Crossroads Dispatches

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

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

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

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

To Peter:

petals,
ethereal
touch eternity
...reverberate

To Yvette:

yodeling valleys
etch t-i-ME

trust ease

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

have you found a space, that empty space...

Has she utterly lost her mind (and gained her soul) she's seriously writing curating things about space and alone and intuition and slow in the midst of this chaotic season? It's Mr. Toad's Wild Ride straight through January...surely anyone can see that?

The awen stirs through the trees: There is no time like the present. (And this isn't really about just women. It's the divine feminine in All.)

"But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.

If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

When writers talk to each other, what they ask each other is always to do with this space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?" - Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize Lecture, "On Not Winning the Nobel Prize"

"Women speak two languages - one of which is verbal." - William Shakespeare

"Many women are sensitive in the way sand is sensitive to the wave, the way trees are sensitive to the quality of the air, the way a wolf can hear another creature step into her territory from over a mile away. This splendid gift of women so attuned is to see, hear, sense, receive, and transmit images and ideas and feelings with lightning speed. Most women can feel the slightest change in someone else's temperament can read faces and bodies- this being called intuition - and often from a plethora of tiny clues that coalesce to give her information, she knows what is on their minds. But it is this very openness that leaves their boundaries vulnerable, thereby exposing them to injuries of the spirit. "

"In order to converse with the wild feminine, a woman must temporarily leave the world and inhabit a state of aloneness in the oldest sense of the word. Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one. To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude - to be all one. It is the cure for the frazzled state so common to modern women... Going home is sanity... It takes out weakness by the pounding. It removes whininess, enables acute insight, heightens intuition, grants the power of keen observation, and perspective." - Clarissa Pinkola Estes, via As A Woman

"One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Enjoy this video on "how to" converse (etymology: turn together) with your inner teacher (video by Rysa5) below:
 

Art credits Morning Exercise III, by Bian Guo Qiang; photo © Ecological Center, of woman birdwatching in Russia on ecotour; The Golden Bough, by J.M.W. Turner; "The Way of the Real and the Inner Light" by Rysa5; high-resolution available here)

i tell myself we all have the same reSources

So many epiphanies. This is where I'll start. May explain why I've been reluctant to blog.

A few weeks ago, an out-of-town  buddy whom does NOT know me as the "blogger who survived the tsunami" emailed me sharing how they observed themselves being "manipulated" into allowing a new drug habit to run rampant in a loved one. Whenever they spoke up they were deemed judgmental, as well as violating the other's free will. A snippet of what I wrote as follows: [Apologies for some raw language, but hey, that's the way she wrote.]

"Non-judgment, think you're spot on. It's not judgmental when you see someone holding their breath for eternity and you speak up. It's not about them being bad or good or right or wrong - that's irrelevant. It's about choosing life or death. Choosing life or death is a decision made every single moment. Sure it's their "choice" but you're not being judgmental, just calling out what's so.

Free will gets way trickier. All the ways this planet is fucked up have to do with violations of free will. Let me tell you a true story.

I am thinking about Tan - who managed the bungalows on Phi Phi Island where I stayed. Another idyllic day in paradise. What better way to eat breakfast and sip ginger tea than facing a placid azure bay. When he started to tell the folks enjoying their toast and papaya that they needed to vacate immediately, they were pretty indignant. I mean they are on bloody (they're European) holiday, forgodsakes. They paid good euros for their peace and frivolity.

It became obvious minutes later why Tan was so insistent. No one even felt a lick of seawater when the tsunami came rushing in and obliterated the bamboo platforms and umbrellas on the beach front and then the second wave that went further still, wiping out the lobby and kitchen areas.

Tan had seen what any one of them could have seen. He saw the tide recede far beyond the ring of rocks. Further than he'd ever seen the sea recede. His common sense told him that the sea would come back in as far as it'd gone out.

Now anyone and everyone else could have jumped to the very same conclusion. Maybe he was tempted to think to himself: "Well, it's their free will. They can see the same sea I'm seeing. If anything, they've a better view right there on the bamboo platform on the edge of the shore. I certainly wouldn't want to impinge on their free will."

