"Caustic" a friend's subject line reads the other day.
Text message from another friend this a.m.: "Can u feel it. hav alot of fire in venus these days and for years to come.can ya handl it."
Reply: "complete consummation..let the fire consume me...what remains is the only real me"
Easier said.
I steer clear of most folks right now because this Kali energy feels too fierce and fiery. (Are newborn dragons and infant feathered serpents cordoned off because they might accidently singe someone?)
One day mesmerized enchanted spellbound by a rotating milky way orb of multi-dimensional geometric luminosity coming to vibrant vibration writhing before my eyes, I felt an inferno arising inside. My face was ablaze, the heat unearthly, uncontrollable, and I nearly blacked out.
"Congratulations," the instructor said when I told him later why I had had to sit down during the ceremony. "That's kundalini. Prana. You got it."
Though I'd been taught to be kind, and tolerant, somewhere in my youth I crossed over to people-pleasing pushover. However, lately, any and everything confining, binding, or tying elicits a zero-tolerance roar: "Get those chains off me at once!"
I've always been an exclusive devotee of the Air elementals - of winged messengers and the sword of intellect and the twinkle of wind chimes and so too the hum of words in poetry and cloud - caring naught for (and giving a wide berth to) the seering flames of Fire. Though I have a feeling before She is through with me, I will have embraced each and every one of the elements - and then some.
"There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish." - John Keats
On my birthday weekend, I had the fortune to meet a complete stranger (whom happened to live on 22 something Cinderella Avenue) as I was fishing for dollars to buy a Caltrain ticket to San Francisco. He sold me his already used day pass for $3.
We got to talking while waiting for my train and he asked if he could keep hanging out with me on the train ride into SF. I made it clear that as soon as I arrived in SF, I had plans with a friend, but that the train ride would be fine to continue our conversation. To make a long story short, in that hour plus interval into the city, he somehow managed to convince himself that this was love at first sight, and I somehow spent the entire ride explaining the concept of platonic friendship while lifting his groping hands off me. When we arrived in the city, amidst the grey skies and grey skyscapers, he enthusiastically described how I could blow off my friend, we'd go dancing at a street festival on Market and some other intersection, then go out to eat, and ...
I don't recall my exact words. I unleashed a torrent about it being my birthday, and how I am in charge of my own birthday plans, and that I had no intention of blowing off my friend, and I walked off with him standing on the corner with mouth gaping open.
I wished I'd handled it with the aplomb befitting a priestess-poet - and I felt strange for the next half hour turning over the mossy stone of mind wondering if I was wrong yet curiously not feeling wrong. There was a sense of personal dominion and freedom over my own life and the courage to stand up for it that is becoming a new way of being.
There might have been a time I'd compromise, and do the spiritual lovey "be nice" thing and suggest he come over to meet my friend, and maybe the three of us could hang out.
Why compromise? I was through, and that was that.
"There is no failure in being human. It does not matter if you waste your life, or you use your life appropriately, Whatever you are choosing to do is just fine. There are no mistakes, there are no failures. There is nothing you can do wrong. The essences of wrong was given to you as a limitation; as was the frequency of death to limit you and bind you in fear. In the Orient they bind the feet. In some cultures they bind the head, in others they bind the heart. Cut away all things that bind you and no longer serve you." - Gillian MacBeth-Louthan
There were no barbs accompanying this No. It was a clean No
that Eckhart Tolle describes, yet it had more bit more fury to it than I'd have liked - like a storm surge behind a levee breaks apart in a fury - because I'd held back too long and played agreeable through the entire train ride.
I've never said No as often as I have this 2007.
These are times we shall be saying a lot of No's. There is always a committed Yes embedded around any No if you look closely. Saying No here, deepens the Yes elsewhere. It's part and parcel of the sorting process, the laser focus process, going on: Yes, No, No, No, No, No, No, Yes, No, Yes.
Caustic, an overloaded word, a slew of negative connotations. I sense my soul friend and I are feeling our newfound personal power spilling over into misunderstandings. We both tend toward trying to be nice (read: pushover). So secretly I actually applaud his pushback.
I sense we are communicating with the codes, signs and symbols of the times.
