“Bits” of anger; and a dog called Maya

 

..

10 May 2015 Journal – I dreamed of going down an almost sheer grassy cliff towards the sea below, and then worried if I was stuck, if I could climb back up, or if I would slip right down and be killed.  I clung.

I thought yesterday about anger – my anger:  how it enrages when “you” annoy me.  It is destructive.  I wonder how much its presence distorts my view of life, persons and journal.  I see the rage outspoken;  it accumulates all life’s disappointments into a tirade.

Rage is usually the breaking wave of a long historic swell, and it uses the rock it finds.  It uses the rock it finds to blame;  but the rock is not to blame.  The love or the man or the woman or the child or the political situation is not to blame.  They help the wave to break.   This is an interesting angle.  Then rage (however furious) is a valuable condition,  to witness and to walk with.  Can I next time, say to it:  “You are valuable, you are a breaking wave, you release fire and salt, you are more than what or whom I think you are….” ?

The rage won’t like that, because its nature is to pile the entire cause onto the person who offended, and on ME.  The raw force of feeling pushes physical pain in belly, tension, collywobbles, incoherent speechmaking, off-the-wall, out-of-order and frustration.   These are all invention!   Try telling that to my rage, next time.

A drawing with eyes closed

It passes when it is shared.  After we talk, it becomes a vibrant – if un-smooth –  channel and transforms to love and relief – on a wall outside at night in Canfield Gardens with my tiny phone.   I am when it is full on, scared of what it might do – it wants to upset everyone and their social arrangements, it is ME-ME-ME.   A Capricorn has a slow fuse but a long one, and when it gets going, it is volcanic.  The bit is in the horse’s teeth, and galloping, and the rider cannot control or stay the horse, but whispers along the reins:  this won’t help, you are too angry, you won’t be able to say it like this, try saying this instead, remember to make it a discussion, do a deep breath, (I don’t want to) – do another one, you are in the Great Work (so what?), what would an alchemist say?  (don’t care). The bit is in the horse’s teeth, and the horse’s mouth is insensitive to my hands.

Your response when I am angry, is to value and allow the feeling and to help it to lighten up and laugh.   The splatter of wave-break words falls out of sight, because with the current some of them get said, some of the eggs get laid, some of them splash on the rock.

Stephen Szegedy Szuts at Caunce Head, Cornwall

There is a deep need to be honest.  This fuels the rage.  But look:  isn’t the truth itself the long historic wave from the ocean?  The anger is the white bit crashing over the rocks.  Truth comes out and changes the setting between two persons.  It shares.  I carried a cargo of personal opinions at the crest; I give them all up.  I suddenly see that you have, I have, the freedom to be who we are.  And I say to you:  I love this peculiar way we are.  I will talk, but at a trot, not a headlong gallop.

I think I am a failure but this is NOT TRUE!   The anger is a gold-rush.  The waves which peak as anger, close to land, are generated far back in the subconscious sea, and arrive rhythmically.  They carry a glorious energy, like a concentric sound wave or song.  These waves travel and break around all our coastlines, and from above, they form beautiful interwoven crescents and wrinkles as they bestow their beauty on the land:  as life breaks forth.

WOW!   How unexpected, this morning.   What a fish!

..

..

And now: down memory lane (May 2015), I find something for dog lovers: 

…   with David and Maya yesterday.  I dug a large hole for the smallish hedge tree we hope to transplant – it is drinking water in a large bucket for a day or two, it hasn’t much root-ball left.  I made a soft path along the “tunnel” to the garden, with two bags of woodchip, so it doesn’t get muddy.  Maya loves the woodchip smell and lay down on the pile before I started to rake it.   David was having a sharp pain day and couldn’t go out.

I took Maya for a long walk up to Sandy Heath woods.  Her guard dog nature is increasingly focused on David and on me, and she never goes out of sight:  she turns to see, she stops and waits.  Sometimes she comes to rub my legs joyfully – “thank you for bringing me here.”  Her black panther beauty and pointed ears sway her lean hips, kool cat, along bluebells, wild garlic and uphill down dale through the woods and under dense beeches, oaks and alder – beautiful companionship and love –  she meets and plays briefly with a variety of other canines, learning the pecking order while I chat with their owners.  Some of them are nervous.

On Sandy Heath through the oak meadows, we came to a pond up there, with a beach of tiny dry stones.  She looked at me – Yes you can go in the water – in she went with big splashes and lunges, to fetch bits of wood I threw for her – and out of her depth she swam powerful doggy paddle, smiling sharp white teeth pink tongue snorting, then big shake-shake sparkle when she came out.

Poor David was horrified to hear this news (on our way home), having just cleaned the pad of fallen black hairs, and mopped the floor – he thinks the ponds up there are filthy, and it is actually the first time Maya has gone SWIMMING, because the brook where she plays is not quite deep enough – but she came home clean as a whistle, I dried her in the garden with a towel, and groomed and brushed out her loose hairs, and she ran indoors just a bit damp, and eager for her wolfie supper, and glossy shining black velvet fox all over, to lie down on the floor and enjoy us while we wolfed our M&S ready meals and stretched out our feet.

…  took Maya around bluebell-oak-wild garlic Big Wood.  She is a very powerful creature and might give me a black eye with her big loving nose and warm musky kisses, if I’m not careful.  D says she is quite naughty at the moment, and he teaches and trains her constantly.  We talk about her all the time eagerly, and billows of love roll over her. I combed her again in the garden – her winter coat is falling out.  I never truly understood dogs in people’s lives – (Dubi wasn’t really a dog, he was a Saluki) – until this one, who is profoundly and archetypally dog.  The dog-human wavelength is vibrant and mysterious.

Dubi in the brook

..

Vision:  how beautiful the tough stuff anger is, with all the pain and sharp animal energy it carries.  How astonishing is the wave pattern, woven around our coastlines, the way the bird-shapes burst from the rock.  The beauty is lived and acknowledged, sometimes with difficulty, always with reality.  I have with this, a LIBERATION – the visceral golden truth of what my private relationships have at their core – and to this I remain true and undivided.

The moment contains no name
or word.

Yes, and the sweet human
friend in their faces
and their laughter at restaurants
like a child with daisies threading split stems –

the magic circle lets you go and takes
you up, again and again
and over and over
with human beings;

the lover, the Friend,
the “one thing” (they say)
is the play of the waters … so I do not get those
“Solemn Meditative States”.

Poems of Eclipse, 1999

..

..

..

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/

Terma – Dare to Trust

 

“The Time of the Sixth Sun” collecting together many elders and sages of the global human community was first launched in April 2019 and again on 6 November by Theo van Dort, Nikki Luna and Uquala, for two weeks. A wonderful and unique heart-opener about positive environmental initiatives and new technologies around the world – spiritual, community and scientific. Profoundly recommended!  For more information and to keep in touch, visit timeofthesixthsun.com  

The package is available to buy until 6 December 2019 – https://timeofthesixthsunlaunch.com/own

..

maitreya with leaf

..

And now … what is Terma?

The Tibetan master Padmasambhava and other great sages hid Divine gifts within the human strata, within the elements of rock, ice, flower and field, within the soul’s deeps for future centuries to seek and find.  At the heart of the Rosy Cross is a tradition of the burial of Brother C.R. deep under earth in a vault built of the laws and proportions of sacred geometry and numbers.   Brother C.R.C the Rosicrucean founder, is repository of the Wisdom. The letters are derived from a Hebrew root RK (I think) which means “tenderness”.

Seek and find … within your home itself.  You have the key – use it now.

..

I went climbing at the Castle, but it was not a good session, partly because it was very crowded, noisy and busy. I lacked a flow of Yang in the Yin which balances the climb. Also; I climb well only if I make a contact with someone; it makes me more daring and … to trust.

Then I went home, and then to Kabbalah group although exhausted.

