Crossroads Dispatches

I felt the feeling of wet earth oozing between my naked toes.

One of the most beautiful, inspiring things I've read lately. I'm keeping this one tucked in a pocket. And more importantly, applying.

"If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities." - Maya Angelou

{Context: There's been a three-year drought in the southwest USA...}

"The old ones say that it has been over one hundred years since the rains have left us for so long," David replied. "That is why we have come to this place, to call to the rain."

{David prays, and arises.} ... "Already?" I asked, a little surprised. It seemed as though we had just arrived. "I thought you were going to pray for rain."

... "No, I said that I would 'pray rain'", he replied. "If I had prayed for rain, it would never happen."

{That afternoon it begins to rain--a lot.}

..."When I was young," he had said, "our elders passed to me the secret of prayer. The secret is that when we ask for something, we acknowledge what we do not have. Continuing to ask only gives power to what has never come to pass.

"The path between man and the forces of this world begins in our hearts. It is here that our feeling world is married to our thinking world. In my prayer, I begin with the feeling of gratitude for all that is and all that has come to pass. I gave thanks for the desert wind, the heat, and the drought, for that is the way of it, until now. It is not good. It is not bad. It has been our medicine.

"Then I chose a new medicine. I began to have the feeling of what rain feels like. I felt the feeling of rain upon my body. Standing in the stone circle, I imagined that I was in the plaza of our village, barefoot in the rain. I felt the feeling of wet earth oozing between my naked toes. I smelled the smell of rain on the straw-and-mud walls of our village after the storms. I felt what it feels like to walk through fields of corn growing up to my chest because the rains have been so plentiful. The old ones remind us that this is how we choose our path in this world. We must first have feelings of what we wish to experience. This is how we plant the seeds of a new way. From that point forward," David continued, "our prayer becomes a prayer of thanks."

"Thanks. Do you mean thanks for what we have created?" [, author asks.]

"No, not for what we may have created," David replied. "Creation is already complete. Our prayer becomes a prayer of thanks for the opportunity to chose which creation we experience. Through our thanks we honor all possibilities and bring the ones we choose into this world." - The Isaiah Effect, by Gregg Braden

"Creation is only the projection into form of that which already exists." - The S'rîmad Bhâgavatam (or the Bhâgavata Purâna).

Art Credits: Sonoita Rain, by Nancy Weaver Monsman

fluid celebration - blog action day 2010 - water installation

This is my contribution for Blog Action Day. This year's theme is water. I recall a ferry ride across the Mississippi in the setting sun in April 2008. My intuition was going haywire giving me something about a "water installation." As I landed in New Orleans, I noted a department store mall storefront on Canal Street with the words charity : water. I wrote it down since the serendipity was too vivid to ignore. I'd never heard of charity:water before.

I kept getting hits of intuition and inspiration involving a water installation, ("but I'm a writer!" I protest to the universe). I continued to brush these inspirations away.

After the Gulf oil spill April 2010, I understood the urgency and regretted that I didn't follow through. So that's partly the inspiration for the following.

"Water is the driving force of all nature." - Leonardo da Vinci

Setting: Sometime in the "future."

Women dressed in diaphonous cloud gingerly twirl with jars balanced on the tiptop of their crowns. In single file, they tiptoe to a well. One filly breaks into a trot and the rest scatter bouncing and bounding in a frolic to the spring. Behind them the scene is draped in waterfalls. On their return with filled jars weighing up to forty pounds, they circumnavigate the circuitous stream feeding the spring in a slow dance that exudes both sublime saunter and rapturous giggle.

The live installation celebrates the purification of water worldwide and the emancipation of women from retreiving water from miles away and storing emotions.

One grey-eyed dancer takes a large clay jar and pours water tenderly into a thin-necked copper pitcher, another woman with flowing black hair pours a jar into a wide porcelain pitcher. Each chooses her own vessel.

Spritely as a naiad, the porcelain pitchered empress brings the pitcher to a young man sitting in the circle.