So thank you for sharing what you did. Because I realize that I've been manipulating myself into believing that I shouldn't say anything because of everyone else's free will.... Many things I have to speak, and many things I've been listening to, but have been quite reluctant to share with anyone because of free will (yada yada).

I tell myself that we all have the same re-Sources. If you choose not to hear and attend to your Self, it is your own right to do so.

That's not feeling so right right now. I feel I need to speak up. If your instincts tell you to speak up, don't buy into it's their free will to die crap.

I'm not sure Tan could really have lived with himself if he had justified philosophically to himself NOT warning the folks enjoying breakfast, NOT whisking the kids that rushed to run toward the waving crab legs.

Luckily, he didn't have time to think about this philosophically. Instinct went into gear. Instincts are right. Your heart is right. Your soul is right. Trust that.

A martyr originally meant a witness, according to the etymology root origins of the word.

Although specifically a witness of torture. I'm not sure how it morphed into meaning a person with a penchant for self-sacrifice exactly. It may have to do with survivor's guilt. But there is a sacrifice of the Self that happens because of our intertwining oneness where witnessing an Other's self-destruction and self-torture, and allowing that is self-abuse.

Speaking up on behalf of life is never wrong.

Tan could only speak his truth. Yet he didn't imperil himself by staying at the shore while they balked and resisted as the incoming freight train of ocean came in.

Around the corner from that cove where Tan's bungalows were, roughly 2000 people died that day December 26, 2004.

Well over 250,000 people died that day - no one will ever know the exact count. I was injured myself on another part of the island - I wasn't at the hotel then; I heard this story from Tan one year later.

I'm kind of clairsentient - it's like clairvoyant, but everyone ultimately has the very same broadcasts coming in. It's a matter of whether we tune in or turn off.

If you have any doubts of what to do, just communicate silently with your Self in its totality - ask for clarity and it will come when you need it right when you need it if your willingness is for whole truth." [Versus sometimes the version of truth you think you'd prefer].

ART credits Rara Avis, by Robert Sturman. (This piece is appropriately enough from the Creators gallery. Aren't jesters the ones that told the chiefs the real skinny versus what they wanted to hear?). Not Quite An Angel, by James Griffin. Enchanted Sea ~ Northern California, by Robert Sturman (on this one, Sturman adds: A disaster makes it obvious / that underneath it all / our true nature is to care.)

lower your standards

To be "original," Swami Kriyananda said, is not necessarily to do something that has never been done before. To be "original" is to live, and to create, from one's point of origin.

A Comfort Zone is a place you go to because you know how to be in it, writes Brenda Anderson. "Until you become conscious of the process, you'll always pick the known over the unknown," she continues. "Please understand: a Comfort Zone is neither a good nor bad. You just need to notice when it has stopped serving you."

A comfort zone is not necessarily an original space nor a safe place. Sometimes on aspen covered foothills in the Wasatch Mountains, I'd be caught out in an unexpected afternoon rainstorm. In a flash of lightning, the dirt trails became grooves, ruts, like storm gutters atop a home, scurrying racing water down its well-behaved path.

Comfortable walking trails shape-shift to ravenous creeks.

How do you venture off the comfort zoned path towards your originality?

Start anywhere. Start where you are. Start in the familiar, attentively, and see where it actually takes you instead of where you expect it takes you.

Just do it, in the immortal words of Nike.

[T]he poet and teacher William Stafford who is recognized as one of the most prolific poets of recent times. For the last twenty or more years of his life he wrote at least one poem every day. And, to the dismay of his students at Lewis and Clark University, he assigned the same task. I can just imagine the groans and complaints that must have followed that announcement. But when the students asked how it could be done or insisted that it was impossible, he replied simply, “Lower your standards.” -"For Perfectionists Only - NOT", Evolving Times, June 20, 2006

I'm thoroughly intrigued with NaNoWriMo for many reasons. But no offense to novelists, I find novels a quaint notion, and I'm interested in quantum notions. So I've joined Marilyn for her NaJoScriMo instead.

November's a decent month for sipping tea while journaling. No word counts.

