Inner Journey, finding Botticelli

Posted on May 30, 2013 by janeadamsart

Mercury, after Botticelli, 2009

This journal entry has been “pending” as a post, for half a year! It is as relevant now to my discoveries, as then. It inspired me later, to blog some of my Watershed Tales – including The Lens.

Link to Aquariel: When Reflecting on the Lovers

21 October 2012 – now we are in Scorpios … I recollected this morning, that my daily Invocation combines Dion Fortune’s “master contact” gesture, with Halevi’s Tree: “Let us gather together, draw together.”

Hand Mudras or Gestures on the Tor - the Shepherd, those who sailed west to east, and theBuilders,

Three Hand Mudras or Gestures on Glastonbury Tor/Avalon – the Shepherd, Those who Sailed West to East, and theBuilders.

Saluting the Tree, I stretched, and when you stretch you hold up all your weight with ease. And stretching is the capacity of the inner and the occult life, because stretching grows. I am moved too. Everything in nature stretches – plant growth and penile arousal. To stretch upholds itself, and widens, and the key to “stretch” is desire.

Feeling physically heavy is perhaps due to the lightening of the body weight during moments of inspiration and lift-off. One of Dion Fortune’s teachers lost two-thirds of his body weight while meditating – she could pick him up with ease.

The resumption of materiality is felt more, after an illumined inner journey or creative process. That must be why some trance mediums – particularly those in the dark circle – get burly and coarse. They pile on weight to offset the astral networking.

Tree of Life in Queen Scale colours. These are the Beriatic colours for the Sefiroth - their vibration in the World of Creation

Tree of Life in Queen Scale colours (Sketch). These are the Beriatic colours for the Sefiroth – their vibration in the World of Creation: Kether white, Hokhmah grey/silver, Binah black or indigo, Hesed blue, Gevurah red, Tifareth yellow/gold, Netzach green, Yesod violet, and Malkuth combines citrine, olive, russet, slate.

Dion Fortune “in-vented” the Fountain Breath. It was designed to assist the early twentieth century problem of purity – how to pass up through the sexual-energy reservoir without flooding the engine, and do good work with it. Her generation’s natural sex drive was expressed in society, in stifled, cramped and addictive ways. Due in part, to the work of this great teacher and others on the astral plane between the Wars, there is a small amount of liberation in our sexual mores. We are able to be more honest with each other in our relationships: gender timelines are not rigid: parents share the active care of their young. Of course, media attitudes and the Karmic heritage of centuries of subconscious abuse have not kept pace with this.

We have to look within our situation and take a great interest in it, to see what is true, and to manifest our Life force in an evolutionary way.

Fountain tree of Life – Queen Scale colours, but the Sefiroth are turned around. Normally we view the Tree facing the same direction with Adam Qadmon’s back to us, with the same left and right sides as ours. Here the aspirant and the Tree are turned to face each other objectively. They embrace. As if in a mirror, the Tree’s Yang right pillar – Hokhmah Hesed Netzach – is reflected in the aspirant’s Yin left side – Binah Gevurah Hod. Some Kabbalists and occultists do practical work in this manner.

About ten years ago, I learned a fountain breath method, up through the “Tower of Alchemy”, the tree and the body of light. So the tower is in my inner eye, right now, by ventilation – it “vents” the Kundalini shakti, in a way which blesses the surrounding landscape with Her Light. The tower is phallic, pumping up the dragon seed.

The Tree of Life/Tower of Alchemy as a flowering Staff, showing the Malkuth cavern with almond flower, Yesod with almond nut, Tifareth as the Rose Cross and Daat as pineal sight - the pine cone at the other end of the Yesod staff.

The Tree of Life/Tower of Alchemy as a flowering Staff (2002), showing the Malkuth cavern with almond flower, Yesod with almond nut, Tifareth as the Rose Cross and Daat as pineal sight – the pine cone at the other end of a Yesod “almond” staff. Yesod is the personal consciousness; Daat the transpersonal link, or Union. Through the interlocked Four World-trees on Jacobs Ladder, Yesod and Daat overlap. See other posts on Jacobs Ladder and Kabbalah. NB – This painting and the inner journey with it, was inspired by David Goddard’s book THE TOWER OF ALCHEMY.

In the root cavern underground – Malkuth – is an almond flower. Beneath the almond flower carved in rock, is a rough ashlar cube: the altar of our life. Through it pulses a fiery fountain, dark and light – a circuit of perpetual cycles: J H V H. In the curved rock walls, are doors – entrances: the Tarot Keys for the Judgement, the World and the Moon converge here. There is also a portal to the planetary Kundalini where we are not supposed to go. It seems to descend a stair, as in my dream of The Witch. (House of Hundreds of Rooms). I went a little way down that stair, and heard the builders’ tools deep down within the basement or outside the House of all Souls.

GALLERY 1

These three Tarot Keys represent the three paths of the Tree which converge to Malkuth, the Earth.

The paths from Malkuth – SHIN, TAV, QOF. In Malkuth are shown the four elements.

At the door by which I entered – down the spine, ida pingala spiral stair – is an earthen jar in which is distilled and grows the Wine of Life. The Wine of Merit is life. It is also a signature of vitality. So attention to it may help mine.

With regard to journeying – my third eye focuses, like a little button put here. Third eye and the fountain breath are what is needed to travel accurately, and go places.

So I’m walking along the centre opening passage, it is of rock, a round curved tunnel, but illumined. My plan from Malkuth is to visit Yesod, where the tunnel opens to a circular “room”. On the Beriatic Queen Scale, Yesod is coloured violet, a wonderful crystal living flower. But first I am in the central tap root rising to Yesod; it is the World dancer’s path coloured indigo : TAV the Sign, GVPh the body as our living temple – and Gravity: a rich indigo upwelling darkness.

Key 21, ruling this path, is called “the Administrative Intelligence“. It contains and regulates the subliminal knowledge of our cellular and Karmic organization, and of the Tree of Life as a whole. Kether is planted deep in the ground!

GALLERY 2

Note a triad pattern – three figures in the cards to each side of The World. They form the letters L.V.X. – Light.

Perhaps when I overheat and the dark is red like brick, it may help to inwardly transform it to blue-violet indigo, to cool down and soften. At once I feel the breeze, like the sea.

Do I meet anyone along here? Some peoples’ meditations teem with inner plane beings and elementals, which I don’t “see”. Perhaps I feel their companionship in the space. I imagine the hoards of workers in the Ministry of Magic entrance hall under the streets, as in the Harry Potter books.

There is a press of workers and of city dwellers in the Passage of Administration, to and fro. I don’t see them, because that is not the trick or birth/Ascendant type of my mind. But I perceive that this path is a vast station of departures and arrivals – rather like Lime Street where I sat with the Yellow Man. He was a classic appearance of the inner Teacher or guardian angel. In that brief encounter in my dream, he nourished and informed my entire life … thank you ! “Ireland was his home.” His impact would lead to leprechauns and Dancers of Pan in my language … see how I am led around to the World Dancer again – for she is truly a dancer of Pan. The trail again is warmed, even heated, as kundalini rises through my ebbed physical strength. Turn Her from redbrown to deep velvet indigo cool. Contain her in the Night of cold waters, silver Isis reflecting stars.