Maybe it was spying the incarnated fire elemental scurrying away from the dance studio a week ago that gave me pause. What am I afraid of? She is purifying innocence. Her pink and crimson sequin blushes across thigh-high dress sparkles revealing her long lean twigs of kindling, burnt straw hair tied up in tinsel sparks of fireworks.
Caustic, from Greek kaustikos, from kaustos, from kaiein, kau-, to burn.
The surface fire blazes away the rotting brush and makes way for an opening in the forest canopy. New baby sproutings unfurling buds can now drink and sup on liquid sunshine pouring into their chalice.
The forest mystery cloaks herself with regal giant sequoia, lodgepole pine, and jack pine. Conifer pinecones yearn for the extreme heat of brush fire to be released from cone itself and germinate and burst free into multiplication.
Though we wonder to ourselves fervently as this fire rages. The intensity and the fury. Will it consume the forest entire?
Sometimes, I know without a doubt, that this Fire is entirely alike the one that swirled through Moses' burning bush. That bush burned aright, yet did not burn up. The dross merely torched away in the crucible of freedom and love.
"Piano as an orchestra of sound waterfalling through "Tea for Two" changes, with the skeleton of the melody baring its trivia from moment to moment. I listened to it again and again, trying to grasp the difference between the song line and what [Bud] Powell was doing to it. Melody versus improvisation; what someone else had written versus what Powell was doing to and with it. Somehow an idea vaguely made its way through: you don't have to play somebody else's melody - you can improvise (how?), you make up your own tune! WOW - really? You mean, I don't have to repeat my parents? I don't have to 'play their melody' for the rest of my life?" - "Eight Fire Sources", by Clayton Eshleman, Poetry Flash, Fall 2006
Caustic...
"A
single ray of light has a pathetic repertoire, limited to bending and
bouncing (into water, glass or air, and from mirrors). But when rays
are put together into a family - sunlight, for example - the
possibilities get dramatically richer. This is because a family of rays
has the holistic property, not inherent in any individual ray, that it
can be focused so as to concentrate on caustic lines and surfaces.
Caustics are the brightest places in an optical field. They are the
singularities of geometrical optics. The most familiar caustic is the
rainbow, a grossly distorted image of the Sun in the form of a giant
arc in the skyspace of directions, formed by the angular focusing of
sunlight that has been twice refracted and once reflected in
raindrops." - Rene Descartes
Yes, I'm into social art of creating a new civilization. An art colony. A rainbow society. The time of the lone wolf is behind me. My soul kin, the soul team magnetizes me, as I them. It is our overlapping passions and overlapping waves that galvanize us, that bring us to each other.
"[S]oul groups will now be coming together in a way that reflects an overlap of similar purpose in regard to creating the New Earth... All aspects that relate to the blueprint of what we have chosen to make the reality of the New Planet Earth, will then come together to create it as a team. We cannot do it on our own! These overlaps [of passion] will create some very incredible teams indeed.
...When we clash with another, many times it is only because their specific purpose is not the same as ours. That person belongs to another team....Because of this phenomenon of higher vibrating energy creating a refining process and a separation of sorts, we can also experience sudden separations from those whom we felt were so very close to us. We simply have differing roles now in regard to purpose. Until we reached critical mass in August of 2005 and then more highly vibrating new energies arrived in July of 2006, the purpose of lightworkers was in raising the consciousness and vibration of the planet. After this was accomplished, resulting in reaching a specific vibrational level, lightworkers would then be ready to begin the process of creating the New World.
New connections would begin to become evident in the fall (season) of 2006, as these new connections would be paramount for the beginning of these new teams of similar purpose." - Karen Bishop, Staying In Alignment, from excerpt of chapter, "With Others"
Caustic...alsooooooo gravitating wavy waviness
Caustic I by Eric Heller, 2001, 32" x 45", LightJet print
"Caustics are places where things accumulate; here light is accumulating
in characteristic shapes on a sea bottom, after being refracted by
two consecutive wavy surfaces. This image was inspired by our study of
propagation of waves through random media, which affects everything
from twinkling of stars to whale communication."
