Crossroads Dispatches

perhaps consider what life would be like if we truly lived by what we believe moment by moment

{Below's a repost of a May 25, 2007 article I wrote that captures my zeitgeist since many folks may be new here; and I haven't touched on this much in past two years. I am in a very optimistic, visionary, yinyang encompassing Renassiance frame of mood that provokes 'social art'--&/+ the kind of art that bursts forth dynamic cultures and civilizations. Enjoy, Evelyn---}

"Perhaps consider what life would be like if we truly lived by what we believe." - Lost & Found on The Hierophant

When I first got to the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, and saw that there were no full-on grocery stores, that's when I first got a clue that the trip was going to be a tad more expensive than I'd anticipated.

That old flashback anxiety came up the first day or two when I went out to eat, paid the bill and then flash forwarded into the future calculating in my head the total spreadsheet amount for food expenditures  for the two months (plus in actuality).

It didn't take me very long to get into the New Orleans' laidback vibe, however, and feel that somehow everything was going to be alright.

What I ended up recalling (my life flowed with grace and miracles in Thailand and Sri Lanka the winter of 2005 too) was when I take the initial, if faltering, step, the Universe takes at least 99 on my behalf.

Small example. I rarely needed to take cab rides while in New Orleans. I would simply decide where I wanted to go  - be it in Tulane or Magazine Street or the Mapleleaf Bar - and voila! someone would inevitably offer me a ride - typically without me asking.

The first time, I'd only been in town for two days so I took a cab to the Jung society meeting on the Enuma Elish myth in uptown. There I met Dan and Diane - literally right next door neighbors to where I was staying - voila! a ride home materialized.

I had no idea when I got there how I'd get home (it was a church tucked off the beaten path; a cab would definitely need to be called out.) Yet I did know I needed to be at that particular meeting. That was the step. When you listen and hear, "Go." You don't balk, "But that's all the way in uptown. It'll cost $25 roundtrip. And...."

Don't give up even before you start. You move in the direction you're being pulled despite appearances that you ought to wait until all the ducks are in the row, and you've lined a ride home, and the stock market is, and the...

I don't wait for evidence to present itself that I'm on the right path. Evidence comes, if it does at all, in hindsight. You move because the wind blows you that way.

"The only thing that will move you (and I don't mean to be too poetic about this) is the same thing that moves a leaf hanging from a tree. It's simply because the breeze blows that way. So you always know what to do: The breeze blows that way, and that's the way you go. You don't ask questions anymore. You don't evaluate why the breeze is blowing that way because you know that you don't know why. And you know you can't know why. There's never been a leaf anywhere that knows why the wind blows that way on that day at that moment. That breeze changes the orientation of your life, moment to moment to moment, simply because that's the way life's moving. And when you're living in your awakened self you have no argument with the way it's moving because it is the same as you are." - Adyashanti

Actually, that's the way I met my friend Wyatt. I didn't know how I was going to get home that day I met him busking on University Avenue either. That was our opening exhange. He asked for money. I walked over, lowered my voice and explained that I'd give him something but I didn't have enough for bus fare home myself. (Tended to go through these feast and famine cycles in the past.) I only know that something was compelling me to go to Palo Alto that day. I followed that whim. Of course, I ended up getting a ride home from my friend that works at IDEO... yet I didn't know that apriori.

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

I witnessed so many acts of collectiveness in Nola, ah, where to begin. Okay, here's one I witnessed: One evening I run into a cool pianist I've met at Mimi's upstairs. He is giving away a newly inherited piano to a fellow pianist sitting there at the counter. They'd met the week earlier at Mimi's. It's an extra piano, and she doesn't own one.

That logic doesn't resonate with everyone. Why not put the piano on Craigslist? Why not eBay? Why not donate it to the ___. Because he met whom it was intended for.

Last week Donna wrote in comments: "For some real fun, try giving money away, and watch how fast it comes back to you. ;^)" Yes. (The Diamond Cutter is a marvelous true story of this in practice. If it matters, he ended up a multimillionaire in the process.) Obviously one doesn't give with any expectation of getting. I don't give for quid pro quo or karmic brownie points.

Anyhow, once I got the lesson of giving, I found another lesson was waiting.

& it has to do with truly living by what I believe. As runners are wont to say, though, your mileage may vary.

There are those who give little of the much which they have - and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.

And there are those who have little and give it all.

These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.

There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.

And there are those who give with pain, and that pain is their baptism.

And there are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor do they seek joy, nor give with mindfulness of virtue;

They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space.

Though the hands of such as these God speaks, and from behind their eyes He smiles upon the earth.

It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding;

And to the open-handed the search for one who shall receive is joy greater than giving

And is there aught you would withhold?

All you have shall some day be given;

Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors'.

You often say, 'I would give, but only to the deserving.'

The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.

They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.

Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights is worthy of all else from you.

And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.

And what desert greater shall there be than that which lies in the courage and the confidence, nay the charity, of receiving?

And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their worth naked and their pride unabashed?

See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving.

For in truth it is life that gives unto life - while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.

And you receivers - and you are all receivers - assume no weight of gratitude, lest you lay a yoke upon yourself and upon him who gives.

Rather rise together with the giver on his gifts as on wings;

For to be overmindful of your debt, is to doubt his generosity who has the free-hearted earth for mother, and God for father.        

- Kahlil Gibran

UPDATE: As soon as I hit publish, I get this about circles of sharing and generosity entrepreneurs in my inbox:

"Imagine walking down the street and a woman comes up to you and says, 'Hello. I have an offering for you.' Puzzled, you look up and in your palm falls a $7500 check. 'Why me?' 'Serendipity,' she says. 'What should I do with it?' 'Whatever you want.' 'How did you decide on $7500?' 'We sat in a circle of silence, wrote down a number on a piece of paper and it averaged out to $7500.' And then she walks away. Now that's a pretty ridiculous story, but that's what has brought us together here." - "A Radical Experiment in Generosity Launches," CharityFocus.com

art credits Visit (detail of entire painting above) by Mari Klarwein; Breath of Gaia, by Josephine Wall (btw, discovered via a cool art blog by Melissa Ulto you may enjoy, Multo.com::Visual Magic); Tree of Fruitfulness, by Lieve Prins; can't find origin (from Myspace page while surfing) but probably one of those fantasy games

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. - Willa Cather

"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy, only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is." - Willa Cather

This week marks the seventh year of the Crossroads Dispatches blog. Specifically the big b-day will be this Sunday, February 6th. Beginning yesterday I've been doing a retrospective of the last seven year's worth of themes in my head (it's significantly been reinvented over and over the last seven years).

Then, I was thinking forward to the vision onward, and why you might care to spend your precious life--be it even five minutes of it--immersing yourself here on any given day.

I don't write to write as many authors do (if I did, I'd have written a book by now). I write for the potential of creative interaction, for feedback loops building off each other, for the mutual sounding board, for collaboration. It's a bit easier to do this online because of the inherent design and nature of the Internet than, say, a poetry chapbook.

This vision thing is going to evolve and develop over the course of the week. Currently, I think I'd like to delve into the theme of abundance. Abundance in the broadest conception of that word--even to the point of being about wholeness, and inclusivity.

So how does it relate to the opening quote and to truthfulness? It's a half-baked hunch. There'll be a point to this rambling surely by the blog birthday. It's just not fleshed out yet.

Yesterday, I thought to myself: "It's brave to admit to global audience you have $2.99 in your bank account." Admittedly, it's not that uncommon especially for bootstrapping entrepreneurs, or anyone taking risks. Yet, somehow instinctually I know it is a taboo to mention your bank account balance aloud, in public, in North America unless it's in upper strastopheres. It's even taboo in private one-on-one to anyone besides a close confidant.

Is this an act of bravery?

Or is it simply honest, truthful, transparent?

Is it sharing?

"Scarcity is the default mode for most of us. It's a hard habit to break, but almost always worth it. Scarcity involves hoarding, and abundance involves sharing." - Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Comformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World

Scarcity involves hoarding. Abundance involves sharing. Hmmmm.....

