World Ends for Elevenses

Posted on December 22, 2012 by janeadamsart

At 11 11 GMT, (which being British, is Best) yesterday, my companion-in-the-Work and I made a nice cup of tea, stopped talking, and enjoyed together the latest Big Bang.

Steven Isserlis & friends rehearse Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time at Wigmore Hall in ’88

What a great day! Everything is ROUND, like the Mayan calender. I even got a snowball from Israel – (my cher ami’s family) – and threw one back to them:

rebbe & rebbetzin celebrate Yule

This drawing was done back in the naughty 90s, but my dear Ex in it (currently in India) looks rather like my cher ami now! – but has more hair.

OK Xmas cracker: now for my usual SERIOUS STUFF.

Fool 0 Hermetic tarot

I sleep better this week, and woke this morning with a vivid impression of two long electric cables being plugged in – (to me?) – blue and yellow. These colours were in something I saw or thought of, recently. Anyway, they are the colour tones of the Priestess and the Magician/Strength/Fool. Priestess and Fool are my old partnership. Blue and yellow irises: buttercups and blue sky – the colour recipe some people use to go to sleep with – remember that.

Priestess 2 Hermetic tarot

Today has that winter grey feeling, Xmas chores are done (except Slippers and Calender) and I might go snuggle with cher ami this afternoon, and watch strictly tinsel on TV. I feel as if every tree is covered with snow. It is raining.

In the world are many disappointed dressed up persons with nowhere to go. The Great Moment passed and nothing happened. The Great Moment has informed my psyche in recent years, because I am sensitive to the collective astral pulse and its themes behind the heartbeat. That meant my little “me” subscribed to some of the nonsense, and felt apprehensive, and blogged like mad.

It is so beautiful the way the symbols cohered yesterday, and gently touched – especially Paul’s xmas card for me, with all its Circles and Eyes, like raindrops.

The Great Moment is now, and passing through all the time.

The Companions of the Light and of crop circles, set up 11.11.21.12 End of Mayan Time, as a joke – to give all the humans a tension buildup, whose relaxation helps us behave a bit better to each other … the relief of a belief. It was in the collective subconscious. Of course, most of us pooh poohed it and went about our business, but it was there all the same, the butt of many a bad legpull. And for the gun-psychosis victims in the States, their parents’ world ended just the week before. The agony.

Those children, those souls were “taken out” abruptly. Many interesting souls died in 2012. They are precise, creative placements on the membrane’s other side. A child’s sudden removal is a bud taken in full fruit. Some of them were advanced souls, and their brief of birth was not to blur their spirit-level with the problems of life. They incarnated just enough to get earthed, be loved, and acquire some language; then go back behind the veil and do their job. Those children now are strong. But it is not sufficient for their grieving parents to join self-interested séances. The grieving parents have to grow, to realise their child is in the Life Stream for their own and the human evolution, through the tipping point. And contact. Aquarius is the contact with the whole human ocean around the globe – experientially, scientifically, cybernetically and spiritually. Touch hands.

in touch 20.12.87

As consciousness, none of us are born. None of us die. We are in eternal connection.

The soul is an infinitely wider landscape than the small presentation of it which births into a family’s love, upbringing, school, abuse, and adult Karma. Rapidly those little ones with their irreplacible gap-tooth smiles, shot through the veil, and now are transpersonal Counsellors. The many sudden and “meaningless deaths” of loved-ones, increase the Manifestation of the Wise, as Aquarius dawns and lifts the dust. For those little children are ancient Ones.

I have yet to experience the traumatic death of a loved one. All the deaths I have been with so far, have been at a ripe old age, or ready and willing to go; so they were celebrations. My parents are still alive. I am nearly 64. I don’t know how I shall feel when they go. BUT – I used to dream again and again, that my baby daughter died. I even tried to dig her up. Those were recurrent nightmares of streaming, shattering, unbearable loss and grief. THE GRAVE.

In my last life, she was aborted from me; my cells have the memory. It is said that I, as young Sarah, died in 1895 at 48, from ovarian cancer, which is grief. It fully tasted me.

The antipodean seer who told me this in 2010, was reading my Akasha records quite accurately at that time. Then a moment came when for various reasons, he could no longer do so. He had been going to give me all the details. He wrote and told me not to correspond with him any more.

In this lifetime I remember, when I was in my late forties, worrying I may not survive fifty, I might desert my daughter, my parents and my loved ones.

