to Poetry magazine and midwifed it into print, refusing to let Monroe change it, refusing even to give her Eliot's address so she might, as he put it, "insult" him through the mails with suggested alterations.

In 1921 Eliot left the manuscript of The Waste Land with Pound, and Pound went through it with his red pencil. He thought it was a masterpiece. [Tis that.] And why should its author not go on writing such masterpieces? Well, he was working as a clerk in Lloyd's Bank in London and didn't have the time. Pound decided to free him. He organized a subscription plan called "Bel Esprit." The idea was to find thirty people who could chip in fifty dollars each to help support Eliot. Pound chipped in, as did Hemingway, Richard Aldington, and others. Pound threw himself into it, hammering the typewriter, printing up a circular, sending out a stream of letters."

And: "As Hemingway wrote in a little "Homage to Ezra":

We have Pound...devoting, say, one fifth of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles for them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."

p.s. One of the things I'll be working on this year is a way to get some sort of microgrant social network up and running - sort of a cross between Josh Greene's fund (but anyone can join in, on either side - giving, receiving) and Kiva.org. I'll be discussing this and The Gift at this weekend's BarCampNOLA.

Art credits The Herringbone Orchestra's Flickr page.

miracles happen anyhow

"The genesis of this book was an event. I used to raise chickens and ducks for food. After a couple of years, a pack of coyotes discovered the easy meals, and I began to lose birds. I scared the coyotes away when I happened to be home, but I knew I could not forever stand guard. One day, when I saw a coyote stalking chickens I asked it to stop. I did this more out of frustration than conviction.

The odd thing was, the coyote did stop, and neither it or other pack members returned." - Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

Miracles are just things we don't expect, or don't understand, happening despite our understanding anyhow. Derrick Jensen's book begins one day when he began a "communion" with animals that he'd expected couldn't communicate with him.

Today, a field of daffodils did not speak to me whispering "We just wanted you to see this", as they did one March in 2006 when I had overshot my desired freeway exit  and thus subsequently pass their art show.

That's pretty standard opening fare for stories of miracles: "nothing much was happening, then..." or, "I was walking along and then I noticed, out of the blue..." or even, "I was 17, living on the streets of the Bronx, and slept on subway trains, ate out of garbage cans when...."

To shorten that last true story, of Lawrence Krisna Parker, better known as KRS-ONE, it's not like a miracle arrived overnight. He does say, in The New Beats, that spirituality in the form of metaphysics provided his only salvation. "It's a philosophy that says nothing you see is real. It's here only because you create it."

"Every day I'd wake up, and I wouldn't say I'm the greatest rap artist in the world, I'd say that I am rap music period. I am rap." Needless to say, KRS-ONE did indeed achieve his miracle.

Today, nothing miraculous happened at all. In fact, I woke up feeling pretty shitty. "Without a word of warning, the blues walked in this morning," was the refrain on a friend's Twitter, and I had to agree that was my mood. Usually, we think I feel shitty today, I felt shitty yesterday, therefore that is the trajectory of my life, when nothing could be further from the truth." Forget yesterday. Forget waking up on the wrong side of bed. Those are irrelevant to Now. Those are irrelevant to the Fool, who resides in infinite possibility. It's the card that says, I know nothing. And in that spaciousness, miracles are welcome.

So I begin the 40 day quest appropriately enough with the image of The Fool etched in my mind. It's actually the card I pulled this morning (and I'm not really using Tarot much these days, as it requires too much interpretation, but The Fool is a most straightforward card).

The Fool is like a child. Funny, Derrick Jensen admits in his book that the coyote communication wasn't that surprising, really, when he remembered. He'd totally forgotten his youth, and that he'd silenced his inner Fool:

"As is true for most children, when I was young I heard the world speak. Stars sang. Stones had preferences. Trees had bad days. Toads held lively discussions, crowed over a good day's catch. Like static on a radio, schooling and other forms of socialization began to interfere with my perception of the animate world, and for a number of years I almost believed that only humans spoke. The gap between what I experienced and what I almost believed confused me deeply." - Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

p.s. These are Jensen's words to the coyotes that first conversation: "Please don't eat the chickens. If you don't I will give you the head, feet, and guts whenever I kill one. And please, don't forget my work in defense of the wild."

Art credits Secret Garden by kayceeus

40 days of extraordinary miracles

I have managed to live once again near large sprawling oaks. Ravens visit too. It wasn't planned, but these sacred trees seem native to my spirit. Much of my inspiration derives from the Earth, and its devas and denizens. One of the most fruitful periods of my creativity was when I declared the very "next" forty day stretch of my life an adventure plunging headlong into an experiment I called "40 days of ordinary rapture."

I spent a lot of time with oaks, junipers, redwoods, magnolias, camellias, garden snails, morning glories, dawn, dusk, and pure inspiration. All this in a suburb in Silicon Valley, which is also ribboned and laced with a tapestry of concrete, strip malls, freeways and after-school tutoring for Stanford-bound students.

