Crossroads Dispatches

make tea, not war communi-tea

Right Head: Oh, stop bitching and let's go and have tea.
Left Head: Oh, all right, all right, all right. We'll kill him first, and then have tea and biscuits.
Middle Head: Yes.
Right Head: Euurgh, not biscuits.
Left Head: All right, not biscuits, but let's kill him anyway!
All Heads: RIGHT! - from film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

When Lucy steps through the fur coats in the English country wardrobe and right into a completely new world in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, it is no surprise that the first being she meets, a bushy red faun named Mr. Tumnus, immediately invites her to tea: "Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?"

This is not the stuffy tea with just the right curd and just the right Devonshire cream of high flying society, but the welcome tea. (Anything goes. It's a gift.) Tea for two. Tea for three. In Walden; Or Life in the Woods, Thoreau wrote: "I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude , two for friendship, three for society." 

"[I]n the East tea is a dietary staple for one and all, and a sign of hospitality even in the humblest of surroundings. Chinese tea houses, India's roadside tea  stalls, Afghan chaikhanas, and the little cafes of Turkey and Egypt are democratic and lively - the opposite of tea rooms in Europe." -   The Little Book of Tea, Sangmanee, Kitti Cha et al

Sometimes I have a fleeting vision of a petite mobile tea with collapsable stools that one carts around the street like the ice cream vendors in the Mission. I pull up to any street corner for instant comradeship. Instant poetry. (You see poetry and tea just fit together.)

The old maxim, "Make Music Not War" is sprinkled generously throughout souvenir T-shirts in the French Quarter shoppes, New Orleans. I cherish that philosophy as a way of life. Maybe less so as simply a slogan.

I have a strong hunch had I'd ever gone busking with my friend between the guitar, the mobile tea cart, and a cheerful placard gently coaxing soul-baring, "Tell us your dream. We'll tell you ours" we'd have prevented civil wars, if not worldwide war.

In April of 2006 I started to drink tea and toast at dawn in the garden. An old habit I'd picked up in Sri Lanka, a land where we drink a warm milk tea (in lucky days maybe with trifle from those little clay pots) and convive at the drop of a hat. My writing blossomed along with that spring. (Please! Don't use this post as any evidence....I've not been up before the crack of 10 o'clock in many moons. I'm anticipating these teas will get my groove back.)

"While other social gatherings might make some people nervous, a tea party should be relaxed. The host or hostess or tea-master is Zen calm. Tea is peaceful. Is it possible that the tea party brings out our truer nature? Do we open ourselves up, let go of conflicts and problems, and experience our lives as part of a larger whole?

The tea party is an opportunity for metamorphosis." - Tea Celebrations, Alexandra Stoddard

Tea is only the symbol. Look closely and it's exceedingly simple. Dried leaves plucked from the Camellia sinensis bush, add boiling spring water, sip. Look deeper and it's twined together with peace, tranquility, inspiration, fantasy, conviviality, hospitality, poetry, soul, companionship, alchemy and immortality.  Look closely and it's exceedingly simple. Toss out the tea leaves if you wish, but consider the rest as a recipe for what we've always supposed was the elusive and exotically far-off: eternal now and unity.

Art Make Tea Not War stencil from the Worchester Stencils Photo Essay (yay street art!) (Thanks! Aha, at this photo essay learned that Buenos Aires started the stencil movement: Some might call it the birthplace of the political street stencil.); Tablee Aux Cinq Jeunes Filles (or Tea Party), by Franck L.

PARTICIPATING (or HOSTING) "Greetings and Gleanings" COMMUNI-TEAS" Schedules & WhatNot:

everyone brings something to the table

"2 years later. August 29th, 2007. Hurricane Katrina. Will you simply stop and reflect? Or, start to be a part of the solution? Marinate." - hip-hop artist and podcaster Clarence Dykc sez via twitter

Purposefully decided not to comment on the two-year anniversary of Katrina yesterday, though I read others' blogs. Railing and raging ain't cutting it for me.

Being part of the solution personally would involve rolling into action. Not because I have to do, and not because I should, simply because my heart pulls me.

Creating a triangle of art/live community center of sorts and arts collective in New Orleans that links up creatives there with centers in San Francisco and NYC, and cross-pollinates them all. Speakeasy cafes for salons and shows and supper teas on the ground level...but I digress.

This "solution" became clearer for me only after I stopped and reflected. Contemplated. Then conversed with many, many folks that most often became friends while I was in New Orleans this spring.