Pleasure, not pressure. Don't let the nice white page intimidate you. Go ahead, wreck a journal. Join us! (Twitterites: follow @NaJoScriMo)

This is a snippet from today's journal scribing. Or is it scribbling? Or both? I had no clue what to write, so I used what was presently in my face as a prompt. Which was the rush hour traffic on Stevens Creek Blvd as I peered out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the cafe:

What if I fell out of gravity? Where would I travel? Cars slide against the street like skaters on a placid icy lake. Lights reflect in the cafe window. Oblivion flows like a river of sleep. The red light a capricious net casting about for driftwood and drifting vessels and driftlessness. Two grey cars, like the salt and pepper Halloween costumed brother and sister pair last night, are poised at the white line. Stopped in the flow, worshiping at the temple of the red light. Both kneeling, shoulder to shoulder. The scriptures coded in red, yellow, green. The predictable tempo of the temple. Obeiance.

Is green the color of freedom? What if one were color-blind and insisted it's always green. What if one opened the door and walked away from the vessel once and for all? A nomad traversing paths beyond the asphalted? Where no temple lights have blessed. Where no temple lights refracted in the panes of glass? Where the only light came from the glow, and maybe stars and supernovas and sun? Could we loosen the grip on the steering wheel, park, grasp the door -- and alight.

Obey the light, red blinks. Pause, yellow blinks. Go forth, green blinks. Alight, she thinks.

ART credits digital painting Gossamyr, by James Griffin

have you heard the Taoist tale of "The Taming of the Harp?"

Ah yes, this Sunday starts off in that in-between space that lies between pillows where inspiration snuggles, arching its back in sync with the dawn peering over the horizon. Where images are conjured of New Heliopolis and the first time Raj greets Awen (dear me, I'm getting ahead of myself) juxtaposed over recollections of the ancient two-story library in Lisbon swirling into a story of its own choosing.

"trees are light written in the calligraphy of the sun" greeted this morning's Twitter. Hmmm, now we are simmering (if not exactly cooking). Maybe my luck is turning, she mumbles to myself, although she doesn't believe in luck.

The last few days my Tarot cards have hinted in a break in a month-long streak of the blahs. Some call it writer's block. Some call it a creative slump. Some call it a disconnect from Source (as if). Some call it the cosmic energy and planets aren't aligned in my chart. But you know the blahs, you know what I'm talking about regardless of labels and pins.

"My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land; The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away." - The Song of Songs 2:10-14

A continuous series of Magus, Sun, Magus in a row leads to a blurt: "No more wishful thinking." I mutter to no one in particular: "The time has come for willful thinking." (Yes, yes, she is totally jibing with the fact that willful thinking has resulted in this grand planetary mess hall, more aptly Mess Hell. It's a little different when you're well aware that if and whence one drops the high-and-mighty act, there's one will and you're It.)

More twitters that illuminate inspiration flutter through the windowsill:

"The best conversations require no words at all, and lead people to the same end point of understanding." - You Decide aka Matt Charron

And then:

"Art seems a conversation without words, reaching deep into our emotional well producing an indescribable reaction." - You Decide aka Matt Charron

Later, in the electronic inbox:

"Everything is the Divine expressing itself as tree, as dog, as person, as thought, as emotion, as light, as sound.  No boundaries. No one. Only One. Only the Divine creating and expressing itself through life." - Gina Lake (of RadicalHappiness.com), Radiance: Experiencing Divine Presence (the entire book's available as a 66-page PDF)

I'm finding you can live on poetry, myth and magic. Not subsist. Gloriously feast. (Of course, perfumed grapefruits and ripe black mission figs - they're royal purple not black - are necessary ingredients too). A princely sum of $1.05 for a bag of lentils. I throw in some oranges from the neighbor's tree that droops over our fence, and the fresh ginger that we used for brewing a tea last night.

Next, I boil a tea kettle of water. The jade packet hints and winks, "Boating down the Li River at dawn among ancient rock formations, many souls have contemplated their place in the universe with a cup of China Green Tips."

A feather alights in consciousness after a few sips, and it's at this point that I interrupt the ceremony at present, hopping off the stool to get my copy of The Book of Tea (the entire text is available here) to share this story with everyone:

"Have you heard the Taoist tale of "The Taming of the Harp?"