My Cheiron return pushed this button hard! – the wounded healer, my daughter’s “eclipse” into San Francisco. I was able to keep in touch with her during her wild years by being silent and calming down. Somehow I knew in the silence she was well, and that this bedrock honesty is better than conventional reassurances.

Goodness! What unexpected and interesting thoughts, this morning.

Placement at the other side is Consciousness each side of the Yule door: a delineation as the Age of Aquarius matures. The Age of Aquarius began in 1600 when Kepler met Tycho de Brahe and plotted the orbit of Mars; but Aquarius in full, begins around now. There are big penumbrae of passing, between Ages. They overlap, casting a pomegranate curve of shadow: vesica pisces. December 2012 is the present portal – Jesus’s birth and death was perhaps another.

A Great Portal requires nothing more, than to sense it is there, and go about one’s daily life in a relaxed way.

Life goes on

Regarding grief and its expression, and how unreachable I was to my family until I broke down during Marisa’s travels, and said how painful it actually was …

On an Ascension path, one is bound by an astral loyalty to the Guardians which makes expression in life extremely difficult. I tended to chatter in code, and in slogan, and to preach. This appears like arrogance. It is not. It is the struggle to find a language in which both emotional realities – each side of the Door – are honoured and can converse, or agree not to. It is painful, and for a long time isolating. Growing older, erodes the resistant membrane, and helps me to laugh at me, to be vulnerable and to share.

There is a close relationship between those who pass on and those who stay on the earth plane. We who stay, assist those who pass – in our daily actions and understandings – to become coherent in their transpersonal duties, feeding back. We are all interconnected. Wherever this is recognised, is Consciousness. It is the sunlight breaking through my Path of Awe.

put on space?

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.

Other blogs: (click on image) – Aquariel, Reckless Fruit (1), Reckless Fruit (2)

Aquariel

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/

For Solstice

Posted on December 20, 2012 by janeadamsart

Walk tall, breathe deep, open heart and arms.

The key of pilgrimage may open the door of the mundane into the transcendently spectacular, without ever leaving home.

The life condition had forgotten or taken for granted, the door of perception. Realisation within all the surfaces of the world is revealed, tender and subtle. With this key, the Vedic sages mapped the stars and sciences, through observing the dance of light, the sound of nature, her atoms, within their own contemplative and “seeing” spines, and walking through all seasons. They loved.

So let the waterfall run down the spine that bonds us: the music of the waters.

body tao tree

The centre of the Sun core is infinite. Planets – planes – are formed in the radiating field which cools, becomes visible, consolidates around him. These like the Rose petals, are Shakti’s dance around Purusha “the Unborn”. They precipitate, as thought does.

The core of a straight conifer stem with its branches twirling, is … the unmoving core of the dancer. And he the Dervish in order not to dizzy, “spots” his inner poise of prayer as the world whirls and rotates around him. Dance is born from within the unmoving fire stem as a barely perceptible oscillation; whose arc, like a pendulum, births a pulse, a circuit or triad – Time.

And so from Sound, a wavelength, an OMKARA within or beyond the audial spectrum, a Universe, coheres centrifugally. A concentric ripple floats out from the core. It becomes thought. It becomes mind.

To be the perception within the perceived, let it run down spine like water, as current, to the ground. The wave in water conducts the current which is “fire”.

OM SHANTI. Wishing you joy, peace and a Yule log to warm the cockles of your heart, this special Solstice 2012.

Go well!

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.

Other blogs: (click on image)

Reckless Fruit (2)

Reckless Fruit (1)

Aquariel

Today is a Special Day

Posted on December 12, 2012 by janeadamsart

12.12.12 today … completes a series in the cosmic clock. 10 October 2010; 11 November 2011; 12 December 2012 – but there is no 13th month! Today is very special.

This painting is called “Binah”, which means “the understanding”. At the bottom is written BEREISHITH – the Beginning. The Divine Child Genesis gazes into the dark profile of the aeons’ reflection, rising to complete the great Circle of the Light.

It is a fourth-dimensional image.

Many are our projections onto the 2012 solstice – the completion of the Mayan calender, the opening sphere of Aquarius. The actual miracle of this moment passes almost unnoticed. It is beyond our language, and independent of our drama. Picture language draws near. This recent Tarot oracle reveals the quality of a Now, and its past (left) and future (right.) 21 is Now, 12 inverts it, and 6 is half of the full 12 in The Lovers. Through a silent night, holy night, the portal to each other opens.

