Human Landscape – Refugee Children

Posted on August 28, 2014 by janeadamsart

What can a war artist do?

A photo is quickly taken, sold to a news agency, reacted to in passing by millions, and passed over. A drawing takes far longer in time and space, to contemplate the condition. I did this one and two others, yesterday. Some more were done last week, and the rest are from a few years ago. .

Our children are the same for us the world over. This woman works hard on the land and in her household. She holds it all together, and carries the weight of water from the well. She gave birth to her babies in pain and crying out and relief; they are her life, each one. Her husband may or may not be a strong, caring father. .

Now their homestead and village is shattered: they wait homeless on the waterless mountain. She is vulnerable. In a war zone, you do not know who is friend or rapist – like an earthquake. Her children are hungry and there is no roof. There is the tearing pain inside her belly, of anxiety and shock: the soft smell of her baby: the bewildered bravery of her daughter as a journalist’s lens draws near. They are rounded up like goats, by unknown herders. .

She is my sister. I live in a safe house with interesting things to do, and plenty to eat. I can only reach out by drawing her, to touch, that she may feel somehow, somewhere that someone knows. Send her strength … Even now … wherever she is. .

He’s a father, and they lost their mother. The children want to help him, and don’t know how. On their terrifying journey to survival, it is the artist’s way to support them. Loaded on a donkey they ride off into uncertain night, the first desolate steps through quicksand, of an astounding courage. .

It is humiliating to have your home torn away and to ride with all you can carry on the donkey to God knows where?

The newspaper said: She has a badly needed drink. While I was drawing her – and it took me nearly all day – I wondered a lot about what blinds a man or boy, to kill or hurt a beautiful child like this in the name of fundamentalism.

I singled these children out from a crowd in Gaza – two brothers and a sister. They watch perhaps the bombing of their street – evacuated. A rope to hold back the crowd, threads together each child’s parentless abyss… the grownups’ broken world

This was a design for a Christmas card some years ago – a refugee camp anywhere and the Star.

The late Valerie Brooks gave 17 years of her life to support children in distress. Through her cleaner, (a doctor from West Ukraine who could earn more for her family by cleaning houses in London, than by practicing medicine in her home town) assistance was given also to a poverty-stricken Ukrainian community, through the Maria Relief Fund http://mariarelieffund.org.uk/ . A network of friends and sponsors helps to support each family there, and to establish an English class and educational opportunities for their children. . It is an extended family.

Many large charities lose their definition in administrative overheads. Smaller charities operate in a grass-roots way through human contact and serendipity. The Maria Relief Fund is a small registered charity, assisting displaced children around the world. I am associated with it and also with the Phoenix Aid Centre . PAC provides accessible therapy and counselling for refugees, victims of abuse and for all who might rise from their ashes and fly. .

A man or woman who brought their family from danger into safety – through the final hurdle of UK border control and language barrier – drew on reserves of superhuman values, to make their quantum leap, and integrate with a new culture. Such persons have that gift to contribute – when these qualities within them are recognised. So we should find it within ourselves, to recognise. .

This is a village child in Ukraine.

More refugees on displaced borderlands – the children take care of each other. They are our future – the unbreakable jewel within us. The Age of Aquarius breaks down old walls.

Kristina is a talented girl in the Ukraine, whom I help to sponsor. She lives with her granny and grandad, who worry what will happen to her when they die.

Dancers at a village festival in West Ukraine.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2014. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

Sacred India Tarot Archive – the Suit of Staves – Ace

Posted on August 23, 2014 by janeadamsart

The Sacred India Tarot bridges Indian yoga and mythology with western esoteric schools.

Tarot key 1 – the Magus – belongs here, to open a new Suit – the Suit of Wands. His is the Intelligence of Transparency. With the Wand in his right, he conducts the divine current. His left hand indicates the garden. In front of him are the tools for the Work.

Jane’s Notes – More than a decade has passed since Rohit and I worked on this suit. Reviewing it, I see the essence of the Wands – the Staves in Indian mythology – as a warrior’s dance. The action is martial but it moves with grace – for instance the wonderful episode which carries Rama and Sita across the sea to freedom and the homeland: an End-of Karma card, as with the Eights in the other three Suits.

There is also the gesture of the multi-dimensional Ashwin Twins, children of the Sun – as they reach a long hand to the struggling mariner in the high seas. We created a rare depiction of this stupendous and health giving deity.

We began to touch upon the martial art as a dance form, towards the end of the Suit of Arrows in this Archive (See Archive of all Posts, or use the Search button). Returning through the Wands/Staves, the form and its focus matures, giving Rama the power to pierce the formidable Ravannah King of Demons.

There is an old Buddhist teaching: the well placed stone. Not how many stones you throw – but which one, and where it lands – in conversation and in dance, as well as in battle: the Art of Life, the great middle way.

In the Indian sense, these pebbles are lingum, the Sign.

Rohit’s Notes (2003)

“I have selected for this Suit of Wands, the Yuddha Kanda – the section of the Ramayana dealing with the battle to recover Sita from captivity in Lanka and its aftermath from the Ramayana. We cannot deliver the whole epic in one Suit, but we can distil some essence from this archetypal chapter. A Gnostic book I read says that, as well as their more traditional meaning as the Fire Suit, the Wands represent the air and the intellect, just as we suppose the Swords to do. So we get multiple layers of meaning here.

“The Ramayana and Mahabharatha are not just India’s epics; they are the national epics also of Java, Bali, Indonesia, Cambodia and Thailand. I would like to show by hinting at those costume styles, that Indian mythology like the Tarot, transcends local contexts and has universal relevance. The Balinese look is spectacular, as this illustration shows.

“I like the tunic clad bearded Ravana; it shows a sense of virile power instead of being grossly ugly and repulsive as most representations of Ravana are. Perhaps the demons should be shown in this style all through?”

Rohit’s Notes (2003): The story goes: Rama in alliance with Sugriva king of the monkeys, and with Hanuman’s assistance, attacks Lanka where his wife Sita is held captive by the King of the Demons, Ravana. Rama slays Ravana and rescues Sita who then undergoes an ordeal of fire in order to clear herself of the suspicion of infidelity. At a later stage, Rama becomes imperilled by doubt, loses his trust in the feminine and banishes her to the forest where she meets the sage Valmiki. Valmiki is the traditional author of the Ramayana and its seer. In the forest, Sita gives birth to Rama’s two sons, but after having to again protest her innocence, asks to be received by the earth, which swallows her up.

“Like Krishna in the Suit of Arrows, Rama is an avatar of Vishnu the Sustainer. The poem is immensely popular in India, setting prototypes of a harmonious and just kingdom, conjugal love, filial and fraternal love. Everything is designed for harmony which after being disrupted is at last regained.”

Jane’s Notes:
Significantly, this story is a multi-level parable. For instance, Rama attains the ideal of wise government and conjugal happiness, but “loses” the plot when he drops to a lower level of the mind and its advisors. The prototypes are self-sustaining, eternally. They bide their time while the human reascends to their timeless horizon. The woman, received into the earth, is the earth’s wisdom which births us. All ideas which battle to the contrary, are time drawn out in fantasy. This suit of Staves depicts some of the psychological uplifts and downdraughts between the Worlds.

Rohit’s Notes – “Ace of Staves – Building the Stone Bridge over the Sea to Lanka – representing creative endeavour”

“We need to have a scene of frantic activity with a bridge of stone receding into the horizon over the sea, monkeys clambering about helping in the construction, and so on. Rama, Laxmana and Hanuman can be shown supervising the operation. This is not very popular as a scene in art, so we have only this vague reference to offer. Please feel free to use your imagination.

