The Queen and the King – Part One – A Kabbalist’s Impression

9-11 September 2022

This is Part One of a pair of posts – linked to Part Two, “The Queen, King and Commonwealth – an Epiphany.”

When I saw the photo of the Queen taken on 6 September at Balmoral moments before she welcomed the new PM, I was moved by the radiance in her face … with her departure just 2 days away.

Here is my tribute:

The hearth-fire symbolises the nation’s heart – often hidden behind the coals.  We might see faces in the fire?  A friend  spotted an “Indian master in a turban” – profiled among the flames and so did others – an “accidental”. Britain’s link with India from the Raj until Gandhi and independence was both good and bad;  the relationship struck deep. Vivekananda visited these shores in Victoria’s time; Theosophy and Krishnamurti followed. The earliest Westerners to settle with Ramana Maharshi at Arunachala were English.  My friend said, “Could this be the Queen’s Magid (companion of the Light) waiting to escort her?” 

… and herself perhaps a few months ago … that tired but firm little hand held and greeted hundreds, tens, hundreds of thousands and more?

..

12 September                  TRIBUTE

And here is my first one of the new King. On the Tree of Life the monarch represents “Tifareth” – the country’s heart centre; as Prince of Wales at Highgrove he sowed good organic seed through “interesting times”. I feel I grew up in nature near him like my brother – we are the same age, we share an early fascination for the sheep on Scottish hills AND the tensions of the spiritual quest. This is significant in our post-war generation and the huge changes and unrest afoot.

During his hardworking Princely years I admired his spiritual courage and his stubborn unorthodox dedication to ethical values in environment, architecture, and the business networks; his wide ranging experience of the world, his mature understanding of people, his own flaws, his sensitivity, and wicked sense of fun; his loved one at his side. This King was a visionary pioneer all his life – and it was a hard learning curve for him to balance that with his royal duties.

Something reached out to me in the photo. Those hats are difficult to draw, let alone to bring out the human being under them!

KABBALAH – TOLEDANO TRADITION

My teacher the late Zev ben Shimon Halevi (Warren Kenton) and our new King Charles met several times over the years. They respected one another though Charles was not his student.  

My reflection on the Queen’s funeral and succession is tethered on the Kabbalist principle of expansion and contraction. Britain expanded as an empire and contracted as an island.  Some of us sit on the monarchical fence and some of us on the republican fence. My vocation is to find and honour the Middle Way inclusively; the quality of life which Queen Elizabeth II lived, and  remained loyal to, whatever her opinions may have been. Look at what her dedicated example inspired in people’s hearts around the world. This in essence is likely to endure. With international and government issues she remained resolutely neutral, yet her friendly shrewd words, her touch and gesture travelled many times further than she did.  She was a Servant in the highest sense.

The Tree of Life is my navigational instrument.  It helps me to perceive the elegant Design in the laws of Creation, life and government – action upon reaction – whose electricity is  played out over three pillars  – Jakin/Active, Bohaz/Receptive, and the central Consciousness. Those pillars form a trinity: the poles of male, female and neutral (androgyne).  

For more information of Toledano tradition visit http://www.kabbalahsociety.org

I try to view events and the inner life through the Tree’s Four Worlds – those of Divine Emanation, Creation, Formation (the psyche) and the Material world.   What manifests through our senses and through collective mind, are the lowest rungs of Jacob’s Ladder: the temporary end product of a process which constantly downloads through those Four Worlds.  We are a project yet incomplete.  Should we mistake the scaffolding for the completed building?

The word “Kabbalah” means “Receive”. The Tree’s heart centre is Tifareth, Beauty.  
“Let us form a Vessel.”

As the monarchy and politics play out their roles on the Tree’s right and left pillars, I trace an inner story through the Centre.  

Here is my personal reflection.

 

**

13-15 September             SOVEREIGN ROLE

Was the royal desk in truth ever as tidy as that?

As Prince of Wales, our King possessed many more interests and arms than an octopus and a dedicated court of toiling delegates to carry out his abundant schemes. He has been a walking Renaissance, integrating his enquiring spirituality with pioneering initiatives in government, music, organic farming, architecture, the armed services, the business world, the Duchy of Cornwall, ecology and climate change, politics, watercolour painting, and intimate friendships. He designed and built a new town in Dorchester on holistic community principles. He was instrumental in resurrecting an almost lost art of sacred geometry in the Middle East; he was a close friend of the late Keith Critchlow.

Look up their role in the restoration of the Minbar of Saladin in Jerusalem.  A Minbar is “a Ladder to Heaven” and from it the Imam addressed the faithful.

This fascinating sequence of 5 threaded videos details the 12th century history of the Minbar, its destruction on August 21,1969 by a fundamentalist Christian tourist (Michael Rohan) and its reconstruction 20 years later by the Bedouin architect Minwer Al-M’Heid with the support of the Prince of Wales and Keith Critchlow who together had created a School for sacred craftsmanship.

History came full circle to turn an opening creative spiral – from destruction and war to knowledge and Light.

This is just one example of the King’s (then Prince of Wales) projects and sponsorship which brought nations, communities and cultures together in the spirit of tolerance and peace.  Those who question how much he cost might consider the long-term value for their money?

 

In his words: “What I was so proud about – if I’m allowed to have a tiny bit of pride – is that it was the School … who had rediscovered the underlying geometric patterns that had enabled this great Minbar to be built in the first place, with equally as much love and devotion and skill and dedication and care on the part of all the wonderful craftsmen who put so much of their hearts and souls into this Work.“

..

Let Minwer Al-M’Heid the architect and engineer of the restored Minbar of Saladin, sponsored by the then Prince of Wales, conclude:

“When you see it happening, when you see all these pieces you have worked with, all these 16,000 pieces that are put together with no glue, no nails, all of a sudden appearing as one Unit – that’s the Unity.  That’s what we feel as something which gives us also great humbleness.  

“We see what our ancestors have done and that art has a meaning, not ‘art for art’s sake’.  Although this is a piece of Islamic art it is in fact based on Universal principles – a joy for everyone who sees it.”

The ancient sacred craft – and the network of its Guilds – was resurrected in the nick of time. Without the providential convergence of the Prince of Wales, Keith Critchlow, the King of Jordan and the architect Minwer Al-M’Heid, it would have been lost for ever.  Quiet creative hands awaken a chrism of healing patterns through the chaos of war and walls – a School of the Soul at work.

 

..

All this creative activity is distilled into one surrendered vow to receive and serve the realm. The King is human, oh so human and all too human. Let us watch him with interest!

..

While I drew his portrait here, I watched his and Camilla’s state visit to Northern Ireland pouring oil among troubled Sinn Fein at Hillsborough castle and meeting the Irish President  – a diplomatic gathering of wounds for chrism and the soft way the sovereign glides, encounters, embraces and speaks – imagine that mellifluous twinkle coming at you – and his dear Queen Consort works the room with equal skill – like a bird. Everyone in black. I witnessed a collective therapy … may those fragile fibres begin to cohere and to sustain life – what a privilege to see the King at work!

Here he greets the Irish president

For long intervals the Sky-News commentators were silent for you to hear that gathered genial sound in the room, the conversations, the whispered greetings of many rivers, many fading wars.

During the service in Belfast Cathedral which they attended, Alastair Bruce of “Sky” noted:
“… different elements of the Catholic faith here in Northern Ireland;  and no Sovereign could be under any doubt of the history and importance of these different views on faith, than the King … acknowledging faith, find their own understanding for the way the world works and a Deity in that process … the monarchy wove a tapestry of time through this country (Ireland) …”

A stillness descends and darkens London in the rain as the cortege approaches Buckingham Palace … Repeatedly through the event is this stillness, to hear the birds sing.

In Belfast Cathedral the priests came forward praying one by one to the departed Queen and to her son:

“Deep peace to you 
Deep peace of the running wave to you 
Deep peace of the flowing air to you 
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you 
Deep peace of the shining stars to you 
Deep peace of the Son/Sun of peace 
and the blessing of the Trinity be upon you, Amen.”

Her Majesty’s passing at 96 allowed her son to ripen on the tree in his vigour as Prince of Wales with all his passionate projects. His working life now changes, but he was long in training. He as Sovereign is an inspiration to me; bow to my Liege. When on duty His Majesty is groomed and genial but at home his comfy light suits rumple. Imagine having to wear one on a hot summer day.

In my own way, I join the reverent queue to pass and see the coffin and hear the bell and the muted drum: with my 7B pencil as witness and worshipper I pray for Her Majesty’s safe passage through the astral realms to God; I watch from home her son’s work yesterday in Northern Ireland, he builds on the pioneering grace of her visits there, and her historic handshake. The Sovereign role stepped through the barricades.

..

AS ABOVE SO BELOW

The funeral procession! The people pray and gather along the trails and in the cities to weep and cheer.  Accompanied by her daughter Anne the Princess Royal, close as they were in life, the Queen is borne slowly from Scotland through Britain’s roads and airways to her resting place – to earth the astral design.   After she landed at Northolt in dripping rain at nightfall, the helicopter camera peered down through West London’s dark wet leaves to follow her illumined hearse – a bright fish swimming its private way home.

Kabbalistically the pattern on the ground follows precisely in time (as the days go by) her “holy place of meeting” with Companions of the Light. With those Beings on the inner plane I glimpse swords and knights and royal orders – the nourishment in England’s heart. Protocol is an ancient sacred dance. The King’s job and character may “tango” it a little here and there. A delight to see, is the walkabouts when he and his Queen Consort get out of the car. Straight away they meet the crowd, the King opens his arms forward to receive and embrace the empathy and warm condolence; they answer and chatter and smile, firmly they both grasp the forests of out-thrust joyous hands – touching each and every one – and are beamed by a bristle of small phone screens to capture their image for home.

Paradoxically in a new age of screens and tense security the Sovereign is no longer in a glass case. Touch him!  A security woman stoutly pushed away an iPad – it was a little too large. What a curious interface we have.

Simultaneously the King is in mourning for his Mama – he dreaded the deaths of both his parents. The aftermath of a death is busy at every level. A deeply seasoned sensitive man is in the land’s highest office.

..

17 September                  A TURNING PAGE

When the heart of a nation is touched and quietened, the turbulent streams may knit together again over it, but the Resonance remains. May the family pull together for “our brother Charles”.

Heard in central London today during walkabout (police addressing the phones) – “no selfies please – you can shake hands with His Majesty and wish him well; enjoy the moment, please!”

I also heard the King while addressing the Welsh speak of “the duty to protect the diversity of this country with all my heart as Defender of Faith.” As head of the Anglican church his duty is to defend “the” faith while his ecumenical heart stands for openness in all faiths: for faith itself.

After the children’s vigil last night, the commentator Alastair Bruce spoke of the monarchy:

“to consistently reinvent itself, to be relevant, capable and new … A page is turning in the national story. It is that turned page that provides the opportunity for all these people who are passing through, who wish to make their respects to Elizabeth II, to just get on with their lives, do what they do, have the opinions they enjoy, be furious, be happy, be energetically desiring change, or wanting to achieve different things in their lives. That is what the Monarchy should provide – as the pivot around which people can be themselves and the nation can thrive.”

..

 

19 September                  PROCESSION

… Glued for days to Sky news about the Queen’s pre-funeral progress through the population and the 5 mile queue through a night and day to salute quietly her bier in Westminster Hall; the children’s and grandchildren’s vigils; the King and his son on walkabouts to the astonished queuers.  A little boy broke down in tears after the King shook his hand and wailed “my heart is bursting” – he can hardly bear it.   The commentators say it is unprecedented and unexpected.  Naturally the Queen and her hand-over pierces the nation to the core.  

Sweet breakthrough –  butterfly is camouflaged to the wood grain, the leaf, the flower, the pattern of the Divine – all my life with fishing line as the fish in the pond tossed and played.

I got out my bike and rode to Westminster to immerse in what is going on.  I hoped it wouldn’t be barricaded off and that I might be able to get quite close to the Great Room to offer my respects.  Moving slowly with the friendly flow – like a vast holiday, packing the pavements – I was trickled and nudged across Parliament square and along a street between the Abbey and the Houses of Parliament … and discovered I was just across the road from the entrance to the Hall itself (I had forgotten where it was) and there behind a small-mesh screen was the queue of pilgrims with their backpacks and families.  They had shuffled all night along the Thames from way East of Tower Bridge, igniting international friendships on the way … now reaching their journey’s end … and that profoundly silent and climactic moment. 

This pavement opposite them was not congested. I stood there for half an hour by the Abbey’s tail (East chapel) as if I were in the Hall itself by the bier, I watched and absorbed, I chanted and prayed with Mischa Rutenberg’s Meher Baba songs in my earbuds.

Reflecting on the architecture (I haven’t been around there for many a year) … how interesting  that the Parliamentary ranks and rows of ambitious talk and bitter conflict are intersected by the ancient sacred space of Westminster Hall which holds the Sovereign like a flower.  Peace and stillness descends on each weary pilgrim, a butterfly baptism, the soft kiss of a new order.  Just as the Prime Minister began her new post, the Royal axe chopped through the nation’s busy hurting mind straight to the heart and silenced everything.  

The connection generated a holistic shockwave.  The media express ideas I never believed to hear from their mouths.  The atmosphere among the crowds was not grief but celebration of what draws the nation together in a way no one had fathomed, it gives us all a break.   It was holiday-like, patient, flexible, slow moving, a beautiful clear sunny day with big galleon clouds in the crisp blue sky.  It was multi-culturally British with hundreds of police in tall Dixon of Dock Green helmets. Dozens of cheery Afro Asian crowd-movers did their job with a smile on their faces and helpful advice.  They and the police handed out badges and stickers to children, and guarded the realm.   They must have been so tired!  They, the guardians honoured this unique day.   Tents, chairs, and picnics crammed the street corners.

I stood there singing to her. When a big equipment convoy jammed the road, I moved on, nudging my bike’s front wheel gently along the pavement. I wanted to see the opposite doorway of the great Room near the river where the pilgrims emerge, and to catch sight of their zig zag approach through the Parliament gardens. I ended up crossing the river to push my bike up its south bank contra the pilgrim flow, and onto Westminster Bridge back to Big Ben.  I tried to figure out the geography of the great Hall which in due course fell into place.   The bright flocks thronged the evening sunshine on the big bold river.   Brilliance … and sharp, deep shadows.  Light and darkness – a unifying moment within conflict; an upheaved oasis amidst uncertainty.   It felt like an earthquake.

Back in Parliament Square again I was stuck for a long time – everyone was – awaiting more convoys of “dignitaries”.   When it cleared the crowd streamed in good order with the lightest official touch.  Where it was really thick the crowd managers linked jovially hand in hand to part the rivers.  Yes it was their day.  

I wanted to see the front of Westminster Abbey and to watch the funeral today with a proper sense of scale and having been there.   The crowd gently thinned out with the flow.  I followed a small labyrinth of streets to the other side – via a good old fashioned pub. It spilled out onto the pavement where I enjoyed my pint of Tribute and crisps.  I looked for a while at the Abbey’s exquisite silvery west face, L’Art gothique in the reign of Henry III; then turned to ride home – twilight – via Hyde Park corner and the Edgware road … through a peaceful maze of traffic barriers.   Victoria Street was open for walkers and bikes.  

When a person dies an energy is released; in my observation it is – (as well as the physical body liberating the subtle unlimited one) – that which bonded the friends of her soul.  That entity stands forth stronger than the embodiment.   What within the soul’s lifetime composition drew friends, lovers, conflicts, and fields of effort together?   I watched this again and again at funerals where I saw grief but simultaneously an uplift, a feasting, a meeting of companions in the Light, a birth. 

The Queen united a common wealth.   Unity’s hand is upon the land as it encounters a rough sea of steep challenges, one after the other.   She built and carved her succession in the family like a cathedral – to stand as sanctuary and to last. 

Within each of us who witnessed, it awakes unique and private ways – precisely positioned within “Interesting Times”.

Ash keys – Druidic symbol of rebirth, transformation, and initiation – roots deep in the ground (Photo by Marisa)

..

20 September                  ROLLED LIKE A MARBLE TO REST

Her arrival, committal and sinking through the floor at Windsor was especially moving:  the removal of her ball and sceptre and Crown jewels to the neutral altar;  the Lord Chamberlain breaking the wand of office, the deep solemnity of archetypes with a lot of devoted and very tired people – her entire household and staff.

All over the land there is an awakening, a reminder that there is more to us than the daily bad news!    

It distracted the nation from the grim economy spike which makes millions fear the winter –  battered with Brexit, corona virus and now the financial crisis tripped off with the war in Europe.   The new King is beleaguered and lost his temper in public over a leaky fountain pen.  Throughout the funeral the raw grief for his mother was exposed in his sensitive weathered face.   I drew a picture (below) of him and Camilla relaxing in Maori or Inuit animal hides;  I saw what he loves, her eyes are his home; and I drew the Queen shaking hands with an elephant (Prince Philip looking on, with a quip); and then I drew her looking girlish and radiant – that one developed easily without mistakes.

The nadir point in the King’s life may have been his first marriage: discovering the sweet suitable girl he was hitched to would never be the Queen he needed to help him with his sovereign duty; that nothing he did or tried to help her with could heal or prevent her despair. He with his inborn responsibility to the Realm was trapped, alienated and desperately unhappy.   In those days the family was an unrelenting fortress and the media a pack of hyenas.   It took the divorces and scandals of three of the four children for the fortress to soften into a wounded Windsor castle and for the Queen to emerge as a “public saint” with a strong succession – Charles and after him his son William.   That family suffered everything the century inflicted upon the people, larger than life in the public eye.  The heart of the land beats with their Mystery Play.  

For the first time I heard Camilla’s voice, her duchess-y warmth, her maturity, her style with the King as his Queen consort.   When I draw her I see Charles’s harbour in her eyes.   Very carefully Queen Elizabeth fixed everything in place before she crossed over.   By attrition she over-rode the Church convention deep in herself and in constitutional law.  Perhaps she remembered how Philip was her mainstay … the progressive relaxation in attitude may have been Philip’s no-nonsense suggestion.   She had him by her side, a firm and beloved mate.  Her son Charles has his own – a woman who also loves horses; with whom his mother could laugh and poke fun.   Imagine the pair of women together in headscarves and gumboots, hamming up the “royal”.

The funeral was a huge performance for the populace:  the problems continue.   It awakened a ray of grace and a double rainbow; we need to resolve our own issues from home, not tug the Royal hand to do it for us.   Their example in the Mystery Play is yet a reminder, an inspiration … to try to manage ourselves better; particularly as we enter a period of relative austerity.   This austerity I believe, may peel off some of the consumerist luxuries we have become dependent on.  What are they compared to the post war austerity?  Can the mass-market “more-and-more” which mushroomed since the 1980s be sustained?  Isn’t it the basis for a collapsing economy?  Any presiding government-elect must be its scapegoat.

There is always the balancing out.  So carry the great change.   It may return us towards a lost gold standard – a water table – an authentic economy, built on value.  There is a longing for this.

Tall oak near Plumstead – photo by Marisa

The Queen’s heritage is her eldest son our King as a visible leader of the land.  His nature (despite loyalty to protocol) is to come out and say what he thinks.  People remark, “It will never be the same again”.   May it continue to grow and evolve in this flexible way?  The family itself, downsizing, pruned, and coming out into the open  inspires respect and compassion.

The public eye is a fickle sheep.  Not so long ago the Queen was still “a buttoned up Ma’am” – since then by careful spin she blossomed into “a radiant Granny” who united the world.   My fidelity to her and her family and their job is steadfast since the age of six.   Fidelity is unspectacular and unwavering.   It watches the public wave-machine scoop and push back and forth.  

I am tugged into my core, leaving behind the dross which pretended to matter.  The core effulges and delivers like a white rose … feeling myself suddenly within the veins of a man’s Mystery.   We see in life’s shrines a Mystery Play like the dramatised poems of the early Christians.   In the street close to the nation’s heart I was gently rolled like a marble to rest, to watch the queue enter the oldest and longest room, after a longest night shuffling along the riverbank. Each soul brought to the Queen an open secret – his or her private Treasure.  A little girl danced and jumped and flung her arms up because they were nearly there!  They could touch the building’s stone.

If the Queen’s body in her bier was the nation’s heart, the queue to enter was a vein of blue blood seeking oxygen and the people flowing out from a pulse of peace were a life-filled artery.  Here I am, with rainbow flowers in my heart … like those flung over the hearse on its journey to Windsor; it arrived in the Queen’s home scattered with flowers on roof and bonnet like Botticelli’s “Flora”.   As a seed, a plant, a sacred tree, it was lowered through sacred space into the Vault; into the ground.

Winter – after Botticelli

I was reminded often yesterday of the Rosicrucean Vault (in my alchemy studies), a sacred Tomb (in the divine proportion 5:8) where lies the body of “RC” (the founder of Rose Cross) since medieval times: a sprout.   I see it now within earth; and the Key to open it in the heart.   It is an old fashioned copper key:  it is traditionally a White Rose.  The Queen was lowered into it, without the Crown jewels … which gleam in their lustre on the altar, waiting to anoint her son.

For every family this funeral awakes a memory of a departed loved one. When my father died in 2016 I happened to be recreating and constructing the Rosicrucean Vault within my inner life;  it was provided by timely grace, for into it we lowered him in that bird-singing Devon yard: a grave without lining, a basket coffin, a soul without clothes – and we had the bagpipes for him as well!   followed by a sandwich feast in the village hall – I hear his merry laughter.   His release was a joyous winter gale in the sky and in the ground the snowdrops of early spring.   

My mother wishes he’d been there to enjoy the party and the precision how we cared and planted him in the ground;  but he was, in every detail.

..

Finally –  a royal handshake from the elephant.

CONTINUE WITH THIS LINK TO PART TWO – THE QUEEN, KING AND COMMONWEALTH

..

..

**

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. See also Aquariel and Gene Keys Diary.

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2022. 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/

The Queen, the King and Commonwealth, Part Two – an Epiphany

White Campion 

This post is linked with my previous post with its theme of sacred vessels: “The Queen and King, Part One – a Kabbalist’s Impression”. This second part is more esoteric – in places it ranges freely and poetically. The writing follows various voices in a whimsical synchrony like music. It carries my sacred vessels and my deep source of inspiration.

In Part One’s story I was rolled like a marble to stand near Westminster Hall where people queued to pay their respects to the Queen.  I was just across the road; I spontaneously sang Meher Baba songs to her.  Meher Baba (February 1894-January 1969) is my beloved Teacher of the Light.  Into his Embrace is gathered my devotion to King Charles III and his family and my desire to help support and protect them.

Today I am working on this sketch of the young Meher Baba in a rickshaw

… and here is the King and his son William.

Family portraiture like this picks up an affectionate awareness of his son’s presence through boyhood into maturity;  the evolution of their shared responsibilities; the love in the relationship, the familiar scent and sounds to each other, the ups and downs.   In William’s features is a captivating flavour of his mother and the Spencer lineage.  Last night (most unusually) I dreamed I met and embraced the King … hence this new portrait-study. I feel his mother the Queen (whom he greatly misses) keeps an eye on him.   I see her face in his.  I see both his parents.

Part One (see link at the beginning of this post), featured five youtube videos detailing the King’s extraordinary work in the Middle East when he was Prince of Wales, on a restoration project which unified the “Star, the Cross and Crescent” (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). With Keith Critchlow, the architect Minwer A-Heid and the King of Jordan, Charles helped to resurrect a forgotten sacred craft and its livelihood.

..

In Part Two I want to reflect on what Lord Heseltine said about the Commonwealth – the jewel in the Queen’s crown – and to let the alchemist play …

Queen Elizabeth II’s passing and her funeral brought together a vast global array of companions of the Light.  Our Guardians and preceptors, one and all, were present within every dimension and strata of humanity.  They were tangible in the uplifting and relaxed atmosphere around Westminster and they flanked the cortege; they brought persons from every walk of life together in friendship; a common wealth.

Let us not forget our private moments of meaning in the gathering!
Here I shall write about mine – within the diversity.
A few years ago, I was taken to … I discovered Meher Baba.  Like a panther his Love awaited my life’s ripe moment – then he sprang.

Here he is playing marbles – he was an expert

Among his Mandali (close ones)  his attendant Eruch said, “People ask what did you gain all those years with Baba?  They should have asked us, what did we LOSE?”

Eruch Jessawala and Meher Baba – These drawings of Meher Baba are Copyright Sufism Reoriented

..

..

Jotted down during Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral:

“The Abbey waits to receive this gentle Christian soul.  It doth their crowns bestow and doth their ashes keep.”

“Of course it will be forever different.  It may be as good, it may be in some ways better, but it will be different.”

And all the way from ‘Frisco – “I watched the WHOLE THING – it’s magical –  pure Harry Potter!”

Myrtle among the flowers on the coffin gathered by King Charles from all his mother’s gardens.

Lord Heseltine remarked on the crimes of our Imperial heritage which make us sombre, and its evolution into a Commonwealth of nations which makes us glad;  they are free to remain under the Crown or to find their own way.  Regarding history as a whole, over time the abuses may transmute to a potential for forgiveness, honesty and understanding.

“Where else in the whole wide world could this event take place?” 

There are mutterings – “Who pays for it? Who asked for it?  Who maintains the pageantry? We are starving!  We cannot pay the bills!”

“The Commonwealth, in the King’s heritage and in his long years of international activity, could be a greater force for good in the world than it has been so far.”

“The Queen’s example sets a precedent for spiritual integrity.”

My mind’s inertia is yet LOVED unconditionally. There is a wider garden to grow into.

The Queen crosses over to the higher plane where she is active behind the veil.  Her job continues in her son the King and in all who love her values. 

Her droplet in the waters is not just Britain but the WORLD.  The ripple moves in and out concentrically. 

..

On the same bit of paper some scribbles from an epiphany of voices I heard on youtube –

Do what you like with God the Absolute but beware what you do with saints!  Realise the fragrance of Who we are and share the fragrance of that attainment with others.

He’ll make the clay into a nice ball and put it in the oven.  When you come out you are durable.  He’ll give you a push and then withdraw – then he will see how you respond with his impetus and he will go with the way you express yourself.   If you give your way to the Beloved, he can make it His way for you.

The aspirant’s real task is to pierce through his own layers of self-imposed sufficiency and insensitivity so that s/he may expose a layer of vital awareness to the world about them which would touch them if it could.

Join singers from Ukraine, Russia, the USA, Spain and other nations in this prayer for peace!

..

AN INVOCATION

The other day, I read Rick Chapman’s book “You and I” (White Horse publishing), and it brought me a revelation:

You unconsciously
feel my Avatarhood
within you;
I consciously
feel in you what each
of you feels.

“And yes,” (Rick emailed) “we are and must resign ourselves to being ‘very much in the veil’  in our lives with Meher Baba.
“The one thing that was consistent throughout the lives of His most intimate lovers and disciples was that, however varied their experiences in the world and their experiences spiritually, Baba did not lift the veil on them in their lives with Him, not perceptibly.
“Each and every one was ‘chop wood, carry water’ in his or her grounding in gross Consciousness, regardless of how close one might be to Enlightenment or Liberation.
“That is the way the Avatar works, and it is unique among spiritual masters.
“Although He may vouchsafe some experience or other to this one or that, He keeps everyone ‘under the veil’ so as to keep the ego in check.
“If you want sightseeing, you go elsewhere; if you want the experience of your True Self as God, you go to the Avatar.”

..

Chop wood, draw water.

Just as I am – heavy sanskaric mind and all – at least I am no tourist.   This is the Earth the Being enjoys and holds me to.   I wondered to this day why with my inner tuition and the gift of access, I cannot meditate/drop out or have blissful cosmic experiences.  I did KNOW – FELT – that what I have and love and am, is complete and real – the rose with its thorns and leaves;  an unfurnished room washed by the Light of the sea.  

What I am and you are is utterly satisfying, including my egoic look-at-me fixtures and fittings and the mirror, including my vanity and my fear of being rejected or disapproved of.  I am here in earth living this whole fascinating egoic landscape.  It is not my Beloved’s pleasure to move the blinds a little for me to drop out into samadhi.   It is my Beloved’s pleasure to play with me around the rocks and through all weathers.

He says with twinkling eye, “Ripe fruit in My hand, this is a generative process – I hold its harvest.”

I am a little gem, a gooseberry, a marble, a prasad he lightly tosses with perfect aim.   Like His Mandali, his close ones and Lovers, I am happy to serve without the veil being lifted; I am His garment.  Love is the Transfiguration I behold on the Mountain with Yeshua.

Like a periodic landslip shifting a little further each time, I trust him more.   Before this day there were rights and wrongs I clutched to myself and suffered with.

..

“Am I a Saint? Why you must be the Avatar! Nothing encloses you.” Copyright Sufism Reoriented

The Wind came up and lifts away Aphrodite’s hair.

..

..

REGARDING THE COMMONWEALTH – A DISTILLATION

Visita Interiore Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem  … Enter the inner Earth, put right/equilibrate what you find here, and bring forth the hidden precious Stone

(From the ‘Emerald Table’, Wisdom of Hermes Trismegistos)

This is echoed in Meher Baba’s words: “To penetrate into the essence of all being and significance, and to release the fragrance of that inner attainment for the guidance and benefit of others, by expressing in the world of forms, Truth, Love and Beauty – this is the sole game which has any intrinsic and absolute worth.  All other happenings, incidents and attainments can, in themselves, have no lasting importance.”

..

More than ever, when wading in sludge, carry the lamp and sweep out the closets of the heart.  Let it SHINE.   LIFT THE LEVEL; be of good cheer.

Some ideas emerge in me organically – relating to Britain’s empire heritage.  With its expansion, we  polluted the conquered lands, destroyed their culture and ancestral lineages and sold the people into slavery.  We extracted from them the wealth and left them hungry.

Over the last century with the precision of Karmic laws and two World wars  Britain’s global territory shrank.

Eruch Jessawala said (earlier in this post), “People ask what (enlightenment)  did we gain, all those years with Baba.  They should have asked us, what did we LOSE?”

What do we need to lose in order to restore equilibrium?

What is or was or will be the “Work on what was spoiled“?
This phrase arose unsought, it is the title of hexagram 18 in the I Ching.

“What has been spoiled through man’s fault can be made good again through man’s work.”  Here is “Dream Arc 18 ” from my work with the Gene Keys animal-kingdom archetypes. The Shadow is the flea, the Gift is the tiger, the Siddhi or Way of Freedom is the hoopoe. That phrase “work on what has been spoiled”  happened to drop into place at this time of writing – the period for the 18th hexagram is 27 September-2 October.  The Zodiac sign is Libra and I happen to be exploring the theme of balance – a classic nudge from the real Artist who works through me

The above link to Dream Arc 18 “happened to” contain an appreciation of my Kabbalah teacher Warren Kenton (Zev ben Shimon Halevi) written on the anniversary of his passing – open it and scroll down.   For more information about his work visit http://www.kabbalahsociety.org

..

Work on what has been spoiled – Isn’t this King Charles’s life long dedication – to return  minerals, trace elements and nutrients to the soil?  Not many are aware that he is an expert hedge layer, farmer and gardener.  His country home at Highgrove nurtures strong organic seed – as befitted a Prince of the realm – whose generations will move beyond his property and invigorate the land.

During his mother’s long reign some of the exploited nations became a “common wealth” – a reclamation in process, dear to her heart.  Ultimately its aim is to restore their individual heritages, conserving a productive web of international friendships.   This was her inner and outer work. It is now the Sovereign’s promise that these nations may retain or discard their constitutional connection without losing the cordial relationship.

The real function of the modern monarchy as I see it, is a “tapestry through time”.  That doesn’t much interest the headline-makers who thrive on gossip and divisions.  In its quiet persistence, its problems and many interwoven interests I see a path of real cooperation and hope.

It is not “plain sailing” because it is in the urgent interest of many countries in the world today to redefine their boundaries.  That movement may account for a number of painful “brexit’s”.  Coming from someplace deeper than the daily politics which act and react as its instrument, the process is more like a global weather pattern – literally a climate change.  There are floods, there are cracks and shrinkage, there is new growth.

For consideration:
“Common wealth” is an interesting expression, suggesting a restoration.  Assets which separated the haves from have-nots are just beginning to be regarded as values in common. Internet technology stirs us into a homogenous uniformity without boundaries.  This may prompt an instinctive struggle for individual forms of expression.   The paradoxical tension is suffered acutely – played out through noble humanitarian efforts, madness, abuse, creative visions, and repressive regimes.  For many of us it racks our bodies physically – if we cannot contain the paradox we are tugged in all directions.

What is the inner meaning of a commonwealth?  Perhaps the wellbeing of the people – to bring them back to their roots and honour the earth where we live. When Empire suppressed indigenous peoples and did not work for the common good, it removed them from their land and root which was their mother. The world is disturbed – travelling away from and seeking home.

What do we distil in life, and how is it different in principle from what we “extract”?

..

THE PROBLEM WITH EXTRACTING

Distillation is a kind of flowering: wait and see.
To extract something suggests that we do not put it back   Contemporary culture is based largely upon extraction, on separating from the whole and mixing the pieces in a way which adulterates and actually weakens the essence.  In the health industry the ingredients separated from plant or chemical compound are artificially reinforced as medicine – a visual market of boxes and pills.   That leaves a lot of waste and want.

In the Elder Medicine the whole plant was known and used; yes, extracts from it were taken and boiled or “reduced”.  What was taken out was respected and given back – as with crop rotation.  Ancestral recognition of the plant’s whole energy field was and is the key.

native american tobacco plant

There is an analogy with the use of medicine plants for recreational or addictive drug use.  When one part of a plant is amplified against the whole it is corrupted and becomes toxic. To me this suggests an imbalance in nature, an unbalanced culture. If we select pieces of indigenous culture out of their matrix to get “high” on or (for the over-sensitive) to numb and blot out the world’s ferocity, isn’t that the voyeur’s way?  Recreational drugs extracted from wisdom plants, are an encumbrance, an imbalance, and delay the return to the Heart of All.

Alternatively the wisdom plant has an emanation with which to sit quiet and hear the universe. We might be near it or see it a thousand miles distant, for it is in the etheric field.  There is no requirement to imbibe, smoke or ingest it; no need for “experiences”, no search for sensation.  To be lovingly present in Nature’s seamless silent dialogue was and is the way of indigenous elders and of the gardener; it is not that of the “spiritual” pedlars or merchants.

Tobacco was a sacramental indigenous plant and non-addictive – the removal of its heart or essence, adding noxious chemicals for stimulus, is abuse … which creates addiction.

Addiction happens where a “hole” in the wholeness is made – the way back home is constantly removed! –  entangling the emotional, psychological and spiritual realms.  This may apply to any substance which is “twisted” or exploited for consumer use. What to do?  We face and must find some way to manage this enormous problem in the nutritional field.

It starts here at home with attitudes.

“If we are abused, then you can’t receive our gift to you. 
If we are abused, you won’t benefit from us. 
And if we are abused, it won’t do you any good. 
Speak to us with your heart, and all will be well.” 

I was touched by this message from David Rainbow, in an online discussion about the destructive use of marijuana – the plant spoke to him.  It said it shouldn’t be smoked, cut with stimulants, or forced into being a drug (which is abuse).  The Medicine is a wisdom for us to quiet our mind and listen to. We are: I am the body of the plant.   It came to me that I might simply visualise and honour the plant in its purity – the true conversation with it.

The message is “stop misusing and misconstruing us”.
And stop misusing and abusing ourselves!

To extract is to exploit.  To extract is to remove, condense or exaggerate a desirable feature for marketing or sensation – like a news item divorced from its context;  like gossip; like opiate extracted from a plant;  like fossil fuels from earth so they pollute;  like annexing a country. Religious bigotry is extracted from revelation.

To extract is to limit, to claim for oneself and even to rob.

It is equally so in the selective view of life, my judgements, desires, fears, and conditionings.  My acquisitive attitudes and choices can contribute to an unhealthy economy.

What a lot the little plant has to tell us!

..

FARMER CHARLES

I offer here my appreciation of a human being, a Kingly pioneer in the search for our indigenous Celtic heritage and wisdom.  Here he is at work hedge-laying –

“Sir, In the face of mockery, abuse and heavy resistance you developed an ’empire’ of organic farming and education … and in due course the people ate out of your hand. The Duchy estates with their high quality free-range produce became today an immensely successful business enterprise.   The profits helped to underwrite your other initiatives in the “common wealth”. The Duchy is now in the hands of your son William.  

“Let us gather together, let us join together, let us form a vessel to catch the dew of Heaven.”

..

AS ABOVE SO BELOW

Distillation (associated with Virgo) is the sixth of 12 Zodiac signatures of alchemy.

To distil is to raise the level of our concern; to reach and allow inspirational resources of love within us which by their nature are more than a match for the world’s ferocity.

It is within each individual’s capacity to “be still and distil;  be of the whole.”  And then to act.

For myself to distil is to hang out all day with an insight or an unfolding creational process – like this one with the Queen and King and Commonwealth –  until the Wine delivers its bouquet.

The old alchemists used to say, “Carry the elixir but don’t let it fall on the ground, don’t confine it to the verbal world of linear ideas and chitchat, else it will raise up cities and delusions against you.”

Lower mind tends to subtract from the whole; forming opinions, re-engraving old fossils, and being possessive – the cult of competition.

To distil is to receive the dew, be still – the essence to shine without seizing it.  Like a rare malt whisky it emanates … and then in our nature, one thing opens into another the gift of abundance: the seed of a common wealth.  Such is the distillation and its potential.  It brings insight of what needs to be done practically.  It is contagious. The light of interior jewels rises in a pearly perfume through earth’s crust.

I am bowled over with the open depth of what I am shown

… and for us to be Lovers, not try to be saints.
Open your heart.

Beloved One
who are in and of my being,
hallowed be your Name.

Thou art that on earth
as it is in heaven.

Give me this day my daily bread
and forgive my errors as I forgive
those of others

And lead me not to trespass
but deliver me from bondage

For Yours is Malkuth the Earth,
Beauty, Root, Truth, Purity
in the Tree of Life
amen.

Click this Link to “THE QUEEN AND KING PART ONE”

Here is a much earlier post https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/tales-from-the-watershed-enoch-and-the-well/ – the vision of Sovereignty in a dream I had in 1975.  It companions this post!

**

**

**

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. See also Aquariel and Gene Keys Diary.

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2022. 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/

A book “Lighthouse in Kettle’s Yard” – and a Dandelion

“My fascination with details will I hope never cease. Each object is a miracle.” (Jim Ede, “A Way of Life”, p.35)

Here is something for you to open on a rainy Lockdown afternoon …

https://lighthouseinkettlesyard.com

I produced this book and basic website almost 18 months ago.  Since then, there seemed to be no leisure time to develop the project or market it!  And still there isn’t.  It finds its natural course like the way it was written.

The website describes my book about what it was like to grow up “in the influence of Kettle’s Yard”. It contains a blog and some (rather lengthy) readers’ feedback to plough through; and a link for you to buy it.