The Hanging Man (who walks contrary to the world) and The World are the two most profound Arcana of Completion in the alchemical process. These two Keys portray the ascending and descending triangles of the Sri Chakra Yantra … and of the Shield of David, or Seal of Solomon. Key 6, the Lovers, applies the understanding in Tifareth. What a Fruit!

The mind stops and enters yabyum, the lovers. A Rainbow Buddha is in the Tree of Life. Time’s wheel strikes the moment.

Oracle of solstice. Ora, oasis approaches this year’s solstice. This is profoundly real, striking the ora, hour, a moment through the clock’s face of Real Aquarius. Alignment flows the ease of being. The force is imperceptibly vast, like gravity. What is gravity? – connectivity.

I carved this balsa boat for my grandmother’s birthday when I was 12 or 13, and packed it in a glass box with cotton wool. The vessel goes on sailing through the clouds. When she opened the gift, she said, “Annapurna in cumulus!”

The child of the turning page (below), was drawn in 1954.

It is but the page which turns. Read on; breathe onward; peace, the solstice blessing, as our unmoving axis turns the worlds.

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.

Mandala: A Demonstrated Democracy

Posted on November 28, 2012 by janeadamsart

What is democracy?

The word is built from the Greek demos, the people, and krateo, to rule: kratos strength, hardness. Demokratia “is a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives.” (Wikipedia.) “Democracy allows eligible citizens to participate equally – either directly or through elected representatives – in the proposal, development and creation of laws… to enable the free and equal practice of political self determination.”

Unfortunately, “democracy” as a political slogan, is often used, to justify invading other nations.

Whether we argue, or whether we are able to listen, is crucial to our grasp of what is democracy, and what is the tyrant or oligarch within ourselves. What can we do about it?

Here is a drawing of a recent group work. It went on for about ten days. The circles around the rim are the 22 participants – the symbols they represented. Each, while journeying the Tree of Life to form a collective Merkabah (Chariot), picked a Path, a Sefira, a Dakini-oracle card, and an Animal of the Zodiac, and sat facing each other, like the spokes of a wheel. I was asked to draw it, and copies were distributed to the group as it concluded.

Reflecting each other, the interconnectedness joins up the dots … towards the higher, deeper, unifying intelligence of our humanity. The Greeks in discourse sat not in rows, but in a circle. In shamanic cultures, the pipe of peace is passed … or the mace, around the circle, for the holder to speak.

Universal peace pipe dream – A sculpture from one of my favourite blogs, http://fromthomas77b.wordpress.com/

This is group work – a human mandala focus. The character of each person is expressed in the symbols they picked out to work with, in the framework and security of the Circle. Mandala is a true democracy, where everyone faces each other and sees everyone else. In the linear mode however, we are unconscious.. We sit in rows with our backs to each other, facing the priest, but we do not see each other.

The Circle has a group leader, whose focus pilots the journey and outcome. With three other people, he or she represents the Four directions and elements at the Circle’s Cardinal points as a framework. This creates a grounding and a solidity for everyone in the group. All the participants, as they emerge through their own heart centres – Tifareth – are teachers to one another. We do breath work, chanting, and a sequence of guided meditations along the paths and triads on the Tree of Life; and we share what is happening individually. Breaking successively the granthi-knots of (1) – ancestral condioning; (2)- the soul’s relationship to Karma and Dharma, and (3) the knot of the mental conditioning, we develop a healing group Consciousness. Releasing and emptying the burdens we carry, creates space in our being. This is the Chariot (Merkabah), by which we pass through the veils which separate ego from soul, and soul from Spirit … to receive Binah, Hokhmah, Kether.

The Tree of Life, showing the granthi knots at personal, soul and spirit levels. These are crossroads in our human development.

In 2004 I participated in the creating of such a Mandala, and this is the message I received: (the three-fold Kether on the Tree of Life reminds me of it …)

“Christ said, “Talitha cumi – arise again.” So renew your Soul Covenant with the Divine. Genesis is revisited; so with the radiant light of protection, serve the Tradition and the Oracle. You have toiled in what was spoiled. A thousand years is long enough! Return to Egypt and its starry desert, and walk the carpet of the firmament.”

“With courage when snow flies in your face, shake it off.
Close sometimes your ears to what the heart is saying, and do not feel its lament.
If there is no God on earth – we ourselves are gods! Adam Cadmon, our completion.

“I saw three Suns in the sky –
Binah, Hochmah, Kether.
They stayed so still,
and they did not leave me.”

(Part of this message came from a Schubert song, translated by Lois Phillips in her book Lieder Line by Line, and channeled for that occasion.)

Rose Savitri

This type of work cannot be written down in books. It is an oral tradition; it is oracular, arising and flowering spontaneously. Rain falls in circles on water. The oral work gives a direct and in-formed experience, which then matures into ways of expression. However, for it to be effective, there has to be a concerted spiritual Will, balance and discipline within the group.

I feel that all over the world, unknown to the superficial spiritual “marketing”, similar initiatives come up through the ground. They form a human root system beyond race, gender, class and religious background. Trans-continentally, a holistic ecology of Consciousness vibrates along our woody veins, nitrates and airways. The world of creative imagination – when focussed – sooner or later manifests, in the world.

The Aquarian awakening does not elevate a guru-ish figure on a pedestal. Likewise, we seek to balance our personality-pressures with the Self – the higher good. We are all fallible, and equally in this process, respect one another. We have loved and lost. We have lived and died. We have strayed and returned. It is called the Path of Return.

The principle – moving beyond the habit of person-dominated spirituality or “organization” – is enabled in the hidden spiritual circles of the world. Gravity flows in spirals and circles; straight lines do not exist; we are not rows, but curves. The curves celebrate the voluptuous Goddess. The principle is transparent and light on its feet. The principle is dedicated, yet unencumbered by property, fund raising or zeal. In harmony with the Laws of Nature and magnetism, it finds always a roof. The mountain, tree and heart together (see below), form a vessel – the tabernacle covers the need. Upon the stillness of the mountain, the tree grows, and the heart’s abundance is aligned; everything is possible.

This is I Ching Hexagram 53: Wind/Wood over Mountain/Keeping Still:

“A tree on a mountain, developing slowly, firm root, is visible from afar, and influences the whole landscape. Tranquillity within and penetration without: correct relationships of cooperation. Haste is unwise. Gentleness is adaptable but penetrating. Inner calm. Slow progress perseveres.”

Richard Wilhelm (precis)

During this time-period, tipping the Mayan calender at 2012 towards Aquarius, a new Great Circle opens, with problems that are inherited and problems that are “new”. As the self-encircling figure of infinity (8) passes through the hour, our perception of time is altered, at first subconsciously. The long-term alteration of the way we see things – awareness – is as radical as the thought of geophysical polar-axis shift or flip, which many prophesy, project and profess.

Who knows? The interior is beyond measure, and our entire worldview is a creation from thought. Life goes on.

It is in our inner evolution to perceive time not in a linear way, but as a pattern of interpenetrating circles and depth. Here … below the strata of wars, earthquake, climate change and wealth imbalance … the quantum leap of our humanity awakes almost unseen, eye to eye: the lighthouse keepers.

Embroidery by Elisabeth

The Word is breathed from heart to heart. Who knows where the heart was born or began? A mandala of souls is an eye, a fountain.

A human Mandala or Wheel: Buddha with encircling Boddhisattvas

Sacred Geometry and Relationships

Sacred architecture is based, almost universally, on a stake in the ground and a piece of string. The string pegs out a circle around the point: the Circumpunct, symbol of the Sun. The stake is repositioned on the circumference, and a new circle with the same radius is drawn. In the same way, persons giving one another space, may dialogue. The oval vesica-pisces is also called a pomegranate.

“In the underworld, Pluto gives Persephone a pomegranate of which she eats, a symbol of femininity and fructification. By … taking this principle within herself, she binds herself automatically to return to the Underworld every year, for only in the descent into the Underworld is new life possible; it requires death to gain rebirth.”

Gareth Knight

On the same principle of embodiment, we investigate and regenerate our inner psyche. From the seed in the ground, the root descends, then a little shoot begins to grow. As in the Seal of Solomon, as in all the Eastern Yantras and Mandalas, ascent and descent pass through each other in the heart. From vesica pisces – the Fish sigil of the early Christians – the Flower of Life proliferates.

On this architectural ground-plan, proportions are produced, the arches constructed, the Sanctuary is built: the vertical through the horizontal plane, the male through the feminine; and it stands. Walk tall, as the terrestrial magnetic divines the Pole Star. We live as a myriad pendulums from that One axis. We are the Circle around the Point. But the point is within ourself!

… and is it any thing?

What are Politics? Is it a group of people working for the common good, or is it the opposite? Polites in the Greek means “citizen” and politeia means “the condition of a state”. Many words beginning with “pol”, “poly”, suggest a head-count – the many – and the application of some kind of restraint. Politics are broadly, the art of government. It is an art – a broth with many cooks.