“The scene of Sagara the ocean offering to help Rama may also be used as a reference. The Single wand could be a fiery flaming arrow that Rama holds and threatens to release into the ocean to dry it up, so that the building of the bridge is not hampered. Perhaps it would be best to combine Sagara before Rama and bridge-building as one composite scene. The bow held in Rama’s hand in the sculpture panel does look remarkably like a wand anyway!”

Jane’s Notes – An observation: The immense labour in building up a causeway of stones in the sea, to access the higher dharma dimension. This is our human way, committed to our real relationships as well to sadhana and all creative endeavours – the sweat of our brow, the fruit of our lives. Interestingly when Rama returns with Sita, they are borne effortlessly by the dimension attained through Ravana’s defeat ! (See 8 of Staves, pictured above.)

The initial work itself reminds me of this painting:

Rubicon 63 – Building a Jetty 1986: the beginning of the process, with all its friends and backers and a salutary shipwreck nearby. This was about relationships, the ache and hunger of the soul for connection. The island the jetty is being built from looks like a mushroom cloud, but was based on the Alet headland near St Malo in Brittany.

Rohit’s Notes – from the Book with the Deck
“The impossible is suddenly prosaic reality: a bridge has been built upon the ocean. The demon king Ravana was secure in his island fortress of Lanka – the city of gold bounded by the impassable sea. Ravana who has kept the kidnapped Sita wife of Rama prisoner in Lanka, is shockingly confronted with the unbelievable news and unthinkable consequences.

“… The Ace of Staves sears away the illusions and delusions dear to the heart; it forces a creative and ultimately more integral response to the challenge of life. If one persists in the old ways, the consequences are swift and harsh as one of Rama’s weapons. This colossal feat was accomplished with the help of his great brother Laxmana and his simian-like Vanara allies – magical creatures of equal, if not greater accomplishment than humans … Such unorthodox brilliance in the swift use of resources, the sheer chutzpah of conception and execution, is typical of the Staves energy… The Staves are only apparently disruptive, and integrate the churned situation at a higher level of consciousness.

“In a reading: Situations unfold at bewildering speed. Vision and visionaries: energy, fiery and swift; resiliance and enduring courage, stimulating thinkers. Shadow: low creative energy, or misapplication – frustration and delays, over-commitment at all levels, sexual imbroglios. There is no need to take on the world. Are you running away with yourself and your enthusiasm? Conversely, what is the strangest, weirdest thing you could do to get this done?“

Here is the finished card:

Sacred India Tarot – the Ace of Staves

Correspondence – Rohit to Jane
“Ace of Wands – There is nothing significant I would like to change in this card as it has a very unusual other worldly element to it. Supernatural events are manifestly taking place as we look. The monkey in the picture can be safely regarded as Sugriva or any one of the innumerable simian hordes who supported Rama. When portraying Hanuman he should be white in colour as he was an albino monkey, very handsome and muscular with warrior’s helm and holding a mace or even hammer. (See Sacred India Tarot, Knight of Arrows in this series.) The hammer might be a strange choice but I have actually seen pictures of him holding one, and it would be a refreshing change to the normal depiction of Hanuman.

“A very small point that did not occur to me until I saw it. Rama is shown with Vaishantha forehead markings, in acknowledgement of his being an avatar Vishnu, but he was personally a devotee of Siva, having in fact just established the famous Rameshwaram Siva temple by the Ocean before the events of this card. It would make a good point about tolerance and the peculiar Hindu genius to meld and assimilate, if Rama was shown with Shaiva markings on the forehead. I never thought about this point as I did not anticipate any such depiction, but now that it has emerged, it will significantly deepen the spiritual and cultural aspects of the suit. In all other respects, the card is perfect.”

Unfortunately I do not seem to have taken this on board for the finished card; all the better to mention the detail here.

For other Sacred India Tarot posts, look under Recent Posts, Search,
or Archive of All Posts in the title bar.