..

Photo from “A Way of Life” p.75 (1984)

What is inside your own house that you treasure and got so used to, that perhaps you forgot to notice it?

..

Kettle’s Yard itself is for the time being closed along with everything else, but you can visit https://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/about/ and take a virtual tour around Jim’s house (look under “Collection” or scroll down to Resources and then “Take a Tour”).

Jim’s spiral at Kettle’s Yard

..

..

And a Dandelion clock for the time of now …
found this on facebook:

Love laughs at locksmiths and at little viruses.  Love IS viral – a dandelion in a field of buttercups.  My evolving Co-virus “insight”  emerged from the beginning of the crisis, but continues to clarify:  a movement towards adjusting overall balance in the bigger picture.

How can a caterpillar’s worldly dirge comprehend … the butterfly inside … which inexorably cracks the chrysalis?

The inner nature of the co-virus is its homeopathic antidote. 

The condition is psychological; obsessive collective fear about covid19 causes many more people to fall ill and die of it than would otherwise.  The amplified attention and media dirge weaken the physical system into habit-channels of expectation.  

From what I have heard, the co-virus signature is an economic one – a depth change to the existing global Economy towards retrieving a real value-standard;  a more equally distributed wealth, and the coming forth of our humanity to one another.   This great Change initially generates fear, emotional insecurity and stress in relationships. 

Then we must turn to face our music, we must reach above and below the pattern of the “fields we know”  – reach deeper and higher, reach inward –  for an information source which touches and activates our natural resilience.

For this, we are in a general agreement to slow down, value what we notice inside our  houses, and take responsibility with our environment.  “I” start to see “you” in a different way.  In places where difficult issues are confined, this can be hard at first – almost unbearable. And it may take time and commitment to illumine those caverns often rocky and harsh – or confused and crowded.  The walking and the lamp are love. What is love?  A being-with.  Create space for our Self and children to dance in, and respect the other’s. Give room to come and go; to breathe.

What is the antidote, the inmost nature of co-virus?   Joy and the creative uplift of love for life and for others – a conscious choice.  It is incredibly catching.  The songs which keep coming and the way we hear our own – and turn to help each other in crisis – are doing just that.

Knock on door.
“Who’s there?”
“Me.”
“There is no room for two of us.”

Knock on door.
“Who’s there?”
“It is You.”
“Come.  We are within.”

Jalal Al DinRumi

..

..

..

Dancer by Gaudier-Bzreska in Kettle’s Yard

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. See also Aquariel and Gene Keys Diary.

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2020. 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/

Under the Grass and Topsoil

 

“The Prime Emanation … is the Revolution inside our being. It’s a process that’s going on in many of us now, making us more and more uncomfortable, and that’s a good thing. It’s a mystical cleansing of the emotional system and it’s why many people who begin working with the Gene Keys quickly lose a lot of weight and others fill out to just the right amount. We’re coming into balance, because we’re throwing out old genetic patterns. It’s about pruning back our desire nature because the solar plexus centre needs a new kind of environment. It needs a cleaner, more open environment, less cluttered with old frequencies. 

“One day we’ll return to the source. It won’t happen because of anything we do but because our particular story has found its way home. All we can do is follow the Emanation of our Love. We think we’re travelling into the future, but we’re really travelling back to the beginning…”

– Richard Rudd Excerpt from the 64 Ways

..

“Mend what was broken. Rekindle the Children’s Fire … We call this work ‘village building’ or ‘culture repair’.”  I had an email from Mac Macartney responding to my request several weeks ago, how can I find my pre-Roman “Angols”?  In his book The Children’s Fire he made it sound rather straightforward but now he says it is a matter of dowsing and resonance as there are no records.  The Roman conquest destroyed our indigenous Druid infrastructure.  How these tales echo through history!

In Mac’s book and journey, a map he drew of Wales shows evocative names of Celtic tribes and elders: Gangani, Silures, Demetae, Cornovii, Ordovices, Deceangle … which spread across the land.  I shall look at these names reflectively from time to time.

I feel profoundly rooted English, uninclined to move from HERE.  I hold the ground like an oak or elm; an Angle Sea – the Mona.  I loved what Tolkien wrote about the elm groves in his Lost Tales.  Tolkien was one of the Elder Ones, reproducing the mythos.  I have this inbuilt interconnectivity; the neural and nitrous fibres throughout the ground which I return to.  The body of Light Emanates. It is not a mere sponge.

..

So in this moment in the earth I have a staff which illumines and is positive.  Let it lead this direction when and where it wants.  Let it shine.  It is a seer.  It sees through all conditions and fractures to the embracing Wholeness of the emanation.  I’m reminded of my painting of the light – the heart – within the earth, and a hammer, a geologist’s hammer which gently taps the geode.

I grew up in Kent, Scottish Highlands, Yorkshire Moors, south Cornwall, Surrey north downs and Quantock Somerset – all before I reached my teens; for we moved house a half-dozen times.  That is a landscape map provided!  I have walked it so much and flowered, that there is not much need to “know” the names.  The essence and loyalty and continuity are here.   It is like looking at the Geological Wall Map of Great Britain in my father’s room – the extrusions and worms of colour told us where and on what rocks we live – north Yorkshire was pale yellow.  And I became a painter for a time.

The gift awoke by the sea in Cornwall Caerhays age six, and that marks probably my descent from the Western peoples, touching ground.  It encompasses my long-ago walks in mid-Wales (tent by the Severn river), Snowdonia and the Pembrokeshire coast … and recently, along the Hertfordshire Way and Chilterns north of London.  The Hermit’s staff is a dowsing rod and also a blind person’s white stick! – for in this lifetime in those places I did not know consciously what I touch.  But they made me an artist.

I live all my adult life in the city which the Romans developed and called “Londinium”. Here I hear through the urban density, the heart of the country and its winter birdsongs and noble river.  Here staying at home for the last 50 years I find space for the soul to wander and flourish; and my present tribe.

My room is an untidy sanctuary of peace with a few trees outside, a busy railway to the north and a street to the south.  This morning as usual when writing, I feel the root of light sink deep, the silken stillness.  At Manor Farm in Somerset we had a giant elm down by the pond whose roots, I was told, spread right across the field under the grass and topsoil.  And so I know the tree’s root-system mirrors its bole; and I feel the Spirit moving into flesh through the stellar fibres of my body’s capillaries;  I am nothing other than this network of the fields and streams and woods;  I am this un-tapped and immense human conscious potential which – after millenia – we awaken into, again … and again.  My Druid knowledge lives today in the core wisdom of many esoteric languages which thrive.  It has a singular pulse in the veins:  I love.  I love.

The old alchemists said simply – don’t drop the wisdom (dew) on the ground.  Most persons cannot understand it, they break it up into cities and beliefs.  Carry it in the vessel which perennially and quietly mends itself with the Sun.  The wisdom is osmosis and photosynthesis: the Sun, the rain and the Earth.  No matter how apparently concealed, the same magnetic shines in each one of us.  It is in process of opening its dimension through our temporal fantasy of destruction.  As the living creature awakes and yawns it cracks the scales.

How tiny is my surface understanding within the solar system and each of its planetary gems.

The silence when the wisdom river is coming and when the oak is flowing is deep.  The magic we know is so immense that the essence transcends and permeates the particles which are knowledge.

There is no need to “know”.  There is every way to “be” and to recognise the flavour.  Taste it.  The animals, the trees, insects, birds and flowers taste it, un-obstructedly whenever they pause.  Wisdom dissolves manufactured outlines and provinces, and for humans this is hard.  Take a step back from the unfolding history and see the process.  The wisdom is invincible and the DNA awakens into this mutation now: frail dragonfly nymph on watery stem – its thorax burst open with the sun’s warmth into wings.

Illustration from Richard Rudd’s book of poems and prayers – ‘The Spring of Dreams’

To remember this is to collect together with Mother Isis the scattered limbs of Osiris and breathe on them with love.  This is perennial in our condition.

Early infancy: Glensaugh, Scotland

Under this tree I planted a small crystal in 2002. The line across is not the horizon, it is where I joined two photos together.

My grandmother in the grass – Easter Ross, Scotland

Quantock dancers

Seven sisters, High Point, Quantock hills

 

So the Quantock hills at present are my “walking country” where my mother still lives.  There is a long Somerset settlement in my life.  My home was there from age 9 until 20. Later, my father moved to North Devon and discovered in the next parish his Yule ancestors, with whom he had himself buried.  In Somerset and North Devon were extensive explorations, our home and our adventurous family holidays at Hartland.

These places where the heart is placed and soaks up the land are pointers towards my ancient tribal locations and relationships.  The seed is blown from tree by the wind or carried by bees to fertile ground by the laws and movement of Nature.  My father was an organic farm-manager, bee keeper and musician.  When I grew up my first regular job as a portrait artist took me all over England and as far as Gordonstoun in Scotland.  In each place I worked, there was first the need to go for an orienting walk and understand the landscape, roads and contour.  My early work is scattered around the country’s living-rooms like seed – many hundreds of portraits of children.  This was Providential.

This brings me to the inner meaning of our children’s fire.  Although it is threatened, there are in many pockets of the land, oases where the healthy seed is cultivated. In due course the whole seed will overcome the adulterated and even take into itself what is good in the latter.  Why else is there this incredible enriching mix and mulch and ferment in the human gene pool – through the overwhelming agony of frontiers, fear, bordering and displacement – why else the cross-fertilisation and upheaval of racial roots?  An innovative and gentle power of the seer is being born through these generations.  The environmental threat catalyses a revolutionary Symbiotic caring.  The animal and plant kingdoms in Gaia no longer agree to be our mere playground or unconscious prey.  The new Consciousness – already sprouting through the ground – is to unify and to nurture.

My mother’s garden in the early spring

The children’s fire?  It is this transformative glow of the quickening, the seed.  On the Underground in London I watched yesterday a father with his sons – he had an interesting lined child’s face, an elder Saxon with soft tired eyes, an artist perhaps with the sky; and one of his boys sat with him and stroked the back of Dad’s neck and untidy hair.  Love and care.