He looks into the pitcher as if a mirror, and reflected and refracted in all the pools they see passing emotions skipping across the sloshing oval like a stone across a lake--a flash of fiery anger, an image of an old grudge, the anguish of an ancient trauma...a flood, perhaps---and the stone stops, the ripples fade, the water stills and pitcher is passed to the next in the circle. He stands up and joins the dance.

The celebration is performed on a regular basis. No two the same. We can't tell you when the next one is exactly as time itself is fluid--we'll be expecting you. 

make our destiny -- it's in the cards

Starting this coming Monday, October 11, 2010--excluding weekends--for 54 days, we're going to collectively contribute to a group "notebook" (it's NOT this blog).

Our group notebook will provide a space and impetus to roam in the arena of "the world I want," something most of us don't always give time and attention to comparatively. The bonus is the act of fleshing out details in writing or drawing crystallizes our visualizations into a pre-reality. As I mentioned, let's use the example of Leornardo da Vinci's stetchbooks of fantastical and visionary inventions and events for our own.

"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active." - Leonardo da Vinci

This notebook will be easy to post to. Include your wildest imaginings and aspirations for a beautiful future written in present tense (be specific as possible), and any accompanying photos via email to post@loteria.posterous.com. Everything is anonymous unless you specify your name in a signature at the end of your email.

"There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory." - Josh Billings

Because this is new, I'll give you a hint of what to expect for Monday. We're going to be cycling through the 54 cards in the Loteria deck since they are simple, concrete rather than abstract symbols. There really is no rhyme or reason to the selection of the Loteria cards. There is a story, however. But the story can wait.

Monday the card theme is La Campana, or The Bell. (Because it's a US holiday, submissions may start on Sunday.) The card will change daily.

If you're a writer, consider the card simply as a writing prompt. You need not be held to the literal symbol in your daydreaming. Use the Bell simply as a catalyst or starting point.

Perhaps it takes you off into a vision of using sound and vibration to lift raw materials, such as stone block, for the construction of buildings ala the Great Pyramids. Or perhaps you it reminds you of a friend whom wanted to install bell towers all through New Orleans and synchronicize the music. Or perhaps you remember a bell ringing everyday in Oaxaca and that reminds you of how much you adore town squares and plazas. So you write about town squares and common areas. Who knows?

"Impossibility is only the figment of an insufficient imagination." - Phil Duncan

You may also submit sketches, collages, etc and never write a single word in a language if you wish, or even create your own language. I'll investigate if and how we can post music and video (only original or remixed, please) onto the notebook.

"Live out of your imagination, not your history." - Stephen Covey

The guidelines are:

1. Truly desire what you are writing, imagining, concocting, conjuring, sketching for yourself. If it's just so-so for you or just seems like something you should want, consider what a friend told me: a 99% yes is still a no. Why settle? The notebook is meant to be liberating! Go for it! If it's not ringing true, keep going deeper and perhaps use your first draft as a springboard to delve deeper or sideways or simplify or be bolder with your vision. It's easy with pervasive media to get caught up in second-hand dreams that aren't necessarily yours. This 54-day process will help us sift through these dreams streaming through us, separating the pure from the dross, the inspired from the expired.

2. Write or draw in present tense. Describe or draw it as if it is happening. One viewpoint is to even consider time as "simultaneous," so that we don't get caught up in past, present, future tense at all. (For instance, consider time as a river. From an eagle's perspective it may view the entirety of it; from a piece of flotsam floating in the river it feels more linear.)

3. Write in the positive. For instance, "The world is without disease and decay" can be phrased "It's a world of perfect health and regeneration. " (For the notebook, I'm aiming for more specific and fleshed-out images and narratives than generalities such as above.)

You can also use other folks' daydreams as a springboard to your own sketches and writing, as well. In fact, that's pretty much the fun part of having this be a group project. More on why this is a group project, I could have simply done the notebook solo, in future posts.

Join us, and spread the notebook to your soul kin: Make our destiny--it's in the cards. Send submissions to post@loteria.posterous.com from October 11, 2010 to December 23, 2010. (You can start on October 10, 2010 for The Bell.)

p.s. The notebook is definitely NOT this blog, so if you subscribe via email your inbox won't be deluged. This blog will be focused on topics related to inspiration, imagination, innovation, and infinite possibilities.

You can view contributions to the group notebook by visiting http://loteria.posterous.com

ART CREDITS: One re-imagining of da Vinci's notebook (not an actual spread from da Vinci works) by Dreimond; a page from Brion Gysin and William Burroughs' Third Mind cut-up notebook (I was blessed to see this great exhibition); the Bell loteria card; this one is an actual page from a Leonardo da Vinci notebook

the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." - Eleanor Roosevelt

Are you failing at sequestering and segregating yourself into the molds that creativity is confined by these days? I am. Without going into the long story, I have tabled a long-standing narrative alternate reality game (ARG) that I've been working on for over a year.

Why?

I realized that there was a far more direct path to what I wanted to achieve than an ARG. (It was a means to an end.)

If what Ana Mendieta's work was is called body art, and Patrick Dougherty's sculptures are environmental art, then maybe what I'm/we're going to attempt might be called "aether art," after the archaic spelling of the fifth element.

My art seeks to challenge prevailing notions of "impossibility."

While walking in Manhattan last week, I saw an HSBC billboard: "O.3% of Saharan solar energy could power Europe. Do you see a world of potential? We do."

I am more than aware that many folks are more focused on what's wrong, and who's to blame. I am not concerned with them. Do you see a world of potential? How do you crystallize these types of visions?

The thing with "aether art" is its mostly invisible to the naked eye. Aether art is basically daydreaming taken up to the level of an art form. And although aether art ends up materializing in matter eventually, there is no way I know of to prove any linkage between the imagination and the materialization. So the world of matter tends to be one of unsigned artworks. Yet like Leonardo daVinci, we'll keep a notebook of our imaginary inventions and vibrant visions to serve as an artifact and as our studio/stetchbook.

If you're familiar with ideas from books like The Power, by Rhonda Byrne (also author of The Secret) and the teachings of Esther and Jerry Hicks (for instance, the metaphor of the stream of life), you'll have a clue to what I'm aiming at. However, the caveat being I don't buy into notion of the "Law of Attraction" in the same sense (for instance, I don't really regard thoughts to be the medium of the canvas, metaphorically).

The second caveat is I'm interested in invention, I know you can "manifest" a ripe plum or a Mercedes Benz with equal ease. While most of these teachings focus on creating things you're already familiar with such as jewelry, cars, real estate or situations like a new job, I am not. That's called shopping. Nothing necessarily wrong with shopping. Simply I am inclined toward inventing new and never-been-yet, or at least remixing the ready-made objects into something original.

I keep saying "we" because I'd like you to take your dreams into reality, too. I believe it was the same night I saw the "Do you see a world of potential?" billboard, that I went to see an exhibit of Brion Gysin's artworks at the New Museum. In 1958, he moved into a residence hotel in Paris that also housed William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso. It was affectionately dubbed The Beat Hotel. The curator noted because of the intense interaction between the artists (especially productive between Burroughs and Gysin), "Gysin's four years at the so-called "Beat Hotel" would be his most productive of his entire career."

I work best if I can have peers as a sounding board. Maybe you do too? There's more. I'm hoping to magnetize and galvanize a very creative group of people that is able to catapult all of us into larger possibilities than we could have conceived of solely ourselves. 

“I'm not a teacher, but an awakener.” - Robert Frost

I'll go into this more in future posts. It's all going to be public. And I'm going to refrain from self-help teaching (I'll still offer original opinions) as it's not necessarily my foremost passion. I want to connect with peers, and the student-teacher relationship precludes that.

Even the idea of "awakener" can be construed in some hierarchical sense. My slant is towards awaking what's already a seed in you and having that be nurtured toward growth.

When I worked part-time at a hat store that stocked probably a hundred styles, people often gravitated immediately to their ideal (not always), and if it truly were a click everyone would exclaim, "Oh, that's you!" I'm looking to encourage people to yield to the aspirations that truly fit them, not making anyone conform to my style, or prevailing popular ones necessarily either. I may cite copious resources in the footnotes perhaps, and hope you're either (a) already familiar with the application of the material or (b) able and willing to experiment on your own. The focus is all on what imagine and create in our world and examples of folks that are suspending disbelief and imagining the so-called impossible, rather than any how-to's.

A lovely sense of creative camaderie that really speaks to me is captured in a snippet of an interview in Iceland:

"I ask Larus [1] about the creative buzz in the Reykjavik[, Iceland] air. Where does it come from--and how can I get some?"

He presses his glasses against his nose.

"Envy."

"What about it?"

"There's not much in Iceland."

The lack of envy he's talking about is a bit different from what I saw in Switzerland. The Swiss suppress envy by hiding things. Icelanders suppress envy by sharing them. Icelandic musicians help one another out, Larus explains. If one band needs an amp or a lead guitarist, another band will help them out, no questions asked. Ideas, too, flow freely, unencumbered by envy, that most toxic of the seven deadly sins. Once unleashed, writes Joseph Epstein in his treatise on the subject, "envy tends to diminish all in whom it take possession."

This relative lack of envy is one sure sign of a Golden Age, says Peter Hall. Here he is describing turn-of-the-century Paris but could just as easily be describing twenty-first-century Reykjavik: "They lived and worked in each other's pockets. Any innovation, any new trend, was immediately known, and could be freely incorporated into the work of any of the others." In other words, the Paris artists of 1900 [more accurately, 1900-1920s] believed in open-source software. [2] So, too, do Icelanders. Sure, they compete, but in the way the word was originally intended. The roots of the word "compete" are the Latin competure, which means to "seek with."

... But I still sensed I was missing something. How can it be that this flyspeck of a nation produces more artists and writers per capita than any other?

"It's because of failure," Says Larus, pushing his glasses hard against the bridge of his nose.

"Failure?"

"Yes, failure doesn't carry a stigma in Iceland. In fact, in a way we admire failures."

... The more I thought about this, the more sense it made. For if you are free to fail, you are free to try.

... There's no one on the island telling them that they're not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write." - Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grumps Search for the World's Happiest Places

[1] A bit more about Larus whom the author interviewed: "In forty-odd years, Larus has earned a living not only as a chess player but also as a journalist, a construction-company executive, a theologian, and, now, a music producer. "I know," he says, sensing my disbelief. "But that kind of resume is completely normal in Iceland."

[2] Hailing from the software industry, I know that open source software developers tend to collaborate on a common project, whereas each of the "Golden Age" artists had their own body of work. I'm more keen on you creating your work of art, than necessarily jumping into a bandwagon that may not be your true calling.

Bonus: I gave a copy of The Power, by Rhonda Byrne to someone close to me. Their remarks after a few chapters. Long sigh, then: "I wish it were that easy. I have too much to worry about." Soon after, I happen to read the following paragraph. Yes, our minds will continuously harp on the impossibilities and seeming unsurmountable odds. But we're not attempting brain surgery, it's heart work. Something we can all tap into:

"I dedicate all of my work to the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. I say our "hearts", because our minds tell us it is not possible. Our minds doubt that things will ever be much different than experience has taught us. You may, as you read the forgoing encomium to a sacred economy, have felt a wave of cynicism, contempt, or despair. You might have felt an urge to dismiss my words as hopelessly idealistic. Indeed, I myself was tempted to tone down my description, to make it more plausible, more responsible, more in line with our low expectations for what life and the world can be. But such an attenuation would not have been the truth. I will, using the tools of the mind, speak what is in my heart. In my heart I know that an economy and society this beautiful is possible for us to create, and indeed, that anything less than that is unworthy of us." - Charles Eisenstein, "Sacred Economics" (in Reality Sandwich magazine)

ART CREDITS: Noeltykay's Bottom of the Ocean Floor and Top of the World; Ana Mendieta's Tree of Life;  Luke Jerram's Aeolus; Ana Mendieta's Alma Silhueta en Fuego.