Rohit Arya
Rohit Arya is an Author, Yogi and Polymath. He has written the first book on Vaastu to be published in the West, {translated into five languages} the first book on tarot to be published in India, co-authored a book on fire sacrifice, and is the creator of The Sacred India Tarot {82 card deck and book}. He has also written A Gathering of Gods. He is a corporate trainer, a mythologist and vibrant speaker as well as an arts critic and cultural commentator. Rohit is also a Lineage Master in the Eight Spiritual Breaths system of Yoga.
Earlier posts about the deck, including the first 15 Major Arcana archives are in http://aryayogi.wordpress.com The deck is copyrighted (c) 2011 to the publishers, Yogi Impressions Books pvt, and available also on Amazon and internationally.

Jane Adams
My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.
This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books).

All original art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012 – 2014. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/

Tales of the Watershed – Chinese Torch Prints

Posted on August 6, 2014 by janeadamsart

fish by Steven Szegedy Szuts

Dreams No.89 May 1975

IF YOU were Chinese …

If who was Chinese? Me, you or history?

The dream is a scribe of “his” story. The dream tells me with some authority, that if I was Chinese and wise like a mandarin, I would know very well that I make my own bed to sleep on. The floor on which I lie for the night to imprint “his” story in my fibre, should be roughened. Otherwise it will have no “key”. My pillow would then slip, and no message come to my hearing.

This seems to be an ancient Oriental tradition. As you make your bed, so you live. A page too smooth cannot take the ink from heaven and the underworld. The fibre holds the script. The rationale for this insight comes to me with all the force of Chinese respect for ancestry, and with the revelation of a brush scribing pictures.

So far so good.

Am I a printing press? And from which civilisation did Renaissance Europe take the idea?

They say to me in this dream, roughen a plank on the wooden floor with a flaming torch to char the grain. Lay paper on the burnt patch, and your pillow on the paper. And lo! when you raise your head from sleep the paper will be printed with the mark of your life.

This principle seems unfathomably relevant to living, creating and suffering. A wisdom within it glows – something to do with fire which heats, burns out old wood and hollows a primitive boat for voyaging. In the spirit of fire are interwoven myriad patterns of incarnation. I gaze into the embers of flame, red, yellow, blue, violet, sometimes even lucid green. In fragile castles of carbon, whole histories fall to ash. A dreamer is a traveller on the spot with his or her ear to the ground.

Certain prints of life are stroked out into the crinkle of slow flame; they glow. It is breaking my heart! how some people can play with fire and create these without having to make beds to lie in, or go to sleep at all. These people – like my sister – have wonderful ideas. They conjure filigree landscape from random traceries of the wood’s charred grain, to the delight of all who behold.

B gave me some sheets of thick paper to experiment with. And look, my sister and her friend Jemima at school are here in the room with me; in their play, they made five or six colour pictures by holding the burning torch to the thick paper. The sharp, incisive lines of their pictures have the glory of a Byzantine woodcut. The flame crinkled or split lines or curves along the papery grain, along which they drew. I held those pictures in my hands. I gazed at them envious, and humble, before such mastery. B said my sister was an ordinary girl – so I never saw the power and clarity of her imagination, till now. How does she do it? Won’t she show me? Then I could make a card like this, for his birthday next week. I want him to value something from me, some taste and texture to delight in, like new brown bread, or an earthen pot with lapis lazuli glaze. Then he couldn’t possibly tell me I’m a “spiritual desert”.

Himalaya - satellite photo from earth book

my grandmother

Jung in the Underworld – from the Red Book

Helen’s brother Robin

I was in his room later. He went to get loo-paper for me to blow my nose. We agreed to see each other less often for a while. At least, our dialogue is not a wound. Can we shake out the feathers, allow our own colours to grow, be less mutually invaded when we meet? Hope broke shyly through into space. The mood changed, and became sensitive to one another. It could smile and laugh with our trouble.