It ultimately frightened me I think when I stepped away from the immersion. ("It") All that buzzing radiant incandescence. The power of life. Sure, I once read a book that claimed that "miracles are natural" but it was another thing to witness it. Again, I stress the word "ordinary" was the intent of the 40 days of ordinary rapture, but that time was suffused with the extraordinary and blessed.

I realize I've been living for a long time in exile. In exile from that grace of inspiration. In exile of my total self. Self-censoring myself because volk and veldt wisdom is still marginalized in what most agree to be a rationed universe.

"[I]t was not uncommon for folk marginalized by the community (mystics, herbalists or witches, widows, eccentrics, and simpletons) to live in the wilds beyond the village, by choice or by necessity. An elderly neighbor of mine in Devon, England, remembers such a figure from her youth - a harmless old soul who lived in a cave and was believed to have prophetic powers." - The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest

So I am giving another experiment a try, starting Monday, February 11, 2008, more along the lines of 40 days of extraordinary miracles. We'll see.

Interesting snippet of a story below to whet your appetite. Here, a hard-hearted mother in medieval times sends her daughters into the unpredictable woods to fetch some eggs from the Widow. Funny, as my 40 days of ordinary rapture starts off with vivid fragments of Hansel and Gretel fairytale, and is an important theme. For context, Bergette starts out as Ghilane's "wicked" half-sister in Tanith Lee's story Among the Leaves So Green. Just a small snippet from one story in a beautiful anthology of mythic stories of the Green Man, dryads, and the Lady of the Forest which has a most beautiful way of expressing The Secret (especially if you read the story in entirety).

"Also oddly, Ghilane doesn't mind the Widow's shack. It smells of hens and cats (and toad?) but also of herbs and various medicines the Widow makes from nettles and similar things. Light streams in at a narrow window. They sit down on two stools.

"Have you made offerings at the Tree?" asks the Widow.

Ghilane hasn't lied to the Widow. Somehow she knows it wouldn't be much use. And the Widow anyway seems to know everything - all this is a formality.

"Yes."

"What did you ask for in return?"

"Silly things. Not to be hit."

"Didn't work, did it," says the Widow.

"No."

"But you go on thinking there's something in the Tree."

"Yes... I think... he's too busy to take any notice of me. But I know - I know he's there."

"So it's a man?" slyly asks the Widow.

"Yes," says Ghilane. "But not a man." She goes red and looks away. "I saw him, once."

The Widow seems amused again. "What did you see?"

Ghilane blushes until she thinks her head will burst, but she says, anyway, "It was early one morning. Bergette scalded me, and I ran up there to the Tree, but when I got close, I waited, because there was a wild boar there. Only it wasn't goring at the trunk, just standing still. And then it walked off. And when it did -- up in the leaves - sort of under the leaves -- "

"Yes?"

"Him."

"What was he like, then?"

"Like --" Ghilane can't say, since she has so far nothing to compare him to. If she had, she'd say, "Like a young prince." Or maybe not. Finally she says, "He was handsome, and there were leaves and grapes in his hair, and his eyes were green, and then they were black. And then the wind moved the branches and he was gone."

"I'll tell you," says the old woman, "what you've been doing wrong at that Tree. You haven't been asking for enough."

"Enough? But--"

"Listen hard. I'll say it once. Don't ask him to let you off a slap, or make your bruise stop hurting. That's no use. Because if he does it, next minute you'll have another bruise and you'll be slapped again, won't you?"

Ghilane nods, watching the hens.

"So what would you really have, girl, from the god in the green Tree? Think. Think carefully. Then speak it out."

Ghilane shakes back her hair and stands up, and raises her hands. "My life to be changed to something wonderful and new, something different - and far away from them all!"

"Be sure of it," says the Widow.

Ghilane is quite sure. She thinks, She's a witch, I've always known...

And then she sees straight through the Widow's veil, as if it isn't there.

Ghilane can't scream. She throws herself down on the floor, and the chickens cluck annoyedly. They don't worry about the presence of a god who's been around forever, and especially here since the Widow peacefully died at sunset, yesterday." - excerpt from Among the Leaves So Green, by Tanith Lee in anthology, The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest

Art credits The Lady of the Forest by Queeki; Celtic Tree of Life (via Myspace profile for Orchid2006). Update: I was alerted that the Celtic Tree of Life I found on MySpace, or Y Goeden Bywydis, is © by Welsh artist Jen Delyth.

indivisible oneness

There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even know that it exists." - Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

I have no interest in reading books from cover to cover any longer although I'll flip through a few pages to catch what sparkles through as gems, but mostly they seem to float at an edge of a surface realm, unwilling to plumb or dive. They bore me, rather than boring into depths. For most part, I've turned to children's books, which feel more honest - plus fun - just checked out today from the Alvar St. Library: Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest and Wynton Marsalis' poetic Jazz A-B-Z.

There is only one book that I did read cover to cover in one sitting lately: The Dark Places of Wisdom, by Peter Kinsgley.