I sense I've been hoarding. I've been holding back the gems of my life from this blog. I've been holding back the coarse black coal as well. It's appears safer to stick to middle ground stuff. Mind my P's and Q's. You know, don't rock the boat.

 

My dream was once--and maybe it still is yet I'm also putting everything on the table for re-inspection--to be in a moai.

What's a moai? Without looking it up online, off the top of my head, to me it's having a clan that mutually supports each other emotionally, mentally, financially--in every realm, yet we don't reside together in a commune nor an ashram. In the financial sense, we'd pool money together to invest in each other's dreams to see them come into fruition. Sometimes it feels like a pretty naïve concept--especially in the West where everyone appears to prefer to be an island (nod to John Donne). (It's funny that moais developed on an island, and in the East.)

Interrelated, I was intrigued by this passage quoted below--specifically, the PLANTING SEEDS sentence. The vision of this blog I have going forward may have to do with planting seeds, letting life live and thrive. Not in the sense that I am planting seeds into your head (I've an aversion to persuasive writing as it feels controlling). Without further ado, here's the passage:

"If You Eat the Rich, You Will Soon Starve
Let's assume we take $1 billion away from the wealthy and redistribute it to the working poor, the below-middle class families struggling to make ends meet. This will result in each family getting, let's say, a hundred bucks. What will each family do with this windfall...

Will they rush to Wall Street to invest it in ways that create venture capital to launch new businesses and support new product invention, thus creating new jobs and exportable goods that help to balance trade?...

Will they run out and use it to buy investment real estate? Will they fund medical research or universities? They will not. [The author says it'll mostly goes to "necessity" purchases and to lowering debt.] It will not be planted as seeds to grow in ways that enhance the economy and its ability to provide jobs, better jobs, health care, or community development, nor will it be invested in ways that make a difference in the individual's family life. That is the cold, harsh reality."

[Here the author does an aside, although relevant to me as I've spend a good chunk of time living in post-Katrina New Orleans, and riffs on the corruption and waste of government funds allocated to the Gulf Coast for rebuilding. . .] "However, private investors from Donald Trump to countless individual entrepreneurs, and private individuals like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, have been getting things done and are having positive impact--with private money.

Taking money away from the rich accomplishes nothing positive for anybody. Leave those same billion dollars in the hands of the wealthy, and most will get invested, some will be put at risk, in ways that do create or expand businesses, fund medical research, hospitals, and universities, create jobs, create better jobs, and in countless ways, benefit everybody. Because the affluent already have their needs met, additional money placed in their hands tends to be, in large part, invested, in other part, spent on goods and services. Money passing through affluent hands is jet fuel for the economy." - No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent, by Dan Kennedy

I'm sure all of us have a point of view on the above passage and have our own list of pros and cons as well as truths and fallacies of these statements. For me, the intriguing part are the questions that arose, including these 3 questions:

1. What have I done with my money the last two years when I was living below poverty level. Did I plant seeds and "spread the wealth"? Did I primarily subsist, stay afloat in self-preservation survival mode as the author assumes?

2. What would I do with $100 now after having considered this? Anything different?

3. What if I gave away $100 to someone--perhaps someone reading this blog this minute? What if I gave YOU precisely $100? Would you use it to plant seeds? How?

Serendipitiously, yesterday I was skimming Chris Guillebeau's book, The Art of Non-Comformity at the bookstore, and he specifically talks about starting a business for $100 and cites a few solid examples.

When I got home, I went to Chris Gullebeau's website, and there's a new forum called, The $100 Business Forum (so actually it'll cost $200 to launch your project, as it's $100 to register).

So I'm curious in the interest of an experiment, let's call it (to be a little facetious) The Eat The Rich Experiment, how you'd use an extra $100? Recall, the above passage also includes "invested in ways that make a difference in the individual's family life," so don't feel constrained to start a business; there's many types of seeds. Share your answers below.

p.s. SoHo (New York City) is a pretty good example that sometimes broke, yet visionary and edgy artists do plant seeds that yield fruit; see The Warhol Economy by Elizabeth Currid. (Not that I'm necessarily advocating being a penniless bohemian. And not that I'm not. It's your life.)

p.p.s. I have $2.29 in my bank account, in the interest of radical financial transparency.

ART CREDITS: All 100% Annie Lapin's works from Light Puppet to Private Outdoor Facial Coronation to Bi-cyclic and Tri-cyclic Romantics.

grace not guilt, devotion not deprivation, expression not repression

Packing to leave this Silicate Valley that swirls of money and machines, towards that that swirls of magic and mirth, I've already begun to miss what I'll miss.

I absorb sequoia masts enshrouded in mists on my walk to the strip mall corner cafe this afternoon. This ravens' lair uncharacteristically silent today. Then there's the magnolia that love fell into me last Juneteenth. Ah, the grapefruit tree on Johnson with the lullaby yellow fragrant fruit.

in this moist almost silence
in this ancient breathing stillness
in this endless moment
in this obeisance
the trees
speak
- Graeme K. Talboys

I awake to the buzzing sound of grinding two days ago. Later, I see for myself: sawdust and limbs piled on the street two doors down. Another perfectly healthy tree chopped down. Does anyone ask the tree? Does anyone ask me? What gross violations of free will are we condoning? I'm still dazed and unsure what is going on, but trees are being marked for "removal" for blocks on end here where I currently live.

On a recent hike in the nearest preserve, Fremont Older, there is a sign pronouncing "Sudden Oak Disease" is spreading throughout. Does anyone listen to the omens and patterns and symbols any longer? Does everyone not converse with roses and figs and rosemary any longer?

I'm not really sure what to say about "the environment" although I've committed to Blog Action Day today. I remember once an introduction to Zen comic book when I was becoming willing to be curious that maybe the world wasn't limited to my conceptions of it. In the comic, a swimming fish seeker ponders thoughtfully, "Um, so, what is thing they call the ocean?"

Well, to be more accurate, and it may be harder to capture in a panel and thought balloons because of its Self-referential absurdity, it's more like the ocean asking, "What is the ocean?" We feel ourselves a mere drop in the ocean - distinct, disparate somehow from the ocean. Yet that very drop is the ocean, the waves, the raincloud arching toward the sky and back again. Nature and our nature: not two, not one, this.

Maybe Pythagoras is to blame. He taught this "dictotomy of perfect mathematical forms and imperfect material forms" and later influenced generations of philosophers such as Plato and other that promoted metaphysical dualism which has resulted in countless debates of matter over spirit or is it spirit over matter as if they were divided natures. Perhaps we can also thank the churches for the "matter is evil" tyranny we're under today. But all that is pointless philosophical blathering.

When I moved to a sublet this summer in San Francisco (my last attempt to make diamond being fit into square wormhole), I'd see stuff everywhere like these stickers on paper towel dispensers: "Don't forget...these come from trees." If I needed more guilt heaped up, I'd have remained a Catholic, thank you very much. Meanwhile, while all these declarations to be green or else surrounding one in the steely streets I never noticed anyone actually admiring trees (much less hugging) nor eyes meeting my gaze in the cafes.

I don't believe guilt is going to save the world. I believe in grace.

I don't believe deprivation is going to save the world. I believe in devotion.

I don't believe repression is going to save the world. I believe in expression.

The whole notion of "saving the world" is fraught with dilemmas too. But this post is getting  carried away as it is. So I'm cutting to the chase: Forget saving the world. Enjoy yourself and you cannot help but be re membered to your own nature which has always been inseparateable from Nature, from Universe, from Multiverse.

Live in graceful devotional expression of the divine, and it is easeful to be a freegan.

"If you are experiencing anything other than pleasure than you are experiencing some sort of resistance to your ultimate survival." - Ian Xel Lungold

We are moving from a time of the programming of original sin to original participation. Emancipation (asserting our free will) and Imagination too are elements of life, vitality.