I showed him three of those prints my clever sister made – the tension of her inner eye and the delicacy of her touch. “Look!” I said. “My sister made those. What an artist she is.” Here’s a black and white one of a labyrinth, an immense industrial landscape somewhere in the North Country. To the left, a group of business magnates in top-hats and frock-coats, barter nineteenth-century expansion. They haven’t refined the technology yet. Smoke billows from chimneys, stove-pipes and flues, and to the right a black city opens to the foot, an intricate tangle of streets and sooty towers – a pool of life that is still a furnace.

So she too knew Liverpool! And here’s a green one, the deft caricature of an earthy old man bent like a gnome. The third one shows a field of long summer grass deep enough to wade in, rich with clover and wild garlic, active with the multi-level hierarchy of small creatures. All her Tragic Stories are here, to walk with – the stories she tells to herself with chewed stems of grass for girls’ hair and bits of bent wire for boys’ legs. She is a sturdy, short-sighted child. She mumbles her song through field and farmyard, utterly absorbed in the drama at play in her hands. I follow sometimes, and listen.

I am burning to do it too. I want to release that vision heat-held in wood and paper. I thirst for the water of life, that slow dew of remembering …

What is really happening is that a baby is sitting here in this room with the burnt patch on the floor, a baby with dark eyes. And the drawing that he, she, I, am doing so carefully along the advice of the ageless sages collapsed, and broke into a wild infant scrawl.

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

aquariel link

A Picture-Book – Pierrot and the White Wolf

Posted on August 1, 2014 by janeadamsart

Pierrot in the fields

This story for our children, and for the world’s ageless children in ourselves, was written in French by Catherine Harding during the 1990s; she asked me to illustrate it. In due course it was published privately in France, with a few of my illustrations, as “Les Explorateurs du Vrai Monde” – Explorers of the Real World. Here is the complete set of drawings and paintings I did for Catherine, plus a few extras at the end.

Pierrot’s story is a celebration of the late Douglas Harding’s life and work. Douglas was born in Lowestoft, and trained as an architect. After he discovered his real Home, he travelled all over the world for sixty years to share it. His unique series of experiments tap our resources of infinity, and demonstrate the treasure lying at the heart of the great traditional faiths. The experiments can be done at any time and place, right now.

Douglas and Catherine met and married in about 1991; their loving and down-to-earth teamwork – built open for each other – enchanted all who attended their workshops. Douglas passed away in 2007, age 98.

Douglas & Catherine Harding at Sholland, Nacton

For more information about Catherine and the Headless Way, contact The Sholland Trust, 87B Cazenove Road, London NW16 6BB, or visit www.headless.org. Douglas’s many books include On Having No Head, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, The Trial of the Man who said he was God, Look for Yourself, The Spectre in the Lake, To Be And Not to Be, Head off Stress, and The Little Book of Life and Death.

Douglas’s 90th Birthday

Now, here are the pictures which tell the story. To view, click on any image.

Chapters One and Two – A White Wolf Arrives in the Village

But you are too small, Pierrot, to have all that inside you!

You can’t see how big it is in me, in here!

Sometimes Pierrot’s dad didn’t allow him to go out, because people laughed at him.

When he was made to stay indoors, he was very sad

Nobody saw her come down the main road to the square, and drink great gulps of water from the fountain, before lying down to sleep in the shade of a plane tree.

Wolf!

Noemie – I have your face

The village began to breathe again.

Thomas punched Pierrot – “I’ll show you you’ve got a head like everyone else!”

Chapters Three, Four, Five, Six – Experiments in Seeing

Visitors! The other kids wouldn’t talk to him before. They wanted to know his secret with the wolf.

“Don’t all speak at once – let me finish my chocolat”

They went out into the fields

“What do you really see, here?”

“On your shoulders there’s nothing at all? But I bet that black eye hurt …”

Joseph, Pierrot’s Dad

“It’s sailing through me!”

