Imaginalist

The book, Imaginalist Vol. 1 is finished, and published. It can be previewed at the link below.

http://www.blurb.com/books/2887407

This blog has been the inspiration for the Imaginalist. Some of the essays found here are rewritten (and I hope improved) there. Additionally, there are new essays, and the images are almost entirely new.

The cat whisker I found this morning allows me to make a wish. It’s only good for one wish, and knowing that cats are very specific, and not wanting to make a mistake, I looked up what the time limits are on cat whisker wishes. I have 17 hours. I am still thinking about what I might wish:

I could wish to see in the dark like the cat from whom I got the whisker. I am always fascinated by other awareness.

Still thinking about it.

I could wish to dream the songs of magic, since music is a great alchemical vehicle.

Still thinking about it.

I could wish to know, really know who I am, who is my Self, and therefore what my Work is.

While I was thinking about wishing my time ran out. And I realized I got the wish that was lingering in the dark of my mind, the wish that lay beyond thinking, beyond specific emotion, but one that stretches out into the future.

I wonder what it was.

Maybe I’ll find another wishing whisker. Maybe this was the only lucky one. Maybe I should wait; maybe I should take a walk, maybe I should take my own advice and “Do something, even if it is wrong.”

While it’s true that no one gets out of here alive, if we are lucky, very lucky indeed, when we do get out, we will have found out who we are. Not so simple a thing for someone born in the booming, buzzing confusion of the Kali Yuga. We like to think things were different in other yugas, other eons, other eras, epochs, and ages. Things were clear, self evident to all, and the question of identity wasn’t a problem. Everyone knew exactly who they were, and therefore what he or she should be doing. We sometimes think people in those ages were not afraid of the things with which we are plagued. But that isn’t true. We know this because there remain myths, in nearly every culture, containing the question of identity. And as Cheryl explains, if we are still re-telling a story, no matter how old it might be, it is because that story still has power for us, and those stories that have lost their power, have lost their meaning and are truly forgotten.

Being forgotten is one of the Great Fears. In the hierarchy of motivation, fear of being forgotten is far more powerful than the desire of being remembered. Buddhists rightly identify fear as at the bottom of or behind nearly everything negative, but not all fears are equal. The Great Fears are far more prevalent than the Great Mysteries, which are usually only referred to when a male is asked a question for which he cannot make up an answer. “Its one of the mysteries,” is a lame but acceptable response, and still qualifies him as having an “answer.” Great Fears, on the other hand, are commonly understood, and often ignored, denied, or are simply invisible, being far too potent to actually articulate, except in the abstract, like this. Great Fears are where I really don’t want to go, as opposed to regular fears that are hard enough to deal with. Everyone has his or her on version of Great Fears, which will come around to us all, no exceptions. And when we encounter them, the event will always seem like a surprise, which is a testimony to our powers of denial, as well as the ability of the unconscious to perceive and react in defense of the future.

Fears will always be. They cannot be eliminated. But establishing a sense of balance between the limitations imposed by fear and the dynamism that comes from the development of our Self does seem to help, even though it may prove to be an illusion, as all self-stories are.

The question of discovering identity is often accompanied with destiny and therefore with luck, good luck. The protagonist in mythic stories is often young, foolish, or somehow unaware, but because it is his or her destiny, good fortune appears in the form of allies of one form or another, without whom survival wouldn’t be even a remote possibility, following the asking of a question, a kind deed or thought, or a simple turn of a phrase. To which the person in question is often oblivious. I am an expert on luck, having been its recipient, in the extreme, on two occasions. The result of this luck has presented to me my destiny, rather than my fate. And of course, as in so many stories, I am clueless as to why I have had such good fortune, as well as what to do with it.

I spend time in meditation. I call it that, and it started out as a traditional mantra, then set of mantras, then immediately images with mantras, then images, then the images started taking over the meditation, and now sometimes I can barely get the first syllables out and the movies start. I still call it “meditation,” but these days I don’t have it as much as it has me. And my meditation has provided me with a sacred dialogue with the realm of the gods, who know about things like luck and destiny.

I think that tomorrow I will start the meditation with a cat whisker image.

 

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

The road is dark here, and full of potholes and stones. Since the war, the one described in the posting entitled War, Symbols, Connection, everything seems to be in disrepair; the war has really taken a toll. So this way between the two worlds is difficult to navigate. I stumble all the time. There are other ways to get across but some of them present even more problems than this one, and some don’t allow any return at all. (Some of the stories of people not coming back are true.) All along the way, of any of the paths the Theoi Chthonoi, the underworld spirits, lie in waiting, waiting to confront the unwary traveler with all sorts of wild surprises. I would say, “Watch your step,” but it wouldn’t do any good.

This morning’s meditation actually began with last night’s dream of horrific, grotesque, disfigured, ghoulish figures, “people” somehow working in tacitly understood ways with Death himself. They worked quietly, respectfully, powerfully. I understood there was no other place for them to find work, but down there, doing grisly work in the shadows. In my dream, I was not afraid of them directly, only collectively. But recognizing they are all a part of me (After all, they didn’t originate from someone else’s mind), this morning I began with an invitation to everyone who lives in there/here to show up, sit at the table and share a meal together. I assured them there would be food and drink for all. In this respect, the realm of the gods is much like the conscious human world: the common currency is acknowledgement, and respectful acknowledgement will get a great deal more at the table than will disdain.

While we were eating, I couldn’t help but notice that whenever one of those particularly difficult-to-look-at daimones would reach for a turkey leg, their mere touch would turn large areas of the normally golden brown, roasted bird, black, and fearfully putrid. We didn’t talk much. “Oh, I notice you have such a way with ah, coloring,” just didn’t seem appropriate, and I wasn’t sure how sensitive they were. But the invitation had been accepted, food and drink shared, and the blackness of the stained rotted turkey meat began to shrink and disappear by the end of our time together, so I assume the party was a success. But I cannot tell you what that actually means, and I don’t want to try. Whatever it means will eventually emerge, or maybe it won’t. I am satisfied they simply showed up.

Turns out that the light from the eyes of those dream creatures is extremely useful. I can see this road a little better now, its stones and bushes, but particularly where the edges of holes and drop offs might be, and just a little further off, into the mouths of caves that hold dark surprises. Even though I have no idea where this road goes. But the light glowing eyes of those daimones gives form to the previously unshaped feelings and thoughts that emerge into my conscious. Who would have thought they are creative little critters.

It’s no accident that the original word that described “Creator” (in the sense of deity being The Creator) was a Germanic word that meant to shape, to cut, and to scrape, so creator is actually more accurately, The Shaper. So it makes sense these theoi chthonoi, these underworld spirits, are denizens of the boundaries that separate conscious from unconscious, and complete unconscious is of course Thanatos, death itself, which both receives and exhales energy to which archetypal shapes are provided by my dream friends.

When I finally realized who I had invited to dinner I understood I have invited the metaphor for Creativity Itself, Creativity at its most radical, autonomous and independent, deepest roots. Now I understand why there was no conversation, that language failed, why only images and emotions maintained our relationship for that limited time, and like the storm that swept through here last week, are gone without a trace.

I suppose it is part of the paradox of the creative that an encounter with the dark deities can bring forth light, insight, even in-lightenment. The result is often not clear. The result may be a sense of ‘what just happened?’ in one’s consciousness, and maybe a residual image. But those images speak, which is, of course the whole reason why one has the encounter in the first place. But in the full light of Apollonian rational explanation, the sureness of those images and their emotional power can seem but a dim wisp of remembered imagination.

So I do not expect you to follow my description, much less try to follow this road. You’ll find your way without a problem, the bright light of Apollo is instantly available to everyone in our age. But, here, take this small stone from the road, for your pocket.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

Before I continue, let me introduce you to two of my most familiar acquaintances, here on either side of me. They actually don’t need much introduction, and it’s likely you have already met, so this may be more of a formality. But since their credentials go back many thousands of years, respect is an important observance.

They are a couple of ancient spirits, or more accurately daemons, from which we get our modern, word demon. These two are members of the Algea, the daemons of pain and suffering. Their mother is Eris, the goddess of discord. Because she wasn’t invited, she threw a golden apple into the middle of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis inscribed, “To the fairest,” landing  at the feet of Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite all of who claimed it, which then led to the ten year Trojan war. Well, these are two of her children; the one standing here on my left is Inflammation, the one on my right, Pain. I knew you would both recognize, and likely shrink from them, knowing that even a mere handshake would likely be regretted. Even being in the same room is enough to evoke deep fear, the avoidance of the slightest eye contact, lest they seize the opportunity to seize you. I hope you at least brought an offering…

It’s best to be polite to elders, especially elders who are quite sensitive about not being invited in, who are used to people who want to flee, and welcome those who want to fight, which from a human perspective is usually not a good idea.

I wasn’t going to write about pain, again, and have resisted doing so for many months for fear of being self indulgent. However, these two have both made their demands much more clearly of late. I had wanted to write about the fog that hangs along the coast, it being quite heavy these mornings, softening the greens of late summer leaves and providing the crows the stuff on which to slide noiselessly through the neighborhood. So I originally wrote:

For years I have enjoyed a close and affectionate relationship with the fog. Not that it’s a warm and fuzzy friend, it isn’t. But it is remarkably aesthetic, and has a powerful ability to soften everything it surrounds. Then came the intrusion. A forceful and strident, blaring, painful voice has intruded, and has not just required my attention, but has changed my perception and the way I am in the world.

Fog and pain both obscure the ability to see very well with their blankets of varying densities, and both increase and decrease, appear and disappear according to some unspecified calculus. But here the analogy stops and the comparison begins.

Pain is noisy, fog is quiet.

Fog is cool, pain is hot.

Fog makes polite, perhaps determined suggestions and requests.

Pain simply demands what it wants: forcing one’s attention.

Pain is an egotist, and can be rude.

Fog is a whispering aesthetician.

Both can be subtle, hiding nuances of understanding, but only fog is gentle.

I don’t tire easily of fog.

And all of it is true. But it’s a description of a fight (another of the Algea family). When I realized that, writing stopped on its own; the Muse had evaporated, at least temporarily.

Daily meditations continued, with corresponding, temporarily soothing, predictable results. One morning, I had a serious conversation with my body, and was more than a little surprised when both Pain and Inflammation took different forms, and showed up for a cup of tea, and to give me some instruction. Because they have a remarkable ability to both command and detract one’s attention at the same time, listening was a challenge. I have had several conversations with them since then, admittedly, somewhat less than mutually interactive, and only reflectively instructive, by which I knew they were real.

My familiar adversaries had changed to unfamiliar allies.

I simply didn’t know how to behave, how to relate to them in roles that were completely new to me. All I could do was to pay attention, respectful attention, which was sufficient. My instruction began:

One lesson addressed the difference between knowing about something and knowing it deeply, somatically, and psychically, which requires listening in unfamiliar ways and not dismissing images and ideas that spontaneously arise in my consciousness.

Another lesson I learned, more deeply, is one does not get to choose one’s psychic or spiritual allies; my conscious ego was not in control, and there was no explanation that I could supply, to offer as a rational denial.

And yet another included a review of the refining functions of the Algea and of Pain and Inflammation in particular, and with that came a flood of understanding: they had been allies all along. Severe. Unrelenting. Their radiating power sometimes dulled by drugs and merciful sleep, allowing an occasional day and a half of misunderstood relief. But their power continued, heating, burning off dross, layers of assumptions, false thinking, and ego driven intentions, and continues, burning even the metal being refined, until only the vapor, the alchemical essence of pure attention remains, allowing for a sort of seeing that is past vision.

These teachers are old school. Requiring crawling through the darkness of heat to get to this place illuminated by burning the bushes of the past, a place of the dark sun.

It is said that what we want, more than that, what we need, perhaps more than anything, is confirmation, acknowledgement of one’s self. Which doesn’t imply agreement, but a sort of recognition that indicates we have been heard, and listened to. It means getting as little as a nod, an acknowledgement if it comes from the right source. When that nod comes from the divine the nod becomes the numinous.

I fell into this cave, nearly drowned in this river of pain, and now realize I will walk out on a foundation of solidified fire, a path of physical pain and numinous teaching. There is no other way. But pain will not carry me out. I will walk out, and walk on cobblestones condensed from the fog of pain, that have rained down, coming in storms, like squalls blowing in off the ocean, the way illuminated by light provided by my incandescent allies.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

What is the word that you would most resist to use to describe yourself, but that you would most want to use? As you read this, I would like to invite you to keep that word in mind…

The great battle, begun thousands of years ago, increased in intensity to white hot a few hundreds of years ago. Finally the invaders have overcome those who resisted, no matter how deeply entrenched they were. To this day there continue to be small enclaves of resistance, but the battle was so greatly lost, and lost so long ago, that those who continue to resist don’t remember why, which makes the loss eminently more tragic, fearful and profound, more painful, and more complete.

We think things are different now, but we actually don’t know how they are different. We have been taught, and have accepted the teaching, that words are mere abstractions of what they represent, and are completely arbitrary conventions. This is easily, scientifically proven with a scanning electron microscope, which can quickly reveal the letters of the word of the name of a substance are not engraved on its molecules, empirical evidence showing there is no necessary reason for using particular words to represent things. We could use any sound and call it a word. Language is simply a social convention, and carries the implication of being a fiction. We just make it up.

Before the great war, words had mysterious, magical power. Names in particular were kept secret, or at least carefully shared, for knowing a true and complete name gave one power over the named. Anciently, prayers, charms, incantations, curses, even salutations and benedictions all commanded respect, even reverence. And once something had been uttered, sometimes even idly, it could not be revoked. The utterance could be altered, influenced, and even used toward a different advantage than was originally intended when spoke, but it could not be completely undone. One of the reasons for this is that all utterance was assumed to be done with intent of the user, and with connection to the earliest stories of creation. This was always so until the war.

Now an utterance can evoke response, but just as quickly can be dropped, with less effect than litter on the street. Now we wonder why the world seems strangely empty when it is obviously full of stuff. The trouble is Objectivism via a “scientific” mentality has not just created objects of everything and everyone, it has introduced an intermediate psychic distance that functions to literally limit the type and quality of what we perceive and express. It’s not that language has lost its power, but now we understand language in a far too literal way. We fail to understand that the ancient power of language was because it operated metaphorically first, and then referred to literal things second. This allowed for the potential interconnection of everything, and particularly if one knew the true names of things and people. Every mythic or folk tale will show this in operation. Now we fail to appreciate what metaphorical thinking actually means, and what it can do, because we have relegated, à la Aristotle and Descartes, metaphor to a simple part of speech with a well defined function. Now we’ve got it backwards: literal referring is primary, metaphor is secondary. And language functions in exactly the opposite way that it did anciently. It serves to disconnect and create semantic barriers between what a thing is, and therefore what it cannot be connected to.

However, the power of language remains, and is available to anyone who dares to use it. But metaphoric language cannot be objectified as a simple tool and demands a different mindset, a different psychic worldview. The first principle of which is a reciprocal relationship. So language allows us to use it, but requires we allow ourselves to be willingly and equally used by it. Uh oh. In a world where control is the operating dynamic, this would be referred to as abnormal, at a minimum. But consider the implications: instead of language being an abstract barrier between ourselves and direct experience, it becomes a bridge, a connecting reality more real than either me or my beloved, which allows, even requires us to honor the holiness of what is created by our connectedness.

From time to time I hear the secret names of plants and animals that live or pass through our garden. But to be honest, it’s extremely difficult to remember those names when I hear them. After that, trying to write or say them is truly impossible,. To do that I would have to know how to control their magic.

But the rose bushes, spiders that live in the rosemary plants, and the garter snake that sometimes shows herself don’t have that problem. I assume that other species didn’t either fight nor lose a similar war. I suppose they fear humans because we are the least connected in the garden, the most foreign.

Now to the name. The word that you would most resist to use to describe yourself, but that you would most want to use. You might want to consider keeping that word to yourself for a while. Obviously, it has power for you. It still acts in that ancient way, metaphorically, to connect you. The second principle of metaphoric communication is the courage to use it.

Well then. Enough of that.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

“There’s that guy again. Good Lord, he is driving me nuts. Can’t somebody shut           him up? Throw a thunderbolt at him? Turn him into salt? Jesus!”

“Why Me? I don’t do thunderbolts, and I don’t answer to Jesus anymore. Besides I      hate it when people yell at me. Ignore him, that’s what I do.”

When metaphoric gods swear it causes a lot of confusion with literal responses.

Meanwhile, I am waiting, still calling out, “Hey! What about healing? You guys used to give that away to anyone.” I wait for response. After a while I hear a whisper, “Why don’t you just do your old healing trick on him, maybe he will go away.” After that, Lucky, the small dog from across the street runs by being chased by a gray stripped cat, being chased by the heated afternoon wind. No one answers in a way I can hear. Nothing much more will happen that day.

They don’t like to be disturbed in the afternoons, especially before their five o’clock glass of red wine. So in the quiet gray morning light, that is when I have often sought out those gods, he, she, they, it, whatever entity will take the time to respond. I need something to help me fill in the gaps of my story, so I knock and call. Bang loudly, present my credentials at the gate and demand response. I can sometimes hear them inside. Sounds like mumbling, maybe it’s arguing, but it’s really difficult to hear what is actually being said, so I assume it isn’t a message for me.

Existence desires meaning, demands it, creates it, and can tell the story that explains it. Never mind the stories are each uniquely determined and understood by only one person. Even then, only actually understood by the unconscious part of each person, and the unconscious never tells the whole thing. But I persist in my need. The story makes more sense to me when I name it, when immediately, connections between events, people, dogs, cats, and the wind, emerge to my great self-satisfaction. In my naming I use the names of certain gods, the ones I like the most. Which of course, and much to my dismay, forces the ones I don’t like to take a much more active part in my stories later on. Cheryl has a whole library about those archetypal names, and how they are patterns of meaning as familiar to our depths as the expanding universe is wide, or deep, or old.

Sometimes when our stories get close to some of the Great Mysteries, like death, intimacy, birth, and the like, I have noticed two things happen. First, we really need that part of the story to make sense, and second, that’s when we run out of storyline. The mythic tales are supposed to fill in. When they don’t, my only option is to lay down, swimming in the thickness of confusion, despair, and desperate for anything, even orthodoxy. Any drug will do if one is in enough pain.

So in the gray light of the next early morning, I once again ask for entrance into the realm of the gods, sometimes riding past the gates on the light of a syllable or the wind created by one image leading to another, to another and another until at last I find myself back in this world, with a little more story that makes sense.