"All through school and University I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps." - E .F. Schumacher (also author of the classic, Small is Beautiful)

Today marks the start of the Chinese New Year. Often Eastern mysticism is considered just that - Eastern, and of no relation or revelance to Western civilization. In one of my favorite excerpts from the book, (and it asks more questions than it answers) you begin to see that there were many-to-many influences throughout the ancient world. And these earliest Greek philosophers (lovers of truth/wisdom/sophia) were not afraid to be as gods: being-awareness:

"A iatromantis was concerned with indivisible oneness. His concern was very practical. What for us are impossible barriers were, for him, just places to put his feet. When you become familiar with a world beyond the senses, space and time don't hold much reality any more.

For the Greeks the god of this state of awareness was Apollo. In his consciousness space and time mean nothing. He can see or be anywhere; past and future are as present as the present is for us. And so he was a god of ecstasy, trance, cataleptic states - of states that take you somewhere. There was a single word in Greek to express this; it meant 'taken by Apollo'.

Apollo's ecstasy was different than the ecstasy of Dionysus. There was nothing wild or disturbing about it. It was intensely private, for the individual and the individual alone. And it happened in such stillness that anyone else might hardly notice it or could easily mistake it for something else. But in this total stillness there was total freedom at another level.

On that other level the freedom from space and time is simply a fact. Doubting it doesn't affect it in the slightest, and neither does believing it: beliefs or doubts don't touch here. To convey a sense of this freedom, one name given to those priests of Apollo was 'skywalker' - a term used as far east as Tibet ['skydancer'] and Mongolia in just the same way.

Because the state of consciousness they knew is beyond time and space isn't to say that it's separate from time and space: by its very nature it's separate from separation. This has become so difficult to appreciate. Either we deny the existence of other states of awareness, or else we put them in a hierarchy somewhere out of reach. And yet the separation is only in our own minds.

These people didn't exist independent of the physical world, and their freedom showed through at every level of their existence. It's no accident that they came from the towns and areas of Greece most famous for daring and adventure, for contacts with foreigners, for long-distance travel. What's also significant is the way all of them either lived on the eastern edges of the Greek world - the Black Sea, Anatolia, Crete - or were born into families that had emigrated from there.

And so many things about them are so close to the shamanic traditions of Central Asia or Siberia that the similarities have been noticed time and time again. Nowadays this tends to create a problem. Most historians have their particular field of interest, are afraid of what lies outside. They like to say the Iatromantis is a purely Greek phenomenon and dismiss the similarities as a coincidence. But they're not a coincidence at all.

The particular kind of techniques used by magical healers in Crete simply confirms what was already discovered long ago: the closeness of Crete's contacts with Babylonians and Mesopotamia. And even more significant are the earliest Greek reports about Iatromantis figures - reports about how they'd travel up to and down from regions far to the north and east of Greece, how they'd pass through areas inhabited by Iranian tribes that were shamanic cultures in their own right adn then on into Siberia and Central Asia.

Just a few traces survive of the poetry those people wrote describing their own journeys. But those traces ae informative enough. They contain clear evidence of familiarity with Iranian languages as well as with the myths of Central Asia, Mongolia, Tibet. And that's only a part of the picture. Objects and inscriptions have also been found that show a continuity of shamanic traditions stretching all the way from the boundaries of Greece across Asia to the Himalayas and Tibet, Nepal and India.

We think now of East and West. But then there were no real lines to be drawn. The oneness experienced by the Iatromantis on another level of awareness left its mark in the physical world. Even to talk about influence is to limit the reality of what was one vast network of nomads, of travellers, of individuals who lived in time and space but also were in touch with something else.

The way so many stories and practices associated with the Iatromantis in Greece have their exact parallels among shamans, and the way they keep occuring in the traditions of Indian yoga as well: this is more than a coincidence. What would soon be covered over and rationalized in Greece was preserved and developed in India. What in the West had been an aspect of mystery, of initiation, became classified and formalized in the East. And there the state glimpsed or experienced by Greeks - the state that could be called a dream but isn't an ordinary dream, that's like being awake but isn't being awake, that's like being asleep but isn't - had its own names. Sometimes it was simply referred to as the 'fourth', turiya. It became better known by the title of samadhi.

Nothing would be easier than to think these traditions never took root in the West, or to believe that even if they did they were never of any importance for the history of Western culture. But that's not the case. Just one of the people whose poetry has repeatedly been mentioned over the past century - without anyone quite understanding the why or how - as an example of shamanic poetry in the West is Parmenides."

Paramenides is often called the father of philosophy.

"Always we want to learn from outside, from absorbing other people's knowledge. It's safer that way. The trouble is that it's always other people's knowledge. We already have everything we need to know, in the darkness inside ourselves. The longing is what turns us inside out until we find the sun and the moon and stars inside." - Peter Kingsley, The Dark Places of Wisdom

Art credits Flame of Love by Brenda Clews via her blog, Rubies in Crystal. http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2006/08/flame-of-love.html

the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow

"For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw,