Crossroads Dispatches

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

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

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

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

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

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

...........

"Maktub," the merchant said, finally.

"What does that mean?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

"How?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

proud to be from neptune

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

life is not a dress rehearsal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

we are the substance we withdraw to, not from

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

where does your art come from?

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

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

"An observation on the fast.

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

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

My response:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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