The problem with parliament is with rows of partisans shouting each other down. They do not yet know how to interconnect their ideals to serve the nation’s interest. The same is observed in my mental process as in yours. What do I believe in? What do I crusade about? What really works? We cannot expect governments to ask this question, until we are capable to ask it in ourselves, our opinions; till we find out what really works within ourselves for for the good; and dialogue is so different … from debate, the warring monologue.

It is the capacity to hear and appreciate another’s story. A circle is a seamless robe of democracy, connected in all its parts. It contains debate, story-telling, dialogue, argument and ultimately reconciliation. Ultimately it brings conflict into resolution.

Our awakened inner life needs an environment of harmony and peace. A leader wears a mantle of authority with, but not over others; to enable others to come to their own authority. In the process of truth all, including the leader, reveal their vulnerability. True Authority is unmistakable. It uplifts the culture of the people, and their needs. Love gives space for others to be who they are.

We need to quieten, to give room.

Flower of night, 1986

“I am a hidden treasure who longs to be known. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift a stone, and I am there. We are not of the world, but in it. We walk just about one-mile-an-hour ahead of the tide coming in. It is tiny, but enough.”

sunflower, fish and paddle-steamer 1988

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). Published recently online: The Reckless Fruit in two parts – here are the links to click

Sandy

Posted on November 2, 2012 by janeadamsart

Under the Tempest lives Prospero.

When my heart is particularly touched to draw, I sometimes turn the photo upside down, and draw it upside down, then turn it round and finish it. Seems a different region of my brain comes into play, and my drawings done this way, are more honest: the proportions are better. When I went up to Waitrose yesterday, and saw this photo in the paper, I cried. It said everything. I cannot say why.

Here in England, we are a fraction the size of the United States, and the things which happen to us are correspondingly on a smaller scale. Sandy was a thousand miles across, leaving scenes resembling the tsunami in Japan: our Great Storm during the night of 16/17 October ’87 was perhaps 50 to a hundred miles wide, at its full strength.

I was drawing before, during and after it. So I attach below, my picture gallery of this sequence, in solidarity.

There can be nothing more terrifying than Natures apparent malignancy, unleashed against our lives, homes and loved ones – perhaps even more than man’s inhumanity to man. For Nature is the only reliable home we have.

Symbols abound – political, ecological and of history, during our era of the tipping point; and not one person’s private thread is unaffected.

Here is not my time or place to opinionate or discuss these symbols; except one. As we cross from one temporal Great Circle of the “Mayan-calender” into another, (as if through an hourglass) it is curious that the East coast hurricane got re-christened “Sandy” even before the waves arrived. The waves threw great drifts of sand over the streets of New Jersey. The only thing wise to say with any certainty, is that Sandy is a wake up call, wake up from the national dream: it changes the patterns and fates, and moves them differently through each other. There are breaches; unexpected reconciliations occur also, in a concerted effort to mend and rebuild the human landscape.

During our English October storm in ’87, I was viscerally aware of an “alchemical process” stirring under the blast. To discover the meaning, if any, we need to look below the turbulence. Under the tempest lives Prospero.

Prospero is not only the guardian of spiritual wealth and heritage, but also the human factor awakened in cataclysm, to draw together, face harsh truths, assist and console one another. Prospero tames and teaches Caliban.

My drawings in ’87 were aware of the approaching storm, before I was. I was emotionally asleep, along with the infamous weather forecast; the sketches from my subconscious, were awake.

Before the Tempest

Before the storm ’87

anxiety ’87

Welcome across? ’87

the day before … ’87

After the Storm

… and the day after. ’87

Monster nightmare, or Wake Up ’87

The Wounded Isis Tree ’87

King Lear – “Blow winds and crack your cheeks!” ’87

Gust ’87

Carnage ’87

… and praise Those that Stood ’87

Destinies and fates thrown across each other ’87

Prospero

Shelter ’87

Ancient voices and wisdom begin to emerge: Prospero ’87

Forage ’87

Storm’s inner alchemy: a crucible of peace ’87

The living trees and civilizations around Earth’s crust share a common root, the crucible of the core.

Dragon & Mother Isis ’87

Mary Gaia with baby, 1956

Whatever the outcome:

No one who leads a land, is superman. He or she contends with too many conflicting self interests in government, and strives to keep a firm middle road.