When that happens, it’s as if magic has happened, made when the trajectory of bright things crosses the paths of imaginative flight, and profound emotion. At once full of elation and fear, wonderful and mysterious. Created when opposites, like fire and water are held together for a time, in the same thought, in the same image. Magic happens when the I and the Thou are no longer subject and object, in spite of the power of the rules of grammar.

Then I stop thinking about, and discover later that I have simply been experiencing, something, which whatever it was, was sufficient for the river of magical experience to have carried me away on a wine dark sea.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

The alarming smell of Smoke on the early morning fog signals something fateful is happening. Close to here a large wildfire roars out of control. Lost among the more than 7,000 acres of wild land and coastal timber are untold numbers of animals that could not out run the firestorm. Sunlight itself is an odd, orange color. The strange fog has brought falling ash. If the regular onshore wind pattern continues, the afternoon wind will become a blowtorch as it funnels through the narrow, brush choked ravines.

Smoke, mists and fog have a difficult assignment, to catch whatever light may be available, and spread, soften, and diffuse it. Normally, the fog and mist are kind to color, mixing it with dew still in the air to create subdued tints that quietly echo their owners. But in the dark, what little light is available is sucked into and under their blankets, creating stumbling places for people wandering off the well lit way.

Those who stumble may blame it on the fog. We do not attribute negative events to ourselves, but look for an external cause. However here’s a quote from Carl Jung that has bothered me a great deal in the past year: “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” So our perception of fate is a function of un-dealt with, unconscious energy. To be fair, he didn’t intend that to apply to all situations, but to those who are not yet aware of their own psychological nature, in both its light and the dark aspects, those I have heard being described as “not cursed with awareness.”

Along my own way, I didn’t notice if there might have been a small flickering highlight, almost hidden in the misty shadows beneath a large dark stone, the one under which I fell headlong. And who could blame me, there was no warning, at least none that I remember.

I didn’t know then the entrance to the underworld was a cave found beneath the throne of the goddess Ananke, Necessity, whose daughters are known as the Fates. Fearful and respected deities, even by Zeus; by some accounts older than Zeus, born of the night. There are three and all three are felt in each person’s life. Of the three, the first is Clotho, who spins the thread of life. Lachesis measures and allots the length of the thread. But it is Atropos, the smallest and the most feared, whom none can avoid, who cuts the thread. We think of Fate as one entity. We think of Fate as absolute. Neither is mythologically accurate, but that is not to say the Fates are easily influenced, nor that if one does influence them, the results are favorable.

Mythically, when a curse (or blessing) is uttered and conveyed with psychic power, the utterance cannot be undone. It is said to be fateful, that is, it changes the destiny of the recipient. However, it can be modified, usually for the benefit of the recipient. The same can happen with things that made. Cheryl says Homer called these sorts of things “daidalic,” after Daedalus maker of labyrinth and the wings of Icarus, These things are fateful, carrying the potency of the maker gods. These are magical things, things to be treasured.

I wanted my journeying to the underworld to be a Hero’s Journey, complete with magical allies and all of their attendant gifts. (How cool would that be?) But it hasn’t been that at all. I have struggled with making sense of it, and fear I had somehow brought it onto myself. Fear that I haven’t made enough sense of it, am missing the lesson to be learned. Fear that I will be stuck in the mess of not being able to function well, walk, talk, and chew gum, condemned to living a life of fragility.

But there are mythic patterns other than the Hero’s Journey, fateful ones. The Knight Errant is one, who may be on a mission, but you wouldn’t know by watching him. James Hillman writes the Knight Errant is one who“…follows fantasy, riding the vehicle of his emotions, he loiters and peruses the anima with his eros, regarding his desire to be holy, and he listens to the discourse of his imagination.” Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 161. His gods are Ananke and Hermes, who occupy the edges and borders of lands and realities where chance is as valued an option as intent, where fate may take unexpected turns, and loosing one’s way is actually the only way. The mists and shifting fog are the path, leading to nowhere in particular, but requiring care.

Remarkably, the wind did not develop in its usual pattern. Exceptionally heavy fog has developed each night for several nights. The fire is nearly contained. The land and wildlife will regenerate. A scar will remain.

Sometimes you find a lucky penny.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

There is dust on this keyboard. I haven’t been using it much in the past month. Some people think dust is the collection of microscopic airborne particles that gradually settle on the surfaces of things as a function of gravity. That is so, and it is also so, mechanistic, so very Newtonian. And although Newton was a religious man, he was not a Romantic. He missed the real reason dust particles collect on my keyboard. As we now know, the real reason they collect is desire, the governing principle that animates everything, and is part of a cluster of meaning, a comfortable bedfellow with yearning, covetousness, passion, and lust. A potent group indeed, so it isn’t any wonder Newton avoided them, preferring the pretense of cool logic, and the security of detached observation.

In orthodox society, it is often the case that the very thing which empowers or provides freedom is held up as that which will do the opposite. This is so with desire, where we are taught from early in life to at least control it, if not avoid or even fear it, lest it lead to its companions, spreading flames of passion and desire that might fill the sky, keeping us up late at night lost in clouds of imaginal yearning, and the next morning, if one has succumbed, to awake with hair on the palms of the hands. What is not taught, even within the unorthodox teachings, are the advantages, the qualities, the potential desire brings. I know, some may be thinking when reading this, “Don’t let the children see this.” Don’t worry, you’re too late anyway.

Early on, when the world was young, the Hindu deity Shiva was disturbed during deep meditation quite intentionally by Kama, the lord of desire. Roused from his meditation, Shiva opened his Third Eye, and burnt Kama to a crisp, ridding the world of the pesky intrusion of desire. But it didn’t take long for the business of the world to grind to a halt. Motivation for anything disappeared, which included all desire for relationships, intimacy and fertilization. Kama had to be brought back, which did happen. But by some accounts Kama remained bodiless. The orthodoxy reduced Kama to a lower sort of deity, more of a force of nature than an entity, a sort of necessary force for the pious to overcome, if approached in purity of course. Hence motivation came back into the world in a more acceptable form, something that even Newton could work with, and ascribe to a dispassionate and trustable universe, and hence the dust collecting on my keyboard, and the dust bunnies in the corners of the room and under the bed.

Even dust bunnies have been studied and explained as the function of air currents acting on hair and dust particles that pick up small electrostatic charges by which means they collect and hold together. More Newtonian nonsense. Truth is, dust particles can’t get enough of each other. And you’ve got to admit to their staying power. And why not let ‘em swirl into ecstatic balls of orgasmic fluff? Who cares? As long as they don’t make too much noise. Ok, so they don’t clean up after themselves, but that is true for most things, and I suspect is a sort of necessary after-effect of desire. Sex is messy.

And like so many other important mysteries of the soul and spirit, Kama (for whom the Kama Sutra is named), changes the nature of the empirical world. He attenuates and sensitizes perception, thus enabling our ability to savor and hold a single moment of sensory intensity for hours, and allows us to “see” the desired quite clearly in the dark. The shape, aroma, texture, and movements of a body become clear, enveloping, and exciting. So while sex may be messy, intimacy is exquisitely satisfying.

But we can’t just let that go on under the bed like that because it’s really about control. More than simple emotional control, Desire and his wife Passion (Kama and Rita) evoke intensity, intensity to the point of suffering. Deep emotion is always tied to our internal gods, some of which we call “dark” and by association to be feared, again, the inverting of what is really going on. We fear the surfacing of intensity. We fear it will fill the air with an explosive aroma we can not understand nor withstand.

But rather than being dark and fearful, desire comes from a Latin root, spirare, to breathe, and shares the idea of breath with aspire, to reach for, usually applied to a high goal or aspiration. And breath is a very old idea in many mythologies signifying spirit or soul, and divine empowerment, the life force itself. Which makes sense, particularly if we recognize, as one scholar does, the possible meaning of desire as being from the phrase de sidere, from the stars. Who knew those dust bunnies were aliens come to Earth for an orgiastic holiday?

My desire requires more than simply admitting responsibility, and thus allowing room for distance, or even guilt. It requires owning, embracing, a celebration. And just perhaps, as a response to that act of abandon, the gods will respond by admitting me into the imaginal realm of the divine through the explosion of the smell of desire and the heat of direct intensity. The connection fused by incandescent desire bonds one to the desired, who becomes instantly, psychically, and physically, the Beloved.

I suspect we would not have been best friends, Newton and I.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

“You need a long rest, at least two weeks. Go someplace like Hawaii.” My doctor said without smiling. I didn’t smile either. I told him I couldn’t afford it. “No problem,” he responded with a small smile. “We’ve got a computer program here in the office that will do the same thing for you. Takes about 90 minutes, but you’ll think you’ve been in Hawaii for two weeks.” I could afford that. He put some sort of gel on my fingers and forehead, then electrodes. It was 2:33, the clock was right behind him. The next thing I knew he was taking them off. The clock read 4:03 and I felt great. I could clearly “remember” the sun on my shoulders, warm sand under my feet, and the sound of waves. There was a slight taste salt from the sea air on my tongue, and I felt great. Then a sudden small jolt of awareness, and I was aware of him taking electrodes off my fingers again, but the clock still read 4:03 pm. The same numbers but this was a different time. There was no warm sand memory, just the terrible uneasiness of the electrodes being in slightly different places, and of not knowing where I had been, or when, or what programmed reality I was in, at that particular 4:03 pm.

I was never the same.
It has been a long journey,
and I’m not back yet,
even though it’s now.

Welcome to the trackless sea. A sea where once one sets off from the shore, there may be no coming back. Then again, there may be multiple returns to the same place, or there may be being welcomed to completely new places where everyone knows you. The worst is coming back to old places were no one even pretends to know you, nor do they pretend to care, all the while your need for connection and intimacy gnaws like an internal, fine toothed worm creating an ache that leaves a wake behind your small boat.

Ancient Polynesians were able to navigate the vast expanses of the Pacific without navigational instruments. Their successful achievement is really only appreciable when, and if, you ever get a chance to be far enough from land to lose sight of it. They sang and chanted, the songs and rhythms telling them how to, and what to look at, what to feel. As much as their knowledge of the sky and stars, they could feel the changing temperature of the water across which they paddled; they watched for changing water colors which indicated currents to ride with, or ride through. More than anything, it was their direct contact with the sea that revealed what track to take. Sometimes in spite of the best wisdom, and most accurate interpretation, storms arose, boats floundered, flooded and sank, leaving only stories of their story. No tracks.

Stories, songs, and chants told the ancient Polynesians what to look at, feel, listen to. The story guided their attention, and told them how to interpret what they were experiencing, Paying attention, more than sailing, was the job of the mariners. Not just paying attention, but being in complete and deep contact with the trackless sea allowed them to follow an invisible one. Direct contact: the real deal. The focus I occasionally loose, and when I do the consequences are potentially disastrous.

Of course it matters if one likes or dislikes the sea. It matters if one has spent enough time in the sea to become comfortable with being in that foreign environment. It matters if one can maintain both a competent and yet a learning attitude toward being in the sea. And of course there are the matters of sailing, and boats, and shipmates and more, all of which deserve similar attention. Being in the ocean can be tricky; there are a lot of unexpected, even unknown sea creatures, currents, winds, and storms that can quickly bring you to the edge, or over the edge of the boat, if not the edge of the world.

And there’s more. There are multiple seas across which to travel. Most of mine are not of my choosing, and all of them are different than what I expected them to be when I began to traverse them. When the ancient Polynesians landed on intermediate islands, they restocked provisions, but most importantly, reoriented their course. I used to think this was to get them back on track to their goal, but I have come to realize it was more to keep them from getting too close to the great falls at the end of the trackless sea, and falling off. The closer one gets to the edge, the more likely is the getting caught in currents that cannot be overcome.

Very like huge rivers, the great currents in the sea are governed by primeval spirits that heed little, that have long since formed uneasy truces with each other, exchanging sea life for temperature in an economy driven by the winds, and monitored by sea serpents. Indeed, there are many things in the Great Sea that are far more powerful than mere humans, and when you meet one, if you’re lucky, like the great current spirits, it will simply not care about you. But as a general rule, big things tend to eat smaller, weaker ones. And as the old saying goes, “When you enter the water, you enter the food chain.” Best to pay close attention to one’s daily spiritual practices, for in the hour of need, when standing in the Jaws of Death, one cannot be choosy about how one gets out. Since I have stood there twice, I will tell you what I have learned, and perhaps it will serve you well someday.

Direct contact. Find the color of your true lover’s eyes in the sky, or sea, or land. Follow the way that particular, and peculiar color directs. Do not let go. It will lead you home. Of this there is no doubt.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

My thought was pure malevolence. The gophers in the garden were obviously taking great delight in killing our favorite plants. More than that, their sense of humor, leaving a wilting, rootless plant, teetering in the afternoon wind, only to fall at the slightest touch, had really pissed me off. So I had resolved to dispatch them.

At the hardware store I considered carefully the myriad means of their demise, fast and slow. I selected a cylinder, 4 inches long, about 3/4 inch in diameter filled with some sort of pulp designed to create smoke that would drive them out of the very earth. Once home, I selected what looked like an active mound, found the hole, lit the short cigar-like smoke bomb and slid it into the hole, lightly placing a clod to close it.

I waited. Cheryl watched.

The smoking cylinder came back out of the hole. Incredulous, I shoved it back in, again closing the hole. It came back out; I shoved it in. It came back out a third time. I realized that there was something, someone at the other end, already pushing back. The smoke-cigar had gone out; I had lost the battle.

Gophers enjoy the reputation of being rodent pests that take particular delight in killing the most beautiful plants in one’s garden. I suspect much more of them. I am gathering scientific evidence to support the thesis that gophers are a race of gnomes, an ancient mythological race that predates humans, and are endowed with particular supernatural abilities. Like the ability to face a foe many times larger in size, and push fire into his face, (and we’re not talking metaphorically here). Of course this is the quality of chutzpah, which is demonstrated mythologically by only the greatest of heroes and fools. And to my chagrin, I have a witness to back this up.

Then there is the ability to navigate the trackless underground dirt-world, leaving a trail of particularly nice, rootless plants. Cheryl, who is a mythologist, and knows about these things, says this sort of ability is called metis, or cunning intelligence, possessed by only the most clever of the gods. So I also have expert testimony. But here is where my theory begins to break down.

Anciently, gnomes were thought to be guardians of the earth and its treasures. It was thought they could not only craft precious metals into stunning works of art, but tended to the growth of gems as they matured deep in the earth. They are old. Cheryl says they’re “older than dirt.” They predate many generations of gods. They’ve seen whole mythologies arise, develop, and vanish. Gnomes communicate directly with the root, the soul of Creation itself, and have done so since the world was hot. But gnomes are creators and craftsmen of the highest order, while gophers gnaw with sharp yellow teeth, maintain crude hoards of bulbs in their tunnels, and kill our plants. Gophers are not unpleasant in and of themselves, and we hold in common a liking for earth-dirt. But I suspect that my research will show them to be not much more than gnome wannabes. But science must prevail, so I need to keep my imaginings scientific and allow for the possibility of gophers-as-messengers.

Indeed, I resist admitting that gophers show courage in dealing with the dark, dirt world. For my part, I would rather stay with the soaring cloud-wind than entertain thoughts of deeply buried, inflamed nerves. But someone has got to go down there and clean things out for me, so I suspect I will have to depend on gophers, spiders, and snakes. My own imaginings like to soar through the heavens, past gateways of stars and clouds of music, where the cool smell on the wind can be swallowed whole. But things that go down, go inward, go deep, are dark, and potentially negative, if not threatening. Psychically, these are the characteristics of the interior soul, which dig and tunnel their way through much different climates. My imaginings are often reluctant to crawl though those cramped passages, only to find things I had hoped not to encounter again. At their worst they smell of inflammation, more often they smell of the earth and gophers. The light, that we think of as spirituality, is too often a delightful fiction. Soulful travel is a necessary and uncomfortable trip, understandable only though ambiguous metaphor. Maybe I need to have a talk with these gophers.

In the meantime, I strategically bury cat box litter in their tunnels. It seems, temporarily, to scare them into the neighbors’ yard.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

I wait for a spider to finish repairing a web outside the kitchen window, only to find the web abandoned the next day, and the next, and next. It doesn’t return.

For responses to emails I have sent, voice messages I have left, and the person in front of me at the market to finish looking through a handful of coins for just the exact change, but then finding an interesting looking coin, quietly slipping it into a pocket and finishing paying. I wait for an expression of discovery, a smile of satisfaction, but he turns with his purchase and leaves.

I wait for the summer monsoon season in the Southwest, and hope for a chance to see a thunderhead build into a structure more gigantic than science fiction would allow.

I suspect you are waiting too.
Mostly I wait for pain to subside, and wonder, and fear it won’t.
That would be an interesting conversation, “What are you waiting for?” “What will you do if what you are waiting for doesn’t materialize?” “Why are you waiting at all?”

Some people wait for revelation, some wait for inspiration. The first is a passive reception, containing from the outside, in. The second is the ignition of a personal flame. It comes from within, consuming from the inside, out.

Summer thunderheads are inspired, their internal flames being ignited by strikes of lightning like gigantic matches being lit by dragging sheets of rain across desert mountains, then spreading their inspiration across the evening sky.

Sometimes it doesn’t happen. The flame does not ignite, the winter waves do not arrive, the summer thunderheads fail to develop. Pain continues. Desire left unfulfilled, disappointment fills the vacuum created by the not happening. The Gods do not visit every day.

Waiting can bind one to inactivity; is simultaneously a spiritual discipline and a waste of time, a paradox that one must not fight lest the binding leads to tightening desperation. And besides being very un-cool, desperation has the effect of driving away exactly what is desired, which creates a very short loop leading back to waiting.

I write. This is a writing of waiting.
I paint. These are paintings of waiting.

 

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

Just this morning, early dawn fog, I surprised a crow flying in the yard, obviously still taking off and gaining speed, a shiny secret precariously held, having been recently plucked. And now I know why I could not remember the dream with which I awoke, and it seemed so very provocative. Damn that crow; that was my dream. Oh, but it was shiny and bright, and I can imagine why it was so irresistible.

A family of crows lives across the street from us in the oak trees, and they often visit, chasing each other into the Juniper tree in the back yard, talking loudly to each other, looking for food and secrets. Our backyard is much more crow territory than that of blue jays or seagulls. The crows know lots of secrets. They may seem to be completely absorbed in their own interactions and intentions, but they are keen observers, and listen carefully. They don’t seem to mind being asked questions, but if will quickly fly off, if the questions get too close to genuine secrets.