The heat passed, as I realise I have a trained and focused mind in fact; for I do not wander off into irrelevant spooks and glamours. The abstract living essences are what I love and dwell among. Always they return me to the visual Rhyme: the play of the Archetypes. Watch and feel; relax; be greeted. Greetings, my Holy ones. They dance slowly round the Muse like Botticelli’s angels. Primavera. I stop here this morning, with Her.

Botticelli’s Primavera – Detail

She, so much gazed upon by millions of art lovers down the centuries since he painted her, is fully fledged, a living Goddess: the Archetypal Mother of All. Botticelli.

Who am I? his apprentice or himself? Now I see the ironic expression of his self portrait in one of his works. It does not matter.

I take his hand and we walk into Yesod, the Foundation of the Tree.

spring violet – photo credit http://www.ofwoodsandwords.com

The violet crystal flowers, all around. We are inside a little spring violet, and in it there is a stone font with a fountain almond mist: a shining in the air. Now Yesod is where I meet my mental-plane Lover, and here I am with Botticelli. Here we are by the dark maternal enigma of giant Isis. So do what is natural. Get into the font, and twine my arms and legs around him Yab Yum and start to breathe together the Y H V H around. We fuse the painterly craft, the renaissance genius, the beauty and purity of the Line. Be still and know I am God. Botticelli got scooped by Savonarola, but I won’t. Ever.

Sandro Botticelli, I am free from persecution, so now I am your Primavera and your Aphrodite. You are ebony lingum in my curvy clouds. A small fiery triangle glows with orange light and flame. We are an Indigo oval stone with scarlet triangle : Akasha tejas, the inner Key to Gold: refinement of the Saturn and Mars centres, and their blend. Isn’t it remarkable how we changed roles, the gender free exchange, when conducted in Beriah.

Akasha Tejas tattva

The essence of the akasha tejas nuptial is the pure white brilliance.

Be still, be still and know I am God. Kether is the deep of things. Kether is everywhere and all pervading, even the enormous floating masses of forgetting. I don’t “see” my lover: I find the sparkling point, the inward lead.

It is a subconscious induction or programming. The inward spark is fresh as a field of hay. It finds and pleasures every crevice. Delta of Venus! Now I am this bud. The green-red drawing is part of a series I drew in 1988, just before I began to study Kabbalah – the story of a Fool and the Lamb he liberated. The Tree spirit in the cell has “black” tributaries like roots or branches and little space pads between them, like foetal fingers. Encircling it concentrically under the epidermis are the notes – F,D,C,A,F – of the Fool’s Chord which he played on his flute. In it is a diamond, the drop of dew on the Rose.

Tree spirit

It is the bliss before bothering about sexual arousal. Before sexual arousal – for I picture the ebony linga teasing and fondling the dew – there is a moment 99.9% ignored, of peace and plenty, stillness and the unknown. Perhaps this is what Ida Craddock was teaching. The ruach is unhurried, deep, gentle and cool.

I suffer from insomina, even when my mind is quiet. To go to sleep at night means: to the right department. Sleep in the body is given when I am free to lay her aside and travel to the right place in the subtle Kingdom of the world.

Somewhere along the line, this facility got tangled up. It works fine when I am writing in the morning, but not when I need to sleep at night. Sleep isn’t only for rest. Sleep for someone like me, is a medium within which to do good work. Not “good works”! – good interior work. In ancient Egypt, the deep sleep of initiates releases their Ba or Ka or Light-body.

Impression that when I am properly asleep and not hooked up to anything, my “Egyptian” consciousness awakes and can travel to wherever some assistance is needed – perhaps to cross the river. I have rather a clear picture now of the Egyptian, and how she works with Thoth and Horus. It is a feeling, rather than a picture. The Egyptian or Atlantean consciousness resides in Beriah. She pervades everything and all the centuries on Earth creatively, a perfume.

Black hair, brown skin, white something. I am sure she is the sunburnt black haired Older Sister princess who comes to sit among the flowers and skipping children in my Cornish garden, age six. Her long head and buck teeth. My new teeth of course, were growing.

Queens with jewels in a garden – 1956

Children and elder sister in Cornish alps, 1956

An unconditional happiness plays near the Cornish Pyramids of white china clay in the 1950s.

In those Egypt days, our gardens were written in formal hieroglyphs, for the student to en-picture and cultivate and make his or her own. Jonquils, jewels, wildflowers: the letters for speech and learning to read.

I have a taste of that wonderful elder society now, its salt sand perfume, and its cool clear vision, long before it got muddied by the priests of power.

In subsequent lifetimes, I became one of these muddy priests also: for everything we en-picture with the trained psyche, we some day embody. It is Nature’s requirement to be fully expressed.

Practicing a Mantra – 1987

The trained psyche comes into flower and operation only at a certain level of the focus. That is her field of protection. She is sealed from the clutter and persuasions that float around and bombard the everyday life. I have an agreement with her: the faculty only works when consciously in the World of Beriah with her.

I seem to have slept enough last night, to liberate this depth.

Copy – Botticelli Madonna & two brats – circa 2007

GALLERY 3

Here is a sketch of Elisabeth Tomalin – I just thought of her…. and of her grandson Tom Hetherwick. I found and cut out that photo of him in the paper. I was struck by an essence of his Granny – her lineage – I see her eyes through his, and smile. She was by nature a guardian and Guide of Souls. She was the only person in the world who knew and kept the secret of the Olympic Cauldron – Tom’s Torch of Time. He shared it with her, while she waited in her bed to die, last spring. She was 99. It was an intense frustration to her when she couldn’t dream, and remained locked in life’s tiny, distressed and despised body. I am sure she is now at large, bigtime. While tidying up my emails I found the eulogies they read at her funeral. All of them agree with love, what a hard trial their Grandmother was.

Meanwhile the diamond grew bright, like rose quartz. It is linked to the Rose in the dark, in the inner rose cross sanctuary.

Savitri 1990

Links join parallel universi through wormholes, just as they do online, and even within one blog . The link is the mode of the interior Consciousness. This is what is meant by Hebrew letter VAV, the nail or hook. It pins time to timeless, thought to transfiguration, his to herstory, things and different periods together. Spheres roam, enter each other and form vesicas in which life is born and broods and dreams.

I picture the inter-dependent souls and fishes, in my walk in the dark.

So !

Resume our place in the font of Isis, Botticelli and I, and greet farewell. Go well, till we meet again. Be loved.

GALLERY 4

Aphrodite’s tresses – an early drawing, circa 1956

I drew this, by turning the photo of his self portrait upside down, and drawing it thus. Then turned it right way up to finish it. The drawing is more honest this way. I get glimpses of a Renaissance Florentine youth.

This is done in the normal way, with great difficulty. Yet it feels like drawing myself. An artist’s intuitive ideal is often based on his or her own features and hands.

Venus after Botticelli 1956

Many attempts yesterday, to draw her. Sometimes I see an Italian girl of that period – who came and sat for him.

Then I went to an astrology class, so this was done from memory while there …

… and so was this. She has rather a modern look about her, but I quite like it as a drawing. Perhaps the secret of Botticelli’s Primavera is his beautiful distortion. Her right eye in his painting, is much lower than her left than anatomically possible. It gives that mystery to her expression.

Another early one – the Centaur with Athene and my childhood hero – Perseus

… and Perseus flying, on Hermes’ winged sandals, near the 3 Grey Sisters. They had but one eye between them, and passed if from hand to hand.

I started this morning, with this one. Nowhere near her yet!

More early angels, dancing around the nativity, I think.

I wonder if B tried again and again to realise his goddess, or was it just one flowing miracle from his hand and eye?

Perseus slays the Gorgon whose eyes turned men to stone

Getting nearer, at last! As I did at the beginning with Botticelli’s self portrait, I turned her picture upside down. It’s the only way to really see, and try to draw consciously.

Enough for now. Actually it isn’t necessary to try to make her look like Primavera – only to use the model as a starting point, and see what happens.

This is more like Botticelli’s later style, perhaps.

And this again, from the earlier time, when I drew without conditioning or fear.

I wonder, his wonderful line, did he draw it just like that, or did it refine through painter’s trial and error and rubbing out, like mine? In not one of these sketches did I dare to place the Primavera’s right eye where he did. It makes all the difference and depth to her expression.

Keeping the whole pattern clear for next time, withdraw back to Malkuth, the almond flower in the cave’s ceiling and … how did I enter that? Ah – it was the talk of Dion Fortune and the Fountain breath, and how it irrigates the surrounding countryside.

The dragon rises and falls peacefully, after all my practice back in 2002. The dragon has a core of fiery whiteness, little puffs of the Brilliance. The universe is composed of Brilliance; why else do the stars shine?

I can visit where I like in the Tower, in a trice. Strange how seldom I come here!

This morning/during the night, I started to form a talisman: Calm, Confidence, Competence. Say those words as often as I can. A picture came with them – a big dew drop, with a tiny one the other way round, inside. It is like the Soul Tetrahedrons. But now I understand what it really means – it is the akasha in the tejas, scarletindigo, the Aries in Capricorn. A little oval Stone of the Wise, in various expressions of density, is realised.

So keep a hold of it at base. When cradling a lover’s fine warm shape, remember this. For all things, to store my energy and help me to sleep at night, say Confidence, Calm, Competence and see the dew inside the dew. It is a Mantrayantra. She’ll get the message soon.

My heart centre is a clover. She sparkles vividly white, scarlet and black. These are the gunas. They are also Rosebud’s Queen mother, who pricked her finger in the winter snow near the ebony wood, and wished for a beautiful child.

GALLERY 5

I lost my curiosity in other peoples’ versions, because my own, steaming along in the subconscious, provides ALL. When I open the trapdoor/manhole cover, and look … there it is, flowing from springs of ageless Wisdom … thanks to the training ground and challenges of this present life time: thanks to the teachers and terrain of other life times back o’beyond, and to those to come. ADONAI.

GALLERY 6

Flora, 1956

Winter, after Botticelli, circa 2005

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. 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/

Elisabeth

Posted on October 8, 2012 by janeadamsart

dandelionseed, by nextbigfuture.com

Water and sand: Elisabeth Tomalin, 4 November 1912 – 8 March 2012: her pioneering therapies.

http://www.thecnj.com/review/2009/102909/feature102909_01.html

What are you up to now, Elisabeth? Do you enjoy my sand castles? Oh yes, we heard you in the kitchen, that day in July, as tough and dainty as a tiny turning leaf, and clapping with one hand – the Olympics, and Tom Heatherwick’s torch of Time.

I meant to sketch you, ever since you died. Now we are in Scorpio, with Saturn and Mercury across the threshold; a very good time to find and be with you. I feel your creative presence, your voice now hale, whole and free from the dragging pain of age and failing skin and nerve-ends: you give me elemental colours – clear peat-brown water, wet rocks and emerald bogmoss – for the Yin winter, the seed descending deep under the frost.

I sat straight down, got out the photo, and drew Elisabeth first from upside down …

then with my left hand …

… then with the right …

… and then as a portrait. This took a while.

I felt her strongly. At moments, it was my Self portrait looking out, and back at me. She would have loved me to draw her when she was alive. When she was dying in the care home, I was not kind, I didn’t visit her regularly. I resented the long bus route and felt dead tired. Her physical and emotional agony, bedridden and “useless” at nearly 100 years old, was heavy going. Her busy mind craved words, oracles and philosophy; she was deaf. She longed interminably to die, and it kept her waiting. Companionship could be silence, which she did not want.

I am tired of my “good-likeness” portraits. How to draw an honest line? Doing it upside down, or with my left, I have no choice but to really look, and not assume that I know better.

Then, like playing something on the piano, remember to loosen and let my arm as a whole move the charcoal, from the spine; not just the habitual hand. My hand with the whole arm movement, is sensitive, more humble. Be conscious how the human is: stop, wait, follow. Be delicate; watchful; bold. Keep looking. Hear her.

There comes a magical power of connection – the living human contour of my friend. I see and feel her lifetimes, the young Princess Soaja, the sharp and ageless pilgrim, her bandy legs, Scorpio birth, a Jewish woman of history, the art therapist giving me, right now, an intense sand-and-water session on my dreams.

I see her in her white wicker basket with her sharp nose in the air and all the lines in her face erased: the utter stillness and relief. She got there at last.

Then summer came. Look at her managing the Olympic Games with glee through her “phenomenally gifted” grandson. Remove all frames of time – ignite the essence!

When Thomas visited his grandmother he sometimes brought his latest architectural plans to show her. She made suggestions. She lay in her sore bed the weary hours, visualising and pondering the buildings and designs. Granny Soaja needed to control things, and she was very difficult. Yet she submitted to some of her frustrations with a gentle dignity.

Who knows what dandelion seeds caught hold? Tom’s Olympic cauldron is a child of his Shanghai Seed Cathedral. In the nation-wide convergence and goodwill of the beacon bearers, real people came forward with the flame, the seed of light; the cult of celebrity began to die.

Elisabeth is active beyond her body. Her irrepressible child dances through the astral plane “across our time”. She had a passion for the creative lineage through her family, and its survival. The tugging worry of all that, is now away under the bridge. She loves her people, her strong daughter Stefany, and her family, and to tell them what to do.

Honesty to the life line is a soft and crumbling charcoal tip … slowly along acceptance. To watch the breath as the Buddhists say, is like drawing someone. Watch it in that way; like plain water beginning to taste nice.

To so-called watch the breath as a meditation felt meaningless. I didn’t know how. The attention jumped off, like a needle from a dusty record. But the drawing lesson with Elisabeth showed the way for me. It comes alive, and is not by the book.

Coda

This my poem
a seeding dandelion clock 
is a globe upon a stalk 

and every where 
I blow, the once 
upon a time it tells.

photo by daviddarling.info

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 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) – along with many other creations in house.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

The Anchor and Hope: Olympiad & Hackney Marsh

Posted on September 11, 2012 by janeadamsart

Islington tunnel: from Mark Wordy’s photo stream

I’ve been reading Patipada’s book of herself and Osho – Forever is not long enough – and am about to begin the other Osho book I have, it is called A Failed Guru. But did he fail? The Osho phenomenon is psychologically rich and fascinating – he, a charismatic wisdom scholar, let a huge car he was driving, go out of control … for the worst to happen, and for their sadhana to grow. I like the Osho people, the survivors, the characters, the workers. O vanished, dissolved, crashed into his devotees, they are the thriving “debris”; this is a teaching in itself. I met Patipada in Sedona; we liked each other (she liked everyone).

The BLISS some neo advaitins have, feels flimsy. It doesn’t have a strong undercarriage, and it is vulnerable to inflation. I don’t agree with the anti-ego objective. We need to know our shape’s subconscious pressure, before we can let it go; otherwise it knows us too … too well! Those who subscribe to “no ego” get carried away into strange stuff like sitting ducks. It is according to temperament and need, but also lovey dovey, and – you know? The cult of personality gets in through the back door – all the wonderful gurus and each other. I’ve been in it, and it isn’t my cup of tea. I know it brings authentic and wonderful interior experiences of no thing-ness. It is one way … at heart it is Sadhana. Like any other way, when focused, it bends the Universe’s antennae towards it helpfully.

from world’s worst camera phone.blogspot

Yesterday – inspired by finding my sketch of the Mrs B’s cycling along the canal – I got out my bike, pumped up the tyres, and rode to the Olympic park along the easterly canal tow-path from Camden Town. The canal is London’s secret life, it curves through the grid. It was wonderful! The Olympic park is just the other side of Victoria Park, where I lay down on the grass for a rest, very wobbly knees – I haven’t ridden anywhere for at least a year. The Buck House athletes-procession-Flypast formation flew over, on its way – a big noise, an arrow head.

I got to the Lea River and saw the big white stadium and “D’s favourite building” – (the red corkscrew thing, he hates it) – all behind massive barricades and security cameras – the park is wrapped in razor wire, and many old lanes and footways are blocked. You can’t get in without a pass, for God knows how long. It is strangely like a war – and yet it was an international release and warmth; I went to soak up the vibes – the thunder and joy of the mass still echoes. I rode along back stage: behind the giant viewing screens, and behind the endless ugly admin boxes. The canal/river snakes along beside it all, with its ineffable old east London character. The outlook for the residents is a metal barricade – in place of construction site, diggers and waste land. It takes time.

I haven’t been there for fifteen years or so; it is all smartened up and getting affluent. I saw some of the famous wild flowers behind the wire, banked along an access road. Actually they look strange and not English at all – which of course they aren’t. They are from the world over, the seeds massed, frozen, migrated and assembled all-together-now. Their brilliant green foliage glows artificially here. I wonder what these flowers will do next year – whether they find suitable nitrate fibres to make their home, or whether like the countries, they visit and depart. The symbol vibrates. The whole thing is rich to explore inwardly. I was on the main ring road enclosing the O park – the O park is just a tangle of weird white architecture, steel and wire, with its back to you.

I thought of the people on the long russet paths inside, all summer: a friendship carnival. The UK’s Libra ascendent was exactly aligned astrologically to the July grand cross. In summation – for there are so many interior themes – the tension erupted a festival, to which the whole world was invited.

I already rode through a dense wood while route finding: I took off from there along the Lea River proper, over the huge Hackney Marshes. The river winds through tall plane and oak trees and many feathery young plantations. The spaces filled with sky are huge and blowy, and there are playing fields. This part is all old and the O park will gradually soften into it. I got out my phone to see the time, and thought of D: on cue he pinged a text “just to say i love you x.” So I told him where I was. Fantastic! he said. Riding a mile further north in the woody breeze – big silver tossed sky – I looked back and saw the stadium and the corkscrew in strangely rural setting. I followed the river to where it becomes a canal/towpath again, and had an ale and bite-you-back crisps in a pub which was NOT the one I was looking for. The one I was looking for (a second ale and old fashioned crisps) was further up the bank of the Lea River – an utterly other London universe where the picturesque housing tide comes to a sudden end on the water.

The pub/cottage is STILL THERE! How did it survive the chain-saws? It is called The Anchor and Hope. It is patronized by desperate 1970s hippies like myself, who got left behind by the clock. We trickle out of the shabby waterfront bar and sit along the terrace in a convalescent way. I remember those erratic old afternoons … glass after glass of melancholic intensity. All I can manage now is half a pint. The wrinkly hobbit in shorts, pulling pints has a long pink nose, and is the weirdest and wispiest of us all. Here on our backwater vessel, we scull slow dreamy circles, while the rough old world goes by. On the water, communes of old boats and barges are moored in zig zag fashion; a steep little street slides down to the edge from Stoke Newington in London somewhere: the place is an asylum.

From there, I rode on another mile or two, past a leafy frum park, and finally turned back into London at Tottenham Hale for the long ride home. Tottenham is where the enormous Lea reservoirs begin. The tow path goes on and on alongside them, far up north.

The 2011 riots began in Tottenham. I think I rode through the place. I saw burns. It is ironic that such a teemingly colourful district is in reality deprived, hungry, bored and angry. Visiting life is not the same as living it.

Very tired by now … the long haul through Turnpike Lane and Hornsey, and pushing up Muswell Hill: then left along the high old disused-railway path, from which you see, as from a balcony, the whole of east London … in the distance, the stadium’s white spikes and festive corkscrew. It is astonishing to cover the labyrinth, ant-like on my wheels. Then Highgate, Kenwood, Whitestone Pond – London’s highest point – and downhill home, getting dark.

In earlier times, Hackney marshes had a heavy, neglected horizon. It felt down and out and druggy. Today the same is enlivened; a current of regeneration flows subtly through it. The Olympics were built on a poisoned chalice in the south. All that toxic topsoil, derelict factories and electronic waste was peeled off, sieved, cleansed, put back and rebuilt into a cup of hope. It is very new, and stiffly guarded. But an elixir of life and interest now flows where the vein was blocked, and time will soften the edges and open it up to the wetlands. I saw many ducks, swans and a weary heron. A falcon hovered.

Poet & his daughter

1968 jazz

This charcoal drawing was done in1964, to The Kinks’ song “You Really Got me”.

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.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

A Vision: the Valley and the Olympic Relay

Posted on September 7, 2012 by janeadamsart

The ‘Brellas. Metro cover, 30 August 2012

When looking up something in my last-February’s journal the other day, I came across an entry – which I had forgotten all about. First there is a dream – an elder landscape, a valley crossing – and then a vision of the Games-to-be: the context is Time passing through the Mayan calender circle into the Aquarian age circle this year – and pictorially, the years fore and aft, around it: a Grand Crossing.

from Kabbalah 1991 series – the Kabbalah is by the way, but this is the general shape!

13 February 2012 THE VALLEY AND THE OLYMPIC RELAY

I dreamt last night a great and ancient moorland landscape, very old rocks. It was a long U-shaped valley with steep sheer sides, glacier carved, exposed. I walked along one edge of it, a path, noting the formations and striations of heather, rock and strata along the other side: vast – could be Scotland or Wales, but could be anywhere in the world.

I backtracked some way, and took a path (right-angle) which descended to cross it. Maybe I slid skillfully, or tobogganed. In the geological patterns up the other side, woods were hidden, as if in the textures of a painting, and little bushy lanes tarmac’d for cars, but almost too narrow to walk along; it was local but remote. Tucked away were houses, cottages and signposts, like the Chilterns; a small urban community took root.

Going up that hillside, as often happens, it turned into an interior labyrinth and I had to ask the workers the way. But the way was always quite clear to see, particularly when I turned a right angle corridor at the top; someone showed me a door leading out of doors, and I saw the cliffs of the valley’s other side again (where I was before), and the paths scratched and worn along them: the VIEW.

The path I was on, scarped the edge, but began to descend. It was sandy and reddish, and lost height. I met people and their dogs or children, and I looked for paths ascending back up.

The landscape had an elder brilliance of colour and tone: I think, an astral region. The two sides of the valley feel like the pillars of the Tree. Among the bare rocks, small thoughts of humanity take hold and flourish. There is an air of rediscovering basics. I cross the bare valley floor playfully. There is stability. There is a conversation, side to the other side.

Parent pentacle – Two sides of the Tree.

This dream-fragment came back to me in the kitchen, by the taps, while putting a jaycloth away. Yesterday I cleaned, dusted and polished my room at last, and bought a slow-cooker and some steak, veg and ale, and made a wonderful stew with an incredible flavour.

I said Chiltern – an echo – the valley is a dramatic version of the long land-furrows just west of Chesham and their paths and lanes: a corrugation like the lines in a fingerprint.

In my studies, I read about “the power which hangs the earth upon nothing. He who knows its presence at the centre of his being, and perfects its unobstructed transmission from that inner centre … knows the practical secret of the Lost Word.” (Paul Foster Case.)

The hebrew word for Imagination is RVCh, Ruach, the Life-Breath … … through the intricate pathways of veins, arteries, nerves and cellular thought streams. I like to think of those almost invisible fat cottages of village life tucked away among the steep bushy trees and hedges – samskaras and samsaras. The One Life creates all my ideas. They are tough like heather.

line dance 1987 – Crossing the valleys of each other

The potencies … are centred in the pituitary body behind the root of the nose. This is the point through which they enter the field. They put you in touch with the essential consciousness of everything, everywhere … the most distant star, millions of light years away, all mineral, plant, animal and human forms.

Behind the root of my nose is a visualising centre, which tastes and smells. Here is a little Tree. Here are bright white Seals of Solomon. The valley in my dream is like a bath. Sit in the bath like Archimedes, home in to the root behind my nose, and check out those distant stars and atoms closer than my breath, the intimate cosmic filaments … and pull out the bathplug with my toe. Like going to see my teacher to ask a question, the intention feels businesslike. Some clutter was removed.

The Valley is in a strange, living mode, a Face, a naked being.

What is your name? Are you called Lebecq?

I see through you, an ancient channel of light and knowledge, like a well, lain horizontally … well, that is a telescope, n’est ce pas? But you are more a landscape than a humanoid. The idea of a telescope brings the stars close. Your silence is as alive as when you speak. You are a channel for God. The telescope is a channel, a stick, a rod, a staff. When the valley of the shadow is cleared and open, I walk in it, I cross it, I admire the detail. There is a point of essence of you.

“Hear the nose on your face”. Listen to the breath. Waves swell, break and fade.

The god Neptune goes into his elemental salt, the Ocean, from the beach, then deeper and deeper. He IS the Ocean, being thus She, la mer, the mare, the mother. Essence is restored to itself … like sperm to egg dissolves back into embryonic femininity, from which the genders grow.

Leibniz, Kepler and Galileo were contemporaries – the invention of the telescope then? The dawn of the 17^th century broke the caul of our world. It was called the Enlightenment. It contracted light years and brought in the universe. (Aquarian age). It invented calculus and measure. The Rosicrucean Manifesto satyrized the Church’s asinine pomp and tyranny. The stars broke into the cleric fantasy and toppled it.

Something like this is happening now. Where there were European wars, is now a perilous Euro-economy – another attention-capturing struggle, another situation beyond the save of linear savants. Listen to the root of my nose; the birds out there, and the cars going by. Listen with everything I am connected to – replacing thoughts. The mind can scan many things simultaneously, but only concentrate on One Thing.

Alchemical bas-relief in Notre-Dame Paris – Child baton

Neptune’s essence restored to his own element in Pisces – is the year’s basic scroll.

In the summer Olympics, the relay of the torch and relay races in general may be significant.

At this point we are a relay baton – (like a telescope) being handed from one temporal arc or era to another. Trust the cosmic athlete to accomplish this more smoothly than the human runners and swimmers. The Olympics is a baton held in hand, a relay.

magus equinox 1991

Yesterday I pondered: the London administration in England, undertook this responsibility, to relay, to bring all the nations together. This factor underwrites the extravagance and the security headache. London – with its alignment to the Grand Cross next summer – is crucially placed for a movement through the hour-glass – trained, record-breaking movement, a national concentration focusing the globe. It may or may not be a shambles. It was the British Empire. It is the Games. Deep deep down under all the hype, the racket, fear and froth, lurks the Greek archetype ideal, unbroken. The relay is unbroken.

Elder thoughts are the open valley when the glacier has shrunk to a little brook in its floor.

The relay is a point of exchange, unbroken. Time is the meeting of the crossing ways, the passing hand to hand. There is an Olympic flame. Did Britain begin this present Olympic cycle, was Britain the first host in the 19^th century, or thereabouts? If nothing else, the London Olympic project reclaimed and regenerated a waste land.

7 September 2012 … and so it has!

I saw last night the relay of blind runners. The howling stadium is made to shush so the runners can hear each others’ feet. The precision with which they hand the baton to each other, is deft in the dark, and … deeply touching. Velocity: trusting: temporal velocity … the trysting trust untried.

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.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

Para-Olympus – Inspiring a Generation?

Posted on September 4, 2012 by janeadamsart

The opening Para-Olympic ceremony carried this quote from Shakespeare’s Tempest:

A most high miracle! 
Though the seas threaten, they are merciful: 
I have cursed them without cause. 

Now all the blessings 
of a glad father compass thee about! 
Arise and say how thou cam'st here! 

O wonder! 
How many goodly creatures are there here! 
How beauteous mankind is!  O brave new world
that hath such people in't!

My friend Paul dropped in for a chat. He had Para-Olympic tickets over the weekend – they had seats next to the Flame! – Tom Heatherwick’s torch of time.

After world war II, a German Jew, Ludwig Guttmann arrived in England. He was “set up” to research paralysed soldiers at Stoke Mandeville hospital. They’d been shifted to the scrap heap, kept sedated and hidden away, frozen in their beds. Guttmann worked with these young men, aroused their fighting spirit, and founded the para-Olympic Games – his chutzpah cut through an English fog of stuffed-shirt medicine. Last week, Margaret Maughan, one of the first Stoke Mandeville medalists, lit the flame in London for the world.

And here is another torch! – Jacobs ladder, showing the Four Worlds.

Four dovetailing Trees of Life – as in Ezekiel’s vision of the Chariot – demonstrate the fundamental cosmic substance and its apparent division into the four great classifications: Fire, Air, Water, Earth.

So we reflected on our teacher in the Tree of Life – Halevi – whose same post-war chutzpah laid the foundation for the Worlds of Spirit, Creation, Formation and the Physical World on Jacobs Ladder – in the Toledo tradition. Halevi’s life long dedication to the School of the Soul – see The Path of a Kabbalist, published by Kabbalah Society 2009 – cuts through the old British inability to say what we feel – get to the essence.

The word Kabbalah means “receive” and also “the balance”.

And our friend Elisabeth Tomalin – Tom Heatherwick’s grandmother. She met Jung, studied Kabbalah, and pioneered an art therapy in Germany for the children of the nazis. She died this year age 99 (see the link in Tom’s Torch of Time, 18 July) : her prickly, passionate Jewish nature is chutzpah. That penetration to what needs to be felt, said and expressed – changing everyone’s way of seeing things – is never “Diplomatic”!

E.T.

When I took this photo in 2007, she had just moved into Otto Schiff House in Netherhall Gardens. Meeting Elisabeth was sometimes like talking to the whole century. She remained obstinately active – up and down the steep hill from Waitrose on her bandy legs, and across Finchley Road, tiny, elegant and imperious: puzzled to go on living when she was so old. Her passion was for the life of the soul. Her longing was for an intellectual connectivity, cosmic and humane, her natural element; but her aging vitality retreated from it as she waited and longed to die. Elisabeth, that torment was only temporary. Through your grandson and his dandelion light, and through your spirit, you are everywhere …

… a sound of one hand clapping!

How does a man or woman with withered legs fold and pack them into a racing chariot? Doesn’t it hurt? No – they are floppy appendages, they say there is no feeling. But every paralysed person surely lives with locked in pains, adrenalin rushes and phantom nerve endings.

The roar in the stadium is mind blowing. There is a strange deja vue: the ancient brutality of the Roman Colosseum inverts and uplifts now to a humane solidarity in Stratford. “It moves the Kundalini centre, the left pillar, root fire into materia – an energy release through solar plexus – the Mother country: ‘team GB’ – the huge cheer as well for the runner coming in last. Transcending nationalities of winners and losers, they applaud the courage: the first and the last.”

Equanimity: magnanimity – isn’t this a doorway to enlightenment? The para Olympic ceremony was called Enlightenment. Light penetrates the darkness. When the cauldron was lit, the audience sang “I am what I am”; some used sign language. Stephen Hawking said “Look up at the stars; try to make sense of what you see; be curious.”

Cyclists, limbless to one side, find ways to self-compensate towards their centre and their balance: runners without sight hold a string attached to the coach’s hand … the pain of hitting post or sandpit edge – the level of trust that is required. “You must jump out of your comfort zone to feel fully alive.” A long-jumper listens for the accoustic signal from the guide – when to take off into the dark! Blind footballers “hear” the ball which has bells in it. They all beat frustration, and broke the tape.

Found this column in the paper:

“Ian Dury had polio as a child. What you never saw on Top of the Pops was that every step Ian took was a struggle, and standing seemed to give him pain.

“I thought about Ian when they sang his song Spasticus Autisticus at the opening ceremony – about what a brilliant man he was, and how even those of us who knew him, never knew the battles that he fought every day. That song still makes me flinch. But I know that somewhere, Ian Dury is smiling.

“These Paralympics will not help disabled people who are currently having their benefits slashed. But they will educate all of us. And their greatest legacy will be in the hearts of children, able and disabled, who will live their lives in a better, kinder and more inclusive world than we did.

“Perhaps, as Oscar Pistorius suggests, in the future we will look beyond the individual stories. But it is hard to imagine that there will ever come a time when we are not humbled, moved and inspired by these incredible athletes.

“In the story of Martine Wright, who nearly died in the senseless mass slaughter of 7/7/05, we see a truth that we will always need to cling to.

“From hatred can come hope and love.

“From the pits of blackest despair some people have the raw courage to look up and see the light.

“From a body that is broken can come a spirit that refuses to be crushed.”

Tony Parsons, Daily Mirror 1 September 2012

An early figure, ja 1956

The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee this year honours one person’s public service and devotion. The Olympian Flame this year brings together around it, a global-collective service and devotion. This in principle prevails.

“People remember you not for what you say or do, but for how you make them feel.”

“The heart when deeply moved, likes a little ceremony.” What begins to move? What breaks the barrier? What inspires a generation?

What relegates sexism, racism, dogmatic religiosity and anti-disability to the dustbin of history?

Their courage moves through a collective cognition; pulling the threads together through the Dandelion of the Light. When I was small, I called them “brave golden clocks”.

Our national pain-body eases for a while, through the releasing effort of those athletes. There is pain at childbirth; then in the full push with Nature’s force – no pain. Pain is our everyday portion or condition of life – at ease with it, or in stress and resistance to it. Everything in nature is assymetric – a push towards growth. Pain appears to immobilize but in fact accelerates the soul. Somewhere deep down, we know this.

The mercury-hermetic archetype is a power of expression and of healing.

Hermes vision, 1992

The Para Olympians profoundly, progressively touch my own disabledness. I am physically strong, but I have all my life, a low pain threshold; emotional derangement and dysfunction, whenever hit by life, or anxious. Who can say if the pain of the psyche or of the body is greater? My pain relief – the pain of life – was, and is, creative – the pressure of itself to express and be born.

Cockerel & abandoned child ’87

These drawings when I did them, back in 1987, express every emotion in the book as I fell and flew through my barriers. They may refer to any form of disability, emotional, spiritual or physical – the jagged reality of being this, and the discovery to move and to flow through it; and they need no other story.

The piano keys are grapes ’87

Right hand metatarsal, ’87. Try easing an ache by letting it draw and open the picture of itself from within. It is almost acupunctural. It is certainly homeopathic. Some of these “draws” were to help me play the piano. I learned the Cesar Franck violin sonata piano part – a technical colossus far beyond my means, and hauntingly beautiful; but I learned it note by note over about six months, and played it with my friend Fred Barschak at a small concours in Paris. He knew one of the judges, so we got a silver medal for trying. But we really did try, and we loved it, and it was an extraordinary adventure. This happened just before my visit to Vera and John Moore that summer – (see my post “A Woman playing a Piano and a Child of Art” 27 August)

Line-dance

Dancers

being? … not conventional lookalike, what ever ’87

Stop! you’re going too fast ’87

That is a Buddha wheel

Tree trunk – play the piano again, from the root ’87

Sphinx 1 ’87

and here is an interesting link … http://aryayogi.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/rohit-arya-on-kundalini-rising-the-android-helix-of-dominic-elvin/

Continue … :

notes and keyboard touch

Relay: centaur, athene and child – as in “Tom’s Torch of Time”

Sense of touch, the place of meeting ’87

We may have areas which cannot feel; but we can find the ones that do, and build the neural pathways from there, back and back into the limbs.

Key ’87

One might be blind or deaf, or simply stretching the antennae or rehabilitating. I drew SLOWLY, moving the whole arm, receivingly; so I was physically connected, as I found and followed my natural rhythm. It is a Yoga. This principle is invaluable for anyone who is restricted, and seeks expression; and I am certain it opens the ducts of healing. The line … I do not know where it may go. It is open ended and no copycat. It is true.

In the tree ’87

A hermetic-alchemical healing: the warmth, the flame from within the egg

Sphinx 2 ’87 – sun, moon and shadow

Newton’s apple ’87

In Olympus 2012, there were apples all over the stadium, and everyone bit into one, all at once. 80,000 bytes!

Materna mother-country-flame ja2005: copy from an unknown artist. Cherish …

remember all those umbrellas and Grail cup curves …?

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.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

Para-Olympic … Beyond Olympus

Posted on September 1, 2012 by janeadamsart

This photo, on yesterday’s London Metro, says it all. And so – surprisingly – does a TV commercial for strongbow pear cider! – an archer pulling back the string, lets go.

“Para” is a latin root, meaning placing beside, which also suggests beyond or outside the norm. Many of our words – parable, parabola, paralysis, paradox, paradise – carry this meaning.

A Poem: Coda

This my poem 
a seeding dandelion clock 
is a globe upon a stalk 

and every where 
I blow, the once 
upon a time it tells. 
                                       Poems of Eclipse, 2000

Mandala sphere of every whereness – the point of being. Consciousness, inward as outward, dives into the heart infinitely, all ways.

A wikipedia image

Here is Margaret Maughan who lit Tom Heatherwick’s Torch of Time on Wednesday: as the mandala rises from flower to stem; from petals to stamens.

The golden thread of the dandelion clock runs through all our waters and strings all our beads.

A few impressions of the festival – a woman sings Handel in pure voice. The new Olympian whose legs were blown off in the July 05 bombings tells: the fate was her destiny. She would not, could not be without it. Clare Balding replies: fate is what you are born with, destiny is what you do with it. An unlegged abseiler brings the torch down into the stadium on spider’s thread; and Stoke Mandeville veteran Margaret Maughan lights the Para-Olympic Flame. A Grail Cup emerges through inverted umbrella curves of light. From above, I see the stadium – a concentric flower – it is a trembling drop in the pool. In the beginning, with homage to the big bang and bosen higgs’ particle of Life, Stephen Hawking invites us to be curious; towards the end, Alison Lapper’s huge pregnant figure bears the fruit. Shakespeare’s Tempest is an enquiring child. The disabled are flying in the interior cosmos, to roam and freely rove. The simple images are very powerful. There are as many human cells in the brain, as stars in our galaxy. Each individual sitting on the tube is a galaxy. Neuron threads inside my head encircle our world four times.

Yesterday – I wasn’t feeling well, and needed to open my eyes – I walked from Amersham to Great Missenden, and met this gentleman:

… he might be looking down into the Olympic stadium: how soft his long neck is. And there is an eye, a vesica pisces, a forming, becoming a sphere …

Further along the lane … Inside the saxon/norman church of St John the Baptist in Little Missenden village, this early medieval fresco has been uncovered:

… and isn’t that an olympic torch he bears in his right hand?

This morning I read: “The Self is the good shepherd of the parables, and none of the sheep, the human personal expressions, is lost forever.”

Isn’t St Christopher, though carrying none other than the Child, the good shepherd? That is “the me” on his shoulder, and my full potential is the Christ. (a good way to handle/heal my sore stiff neck – on my left shoulder, just like St Christopher’s, and softly without hurry, like the swan: walk glide tall.) Christopher bore his burden across a flowing torrent, rocks and water, human strife, disability, to the sands.

In Greek mythology, the hero Jason did too. His burden was an angry old woman, she clung around his neck and scolded him; and he set down at the far shore, none other than Hera, the Goddess of the Hearth. Patience.

Para means “beyond” or “to one side of” – as in parabola (para beside, bola to throw) … parable, compare … paralysis (para beside or derange, lys loosen) … paradox (contrary to received opinion) … paradise (the disus or greek paradeisus is a park or pleasure ground. Reflect also on other words – paraglide, paraclete, parallel …

I and you and every one of us has some disability or pain of life. A Para-Olympian through her or his damaged and disabled frame, pain and courage, achieves something which is beyond Olympus. Thus their extraordinary inspiration to us all. Thank you. Thank you.

Hemisphere perfection: A photo from Friends of Charles Darwin

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.

I write, illustrate, design and print my books. Watch this space.

Tom’s Torch of Time – an Olympic Relay alchemy

Posted on August 8, 2012 by janeadamsart

Children of the World 2007 – a drawing done for the Human Rights Aid Foundation

Here is the Olympic Flame during the Games. 204 children, one child accompanying each nation’s team, carried a bronze petal towards the creation of the complete torch flame. The petals when lit, lay as a great mandala over the ground. As national diversities emerged into unity – like stamens of a flower – the mandala rose to form the Olympic torch.

Here is the flame from within it, looking up.

My earlier post, Reflections on the Grand Cross (22^nd June) touched on the Cardinal Crossroads (17 July) of Pluto in Capricorn, Moon in Cancer, Mars in Libra, Uranus in Aries: tensions and responses through the antipodeal frame of solstice and equinox. Many astrologers and seers speak of a profound tipping point; the relay-release of the old Mayan Great Circle, or frame of time, into the “new” Aquarian Great Circle. They see violent interactions, and all kind of things.

Our projection onto 2012, when boiled down to essentials, may amount to the handing over of the Torch of Time, through time and space: through the dream.

Four seasons electron figure-eight

Intense pressure is suffered in a myriad different ways, collectively and individually, as human conscience passes the midpoint of a cosmic “8” – the figure of infinity; itself a crossing-point of the unbroken Circle. The dawn of “something new” has no adequate prediction. The dawn of “something new” is through the neck of the hourglass. It reflects the old, yet differently. A young gangster kid may be inspired to break through into athletic training and fellowship – a local quantum leap. These things happen.

Few of us have the “dancer’s training” to bend and yield and flow with it. Yet truth is found when we look within ourselves, rather than outward onto the shifting persuasion. This inner truth is sometimes surprising. It is like having a view from above, rather than from inside the street’s canyon – to see all the streets, all the connections, the city and its fields.

