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.

]]> http://xyante.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/316/feed/ 0 xyante Imaginalist Vol. 1 http://xyante.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/cat-whisker/ http://xyante.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/cat-whisker/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:35:48 +0000 xyante http://xyante.wordpress.com/?p=304 ]]>

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.

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

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

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 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