"The poet's role is to tell of things that might happen, things that are possible. Aristotle adds that the poet may imitate life not as it is, but as it ought to be." - Fashion diva Vivienne Westwood's manifesto, "Active Resistance to Propaganda"
This is this poet's Law of Attraction: The unseen language, the green language of glyphs and motion, communicates impulses through waves of vibration inextricably intimately intricately inexplicably simultaneously in explosions of dimensions seen and unseen of sound and light.
when u type i see lots of musical notes flyn off ur typing machine - friend, and seer from other coast, in text message
I believe in the beginning, there was only sound. Pulses of light next. And Tesla centuries before his time. Souls re-sound, resonate, and accumulate bouncing with like-hearted mates. Spelunking together into the cave of the Heart. (Yes Virginia every vibrating being has soul: that slab of stone to this keyboard too.)
"You can have some amazing hallucinogenic experiences doing nothing but looking out your window. There is also the summer, when it gets hot and sticky and the air is very metallic. There is a lot of Indian spirit. The earth there is unusual, filled with ore. So there is something happening that is hard to define. There is a magnetic attraction there." - Bob Dylan, 1978 Playboy interview
Caustic...a word woven in our minds with corrosion. Yes, my own education lept me into the association caustic = corrosive, deterioration, rust (rainbows and water waves were secondary growth planted after the fire burnt through the debris of my mind). My alchemical soul purified, I imbibed the multidimensional nature of caustic:
"The materials most resistant to corrosion are those for which corrosion is thermodynamically unfavorable. Any corrosion products of gold or platinum tend to decompose spontaneously into pure metal, which is why these elements can be found in metallic form on Earth, and is a large part of their intrinsic value. More common "base" metals can only be protected by more temporary means." - Wikipedia on corrosion
And so be it if should I be a caustic agent in this last turn of this age of iron, the Kali Yuga, as the wheel spirals into its next cycle, for I know we are pure gold - pay no mind to all the dross.
Humans don't rust. Baser metal will not survive the intensity of the burning, yet the underlying gold will shine, fiercely radiant.
Just the other day, before head gyrates to horizontal dreams, I write this Alchemist's Prayer. I am not always 100 percent certain that my intentions, desires, and Will are in alignment with the Whole. So I state my wish, adding:
If my intentions are not of the Highest, please transmute them for the Whole. That is what I am here for: the complete transmutation of our basest desires into the very finest Gold of All.
Namaste, golden beings.
UPDATE: "Melt into water. levitate in air. consummed by fire. I think love braids all three yearnings to surrender, let go." - me, in text message to friend last night
June 12th, I had an extraordinary occurence that brought this story into the realms of karmic and soul healing. I drew the Adjustment, or Justice Tarot card yesterday (pops up frequently... again today for instance). It's been a card that baffles me. Yesterday it dawned on me that it represents the harmonious symphony of wisdom, love, and power; of air, water, fire in an elemental sense; or the triune of crown, heart and solar plexus chakras in terms of the body temple. The dance is being all three at once and attuned to the drumbeat of the Earth. Too much fire can be caustic, can hurt; too little and our passion and will whimper down to charred remains. Anyhow, it's quite a story and worth it's own post.
The golden age is the embodiment of our higher selvs.ful on.all the time. u ready. - friend's text message this a.m.
Bonus: By the way, Earth elementals and other devas are known as The Shining Ones by the ancients. This excerpt below from The Path of the Priestess: A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine, by Sharron Rose, sheds a little remembrance into one Golden Age and the one we're evolving into (hmmm, odd to write it that way, as if time was linear rather than stacked simultaneous into a symphony of eternal Now).
images Untitled (How to Make a Rainbow), Joseph Cornell (my guess is it's this Joseph Cornell) via Dust Congress; Rainbow Serpent, by Brad at Nowa Nowa Primary School in southeastern Australia; Earth and Sky, by Vicky Brago-Mitchell; Rainbow Mountain, by Vicky Brago-Mitchell (yes, you must check out Vicky's entrancing fractal art) Caustic I, by Eric Heller
aa"According to the ancient texts human beings did not evolve from some inanimate and simplistic form, as our modern scientists would have us believe. Rather, we emerged fully realized at the start of the Golden Age. Every spiritual tradition speaks of this time, whether it is known as the primordial paradise, the Garden of Eden, the first world, the Dreamtime, or the Satya Yuga. In fact, teachings from spiritual traditions around the world describe this as an age of primal perfection in which humanity was one with nature and spiritual order prevailed.