The contact – to person or wall – through all life comes and goes.  The creative contact – I’m not there yet, this morning – is contemplation and love.  Performers lose their contact when too much is expected of them in a culture of spectators.  Spectator types (majority) rely on making a projectile contact through those who act it out. This threads through the entire spectrum of sport, art, the economy and politics.  Real connection – especially intimate – meets a cobweb of resistance.  The contact for me on a tired morning is coaxed.  It moves slowly into itself.  This afternoon I go to acupuncture – an appointment I pre-empted last week with retro Mercury! – I made a long journey for nothing.

“Hallo!” the voice comes from inside, just as I wondered whether pre-empting appointments acts out in microcosm a planetary movement in the celestial field.

The voice from inside, the connecting, is the contact.  The contact does not race into creative intensity – as it would if I were trying to perform or to work hard.  It stays with itself in a grey dawn.  The contact has this feeling of fragility; my physical body is not young.  At this moment the sun pierces through damp weather and glows on the wall.  It glows and fades, glows and fades, smudgy tree shadows’ slow quiver in the breeze.  There it all is!   Whenever the sun’s brilliance comes through and warms my eye, the heart responds, because what is my heart?  The Sun within me.

Each morning I look at the drawing I did for my father’s birthday in 1988:

coming out … touch the world

Everything is in it … Including the climbing!

The guidance from within does not impose meditation or belly breathing.  It awakens me to follow gently; to let it expand naturally from small beginnings.  Tuning into the Schumann resonance from whatever state of dullness takes time and listening and being.  It begins to embody down into my feet.  We shall (and do actually) live on Earth with and as the slow yet swift movement of the sunrise.  Cultivate the awakening, take the plough.

“Love and you shall know.”

Master Rakoczy, violinist

Creative works are my gift to myself from the boundless.  This morning dozing, I dreamed of the fashion nowadays for Way-showers to provide a gift when they are interviewed online; in my sleep I saw or read about two of these gifts which were objects, and then Ramana Maharshi’s which was  an equation I can write – as I woke I lost it, nearly found, then lost again.  I saw this sketch of him:

The meaning is old and beautiful;  the meaning is Terma and we find such gifts in our House of the Psyche in the Tree.

Fountain breath, tree of life

I am excited with the concept of Terma.  I discover it throughout the awakening network among us, as within and from my Self – core – when the torch is shone in here.  It illumines it.  Terma containing countless gifts and discoveries in the rock, is the whole of my life, and with Pluto and Saturn moving through Capricorn there is more of it now than there ever was before, on Earth; in the interface of the Companions of the Light with our physical being; and the inevitable resistance to it, to overcome.

I am a Terma.  “I am a hidden Treasure and I love to be known“.

Illumine the coal face

..

Dare to be Divine?   Dare to trust.  Dare to trust the wall of life, dare to trust the person and dare to trust myself.

These are my two dear friends Bibi and Paul;  they are both teachers and sometimes they dance together.  Bibi (on the left) made a beautiful film in which she dances the Tree of Life as Tai Chi by the sea:

..

See also my post in Aquariel, about Hashaq… the creative background

..

Some Kabbalah group notes

The principle of the Game is in Beriah, the World of Creation.   For all the trouble South Africa is in now (as with every country its own) the multi-racial friendship in the rugby SA/UK match was impossible two generations ago.  This fact moved one of us – who was born there 84 years ago – to tears.

What is God?  What do I mean by One?

A married couple both from dysfunctional families, with difficulty started a pregnancy.  They have just been told by the hospital that their baby foetus has a heart condition.  They have only each other for support in the unknown.  WHY ME?  Talk to the little one, what are you carrying for us to learn?  Do you start to mend the broken heart in our families?  We are three of us now.  We are a team.  Work with it.

Yet medical predictions relying on measurement do not always manifest.  There are cases where the handicapped child is born with nothing wrong.  The resources and sources are Karmic in their depth.  The mystery is the unknown mending.