In the seed is the fire which is Life.  In the Upanishadic wood is the latent fire; in the grass the cow and in the milk the cream.  In the hen, the egg is our solar system.

Parvati waters trees. This image is copyright The Sacred India Tarot deck published by Yogi Impressions in 2011

The healing way is for those of us who have access and liberty, to attend to the quantum particle on behalf of the majority.  The consciousness is what there is.  Each root in the ground illumines and connects with all the others.  The quantum, homeopathic in dilution, is beyond prediction’s enclosures.

The needle’s point of Sufi thread pierces vertically the dense horizontal matrix: the tapestry.  What do I sew?

Light the fire for our children.  Be warm of heart.  Make this picture daily with the thread through the tapestry.  The only disease – the root of all diseases – is any form of our excess.  Balance is inevitable.

..

..

..

..

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. See also Aquariel and Gene Keys Diary.

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2020. 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/

Drawings of Animals, Persons and Phoenix

1 November 2019

This is a big post, mainly pictures, most of them drawings I did this year … with some story as it arose.

The sketches of endangered creatures in the Amazon rain forest were commissioned last January for a children’s book to raise awareness .  However they were not in the style which the author needed; so here they are for an airing.

The Amazon fruit bat wakes in Plato’s cave.  Can you see the snail? – (2018)

bespectacled bear comes out into the open – 2019

Doesn’t each creature tell a story of someone you know, or of yourself on this day or that?

spider monkey 2019

Here, he lets go …  Instant enlightenment is on call

poison dart frog 2019

but it isn’t quite … what the seeker expected to find?

giant amazon snail 2019

Very slow and steadily he made his way along the Path, feeling every element …

flying fruit bat 2019

until he could open his heart and fly home …

fruit bats resting 2019

… to rest upside down in the boundless with his friend.

..

Now here are some family snaps:

man with cat 2018

man caving, birth 2018

my friend,  she sits like an eagle 2018

new generation: this is her dad, just back from the war. She’s in the pram  …  (2018)

..

These sketches are from my earlier post with Shakti Rising:

Ramakrishna and Yantras – 2019

Sarada Devi wife of ramakrishna (1994)

..

I found this on a friend’s bedroom wall when I went on a visit – I had forgotten all about it.

My father’s afternoon nap – circa 1972

peter (my father) in devon –  2019

Brave bears …

and a fox at dawn:

..

Copy from Botticelli; the winds are angelic forces – birth of Aphrodite 2019

this old sketch turned up of Douglas and Catherine Harding – perhaps 1996.  They are built open for each other. They tell friends to “See” who they really, really are,  like birds on the wire.

..

Hand mudras – sacred gestures 2019

I went for a walk and met a beautiful nose on four legs

Arthur Koestler 2019 – an old mentor

..

Here is a story:

Celebrate Nyousha (1997-2019), 2019

In August this year, we held a wake for Nyousha. She was only 22, the cancer started when she was 17. She wrote in her diary that each day, each moment holds the potential to make a change in the world; her courageous statement of living and loving more intensely through her death.  She was a feminist and an activist; she deeply searched her soul.  This young Persian artist had to die just as she grew up and opened wide. Her radiance illumined and inspired her loved ones.  Nyousha is among us.  She is grieved; and yet she is free.

In the Phoenix Community house in North London, I have my art room. The fur of old Kabbalist visionary was removed from my room for the weekend, and replaced with the young girl’s vibrant life for her family and all their friends to come and see; her exhibition, her gallery, her soul. We hung her work also all around the house.  About 300 people feasted in the garden and there was music.  Afterwards her brother carefully put my infrastructure back where it was.  My life made room for one whose adult life only began.

Today writing this post and uploading my portrait of her, I  discover it is her birthday: 1 November.  In Scorpio’s depth today, Mercury pauses to rest on one foot before re-winding the spiral backward. Hence, I reflect further …

Zoroastrian rock phoenix

Creative work supports the soul in yet another miracle of reality.  In shock and acceptance, the phoenix turns, ascends within and sings the outrageous alchemical moment in the heart and in Sol.

On hearing it’s her birthday, I got out my colours and struck for Nyousha this coin:

..

Sketch of Nyousha & a climbing stretch – 2019.

..

woman running with wolf – 2019

..

Here now are a few sketches of climbers – always an amusing allegory with conditions of pilgrimage, ascension, meeting our Shadow, call it what you will.  We help each other:

Momo Freehill, bouldering 2019

..

Climbing at the Castle Centre 2019.  That is me, near the spectacles, belaying my daughter.

Self and dropped knee/chimneying …

..

… and herons, from a small book I just completed, about an artist I met when I was 16 – there are experiential roots of Islamic and Hebrew calligraphy:

Heron 2 2019

Alif aleph yod heron 2019

..

My grandfather, copied from a black and white photograph by Richard Poussette Dart which I found in a book at Kettle’s Yard.  I was deeply impressed with the way Poussette Dart portrays him as a working mystic.

Jim Ede from a photograph by Richard Poussette Dart 2019

..

More of the climbing companions.  This oak tree grew out of a sheer gritstone rock face in Yorkshire.

climbing on Agdon Rocher 2019

..

Tom on the  slabs

..

Back home, my Rilke gallery begins to grow!

Rilke 3

Lou Salome and Rainer Maria Rilke 2019 

..

Procession – 2018

And: my journal today. I want to say again (not didactically) that when I am deeply reflective, it appears to me that we humans are within a genetic matrix which is creating a new Aquarian symbiosis. The animal kingdom is under threat of extinction by the present human imbalance.  Yet, looking at the countless small initiatives to protect and conserve a species and restore it to its habitat, I see the birth of a kind of care which did not exist when the beasts and birds were our plentiful hunting ground or amusement.  Against the ravages still being made against nature, human conscience in her depth strata expands the palette, embracing our shadows with the dawn.

Care and respect for the animals includes “the soft animal of our body” and  soul within us, in all its beauty.

My daughter Marisa with her cat when he wasn’t well

For me, Gaia is not the earth-being alone – for we are not separate.  Gaia is our conscious human-earth relationship: to care.  The breakthrough comes where hope seems to be lost.  The condition is unbearably painful before I agree to pause, turn and evolve – individually as collectively. Nothing can prevent the evolutionary cosmos in the DNA.  The evolution proceeds at all levels interwoven: spiritual through psychological to the instinctual body and her seasons; the plant, mineral and subatomic universe.

A phoenix rises from the ashes to our call: transfiguration.

As the sun rises over the horizon it throws long sharp shadows across the field.  These confront us in our world at present.  Pluto’s movement through Capricorn de-constructs old institutions to make room for new birth.  Watching life in the cauldron, as hologram, I observe these basic principles time and time again through the chaos.  Since 2012 particularly, we are required to embody the ageless wisdom and to get real: our boots on the ground.  As the linear convention of time changes its nature, so emerges in both men and women the feminine, the unconditional rejoicing creature within us who flowers and gives birth.

..

Sleeping swan (1988). Her nose is where she flies

..

..

..

**

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. See also Aquariel

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2019. 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/

Philosopher Stone

20 September 2019

I woke to a Promethean poem this morning.  Unfortunately it faded.  I am left with the sense of a large almost-round grey pebble.  The message within its fall to gravity was the fire.  It is the fire. It was bonded with the flow of water. But water is flowing Stone. The water which flows as Stone contains the fire which falls to Earth;  each day a fall of meteorites most of them incandescing to powder in the atmosphere – Air; these primordial processes prevail regardless of small human guilt.

The Stone is in my hand and its weight flies into the infinite core fractal of interior space, and inside each of Jim Ede’s pebbles is God.  This is noticed through the anguished human claptrap.

Two realities reside here: one, that we humans spoil the earth, and the other: how can we so arrogantly presume to?  It is in Gaia’s destiny to clear some of her surface areas for a time and alter the climate composition. As our Solar system moves deeper into the Photon belt, each organism is aware and agitated through changes in the DNA.

This is an unusual and Holistic idea. The substance or impression of Holistic ideas transcends – is greater than their composition.   Their composition – how they print out – is subject to the interpretation: the words.

The substance, the dimensional weight falling through my body however – this is true, and it is what I call transmission, reception of the Promethean fire.

 

Let it do its work.  Through countless receiving channels it is spelled out into this or that interpretation.  Generally speaking there is agreement, that when we fully embrace and accept responsibility with our suffering, there is joy.  There is unexpected, boundless joy, whatever appears to go on, or apparently engulfs it. Where one spark is covered for a time, another shines out.  Watch a glowing fire in the hearth; it whispers along the wood like a slow snake.

Human beings need to suffer from their rattling thought and its environmental disorders, disasters and creation of deserts, in order to begin to step free from this convention mind – to work with and as Nature, Gaia, not against.

“To begin to” is the operative word here.  Fixed holding-positions get left behind.  Awaken into prayer and progress with the day, again and again and again and again;  recreate the Power of Creation. An infinitesimal neutrino penetrates the leaden shield into the star; from star to star … again comes around the Promethean gift of Fire, the spark within each of us planted; the phoenix bird of song and light and joy in the recovery and resurrection:  “I am the Resurrection and the Light.”  “I am the love of the Light.”  “I am the core of Love itself.”  “Let there be Light.”

Coursing the sap in stem, nectar aflame,
each power to one beloved nadi clings.
The force through spine’s sushumna sings
‘All presence’, ‘Heart’s ocean’, ‘Swan of peace’, ‘Supreme’.*

As Her light pervades my body, I am detached;
my form as Self, Self and the world are matched

[ * – In one of my Ramana Gita sonnets, these are names roughly corresponding to atma nadi (Self), para nadi (that which is beyond manifestation) and amrita nadi (nectar of immortality) in the text.  The nadis are the meridian map within the Yogic body.]

phoenix bird of fire

..