"Orpheus dates back to an ancient time when words and things were not yet separated but were united in a kind of melodic chant. Naming, singing, was identical with creation, with making reality. Or, rather, in naming, the Gods spoke through the name... In this sense, poetry was science; language was knowledge and power. At least in the mouth of the prophet-poet-shaman, language was the language of the Gods." - Christopher Bamford, Homage to Pythagoras (quote via Radical Nature) 

The Secret started to hint of keys like Appreciation and Imagination. Keys out of this base level of game play yet still acting within narrow perimeters as if this were the only game in this tune town Terra. So most folks borrowed the keys out of "prison" to jot down to the IKEA, get a spanking new comfy futon, zip back to prison, all the while merely rearranging the furniture. There is more to Mother, more to matter than meets the eye.

"Close your eyes and make a wish. You didn’t have to think very hard about it did you? Now ask yourself what is standing in between you and that dream? Take your time. You have the answer inside you." - Stephanie Azaria, Weekly Horoscope 10/15-10/21/2007 for Leo (he, he the Leo aspect within each of us is the curious child creatix)

The signs are all around of a new age as I flit about my day: Leo Dr, Eden Ave, Fruitdale Dr, Orchard Dr, Goddess Ct. And reminders to wreath myself in symbols abound too like Riddle Drive.

"And the shamanic-Orphic chants, songs, and poetry were the means by which the human mind could participate in the story of matter itself. But we lost this deep connection a long time ago -- when we stopped listening, and nature and the gods fell silent." - Christian de Quincey, Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter

This topic is too vast, too inner resting to try to complete today, or for that matter, ever complete. Creation is a never-ending game. I look forward to inviting you engage your imagination and play in a new game, World With All. This is a collaborative reality game. It starts Now from right where you are. Another version of it starts here on this blog (yep, I grabbed WorldWithAll.org too) sometime after the Mercury retrograde.

Enjoy yourself as Adyashanti says, and in joy in your self, as Eckhart Tolle would say.

Art: When Apples Were Golden, by John Strudwick, The Music of a Bygone Age, by John Strudwick (via German site on Lady Genevieve as Hellenic symbol, I think); Saint Cecilia, by John William Waterhouse; The Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo by Marie Spartali Stillman.

Bonus: Since I mentioned the lovely magnolia that ceased me last Juneteenth two thousand sixth anno domini, here's a letter I mailed to a lover that next day:

"I went to see Adya last night - hadn't seen him in person in a month since he'd been doing the whole East coast tour thing. I'm used to seeing him (except for my Asia trip) more often. I cannot say that it was his doing that he took me to a whole new level per se, but in his
presence I realized yet another depth to what I already know.

I walked home alone from Safeway (needed some toiletries) afterward. My car works again, I'm just in a walking mode and the moon crescent was beautiful and calling me to walk. I came to a magnolia, the giant blossoms are now like a leafy menorah holding pearl-white candles pointing upward to the night, and I was moved to touch it.

I spotted and placed my palm to the heart of the tree. I feel it, petting its bark moving my hands the way a blind person explores your face for the first time in order to know you every inch. There is nothing sexual, erotic in that touch. Why do I have to say that? Something's shifted deeper into another intimacy altogether. This isn't about rediscovering my sexuality, sensuality. It is an exploration of my very own boundless body, probably what they've always meant by the Body of Christ. Foreign, new, familiar.

As I touch the tree I almost cry but no tears come just the pang of it hits my chest. I don't need to cry anymore. We're home. We're reunited again. I realize that I had come upon something true I wrote to you right after [a trip together] - "I'm speechless." But I kept that knowing at bay to a shallower,albeit playful, level. I didn't let myself feel what that truthfully meant maybe... until last night.

Yesterday I was at a cafe where there are tubs of chalk and chalkboard walls in the bathroom. I had to come back today to check out what the actual exchange was and what I wrote, because something profound 'happened' since. So I was reading this exchange on the chalkboard :

Person 1 scrawls: Love is a dirty word. Use it carefully.

Person 2: Love is just a word.

Person 3: Love is a scary word.

Person 4: Dam I wish we all could talk in Latin they had 5-7 words 4 Love like brother love, love for your wife/husband and so on.

Person 5 a.k.a me just had to chime in, yet something else wrote for me:

Observe getting caught in words, concepts. Love is Wordless.

Whatever I wrote then that afternoon I understood deeply by midnight...a meditation seized me, humbled me, plunged me to another deepness. I don't know how long I was in meditation - hours - I think I went to bed past 2.

I feel speechless, wordless, dumbstruck almost - except that of course I'm actually wiser but it's unspeakable. Wisestruck, moonstruck?

I came upon this quote a few days ago: "Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame." - Thoreau

I  don't feel scared now... In fact I look forward to melting myself. Into my Self.

Mr. So-called Chaotic Bundle of Wax [his own words, not mine], the invitation is always there to acknowledge the liquid pool of Being already now. And, in realm of time, the invite is there to experience the process of the melt together. I don't mean only me, either, it always happens in the context of relationship because we see our nature in reflection.

This reminds me of how much I'm absorbed watching lava lamps as they seem to capture the felt sense of that flux of moving into and out of each other and exploring, discovering this mysterious delicious cosmic body of Being."

Bonus 2: Very apropos during this time of messages on tuning in to Nature's messages and "normally unseen spiritual energies" by Stephanie Azaria.

with an apple I will astonish Paris

“With an apple I will astonish Paris.” - Paul Cezanne

A friend is picking apples and other delectables in an organic farm in Washington state. For the record, I'm typing this on a computer, I have a BSEE (that's collecting dust), so it's not exactly like I'm a primmie. I sense that gardens and geometry (yet another rabbit hole of a storyline) are the hubs of the gaiac equation. Here's a short excerpt of a recent chat with my friend:

9:40 PM me: aha, read this...This is so very close to what I envision as art colony,eARTh...

"Everyone needs their own space. And everyone needs a space in which they can be a community. Eating and meeting determine the communal space. The garden is in common, and all craft and artistic activities are best executed autonomously and anonymously as a collective whole. We each breathe and live in the same common space. Who is to say where the inspiration comes from? The cook in the kitchen cooks the beets which make the soul of the poet come alive. Was the poem in the beet and the love of the cook before it became a song in the mind? Give thanks to all beings and take credit for nothing. The Creator sustains the flow." - Sixteen Principles for the Reunion of Condor and Eagle

9:42 PM faun: perfect

9:43 PM me: so very perfect, so the garden of eden spirals forth again...thinking i will leave here in a month, thinking maybe NOLA, but just pack and it'll be obvious

thinking of community gardens, gardens in abandoned yards(homes)

9:46 PM faun: similar conversation tonight was over food not bombs; a friend said gardens not lawns

me: yes!  oui!

9:48 PM faun: as you've once said; serendipity

one day the dream of a tree house; a forest; a garden; alternative/solar energy . . .

  peace love & light

me: one day very soon, gaia would like that too

9:49 PM faun: ecovillages everywhere

9:50 PM me: i am off to skip to find spot in america that people desire that, and to create art rather than work 9-5 to pay cable bill

9:51 PM faun: something authentic

9:52 PM   what we were created for; art

Indeed, what we were created for -- to create Art on eARTh.

"You want a revolution? Don’t pick up a gun. Pick up a hoe." - John Mohawk

p.s. I rigorously rambunctiously suggest you join the Twitter twibe, I'm at eve11. It's one way for artists to collectively share and mutually support our work towards building eARTh colony wherever our home and heart is. Sure, right now there is a glut of techies and PR folk on Twitter, but I'll plug you into the network of green lovers, artists and poets, if you email me privately. It definitely doesn't work to read Twitter. Its genius is not in broadcasting news; but enabling moment to moment haiku-like two-way dialogue. The Maitreya effect of friend to friend to friend in action. It's active participation (SMS aka text messaging is bonus), collaboration and bouncing inspiration back and forth that makes it worthwhile.

ART Paul Cezanne's Still-life with Apples or, Nature morte. Les Pomme; Paul Cezanne's Vessels, Basket & Fruit

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.

777: the religion of money, or, the river of life

"I have been thinking about balance of the four elements. I am wondering - your life as you describe it in your posts seems to emphasize the air (freedom) and fire (passion) aspects. Are you in touch with your 'roots' (earth element)? Obviously the material aspects of your existence is not significant any more (unimportant?). But where is your basis?" - a reader

I don't know when it happened. When I realized I didn't need a priest to talk to God. When I realized I did not need a guru to come to the Self that's always been.