It's no secret if you've been reading this blog for a while that I've been thinking more and more about community. The history of social movements. What kind of planet I want to live in. How I create that world.

"We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor." - His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

I don't need my neighbors to be my very best friends. Yet there is something vaguely troubling that the way neighbors often deal with issues like the disabled car in front of the house, or music and voices in the backyard that obviously bothers them is to call the police rather than simply knock on the front door of the house, and have a short discussion.

I don't need the bank teller to be dearest confidant. Yet, there is something vaguely troubling when they avert your eyes when you're trying to find out about a continual series of fees on your statement hurriedly brushing you off, "You really should call the 800 number. I can't do anything about it." (BTW, reflected far long enough, I am no longer a Wells Fargo customer.)

I wholeheartedly agree with Stowe Boyd's post, "Anne Truitt Zelenka and Steve Rubel on Web Friendship", especially when he writes:

"[T]he new nature of connected friendship is taking on the shape of the Web itself:

1. it is increasingly open (much of our fraternizing is in public),
2. tolerant of diversity (I disagree publicly with my friends, but I accept this as part of friendship, not a blind gang-like sharing of narrow perspectives; and they are from all over, all colors, all shapes and sizes)
3. bottom-up (its not because we work together, or because we are members of some organized group)
4. personal (I don't belong to cliques, but am connected to individuals)
5. flowing (people's relationships are constantly changing, and shifting in complexity).

Many would look at the new state of friendship and suggest that something has been lost when you don't have a small group of friends that all know each other, that invite each other over to bbqs every weekend, and who all attended the same schools, workplaces, and places of worship. But I believe that we are moving away from a narrow, parochial, and inbred sort of friendship." - Stowe Boyd

Yesterday I read a New Orleans' resident Jonathan Bailey's blog post, "7 Lessons Learned 2 Years After Katrina". His lesson number 3 was:

"Disasters Bring People Together, Politicians Drive them Apart: Racial tensions in New Orleans have always been high, but immediately following the storm, an atmosphere of cooperation filled the city. That is, until our mayor gave his famous “Chocolate City” speech. Then everything changed for the worse."

Divide, and conquer. A very, very ancient tactic to breed war and conflict - and maintain the illusion of control and power over others. So, if we want to reclaim our power, sometimes the simplest of things to do start by meeting me at the table. We'll see where things go from there. Stretch me, why don't you?

I believe that everyone brings something to the table. That we as human beings have more common interests than separate. If only we would sit down together, share some bread and tea, and converse.

"The origin of the word "community" comes from the Latin munus, which means the gift, and cum, which means together, among each other."  - Bernard Lietaer, Beyond Greed & Scarcity

I love writer and yoga instructor Jeff Davis' work and workshops (I speak from personal experience). Just recently I noted he was on the same page as I: "He is converting his farmhouse and barn near Woodstock, NY, into a simple place where active visionaries can gather." In the same article, he wrote:

"We conversed. And to "converse," after all, suggests a "turning with." One turns with the to other. Although conversation likely once referred to a monastic mode of life devoted to conversations with God, out of the monastery our daily conversations can let us hear how "all that is" speaks through strangers and lovers." - Jeff Davis, author of the book, The Journey from the Center to the Page: Yoga Philosophies and Practices as Muse for Authentic Writing, "Talking 'Bout My Transpersonal Generation," Common Ground mag, July 2007

I've always been inspired by the Salon movement, housed in salons (rooms) in French homes fomenting the French revolution and a flowering of the arts and letters, as well being entranced with the way cafe societies threw together writers, politicians, philosopher-thinkers, artists, scholars and general ne'er-do-wells into one pot to stew, and ultimately learn from each other. (I've always been inspired by the Italian Renaissance, too.)

Vicki Robin, co-author of Your Money or Your Life (that was a life-altering book when I read it about eight years ago), also began Conversation Cafes. She shares: "I once asked a Dane how Denmark had resisted the pressures of globalization [i.e. conformity]. He said two words: study circles. Most Danes throughout their adult lives have the habit of conversation about things that matter in small groups.

"Why Conversation Cafés? Because when you put strangers, caffeine and ideas in the same room, brilliant things can happen. For that very reason, the British Parliament banned coffeehouses in the 1700s as hotbeds of sedition. Might we brew up a similar social liveliness now?" - Conversation Cafe website

p.s. More in next post, including how to roll your own Make Tea, Not War Communi-teas in your community. This is just a heads up that I'm hosting a few communi-teas to promote peace: general theme, Greetings and Gleanings. Held in common spaces, community spaces, gardens, parks, backyards, arts collective lofts throughout Bay Area from 9/9 through 9/11. To make it accessible to all walks of life, there is no cost. First one, 9/9 at the community garden on 23rd and Shotwell, San Francisco, 1-3 p.m. Also check twitter.com/panmesa for updates.