The alchemist blows a little on the banked fire, and it glows.   The breath. The body.

In a stone-age cave, the warming flame flows along the log like lava, like water with Light which is air and the Earth’s solar core.  Everything, each and every phenomenon has this potential (See the link to “beyondhumanstories” further down this post) …  within the plastics and perverted materials, nothing is other than the core.  Sooner or later it returns to the core, as technologies arise to biodegrade our unconscious waste, for we become conscious, first individually here and there, and then collectively as a tide through tipping-point.  Alchemists are able to quicken the interior process, and to see above the tide.  Wherever an alchemist is at work, the environment blossoms.  Alchemists are gardeners.  We potter and we ponder and we fish.

..

The slow fire along the log burns out old Karma and all its fascination and even beauty.  It cleanses the slate, to the horror and grief of all who saw and were aware of, for instance, the burning of the Amazon forest. A cruel human may have caused it or encouraged it to spread; but it was to be.  It shocks and burns the soul.  It starves further the respiration’s resources.  The respiration is the whole planetary balance and swirl of currencies and weathers.  Why is this happening?

I think the new human will have, and has already a bond with nature, with creature, fish, plant, tree and rock which we used to plunder and exploit and harm.  The new human is so deeply, painfully connected with what she harmed that she plays into the restorative power of transmutation and the burgeoning of Life.  Humankind is no longer separate from the forest and creatures of the field, no longer separate from the seas, no longer a player of golf.

The new human re-learns the ancient unifying magic;  the art begins where nature ceases to act.  Already this is developing as a fact.   Those who despaired and yet were willing to hope, drop away from the old system. They begin to work with the Sun, creating local solar technologies.  They nurture the family and patterns of relationships.  Relationships are geometries and sacred forms and problems of harmony.  With the ripple effect, they enter and inspire one another.

A drawing from Douglas Harding’s ‘Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth’

I wanted to say … concentric waves or ripples.  Where the Stone falls and breaks surface, there is a centrifugal ripple: concentric rings.   These move subtly through immediate society and communities, creating further impacts and their rings.  Watch a fall of rain on the pond.  I don’t publish 99% of my work because it could be misunderstood.  I am not totally sure of it myself, or of peoples’ capacity to misinterpret and to twist.  The Stone goes on and on falling into my fractal core and there is no time to stop and buff it up into shape to pass through the gate; for always it comes.  I trust that where I work, the Companions of the Light take care of it. Their power to reach the ground and to start a wave passes through where I sit and write it down, and travels to other antennae.  I write the same thing over and over and over for the telegraph wire.  I’m a starling sitting on it.  There is never enough of it.  I write and sing so others unseen are inspired.  There are notes that travel above and below the standard spectrum; the invisible octaves of the ground of being.

Starling & murmuration – Image from allaboutbirds

While I was cleaning the house upstairs yesterday, Genevieve’s conversation with Paula Aamli (https://beyondhumanstories.com/podcast-hope-beyond-hope/?fbclid=IwAR3SX5Z8FWTfCgpMmcSayAIQghOQgphJJaq4Mx8c394Ey4X80_e4Yht4Pz8 uplifted and helped me to turn to face my pain; for Paula discovered – through facing hers – that though the present human engine is destroying its future, there is an unexpected response of joy, gratitude, discovery and noticing the infinite resource of life even in a walled in city garden, and certainly within the soul’s courage.  There is more to this than we know.

It is the infinitesimal fractal potency of the small!  The 9^thGene key is called the Power of the Infinitesimal.  Beauty is the story, the dimension which cuts through every science.

Brancusi’s Prometheus on Bechstein, Kettle’s Yard

I was told long ago, in 1969: Your beautiful thoughts are not enough.  The stuff of beauty is sterner.  The way is to evoke and inspire that beauty in someone else.   Ah, but I see today, the beautiful thoughts are, and create the Way.  The beauty didn’t come into my hand like soap.  It had to be worked for, leaned into and with, discovered, suffered, recreated.

The new chapter is respirational, back and forth, in and out.  When the old breath is done it dulls and expires: the new breath coming in underneath it be-stirs things.  So rises and falls the Tao in our world.

..

When I woke this morning with the Promethean poem I lay for a while listening to the hammering builders who’ve taken off a roof, up the road.  I could just hear the dark yammer of their radio.  Listening to radio news and watching media is a yammering, de-sensitising skin which most of us wear. It reinforces the screen of isn’t it all dreadful and bad, and it deadens the feeling.  Journalists are able to witness and report horrors with this leaden blanket.  I don’t have that protective numbness.  The Guardians force me in this way to stay sensitive.  I don’t read the papers or watch the media. My ear is to the ground; I pick up what I need to know.  The human commentary on atrocity and damage and guilt, is more than I can bear.   Many of us walk with only one side of our bodies and half of our brains and heavy clouds in our heart and loins.  I used to have dreams about only being able to walk with one foot, the other was tightly curled up asleep underneath.

The Tarot key that intuitively blossoms today is the 8^th– Soul strength, the woman guiding the lion to sing and to speak.  “Make your pattern accurate, profound, honest, courageous.”

It is another such beautiful September day, this morning, sharp and fresh.  Water, stone, meteorite – recollect that vast numbers of comets and meteorites and cosmic bodies are  petrified water.  Water of Life.

The Stone warms up to flow as water with the fire inside.

..

..

..

Click on image to view

Ben’s roof

Ben building house

Cosmographic volume, after Kepler

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. See also Aquariel

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2019. 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/

 

 

As we become still and look

..

My tarot reading last week – see Aquariel

Thrice Great Hermes said, “For never … can an embodied soul that has once leaped aloft, so as to get a hold upon the truly Good and True, slip back into the contrary.”

This is a profound Law.  Note he said ‘embodied’.  He didn’t say ‘without the body’ (as in trance or nirvana).   He said in effect, Leap with hands and feet into the heart of God.  That is an osmotic shift in the atom of human consciousness as a whole.  The membrane, the veil is semi-permeable.  There is no way the sap of the Tree of Life can run back downward.  The ascension pulls it through the cells;  a vacuum which it must follow and flow into.  Once you are through, you know that everyone comes through it sooner or later.   There are certain old clothes which are impossible to wear.   Love is no longer a thing of the movies.

 

Considering Chopin whom I am starting to sketch … his music was and is pure female opera song:  his unique ability to let them out of his bag;  his passion for singers, their lovely companionship and their voice which did such things.  Perhaps he might admire but could not love a woman who did not sing?  George Sand was probably not a singer (or perhaps she was?) – she called a spade a spade; her yang complemented his yin;  they may have had deep Karmic business in their attraction field.  One of the two sketches I did last night, while watching this video, is from hers of him.  From their liaison in Majorca came the tender Preludes which I used to play and to love dearly.  I have an old recording of Arrau playing them.  In one of them he throws a fiery tantrum, and my father used to mimic in falsetto George’s shock:  “Frederick!”

The journey up the Tree of Life through osmotic membranes is continuous, and there are obstacles – veils or resistances, a sort of grey chaos like my head-cold just now, through which the flowers spike their way.  These things come in waves.  When an inner contact is brewing, it brings some obscuring resistance to clear or blast off.  Through the snot and tissues, the irrepressible florets … make a baby sneeze.   The rising sap is a fountain of little fishes.  Not one of them can turn round and go back to the sack.   When the One which is ‘I’ reaches egg … PRESTO bellissima!   Nothing is EVER the same again.

Generally speaking, the course of life is a series of these small hiccups.  Perhaps jnana  (wisdom) is a state where they all join up and nothing is the same again EVER, and it is always like this:  the living and dying and letting go.   Robert Adams in Arizona looked like this.   He had no teeth when he said, “it has no end.  No end.”

..

I imagine the extra terrestrial intelligences which interweave with ours, have that form of expansion which to us is liberation.  I imagine they move with our magidim and guardian angels easily, for the wavelength doesn’t limit the concepts.   The Presence of the aumakua varies only by local interest from galaxy to galaxy.   Holding my coloured lamp which invites them and rebuffs tricksters, I imagine them freely filling the spatial interstices in the room.   I may not have the gift of seeing their forms, but perhaps I can converse receptively with their mystery.

Fred Hoyle wrote a novel (1950s) of a close approach to Earth, of this kind.  When it connected to the intellectual brain only, it drove it insane.  The acceleration which is pure Consciousness can however be contained in the breathing heart body:  the heart or solar plexus mind (awakening silence which loves).

In this light, what is the accelerative frequency which plagues the human engineering at the present time, and where can it be accommodated?   Food for thought!

It drives many of us insane, particularly those whose incentive is to destroy their neighbours and environment.  These processes are cosmic eyeblinks; we endure their unfolding for decades and sometimes centuries.  Into their unfolding the threads of millennia are drawn.   Nothing of what is seen today can be interpreted unless we rise above it and get some glimpse of the landscape from elevation.   The landscape looks like the Andean Nazca lines, criss-crossing the ridges and plateaux.   To read this map would require a four-dimensional understanding of acupunctural meridians or the nadis of yoga, applied to the leylines of earth and through history’s points of intersection.   An acceptance that the map is of that dimension assists the contact of Higher Mind with a tiny bee in the earth hive.   Most accounts of Self knowledge say we should fall open into knowing nothing.   Then that by which I am known, can get to work.

Meister Eckhart said, “God does his deepest work in the soul when she is at rest.”  

The alchemical maxim is: Art begins where nature ceases to act.  The Hermetic soul begins where human intellect lets go.   I could study books about Nazca lines and Nadis, but I don’t wish to fill up my thought again with issues whose complexity generates karma by psychological default.  I now see clearly the last twenty years since I suddenly downloaded a lot of knowledge and started to see.   The light ‘grounded’ through some intense liaisons.   It had to materialise.

In the olden days, the rishis sat under trees and went about their lives and adored the sunrise and their cows:  their loving heart saw and knew the All, because it is in our DNA.  This faculty has not changed, deep down.   The sensitive veins to it are reopened, by keeping quiet.   This is what the alchemists call, “the miners of the mountains”.   It is all within us when we become still and look.