I just can't recall when I realized there is a direct immediate 24/7 envelopement with Source. Sometimes I may quote April 7, 2006 as a date. Peet's Coffee as a place. But really, when we're not deceiving ourselves, when were we not enlightened?

Do we really need a hierarchy of religion and libraries of special and often esoteric texts to tell us: Be still and know that I am God? Not really. Simply be completely still without any holding onto any of your concepts of God, or you, or me. Come empty, and you will know fullness.

The river of our life is connected to an eternally spring-fed source.

So current I can comprehend.

Currency feels also like another one of those intermediaries. It's still an exploration for me, but.... I want to touch earthy Mother, Mater, matter with my own hands, bake bread with my own hearth without the priestly caste of money to mediate on my behalf. (You may think I live on some other universe; not really, I've just seen into a probable universe.)

I for one am certainly no renunciate, no ascetic. Been there, done that. (I detest the word "sustainable": reeks of scarcity, not the fecundity of nature.)

I'm more of a tantrika, an aesthetic. When I'm honest, I can't say I have any compelling desire to create yards and mountains of crinkly khaki-hued paper strips and metallic disks. Rather I'd create me temples of glittery gold and lapus lazuli tiles, pyramids of rainbowed light, oases of frankincense and shifting shimmering sands and palms and cerulean blue lakes.

I'm a creatrix at heart. I want to go to the heart of the matter. No middlemen, please.

Yesterday, I twittered: Imagine a world where money is extraneous. So we print beatific money as art. Period.

On 07-07-07 there are worldwide concerts being held called "Live Earth." Live Earth: beautiful. Right on the money! Yep, She truly is truly alive.

Yet drowning in a collective, collected (stagnated), sea of doubt - that's not befitting to a grand Creatrix such as She, such as me.

I know where that doubt comes from. I've touched it too. We cannot believe we're really in the channel of the river. When we look around it seems like we must be going upstream because the so-called "mainstream" is going somewhere that other direction.

as seen spraypainted in street outside my house: CONFORM. Hmmm, not very likely. - July 1, 2007 twitter

Does the truth need a defense team? Do we doubt so much that we're really are on track with truth, and our God Self, that we run to others to give ourselves over to us?

"I want to point out here that if the answer is right, it does not need pressure to gain acceptance. The truth has enough presence to be recognized by any that have experience enough to recognize it. Those that have not recognized something that others feel is the truth need to be free to seek the truth in their own way." - Ceann DeRohan, Right Use of Will

So on 07-07-07, in addition to throwing your juice bottle in the recycled bin, consider a willingness to believe in Life....consider a willingness to believe in grace.

Believe that limitless miracles are the natural course of the river.

Believe in yourself.

Let's take the dam we've built down and let Her flow.

p.s. Inspiration for printing my own money from NPR (via Marilyn) and The Diggers. (You'll have to connect dots.) I'm through with the starving artist archetype, are you? Artists are some of the boldest Creatrixes on Gaia.

But you're not inspired by what the U.S. Mint spews out either, eh? Well, check out Eve's one-dollar bill. (We're all going to curate something...stay tuned.)

Bonus: Snippet of the 07-07-07 message on Gillian MacBeth-Louthan "The Quantum Awakening" site:

The choices of the last two years brought you fully into the land of I  DO BELIEVE or the SEA OF DOUBT. Do you believe or do you doubt?

In the next days you will be given a choice -€“ do you believe 100% that you are aligned with what is light, what is Christed, what is good about man, about God, about Life.

You will have to dig deep into this haystack to find the needle that represents the goodness in this time and place. You must become a living blessing to all those that cross your path, to give to them a great new hope for the day.

Do you realize that throughout your day everything you do affects another and as an emissary of light. Ask to be a blessing for everything and everyone from the morning to night. It is by doing this that you will amplify the wattage of creation and put it in into a place that will solidify.

...A clarion call has come forth and asked you to reconfirm your vows with the light, with what is divine, with the future of planet Earth in a place of peace. So many of you have given up on your freedom, on your heart'€™s desires, on what brings you joy that the 100th monkey of doubt has shifted the entire equation of ight and dark. We ask you to dig in your heels (and they are winged heels) as of late and to believe not just for yourself, not just for your planet and your people but for all that exists that depends on the outcome of earth'€™s ascension or dissension.  And this we leave you as a thought in your heart. - Gillian MacBeth-Louthan

Art Credits: Persepolis, by Michael Parkes; Golden Serpent , by Michael Parkes; Drowning, Peacefully, by Solkeera (reminds me too of end of Piscean Age, beginning of Aquarius...); The Riddle, by Michael Parkes (just discovered Michael Parkes via image search for "oasis" - simply adore his work! Love to see his printed money.)

lighting up through living gaia & twitter poetry

Groggy. I feel haunted by story of Jonah. Reluctant prophet. Me, reluctant scribe 4 the stars...caring what ppl think bout me...stupid fear - first text this a.m.

Haha just play...lite up. - friend's text message reply

Star star teach me how to shine shine
Teach me so I know what's going on in your mind
'Cause I don't understand these people
Who say the hill's too steep
Well they talk and talk forever
But they just never climb - The Frames' "Star Star"

"Lite up", my friend's words echo. I thrived last summer on organic farmer's markets: heirloom tomatoes, juicy white peaches, potted basil, oranges, chocolate, almonds, fresh buffalo mozzarella, and earl grey with bergamot.

One day I simply found myself answering "no thanks" when my housemate offered me a spinach omelette. Eggs didn't call me any longer. Strawberries, blueberries and yogurt did. Rosemary garlic toast with moonlight spice white tea on other mornings.

One day my friend Ruby handed me some tomatoes and zucchinis from her backyard. One day they spoke to me, and their edible love brought tears to my ears.

I once watched the animating force drain away from a live squid taken from a fisherman's cage in that otherworldly azure bay spread before Phi Phi Don and Koh Jum islands, and watched that squid die before my feet while the motorboat zoomed that Christmas Day 2004 (day before the fateful tsunami). Within weeks, I was eating my favorite Thai basil with squid dish again. One day last summer, I simply stopped eating meat.

One day the world lightened up, and I with it.

"I don't think being tight and strict is healthy, in general," he says, adding that if you are going to eat a Big Mac, at least be conscious and enjoy yourself while you are doing it.

"As you transition from cooked to raw food, you'll be drawn to more and more living foods. You'll eat that way because you want to, not because you think you want to. The change will just happen. You don't have to try because it's not about willpower." - Rod Rotondi, owner of LA's Leaf Cuisine, "We Like It Raw", May 2007, Common Ground Magazine

I stopped being an environmental activist sometime in 2001. My last convert was my sister. Partly exhausted. But so too, somewhere my yearning to commune with people from all walks of life won out over persuading people what they ought to be and ought to do. I simply wanted to understand them as they were.

I'm a guilt-free green; an eco-epicurean. I bite my tongue and try not say too much about activism. Especially any activism against activists ;-)

I figure my example speaks loud and clear enough for itself. Other friends chided, "Why don't you get your car fixed?" (This was back when I did have the money to repair it.) "Wouldn't that make your life more convenient?"

I don't understand convenient. I do understand how my life has blossomed without a car.

I notice that the Live Earth concert's promotion is going gangbusters. I receive the Live Earth Twitter messages; pithy tips like:  Ironing clothes. Nearly 12 million pounds of hazardous solvents are released into the air yearly by our dry cleaners. Liveearth.org. 10:19 AM June 11, 2007

There's an organic drycleaners at the stripmall closest to my house. I have to pass by the sacred grove of sequoias, the flock of ebony ravens, and countless other beings on my way there. What on earth would I need drycleaned though? And I couldn't find my iron if my life depended on it. I'm not sure I own one, anymore. No one convinced me. No one could have convinced me. Ironing just dropped away from my life like an old worn shoe.