I have several times engaged in conversations with crows. The younger ones seem to be less wary, a little less canny, than their parents, so I have gotten a few answers that were, apparently, immediately regretted. But for the most part, the parents and other older crows keep close track of youngsters, and their as of yet less restrained crow tongues. Crows keep their own secrets, one of the greatest of which we already know, not that crows can speak, but that crows can understand human languages. But I have yet to get my dream back.

No matter. I have secrets enough of my own. So do you. And we don’t need crows to keep them. Even though keeping secrets is shared by many species, it’s humans that maintain a great denial about having them, as if having secrets reflected poorly on one’s character. Such humans would never make it as crows.

I think crows, cats, snakes and a few other species find it particularly easy to keep secrets. Humans are not so talented. Once in a while I wonder, imagine, what sorts of secrets someone I know might be keeping. I like to pick someone who is especially uptight about maintaining a particular image. Imagining a story for them is usually easy, and often comic. People present lots of information to anyone who begins to observe and listen to them carefully. While their explicit secrets remain hidden, the spontaneous metaphors inspire reveal layers of information that furtively slip out from behind the veil that both protects and reveals them.

It’s easy to understand why crows like secrets. It’s the same reason we can pick them out when people try too hard to keep them hidden. They’re shiny. Watch crows for a while and you will likely see that when a crow is just at the right angle to the sun, black feathers reveal their true mercury silver color.

We humans pretend our secrets are dark and hidden, but the deeper we keep them, the brighter they shine, until finally their power of illumination is so great the depths of the unconscious calls on its Hermetic messenger, whom we call the Creative Imagination but who is actually Hermes himself, who also has a penchant for shiny things like coins, to find a way to reveal the energy secrets pack away like buried treasure. We think crows swipe the secret, but, no, we have it backwards. It’s the secret that has the crow, or the dream, or the slipped tongue, or the subliminal image. Crows are convenient Hermetic minions because they can’t resist shiny.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

 

Cloud music is not the sound of the wind. Cloud music is the sound of the cloud itself, its own physical voice. Here’s how it comes to be: The water droplets in a cloud actually rub together, gravity keeps larger droplets at lower altitudes and smaller droplets at higher ones. Air movement creates friction between droplets, which creates sound. Lower frequencies emanate from larger droplets, and higher notes from smaller ones. The wind assures mixing of sizes that create harmonies. The mixing results in melodies, rhythms, eventually full blown symphonic works of soaring music. Friction between the droplets also builds up tremendous differences in electric charges. When the charges build up enough they connect, creating lightning and thunder, the cymbals and kettle drums of the cloud orchestra.  Oh yes, a thunderstorm is not just a symphony, it is a full orchestra playing with all the passion available to those who follow the trailing cloud paths, following their shifting colored notes.

In the first half of the last century, a little known, self-taught meteorologist and amateur musician, Theodore Domingo, hypothesized that clouds actually make their own sounds, so he conducted an experiment to record and measure cloud sounds. His equipment was primitive, but he managed to record some basic squeaking noises while parachuting though a thunderhead in the tropics. No one took him seriously, but his recordings survived. To those who have taken the time to listen closely, what he recorded was clearly not simply the wind. So there is some, admittedly precious little, research which supports Cloud Music. What he didn’t know was that whole symphonies are composed, performed, and lost as a single thunderhead progresses through its life of development. But if I am not mistaken, this is exactly what is referred to in the New Testament by the statement, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Clouds. I have always had a passion for clouds. I have never understood it. Never tried to understand it, and have never really wanted to understand it. It just happened. When I learned to paint, the two, clouds and painting, seemed like the most natural and automatic combination. At first, they joined together crudely, but have since then figured it out between the two of them. And I have listened as photographs and drawings have had their own, similar conversations with clouds. I am sure they discuss the alchemical implications of the marriage.

I delight in the story of Alfred Stieglitz and his famous Equivalents. In 1922 Stieglitz had achieved such mastery in the photographic medium that he was accused of using hypnosis with his photographic subjects to achieve his artistic and technical success. Irritated,  he intentionally created a series of cloud photographs (subjects he could not be accused of hypnotizing) called “Songs Of The Sky.” These are pictures with such metaphoric strength they overcome the inherent ambiguity of photographic images. He called his cloud images “equivalents,” which were intended to engage the viewer with the same intense passion that he, Stieglitz, originally experienced with the subject.

He described that relationship:   “If what one makes is not created with sacredness, with wonder; if it is not a form of lovemaking; if it is not created with the same passion as the first kiss, it has no right to be called a work of art.”

But my cloud images don’t stand for anything else. I just love cloud pictures because they are of clouds. Intricate, powerful, delicate, infinitely variable, above all, beautiful. Cheryl says about drawing, “Be careful what you draw, you just might fall in love with it.” I think the same can be said of painting, photographing or any medium, if it one engages it with pure authenticity.

One has to be a little careful, not to let the Cloud Music get too loud. Mountains, mesas, oceans, and deserts all tend to get agitated, of course they have their music, but envy is a universal emotion.

This is my Anniversary Of Standing. I celebrate being thrice born at this time of year. Once in my original Earth birth, and twice more as I emerged from the Jaws of Death. At this time of the year Cloud Music is not so particularly loud for me, but it is exquisitely clear, and sweetly subtle.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

Few people know this: Cycles are actually what drives the world itself. Large and small, orbits, rhythms, vibrations can be amazing when their often spiral natures are shown in their Fibonacci, mathematical glory. Time’s seasonal cycle, the repetition of the calendar, marked by the ocean, wind, sky, and its light is always immediate. But mythic stories are also cyclical because of the repeating nature of the core of the story, which re-emerges like winter grass in disparate places and cultures. And how we describe the world is how we experience it.

Ironically, we don’t see in cycles; we see in straight lines, mirrors and prisms not withstanding. We can recognize and understand cycles, but while we are in one, it’s really difficult to determine where the end actually is. We too often limit ourselves to the tools of memory of the past, and anticipation of the future, and these two tend to reinforce a given cycle we might be experiencing, especially when they are glued to the events of the cycle with anxiety and fear. One of the functions of ritual is to help us become aware of the re-creation of important events as well as the changing of dysfunctional, repetitious patterns so we can appreciate the cyclical nature of powerful experience. Ritual bends our straight line perception into holy, cyclical repetition.

In the Spring, high pressure builds in the north Pacific creating a “Spring Winds” weather pattern. It’s part of the cycle of life on the edge of the continent. Bright days, strong light from a sun not fully high, strong northwest winds, and no storms of any significance. What little moisture that manages to form and fall may be enough to soak into the faded gray fence wood in the back yard, but not enough to wet the ground beneath the juniper tree. By mid-mornings the crisp wind has dried whatever rain had fallen and blown its moisture east into Nevada, where it is lost in the forever sky of the cold, dry desert. The daylight lengthens noticeably at this time of year. I look forward to the warm days of summer, but mourn the loss of deep energy winter storms. This winter was mild. Too mild. We will be rationing water for the rest of the year.

It will be a gray summer. The usual seasonal cycle is different here. Winter grasses are brilliant emerald green which begin to shift to a rich golden color in late spring, then to dry and brown in the late summer, by early fall the brown has become gray, fires are a continual, fearful threat. By the second or third winter rain the hills are a discernable green, and hope for enough rain seems to emerge with the new grass.

The Jaws of Death experiences have forced me to look around me more carefully. When a cycle is short, I often miss it entirely, when it is long, my limited perception only sees in a straight timeline toward the past, and a straight projection toward the future and I miss it unless I am patient enough to experience it again, but that may take many cycles. If the cycle is just my size, I get dizzy. In any case, I haven’t really seen anything beyond where I actually am, if that.

In times of stress my ability to perceive contracts, narrows in scope. This is not just a tendency, it is an actual change in ability. I focus more and more narrowly as stress increases, be it stress from anxiety, pain, fear, or their friends and combinations. This morning I found one of my medications in my pocket. Surprised, I checked my log. I had “taken” it at 6 pm, right on schedule. But I hadn’t. There it was, in my pocket. So I must have lost track of what I was doing in the three steps it takes to cover the location of my medication and accompanying log, and the sink, where I get a drink to take the pill. Is that a small cycle, big cycle, or a just my size cycle? I vote for just my size.

I survey the rooms of the house, and the yard, and see item after item, weed after weed, chore after chore that has been invisible to me for weeks, months. What else is there that I didn’t see? How long will it take me to forget my present awareness, to narrow my focus again and become only aware of the six inch diameter patch in my lower spine that has become an entire universe of awareness and priority? Just a rhetorical question because in some mythologies, time is always cyclical, and some of the cycles are really long. Hindu yugas, for example, are hundreds of thousands of years long. We currently live in the Kali Yuga, which is about 450,000 years long.

But every Spring brings the wind.

 

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

A trip to the underworld is enough to ruin the whole day. If one returns, his or her fundamental life story is likely going to be different, a lot different. But it may take a while to figure that story out, and the shock of having been to the underworld is enough to keep the new story buried in the foggy memories of the trip.

As it is, the real world is made of curving, linking, and sometimes shattered stories. This realization alone can trigger deep disequilibrium, but when it is coupled with a new story that contains an underworld visit, or two, just being aware of the story can be unpleasant in the extreme. I understand why people avoid it. I’d avoid it too, but I cannot.

In some societies, when a person almost dies, he or she is often “remade,” and often renamed, as a part of coming back from that most difficult of journeys. Re-entrance into society is then done with a different identity, one with a different story. Mythically, when one returns from the underworld, one often brings back something special like secret knowledge or wisdom. Sometimes the story gets embellished, and those who return get handy attributes like extra-ordinary perception or powers. And sometimes the new story of their identity is not understandable to those around them. In Western societies we have not been kind to people whose stories we cannot understand, and we use terms like crazy, mad, insane, and idiot to dismiss the person and the new story, but it’s actually a self protection mechanism. We know that if we accept that person’s new story, ours will have to change accordingly, and at that realization, warning buzzers sound and red lights light up in us.

Those returning with a new story may find they don’t remember all, or even any of the details of their journey, and what they do remember is necessarily deeply metaphoric, and fraught with questions of interpretations and applications. And the more literal the interpretation, the more strong are the reactions from others, ranging from bemused tolerance to outright labels of condemnation. All of which begins to erode the power of the new story, until the unconscious recognizes the lack of safety, and retreats, taking its psychic power with it.

I began writing this blog with the intent to help me make sense of having gone though that process not once but twice. My first fear was that I was so dense that I had flunked the first course of study, and was required to take it again, much more slowly, and with exquisite pain to punctuate my attention. I continue to hope that is not the case, and while I may never discover the reason for the second lesson, insights are beginning to slowly emerge.

There is a lot of writing and thought about experiences that shatter the thin films of stories that we pretend are the firm pillars of reality. People in situations similar to mine often write about pain. It defines, and commands their world. One does not have the power to simply opt out, so some write, some sleep, most of us take pills. I have learned not to try and battle the pain. That just feeds more pain, besides, the real battle is with despair. If I stay present, both pain and despair become manageable. The two, pain and despair, are too difficult for me to keep track of together, and pain, being the more immediate of the two, wins my attention. I cannot say we have become friends, but we have progressed far beyond simple acquaintance, to deep intimacy. I wonder if pain, as another voice, may have connections to the underworld that I do not have. Understanding the message is, at least, challenging.

In a conversation about a pain storm that had taken several weeks to pass through, I had mentioned I felt like the pain was chasing me. “Toward what? What do you think the pain is chasing you toward?” Cheryl’s question was a take-off on the question asked by mythologists, “What is the myth that is living you?”

I pointed toward the newly completed painting on the floor, but couldn’t say anything at all. Her question had stunned me into an emotional stupor, because one of the few places I can stay for any length of time is on the floor, while painting. It was obvious that the painting was a result of that limitation. I quickly got lost in thoughts of how pain comes in waves or cycles that may roar through, or may settle in for weeks, but like storms, seem to have an identity all their own.

Cheryl gently asked another question, “What does the pain storm say to you?” I thought for a few seconds and understood there did seem to be a voice, one from deep within, from deeper than the pain. “This is the only way I could get you to paint,” it said, “to nudge from within you the voice of the storm.”

I realize then the pain was not an “it,” the pain has been a vehicle for that voice, like a river, complete with high and lower flow levels, bends, eddies, rocks, rapids, and falls, all of which make listening to the deeper voice more difficult. I had suspicions that Pain had been a vehicle, the vehicle on which I rode to the brink of the underworld, and back again, but only that. It’s not that I had not honored the metaphor, but simply did not know what to do with it. It turns out that trying to do anything with it was exactly wrong, or at least counterproductive. Simply waiting, being with it over this past, nearly a full year’s, time has allowed it to unpack its layers of meaning for me. That’s the way metaphor works, always. Layers unfold over time, but only when the environment will hold their meaning. Otherwise they stay locked, this one very like a dragon, safely guarding its treasures.

There is a principle at work here, which is, if you give the unconscious a chance to speak, it will. Of course the unconscious speaks only the language of metaphor, and only the gods can speak that language without timidity, which puts us all in a very precarious position, since we cannot communicate at all without metaphor, but that is another topic.

So all of this is sort of a preface to say that a new story is emerging for me, but it is frightening to even admit to a new identity story. What if it does not support the old one? Who will I be in that case? Even though my conscious mind knows full well the old story was a fiction anyway. We cling to our old stories because we know them so well, they seem to be the very fabric of our existence.

My new story uses some of the aspects and parts of my former story, but the plot is both unknown and different, and the conclusion is, at the very least, in some other place than the previous one. However I recognize one new part of the story, which has to do with putting myself out into the world as an artist, which up to this point, I have to admit, I have resisted. Indeed, I have been forcibly returned to this most basic part of myself. And since I have been reduced to this essence, externally to the living room floor, internally to my soul, to discover what has been re-membered by having been reborn, not twice but thrice, I begin living a new story. And since you are reading this, in a smaller way, so are you. Thank you.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

 

Deserts are beautifully severe. They get a bad rap in most cultural symbolism, but it’s not without reason. Arid and extreme, without a doubt, but what they allow is sight. Mountain peaks looming up half hidden by razor straight horizons, the horizon itself may be a hundred miles away. The wind blows there, lifting dust that turns the blue sky into apple green near the horizon at sunset, and desiccates, preserving anything that cannot regenerate or conserve its moisture. Rocks, hills, mountains, even the sparse vegetation is sharp. One respects the desert. It can cut.

Places of truth and deception, deserts show the real and the mirage at the same time.
Perhaps it’s the nature of the desert that brings one into the presence of the divine. The particular quality of being able to hold a paradox, without the need to either resolve or collapse it, has long been prized as a spiritual technique.

With the obvious exception of blighted cities, deserts are places of expansive solitude, sought out by many only to be swallowed by vastness. Its perfectly natural that ascetics and mystics from all cultures and times have retreated into them for communion with deity. Those lucky enough, met themselves in visions of light and darkness, and revelations of voices which were at the same time thunderous, and still and small.

Sight is interesting, referring to what is perceived by the eyes, which seems physical, mechanical. Seeing refers to “following with the eyes,” which we would expect, but its old meaning imbeds the internal sight we refer to as “seeing with the mind’s eye.” With external eyesight we perceive the objective world. In the desert, camouflage markings are the norm, rain from thunderstorms often does not touch the ground, and mirages reveal both false images of water and real objects that lay beyond the visible horizon. In the desert in-sight is often far more valuable, what is usually hidden, which is often sharp, if not poisonous. In the desert, in-sight can penetrate the barriers of objectivity, can reveal more than the truth of sight, which in and of itself can show the staggering severity and contrasts of the land.

When I was little, our family drove across the desert fairly often. In summer we drove at night to avoid the heat. We often took side trips, but always with forethought: water, boots, shovels. It was the desert that I wanted in my pictures when I started panting. I was young, and “capture” was a word I misused. I was always disappointed by the pictures I made not realizing the desert had already captured me. I kept mistaking the place for my experience. What I wanted to show up on the canvas was my own experience so I could be in the place again. I could see neither the desert nor myself very well.

Now crossing the desert is done on multilane freeways in air conditioned vehicles traveling so fast one cannot see very much, and can hear nothing. We get off only at truck stops, which bustle even through the night. But a side road, one that raises dust so fine in penetrates though the closed doors of the car, can be of great value. Try this: Drive for just 10 or 20 minutes, far enough to get out sight of the main road. Stop, turn off the motor, get out and walk off the road. Stop walking and close your eyes. You will immediately be aware of the vastness of the sound as well as the sight. The dry air carries other sets of sensations, smell and feel. The melding of all, sight, sound, smell, feel, create the Image, the overall impression, of the desert that we create in the mind’s eye. This is the soul of the desert. As Jung says, “Image is psyche,” and psyche is Jungian for soul. The desert is one of those rare places where it is possible to physically step into a psychic archetype.

The desert is alive. Whenever I am there I get glimpses of the truth. Flashes of insight into the archetype itself, which is accompanied by a burst of excitement. It’s a familiar energy, one I grew to desire when I was young. It has never changed; at once dramatic, sublime, and full of awe. When one has a “familiar,” one has a daemon, a spirit, a deity within. If my rational mind has its way, I will dismiss my burst of excitement as immaturity, but then again, the actual meaning of “excitement” is god within.

The desert teaches me; I finally begin to see the truth, the truth of my own metaphors and stories, the truth of my own creations. Although they are fictions, they are also the creation I call myself. There is something out there, I can see it, it’s me, thinly disguised, making sense of what I see, looking back at me, impatiently waiting for me to catch up. When I do, which isn’t often, I find exactly what makes sense to me, and if I am unlucky that day, I pretend to be surprised. But on good days I see my insistence of the story I use called reality, and my particular understanding of it. I wonder which are more beautiful, desert sights or desert insights?

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

 

There is an organized effort called “This I Believe,” that solicits essays on the subject. This is some of what I believe:

Some stories and tales become a part of our culture and are passed on from generation to generation, like the founding of the country, patriotic bravery, and lives of service, integrity, and belief. I believe these sorts of stories carry some sort of cultural truism that is being taught by the telling of such stories, and such is the stuff of our cultural mythology. A Myth is not a falsehood, but a flexible story that carries a deeply embedded truth to which the culture as a whole responds. It has an inherent quality of being able to sustain the communication of that truth regardless of changes in plot, characters, situations, cultural contexts, and in spite of an amazingly wide variety of rhetorical manipulations. So I believe in the strength of mythological truth.

I believe that examining the world around me through a mythological lens provides me with a powerful tool that can reveal the underlying driving forces in events and people.
That is, if I take the time to listen and think about things carefully.