During this idyllic age the world and all its components - from human beings to plants and minerals - were seen and experienced as the immense manifest body of the formless. We were part of the dance of divinity unfolding itself. Therefore we had no need of outward images, rites, and rituals to help us maintain our link with divinity. According to the French alchemist Fulcanelli, we experienced total balance and alignment with the universe. Female and male lived together in a state of continual bliss. Fulcanelli states, "Living a contemplative existence, in harmony with a fertile, rejuvenated earth; our blessed ancestors were unacquainted with desire, pain or suffering." In this luminous garden of delight we were at peace with ourselves, each other, and the world we inhabited.
In the Golden Age, which is extremely difficult for us to even imagine, let alone articulate, because of our current position in the cycle [Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron Ages], our reality was not as solid as it appears to our modern earthbound senses, but rather an exquisitely subtle vibratory reality composed of light and sound. This was the period of new beginnings, when the divine intelligence manifested itself in the wealth of forms that make up our world and the spiritual realm became conscious of itself as the manifest world and as the divine power governing it. In this remarkable age all beings, knowing themselves to be the energy of divinity fashioned into a luminous form, were naturally conscious of the world of spirit, and their external reality reflected this spiritual consciousness. This was the mythic age of goddesses and gods, the age of the immortals. There was no veil separating life and death [in fact, I believe death never ever crossed any being's thoughtform yet], and our innate consciousness was free to fly between the spiritual and material realms.
In the myths and legends of many civilizations we discover these goddesses and gods, our divine progenitors. In their shimmering, translucent world of light, which existed prior to the formation of the veils of linear time, the process of entropy had not yet begun. The laws of physics and the forces of gravity of the later ages did not constrain these suprahuman beings. Therefore, in their deeds and demeanor they demonstrated abilities that appear extraordinary to our modern sensitivities.
This was an epoch of purity, innocence, beauty, and truth, the era that the Australian Aborginines refer to the eternal Dreamtime [the eternal Dreamtime has no beginning nor end], that occurred before time [appeared to have] began. In this first age of the Dreaming, it is said that the vast expanse of primordial space was infused with the power and intensity of great mythical energies and beings who realized their dreams and visions without the limitations of embodied existence. As vital forms of fluid, divine energy joyously weaving, playing, and manifesting their inner light as external reality, they planted the essential seed emerging from the residue of the former mahayuga [Hindu: great cycle]. From this perspective our original ancestors were not primitive apes but a magical display of the very essence, nature, and energy of the primordial source of all creation fashioned into a luminous form.
One of our most insightful explanations of the beings of the Satya Yuga [first Golden Age] can be found in the Tibetan Buddhist teachings. These teachings describe a subtle dimension of light known as the Sambhogakaya, or wealth dimension. It is a magical realm composed of the luminous essence of the elements that make up our concrete physical world. As we have seen in chapter 2, to the initiate these essential energies appear as multiple symbolic forms or realized beings known as dakinis, dakas, bodhisattvas, herukas, and so forth. Each of these forms is perceived by the initiate as the personification of a principle of pure wisdom, and each serves as an inspirational role model whose qualities are in perfect alignment with the highest spiritual values. But this is not the only ancient tradition in which these sacred beings of light appear and interact with the awakened practitioner. The angels of the Judeo-Christian and Zorasterian traditions, the kachinas of the Hopis, and the neters of the Egyptian tradition [plus the devas of the Druids and pagans] can all be considered present-day links to this extraordinary age. For this was a time in which dynamic archetypal energies radiated like shimmering rays of light from the primordial source of all becoming. How would it affect our perception of ourselves as human beings if we were to imagine that these radiant beings were our ancestors?