Once in the hoary ages in the Ravine of Lung Men stood a kiri tree, a veritable king of the forest. It reared its head to talk to the stars; its roots struck deep into the earth, mingling their bronzed coils with those of the silver dragon that slept underneath. And it came to pass that a mighty wizard made of this tree a wondrous harp, whose stubborn spirit should be tamed but by the greatest of musicians. For long the instrument was treasured by the Emperor of China, but all in vain were the efforts of those who in turn tried to draw melody from its strings. In response to their utmost strivings there came from the harp but harsh notes of disdain, ill-according with the songs they fain would sing. The harp refused to recognize a master.

At last came Pai Ya, the prince of harpists. With tender hand he caressed the harp as one might seek to soothe an unruly horse, and softly touched the chords. He sang of nature and the seasons, of high mountains and flowing waters, and all the memories of the tree awoke! Once more the sweet breath of spring played amidst its branches. The young cataracts, as they danced down the ravine, laughed to the budding flowers. Anon were heard the dreamy voices of summer with its myriad insects, the gentle pattering of rain, the wail of the cuckoo. Hark! a tiger roars--the valley answers again. It is autumn; in the desert night, sharp like a sword gleams the moon upon the frosted grass. Now winter reigns, and through the snow-filled air swirl flocks of swans and rattling hailstones beat upon the boughs with fierce delight.

Then Pai Ya changed the key and sang of love. The forest swayed like an ardent swain deep lost in thought. On high, like a haughty maiden, swept a cloud bright and fair; but passing, trailed long shadows on the ground, black like despair. Again the mode was changed; Pai Ya sang of war, of clashing steel and trampling steeds. And in the harp arose the tempest of Lung Men, the dragon rode the lightning, the thundering avalanche crashed through the hills. In ecstasy the Celestial Monarch asked Pai Ya wherein lay the secret of his victory. "Sire," he replied, "others have failed because they sang but of themselves. I left the harp to choose its theme, and knew not truly whether the harp had been Pai Ya or Pai Ya were the harp." - Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea

p.s. I have no idea where Awen's story is going. Which is a tad spooky. And heinously unstructured should you be a literature prof. Hardly proper "writing". Rough draft after next rough draft. Images and fragments unfold mostly during meditations, or when I first wake up. "I left the harp to choose its theme..."

Art a pointer to a friend of a friend, David Titterington's artwork is like the calligraphy of the sun too. First up, Peekabuddha, 3' X 4'; then detail from Death is Absolutely Safe, 4' X 5'; Before the Temple, 45cm x 38cm; Just Look , 4' X 4'. David Titterington's recent work here. David's blog here. ("I just learned that my name means "beloved river crossing."  David Ford.  "Titterington" of course means "laughing town.")

urban fantasy alternate reality what if's breathing our world into being

"He believes in respecting forms already established for the novel. I believe in a form which is constantly mutating." - Anaïs Nin

Don't want to say too much more this minute. Let it unfold. But my semi-fictional character, Awen M. Currie, has a new blog, http://revelocean.blogspot.com. (Yes, nevermind linear storytelling, like most blogs it's reverse chronological which still isn't very sensical in a nonlinear reality.) And he's been twittering away at twitter.com/awen8.

I'm experimenting with new ways of playing What If. Visioneering.

"Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world. In reality the world is ever recreated in you and by you. See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being." - Nisargadatta

The inspiration series was enlightening. The imagination series was fun. Yet there's something richer, more immersive about memoir and fiction that pulls you square and center into the picture in a way that self-helpy non-fiction and expository blog rants can't.

Check out World Without Oil (weekly story index here) if you've a few minutes. Rather than preaching and lecturing (yawn, if you ask me) on a post-carbon peak oil possible future, they've posed relevant scenarios.

You're asked to imagine this is happening. So you've just walked into this global storyline, suspending disbelief, how do you react? Discuss on the porch, over tea, at the water cooler, via blogs and phoned-in calls. Act as if. Live it. For instance, their Week 1 began:

Supply uncertainty drives prices higher    

"Fuel prices jumped this week, led by gasoline which gained over a dollar a gallon on average. Oil distributors pointed to several "renegotiated" delivery contracts as proof that a long-rumored shortfall in the supply of U.S. oil has finally arrived. Oil producers were tight-lipped about the adjusted contracts, and as I write this it's still unclear how extensive the shortfall will turn out to be."