For example, I believe we have witnessed the progressive failure of education over the past 35 years because of a short sighted emphasis on what people might remember when taking a test, to prove educational competence, and therefore the success of their educational process, because of economic motivations over all else. At the same time I believe education has failed to teach functional, critical thinking skills which has deprived literally millions of people of being able to understand fact from opinion, separate dogma from personal values, identify the bias of information sources, cast an informed ballot, and a functional awareness of how to continue to learn apart from any school or social structure. Because of this, I believe I have watched confusion and fear on the part of the electorate, cowardice on the part of many journalists, and greed for power and money on the part of most politicians and major capitalists.

And while I believe the chance of humans destroying themselves through the destruction of our own habitat is very real, and greater than we actually know, I also believe the chances of our creativity being successfully applied to the really big issues, and to human survival itself are much greater than we can ever know. For I believe one of the truths that mythological stories continually teach, is that all humans are creative.

In my life, I have always been the least creative and most vulnerable to error when I have been the least aware of my own story which both blinds me to myself, and pretends sophistication. Mythic stories, by contrast, are unassumingly honest and can tell of brilliant creativity, often so unexpected that the narrator is forced to make up an explanation of divine intervention just to account for a solution to an intractable problem in a story.

I believe that mythological truth will out. Like trying to compress a liquid, it will find a way to surface, and will re-emerge through new stories, new heroes and heroines. In the end, I believe that Modernism is a failed experiment, even though its achievements are truly amazing, but I believe it’s time, and none too soon, to move on to a new world, not a Postmodernism, where anything goes, where all rules exist to be broken, and greed and mean spiritedness can run in unregulated amuck, but to a world of post-mythological awareness where people are looking for the stories that contain the truths which will teach us, once again who we really are.

Writing this short posting was easy. I simply thought about the topic, read a great deal, listened to other people, discussed this topic often, and engaged in a great deal of other, related work. The years that this process took seemed to fly by. During the process I nearly died, twice. Once at the hand and knife of an attacker at midnight in an Atlanta suburb, and again as the result of a rogue staph, spinal infection which taught me the real definition of sustained and eventually chronic pain. In response to these two events I started the blog you are reading and looking at. I hope it is interesting to you. That is why I put in both writings and art work, to make it interesting. I believe one’s internal daemon is aware, and kind enough to know when events are too painful to remember, not just accurately, but remember at all. So I know there are large gaps in time, that I cannot remember anything. I believe during those times I took a trip to the mythic underworld, and was, for some reason allowed to return. I believe the only way to communicate about it is through metaphor, which is the language of myth, and the language of all spirituality, of the unconscious, the language of the gods themselves.

Creativity is an interesting muse, fickle, attractive, seductive, at times ecstatic and euphoric, at times simply hard work. I used to keep a small quote on my computer screen that I have heard attributed to several sources, “Writing is very easy. I just sit at my keyboard until little drops of blood form on my forehead.” My process has been like that. But I have learned one thing from my experiences, which is not to offend the muse. When she arrives, I respond. I have purpose, and sometimes the magic works well enough to show up on canvas or paper. In the meantime I remain confused, so I spend a lot of time attending to Princess, our cat.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

Mythologically, no one can save the hero or the heroine.

First of all, not all paths are the Hero’s Journey path. Some are paths leading into the woods, or the desert, or the mountains, or are trackless paths across the seas that may lead to nothing at all, or may lead to personal discoveries, or may lead to locations and findings of wisdom or power, but that do not require the same stages and follow the same form as the Hero’s Journey as identified by Joseph Campbell, and oversimplified by millions.

Second of all, some paths lead to well deserved resting places. Some paths are simply confusing. We are arrogant to assume we can decode everything with a single, relatively simple metaphor.

Third of all, we cannot avoid being on a Hero or Heroine’s Journey at least at some point. And maybe you are on one now. I can think back and see how I have been on several Hero’s Journeys and didn’t know it most of the time, and only now am learning the lessons of what the path had to offer. Learning only now, months and years later that I did bring back some metaphoric treasure, some wisdom or magic. A treasure is of little value as a tool if we do not understand its use.

Importantly, the hero or heroine does not embark on the journey without at some point, often, just after answering the call, when it is far too late to change anything, without realizing one is totally screwed. There is a very good reason for that realization, which is that one is on one’s own. And when you are actually in the thick of the Journey, and in free fall after what Romantically is called “The Call,” at least I never stopped and thought, “Oh, I am on a Hero’s Journey, so I can take comfort in knowing that help is just around the corner.” Nope, the thinking is much more like, “Oh shit, here comes another wave.” And that is about the limit of the sophistication of the thinking, which is to say there isn’t much ‘thinking’ there is just visceral response. Just non-thinking action.

In the path called the Hero’s Journey, the hero or heroine never speculates, “Things look bad now, but I know some mythic ally will appear and provide me with a special tool or magic knowledge with which I will succeed in this journey.” This is because in a real heroic journey, sometimes the hero dies. He or she just doesn’t make it. The prevailing forces are simply too great for any allies, to which the hero may have access, to counter. Siiipffft. End of story. We may celebrate the heroic struggle, if we know of it by evidence left as an appreciated tragedy, an unacknowledged Journey.

At one point in my life I really thought it was my job to be the Ally, the one who magically, mythically steps into the lives of others as they were in the pit of despair, and save them with some sudden insight, act of will, or profound pronouncement. What hubris. It was a very painful, and prolonged lesson to learn that not I, nor anyone else, could intentionally act that part. That is not for humans, but for deity to decide.

No one can save you.
No one can save me.
We must save ourselves.

How?

Here is what I think: We save ourselves with Authenticity. Being Present with whatever, with whomever, and in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. We save ourselves with the help and intervention of deity, but that is only a function of our own genuineness.

This is why doing art is one of the most direct ways to changing the universe, at least to changing our individual universe. More than most disciplines, it provides us each with a completely individualistic and subjective experience, which when we do achieve it, is immediately self justifying. No explanations are ever needed. The resulting work automatically stands on its own, a testament to a spiritual event. An event that changed things, a testament that signifies the hero/heroine did not die this time, but lived on, and has left this evidence as an important indicator. But even then there are no guarantees.

But which is, at the same time, cold comfort if you are in the throes of freefall. I am sorry for you if you are. I wish it could be different for you, that you could be spared somehow, because I love you. But I cannot do a thing; I still love you, and that makes it all the more difficult.

Please succeed.

© 2009 All Rights Reserved

Paths have always been full of metaphoric meaning. I like the ones that lead over a hill, or into a woods, or into the mist. It’s more fun not knowing where the path goes, but that I am following it, the path knows the way. The path leading, showing. Others must have been this way before I got here, and have marked the path for me. (I say to myself I am grateful for their thoughtfulness, and imaginally I continue along the path.)

           

Who was here? Who marked my path? Who marked yours before you? The paradox of paths is that we all walk alone, individually, originally. At the same time we all find evidences that someone else was here before, found the same connections, and left symbolic sensations that provide precious psychic markers for our travels.

 

Slow. Very very slow. I progress down my path, on numb soles, so slowly I wonder about making progress at all. Writing, painting, walking all seem to take place in a strange, changed medium of time, one with the viscosity of molasses. Sometimes I awake and find myself repeating what seems to be the same part of my path, trying to learn how to proceed by traversing it again, and again. Mostly I am looking down and in, and its easer to crawl than walk.

 

Full of lovely ambiguity, a path can denote a route, a course of action, and a history all at once. So maybe paths are marked, not so much by solid ground, but by trails of moving mist and fog, that vaguely change directions, and at the same time obscure that obstacle-rock on which we are just about to stub a toe, break an ankle, to trip and tumble off the path entirely. I have nearly fallen completely off the path twice. In retrospect the falling off part is suspended in time, has placed pauses in my memory, and is disguised with veils of nerves regenerating, sending out errant signals squealing in the darkness of my body. Nearly falling off helps me to realize that much of what I thought was solid ground has been thin ice. Ice is a demanding path, and thin ice is laced with the fear of falling through. I can clearly remember the sensation of my foot breaking through thin ice, a situation that seemed to often result in a wet foot, a bruised ankle, both or worse. I think we depend on our pretensions about solidarity. I don’t like walking on ice, not because its too slippery, but because it’s too cold.

 

A lot of the time my own pathic metaphor is too rigid, becoming pathological, being habitually dysfunctional, expecting progress, looking back and finding a clearly causal set of events that got me where I am. Nevertheless, my path is also, by definition, pathologically accurate, having been (at least partially) caused by dis-ease. But my own history doesn’t seem very important to me except to show me when I think ahead, the way is not so clear, not sure at all and I wonder if I haven’t got my directions twisted around. Surely I am further along. Surely I am not still here. But just as surely, I am still watching the same damn pain go by again and again, as if in an old cartoon. This path teaches patience, not directions. I don’t want your stinking patience, but choice is not a luxury that is available at the moment.

 

In the present, all of my perceptions are only of the past. I can only be aware of what has immediately just occurred, even if the sensation is only micro or nanoseconds past. All of my perceptions, as soon as I realize them, are instantly based on what just happened. But regardless of my answer, the point is my perceptions are memories, and they always point my attention toward the past. Oddly, thinking about my path in the past seems like it would provide me with a sense of security, of what is real, what got me here. But I am unsure of where I am, and more unsure of where I am going.

 

If paths are mythic and archetypal, then they have to be marked with emotions, memories, and patterns to which we respond immediately, somatically, and phenomenologically, which certainly works for me. Archetypes are mysterious. Almost paradoxically we all respond to them, but they also always have to be grounded in each of us individually or we would never get any meaning from them. They always seem to surface, somehow meaningful, in every body. They seem to have a mind, even a will of their own. How does that happen? Must be the archetype that done it.

 

Well then, I can comfort myself with the self-contentedness of engaging in a mythic journey. I am sure Paths are mythic, but is every path mythic? And how do I know this one is? And how do I know that I am following it mythically? What would that look like as opposed to what I actually remember? Did I have the right experience? Did I do the right thing? Am I doing it wrong? There’s a Randy Newman song about that, “Just don’t move me the way that it should. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.” This path doesn’t seem to move me much, and I suppose if I am asking the question, the answer is “yes.” On the other hand, I don’t see any optional routes at the moment. I forgot: paths may be mythic, not all mythic paths are heroic. And even when one’s path is heroic, while most heroes and heroines are wounded, there is no guarantee of eventual or ultimate survival. Ok then, not much comfort there after all.

 

My problem in the present is, I cannot intend myself one inch further along this path and into the future. Actually this is not a problem to be solved by thinking, this is an experience to be had, and lived through. Maybe the message is, I just need to check out this place on the path more carefully, or maybe it’s that I just be with myself in this place on the path. Maybe the problem is I keep treating my path like an archetypal moving sidewalk, and it behaves accordingly.

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

Riddles. I never liked riddle games when I was young. I think it was because I rarely got the answer very quickly. Things have not changed as I have gotten older. But then, it seemed to me that everyone else around me was already laughing at the joke and I was still working on trying to get the answer to the riddle. In retrospect, the thing that bothered me the most was not my inability to solve the puzzle quickly, but to not be included in the social group knowledge. Here’s a story theme: being on the edge of social networks and groups, never feeling like I enjoyed full, center weighted membership. It took a very long time for me to realize that there a lot more people on the edges than in the centers of things.

Riddles often fall into cycles of phrases, images of repetition, rings within rings. Symbols of many things including eternity itself, rings at their best are punctuated by jewels of meaning, stars in the arc of the heavens worn on heads, fingers, around waists, ankles and wrists. They challenge us to duels of interpretation, which we are pleased to lose, wearing the triumphant rings for all to see, and marvel at their beauty and mystery, at least in our dreams. I’ll bet you have some favorite jewelry that bespeaks of more than pretty colors or interesting design, but that holds some private meaning that you rarely, if ever share, and which you actually do not completely understand yourself.

Dreams. Cheryl tells me mammals have had the ability to dream for about 180 million years. What I find interesting is that after that after many of millions of years we still don’t know what dreams actually are, and we still try, sometimes quite desperately, to decode them, “accurately,” as if a linear cause-effect understanding can be accomplished. And to no one’s surprise, when it can, when the meaning of a dream can actually be completely decoded, defined, dissected, and delineated, we find that its fragile power far too easily decomposes in front of the eyes of our controlling understandment.

Dreams are metaphoric, and while metaphors do have referents, their confirmation, and the nuances of meaning that can be attributed to the connections between the two are up to the dreamer, archetypal images in dreams notwithstanding. But this is not about how to understand dreams except to say that dreams are a means of discovery. Riddle-like in their interpretive challenge, they are also riddle-like in their means of understanding, being open to those that are open to them, but always mixing a sort of shyness in the light of intention.

It seems certain that we are compelled to construct plausible meanings for dreams. We fall easily prey to the boring and the absurdly scripted dictionaries, providing cyclical humor for the deities of dreams, something to keep them amused while they spin their rings of dark ambiguity.

Storms. Meteorological storms are often weather fronts thrown out in vast arms from a central area of low pressure. They often signal the boundaries between masses of air between which are great differences in temperature and pressure. The clashing of which can result in spectacular fireworks of lighting, ominous thunder, and frightening wind. And there are other sorts of storms, pain storms for instance which can be physical, emotional, or spiritual, and various combinations of all. For most of us, awareness of these storms, once they have passed, is short lived even though the storm can actually rage on for great lengths of time.

Dream storms can signal the clashing of worlds, conscious and unconscious, intent and what may seem to be fated experience. They can pass through our reality like a thunderstorm in the middle of the night, providing eerie illumination, making things familiar seem strange. Trying to understand the metaphoric dream is like trying to control the sea. Just about the time we think it’s safe, and we have a meaning figured out, when we think we are in control of the dream and ourselves, the dream reoccurs, cyclical, riddle-ring-like, telling us only that there is some deeper meaning, which may escape our mental investigations in spite of all of our attempts to shine a light of illuminating consciousness on it. Just when we think we have it boxed in to a Romantic understanding that fits well into our fantasy… “Well this is obviously an archetypal dream involving the universal, symbolic images of… blah blah blah,” the dream shifts its shape, and when you expect it to fly and are looking toward the sky of your understanding with great anticipation, it crawls out of the shadows, and with only a quick glance surprises you awake to wonder, with a gnawing sense of anxiety, what just happened.

Quickly now, and quietly, or they’ll notice, and you have taken the box as well, and they won’t be best pleased about that. So you’ll need to be far from here, well into the other light by the time the word gets out.

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

There is a way of describing how to look at something to see it more holistically than our normal way of observing. There are various ways of describing what it is, how to do it, and what it’s good for. To look with soft eyes is to observe something differently, to look at something but to redirect one’s attention from the regular foveal to the peripheral areas of the field of vision, but without moving the eyes themselves. Another way is to look at something though partially closed eyes, just closed enough so as to be able to look though the eyelashes. The lashes break up the image so we lose detail and contrast. The resulting image is more a result of the larger, geometric shapes, the areas of color or simply light and dark that make up the composition of the image. Doing this immediately gives one more of a gestalt understanding of a particular image or scene.

This same idea can be transferred to other senses as well. Listening, listening to a single sound, perhaps the sound of your hearing, a slight ringing perhaps. Maybe your breath, or heartbeat. Isolating a single sound in the environment, then adding another, holding the attention on that second sound while not losing track of the first. Not trying to listen to remember, but simply to appreciate each sound. Try this with taste, and smell, but above all, try it with touch.

Soft hands can pick up the sharpest object, a thorn, needle, knife edge, and not be pierced. But one must have a relationship with that point or edge, acknowledging and respecting its own nature. Lightly touching, feeling the nature of the texture and temperature of what one is touching, slowly, intentionally, immediately sensitizes the finger tips. What you are touching also immediately changes in your understanding of it.
If you try this with another person… well, you already went there.

Seeing with hard eyes is akin to what Martin Buber called the I-It relationship which uses empirical objectification to validate the accuracy of what we see. It operates as a cultural excuse for interpersonal closeness, but it actually is only about one’s self. Modernism, particularly in the Western mind has had a profound effect on awareness itself. It’s a really difficult problem to see what isn’t seen, hear what isn’t heard, understand what is unintelligible, incomprehensible. Modernism assumes that given enough time and money all problems can be solved. What’s worse, is that Modernism is a very arrogant worldview which assumes that its practitioners are able, with little if any practice, to take a perfectly objective position, detached from any bias, to both comprehend and accurately assess the situations in which one is found. In short, we don’t think we get it, we know we get it, and we are right. So we are always surprised when we are surprised, and usually in denial when we are wrong.

Here’s the big news: There isn’t any true objective perception – of any kind – for any person – at any time. Everyone has perceptual biases, some of which we are aware, some that operate as blind spots for us. The more we attempt to control those of which we are aware, the more we empower the others. But when you think about it, biases are a function of our values, and we are never without a set of values. Even the most scrupulous scientist, functioning with the most strict set of procedures and carefully calibrated equipment is working with a “scientific” bias. That isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a bias like one’s preference for dark vs. milk chocolate. Mine is dark, the darker the better.

I don’t see my mental images vividly. Some people do, maybe you are one of them. My mental images are rarely so specific that I can keep track of details. It’s the same with how I read, and even how I dream. Maybe my astigmatism applies to my interior seeing as well as my external vision. I do perceive emotionally, and quite intensely. At first thought, seeing emotion may seem confusing, but since images are holistic they present themselves to perception all at once, so it is easy to understand how associations like emotion come slamming into my consciousness, commanding attention, obscuring detail. This has always been my lot in life, and created great confusion for me for much of my life.

Having twice stood in the Jaws of Death has not changed my way of seeing and feeling, but it has heightened my awareness of both how and what I see-feel. In contrast to the I-It mentioned above, the other sort of relationship Martin Buber proposed is the I-Thou. Where the object of perception is not considered as simply an object to be controlled, but an other with whom one enters a sacred relationship, transitory, intensely direct, and ineffable. The relationship itself is “the between.” When it becomes an I-Thou, it begins to function as an aesthetic bond, so that one is caught up in experience as art, rather than doing art as an experience. One cannot intend to have this happen. To do so invokes the will, and defines the relationship as a goal, an automatically objectified I-It. By contrast, in the process of the I-Thou, one begins to see what cannot be seen, experience what cannot be described, but whether that promotes projection into the depths of the unconscious or the depths of the imaginal universe, it is the same. When it happens between two people they are bound together with a mutual question, of “What just happened?” which can only be asked afterwards, and remains elusively ghostlike. Just as well. Mystery is essential to seeing what cannot be seen. 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

 

We never seem to tire of the drama with which Mother Nature surrounds the appearance and disappearance of Apollo’s chariot of fire. Sunrises and sunsets command universal attention. A much less dramatic but no less beautiful event takes place in the sky in the 180 degrees from where we usually stare with so much appreciation. On a clear evening just after the sun has set, a dark blue-gray band one might at first think to be a band of clouds begins to show itself exactly opposite the recently set sun. There, over a widely stretching swath of the sky, a blue-gray band is cast through the atmosphere, and rises into space. I doesn’t last long, 15 minutes or so on a clear evening. Mornings provide the same scene on the western horizon, just before sunrise: the same blue-gray band, this time diving into the horizon at the first hint of the sun. This is the shadow of the Earth. The sheer scope escapes us, daily.