Star star teach me how to shine shine
Teach me so I know what's going on in your mind
'Cause I don't understand these people
Who say the hill's too steep
Well they talk and talk forever
But they just never climb - The Frames' "Star Star"

If you've ever had a real heart-to-heart conversation with Gaia, you'll see she is precisely attuned on her evolutionary spiral journey. She's on track with her destiny. (She'll nudge you towards a remembrance that the word, destiny, is a code, a secret handshake between old friends. A trigger bringing back our attention to the Deity ESTablished IN You.) Then she challenges: Are you living your destiny, your Highest Self?

Summer, for me, is a time of live meals. Of lightness. I think that's why I'm smitten with Twitter. Simple. Spontaneous. Flirtatious. No craft, no technique, no scripting, no editing, no hemming and hawing, no trying to achieve the perfect post. Now, and now, before you blink - just blurt your heart out.

"Twitter: All the addiction of blogging, with 10% of the effort." - Hugh MacLeod (Hugh's twitter)

I'll certainly be blogging and twittering this Summer of Love 2007. Plus stuff of a more ephemeral artful nature is afoot at my Summer of Love pad in S.F. (Please swing by when I move in end of month.) Though the stockier stew of word-drenched essays may take a backseat for a while as I whip up frequent quirkier morsels of ambrosia.

p.s. Here's what my recent Twitter trail of word crumbs looks like (reverse chronological). I took the liberty of adding a few hyperlinks not in original for additional context. You can partake and subscribe calorie-free to my Twitter messages here.

eve11 attach picture? naked princess hold sceptre of solar cross, in other hand, tiger by tail, a pyre burns, she leaps into volcano of her dreams half a minute ago from web

eve11 day tarot Princess Wands:She tames the beast of fear.She is complete self-expression, in total disregard of all that is socially acceptable. 11 minutes ago from web

eve11   6/19/67 in history: Paul McCartney admits on TV that he took LSD ! http://tinyurl.com/2ywgg7 about 11 hours ago from web

eve11 sol: grab blankie, sleep outside, let shooting stars zip through velvet soul (xtra cred: squat nice rooftop, bonus if view of bay bridge) about 11 hours ago from web

eve11 sol: go2 dollar store, snag smiley face stickers (2nd best: rainbows, or rainbow hearts & stars), l8r traipse through fancy mall, & spread! about 15 hours ago from web

eve11 conjuring an orange grove spring to draw fresh water for my tea, well, that's what the moonlight spice white tea package nudges about 15 hours ago from web

eve11 Once" remind me of a momentary shooting star in the guise of busker that captured my heart, but so many genius artists do that, don't they? about 15 hours ago from web

eve11   went to dollar store to buy smiley stickers for (shhhh) submervise mission at Santana Row, and then went to see film "Once" about 15 hours ago from web

eve11 friend texts to ask if they called me E.V. pronounce eee-vee when I was little. no, my sisters called me (and stil do) eh-veh, breezy soft e about 15 hours ago from web

eve11   walkin to non-starbucks to hang out, good place to plot world overthrow by daisies and dryads and dolphins about 23 hours ago from web

eve11 sol: get out of vw bus & walk more, strum toes w/ the pulse of Mother Earth whether be muddy rain, tickling grass (uh, as in park greens) about 23 hours ago from web

eve11   @MarilynM: "enjoys work less than me", try moi! Abolish work, play: manifesto at http://tinyurl.com/ltu7 about 23 hours ago from web in reply to MarilynM

eve11   @evem: o that's glorious, twin! let the sunshine in! check out http://tinyurl.com/2aughv about 23 hours ago from web in reply to evem

eve11 sol:while hypnotize by lava lamp, wrap psy head round: yes is a world & in this world of yes live (skilfully curled) all worlds -ee cummings  about 23 hours ago from web

eve11 ala liveearth070707 twitters,gonna preface little ditties, little spontaneous Summer of Love tips with "sol", turn on,tune in, drop out 4 mo about 23 hours ago from web

eve11 off to sleep at godly hour of crack of dawn, i knew it was late when East Coast friends start textin (up Net surfing, read Ascension Magick) about 24 hours ago from web

eve11 phone line (+dsl) went kaput friday, took as omen to chill, be hermit for the weekend (silly friends say something about mercury retrograde)  03:38 AM June 18, 2007 from web

eve11   enough waking dreams, horizontal dreams await 09:51 PM June 14, 2007 from web

eve11 whew hot! end up chatting re knights in shining armor & prince charmings with housemate instead o spark fire in the park, tho cooler, go now 05:58 PM June 14, 2007 from web

eve11   heading out to rainbow park with journal and markers to plot the massive top secret anarchist World Tickling 04:37 PM June 14, 2007 from web

eve11 juneteenth vertigo thinking about all about to blossom this summer of love...expect artful shenanigans at my new pad near 24th&Folsom, SF 02:51 PM June 14, 2007 from web

eve11   sipping heated dewdrops w earl grey with bergamot & thinking of you 02:37 PM June 14, 2007 from web

Art: Misty River, by John Dolphin from Terrable Terragens (stunning photography of Terra Nova, the New Earth); Mandelbrot Galaxy by Vicky Brago-Mitchell (fractal art); Unveiling the Sorceress, by Timothy Lantz (fantasy art); Star Star, song by The Frames

the poets law of attraction & caustic burning rainbow souls twinkling stars whalesong

"Caustic" a friend's subject line reads the other day.

Text message from another friend this a.m.: "Can u feel it. hav alot of fire in venus these days and for years to come.can ya handl it."

Reply: "complete consummation..let the fire consume me...what remains is the only real me"

Easier said.

I steer clear of most folks right now because this Kali energy feels too fierce and fiery. (Are newborn dragons and infant feathered serpents cordoned off because they might accidently singe someone?)

One day mesmerized enchanted spellbound by a rotating milky way orb of multi-dimensional geometric luminosity coming to vibrant vibration writhing before my eyes, I felt an inferno arising inside. My face was ablaze, the heat unearthly, uncontrollable, and I nearly blacked out.

"Congratulations," the instructor said when I told him later why I had had to sit down during the ceremony. "That's kundalini. Prana. You got it."

Though I'd been taught to be kind, and tolerant,  somewhere in my youth I crossed over to people-pleasing pushover. However, lately, any and everything confining, binding, or tying elicits a zero-tolerance roar: "Get those chains off me at once!"

I've always been an exclusive devotee of the Air elementals - of winged messengers and the sword of intellect and the twinkle of wind chimes and so too the hum of words in poetry and cloud - caring naught for (and giving a wide berth to) the seering flames of Fire. Though I have a feeling before She is through with me, I will have embraced each and every one of the elements - and then some.

"There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish." - John Keats

On my birthday weekend, I had the fortune to meet a complete stranger (whom happened to live on 22 something Cinderella Avenue) as I was fishing for dollars to buy a Caltrain ticket to San Francisco. He sold me his already used day pass for $3.

We got to talking while waiting for my train and he asked if he could keep hanging out with me on the train ride into SF. I made it clear that as soon as I arrived in SF, I had plans with a friend, but that the train ride would be fine to continue our conversation. To make a long story short, in that hour plus interval into the city, he somehow managed to convince himself that this was love at first sight, and I somehow spent the entire ride explaining the concept of platonic friendship while lifting his groping hands off me. When we arrived in the city, amidst the grey skies and grey skyscapers, he enthusiastically described how I could blow off my friend, we'd go dancing at a street festival on Market and some other intersection, then go out to eat, and ...

I don't recall my exact words. I unleashed a torrent about it being my birthday, and how I am in charge of my own birthday plans, and that I had no intention of blowing off my friend, and I walked off with him standing on the corner with mouth gaping open.

I wished I'd handled it with the aplomb befitting a priestess-poet - and I felt strange for the next half hour turning over the mossy stone of mind wondering if I was wrong yet curiously not feeling wrong. There was a sense of personal dominion and freedom over my own life and the courage to stand up for it that is becoming a new way of being.

There might have been a time I'd compromise, and do the spiritual lovey "be nice" thing and suggest he come over to meet my friend, and maybe the three of us could hang out.