And … for instance … a TV camera inside a helicopter records a hand-over of the Olympic torch down there in a London street … or a village … or a coastal path or remote, rainy field. The place is lined with flags and inaudible cheering; a small white clad figure approaches another in the rain; there is a pause while the flame is stabilized, then off goes the new white clad figure, her arms uplift with joy, her hair down her back; she seems to float, she is heavy and yet she flies. She runs like an early Picasso Grecian dancer; and the ancient happiness punches up into the sky.

I was moved, by something deep and archetypal. Till then I was “an Olympic sceptic” – I saw chiefly, an extravagance far beyond the British purse, its one heritage being the “greening” of an industrial desert – a reclamation of toxic soils.

Torch bearer (1955)

Every carrier of the flame was stirred, carried into an unexpected dimension, and so were the watchers, along its 8,000 miles. (Or was it 80,000 …?)

Astrologers view the Grand Cross and London’s exact alignment with it, with traditional pessimism. Yet I also perceived the coming of all the nations together in an estwhile centre of the Common Wealth: Greenwich meridian 0. There is a civil vulnerability; Isn’t there also the potential for a progressive release; a different gesture? Alignment with whatever the stress, converts it to an asset, and flows. It is an art of life. The forces which move us are so much deeper than we know.

Leda & Swan (1957)

The euphoria of the Olympic award in July 2005, was swiftly followed by the bombings. The wake gathered in Trafalgar Square to say “we shall not be defeated, and nor shall we hate.” In all our minds is that vigilance with the shadow which accompanies the light. Yet in the passing of anniversaries, the replay of patterns, history “reverberates” beyond our fears. In the bigger picture of the cycles, there is so little that we actually see. What we think we see is feudally enclosed by our conditioning.

All we can be sure of, is that we cross again these points, but with a turn of the spiral, rather than a closed circuit. Thus is Nature and the growth of trees. The spiral is tight with our history and apprehension; yet still it is the Great Spring – a planetary kundalini Yantra. Watch the world, and turn inward; see “the point of intersection, time with timeless: an occupation for the saint.”

Draw a Yantra

A Kabbalistic meditation this week: the PRESENT. The present. A Present, like a gift – here in this room with its pictures and things, in this block of flats, the noise of cars and trains going by each side, in this neighbourhood … within the event of the Olympic Games in London. Mostly, this Present is the busy, tiny, teeming moment’s turmoil. Sometimes this Present is an entire aeon, or aeon of aeons … the Buddha’s breath … NOW. Into NOW, the tiny things melt for a moment.

What different clocks! And we can go anywhere. We can go to before the big bang, behind where all this began … nothing. No thing. Silence. Space. Conscious. The focus of an emanation which is Light – a point – expands. Let there be Light, and all that becomes. The tsim tsum is this beginning of the whirlings, gilgalem, the polarized pulse of atomic gravities, so tiny, which turns – the great wheel of the Milky Way – in one of its spiraling arms voyages our little Solar System. The Vedic gods I realize, with their many arms, are GALAXIES!

Cosmic egg and wood grain

Then a trip through history, geologic and human, evolving through NOW, always now, to the re-absorbed aeons of ions into the point: no thing. Kalpa, the Great Breath. And open your eyes into this room. Thou art God. TAT TWAM ASI. AHIH ASHER AHIH. And make the tea!

Time is multi-directional, and also inward. Time is a petalling flower – each petal is a local clock, and they grow and fall away, and new ones come; each petal is an electron circuit, a planetary orbit around the stamens of the Sun.

This brings me to Tom’s Torch … and its hundreds of bronze petals.

Thomas Heatherwick, the architect of the Olympic cauldron, is the grandson of Elisabeth Tomalin, who died aged 99, this year. Elisabeth carried in her tiny, intense, twig-like frame, a century’s history:

http://www.thecnj.com/review/2009/102909/feature102909_01.html

Herself a Jewish refugee from world war 1, Dresden and the Holocaust, she met Jung in Switzerland and made her home in England when she was young. She worked as a fabric designer for Marks & Spencer, then trained as an art therapist, and returned to Germany in the 1960s, where she pioneered her work among students whose parents had been Nazis, to heal their soul. She released their creativity through dream interpretation, using water and sand. In one of her visions, she inherited the link in an unbroken tradition of doctors, whose root was in Israel – this was a comfort to her. Her story is extraordinary, as the above link shows. Here is one of her last embroideries which she gave me. Her hands could not control a brush, but could still sew. Embroidery, for Elisabeth, was a tapestry of the soul, the colours of lifetimes, in and out: the flowering landscape of the inner thread.

Figure of Eight, by Elisabeth Tomalin

Elisabeth’s burning quest for connectivity, and the wholeness of the soul, made her a difficult companion, to herself and to all her friends. In her daughter Stefany, her grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, that powerful river of the lineage survives and flows. Her grandson’s imagination is prolific, since childhood. He is the architect of the Seed Cathedral in the Shanghai Expo, and of holistic buildings patterned on the flow of wood and water, in Britain and all over the world. He and she were close.

Tom Heatherwicks Seed Cathedral

The Great Work of Alchemy is stealthy, and many of its hands do not know what they do. Time’s great petals are brought to form a mandala, each is dipped to combine an Olympic flame. Young persons and athletes without celebrity, brought Tom’s bronze petal-buds each to each. It is beautiful to remember how the flame traveled around the land, from the Giants Causeway to Trafalgar … villages, lanes and towns, by horse, by boat, by wheelchair, by abseil and by bike. It atavistically moved people, one didn’t know why, culminating in the great, converging relay. It is ancient, as the beacons on hills, the messengers along ley lines who carry fire in nests: the elder earth energy. It woke something. Until I saw it, I had no idea what all the fuss was about.

Tom’s Torch – the Miracle

The mandala of the petals of the flame lay on the ground and glowed. Then every stamen was raised up, like a carousel on stalks, till the One Torch merged, flowed and burned for the world: Tom’s torch of Time.

The horizontal yantra rose into the vertical stem.

Torch bearer (1954)

A Summer Grand Crossroads brings many, many nations together in a world city, to compete, befriend and celebrate; to pass through each other, and begin to transcend the little cult of the individual – through stretching individual capacity beyond the barriers. There are problems, furies and triumphs. We are villagers.

The weatherman on TV last night, announced with relish: “The weather is improving. This weekend, for the closing Ceremony, we may look forward to a Bright Gold Medal in the sky!”

Crossroads are places of meeting. In their centre may be planted a tree, a seat, a garden, a gossip, a conflict, or even a sacred space.

What is my Crossroads? What is your Crossroads?

How does the river flow and feel?

Even if we in the British economy, suffer “an Olympic Hangover”, this too, shall pass, and is part of our character. Likewise, we chuckle at Danny Boyle’s opening Ceremony, a radical departure from the tradition of the host country to boast about itself.

It is important to recall the surprise of the revealed Symbol, signifying yet something other, always.

Sunflower

Relay – Centaur, Athene and Child (1987)

Solomon’s Seal: Flower of Life

The fire of our Sun creates the light of the world. The seed creates the form within the Mother Consciousness. Here, the children return the Flame to its source.