Door

Door ... 2008

Little Critter

Little Critter with Clouds...2008

'Because it was him...'

In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together, so that it cannot be found. If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: 'Because it was him: because it was me.' Mediating this union there was, beyond all my reasoning, beyond all that I can say specifically about it, some inexplicable force of destiny.

Essay 28 ... On Affectionate Relationship

Michel de Montaigne

The Shortness of LIfe

Can anything be sillier than the point of view of certain people—I mean those who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves very busily engaged in order that they may be able to live better; they spend life in making ready to live! They form their purposes with a view to the distant future; yet postponement is the greatest waste of life; it deprives them of each day as it comes, it snatches from them the present by promising something hereafter. The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes to-day. You dispose of that which lies in the hands of Fortune, you let go that which lies in your own. Whither do you look? At what goal do you aim? All things that are still to come lie in uncertainty; live straightway!

Seneca the Younger (4BC to AD65)

Kything

Proginoskes looked at her with two, ringed owl-like eyes.

"You're beginning to learn how to kythe."
"To what?"
"Kythe. It's how cherubim talk. It's talking without words, just the same way that I can be myself and not be enfleshed."
"But I have to be enfleshed and I need words."
"I know Meg," he replied gently, "and I will keep things worded for you. But it will help if you will remember that cherubim kythe without words among each other. For a human creature you show a distinct talent for kything."
Meg blushed slightly at the compliment...


A Wind in the Door (1973) ... Madeleine L'Engle

Hut-Spirit

Everything seems to have its own spirit. Plants, insects, rocks even the firewood. This hut also has a spirit, a different kind, one that has been nourished by the thoughts of previous hermits. This hut-spirit tends the local mice and the chipmunks. It sets tasks for the human beings who spend their time here. I was moved to, fix a window, and mend other odds and ends. This spirit also has a splendid sense of humor. I like it very much.

David A. C Cooper (Entering the Sacred Mountain)

The Seas of God

Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

O my brave soul!
O farther, farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!

Walt Whitman ... 1819 - 1892

Threshold

Threshold ... 2007

Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek...2006

Abandoned Games, Forgotten Toys

Abandoned Games, Forgotten Toys...2006

Song of the Seraphim

Song of the Seraphim...2006

Voyage of the Rose

Voyage of the Rose...2006

Universal Theatre

Universal Theatre...2006

Celestial Guardians, Astral Navigation

Celestial Guardians, Astral Navigation...2006

Betrothal

The Betrothal of Artemis and Aphrodite...2006

Old Mother Time

Old Mother Time...2006

Iris

Iris...2006

The bird was singing brightly within his breast, and Anselm walked by the guard into the gap betwen the golden pillars, into the blue mystery of the interior. He was penetrating into Iris's heart, and it was the blue flag in his mother's garden into whose blue chalice he floated, and as he quickly approached the golden twilight, all memory and knowledge came to him at once. He felt his hand, and it was small and soft. Voices of love sounded nearby and familiar in his ears, and the glistening golden pillars sparkled as they had in the remote past, during the spring of his childhood.

And the dream that he had dreamed as a small boy was also there again, his dream about entering the chalice, and behind him the entire world of pictures came and glided with him and sank into the mystery that lies behind all images.

Anselm began to sing softly, and his path sloped gently down into home.

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)

Secret Toy

You make unknown the child's sleeping face, his half-open eyes and mouth. Everything in the world is a secret, and the games are still the game of love, the game of hide-and-seek, and the chilly game of solitude. In a secret room in a secret house his secret toy sits listening to its own stillness. Crows fly over that city. the ghosts of his and our dreams come together at night like window dressers and their mannequins on a street of dark, abandoned buildings and white clouds.
Charles Simic...Dime-Store Alchemy.

Bebe Marie...Joseph Cornell

Simic's book is a little masterpiece. A series of short meditations, these little boxes of language evoke the spirit of Cornell's imaginal soul-theatres.

Our Sibling Kin

Joseph Cornell in his Bedroom...Duane Michals

Every art is about the longing of One for the Other. Orphans that we are, we make our sibling kin out of anything we can find.

Charles Simic

(from Dime-Store Alchemy)

These words of Charles Simic from his book about Joseph Cornell and this poignant photo bring tears to my eyes.

Toward the Blue Peninsula

Toward the Blue Peninsula....Joseph Cornell (1903-1972)

It might be lonelier
Without the Loneliness --
I'm so accustomed to my Fate --
Perhaps the Other -- Peace --

Would interrupt the Dark --
And crowd the little Room --
Too scant -- by Cubits -- to contain
The Sacrament -- of Him --

I am not used to Hope --
It might intrude upon --
Its sweet parade -- blaspheme the place --
Ordained to Suffering --

It might be easier
To fail -- with Land in Sight --
Than gain -- My Blue Peninsula --
To perish -- of Delight --

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Entrance to the Rose garden

Entrance to the Rose Garden ... 2006

Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning

T S Eliot 1888-1965

Hermit

Hermit 2006

The Great Happiness

The Divine Land 1979 (Cecil C0llins)

The lowest level one could call the small happiness, and above that..a small unhappiness, where one is restricted to fear of losing the small happiness. Above is the great happiness, which means you have seen through the small happiness. I mean by that it doesn't satisfy you, and you are unhappy in a very deep way because you know there is a great happiness, and, if you can't experience that, you reject every other form of hapiness, because that is the happiness you know to be the greatest and the most real...Let me put it another way; you are unhappy because you can't reach it but you are very happy because you can see it. In a word, you're alive...