Weave us into a possible future, let us picture ourselves in the middle of a plotline, rather than just spout out more statistics in a news item. I like.

"If we see it from the scientific, intellectual point of view, we see it as almost impossible. If we see it from a magic point of view, we can feel that yes, we can make a difference." - Mayan priest Gerardo Barrios Kaanek

p.s. Jane McGonigal is one of the creators of World Without Oil.

(Psssst, it's no secret, I'm a utopian.) Thus what-if possible futures I'll throw out look radically different. I'm a believer in: Whatever we can conceive of, we can build. Although, the challenge is our collective imagination muscles have been weakened by centuries of defeatism, centuries of utter rationality. Build it, and they will come.

Art I just finished reading The Magician's Nephew, and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Tres immersive storytelling. Dreaming of Narnia, by Sarah Carter. What I'd like to call the Wood Between the Worlds, photo via Tamo-Do: The Academy of Sound Healing, Color Therapy and Chi Movement. ("You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive. When he tried to describe it afterward Digory always said, "It was a rich place: as rich as plumcake." - The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis)

genesis of alternate realities

I want to set the record right. When Niall MacMhuirich died in 1726, the bardic order did not become extinct in Scotland. Oh, sure their presence were no longer needed at Court. And maybe thereabouts is whence the term "singing for your supper" came into being. What a fall from the heights of paradise for bards!

Yet the tradition has always continued backwards and forwards in time.

So maybe that's when and where Awen Mihir Currie comes into this picture, or more accurrately the frame (the picture's much Bigger) I call my life.

Not too many blue moons ago, I replied back to a friend that now feels more like an online avatar since we haven't seen each other in this dimension in a very long time:

there are many that roam the earth
in these epic times

we are the Stars of the epic
I started to write a [10-minute] play with you as
my inspiration called "Where Angels Fear to Tread"
and then I quit writing because I realized
I might write the future into existence
something felt true about it
I'd fast-forwarded to time maybe 2011
and your character collaborating with dolphins & whale

to record their song
for a musical score or something like that
& then you started to understand their tonal
language because it is like singing and star languages
and they warned you about a quake
to come in bay area, and we do have time to warn people

just before the quake
there is a superconductivity like after a crop
circle, and there is an information charge, magnetic?
i quit writing, too true

epic times

and we both have a flair for the
dramatic
(look at your life, stuff of movie
script, no?)

these are going to be epic times, the reason
you were born on this plane at this time
is upon you - the pressure you feel is like
the pressure you felt in the birth canal before
you came into this world, something wants
to be born, allow your destiny

many angels roam the earth at this time,
but not all of them, appear as you'd
imagine

few do,
myself am muse-magician-mystery
more sorceress than saint
past lives include temple prostitute,
courtesan,
whore
too - not all self-aggrandizing holy angelic
tho truth is Every blooming thing holy

i found my peoples in nola
gypsies & Geminis
time travellers & tinkerers
wizards & wandering bards
carny kid & crystalline child
dakinis & dragons

when my Powers [not 'mine' or anyone's; omnipotence ] started growing
i would magnetize my thoughts accidentally

magnetism & creativity go hand and hand
electricity too
planets and Sun increasing in both fields
tho physics NOT my subject nevermind that I
have electrical engineering diploma -
i kinetically feel this

anyhow, i would magnetize thoughts into
reality
so that if i was feeling guilty bout anything
whatsoever, unrelated too, or
even not having an up-to-date registration
on my car, I guarantee you I would be
pulled over by a police officer
over & over & over in the same week
UNBELIEVABLE
different officers - finally started dawning
on me that something was up
(i gave up driving too, as wanderers and wonderers
are wont to do eventually)

your Creative powers trump mine, I suspect

they are there for a reason O musician-magician

nothing to worry about, plenty to glory about

your friend at your service whenever wherever,
e

You may ask if Awen is real. I have a different sense of reality than the average person. So does my clan.

Yet even in the flesh, they still don't exist to most people.

Invisible.