We all have a shadow, even the Earth. Light must create a shadow, darkness, for everything it hits. No exceptions, not even planets.  Shadow is an interesting word. It is a shade or umbra. It’s also a phantom or ghost, and is associated with the sense of being fleeting or transitory. Shadow has recently found wide use in popular culture. But Shadow and its variant Shadow Side require more careful regard than being tossed off with associations like “the dark side,” an ominous sounding term with implications of realms of evil and names like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. Psychically, if consciousness is the part of us lit by awareness, then the shadow is “The ‘negative’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and contents of the personal unconscious.” Carl Jung, Collected Works 7, paragraph 305.

Got any secrets? Things hidden even from yourself? Of course, we all do. They all go into the shadow. If you just answered “No,” then you just picked up another one. The shadow, like all things in the unconscious, is inextricably linked to emotions, often strong ones. So the shadow is negative in the sense that it contains or holds what we do not want to face or show. It is evil only if that is what one is hiding there. Who among us does not fear what we have hidden in the depths of each of our unconscious minds? Who has not offended someone dear to us, and has not tried to bury that hurt, hide it from the light of scrutiny? Who does not fear the parts of our selves we have tried to avoid for so long, only eventually to meet up with them anyway?

If Apollo is the Greek god of light, then what of the dark, the shadow? That would be Dionysus. He’s often thought of as the Greek god of wine and excess, but he is much more than that. Apollo is rational, ordered, structured, process oriented, achieving, and to be sure, masculine. Dionysus is intuitive, chaotic, spontaneous, passionate, and feminine. Above all Apollo is the light, conscious, and visible, while Dionysus is the dark, underground and unconscious. Most importantly, each gives more meaning to the other.

 The shadow is tricky for sure.  We ignore it at our own peril. “…[W]hen an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate…when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his (or her) inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.” Carl Jung, Aion, paragraph 126.

This statement really bothers me. Mythology is full of gods and goddess punishing humans who have offended in one way or the other. Dionysus is easily the god of emotional intensity, and can be a particularly virulent, sending his Meanads to descend on the offender with limb tearing ferocity, just ask Orpheus. Dionysus traveled to the underworld, and back (bringing his mother or wife depending on which tale you read). Apollo never did. So I am both troubled and challenged to consider my experiences of the Jaws of Death in light of Jung’s explanation of a repressed shadow.

Jaws #1: A shadowy figure emerged from the shadows in the night, wielding a nearly invisible blade, widely swinging, cutting indiscriminately, face and hands. It seems to me the entire event took place as if the Shadow was another dimension that materialized for a brief period. We found ourselves lost in it, were wounded while getting out, As the shock faded our amazement grew. We were amazed within hours of its occurrence that it had actually happened. It felt like a weird and extreme sort of jet lag.

Jaws #2: I was fading, deeply into the deepest regions of pain, and then placed on an anesthetic raft, running down the river of unconsciousness to a place as close to the underworld as one can get without plunging off the edge of no return. A necessary trip so I would be far away when another, this time brightly lit blade was wielded, this time with great skill, into the nethermost region of spine, and with long lasting effects. I experience a similar sense of unreality when I think of this, not unlike the first Jaws.

Interestingly, the shadow will out. It cannot be kept from showing some of its contents. Inferring from Jung’s statement above, the shadow is not a limitless repository for our unwanted stuff. It eventually spills over. Leakage is one term that describes it, rebellion is another, revolution a third, meltdown perhaps at the opposite end of the continuum, but all can apply to the revelations of the shadow. If I were given a choice, I pick revolution, but not coupled with surprise. I pick revolution which occurs as the result of authentic self evaluation. I usually only share my ideas and feelings with one or two people. OK, usually with only one. (Cheryl is amazingly patient.) Leakage represents my own blindnesses, which are often embarrassing, and potentially devastating. Last in my preference is meltdown, which may destroy the life of the conscious, and also allows for the possibility of the shadow taking over, which is not pretty for anyone. 

The issues of the shadow are never completely resolved. Indeed one is healthy with a dynamic balance among the various dynamics of the personality, of which the shadow is a part. But Jung’s words, “…when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate,” drive me a little nuts.  So I take seriously the challenge to both reveal what is in my shadow, and honor Dionysus. OK, so more public drunkenness? Might work, but if done with less than a sacrificial intent might easily backfire. Just doesn’t won’t work very well for me. A place on an altar? Closer, but in and of itself, not sufficient. What drives a great deal of energy into the shadow of most people, myself included, is the power of orthodox thinking we get from those around us. We are fearful of the condemnation coming from their “right-thinking” orthodoxy. Challenging orthodoxy is precisely one of the roles of Dionysus. So being willing to reveal something that we have kept hidden, and with it to challenge orthodox thinking, is quintessentially Dionysian. But Apollo’s cognitive voice of judgment will immediately compete for my attention and will. As Robert Calasso writes, “Both Apollo and Dionysus know that possession is the highest form of knowledge, the greatest power.” The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, p.145.

 My own shadow has held a fear of writing in it since I was quite young. Writing is a challenge that has intimidated me, and I have hence avoided for years. To quote myself from an above paragraph, “…what in life has one has attempted to hide, and what of one’s self has been ignored?” Ah, but I set myself up in the need to challenge orthodoxy. Ok, I hear me.

 I think it’s important to note that in the images above, just above the shadow of the Earth is always a beautiful rose-pink layer. That’s called the Belt of Venus. Ginette Paris writes in Pagan Meditations that anciently, Aphrodite (Venus) was always represented at least partially clothed with a magic girdle, ribbon, or belt which bestowed irresistible love and desire on those who wore it. Aphrodite and Dionysus are both gods of sexuality, the first refined, civilized and unhurried, the second raw, savage, and impetuous. The metaphor of the physical sky, the magical belt that, for its brief periods of visibility accompanies the shadow, giving it a suggestion of form. My own shadow tells me to write, and to write about human relationships. Write from the heart, right from the heart. This is a fearful thing to state. It’s both a recognition and an invitation, so it might be too late to be careful about whom I have invited as a traveling companion. Might as well start to shine some light on this path, see where it goes.

 © 2008 All Rights Reserved

Spiders are old, been around a long time, so have spider stories. The stories are so old they have become mythic in many cultures. And not just mythic, but creation myth, which by implication makes them some of the oldest of all. As stories, myths always contain some embedded truth, so that no matter how the story changes in its retelling, the imbedded truth manages to survive and emerge. Spider Woman, for example, is the deity that led the ancient ancestors of the Hopi from deep in the under world to emerge into the world. She taught them both written language and numbering. Spider Woman is also the deity that taught weaving to the Dine, the ancient ancestors of the Navajo. Weaving is the theme of the Arachne story of Roman mythology. Arachne was a great weaver, so great she challenged Minerva to a weaving contest, and according to Ovid, in The Metamorphoses, actually won. This turned out to be much worse than a very bad idea, as she ended up being transformed into a spider for her hubris. In Africa spiders are associated with trickster gods, and in India with Maya who spins a web of illusion. Spiders have always been regarded with some ambivalence.

 

Deep inside the body, even within the spinal covering itself is a membrane called the  Arachnoid membrane. The outer covering of the spinal cord is the Dura which provides a seal for the nerves and the spinal fluid. Inside that covering is the Arachnoid layer, and inside it are fine filaments of nerve roots which eventually combine to form larger structures we call nerves. If the name Arachnoid suggests something of spiders, you are correct. This membrane gets is name from the web like nature of these filaments that resemble spider silk. Mine is inflamed. This is not good.

 

Within my Arachnoid membrane there are areas where nerve roots are clumped together, and to quote one neurologist I spoke to, “Nerves don’t like to be touched.” So I have a condition called “Arachnoiditis.” I do not recommend anyone looking it up on the internet. What you’ll find, if you do, will scare you. So there is another similarity to spiders, who are, for most of us, very scary.

 

Spiders are interesting though, and even if you find yourself experiencing some significant squeamishness while thinking about them, I will recommend you resist the urge to kill them regardless of where they are encountered, as some people do. I know, it’s the fear. And I know the verbal symbol, “spider,” is imbued with inherent properties which can command our attention. All symbols can be considered and described along a few continua with which nearly any symbol can be described. The first one describes how active a symbol is, so you might try rating your reaction to “spider” in terms of active and passive like this: Active __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Passive. You can mentally put  an x or a ü in the place that works for you, but as for me, “spider” is extremely active. I know that there are some spiders that are much more active in terms of hunting than others. There are no spiders that are passive, but a garden spider sitting still in the middle of a beautiful spiral web usually does not evoke immediate responses of activity. However if you touch the web, and mimic the vibrations of an insect you might be surprised at the speed of the spider racing to what she thinks is dinner, half a second or less to get to the disturbance. I suggest using a twig. If you try it, you may fool her once, but usually not twice. Spiders seem to learn more quickly than a lot of humans I know. My ü mark goes second space from the far left.

 

Ok, try this one: Good __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Bad. This one is a little more tricky. Some people will step on any spider in any place, thinking they are all bad. But Good-Bad is much more of a value judgment than Active-Passive (which is more descriptive). Like all value judgments, this one is contextually driven. But think of this, spiders perform a huge ecological function, keeping the world’s gigantic insect population in check. Consider that the world would be pretty quickly inundated with moths and flies, if it weren’t for spiders. So spiders usually warrant being taken outside, even if they are scary, which usually means we fear they are dangerous. Most spiders are not actually dangerous to humans at all, though a few clearly are. All are venomous in one way or another. They are predators that kill and consume (the juices and predigested soft tissues of) their prey. And if we get in the way of some of them, their bites can really hurt, or worse. Spiders really do have fangs, which are hard, pointed and poisonous. Some species have fangs that move up and down, like tarantulas, others move their fangs simultaneously sideways and inwards, which brings up the last rating. Remember, we are talking about your reaction to the symbol itself: “Spider.”

 

Now try Powerful __ __ __ __ __ __ __ Powerless. Aha, now we are getting somewhere. For one thing, we cannot really separate the word from the image, and although I cannot know what the mental image is that you have of a spider right now, I know you’ve got one, and that mental image is very likely to be a very powerful one, particularly since I brought up the fangs part just before I asked about this.

 

We can be ambivalent about the Good-Bad part, but agreement on spiders being active is pretty widespread. And powerful? We hardly need to ask. Spiders are so powerful you might even now be checking out the corners of the room you are sitting in, or thinking you have not cleaned behind the couch for while, and who knows what monster spider is lurking there, just waiting for you to try and retrieve a lost sock.

 

Now consider the Arachnoid membrane that covers the nerve roots of the spine. My consideration takes me deep into both the body and its essence. Its nature is to be a web like structure to hold the most delicate of nerve roots. If one were to try and do this intentionally, I suspect it would take a great deal of finesse and ability. Lucky the body knows how to pull this off without my conscious help. This is a most sensitive area, one not accessible except by trauma, whether accidental or operational. One where the most careful surgeon’s scalpel might seem a blunt instrument. One where the aftermath of infection would leave the debris of clumped nerves like hurricanes leave clumps of uprooted trees in their wake. A tangle of web like nerve roots. Not unlike what happens when a beautiful spiraled web in a garden is caught on the tail of a maurading animal or on some unaware human walking through on a damp morning.

 

I have to wonder what wonderful spider wove this delicate and important structure that we rarely hear about and even more rarely encounter? I remember the myth of Arachne and Minerva, where Arachne won the contest with Minerva and was shown to be greater in skill, but lesser in strategic awareness. It’s interesting that in Greek mythology Minerva is Athena, virgin goddess, goddess of wisdom, strategist, associated with owls, snakes, and weaving. And Arachne is “rewarded” with being banished to the identity of a spider, and as such becomes analogous to the shadow side of Athena/Minerva. Shadow sides by the way are always deeply buried and largely inaccessible, by definition.

 

One of the Jaws of Death experiences has activated that normally quiet Arachnoid membrane in me, the clumped nerve roots within it, and has resulted in quite a spider bite. To say it has my continuing attention would be to understate, and perhaps dishonor the intensity of the experience, the current result of which commands my daily attention.

 

I have to admit to falling prey to the desire to establish causality. And in retrospect, history is always causal. So catch myself I wondering if the spider web membrane is angrily inflamed because Athena is pissed off at me? Perhaps I have ignored her. Mythologically deity does not take well to being slighted, and when that sort of anger is coupled with feminine power the result is not a pretty picture. Athena/Minerva is a powerful, feminine deity, one associated with vision, independence, and power. She is a complex goddess, and is not easily pinned down to simple description. Her father was Zeus, her mother, not quite so well known, was Metis, whom Zeus brutally swallowed. Metis, a sea goddess, was renowned for her cunning intelligence, which is now what the word “metis” signifies. Those possessing metis are able to change behaviors, directions, strategies, and even identities, with a sense of cunning, astuteness or shrewdness.  

 

Having written all of that, there are an infinite number of things I might have done to offend a god or goddess to incur wrath, so finding the mythic cause for my condition is a failed exercise, from the get-go. Besides, I doubt very much if Athena will stay still long enough for me to pin her down, and an attempt to do so may very well be treated like Arachne’s hubris from long ago. Nevertheless, there are two things that emerge for consideration. The first is a challenge to be more carefully strategic, and perhaps a little more careful about being astute in regard to my own professional work. The second is a thought about putting something on an altar that represents Athena’s energy, because one never knows who will come knocking, particularly at this time of year…

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

“How have these experiences changed you?” My dentist looked at me somewhat incredulously, and expressed his somatic response to the brief story I told him about Standing in the Jaws. He sings light opera while he works. If he’s working close, he just hums quietly to “himself,” but the stories completely stopped both his work and his singing. Then he had a couple of his own to share. Story is like that, it often triggers a reciprocal response, especially when the listener has felt a strong emotional response.

 

“What meaning have you gained from what you have gone through?’ A long-time friend asked of me during a lengthy phone conversation about the Jaws experiences, complete with colorful details. She grounded her question with several reminders of events we had shared together. Her anecdotes emphasized our shared history and her own perceptions. She was interested in how that those shared experiences would play out in what I would tell her. I wasn’t sure what to say to her.

 

“So what do I want my life to be like?” I found myself asking of me while standing on a curb waiting to be picked up at the Memphis airport. My shuttle ride was late, so I had some time to just consider myself and my being in the world. (Well, let’s see… I would like to be rich, in perfect health, always have the perfect answer to any question, have perfect teeth, never get sick, never have anything I own wear out…) This could be a very long list. My fantasy leaped past the reality of where I stood, and to what I was supposed to be paying attention. But it sounded, in my mind, like I was Sarah Palin on a good day.

 

Have you ever tried to carefully watch a well defined shadow edge as it moves? It takes a great deal of patience, and if you are like me, you will notice its change in position in small jumps rather than the slow, continuous shifting that is a result of the Earth’s daily rotation. I doubt that you will catch the actual movement of the shadow for more than a fleeting moment. The Jaws of Death lessons are something like that. They have appeared slowly, fleeting, and shadowy.

 

There have been some profound lessons (at least for me). Most of them have something to do with deepening of previous understandings. Like taking time to appreciate what each moment is presenting to me. A few what I would call genuine insights, but perhaps the greatest “lesson” may the most obvious: Accept what has happened. I don’t like that last lesson. It has taken months to get past my resistance to it. On second thought, I am not past it, I just want to be passed it.

 

Here is something more that I have learned: While it is true the experiences of standing in the Jaws of Death are experiences of the being on the most delicate edge of life, and slipping toward death. It is also true, at least for me, that the experiences are also gifts of psychic sacredness. But having unwrapped a few of those gifts I find it difficult to exclaim to my unconscious, “Oh you shouldn’t have. Just what I always wanted, a trip with a view!”

 

I know that my journeys  took me close to the underworld, but I do not know what changes they have wrought. There have been some genuine moments of a sort of heightened perceptual acuity when sounds and sights have seemed to lengthen in duration, so that time seemed to slow, but not in any distorted way. And there have been some moments of emotional depth, particularly with Cheryl,  that are, at least for me, ineffable.

 

But I have found that simply considering the idea of acceptance in regard to the Jaws experiences stimulates something that surfaces from my unconscious mind, something difficult to describe. I think it goes like this: The empirical facts document having been completely overpowered in both events that form the Jaws of Death, between which I stood. The scars left from these experiences are somatic and psychic, and the healing required from these wounds, psychical and physical, is far from being finished. But this recognition is also a devastating admission which threatens the invisible depths of my self image, upon which my daily consciousness and security depends.

 

Here’s why. My acceptance of the actual events also requires accepting that I could not overpower either adversary, neither the man who emerged from the darkness with a knife or the infection that took me into the darkness to meet the surgeon’s knife. This admission and  acceptance requires a definition of my own self image, my own identity. The definition includes me as powerless, which is untenable to my conscious mind. I can tell the stories of those experiences, but my conscious mind is caught between the description of what happened and my resistance to not being able to do anything about either.

 

Hence, my resistance to acceptance; I cannot accept a definition of my identity which includes powerlessness. To do so means living a story that is untenable to my conscious mind. Therefore accepting what actually happened is both an empirical mandate, and a psychic, double bind meltdown. Just figuring this out has been a painful process which has included having to project possible scenarios of “what if’s” and finally coming back to “what is.”

 

So “acceptance” has had to expand for me, or I have had to expand it.

 

Indeed, accepting that I was completely overpowered, and placed at the mercy of whatever forces and dynamics that were operating at the time. Choice was not an option while standing in those Jaws. But it is now. Now I can include acceptance of my survival, indeed strength, recognizing that there have been many in similar situations that have not survived. There’s more.

 

Accepting that in the wounding there are also gems of understanding that could not have been intentionally developed, no matter how long or hard I tried. Accepting who I am, who I have been, and what I will be, all at the same time. Accepting that there is a hidden strength, revealed in the process of accepting.

 

Indeed, I fell, but only to a near ledge, and have regained the path. Now, having retreated from the edge of the precipice I need to remember to breathe deeply, slowly, do my exercises, eat my vegetables, and listen, watch, be.