Why compromise? I was through, and that was that.

"There is no failure in being human. It does not matter if you waste your life, or you use your life appropriately, Whatever you are choosing to do is just fine. There are no mistakes, there are no failures. There is nothing you can do wrong. The essences of wrong was given to you as a limitation; as was the frequency of death to limit you and bind you in fear. In the Orient they bind the feet. In some cultures they bind the head, in others they bind the heart. Cut away all things that bind you and  no longer serve you." - Gillian MacBeth-Louthan

There were no barbs accompanying this No. It was a clean No that Eckhart Tolle describes, yet it had more bit more fury to it than I'd have liked - like a storm surge behind a levee breaks apart in a fury - because I'd held back too long and played agreeable through the entire train ride.

I've never said No as often as I have this 2007.

These are times we shall be saying a lot of No's. There is always a committed Yes embedded around any No if you look closely. Saying No here, deepens the Yes elsewhere. It's part and parcel of the sorting process, the laser focus process, going on: Yes, No, No, No, No, No, No, Yes, No, Yes.

Caustic, an overloaded word, a slew of negative connotations. I sense my soul friend and I are feeling our newfound personal power spilling over into misunderstandings. We both tend toward trying to be nice (read: pushover). So secretly I actually applaud his pushback.

I sense we are communicating with the codes, signs and symbols of the times.

Maybe it was spying the incarnated fire elemental scurrying away from the dance studio a week ago that gave me pause. What am I afraid of? She is purifying innocence. Her pink and crimson sequin blushes across thigh-high dress sparkles revealing her long lean twigs of kindling, burnt straw hair tied up in tinsel sparks of fireworks.

Caustic, from Greek kaustikos, from kaustos, from kaiein, kau-, to burn.

The surface fire blazes away the rotting brush and makes way for an opening in the forest canopy. New baby sproutings unfurling buds can now drink and sup on liquid sunshine pouring into their chalice.

The forest mystery cloaks herself with regal giant sequoia, lodgepole pine, and jack pine. Conifer pinecones yearn for the extreme heat of brush fire to be released from cone itself and germinate and burst free into multiplication.

Though we wonder to ourselves fervently as this fire rages. The intensity and the fury. Will it consume the forest entire?

Sometimes, I know without a doubt, that this Fire is entirely alike the one that swirled through Moses' burning bush. That bush burned aright, yet did not burn up. The dross merely torched away in the crucible of freedom and love.

"Piano as an orchestra of sound waterfalling through "Tea for Two" changes, with the skeleton of the melody baring its trivia from moment to moment. I listened to it again and again, trying to grasp the difference between the song line and what [Bud] Powell was doing to it. Melody versus improvisation; what someone else had written versus what Powell was doing to and with it. Somehow an idea vaguely made its way through: you don't have to play somebody else's melody - you can improvise (how?), you make up your own tune! WOW - really? You mean, I don't have to repeat my parents? I don't have to 'play their melody' for the rest of my life?" - "Eight Fire Sources", by Clayton Eshleman, Poetry Flash, Fall 2006

Caustic...

"A single ray of light has a pathetic repertoire, limited to bending and bouncing (into water, glass or air, and from mirrors). But when rays are put together into a family - sunlight, for example - the possibilities get dramatically richer. This is because a family of rays has the holistic property, not inherent in any individual ray, that it can be focused so as to concentrate on caustic lines and surfaces. Caustics are the brightest places in an optical field. They are the singularities of geometrical optics. The most familiar caustic is the rainbow, a grossly distorted image of the Sun in the form of a giant arc in the skyspace of directions, formed by the angular focusing of sunlight that has been twice refracted and once reflected in raindrops." - Rene Descartes

Yes, I'm into social art of creating a new civilization. An art colony. A rainbow society. The time of the lone wolf is behind me. My soul kin, the soul team magnetizes me, as I them. It is our overlapping passions and overlapping waves that galvanize us, that bring us to each other.

"[S]oul groups will now be coming together in a way that reflects an overlap of similar purpose in regard to creating the New Earth... All aspects that relate to the blueprint of what we have chosen to make the reality of the New Planet Earth, will then come together to create it as a team. We cannot do it on our own! These overlaps [of passion] will create some very incredible teams indeed.

...When we clash with another, many times it is only because their specific purpose is not the same as ours. That person belongs to another team.

...Because of this phenomenon of higher vibrating energy creating a refining process and a separation of sorts, we can also experience sudden separations from those whom we felt were so very close to us. We simply have differing roles now in regard to purpose. Until we reached critical mass in August of 2005 and then more highly vibrating new energies arrived in July of 2006, the purpose of lightworkers was in raising the consciousness and vibration of the planet. After this was accomplished, resulting in reaching a specific vibrational level, lightworkers would then be ready to begin the process of creating the New World.

New connections would begin to become evident in the fall (season) of 2006, as these new connections would be paramount for the beginning of these new teams of similar purpose." - Karen Bishop, Staying In Alignment, from excerpt of chapter, "With Others"

Caustic...alsooooooo gravitating wavy waviness

Caustic I  by Eric Heller, 2001, 32" x 45",  LightJet print

"Caustics are places where things accumulate; here light is accumulating in characteristic shapes on a sea bottom, after being refracted by two consecutive wavy surfaces. This image was inspired by our study of propagation of waves through random media, which affects everything from twinkling of stars to whale communication."

"The poet's role is to tell of things that might happen, things that are possible. Aristotle adds that the poet may imitate life not as it is, but as it ought to be." - Fashion diva Vivienne Westwood's manifesto, "Active Resistance to Propaganda"

This is this poet's Law of Attraction: The unseen language, the green language of glyphs and motion, communicates impulses through waves of vibration inextricably intimately intricately inexplicably simultaneously in explosions of dimensions seen and unseen of sound and light.

when u type i see lots of musical notes flyn off ur typing machine - friend, and seer from other coast, in text message

I believe in the beginning, there was only sound. Pulses of light next. And Tesla centuries before his time. Souls re-sound, resonate, and accumulate bouncing with like-hearted mates. Spelunking together into the cave of the Heart. (Yes Virginia every vibrating being has soul: that slab of stone to this keyboard too.)

"You can have some amazing hallucinogenic experiences doing nothing but looking out your window. There is also the summer, when it gets hot and sticky and the air is very metallic. There is a lot of Indian spirit. The earth there is unusual, filled with ore. So there is something happening that is hard to define. There is a magnetic attraction there." - Bob Dylan, 1978 Playboy interview

Caustic...a word woven in our minds with corrosion. Yes, my own education lept me into the association caustic = corrosive, deterioration, rust (rainbows and water waves were secondary growth planted after the fire burnt through the debris of my mind). My alchemical soul purified, I imbibed the multidimensional nature of caustic:

"The materials most resistant to corrosion are those for which corrosion is thermodynamically unfavorable. Any corrosion products of gold or platinum tend to decompose spontaneously into pure metal, which is why these elements can be found in metallic form on Earth, and is a large part of their intrinsic value. More common "base" metals can only be protected by more temporary means." - Wikipedia on corrosion

And so be it if should I be a caustic agent in this last turn of this age of iron, the Kali Yuga, as the wheel spirals into its next cycle, for I know we are pure gold - pay no mind to all the dross.

Humans don't rust. Baser metal will not survive the intensity of the burning, yet the underlying gold will shine, fiercely radiant.

Just the other day, before head gyrates to horizontal dreams, I write this Alchemist's Prayer. I am not always 100 percent certain that my intentions, desires, and Will are in alignment with the Whole. So I state my wish, adding:

If my intentions are not of the Highest, please transmute them for the Whole. That is what I am here for: the complete transmutation of our basest desires into the very finest Gold of All.

Namaste, golden beings.