They are not represented in The New York Times, Vogue magazine, or even Live Journal. A lot of them when seen, seem as drifters and dilettantes. Surface appearances.

Awen is an ambassador of sorts for these clanfolk. A composite character of my soul family. I'm the bridger of the bunch. One foot precariously perched in both worlds.

Why Awen came online when he did he shall reveal soon enough. There is a little bit of urgency. You see August 28th is a lunar eclipse. September 11th a solar eclipse. And September 14th...but I'm getting ahead of myself. He's still fleshing out online. Twitter is easiest for him to update - twitter.com/awen8. And since all stories happen in turning point moments, it may connect you more intimately with the day to day.

You definitely should check the Twitter "with friends" too. Everything happens in the mirror of relations, after all.

The blog (as is) isn't going to work. Tumblr's great for someone that's hypercreative (used to be diagnosed as a disorder called A.D.H.D. back in 2007; can you imagine!?), but ughhh! it really needs comments. So Awen's is yet another abandoned blog. (Maybe I'll let him piggyback on my Typepad Pro account?)

The MySpace page, myspace.com/revelocean, for his sound (band doesn't quite capture) is just a start. There he says:

A friend told me that you don't "exist" until you have an online identity. Well, I don't really believe that as I meet plenty of peeps that are off the radar so to speak. I see them at the BART station, pushing a cart of jangling cans and clinking bottles, watching the whales off the coast, squatting at the top of city hills and abandoned warehouses, and travelling the highways and biways of this fine country. We exist all right.

p.s. Some would want to characterize this genre of play. Genre of writing. Maybe chaotic fiction? Alternate Reality Game? (Recommend checking out World Without Oil for another example.)

Wink: Hmmmm, how about Alchemical Reality Game?

Art Yoshitaka Amano's Iris; many bards were seers, fortune-telling nomads as child too... Yoshitaka Amano's "Miraishi-tachi" - The Future Foreseeing; Awen looks a little like Yoshitaka Amano's Lord of Dreams.

Bonus: A beautiful thumbnail gallery of Yoshitaka Amano's work here. I adore his Fairies art book.

the art of living as a living artist

"Then came the first autumn salon and he [Matisse] was asked to exhibit and he sent La Femme au Chapeau and it was hung. It was derided and attacked and it was sold." - Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (this passage from snippet therein from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas)

Our culture has a way of worshipping dead artists...while mocking living ones. Matisse was labelled a fauve, a wild beast, initially by his contemporaries.

Matisse smartly quit going to openings after witnessing the stratching and clawing at his La Femme au Chapeau that fall in Paris. He never again set foot at a Salon exhibition again.

He did not quit painting however.

"Totalitarian regimes fear freedom of expression in works of art and attempt to control and censor them because the visions embedded in art have the capacity to transform culture." - Alex Grey, The Mission of Art

There are times I have thought the end is nigh for my blogging. Maybe quit writing altogether except for the Zen direct in-the-moment Twitter.

My laptop keyboard and other sundry parts are on their last legs, for starters, and making it exceedingly difficult to write anything online. At least Twitter works from my mobile phone.

Summer lights and tree whispers beckon even onto tumbling fall.

The old writing has not been feeding my soul. Plus...

The biggest truth to lack of interest in writing: What's the point of writing when I get more and more mocking correspondences from destroyers (to be distinguished from creators - whom are my clanfolk).

"I say to people that I am not writing, but I keep on writing in the diary, subterraneously, secretly, a writing that is not writing, but breathing." - Anais Nin

Well, alas, there is a tale waiting to be told. A myth that traverses the imaginal and physical realms, coalescing hypothetical distinctions between the two. It's waiting for me to rise to materhood. In the end, you don't quite create for yourself, or anyone else. It births of its own, pushing through the womb onto the world.

"We must be the new mythmakers for this age... We are explorers, foraging a new way, so of course we may seem crazy at times, or depressed, much like the shamans of ages past." - Christopher Penczak, Ascension Magick

Art flows through us as a gift. And a gift is to be given. Whether it is received, or not, is not our chief concern; it is given, released, hatched, emerged. The gift has its own momentum, its own movement, its own mobility.