Bonus: Whether they walk their talk or not, I know not. But I am digging their self-organizing philosophy: "Forget what you think you know about activism and community service. Forget the Non-Profit Industrial Complex with its centrally controlled organizations. Forget grant applications and fundraising drives, complex tax codes, and government regulations. Forget political correctedness, groupthink, forced neutrality and censorship.

Burners Without Borders (burnerswithoutborders.org), a new movement for social change borne out of the Burning Man Festival, does away with all that bureaucratic detritus. Taking its cue from Doctors Without Borders, Burners Without Borders is led only by an idea: that of a boundless, leaderless movement, based on gifting and community, that seeks no publicity, recognition, money or power. All it seeks to do, like its progenitor, is to build community through addressing social needs, creating art and healing the deep wounds of a disconnected culture in the throes of anomie." - "The Revolution Will Not Be Invoiced," Common Ground mag, August 2007

Art Dining Room Overlooking the Garden, by Pierre Bonnard (" At the insistence of his father, Bonnard studied law, graduating and practising as a barrister briefly. However, he had also attended art classes on the side, and soon decided to become an artist."); Le Moulin de la Galette, by Renoir; Apple Picking, by Camille Pissaro (the women appear to be gleaning) 

so maybe a city has a soul, maybe it dreams

OLD MAN: "Perhaps a city is a living thing. Each city has its own personality, after all. Los Angeles is not Vienna. London is not Moscow. Chicago is not Paris. Each city is a collection of lives and buildings and it has its own personality.

So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams." - Worlds' End, The Sandman series, Neil Gaiman

What does your city, town or village dream? Myself, lately, very lately I've been longing to leave the Bay Area. Alas, our dreams have parted ways.

But does where an artist live really matter? (I'm not asking rhetoricalically.) Aren't they living in their music, their journal, their  sketchbook, their garden, their pies? Their imaginary world? So does what happens and who lives outside their door matter?

Do artists really need other artists that sync or stretch or collaborate with them?

Enveloped in Imogene Heap's multidimensional city yesterday (truly, she creates a city onto itself with her sound*, check out Hide and Seek), I decide to learn more about her:

"The boarding school she was sent to lacked students wishing to pursue music and Heap clashed with the music teacher. His idea of punishment was to leave Heap alone to learn for herself; as a result she principally taught herself sequencing, music engineering, sampling and production on Atari computers....

[Growing up and several albums later:] Due to bad experiences with record labels in the past, Heap made a decision to put out the album on her own in the UK, starting her own record company, titled Megaphonic Records. The album, titled Speak for Yourself - as Heap had produced, written and done 'everything in between' on the record, including designing the artwork..." - Imogene Heap profile on Wikipedia

Po Bronson in his bestselling What Should I Do With My Life? talks about the establishment of the Writers Grotto, a workspace where the creators encouraged each other to take creative risks. In isolation, Bronson confesses, he might be tempted to chuck it and take that editing job after all.

What if your art isn't artifact at all, but a constellation of experiences? More akin to The Diggers. Or, perhaps, the Fluxus art movement: " Their activities resulted in many events or situations, often called "Aktions" — works challenging definitions of art as focused on objects -- performances, guerilla or street theater concerts of electronicmusic — many of them similar to what in America were known as Happenings." Does it matter then?

I suppose, in the end, something rings true about this "mirror neuron" concept below. Maybe I'm just dreaming but to me it feels like my creative edge has slipped ever since I came back to the Bay Area. Especially so during my five weeks in San Francisco. I couldn't slip into the ease of spontaneity. The mystery and majesty of life. And I still don't got it back.

Anyhow, it's probably the scientific explanation for Zen direct transmission, oh, and tuning forks:

"In the early 1990s, neuroscientists were studying the brain activity of monkeys, particularly in the part of the brain's frontal lobe associated with distinct actions, such as reaching or eating. They saw specific neurons firing for specific activities. But then they noticed something they didn't expect at all: They very same neurons fired when a monkey was simply watching another monkey perform the action...

"Monkey see, monkey do" suddenly took on a whole new meaning for me... These copycats are called "mirror neurons," and to me their implications are staggering...