[Fast forward through chapter through Silver Age of Ritual, the Bronze Age of Doubt, Iron Age of Chaos, to section titled "The Time of Transition", or as I'd say a time at the crossroads]...For those who are firmly attached to their earthly material existence, who can only see within the limits of their own lives, let alone their own cycles, this chaotic time does appear to be the literal end of the world. The signs of the end, as documented in sacred texts from the Revelations of the Bible to the Corpus Hermeticum and the Tantras, can be seen throughout the modern world. For the people who cannot see beyond the veil, we are in the metaphoric "winter of our discontent," the season of death and the deepest darkness. But as all these sacred teachings reveal, from the depths of darkness comes the greatest light. And so for others this is the heralded time of the great alchemical transmutation of humanity. It is the time in which the metaphorical black coal, or prima materia, of our being has the greatest possibility of being transmuted into the pure crystalline diamond. When this happens an extraordinary shift occurs, as we are filled once again with the pure light of divinity and become the spiritual seeds of a new Golden Age.
These sacred teachings of East and West have their parallel in those recently brought forward by medical anthropologist Dr. Alberto Villoldo, who has spent many years studying and transmitting the sacred teachings of the Incan shamans of Peru. These shamans have told him that humanity has reached what they refer to as the pachacuti, or period of renewal that occurs at the end of time. During this transitional time of upheaval when the world will be "turned right side up again," there will be a "tear in the fabric of time itself, a window into the future through which a new human species will emerge. They call this new species Homo luminous."
According to the Brahma Kumaris, a spiritual group from the north of India that is steeped in the ancient ways of the feminine and the values of nurturing, communion, and grace, humanity has now moved beyond the Kali Yuga into a new transitional age, which they refer to as the Diamond Age or Age of Confluence. This is an age of consciousness that is not manifested in the physical, when those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear become aware of the great call to the light.
...Only when our actions spring from an honest and open heart can we begin to create a world free of the demons of fear, greed, and deception. Only when we have the courage to clearly see ourselves and freely admit how deeply we are entrenched in the darkness - how far we have allowed ourselves to fall from the pure light of truth and integrity - can we begin to dream a new world and give birth to a new shining age of spirit. For out of the ashes of the Kali Yuga the Golden Age is born. Out of the depths of darkness light is born." - The Path of the Priestess, by Sharron Rose
I know you must already know this, but I'll say it here anyway. I trust you to do what is right for you, and I'm so glad you did exactly what you did. Happy belated birthday, and thank you for helping me, too, be a little more free.
Posted by: Siona | Jun 12, 2007 at 12:40 AM
Brave.
Sincere.
Beauty.
Lover.
Sentimentalist.
Lucid.
Tranquil.
Provocateur.
Providential.
Cheers,
~~michael
Posted by: michael pokocky | Jun 12, 2007 at 02:45 AM
such a beautiful 5 ye spin, kin
wrapping around six
until we be 11
loves,
Posted by: thomas | Jun 12, 2007 at 12:52 PM
Funny Siona, I just "happened" to run into said guy at the bus stop on Tuesday evening... which makes that about 10 days after the birthday train trip. It was beautiful to have an opportunity to have a "do over", and really part peaceably. We both apologized; and it was remarkably simple and natural.
Thanks so much for the kind words, Michael!
Thanks Thomas, aha, methinks I spot a new poet-bard-alchemist friend.
Posted by: Evelyn Rodriguez | Jun 14, 2007 at 10:48 AM
Wow I love your writing style, from a fire sign.
Posted by: Michael | Aug 24, 2007 at 07:33 PM
i love you
Posted by: Ayse Gursoz | Feb 02, 2008 at 03:59 AM
I want some of what you're on.
Posted by: Fixed Gear | Apr 30, 2009 at 02:30 AM
All I have to say is that I was hooked from the beginning! Had to read it all, I'm inspired... Love your writing style, very sincere and sentimental.
Posted by: Ivan Loves Law of Attraction | Oct 22, 2009 at 06:09 AM
incredible, words can't explain how i like this blog. love it.
Posted by: Jude | Dec 21, 2009 at 02:34 PM
There should be a better way to start a day than waking up every morning.
Posted by: Supra Footwear | Nov 02, 2010 at 01:37 AM