So ultimately I write because as Alex Grey shares in The Mission of Art, "The need for healing actions that foster collective awakening and demonstrate personal responsibility for global conditions has never been greater."

"It was very strange in its colour and in its anatomy...The Cezanne portrait had not seemed natural, it had taken her some time to feel that it was natural but this picture by Matisse seemed perfectedly natural and she could not understand why it infuriated everybody... She then went back to look at it and it upset her to see them all mocking it. It bothered and angered her because she did not understand why because to her it was so alright, just as later she did not understand why since the writing was all so clear and natural they mocked at and were enraged by her work.

And so this was the story of the buying of La Femme au Chapeau by the buyers..." - Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, edited by Carl Van Vechten

p.s. Gertrude Stein and her brother thus bought the publicly derided Matisse portrait. And the rest is history.

p.p.s. I'd love to write more here about the art of living as a living artist, of which only a teeny fraction of living art concerns how do we pay for the roof over our heads, our meals, our toilet paper. But oui, that too.

Art John Picacio's cover art for Lou Anders' FAST FORWARD 1: FUTURE FICTION FROM THE CUTTING EDGE; Alex Fleisig's rendition of Harry Potter over at Drawer Geeks. 

fire the grid, making love to your beast as every footfall is your own

I awoke at precisely 4:11 a.m this morning from a nightmare.

All I remember now hours later was there was a beast in it. And I was none too sure the beast was my ally. Though knowing all too well of Jungian shadow work, I'm pretty sure the Beast represents beloved, though shoved away into a deep dark corner, aspects of my own self.

Being an outlier in the New Age community (I'm a skeptic; while I'm open to new information, ultimately rely on my own direct experience and knowing which places me at odds with said 'community' much of time), I'd heard of the Fire The Grid global meditation scheduled for 11:11 a.m. Greenwich time, July 17, 2007.

Which would be exactly 4:11 a.m. Pacific time for me.

I had vacillated whether I was going to participate or not. My own gut instincts told me that this particular channeller's message wasn't resonating for me; although the personal story of her son's recovery from a near-fatal accident emphatically did. That story rang truer than many things I've read in ages.

The rest of the site, I picked up sensations of fear and worry from the material which I don't share about the fate of the planet. The visions I have sensed of the future are so startingly palpably real and beatific they're so much harder to swallow (you ought not because I say so; inquire for yourself) than scenes and memes of doomsday and annihilation we're accustomed to.

Also I didn't sense that anything of significance galactically was happening on July 17th. (July 8th, however, was a different story.)

As the weeks went by, the Fire the Grid meme spread like wildfire. (Someone was doing their marketing homework.) The more websites that referenced Fire The Grid, and the more email I got from newsletters I'm subscribed to and from well-intentioned individuals endorsing the global meditation, the more and more I began to doubt my own (conflicting) instinct.

Who am I to know for myself, eh? Memes know better, right? Memes are gospel, silly. (Have you ever noticed meme screams me, me?)

So last night I was still vacillating whether I would participate at 4:11 a.m. Although weeks earlier I'd been certain I was not. My own personal decision. I wasn't going to tell anyone else whether they ought to or not.

Finally, around midnight, I decided that I was not going to do it, although, this nagging doubt accompanied me to my slumber. As usual, I prayed to my higher self to show me what I didn't know I didn't know as I lay down.

In the move to San Francisco, I ended up giving a lot of philosophy, spiritual and business books away. I realized I am never going to crack many of them open. I want to rely more and more on my own innate instincts, intelligence, power and love to guide.

I'm not sure when we became a self-help society, but the signs are everywhere that this is so. It's intricately tied up with celebrity and expert worship too. Constantly continuously giving our own power away.

There's a part of me feels like maybe the best thing I can do is close the curtain on this blog and simply remind you that you have access to everything you ever need to know

...in the moment you need to know it. Trust your holy self.

That said, there are reasons to share. There are reasons to read. Sometimes it's all a game we're playing in a house of mirrors.