Cecil Collins (1908 - 1989)

In the Forest at Night

In the Forest at Night ... 2006

We Two...

We Two...2006

Soul-Shrine

Thou angel of God who hast charge of me
From the fragrant Father of mercifulness,
The gentle encompassing of the Sacred Heart
To make round my soul-shrine this night,
Oh, round my soul-shrine this night.

Ward from me every distress and danger,

Encompass my course over the ocean of truth,

I pray thee, place thy pure light before me,

O bright beauteous angel on this very night

Bright beauteous angel on this very night.

Be Thyself the guiding star above me,

Illume Thou to me every reef and shoal,

Pilot my barque on the crest of the wave,

To the restful haven of the waveless sea,

Oh, the restful haven of the waveless sea.

from Carmina Gadelica

Something Helpless that Wants our Love

We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called "apparitions," the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. for if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.


Rainer Maria Rilke (from Letters to a young Poet)

Nothing Else but Miracles

Walt Whitman is one of my most significant teachers. For someone like me who can easily become muddled and ungrounded, his passionate evocations of life in all its manifestations, his affirmation of everything human, pull me back to the earth. I am soothed, comforted and inspired in equal measure.

Miracles

WHY! who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love—or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with my mother,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive, of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds—or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sun-down—or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite, delicate, thin curve of the new moon in spring;
Or whether I go among those I like best, and that like me best—mechanics, boatmen, farmers,
Or among the savans—or to the soiree—or to the opera,
Or stand a long while looking at the movements of machinery,
Or behold children at their sports,
Or the admirable sight of the perfect old man, or the perfect old woman,
Or the sick in hospitals, or the dead carried to burial,
Or my own eyes and figure in the glass;
These, with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring—yet each distinct, and in its place.
To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass—the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles. Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Becoming Water

Madonna del Parto (Piero della Francesca)

The faith community I have been part of during the last few years has been the Religious Society of Friends. I have imaged the Quaker tradition as a trellis supporting the vine of my spirituality. But now the trellis seems to be dissolving…the hard edges, the forms of it are blurring…melting as a block of ice would...though it is not in brilliant sunshine but some darker, cooler place. (How can something both cool and melt at the same time? Yet that is the way it appears).

I am meditating more, finding the space behind, beneath and around things….Content is not so significant..or what there is is loose, allusive, obliquely visioned. I am reading fiction and poetry…Rilke, Thomas Moore and soon to return to Proust…looking at art books.

I use Reiki…gently. In the next few weeks I will receive my Reiki 3 attunement. Actually the dissolution seemed to start with my first attunement. From there the softening and melting began.

In a recent dream I was in a white cathedral. I saw many art works depicting the Annunciation. This gospel story speaks to me of something hidden.…Mary pondering these things in her own heart…Impregnation…receiving…conceiving…all in the dark womb, which welcomes and receives….a powerful metaphor for contemplation…the virginal womb into which the Spirit pours in darkness…a place of watery containment.

Recent intermittent feelings of fatigue have forced me into whole days of inactivity…. I resisted and resisted these but the times I surrendered to them have became a contemplative space where I can be nourished by emptiness…no choice but to be still, to rest, to go down…allow something new to grow in the protective darkness of unknowing.

Of course it is all more fragmentary than this...by its nature it is obscure and lacking in any clarity. Rivers... streams.....rain....oceans....gutters...puddles...the still waters of the evening....harbour and open sea.

Life's Dark Beauty

Religion, too, often avoids the dark by hiding behind platitudes and false assurances. Nothing is more irrelevant than feeble religious piousness in the face of stark, life-threatening darkness. Religion tends to sentimentalize the light and demonize the darkness. If you turn to spirituality to find only a positive and wholesome attitude, you are using spirituality to avoid life's dark beauty. Religion easily becomes a defence and avoidance. Of course this is not the real purpose of religion, full of beautifully stated wisdom, , and the religious traditions of the world are your best source of guidance in the dark. But there is real religion and there is the empty shell of religion. Know the difference. Your life is at stake.....

The spiritual life is both deep and transcendent. It shouldn't whisk you away from your daily challenges but should offer you an intelligent way of dealing with all the complexity involved. It should make you a person of character and discernment, emotionally tough and intellectualy demanding, as well as loving and compassionate. It should give you insight into the deepest of your questions and problems, and give you a vision which extends beyond the everyday issues. Religion often fails to explore the depths and only offers the vision, but then the transcendent possibilities lack depth and in the end hurt more than help.

(Thomas Moore)