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

Hitting a wall is obvious, if not immediately painful. Hitting a fog is not the same at all. I seem to have hit a fog. The result is what is commonly referred to as being blocked. I check my email, check the news, finish my chores, worry about a nagging problem I can only partially control. Creative work doesn’t seem to work out right. I get an idea, start to work with it and stop. Nothing else seems to emerge, language seems forced. It’s all too intentional. I cannot see though the fog that inhabits my head.

 

There’s fog outside my head too. The coastal fog is in. It was here all day yesterday and will hug the coast most of today. We usually don’t get coastal fog like that, especially in September, but no one is immune from fog no matter if it’s physical, mental, mythic, or psychic. I used to live in northern California, in the redwoods. Fog in the redwoods is beautiful and soft, aesthetic. I like to describe it as living in a Chinese painting. My personal fog isn’t like that. Instead of energizing my appreciation and awareness, it takes the edge off the clarity of my perception, and that’s only partially from medication. Operating in my personal fog is like driving in thick thinking, straining to make out the oncoming headlights. They’re a pair: fear-of-pain and pain. The anticipation of those lights fixes my attention, creating a sort of tunnel vision. The lights approach, slow down to a crawl as they pass, making sure contact has been made before slowly moving on, disappearing in my clouded consciousness. On a bad day the fear-of-pain and pain circle each other in the fog, each chasing the other, brighter-dimmer, brighter-dimmer. The circle they make eventually leaves a bright afterimage doughnut shaped ring of additional fog in my head. The lights have been left on too long.

 

My thoughts replicate the cyclical pattern of those lights. Fears and fantasies it’s still false thinking. But then, there are lots of other types of fog. I am sure you have your favorites. Some of mine are information overload fog, career future fog, and rhetorical fog. Lately I have gotten exercised about rhetorical fog.

 

 (Pause)

Where was I? Oh  yeah, something about  the fog of what I don’t want to have happen.

But it already has, and keeps happening. For example, I had an earlier version of this posting, but in a fit of foggy thinking I actually deleted it. More fog.

 

I like to think I am decisive, but in fact and particularly when in a fog, I tend toward impulsiveness, stubbornness, and lack attention to details, hence the deleted file. But the story I tell about me to myself is different. It depends on a social convention about a person of strong will and therefore strong character. It’s not that I lack character, it’s that I am creating a story about myself that is, at times, inauthentic.

 

We create and simplify our self-narratives so that eventually what comes out of us are one-liners and catch phrases. A quick listen to the latest  political phenomenon will show how easy it is to over simplify for the sake of self-image management. Simple, polarized stories are easy to tell, easy to understand, and easy to remember. They actually create a fog of rhetorical acceptance, keeping people from looking for clear meanings and understanding. Face-to-face conversations and interviews sometimes let us get close enough to peer though the intentional fog. So it has been with the phenom candidate herself. If the coming debate continues that fog evaporation, she’s toast, and none too soon. She’s got a lot of company though. George W has a similar thinking pattern. Almost every complex question leads to a simple, willful answer. Yes-No, White-Black, Moral-Immoral, For us-Against us, Right-Wrong. All categorical boxes which keep a lot of people from ever seeing through the fog. With his fog making captain (Carl) gone, George W has had an extremely difficult time keeping people from seeing him.

 

Decisiveness. Intent. Will power. Character. Words with serious fog making potential. This is a line of associations that some politicians would have people consume as their genuine story. But look where that sort of over-simplified story has gotten us. What is amazing to me is that this rhetorical ploy never seems to lose its effectiveness. It creates a fog, to which people’s reaction is often confused or at least uncritical acceptance. It was Plato, as I remember, that distrusted the manipulation of language as rhetorical fog, and declared that “language has the power to rape the mind.” And he was right. (Ever wonder why George W is the only person in his entire family with a Texas accent?)

 

Of course we all fall into the fog of our own thick thinking from time to time, pretending we are the only one in charge of us. Ignoring or not being able to comprehend the inter-subjective nature of how we think and how we communicate. But rhetorical fog is different than the blind spots from which we all periodically suffer. Personal stupidity aside, rhetorical fog requires an intentional deception.

 

A few times in my life I have been treated to a “fogbow.” A fogbow is an actual meteorological phenomenon. It’s like a rainbow, but the arch it makes is not colored. It’s  pure, bright white light. It’s also not transparent like a rainbow, but translucent. It glows. Conditions have to be just right, the sun at one’s back, and a fogbank in front. Sometimes just as one enters, or sometimes on exiting the fog, a bow will form creating an arch into which one may enter. I think it’s Nature’s reassurance about fog.

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

When I was in my late teens, my mother bought me a birthday present. I was disappointed because what I really wanted was a new carburetor for my car (I know I am dating myself.) She had paid for a set of lessons, oil painting lessons. She had made the acquaintance of some people from Czechoslovakia (when there still was one), and hit it off because my grandparents were from Hungary, which was, evidently, close enough.

 

So my teacher was a Czech by the name of Joseph Buresch. His wife, Zdenka, who was also a painter, also gave me occasional instruction. Although the combined time I spent in their studio amounted to something around 6 months, I soaked up their teaching like a sponge. We had a great relationship, and Joe eventually offered to take me in as an apprentice. “Old world style, four years, five maybe six days a week.” Joe was a bona fide master painter and restorer. (He had a walk-in vault in his studio which commonly held paintings three or four hundred yeas old.) As an apprentice, I would open and clean up the studio, do other chores and learn everything about painting and painting restoration. I declined. It was the Vietnam War era and I’d have been drafted in a heartbeat. I still wonder what that path would have been like. I always thought Joe took my refusal personally.

 

When I was painting with him, I thought Joe was terribly inconsistent with me. Often he would be full of praise and helpfulness when working with a nice little old lady, he had lots of those sorts of students, bread and butter income for him. But he was direct with me, and I often felt ignored. Zdenka was more helpful and supportive. Occasionally she would pick up a canvas I was working on right out from under me and take it to Joe, which created an animated conversation in Czech about it. He was usually dismissive, and she would return with some direction for me. Once in a while she would whisper, “Don’t tell Joe…” and then would teach me some new technique that would be outside his regular, rigid painting protocols. Joe was very “old school.”

 

Zdenka painted from her heart first. She worked with a painting knife most of the time, left handed, wedging her palette between her right shoulder and wrist. She had no right hand. Earlier in her life she lost her native painting hand, during WWII, when the Nazis cut it off. She never spoke of it.

 

Eventually, I remember Joe looking at a painting of mine and remarking that I had not learned what he had taught me. He invited me to bring him my work whenever I liked for his review, and I realized he meant that I would no longer be his student. No matter, was my attitude, I was off to college. I never took another painting to him.

 

Truth is, I internalized him. Joe is still with me, Zdenka too. Not more of one than the other. I claim no special powers here; I do not hear mysteriously hear voices or channel his or her essence. Even though I can clearly remember their heavy Czech accents. I don’t ask myself, “What would Joe do?” Or “What was it that Zendka told me?” Indeed, I learned but a little of what Joe might do. But I project him and Zdenka whenever I paint. They inhabit each canvas, and paint, and brushes, and turps, even the paint rag I use to wipe cleaned brushes. They continue my education from there.

 

They are more in my mind than they were when I was interacting with them in the painting studio. I have no doubt that things I clearly “remember” Joe teaching me, he never did, but I actually learned through trial and error or dumb luck. Nevertheless, I still hold out for his indirect influence though my painting tools. As symbols of the mythic teacher, Joe and Zdenka now have talent, knowledge and powers far greater than any single person might possess. Such is the nature of archetypal manifestation.

 

Its too bad archetypes as resources are not under intentional control. That too is part of their nature. Ironically archetypal manifestation is much  more a function of the quality of relationship one has with one’s self, than the relationship one has with the archetype. As I understand it, intentional selection may have very little to do with how mythic archetypes work within us. Most importantly, archetypes are much more connected to associated emotion than to specific information. So Joe and Zdenka have a lot more to do with how I feel and treat my paint brushes than what those brushes might actually paint.

 

Today the magic didn’t work. I hate it when that happens. Two paintings going, and I’m stuck with different aspects of both of them. “I’m LISTENING…”  “Just tell me, OK?” I’m frustrated. I want to know what to do to make those paintings work right, and my left wrist is sore from leaning on my hand too much while painting on all fours. I’m done for now. The light is way past gone anyway. I cleaned up, started writing this, but my left hand is still numb. I think Zdenka is trying to get my attention.  

 

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

“Turn left here.”

“Right here?.”

“Right.”

“Now turn right.”

“Right here, right?”

“Right”

 

With that many right turns one might start thinking war is patriotic. 

I wonder about being left. Out of spite, or being right?

 

Right is a very strange word. We use it in lots of different ways and it carries powerful connotations. With that in mind what is it about the right side?  Right handedness is commonly dominant among humans. Handedness as a dominant trait is so familiar that we have built a world that accommodates it, and it’s right for us. So it’s easy to understand why the right hand shows up so prominently in Judeo-Christian and Muslim theologies and cultures. The “right hand of God” for example, being both the symbol of the power of deity, and a preferred place in relation to deity. When I was young, I would think about being in that location, and hope for the best. Now I wonder if Deity is necessarily right handed. Wouldn’t he/she be necessarily ambidextrous?  Yike. That might lead to a situation where being on the left hand side ends up being on the right side and might make heaven a very confusing place for righteous leftists.

 

I wonder if “right” is hot, or is it cold? For me it is hot, but I have met more than a few people for whom it is cold. But being cold and right doesn’t work for me.

 

We have a lot in common, Cheryl and I. We are both artists, and we are both right handed. When we were attacked in the first of the Jaws of Death, we were both wounded. All the wounds were on our right sides. (And when I endured the rogue infection in the second of the Jaws, all the subsequent nerve damage is on my right side.) Our bodies sustained attacks on the right, in those terrible times. Fortunately, with the left intact, we left. Maybe that’s why we were able to survive and return. Now we understand the world is different for us, better in many ways, worse in others. Now we also understand that the world we thought was stable, dependable, and safe can at the same time be darkly chaotic, immediately changing, and terribly dangerous. The operative thought in that sentence is not the contrasting ideas it’s their simultaneity: at the same time.

 

What is the nature of a wound, beyond the clinical description? If the body has a sort of knowledge, its own wisdom, as we say, then what is the result of first being wounded and then scarred in the hand with which we create? Do the lines I draw and paint reflect the curve now found on my cheek? Does Cheryl have problems drawing straight lines because they tend to now have a bend at the end that reflects the permanent angle in her middle finger, a peculiar quality that she now clearly states she has learned to love, with just a hint of sarcasm left in her voice?

 

Everyone has wounds, physical and emotional, but understanding them in simple, causal ways is untenable, and silly. Since I need to make sense out of mine, I have “conversations” with my body during morning meditations, acknowledging the sensations it is sharing with my awareness. You ought to try that sometime, it can be a very revealing process. Body knowledge works differently from the conscious mind. The conscious mind forgets, and when it re-members an event it distorts “memory” anyway. However, the body and the unconscious do not forget. Well, they forget or distort facts, but what they retain is emotional energy. And they can maintain the emotional energy of any event for an entire lifetime. When the energy is dark it needs to be acknowledged or, specter-like, it will find ways to come back and haunt.

 

Dealing with deep emotional energy is work at a psychic-mythic level, where the accuracy of details is always secondary at best. The important issues are not about facts, they are about images and relationships and the energy that drives them. Emotional energy is what takes the wound to the depths of the mythic fabric in all of us, regardless of our emotional intelligence scores. That is where archetypes live, and this is what they live on.

 

Our right sided wounds are compounded by the conventional, cultural and even mythic connotations of the language symbol called “right.” Which colors our wounds and body knowledge, and perhaps our creative work. There is no doubt we were “wronged,” a quality which is often reinforced by those with whom we share the event. That sort of response is a reinforcement of the conventional story about right and wrong, and in our case, simply compounds the idea of being victims of a terrible wrong.

 

That’d be ok if we are telling the Victim story, but we’re not. We’re telling about the Hero/ine’s Journey here. True enough, heroes and heroines do get wounded, and sometimes even die. There is no guarantee for anyone against real risk. And if the story is going to be genuine, it’s gotta have real risk.  We get to claim authentic participation in that mythic journey, not because of our trips to the underworld, but because, in the words of Alan Watts, “…the feeling will not correspond to the theory until you have also discovered a unity of experience.” We were presented with that unity of experience in an emergency room, wounds still gaping, when we realized that we had just been complexly run over by a wave of evil from under which most people do not emerge alive, and we were going to be ok. Changed, but ok.

 

All the wonderful sympathy and empathy from our dear family, friends, and concerned observers notwithstanding, the story we can authentically tell is how that event, and how those residual wounds continue to present us with gifts. So in a weird but important way the conventional sense of what is right casts us in a powerless role, so is actually potentially damaging and therefore wrong. And we who bear the scars of being wronged have created a powerful story that presents us with multiple gifts. If recovery from being wounded is the right thing, then ironically we who were wronged, are now righting ourselves.

 

Try this: Point your index finger above your head and make a continuing counter clockwise circle in the air. Don’t stop moving your finger in that clockwise circle, but lower your hand down to about your waist. (Do that and then come back and finish this. I’ll wait here.) Now which way was your finger going after you lowered your hand? This doesn’t work if you look from the left or right, only from above and below. So maybe when one returns from a mythic journey, which are usually journeys below, things look somewhat turned around, more counter, less clockwise when one gets back.

 

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine pain to be a fast moving river with a strong current, and you are on an inner tube or a very light weight boat without a rudder or paddle. Now imagine trying to float across the current to get out of the river. It simply isn’t going to happen. Not until the river widens and slows, and you can find a little beach to land on. I am grateful for those little beaches, and have landed on several of them with tears of relief.

 

When I have met with medical professionals who have taken care of me, I am commonly asked, “On a scale of 1-10, where is your pain level?” I have learned to qualify my answer with a sort of calibration. “Well if 10 is so intense you black out, lose consciousness, then my pain is…” It helps a lot to do this. I can see a common reaction in the faces of those who ask: controlled, if not suppressed surprise, and an odd recognition that I have thought about it and have a qualifying calibration that gives the whole discussion a sort of anchor of mutual understanding. Here is what the rest of the scale looks like for me:

 

Levels 1-3 are alarming at first, and are all that is needed to recoil, and start a fear driven retreat from pain. That is, until you hit a true 8, and wish with all your might to be back in the relatively shallow water of the lower levels. At level 4 one begins to realize that what was thought to be a stream is actually a river with a surprisingly strong current. One that could easily sweep one’s feet out from under. It may not seem like it at the time, but 4 is a transition level, presenting the potential for deeper realms of appreciation. Here’s when the trip to the doctor or hospital may start to be a Journey. It may occur to one’s thinking that these pains are messages, but they are difficult to decode. Indeed, they often defy understanding until much later. I think that in the 5-7 range one begins to realize the river of pain is full of rocks, rapids, and falls. One begins to be thrown under water, bruised, and pinned against rocks. Control has long since passed to the pain, which may now begin to be a dark Other raging with a terrible anger. It is now Pain with mythic properties and powers. If you ever get to stay in the 8-9 region for any length of time you will probably not be able to hear the tremendous falls over which you will soon pass on your way to the throne of Pain where you will be able to present yourself as a sacrifice. Who knows if that is a good thing of not, but If it is a sustained Journey, I will promise it will be one you would probably like to, or in the kindness of the conscious mind, actually forget, but which your body never will. I pray for your relief.

 

Of course pain has its types, and commonly we describe it with aching, throbbing, sharp, stinging, stabbing, electric, reoccurring, constant, and deep. Pain originating from a muscle spasm is different from pain coming from a damaged nerve. Bruises are different from cuts. Infection is different from them all. Pain is complicated, and I have come to know some of these types better  than others. Importantly, pain communicates with not only these messages but each type has its own levels of intensity, and nuances of feeling. I’m quite sure I have missed some or many of those subtle messages, but  days, weeks, and months of repetition have provided me with a familiarity I would not have selected for myself. Now I find the repetition is useful for understanding what is happening within myself.

 

None of my medical practitioners has ever asked me questions like, “Where has the pain taken you?” “What did you see, hear, or learn there?” “Did you remember to acknowledge the pain?” “Did you engage in a dialogue with the pain or the part of the body experiencing the pain?”  and “Did you return intact, or has part of you remained in that place?” Their focus is narrow – the mechanical body, and besides, they have to protect themselves from being pulled into the pain of their patients and clients. I try to answer the questions anyway. I’m lucky, Cheryl is a myth and story expert, and has a particular genius at helping people unpack their story. “Did you get a chance to walk the labyrinth?” “Would you like me to teach you a song?” “Are you going to write that dream down?” She has been long-sufferingly kind and generous. But pain has a sort of contagion to it, at least among those in close relationships. And she has long since been infected with my pain, which of course sets up an additional cycle of pain to manage. (Sigh)

 

In reality, when I do find myself on one of those little beaches of relief, I get completely caught up in its warm glow. I forget to use that chance for understanding. Relief, oh blessed relief, Pain’s opposite, provides a counterpoint to pain. But nature is not without irony. I know about relief, I think about it, I want it because I know of it, out there, somewhere. Relief immediately becomes the bait that I go for, which makes the pain trap all that much more difficult.  And the more I focus on relief, and try to retreat from pain, the more difficult my immediate situation becomes. What a rotten trick. At the same time, when relief comes, even though it may be fleeting, oh, it is so good. If it’s been a particularly long time since the last my respite, relief’s relaxation easily brings forth a flood of pent up emotions. Even though relief provides a target for my desire to be free from pain, and my  fear of experiencing it in the first place, I often pray for my own escape.

 

it is easy to write one thing, but to experience something quite different. The mythic journey of pain is truly one of perseverance and tenacity, of cycles and redundancy, of hope and discouragement, of forgetting and awakening. My Journey’s does not have to culminate in an ending breakthrough as an explosive Aha!, but subtly continues to refine for as long as my ability to tolerate it.  And what does one get for being patient? Pain presents the great gifts of being present and being aware.

 

But there’s more, and I am not sure how to describe it. But having gone and continuing to go through these times of pain has given me some sort of mythic subway pass. Several times, in deepest meditation I have encountered a barrier of some kind. At these times I have presented the tokens of my pain and experience, which has so far been met with the opening of a way through which I can pass to find a power or force which exists beyond my awareness or understanding.