Once I sent the beginning of a poem I was writing to a friend. This is how it started, and then I got snagged not knowing what was next:

if said angel wandered the earth
she gallavanting mistletoe in a sphere of lapis

There was a little more in the email about nebulas and nurseries where stars are born, and he writes back (and this is someone that has had more than his fair share of beastly experiences):

I've found the worst turns to the best because contrast is all really see

live it be humble enough to see it and then tell it in your own words........

glory be to the one ones who know that every footfall is their own

Those words sum up the motivation I have to continue to write - and share. Tell it in your own words: poetry - not gospel.

And so when another friend texting with me this morning says: i love my nightmares... Wonder what it b like 2 make love 2 ur beast?

I understood. And I understood why I rolled over in the crisp covers, and simply went back to sleep at 4:11 a.m.

Bonus: One of the most sane responses to the Fire The Grid meditation I'd read. Stumbled upon at midnight last night when I just meant to read more David Wilcock. Snippet below:

"[W]e feel the key is not in group meditations, but rather in an ongoing practice. The Law of One philosophy only ever gave two techniques that create an ‘exponential increase’ in your spiritual growth in a short time:

1. Seek the love in this moment.
2. Reflect on issues from your past that inform this moment.

Each additional seeking of love in the moment creates an exponential increase. Each additional issue from your past you can bring up and examine for its relevance to this moment creates an exponential increase. 

The world is healed by our own diligent effort in healing ourselves, day by day, consistently. - "Should I Meditate on July 17th?", David Wilcock, Divine Cosmos blog

images Fallen Angel, by Olivia de Berardinis (hmmm, embracing our fallen angel self is making love to the beast, perhaps); Girl Before a Mirror, by Pablo Picasso

speak to my soul

Today, I walked a fair distance  to go to the cafe that speaks to my soul.

There's another quite functional cafe around the corner from me. Were I  wanting coffee, it'd do.

"We're spiritually starved in America and not underfed, but undernourished." - Carol Hornig

At this cafe poetry flows. The main elements: warm blond woods everywhere, hardwood floors, sunlight streaming through glass, no wifi, owners that know your name. Fired play and rainbowed glass art. Wall of teapots: flowered teapots, porcelain teapots, shiny silver teapots, glazed teapots. Cerulean blue plates, giraffe bookmarks, sleek Italian almond hazelnut ginger lemon syrups, intricate little jewel boxes fluttering memories of Murano colors and Venetian sunglasses, undulating anemone ashtrays. Enormous pottery redolent of a woman with an alabaster jar, or maybe something you'd heave to the well for your daily quench. One jar like colossal conch shell, another jar amazonian emerald endive leaves, another striped watermelon ribbons of clay wending vine-like toward the minaret neck.

"It's meant to evoke the way an artist would live." - Ian Schrager, hmmm, does art speak to soul more than design?..."Rather than just slapping art up on the walls of the [Gramercy Park] lobby and guest rooms (although they'll do that too), its spirit will permeate the place."

From this cafe I twitter: "I imagine schools where weaving daydreams & sculpting magicscapes *IS* paying attention". In my journal, I twizzle with twitter poetry reserved for the walk home: "in my cosmic clan, we thrive on iridescent icosahedron not iPhones, fey not Facebook, music not Myspace (twitter is an exception ;-)"

I comprise storylines for performance art, plays, playgrounds. I ought to be able to write anywhere, be anywhere, thrive equally anywhere. The reality is some places sing and speak to my soul, while others are muted, holding back their song.

"If we are sensitive, we can feel when environments are awakened. Human beings can be more or less awakened. So can trees or a mountain, canyon, hilltop, or a particular street corner in our neighborhood. When we are sensitive, we can feel these things. When we expose ourselves to that awakeness, to that environment where spirit and matter are harmonized, it helps us awaken. Ultimately, that's what satsang is. That's also what meditation really is." - Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing (practically have this Harmonization chapter memorized)

It's so simple really I'm confounded why I ever second-guess my heart and gut: that cafe feels warm, feels good to me. Simple.

p.s. A walk on a gorgeous day is better than icing on the cake. Twittered these via text messaging enroute: round table convenes outside.princely jasmine, regal agapanthus, sheathed magnolia knights in armor share tree w/ grail cups of perfumed bliss and: Summer of love: walkin 2 café where every1 knows yr name & spot bold california poppy orange 72 Volkswagon bus 4 sale.tempted