If he is lucky, he keeps his integrity and his honesty, and is not afraid to declare his limitations openly. No change happens overnight. Nor is change brought about by just one four-year term of “Yes We Can.” “Yes we can” needs to complete the process, through all the “no we won’t” resistances to it. That takes courage.

The winds of change we witnessed this week, are a stern picture; the storm accelerates our vision. Hurricane Sandy on earth is a tangible warning, as is perceived all round the planet, from the higher plane. Besides destruction and tragedy, it blows out the cobwebs, and a much further horizon may clarify. Each Tempest, in a single soul, as in a nation, contains a seer, or transforming power.

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.

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.

In the seed and the flame is the essence of our humanity. They light the Tree of Life.

Snowdrop: In touch, across the Seas (1988)

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 Robert Adams Transcript

Posted on July 18, 2012 by janeadamsart

Thank you, Hamish McLean for sending me this transcript today.

“Not everyone needs a guru. A guru can be a tree, a mountain, a lake, a flower.

“You’ve heard this before, but let me explain it. When a tree becomes your guru, the tree is no longer an ordinary tree. It’s you. You are identifying with the essence of the tree, which is consciousness. You’re not seeing the tree as a tree. It’s the beauty of the tree or the mountain, or the lake, or whatever, that first attracts you. But if you just see the tree as a tree, you’ll be disappointed, for the leaves drop off, bugs attack it, people chop it down. Yet if you identify with that tree, spontaneously, intelligently, that tree becomes you, and the essence of the beauty is the essence of your beauty. In that respect the tree is your guru.

“Therefore a guru in the human form is a being whose words in the silence you feel in your heart. And just like the tree, the essence of the guru is your essence. There is only one. Therefore when a student is sincere in their spiritual practice, when they put that first before anything else, when they continue to work on themselves, automatically the guru within yourself, the essence within yourself, like a magnet, will attract and pull you to a guru outside of yourself, which is really yourself, that can cause you to rise higher and become liberated. You’ve got to stop seeing yourself as a human being. You’ve got to catch yourself. Whenever you think something is wrong, someone has hurt you, someone hasrubbed you the wrong way, when things do not go right at your job or at home, do not be like the ordinary person and react to it. And do not believe that if you do not react, things will get worse.

“I cannot tell you enough that every situation that happens to you is necessary for your growth. There are no mistakes. Everything that you’ve been through, everything that you’re going through, is absolutely necessary for your spiritual growth. If it does not look kosher to you, realize it’s your mind reacting. It’s your ego reacting. And the way to handle it, is to just observe.

“Do not get involved by arguing, fighting, trying to change things. Just observe. If you can observe without getting excited, then you’ve passed that test and you will not have to repeat it. But if you get angry, you get upset, you want to get even, you’re always thinking about it, and you have hate and animosity, even though you move away from that situation, you will meet that situation again, and again, and again, until you learn not to react to it.

“The universe is a university to educate the soul. Before we can go any higher and awaken, we have to have these little realizations where we begin to feel that there is nothing wrong. There is absolutely no thing wrong. All the good of the universe is yours. There is absolutely nothing wrong, nothing. If you can only live in the moment and feel what I’m saying, everything in this world, in this universe will become you. That’s why people like Jesus and others have been able to say, “All that I have is yours,” meaning that consciousness is bliss, and bliss is expressing itself as the world, as the universe, as yourself. Live in that bliss. Refuse to acknowledge anything else.

“It appears that if you do not acknowledge something, something will go wrong in your life. But you are not made for something to go wrong in your life. There is absolutely nothing wrong anywhere, so how can anything go wrong in your life. Even those of you who believe God is running the show, God couldn’t be good and bad, or there would be a capricious universe in which we live. The moon would crash into the sun, wheat would grow one time and roses would grow another time from the same seed, when we live in a capricious universe.

“There are not two powers here. There is one power and you can call that God. It is all-pervading. If it is all-pervading, and there is no place where it is not, how can there be a problem? For in order to be a problem there has to be God and something else. But all you’ve got to do is a little meditation, and you will see that there is only God as everything and there is no room for God AND anything else.”

Robert Adams ♥

I wonder what your grand cross is. Mine yesterday, was a long, footloose summer walk in the Chess Valley flower-meadows outside London … and a x on my phone, as a squabble with a friend cleared up.

From a path along the woods, I saw the river below, full of recent rain and almost spilling its banks over the fields; then it thunders down a little weir. Inside the weir I guess, there is an extra little door to let the pressure through.