"[Our] intimate brain-to-brain link-up...lets us affect the brain - and so the body - of everyone we interact with, just as they do us," writes Daniel Goleman, PhD, in his book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships." - "Power: Redefining a Dirty Word", by Francis Moore Lappe, Common Ground magazine, August 2007

Alas, I continue to wonder, what if we don't choose the city, what if the Shining One of the city chooses us? What if we're collaborators in its becoming, its becoming art?

p.s. *Hide and Seek on Wikipedia: "The song is performed with the sole accompaniment being the sound produced by a harmonizer^[1], and a Vocoder (DigiTech Vocalist Workstation)^[2], creating an altered a cappella sound."

Art Jasper Morello, title of artwork unknown. Also, sweet discovery of mythic utopian Helicopter Archipelago: "They visualise “a linked network of solar-powered helicopters flying permanently over transnational seas, full of folk songs, tanned deck-hands, and hammocked fruit trees.”...The machines remind me of the steampunk vehicles of Jasper Morello, although these are for the purpose of trade and ‘adventuring’, rather than dwelling." - KuiperCliff blog [He, he, isn't adventuring the same as dwelling as living?]

Illustration from Flotsam, a children's visual tale by David Weisner: "It tells the story of magical undersea worlds inhabited by cities floating on turtle backs, blowfish hot air balloons, octopuses reading the paper in their living rooms with lamps made from electric fish. All without a single word." - The Steampunk Home blog

Hall of Mirrors fractal by Sven Geier.

black rock city rises; when in doubt, share

"To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and commonsense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams." - Giorgio DeChirico

"I want love community communing warmth conversation music laughter colors art feasts festivals play...why seem so few do?" - 7/11/07 text to a friend

"When in doubt, share." - as seen on bumper sticker, car ahead (actually a Sun Microsystems ad, yet good counsel anyhow) - my Twitter stream 8/23/07

"The difference between illness and wellness is the 'we'." - as recalled from a Dean Ornish talk years ago

"The difference between revolution and revelation is elation." - Evelyn Rodriguez

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." - Oscar Wilde

Today, a city is conjured like magic from nothing but gypsum sand in the desert. An ephemeral art city of 40,000 people that rises and collapses in the span of little over a week. A city that influences many of its ephemeral residents for the rest of the 365 days of the year.

I'd like to play here on this blog with what we'd envision our 365-day communities to be like in our wildest dreams throughout the time that Burning Man is rocking on the Playa.

At BarCampBlock this year, to help others get a quick read on you, you're asked to write three tags (keywords) on your badge that distill your current passions and interests.

My tags were: gift economy, revolution, street art. {I wasn't bold enough to write revelation in place of revolution. Though they are intertwined.} Those three tags might sum up Black Rock City too.

Though for me, my city's less desert, more oasis. A city of growing things. A place more akin to a meadow with fruit trees and gurgling creeks. Where the land provides (and you don't need to haul your own MREs and water gallons). Dip your cup and quench your thrist. Reach out your hand and pluck a fig.

"In the face of global warming, and the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be... we've started to grope for what might come next." - Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

"In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke’s home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” Mises noted disapprovingly. “Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness” was Röpke’s rejoinder." - review of Deep Economy, "Price, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness", The American Conservative, July 30, 2007

Bonus: Snippet from my post: "Perhaps consider what life would be like if we truly lived by what we believe":

I found that New Orleanians were generous, sharing and less of a "me, mine, and my" frame of mind than I'm used to observing in the US.

It's there it all dawned on me that money would end up becoming extraneous.

Call me quixotic, idealistic, dreamer. (I cannot explain the how's) I've seen into the future. (Though yes, the future keeps shifting because we change it.) Surprising myself, I feel moved toward "collective" (for lack of better name) and cooperative ways of sharing which don't necessarily involve money, or monetary systems.

I want to play in that realm. Live by that belief that we can take care of each other.

To me, art isn't to be merely visited, watched...it's more like a space you inhabit, you absorb, you be. Doubt I've said this, but I'm into social art. Not social as in we're going to exchange comments, trackbacks, and I'll add you to my buddy list.

Social as in art that creates civilizations...like this...

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

- John Lennon, Imagine

Update! Bonus: From Lynda Hill: "The Sabian Symbol for this lunar eclipse [in wee hours after midnight a total lunar eclipse is visible on west coast USA] in Pisces is Pisces 5: A Church Bazaar. This Symbol speaks of people pulling together, with a sense of faith, and working towards the common good of one's community, family, neighbourhood, along with one's spiritual needs being fulfilled."