UPDATE: "Melt into water. levitate in air. consummed by fire. I think love braids all three yearnings to surrender, let go." - me, in text message to friend last night

June 12th, I had an extraordinary occurence that brought this story into the realms of karmic and soul healing. I drew the Adjustment, or Justice Tarot card yesterday (pops up frequently... again today for instance). It's been a card that baffles me. Yesterday it dawned on me that it represents the harmonious symphony of wisdom, love, and power; of air, water, fire in an elemental sense; or the triune of crown, heart and solar plexus chakras in terms of the body temple. The dance is being all three at once and attuned to the drumbeat of the Earth. Too much fire can be caustic, can hurt; too little and our passion and will whimper down to charred remains. Anyhow, it's quite a story and worth it's own post.

The golden age is the embodiment of our higher selvs.ful on.all the time. u ready. - friend's text message this a.m.

Bonus: By the way, Earth elementals and other devas are known as The Shining Ones by the ancients. This excerpt below from The Path of the Priestess: A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine, by Sharron Rose, sheds a little remembrance into one Golden Age and the one we're evolving into (hmmm, odd to write it that way, as if time was linear rather than stacked simultaneous into a symphony of eternal Now).

images Untitled (How to Make a Rainbow), Joseph Cornell (my guess is it's this Joseph Cornell) via Dust Congress; Rainbow Serpent, by Brad at Nowa Nowa Primary School in southeastern Australia; Earth and Sky, by Vicky Brago-Mitchell; Rainbow Mountain, by Vicky Brago-Mitchell (yes, you must check out Vicky's entrancing fractal art) Caustic I, by Eric Heller

summer of love 2007

"We were becoming world citizens. Peace and love weren't just slogans but states of mind and experiences that we were living and bearing witness to. Living in harmony with the earth was an ideal that we felt and perceived as real experience. We were bringing forth a second Renaissance that would change human culture." - Allen Cohen, co-founder of the underground paper San Francisco Oracle, essay "Summer of Love"

Everytime I go out for an late afternoon visit with the sun and the clouds and the morning doves and the redwood grove and the children gleeing at Rainbow Park, I return flooded with a clarity of information download(s) and renewed vitality... a rush!

Dusk last night, texting a co-inspirator: "summer of love 1967. haight-asbury. 40 years the children wander Egypt. beatles all you need is love, 62567=9. 62507=22. umm yum summer of love in fruition 2007"

"Performing at the height of the Vietnam War, the group [The Beatles] wanted to spread a message of peace and love to the world. They broadcast a live set, at 8:54 p.m. GMT [on June 25, 1967], singing John Lennon's song, "All You Need Is Love", which had been written especially for the occasion. The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Moon and Graham Nash, among others, showed up and sang along. The performance was done after a single rehearsal." - Wikipedia on first worldwide satellite broadcast, Our World

It's summer... have you looked! Nature's display is shamelessly fecund and prodigious. The magnolias buttery sweet. Petals the size of my palm open in an untethered gliding sliding slurring surrender off the edge of the satin ivory sheets bedpost. Any minute she may float like an orchestra note landing face to face with Gaia's cheek.

Summer. A time of expansion. Love is definitely sowing its seeds like dandelion weeds. People say I seem to be in love.

Love is in the air
In the whisper of the trees
Love is in the air
In the thunder of the sea - John Paul Young

People say I seem to be in love. Yet they say this as if I am in love with. If they only knew!

On Valentine's Day I wrote in my Zaadz blog (ah, so many blogs, so little time):

I was flipping through WeAr magazine (adore it, if you're into global fashion/ retail/ art you might get a kick out of this large-format Berlin mag) when I came across a layout of Richard Kidd store in Vancouver.

Under glass skylights and the criss-cross steel beams of chic industrial bohemia, a wall mural reads:

I CAN NEVER BE IN LOVE

BECAUSE I AM LOVE

Profound poetry appears in the most unexpected places. Love letters to an unspeakable God ditto.

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” - Sir Winston Churchill

p.s. I love that tagline in the image: "It was the end of believing…”

(and, the beginning of being)

"Someday, after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energy of love; and for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." - Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The foundation for the law of attraction is the law of love. How can one be immersed in abundance and be divorced from its prima mater, the animating spiral of Love? I was pleasantly blessed with I stumbled across Standing Elk's website recently "by accident" and was stunned by the clarity of its wisdom. He writes simply, eloquently, about each of the universal laws. On the Universal Law of Love he begins: "This is the Greatest Law of them all. This is just my opinion here, I would want you to know that, but it is an even higher law than the Law of Free Will. For that is what all creation is, is based in Love..."

"I do not say that you cannot learn to materialize every wish of your being - and this aspect of alchemy is for some the easiest part of the whole, while for others it remains the most difficult. I do say that the design of those wishes ought to be contemplated more than the wondrous science of bringing them into manifestation from the invisible. For to create a worthy design is a most noble endeavor, worthy of the God in man, which alone can set him free to fulfill his immortal destiny." - Saint Germaine (aka Merlin)

I believe the hippies were aiming for an unfurling Renaissance that summer of love, 1967. I believe they were planting the seeds for something that would require an exodus through the desert of our collective and personal dark night, the moist black soil, through the Abyss, to come to fruition.

I'm not into nostaglia though, nor slumbering back in the past. History is intriguing in it reveals the seeds. I'm simply thrilled we'll be around to see the harvest.

Sex, now Eros coursing through all the chakras, everything is erotic, well beyond sense of self or Other, co-mingling light bodies Drugs, now simply letting go of control, opening to the inner planes of reality, space, light, Life.  Rock 'n roll, now singing our signatory soul notes, attunement, oui, "All I need is the air that I breathe" music music everywhere too, in harmony with water, earth, fire, air, aether, stardust, the music of the seven spheres.

new soul kin's email: once in [a lovely country] friends walked along hilltops, alternations of voices reading a new earth by e. tolle, a rennaissance of consciousness, observing the day moon rise into blue sky.

my reply: my renaissance in consciousness, reading prajnaparamitra sutra, or maybe it was just the tea at Peet's went down the wrong pipe ;-)

This, the Season of Renaissance. Now, the Summer for the Art-Happening called Awakening. As Paul Levy says, "For the deeper purpose of Art, to quote philosopher Friedrich Schiller, "...is not merely to translate the human being into a momentary dream of freedom, but actually to make him free.""

"Or the late, great psychedelic alchemist trip-master Terence McKenna , who rhapsodized about magic mushrooms, the collective over soul, gathering eminences, star ships, microbial creatures, membranes of inexplicable love, transcendental dramas, and birthing the self. McKenna and others believed that mushrooms are trying to tell us something in some cosmic fungal language— a bit of madness that arguably is more in tune with the thinking of today’s artists than a show of Beatles album covers is." - Jerry Stalz, New York Magazine Art Review on the Whitney's Summer of Love exhibition

Another friend theories, queries: "fairy tale futures remember aoristic internet" & "a curious hypothesis wonders how might a forest's fungal internet respond to the world wide web?"

Me and my soul family make McKenna seem sane. Alchemists, all.

"I'm a revolutionary artist. My art is dedicated to change." - John Lennon

And, hey, we're not even on drugs when we bounce sparks off each other. Me, never so much as touched a cigarette. (Mostly because I was afraid where drugs might take me... I might not be in rigid control, or something.) Now, unless it's ayahuasca with a shaman maybe Santo Daime in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest or tasting the clouds in the Peruvian highlands, it's superfluous.

I'm tripping enough.

We're jamming on unconditioned love and truth and the exilir of life.

And we couldn't do it alone. Enlightenment takes mirrors of our own selves refracting, reflecting, refluxing, remembering, reigniting, rekindling, realizing our own face before we were born squarely back to Us. And this synergestic combustion is what I think started to happen in the late 60s:

"The Oracle would go from hand to hand and mind to mind in the evocative states unveiled by marijuana and LSD. It was a centering instrument for that intense, aesthetic, and expanded perceptual universe. To this day I meet people who tell me how they had seen an Oracle in some small town in West Virginia, or thereabouts. They attribute to that sighting of the Oracle their recognition that they were not alone on a dark planet in an empty universe. From that moment on they date the beginning of their journey toward self-realization." - Allen Cohen, Notes on the SF Oracle for the Haight-Asbury in The Sixties CD

I see the future, I see the Art-Happening called Awakening (see Bonus Deux), and well beyond to the Golden Age because it's Here, and it was all set into motion Then. (We set the Future-Present-Past into motion every moment).