 

 

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

Any trip should hold the potential of being a JOURNEY, as in Hero/ine’s Journey. They don’t all turn out that way of course. I go to the store, come home and don’t even remember doing the traveling. You likely do the same going to work, school or any other familiar location which results in a routine trip. We just go though the same pattern, routine takes over, and we get there, as in “Are we there yet?” But a Journey is not just a trip. In fact, you don’t have to go anywhere while on a Journey, you just have to come back. These days I am much more focused on the process of the journey than whatever end it represents; this focus was not a choice. But how does one make a trip into a Journey?

 

I am making a couple of pictures. It’s a difficult process because standing in one place and sitting in one place are both difficult, indeed so difficult neither are an option for very long. And since I am a painter, that eliminates standing at an easel and sitting on a stool. So I paint on the living room floor, on all fours. This makes for a pretty slow trip, but the journey seems to progress more quickly. The carpet is kind to my knees. The light is good until about four thirty or five o’clock, in the summer, depending on the seasonal fog that hangs along the coast. When it invades for the evening, the light goes, and it’s time to stop. Besides, my knees get tired. The trip has accomplished little and sight of the journey has been lost in the fog.

 

So far, it’s working pretty well, except I have painting stuff spread all around. I have discovered one advantage to this is I can look at a canvas I am currently working on more often than if it were sitting in the back bedroom we use for a studio. Sometimes I find myself simply staring at that canvas, not actually focusing on anything, or considering it carefully in terms of composition or color scheme or some other criterion. Eventually, the picture will show me what is successful and what is not, unless I stifle its voice with desires or fears of success. In the painting, there is a path that follows along a cliff. The path is often obscured by heavy fog and clouds. The cliff drops into dark abyss. It occurs to me that the path in this painting is not about where it leads, but what it divides. Maybe that is the nature of all mythic paths. I don’t know.

 

I start with a rough sketch on the canvas. Well developed, or well intentioned, and sometimes haphazard, my sketches are simply lost when the first layer of under-painting goes on. But I have an infallible mental image for each picture that guides me – yeah right. In fact, each time I do a painting, if it is successful at all, at some point in the process I completely lose control of it. The underlying sketch is covered up, the proportions seem screwy if not simply wrong, and most of the time there are one or two small areas that seem to be working just fine, which If I try and save while working on the rest of the painting, at the end of the process those original “successful” areas will usually sink the whole thing.

 

But I have been though this process many times, and have observed that after the painting seems to dis-integrate (literally, lose its integrity), if I keep painting, then a whole painting eventually emerges. One that usually bears some resemblance to the original idea if not sketch, but one that has its own integrity, its own composition, its own colors, and sometimes even its own subject matter. It will have a life and and a light of its own. If I listen, it will communicate with me. If its successful for other people, it’ll communicate with them too. I have no idea what it says to them, those are private conversations.

 

If the painting does not embrace the real risk of failure, not only can it not be creative (because we would be able to predict the outcome), somehow in the risk taking and re-emergence process the painting becomes more than a thing, it becomes a partner in the process. It changes from a simple vehicle to an ally, like an intelligent and aware horse that seems to know how and where to take me. Once in a great while I get a whiff of something, some essence other than my intention. If I am very lucky it is the faint smell or slight sound or glance coupled with an emotional quality like awe or deep fear. It is the Other.

 

Other what? I dunno, other entity, spirit, essence, even being, but it begins to “act” like an other person, and when that happens the creation becomes a part of Creation providing intoxicating energy. It becomes metonymic of the divine, participating in a quality of relationship that moves beyond perceiver and perceived, observer and object, to a kind of dialogue, where she (I think all my paintings are feminine) and I are in a reciprocal relationship.

 

“Bah. Pure projection,”  you may be thinking or even saying to yourself. Perhaps. I won’t say no, indeed, I will argue that you are correct, and more, that everything we perceive and experience is projection. The argument about its “purity” is a different topic, and suffice it to say, I am not one that is comfortable arguing for it.

 

The painting becomes my vehicle for the Journey, at least for a while. As for subject, a path, in the clouds and fog. Symbol for a lot of things, but a path leads one along and divides. Trip or Journey, I forget which I am on until I trip in the fog and slip off the liminal path. The options are two: fly, or fall.

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

Quite some years ago a good friend of mine gave me a gift certificate for a massage. I had not experienced much in the way of body work before, and so I was a little surprised by the very cordial intake interview that occurred before the massage. At the end of the interview the masseuse declared, “Well I usually don’t get too deep with anyone on the first session. But since we share a mutual friend, let’s go… if you want to.” “Sure,” I replied, not having a clue as to what she referred.

 

The massage started. And soon enough she paused and put her thumbs (or fingers I could not tell which) on a particular tight spot and stated, “Here’s something.” Then asked, “Do you want to go there?” I wondered to myself if “there” was another place. “Uh, sure.” I replied, again not having a clue as to what she referred. To my utter amazement, I soon found out. In response to my answer she would drill into that knotted muscle with what felt like an amazing amount of strength. Shortly my mind began to be flooded with images, then memories and emotions. This pattern was repeated several times, each with the same reaction on my part, but always with different images. Most of the images were old, from much earlier in my life, and all were associated with difficult memories, and strong emotions.

 

The massage ended. And full of questions, I was more confused than relaxed. However, her work being done, my masseuse simply wished me well, and sent me off feeling strangely lighter.

 

How could that be? I wondered. How could memory, image and strong associated emotions be held in muscle tissue that had been replenished if not replaced? The body replaces its own matter at different rates depending on the type of tissue. But eventually and periodically we replace everything that is actually physical. Besides that, my assumption was that memory was “stored” in the brain, like paper documents in file folders. So how could memory make its way to knotted back muscles. Ah, but in those days, I didn’t understand that the mind included all of the body. And that is not how memory works at all. Besides, why stop the mind at the edges of the physical body? Indeed there are several traditions that acknowledge the existence of other sorts of bodies like spiritual, and psychic. But we in the West are often stuck, and stopped with a simplistic body model, one that is split from the mind. The Cartesian mind-body split didn’t start with Decartes, but he helped cement it into the fabric of Western thought, and I had inherited it as if he had been my dad.

 

What had happened was an example of how, in part, the psyche works. It had selected images that operated as symbolic metaphors, empowered with both real and imagined emotion, and tagged them somatically. So when the body was given an opportunity to reverse the process, it had only one conditional requirement, after that came the free flowing of images and emotion. And the requirement? It is a simple, profound and yet difficult prerequisite: safety. Physical (including surroundings), psychological (no threat to the ego), and social (no threat to the self esteem). In my example above the request came in form of a particular kind of intentional massage-touch. The safety having been established during the intake interview even though I was quite oblivious to it.  We had gone there, and had returned, and I was the better for it.

 

This is a very old, even ancient understanding. Consider the neighborhood shaman. It is his or her job to move from one reality to another, from physical to spiritual and back again, usually on behalf of a client in need, often physical, bodily need. The means to such journeys, to “there” and back are things like drumming, dancing, ingesting teacher or ally plants, images, and talismans. Whatever the means, the shaman’s journeys and communication between worlds would have been and would continue to be impossible if they had been saddled with the assumptions of the Western mind. But in all cultures, there have been those that specialize in out-of-body experiences, ecstatic experiences, developed for healing and spiritual development.

 

We are generally estranged from our bodies. We treat them like objects, machines, circuitry, pumps and duct work, levers and pulleys. We understand them in terms of physics, chemistry, and electronics. We forget we are a body because we are dissociated from it, and therefore from ourselves. We’re afraid of them when they respond to our desires, and we berate them when they respond to our indulgence. We only include mind to figure out body, and we don’t dare mix spirit in with it. It’s no wonder we don’t communicate well with it even though we live in fairly close proximity.

 

Ok, so why don’t we all just press on a knotted muscle and start to get messages from the memory, the unconscious, or the beyond? I think we often do, we just don’t pay attention to our bodies as a source of wisdom, much less as a communication partner. Since the unconscious speaks only metaphorically, images originating from it are symbols that are only relevant to one’s own particular context so the meaning might not be immediately apparent, even to the individual. But that has changed for me now. Now I have too much profound experiential knowledge to either avoid or deny my body its role in helping me manage our shared affairs. And, I am getting a little better at paying attention to, and understanding it.

 

These days my body aches all the time. “Just take more.” The doctor said when I told her how much pain medicine I took. Ok, but I also know that more brings some relief, more also costs me a new found sensitivity. My body is beginning to show me that its trip to the underworld has had some effects. Now, when I pay attention, so does my body. When my body pays attention when I am with someone who is safe,  then a resonance with the Other, mind-body begins to form. When that happens the boundaries between the two mind-bodies  begin to extend, get fuzzy, and even mixed up in each other. Cheryl’s frequent gift, sometimes several times a night, are massages that help relieve stabbing nerves and muscles. Last night  we cried together, and never did get the “subject” sorted out. No matter. We cried for each other. Until that moment, my understanding of shared ecstasy had remained somewhat conventional and fictional. But “ecstasy” means “being out of one’s body,” and when minds and spirits extend to include that of the Other, that is exactly what happens. When it is happening there is no awareness of the Other as object. The Other and the Self have crossed a sacred boundary, and both bodies stand in a shared dialogic space of holy ground.

 

There.

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

 

 

 

 

 

These days I have two dark lines that run vertically, down my spine. Another which makes a graceful curve on my face, and a final one across my palm. It stops just short of the life line on my right hand. The scars are from experiences struggling with the Jaws of Death. Nevertheless my awareness of them often fades, and I am a little surprised when I see them. When I really stop to think about them, words don’t seem to support my thoughts much less feelings.

 

Descriptions of how these scars came to be might be done in several ways. One set of narratives, “objective” in their nature, might describe surgical procedures. Clinical, dispassionate, and quite matter of fact. But since I was not awake or very aware when those procedures were done, and since I am not a surgeon, I can’t be very creative about these stories. Another set is more like dark movie scenes that my mind does not like to watch.  Sudden, violent, and blurred with fear and pain. Still another way of understanding how to describe these scars would be from the point of view of those supporting me, watching, holding on, worried, and waiting for news of my journeying. But I can only listen to these stories with appreciation and great humility at the love that supported me. These stories inform my own, but they are not my story. So I must create a different explanation, and I prefer one more metaphorical. I think the scars are teeth marks.

 

I started surfing in the early 1960’s, and never gave sharks much attention until I lived in Central California in the late 70’s. I often surfed alone, and the presence of sea lions provided a lot more opportunity to think about whom I might be sharing the ocean with. When I lived much further north, in Arcata, I began to gain a much more keen appreciation for what sharks, in particular Great White Sharks, do to maintain a place at the top of the aquatic food chain. Indeed, I picked up a saying there, “When you enter the water, you enter the food chain,” as a way to remind myself to respect my alien status in the world of sea water. But I learned from several marine biologists who were studying Great Whites at the time that most Great White  attacks appear to be investigations: “Is this thing food? It looks roughly like one of my favorite foods, sea lion. I’ll just take a little bite and find out.” Unfortunately, a Great White shark sports five to seven rows of serrated, razor sharp teeth, (top and bottom), and can apply pressures of a couple of thousand pounds per square inch when it takes a bite. So what may well be a simple question for a Great White shark, can leave teeth marks with serious implications on whatever is a potential answer.

 

Metaphors are really interesting because even if their selection seems arbitrary, if a metaphor is genuinely, personally important, then it can open the psyche with elegance and efficiency. Staying with a metaphor that seems to ring true allows one to investigate the issue much more deeply than if we were only dealing with immediate but superficial “objective” representations.

 

I can ask, in mythic and psychic terms, if the marks were the result of an investigation, not unlike the Great White shark, what was the question being asked? I have never been bitten by a shark, but I know what the fear of that feels like. I also know the underworld is populated, in large part, with our fears of things that go bite in the night. And as I have learned (the hard way), the only way to keep from repressing the negative energy of emotional events (real or imagined), is to make that energy explicit. That is, talk about them. But contrary to what might seem to be the “natural” or normal way to go about it, which would often be to gain an accurate description of those events, I am trying to both gain an appreciation for, and allow those events to be what they are, and what they will be, fears and all, without the imposition of “objectivity.” Which is yet an additional metaphor and story, but one with limited, and prescriptive outcomes.

 

My metaphor comes with a cost. Lee Thayer says, “To know something is to take it out of nature, and to take oneself out of nature in the process.” My “teeth marks” allow for the possibility of unknown understanding of my experience to emerge. Understanding that would have been precluded if I had opted for a clinical explanation or even a sharing of someone else’s experience of what happened.  Thayer goes on to say, “Like the dancer and the dance. The knower and the known are but two aspects of the same thing; it is the one that creates, gives life to, gives meaning to, the other. To name the one is to name the other, and neither is any longer what it was.”

 

Metaphors have soft semantic boundaries. Their meanings are subject to lots of influence, and in fact are never rigid, not if they are personally important. So to use Thayer’s metaphor, I dance with not only the teeth marks, more than the teeth themselves, but with the very forces that bit. Not defaulting to the metaphor and story of “objectivity” provides opportunities for insight. Some people call those moments of insight flashes of intuition, which is yet another metaphor. But if the metaphor is authentic to me, then it becomes meaningful, literally full-of-meaning, and I am instantly in a relationship with those teeth marks. They become story tellers, messengers from a world that I have yet to understand. As Joseph Campbell has said, “The best things cannot be said; the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation.”

 

Yup. I think they’re teeth marks.

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

People like to watch the ocean waves break, and roll up onto the sand. It is a never-ending source of interest. When the waves are big enough, like here in the winter, they are quite spectacular. As the wave moves toward shore, the front of the wave “feels” the bottom (sand or rock or coral reef) and slows down just a little. The back of the wave overtakes the slower front and spills over the top. When this happens, the top edge of the breaking wave is thrown out and can come down in front of the wave with quite an impact.  Waves are pretty consistent over the course of a day or two, and will tend to be of similar heights. Because of that they all tend to break in about the same places, smaller ones closer to shore, larger ones farther out. The place where the waves break is called the impact zone. When waves are large, and breaking close to shore, it’s not a good idea to be in that zone. The force of a large breaking wave is tremendous, and can easily do you serious physical damage.

 

To make it worse, something that floats, like a tree branch or log, is often swept up the face of the wave. It often does not make it over the top but is thrown forward with the breaking wave and pushed toward shore, then drawn back into the impact zone when the water recedes, only to be sucked up the face of the next wave, thrown into the impact zone, up towards the shore, and pulled back into the next wave. From the log’s point of view this can go on for a very long time.

 

Get set for a blinding flash of the obvious: Physical, mental, and spiritual realities operate differently from one another. I’m slow, I know. (I have an excuse, which is as lame as any other excuse, so I won’t go into it. It’s just useful to have one.) The point is that one can experience a change in physical reality and not experience it on the spiritual or mythic levels (for me they are usually nearly synonymous).

 

The flash occurred this morning sitting on the sofa talking to Cheryl, my wife, who sort of casually stated, “You paid for a round trip ticket to the Underworld, but you’re still in it.” It was instantly apparent to me that I was physically back from that journey, but on the spiritual level I was still there, thrashing about like the log in the waves, with just about as much awareness, but with keen appreciation of the process.  It’s one thing to fall off the roof, it’s another to have the building fall on you afterwards, and yet a third thing to keep repeating the process. Oof.

 

Trips to the underworld have been described in a great deal of writing by formidable authors including Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. If you picture Campbell’s model of the Hero/ine’s Journey of a simple “U” model, it starts from a state of innocence at the top of the U; but one soon encounters “The Call.” From there, one slides down the U to some sort of Initiation into this mythic process. At the bottom of the U one is in The Ordeal, or The Pit. This is the classic trip to the underworld as identified in many mythic tales. Somewhere, as one progresses up the other side, a Breakthrough is experienced. And finally at the top, a new reality is celebrated. This description, of course is oversimplified in the extreme. But hey, this is a blog. I share it with you to be able to pose the question, “What happens in the Pit?”

 

What happens is one of several options. The worst case scenario is that the hero/ine dies. Gods tend to resurrect, mortals tend to stay dead. Another is that one cycles in the pit. That is, it doesn’t seem to be a smooth journey through the worst of the storm and then up to a “new life.” If it was that simple there would not be a need for the great deal of writing that describes it. From my experience, progress out of the Underworld seems real enough, then like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, wham! One is flat on one’s back. But unlike the cartoon, from all my own observations and (current) experiences, and as the log-in-the-wave metaphor shows, life in the Pit isn’t fun at all.

 

Getting out is simply not within our power as mere humans. So what else happens is that we meet helpers or “allies,” beings or forces that intervene to provide extras, which can take the form of information, directions, weapons, clothes, armor, any number of things, and combinations of all of them. The point is we cannot get out on our own. So OK, just gimme the secret and I’ll be off then; I have things to do.

 

Not so fast. Again, if it were that simple, we’d all be outta there slick as shit. And although I am being somewhat cavalier in my description, don’t forget: Sometimes the hero/ine dies. No one is immune, not even the gods. So what is the price of the round trip ticket Cheryl called out for me? It is a resource we all have in our possession, is of the greatest of all prices, and is the most threatening as well. It is a Great Sacrifice. It is the sacrifice of the ego, which requires the death of the part of one’s great link to individuality, and one’s claim on Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame.”  It is, as “sacrifice” indicates, not what we fear, which is the giving up of one’s person or one’s personality, but it is the making-holy of the ego by subordinating it to powers greater than our own ability to get ourselves out of the mess we find ourselves in. And while I write that last sentence, I am sucked up by yet another wave, and thrown over-the-falls onto the rocks and sand, the wind knocked out, and pain shooting through my spine. I really hate that part.

 

Tell me then, how does one intentionally make one’s ego holy? That is yet another paradox or dilemma, like being intentionally humble. As soon as you think you are, you’re not. Damn, here comes another wave; I don’t even have my breath yet.

 

Yet people have done it. Many have returned, some have described their experiences. Too bad that most of the time those descriptions quickly turn into orthodoxy, and doom any efforts of emulation. Of course if I knew the answer to how, I’da been outta here long ago.

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

Looking back on the past couple of months: I been in here too long.  If being in the emergency situation was being in the Jaws of Death, then over the past two months my position has moved from being clenched between the teeth to a lengthy slide along the tongue, to moving around to various locations on of the mouth and now finally sitting stuck somewhere on the lips. I am out of danger, it seems, but not out of the influence of its bad breath. A condition that can last far too long.

            Any sort of serious stress can precipitate the need to move from one’s daily focus into one’s foundation. But the Jaws live beneath the foundation, under the house of my well being, in a cave below the basement, and the distance between the cave and the basement is of mythic proportion. While in that cave the Jaws did me some serious damage and threatened the very foundation of my house. The damage has brought my attention to itself for months; its repair is very slow. I got that trip to the Jaws, and mythically to the underworld itself, for reasons unknown. So I am making the assumption that I can learn something important, and in the process of repairing the house I will end up with something better than I had. We usually visit our foundations in times of stress, particularly when security and safety are threatened. OK, I qualified. 