Art " BLACK ROCK CITY, NV: A crowd near "The temple of dreams" by Mark Grieve gathers around a white bus to hold a jazz funeral for the city of New Orleans after learning of the devastating effects of hurricane Katrina in Black Rock City, Nevada on September 4, 2005. (Photo by, Jonathan Kingston/Aurora)"; more Jonathan Kingston photos of Burning Man 2005.

Painting of Tir na nÓg, the Land of Youth, unknown artist via this site. Second artwork of a Tir na nÓg temple by Arref Mak. About Tir na nÓg:

"In the hollow hills of Ireland, in the lacy margin where the Atlantic tide touches the shore, on the islands just beyond sight off the western coast, lies a country invisible to most human eyes, a country called Tir na nÓg - the Land of Youth. Life in this Otherworld flows and eddies much like life in Ireland, except that to all of the strife and clamor, love and jealousy of the mortal world is added the shimmering loveliness of the fairy realm. Wars are waged, songs are crafted and sung before the ladies and gentlemen of the court, and the young fall deeply in love, as they do in our world." - from Wikipedia

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)

you will be coming into a fortune

"You will be coming into a fortune." - fortune cookie 7/30/07 from restaurant on Mission near 25th St, San Francisco   

You will be coming into a for tune.

For tune: what we speak reverberates in resonance with the frequencies of aether spun using nearly invisible light-threads striated into a tapestry of matter.

What we speak matters. Matters. Matter. What matters to us is alive in our every waking thought, vibrating wavelets, imprinting in matter.
 
What are you singing? What's your refrain? Who's in your choir?

crystal did you know: abracadabra is derived from the Aramaic word meaning "I create as I speak."   10:43 PM August 21, 2007 from web

I started reading The Chronicles of Narnia recently myself since as a small boy, Awen (twitter.com/awen8), a semi-fictional yet quite real character, was fascinated by the otherworlds that these children travelled to. It was an influential book in his young life, and perhaps the clearest murmurings of the beginnings of his musical, magical life.

"All this time the Lion's song, and his stately prowl, to and fro, backward and forward, was going on. What was rather alarming was that at each turn he came a little nearer. Polly was finding the song more and more interesting because she thought she was beginning to see the connection between the music and the things that were happening. When a line of dark firs sprang up on a ridge about a hundred yards away she felt that they were connected with a series of deep, prolonged notes which the Lion had sung a second before. And when he burst into a rapid series of lighter notes she was not surprised to see primroses suddenly appearing in every direction. Thus, with an unspeakable thrill, she felt quite certain that all the things were coming (as she said) "out of the Lion's head." When you listened to his song you heard the things he was making up: when you looked round you, you saw them. This was so exciting that she had no time to be afraid." - The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis (1st book chronologically in The Chronicles of Narnia series)

There are passages in William Irwin Thompson's visionary handbook for the future, Darkness and Scattered Light, that I've read and re-read and re-read. (And I hardly can read any longer. Alas for this once adoring booklover, most books lack requisite juiciness and zest.) This is one of them:

"Perhaps the best way for me to describe the re-creation of the past in the future is to follow Plato's example again to tell "a likely story."

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there were two brothers. One was big and strong and highly respected as a great warrior; the other was looked upon with scorn, for he was soft, gentle, and effeminately given to lying among the flowers to play his flute as he gazed at the sky. A time came when the town of the brothers set about the work of constructing a great temple to honor their gods. Since the oldest brother was the largest and strongest man in the community, the elders asked him to move the huge stones needed to make a truly holy temple, after the fashion of the ancients. The older brother responded with muscle, but he could not move even the smallest of the large rocks the priests wanted. So then in good warrior fashion, he set about organizing the conquered slaves in work gangs; but no matter how hard he beat them with the whip, the slaves could not budge the stones. While the slaves and the older brother were struggling with great effort, the younger brother came strolling in from his morning with the flowers and the sky. He looked at the people and the stones, and then he looked into the stones and recognized them, for he could see their names. With a smile he took out his flute and began to play. The older brother shouted that that there was real work for real men to do, but his shouts were stopped by an exclamation from the slaves, for the great stones were beginning to sway back and forth in rhythm to the music of the younger brother's flute. Stopping for a moment, the younger brother told the priests that they should speak to the stones and tell them that they were being moved to make a great temple to honor the gods. And when the priests had done this, the young brother told the slaves to take the stones gently by the hand, for they were very, very old, and lead them along the path to the site of the temple. And then he began to play his flute again. The stones began to sway back and forth; and as they did, the slaves gently guided them and the great stones danced themselves down the road into the place the priests had chosen for them.