..

Aruna is red fire,
Achala is standing still,
becoming a sacred hill, Arunachala, kind to kine
whose milk is the morning stream from Vedic stars.

The cow in Vedic hymn is sacred, pure light 
milked in pail by Upanishadic seers,
and a drove of cattle clouds at dawn, are gods 
that glow around her rising star.

In countless tales
the un-created cracked the sky;
but my silence of no angel’s feathers 
is drawn to see or sense
small feathers fall in place,
whether or not resolving.

1999, Poems of Eclipse

..

It is the human predilection on the surface to keep busy.  That is OK.  Our bodies and our skills need location and exercise. Ramana Maharishi used to say that for those born in the west, to have to live the busy western mindset was their Sadhana or spiritual practice.  For those born in the east, their Sadhana was through ashram discipline along Yogic paths.  I sense the interplay and often collision of the western and eastern paths, permeated now by communication technology.  Blavatsky brought them together in the 19^th century;  J Krishnamurti lived the way the eastern and western ways ‘clap hands’.

Yet further east I hear the koan:  sound of one hand clapping.  Koans are designed for the mind’s habit to fall apart; and the existential koan is Love.

..

..

..

..

A Walk with Easter Bluebells

..

Happy Easter!  On a long walk in Hertfordshire with camera – which cannot capture that deep purple fiery glitter coming through the ground, so let’s just imagine it.

..

World turns upside down: sky through the ground

..

Sky, earth, water

..

..

..

..

..

..

living creature

..

living body

..

worlds meet: as above so below

..

tuning fork

..

..

..

..

like a bow

..

..

relationship, dancers

tingly tangle!

..

 

landscape every which way

..

Friend’s astrology on the Tree of Life

..

..

..

**

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.  See also Aquariel

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2017. 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/

Sketches of Pallas Athene

..

..

Athene was the Greek warrior goddess.  She might correspond to India’s Durga.  Her magnificent grey eyes were filled with light;  she came across the seas, larger than life, to inspire Perseus and other heroes on their dangerous odyssey. She lent them her weapons, her bearskin and Hermes’ gold sandals and cloak of invisibility.  Her creature is the Owl.  May her wisdom be our courage.

When I was a child, reading Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes, I copied out my favourite pages from the tale of Perseus and the Gorgon – how we face our shadow –  and illustrated them.  Botticelli’s allegorical painting of Pallas Athene and the troubled man who is half a horse, puzzled me.

I had last year in the back of my mind’s eye, Athene’s face as she strokes the centaur’s head.  When I was small, my grandmother must have told me the story, because always since then, I hear her crisp voice explaining this picture, perhaps she talked to me about the shield and the bearskin and the centaur and the spear.  Later, I learned to read.   An archetype behind my grandmother’s presence – the true picture (like a Botticelli or Leonardo) -transcends the suggestive physical form. The Presence of that art stood subtly behind Helen Ede’s face, her flavour and her voice.

Each child has a special feeling for her grandmother perhaps.  This is my own.

..

The painting by Sandro Botticelli

..

One of my versions, in 1987.  I too was on my inner journey …

..

… to mend my dolls.

..

I set forth into life, with Athene’s blessing and Hermes’ sandals

..

Do I learn from books, or do I really look and see?  Wake up!

..

Here are Ceres and John, the deep unfolding bud within Revelation.

..

When I did this drawing – copying Botticelli’s – towards the end of last year, the allegory or mystery within it came up to the touch. She seems to raise the human animal body with all its memory and mythos, through levels of awakening:  they behold one another, astonished.  I particularly enjoyed drawing the centaur.

It was very difficult for me to draw Athene. When she at long last began to look like a goddess (not Botticelli’s look-like, but in her own right) I became deeply interested in the Centaur.   With him, the painting’s archetypal resonance emerges.  He is the daemon, the living creature of the woods:  his face is twisted like a root:  he is as we were when the Spirit world still shone through our irregular features –   a tall, noble, careworn personage, Cheiron who guided the Argonauts from his cave on Mount Pelion.  In the original Botticelli, he looks tall and spacious, but when I try to draw him, I discover his horse-body is a Shetland pony – short legs and haunches at the level of Athene’s knees.  So his distortion and its strange natural beauty in the Botticelli is curious:  the man body is long and powerful:  the horse body small and sturdy.

Try to imagine him here in this room:  great Devic man of the woods on a little Sheltie’s short legs which (relatively) scuttle him along like a small dog.

..

I always imagined Centaurs as the proud neck of great stallions who leap fallen trees and rocks effortlessly, read the stars and regard bipeds with disdain.  This one’s human body is outsize. Athene in my drawing is super-human size, she has very big feet.  She is a goddess.  I used to love the leaves and flowers on her shining dress.  Her face was rather grown up and sorrowful.  In my rendering, it is sensual like a female Pan, an awakened child, a bit like Botticelli’s earthy angels.  She gazes wonderingly at the Centaur creature whose dark locks of hair she strokes – in my drawing she might pull his hair, gently draw him up to her height, to be seen.   She seems to unmask nature.   Her presence and touch lifts him from small pony body (or cart-horse) to the godlike stature of human, and still he is uncoiling from his shy woodland state:  he shields himself like Adam and Eve:  he twists like an old tree. His eyes and consciousness do not know what or Who this is, that lifts, shines and troubles him.

The allegory is now clear to me.  Like the Birth of Aphrodite, it is another portrait of Renaissance in the collective soul-body at the time.   I am fascinated by his daemon woodiness and the idea that in any sylvan glade in the woods, these two might emerge through transpositions of the light.

In the painting they are on the shore of a lake by a temple; in the distance behind them sails a little boat. In my mind’s eye they are deep in the woods, among the trees. My early impress of childhood awakens to a transformed sound:  as I began to draw the Centaur, I heard and felt the ‘quickening’ in my body.  It is easier and a relief to draw his battered face than to try to represent a Botticelli beauty … I had a long struggle with her.  He is of the curled roots and loamy sharp smells of the woods.  Pan-like, he gives me his energy.

Like when I copied Botticelli’s Primavera Mercury some years ago, I understand God’s ‘twist’ and brush-stroke in our design, which we endure:  body’s spiral movement – face’s anxious uplift – essential in the overall design to support it like a pillar, like Atlas.

Mercury – Hermes – copy after Botticelli’s Primavera

..

A week or two later, I did the same drawing, this time with my left hand.  Why?  Because my left hand – the surfacing subconscious or feminine, has not yet acquired bad habits.  It is less facile, so it is aware.  The lines come from within, slow, sensitive and deliberate, I seem to see where they should go.  I didn’t have to erase much.

Centaur and Athene after Botticelli – drawn with left hand

..

Athene herself looks amazed at what she uncovers.  It is related to her allegories of unmasking with Perseus and the Gorgon, and to my feeling with this drawing.  Her shield and bears-head and owl are not visible, but all are implied in her raising of the Centaur to the light.   In my right-hand version, there wasn’t much room on the paper to draw her big axe-head on the staff she holds, and there was no room at all for the Centaur’s bow.

Centaurs are the Sagittarian Archer.  Traditionally the Sags are small, dark and lithe, and swift with their arrows which travel far … until they reach the Saturn field of Capricorn.   In winter there is this tidal pressure and restraint:  centrifugue and centripetal movement, Jupiter and Saturn across the Tree:  winter.

..

Aphrodite comes ashore with shadow.

..

Hear the sea.  Walk in the sand.

..

..

..

**

Copy of Sandro Botticelli’s self-portrait detail from “Adoration of the Virgin”

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.

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2017. 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/

The Mellowing

Woodland 1986

..

Walking in the beech woods near Great Missenden, I was thinking about being the childhood, and I wrote this down:

Elder age is not only four
hop skip jump,
but the Mellow
just as good.

No repeat
but savour
through and through
the NOW

my elder age’s
same unlettered quality
to find itself
not a drag!

What a gem. It came when I bent down to see what it is like to be just child-high off the ground. And then stood tall again. It isn’t about recapturing that odd, rhapsodic little girl physically and interiorly. The whole organism is by now as different as a fruit tree from the sapling. The organs and pulses and hormones and appearance are changed. The pressure of life in children and kittens and lambs makes them skip irrepressibly, enchantingly.   (It still skips in me at 67). The pressure of life in we older folk has a slower tempo, the character of a river rather than mountain brook … which carved its way … the same ESSENCE unbrokenly unique.   The way to enter the stream is here now.

..

little boy by the sea 1954

..

Childhood is full of hassle – growing pains and hateful grownups and bad dreams and tedium and fear and need. Elderhood is full of hassle – just the same. It isn’t about what I become, it is being.   Savour the slow distillation at this point: river of leaf mould, sky and rain, river great snake slipping along its curving channel, the revelation turns discreet, subtle and lingering, an old wine.   It has to find its way through anxious mental arteries and conditioned stone walls and erratic absence and getting weary & cross. The marvel and mystery is here for the looking, and I love it so.

..

Little girl in a meadow, 1955

..

The mellowing. The living mystery is in the mellowing.   The child’s ferment is the bouquet in the elder one. You need a trained palate to really taste the wine: to become still where the child goes skip hop.   And then it takes you by the sea!

I’m reminded of Yehudi who played the violin perfectly when he was a little boy. When he grew up he lost it (terrifyingly) and had to learn how to do it: fingering, posture, technique, tone, bowing and behaviour.   He became a great humanitarian and yogi, and a musical ambassador for peace.

..

Yehudi Menuhin joyously 1986

..

This tells me that the creature the child grows up into has a special responsibility and value, because he or she does and is all kinds of things that the eternal inner child could not yet. Life is not just easy, at any stage of the game.

..

Red roofs, Cornwall, 1956

..

..

..

Elisa & Mary in Iona – 2016

**

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

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

aquariel link

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