            Usually foundations hold us up in times of stress, but when the foundation does not hold, not only does the building of one’s life collapse, but the previously unknown door to the underworld (hidden somewhere in everyone’s foundation) yawns open, and with reality crashing down, escape down that dark passage may be the only option. Not everyone gets an invitation to explore that portal. One doesn’t decide to take that path, one is pushed, which doesn’t make sense until after one has returned and tells the story, if one is very lucky.

            In the meantime I struggle in my foundation where routines are taking over. I recognize that I am in a set of routines that reflect disability – I sit in the same places that are comfortable. Nothing wrong with that, but I find myself thinking and saying “I hurt.,” “I can’t,” “I’m tired,” far too often. All of these statements may be accurate at one level but perception is tricky, focusing attention on pain or inability to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Surprisingly quickly, muscles tighten and grow inflexible; stretching is equally challenging, particularly while dodging lightening bolts of pain fired off at random by some angry nerve. While it’s necessary to have a strong and healthy foundation, it isn’t usually a good idea to live under the house. Talk about “inside the box thinking…” It’s a very confining viewpoint.

            Getting out of one’s foundation is not a simple task. Of the things I did not get during my journey was a roadmap, nor a set of instructions directing me to the way out. The first phase of return from the underworld was almost automatic once I regained consciousness. Physical healing and pain medications were a big part. But of much more importance was the spiritual an emotional lifeline I was provided by people surrounding me with love and light. But being back in physical reality is not the same as being out of the foundation.

            The foundation presents a formidable barrier. Routines establish quickly and set future expectations which lead to predictive outcomes; they are not easily banished. It’s a paradox of sorts: foundations provide stability, safety, and security. They help us get stuff done, and assure that the whole society doesn’t simply crash into itself while we’re driving on the highways. Routines also limit our ability to expect spontaneous events, so we easily miss opportunities and revelations which represent change. A stable foundation is the essence of being non-creative. It’s not supposed to be creative. Creative foundations make for very tippy buildings. But if I don’t re-create myself I am doomed to live a life sitting in the same places, punctuated by visits to doctors and other people that I hope will have the answer to getting me out of here.

            I wonder what would happen if I… Hold on. Things might get tippy.

 

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

Once, a long time ago, I had an experience with a turquoise blue curtain that I saw blowing slightly in the wind. I was in the passenger seat of a moving car, and I noticed it because of its own movement. It was hanging in a second story house window, not particularly large, so it was probably a bathroom window. Summer afternoon. Warm. Sunny. At the time I had two thoughts, almost simultaneously. The first was that I had never seen such a beautiful and intense shade of turquoise before. The second thought changed me forever because I realized that the world or reality of that beautiful shade of turquoise had always existed. It was simply me that had finally noticed it. When I was pondering the second thought, the third thought emerged and I realized that I had to allow for not just a second reality, but that if there were two, there could be an infinite number of realities, and I had to allow for all of them. Difficult to do. And it turns out to be much more than a good mental exercise.

 

If you think of “realities” like a journey in a space ship, like in a sci fi movie, it’s a pretty difficult undertaking.  But if you think of going to alternate realities as subtle shifts in perception, it’s not such a stretch. When you consider it, each of us has the reality we are aware of, a few more that occupy our vision for the future, a few more that account for fantasies throughout the day, and how many more that represent the potential of our imaginations?

 

Oh, but you might be thinking, “But those are simply “made up thoughts,” just figments of our imaginations and memories, not physical realities. Perhaps. And if so, the story you may have for reality is based on more than just observation, but an assumption the scientific method is guarantee of the accuracy of our perceptions. It is the most rational model we have, and is responsible for much of the modern/technical world in which we live. Or perhaps you have a more spiritual orientation to your story, maybe a version of a story that Alan Watts refers to as the “quiet dignity and inner peace of the old fashioned believer.” Both are culturally driven explanations that show up in our stories. Both depend on an additional assumption of consistency and repetition on which we can have faith, in which we can place our trust. No problem, most of us can’t seem to shut up when it comes to our own story anyway. Indeed, repetition, internal or external, is how we continually reassure ourselves of how the story goes.

 

But what we miss is, our personal model of reality is backwards. We think that the world is “out there,” sending us information like sound and light waves, which we interpret “in here,” in our minds. What actually is happening though is that with the information we receive, we are creating the world “in here,” while we keep extending our perceptual abilities “out there,” and all the while not recognizing that each of us is creating the world in which we live, internally.

 

I have held this view for years, but after standing in the Jaws of Death, I now understand the fundamental importance of this process. While actually being gnawed on by those jaws in my most recent visit, my world became a much different place. Contracted and reduced to pain and a vague sense of “holding on,” physical reality became, most of the time, secondary, many times completely irrelevant, so I now cannot re-member it. My world, reality for me, for a time, was a single sensation and a single relationship punctuated with intervening events like doctor and nurse visits. The same sort of process took place with my first visit to the Jaws. The world contracted to a dark and limited few things that required full attention. But even at that heightened state of attention, I was simply being swept along in that particular wave of events. Each time I have been in the Jaws, reality contracted to simply being in the situation, little or no plan, very limited vision for the future, no thinking about the past, there was just being in that moment. Nevertheless each event was a singularly commanding reality, not just because each was literally life threatening, but also because as the world contracted to immediacy, those limited aspects to it expanded to enormous proportions.

 

One of the most interesting things about these different realities is that they were both potent enough to shake me out of my regular story. The one that pretty well governs my awareness and therefore the creation of my personal world. You know, like the one you have that governs yours. The experience of being in the Jaws is a source of energy, call it dark energy if you want to (that’s part of your story), but energy so strong that the story I had constructed, the one called “reality” evaporated. Like the cartoon character that has looked down after having run off a cliff, I was in free fall.

 

The outcomes are interesting, at least to me. One is a heightened sense of perceptual awareness. Another is the understanding of the flimsy nature of what we insist is a stable and secure reality. A third is a sort of detached recognition, an allowance actually, where in my own mind I create psychic space to let each reality be whatever it is and recognize that it will exist completely without my awareness, much less influence. A sort of corollary to this last point of learning for me is a recognition that I can only determine my own story to some degree, never totally. Situational forces will always intervene with influences beyond my ability to control them. The outcome is always up for grabs. So I need to be as proactive with my own story as I can. It’s a creative process for which I cannot completely pre-determine the end.

 

What keeps this whole thing from becoming simply an exercise in relativism is that each reality comes pre-packaged with a tacit understanding that it is Correct. Or to paraphrase Lee Thayer, “This way of understanding must be correct. Otherwise why would I be telling you about it?”

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

Crazy people have a difficult time in the world; no one agrees with them. Quite literally, they understand a unique world that no one else shares. Society does not seem to know what to do, so it calls them crazy, then they can be marginalized. By contrast, when everyone else we meet seems to generally share our own way of thinking, life is… normal. In fact we usually just assume we are seeing things the way they really are, the way everyone else does. Then we spend a fair amount of time making sure that the sense we make of the world is at least close to the sense other people make. Our common languages facilitate this process and most of the time we go to sleep at night reassured that we have not only “communicated, “ but we are also reassured that we are “right,” because we got some agreement in regard to our sense making.  We do this by sharing stories of our perceptions and experiences.

Those folks with unusual experiences, for instance unusual sightings, Bigfoot, UFO’s or the Virgin Mary, often have a difficult time relating their experience to others. Most other people don’t share those experiences so they cannot really understand, much less confirm the sighting, vision, revelation, or  mental image. So those experiences are abnormal. If those who have had them keep insisting on their way of making sense of them, especially if they do so in ways to get social notice, they will get labeled, and shift toward the crazy end of the crazy – normal continuum. Sometimes they find others with similar experiences and form support groups to discuss and compare, developing language which at least the group can agree on.

Sometimes they wear t-shirts or put bumper stickers on their cars. Sometimes they keep their group membership a secret. In any case, the group is a shield against the assault from larger society in which they still don’t fit. However, just like the normal folks, the ones with abnormal experiences communicate by sharing stories of perceptions and experiences.

So one’s placement or location on the crazy – normal continuum primarily depends on what degree one is perceived as being conventional, or not. Given this general social mechanism, my Jaws of Death experience has moved me a little closer to the crazy side. I know I am over simplifying both ends, crazy and normal, and I don’t recommend either. But I understand now, a little better and deeper, what it means to have had an experience that cannot be communicated.

In actuality, we are all closer to the crazy end than we may want to admit. In actuality, there is no way to guarantee that what I see, much less understand as the color blue is the same as your experience and understanding of the same color, even if we standardize that color in terms of wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. Indeed, it is common that people who are what we call colorblind do not discover that until they get into school, where they often take years to finally come to the conclusion that their personal experiences of color are not what is commonly referred to by the teacher, class, or eventually ophthalmologist who tacitly represent what is normal. We don’t call them crazy though, they’re not far enough down the continuum.

I keep my most crazy thoughts to myself, especially those that I fear may actually threaten my general position on the continuum. After all, I have to maintain some degree of professional credibility, on which depend things like being able to communicate with clients, and, eventually, my income. So I use metaphor to try and communicate with others about my experience: Jaws of Death, trip to the underworld, river of pain, hit in back with a baseball bat, etc. None are adequate. Yet this is all I have.

If I am lucky enough to come up with a painting or a drawing that stands as a metaphor, I won’t have to explain as much as with verbal metaphors. Images are wonderfully projective, so people will simply see in the picture what they will. Projection happens anyway, images just facilitate the process. They’re engaging.

Joseph Campbell wrote,  “ The best things cannot be said, the second best are misunderstood, after that comes civilized conversation” (Masks of God: Creative Mythology). So, you may ask, why try at all? Why try and communicate with metaphor, image, blog, conversation or any other means? Simply, because it’s no fun being alone in a semantic universe of meaning. Even hermits have networks, theologies, structures of some sort with which they are linked. (Introverts are some of the most talkative people on the planet, in the right circumstances, and once they get started.)

So there is a cycle here. Individual, unique understanding will tend to move toward social interaction, group membership, shared understanding and a confirmation of being normal. But being normal can and often does get confining, too prescriptive, and even threatens our individuality. So we move from one to the other, perhaps the cycle is not exactly circular but looks like this:

 Strange Attractor of Individuality vs. Conventionality, Crazy vs. Normal

Strange Loop: Normal vs Crazy

                                    Adapted from Barnett Pearce, Communication and the Human Condition

But don’t let the model fool you. It may appear that people cycle equally and endlessly from one side to another, and it doesn’t happen like that very often. Indeed, we’re not that well developed. For my part, I tend to hang around the “Search for unique experience” side of things more than the “We’re the same right?” side. When I was younger, looking for confirmation that I was conventional meant to me that I might be more socially successful. I was, of course, wrong.

A stint standing in the Jaws of Death has provided me with a sense of, an awareness of, the need to be crazy and normal, not at the same time, but each in its own time. You may find a different strange attractor driving your life (or several!). Any true dilemma can be mapped in this way.  No doubt, it’s a dizzy process.

 

Apollo demands his reason and light. Get too close  - get burned. Dionysus demands his darkness and disharmony. Get too close – get lost forever.

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So being bitten, even gnawed on a while by the jaws has proven to be an immediate and long term challenge. Immediate in that besides the daily, constant pain and physical limitations (which are really frustrating), I am also thrust into a confrontation with change. I have to recognize that I am different in physical, mental (intellectual), and spiritual ways. Some of those differences are obvious, but most are intangible and  much more subtle. They lead me to questions, “What will I, what am I transforming into?”

 

I feel the distance of time creeping into the immediacy of my experiences. The intensity of those moments dims, the story I tell people becomes more familiar to me, more routine, I realize that story is far from complete, and yet it necessarily functions as a both linear description, and holistic symbol for the jaws experience.

 

The experiences necessarily lead to my knowing, and knowledge necessarily leads to my story, but telling the story also leads to a kind of semantic distance, an abstraction that leaves both details and emotional intensity behind. This is a sort of unintentional “forgetting” reinforcing some information, ignoring other information, all leading to less direct access to the original experiences.

 

You might be asking why I would not want to forget about these experiences. Distance, forgetting, even just being routine about them degrades the quality of my understanding of them. Besides, these are powerful experiences, and I am not determined by their potential negative impact. My orientation towards these jaws is that I want to be able to stay open to what these jaws have to offer, teach and transform. So I am bothered that even the very story I tell tends to create distance between me and those jaws of transformation.

So what to do?

 

I remember something written by Mircea Eliade; “A sacrifice, for example, not only exactly reproduces the initial sacrifice revealed by a god aborigine, at the beginning of time, it also takes place at the same primordial mythical moment; in other words, every sacrifice repeats the original sacrifice and coincides with it.”

 

‘Sacrifice,” is etymologically composed of two roots, sacre, holy, and facer, to make. Sacrifice then means to make holy. The common understanding that it means to go without, or to give up something of values is incorrect. In ancient times the gods required things to be given up to both create a first person experience and to point the attention of the person involved toward a particular god or idea. Sacrifice has always been about a personal experience, not one dictated by another person, much less an institution.

 

So what’s the point? The point is that any ritual, when done with a mindset that “makes holy,” is sacrificial.  A ritual directs and intensifies one’s attention and appreciation for something. So if I do not want to lose my appreciation for the experience of being in the Jaws, I know what to do: ritual that makes holy.

 

The only activity that I can do that has the potential to achieve that is the activity of Art Making. Why art? Because making art, when directing it at a powerful referent, has the ability to become a powerful, personal symbol that, instead of creating distance between me and the experience, can close that semantic gap, and act as a projective bridge (or better yet an actual vehicle) between me and the experience of being in those Jaws.

 

The Jaws owe me. Those original experiences were made holy with rivers of real blood, and real pain. They are now my portal to transformation and development. And I intend to collect.

 

It isn’t easy to “go back.” (There is really no such thing as going back in time, so one actually re-members, recreates those events we call it remembering.) but when one does ritualistically an interesting thing happens. As Eliade continues,  “All sacrifices are performed at the same mythical instant at the beginning of time; through the paradox of the rite, profane time and duration are suspended…

 

“Insofar as an act (or an object) acquires a certain reality through the repetition of certain paradigmatic gestures and acquires it through that alone, there is an implicit abolition of profane time, of duration, of history. “

                                                                                                            The Myth Of The Eternal Return. P. 54

 

Even time, one of the forces of greatest perceived power, collapses at our feet, and during those moments of greatest engagement, we don’t even know it. We are, for a while, changed from being in the river of time, to being in the ocean of being, where we have access to all things.

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

 

 

There is an old folk story, sometimes it’s a song, and the characters can change, but the meaning of the story stays the same. It’s about a man (in some versions it’s a woman) that meets a snake on the bank of a river. The snake asks the man to carry it across to the other side. The man says to the snake, “No, you’re a snake, and if I pick you up, you will bite me and I will die.”

 The snake replies, “No, I won’t bite you, you are carrying me across the river. Please take me across.” This interchange goes on several times, usually three, and then the man gives in, picks up the snake, and starts across the river. About half way across the snake gives the man a fatal bite. “You bit me!” He exclaims in surprise. “Well,” responds the snake, “You knew who I was when you picked me up.”

 I had a similar experience when I was stuck with a thorn, the first part of a sort of perfect storm of events that nearly ended things for me on this planet. When I finally got a chance, I went to the garden and had a conversation with the vine that furnished the fateful thorn. I learned something important from that conversation. The vine didn’t care. Thorns are its nature.

There are problems with standing in the jaws of Death. As you might expect, fear does get in the way. It gets in the way of our thinking clearly, observing clearly, acting rationally, before, during, and after the event. When bad things happen we often want to say, “That’s not fair!” But fairness only applies to those who have accepted the convention and value of being fair, which only applies to some people, and certainly not the rest of creation. Being treated fairly assumes we are somehow entitled to a particular kind of treatment, that we are “special,” somehow.

 My experience has heightened my awareness of both the nearness and the randomness of events that can sometimes be catastrophic. However gratitude for being alive also “gets in the way.”  I am now often overwhelmed with the world in which I travel. Stopping along a walkway, for example, I cannot believe the detail and lushness of the world. The experience can easily bring me to tears.

 Ah, but it’s not fear or gratitude that gets in the way of understanding the story of the experience. Its not even emotion itself that gets in the way of our ability to get at the “real story.” It’s us. We do a disservice to ourselves by searching for the “real” story. There isn’t any story that is any more real than the one we create.

 

 

 

© 2008 All Rights Reserved

When we communicate successfully it’s because we have some sort of common experience or understanding that we can both refer to when particular language is used. Although I have no idea if when I say “black car” that you are thinking of a Honda, Ford, or any other make. If it matters, we’ll have to work that out between us. But what if a person has never seen a car? Ah, then I simply supply a picture, and we move on, with a little less common understanding than in the first case. Yes, but what if the image makes no sense to the other person, or if we are referring to an intangible concept, like love, or pain? Well then we are left with the last resort. I use a metaphor, and say something like, “Well love is like a religious experience.” To which the other person may respond, “I have had a religious experience, but it was painful. So is love like pain?”

 

Metaphoric communication can be dangerous. But many times it’s all we’ve got, particularly if we are trying to communicate about deeply personal experiences. Metaphor is far more than a mere “figure of speech, and much more than the identification Aristotle made, that it is one of several rhetorical tools we may use to persuade others. Indeed, in all religious writings, regardless of age or origin, it is the stuff of deepest meaning, sometimes even intentionally secret meaning. Metaphoric is also the language of the unconscious, which is why figuring out our own dreams is often a problem. Nevertheless, if you can figure them out, it appears that the unconscious is pretty smart, and has a lot to say.

 

We get very hung up on communicating as if we could force mutual understanding with being more and more accurate. Sometimes it seems best to simply present an image and stop trying so hard. We too easily forget that the relationship we have between us is far more important than the accuracy of our respective understandings, especially when we recognize how impossibly ambiguous words and images are anyway.

 

We have the priority wrong: the priority is about the quality of our connection together, not about the accuracy of our words, much less who might be “right.” What’s important is that we can have a relationship at all, that allows us to get to an understanding, but if it doesn’t then so what? If our relationships depended on successful communication we would all be very lonely indeed.

 

All of this is to present the following image, which was presented to me by surprise. I went looking for a winter storm with large waves forecast. I was looking for excitement. I found nearly no waves, and just the beginning of incoming clouds, and light.

 

 

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