That little person In the mirror is really small, but in the centre of yourself you stretch to infinity

Arctic wolf

Sharing

Hold them and see – what’s between your ears?

Pierrot showed them all his secrets

Chapter Seven – Sharing the Seeing

Whooee! the town hall’s coming towards me at top speed! (Douglas is on the left, with wine glass, and Catherine on the right, with bagettes)

The White Wolf sat up suddenly and began to wag her tail

And that night it was the Milky Way, the Great Bear, the Plough and Cassiopeia between the childrens’ ears that opened the doors of the Real World for them.

Your secret is too beautiful, Pierrot, we must share it.

Monsieur Marcellin’s gun, his fear and his blustering

Chapters Eight-Thirteen – The Attack

Look for Yourself

Silently, Noemie took his hand …

It’s a miracle, Pierrot!

The Sun

Thomas’s Dad Marcellin

Chapters Fourteen-Seventeen – A French Village Awakens

“…But the One that’s looking at old Josephine …”

The Tube – or paper bag experiment

I’m sorry for punching you, Pierrot!

If we look carefully, this immense heart is full of Light. And this Light makes us want to love

Every child all over the world

The village resumed its normal provencal way of life.

Douglas plays Boules in the square

The back door had probably been left open. In any case, she disappeared and neither Pierrot nor anyone else ever saw her again.

Artists’ Epilogue

Putting on my face. In the little mirror I am a tiny solid thing. When I put on and wear space I am …?

It is time for the artist to ask herself some questions. As I draw my self-portrait, what do I see? What enters my extended hand and heart? What fills the un-named movement along my arm, what welcoming focus – shape to space? What ancient world, before historians wrote a word?

Who draws through me? the taut flow through finger and thumb to a dancer’s point ? What smile in space for lines of life to happen? What urgency gives birth? And the tight hours – as often as not – groping towards the magic “touch” with tippex, eraser, and elimination?

How many faces do I see? Do I have one here? Or is it yours? Plainly, my daily life and relationships require the same careful attention to precisely what is there. Not what I’m told, or think I should believe: but receiving the curve – “I am you are. Thou art I am.” Keep practicing. Look, I am built open. I may trade faces with Pierrot’s white wolf, or with my foot on the floor, a still-life on the window sill, a sketch-pad on the kitchen table, the sense of dotting an I. I may trade faces with you or with the sky whose clouds keep changing curtains. Where I look in the room, looks back, and I, un-named and changelessly, change all the time. Look, if I cross my eyes a bit, there’s a nasal blur and spectacle frames – as I thought. But when I put them on … The One Eye has these details like a mountain spring.

As I put life’s tunnel on my nose, who comes to meet me but my Friend?

and now a surprise Present to unwrap at the End of …

“Wait,” said Douglas (on our first meeting in Nacton), “How many faces in this bag? Scientifically – how many faces do you see?”

I looked for some time silently. The sides of the paper bag removed Douglas’s face from the context of everyday resistances. Bit by bit I freed myself to gaze and to receive the information as if I never saw such a thing before. It was rather warm in the paper tube, and from time to time we had to come out like divers, for air. At first the intimacy made me feel selfconscious. Presently as I overrode my small fret, I found myself contemplating with compassion, a living landscape. I received the searchlight of that sensitive terrain into my emptiness. I saw how the pupils and lids of the eyes narrowed or dilated, as they roved and scanned mountains and valleys. They examined features in detail – eyes, nose, the lines in forehead, the contour of the cheek, the growth of hair, the twitch and lilt of expression. I saw the baby unborn and everlasting, the bed of the river, the vulnerable soul in those dark eyes which, like wells, never age or end; the youthful profundity of that searching glance.

I received and beheld an inescapable mysterium, a humanity.

“Just the one face,” I replied.

“Yes,” rumbled Douglas, “You’re starting to see the point.”