You can see it so clear in 1967... Clearer still right this June Seven, Two-O-O-Seven, no?:

"Thus, the Oracle pages correspond to the methodology of the Thanka art of Tibet and Byzantine art in which artists established a visionary state of mind, through meditation, chanting, abstinence and/or prayer, and tried to convey that vision in their painting.

The perceivers of the art then could mount to that same elevation, and experience within their mind the same visionary state. So, looking at an Oracle could be a sort of occult trance experience communicated across the dimensions of space and time, through the tabloid medium, from one explorer of inner worlds to another. That was the magic, the fire, that spread from mind to mind with the Oracle. Motifs and techniques were universal -- from ancient Chinese spirals to Sci Fi. Wings, rays, auras, arabesques, swirls, unicorns, and centaurs, mandalas, collages, flying saucers and their inhabitants, op-art, flowers and paisley, nudes, feathers, and ghosted images were interwoven into a dazzling cross-cultural spectacle of multidimensional depth, pattern and flow." - Allen Cohen, Notes on the SF Oracle for the Haight-Asbury in The Sixties CD

p.s. In San Francisco on June 25th? Expect an Art-Happening... details unfolding...

Nostaglia/ background info: Wikipedia on Summer of Love; Whitney Museum Summer of Love exhibition (showing May 24-Sept 16); Summer of Love Whitney exhibition in NYC, review; San Francisco Chronicle's 40th anniversary of Summer of Love coverage; lyrics to "All You Need Is Love" and Wikipedia's two cents; a cover to an issue of The San Francisco Oracle; Summer of Love essay by Allen Cohen, of San Francisco Oracle fame and co-organizer of the Human Be-In; San Francisco Oracle and Haight-Asbury history, compiled by Allen Cohen; Seattle Times' coverage of Summer of Love 40th

BONUS: "A mover and shaker in the hippie scene [& living in H-A in 1967] and now a social critic and professor, [Theodore] Roszak summed up the Flower Power movement in the following way:

"I don't think the Summer of Love left any blueprints behind on how to build a better world. It was much more a showcase for enjoyment, for happiness, for freedom, as people understood it then. But if you probe to the underlying values of displays like that, protests like that, you can perhaps see the seeds of a better social order than the one we're living in now. If the ideals of the Sixties had prevailed, it would be a world, where people lived gently on the planet without the sense that they have to exploit nature or make war upon nature in order to find basic security. It would be a simpler way of life, less urban, less consumption-oriented, and much more concerned about spiritual values, about companionship, friendship, community. Community was one of the great words of this period, getting together with other people, solving problems, enjoying one another's company, sharing ideas, values, insights. And if that's not what life is all about, if that's not what the wealth is for, then we are definitely on the wrong path." - Mark Vallen blog "Art for a Change", Summer of Love, Take 2

images Yab-Yum, by Paul Kagan (Oracle issue #7 cover); 2nd photo "It was the end of believing...", origin long forgotten, definitely not Sixties;  Vernon Panton's Phantasy Landscape Version II (1970/2000) at the Whitney/ photo © Panton Design, Basel; light show from Gene Anthony's photo gallery from the 1967 Summer of Love; Erick Wong's photo from the 1967 Summer of Love (via SF Chronicle's 40th anniversary coverage)

Bonus Deux: Paul Levy on the Art-Happening Called Awakening (my twist is bit mo over the top immersive experential fun):

beyond 'The Secret' series: qualifications

"The reason can give nothing at all
Like the response to desire." - Wallace Stevens

What are my qualifications to host a "beyond 'The Secret'" series?

Am I an expert on abundance?

Am I credentialed in manifestation?

Am I hailing from the right lineage of teachers and masters?

(Forgodsakes last week she only had four dollars in her wallet. What does she know?)

Do you see the trap you've fallen into if you believe I have to be an expert? That I need a diploma in manifestation? That you'd like to talk to my stockbroker and financial advisor for evidence that I know squat about what I'm talking about?

Oh, I may be tempted to give you some "credentials" but the Universal laws don't give a damn.

If you need my qualifications to listen, there's a good chance you're holding a belief that maybe you need to be "certified" or "anointed" in some manner to create what you desire. Maybe you're thinking you've got to "pay your dues" and "earn" your creations. Or, at least, be able to prove yourself a worthy enough investment for the Universe to take notice (as if it operates as a bank or venture capitalist).

If you need my qualifications to hear, there's a good chance you believe that someone else, anyone else, is granting you this unconditioned and unlimited wisdom, power, love already innate within you.

You don't earn your way through good works, or prove your worthiness, or chalk up enough merits and pay your indulgences.

And She doesn't require a recommendation, a lead, or your ROI analysis. She doesn't require a return on her investment whatsoever.

Grace is free! Absolutely Absolute vast & free.

Let's just say that my sincere desire to have these mysteries revealed is more than enough. And that's enough for me, and it's enough for you.

I understand though; there's oftimes I don't trust that the very tenderest fluttering of love and willingness are going to suffice either.

I have been for so many years absorbed in a quest and exploration of the transcendent otherworlds of formless and Absolute consciousness. Currently, I find myself totally smitten by the tangible, and Earth herself. And the alchemical union of the formless with form.

My favorite Tarot card captivates me. It is the Princess of Disks (to the right), representing "earthiness of the earth."

"Here we have an attempt to translate into a picture the spiritual quality of earth, eternally pregnant and containing in its fertility the unwritten cypher of cosmic lore." - "Princess of Disks" interpretation, Instructions for Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot Deck

Eternally pregnant. I adore that image of creation. This devotion, that desire to touch this earthiness of the earth for my self, more than suffices... for earnest desire ruffles the wind and moves the mountains and it is the way of manifesting in Mother, in matter.

Be wary of experts. You are the guru. (GURU = Gee, you are you.)

So I'm not writing this as an expert bestowing expertlyness, but rather as an adventurer and creatrix of the golden age cavorting with fellow wayfarers & imagineers.

You have all the questions and answers, as you are all the questions and answers. We need only to quit pretending we don't...

"One mother describes her own experience with her 5 year-old. “We were in the kitchen. I was cleaning out a cabinet and she was playing. Out of the blue she said, ‘This is our last year, Mom.’

“Taken totally aback but definitely not wanting to startle her, I nonchalantly asked her ‘Oh yeah? Whaddya mean?’

“‘I mean, this is our last year to pretend. After this year we get to be real again. No more pretending.’

“I kept cleaning out the cabinet and asked her if she could explain any more. She said, ‘This is our last chance to get to pretend. After this, we get to be real again. No more chances for pretending because this is our last chance.’

“I did ask her (still nonchalantly but showing interest), ‘And this is a good thing, right?’

“‘Oh yes, Mom... a very good thing. We’ll get to be angels very soon.’" - "Indigo Children", Library of Halexandria

Bonus: "When I first saw the Princess of Disks, I was utterly captivated. [Me too!] I got a Scandinavian feel from her, particularly Finnish--which really made me identify with her, as I'm a quarter Finnish and a quarter Danish.

I made an immediate connection not only with the card, but also with the disk she holds. To me, it's the Sampo: a magical object forged by Ilmarinen the smith in the Finnish national epic 'The Kalevala'. The Sampo was supposed to be a three-sided mill, one side grinding out grain, one salt, and one money. Its lid is multicolored and even though it is eventually destroyed by Louhi, mistress of the North Farm whose daughter Ilmarinen courts, its fragments take root and continue to produce and symbolize prosperity. It makes perfect sense for the Princess of Disks, the earth of earth, to be holding the Sampo (who knows, perhaps she is the daughter Ilmarinen had been seeking to wed, born of witch-blood and proper bearer of the Sampo)." - posting by 'prosewitch' on the Aeclectic Tarot forum

images Timothy Lantz' (newly discovered - wow; I totally love a pure sleek dark too) A Change in the Wind; Princess of Disks from the Thoth Deck, art by Lady Freida Harris; Timothy Lantz' Quintessence