Contained in this variation on an old legend is a racial memory of a lost technology... All our legends of magic and wizards are simply memories of the days of this lost sacred science. From the point of view of this ancient knowledge, matter was alive and was singing; if you knew its key signature cabbalistically, you could vibrate in resonance with it, and dance the rocks into place." - William Irwin Thompson

p.s. If ever there was a tune toon town, it's New Orleans. "this whole city throbs 2 the sound of musica, even in july." - text from Nola friend in July 

Art Spiritual e-Art by Maia; when I meditate with any artwork from the spiritmythos.org site (all available as prints and screensavers), my poetry is otherwordly, or more accurately, I'm attuned to my highest dimensional self and words dance themselves into perfect placing like stones fitted for a temple. (These poems are secreted away in an anonymous, public website - email if you're interested in checking out.)

I'm well aware that Maia's work is thoroughly copyrighted, yet I just saw the bumper sticker (clearly a sign from the blue-white starlings), "When in doubt, share."

Damanhur temple. A very real underground place. Go, should you ever be within a thousand miles of the vicinity of Turin, Italy. I spent seventeen or so idyllic, life-altering days there one fantastical August.

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. 

you are not a troubled guest on this earth...you were invited from another and greater night

"Hafiz stands
At a juncture in this poem.
There are a thousand new wheels I could craft
On a wagon
And place you in -
Lead you to a glimpse of the culture
And seasons in another dimension." - "Wise Men Keep Talking About", Hafiz

"To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged." - "What to Remember When Waking", David Whyte

Bonus: More inspiring poems at Panhala.net.

p.s. Back from my mission in The Mission district of San Francisco.

And from my Twitter stream: "Why I'm Blogging Less: 3. Harder to articulate, blogging not stratching the creative itch. Fantasy graphic novel may be in the cards."

Can you say mythopoesis?

All pictorial art is the transformation
of dead material into something spiritual. -Anonymous

Same goes for writing.

Art Charles Vess illustration from Neil Gaiman's Stardust graphic novel.

"Loafe with me on the grass," Whitman says to his soul

I guess [the grass] is a uniform hieroglypic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white,

...I give them the same, I receive them the same. - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

In an 1847 notebook Walt Whitman, then about twenty-eight-years old, recorded a short fantasy concerning food. "I am hungry and with my last dime get me some meat and bread, and have appetite enough to relish it all.--But then like a phantom at my side suddenly appears a starved face, either human or brute, uttering not a word. Now do I talk of mine and his?--Has my heart no more passion than a squid or clam shell has?"

But in truth he feels no desire to share his meal. He's hungry. No law forbids a man to feed his stomach. "What is this then that balances itself upon my lips and wrestles as with the knuckles of God for every bite I put between them, and if my belly is victor... follows the innocent food down my throat and turns it to fire and lead within me?--And what is it but my soul that hisses like an angry snake, Fool! will you stuff your greed and starve me?"

I am reminded of the story of Saint Martin of Tours, one of the earliest saints of the Western Church. Martin had a vision as a young soldier serving in the Roman army. Having torn his cloak in half to cover a naked beggar, he saw, the following night, an image of Christ wrapped in the garment he had given away. There are spirits that appear as beggars in our peripheral vision; what we bestow upon them draws them into the foreground and joins them to us. "Song of Myself," Whitman's greatest poem, begins with an invitation to the "starved face" of his hunger fantasy. "Loafe with me on the grass," he says to his soul, "loose the stop from your throat, /... Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice."

Somehow - it is not recorded - he gave his soul its bread. It came toward him as a lover then, not as a beggar or beast. It stretched him on the grass and entered his body. Its throat opened and it began to sing.

[Feed your soul - and all else flows. All else follows.

All above is an excerpt from The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde. Wonderful book.]

Bonus:

"Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth" - Walt Whitman

"The mystery of this life, or at least its surprise, was that in 1855 this previously run-of-the-mill writer came to publish Leaves of Grass, a book remarkable both in content and in style. The turn in Whitman's life has been explained in many ways...

After Whitman died, a friend of his, Maurice Bucke, put forward yet another [theory] - that in June of 1853, when Whitman was thirty-five, he had an awakening, a rebirth, a moment of "cosmic consciousness."" - Lewis Hyde, The Gift

art: a still from Arte Proteico. Evo. Video. 23 min. 2005 (via Rodrigo Alfonso)