Love the teaching.  I don’t know God!  I am, this is, a detail in the unfolding of the Holy One.  The Holy One unfolds the garment of the All.  Doing the right thing begins to know the unfolding of God as synchrony appears.  How empowering are our questions – who is God? and why me?

A cosmic violinist – 1988

..

We explored religious origins and their corruption by priestly power.  Knowledge of the Tree of Life opens up the dimensions – the four worlds or levels – in Egyptian hieroglyphs.  These four levels appear universally – Egypt and Zoroaster traditions.  The Tree is our road map.

A story of a well known musician – care which is core is absent from his life, through addiction to overwork or to public response.  Each day there is so much new going on, alchemically – cooking, gardening and relationships.

A vixen came to watch the internment of a family member’s ashes at Kensal Rise.  She was beautiful, vibrant and interested.  Then she paced around the grave in a magical circle.  What do we really know?

Refugees are constantly being displaced, and we en masse hear only the downside.  Yet many refugees are uplifted and start a new life. Why this huge displacement?  Look to the Beriah dimension which is vast!  A few are capable to take the opportunities opening out.

“Human beings of integrity are unlikely to be elected into high office.”

I witness a collective awakening in our evolutionary process, which is not of standard government.  Awakening from the convention of doom, gloom and blaming others, to evolution in earth, are painful steps towards human maturity, the unfolding of what some call the Great Plan from underneath the world’s show. You and I have capacity to free ourselves from an age-old victim consciousness.  The map just begins to be opened for the walker.

Despondency?  The collective crisis has been unfolding for centuries, millennia.  Individuals learn and grow.  The light from the lamp reaches further and reveals what was not seen before, which used to be dark.

As one drop of perfume fills a room, so do Schools of the Soul generate the unknown factor of inner work.  

The question what is God?  Who am I?  The alchemy of the moment happens in the situation I am in.  Walk into the house.  LISTEN.  Walk into my body.

What does the mother of the foetal heart condition actually sense?  She was silent and then replied “Life”, and her responsibility to this Life in whatever form.  A drop of the real Life force changed the atmosphere in the room.  The spark came.  The baby’s name is Hope.

Alchemy of the Question – how can I serve the gift, and learn?   The Lord is in his temple.  I am the temple.  Knowing this is ALL.

..

..

..

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/

The Rose in the Starfish

Rosicrucean Emblem Ten: Atlas

Journal, 7 October 2019

Is ecstasy the captive of existential fear?  Are they hand in glove?  What is love?

Here is a story in Arthur Koestler’s ‘The Act of Creation’: “The great biologist Elie Mechnikoff felt rather lonely one afternoon in 1890 when the whole family had gone off to the circus … he remained alone with his microscope. The microscope was in Pasteur’s laboratory at the Ecole Normale.  Mechnikoff was observing the life of the mobile cells in the transparent larvae of starfish, and idly threw a few rose-thorns among them.  The thorns were promptly surrounded by the larvae and dissolved inside their transparent bodies – they had been gobbled up and digested.  This reminded him of what happens when a human finger is infected by a splinter; it will be surrounded by pus which, like the starfish larvae, attack and try to digest the intruder.  By this analogy Mechnikoff discovered the organism’s main defence mechanism against invading microbes: the ‘phagocytes’, cell-eaters, a population of mobile cells among the white blood corpuscles.”

[Hasn’t this some resonance with the development of advanced technologies to bio-degrade the plastics in our oceans?   SIXTH SUN LINK – :  “The ‘Time of the Sixth Sun Series’ is a movie and documentary series 11 years in the making about the awakening and transformation of global consciousness and the huge potential we have for change in the world. Starring Estas Tonne and featuring over 85 indigenous elders, wisdom keepers, visionary thought leaders with a beautiful soundtrack. If you’d like to see the trailer and sign up to watch for free go to: https://timeofthesixthsunlaunch.com“

This project was first distributed last April, and is being made available again on 6 November.  I only saw a small part of it then, and was deeply uplifted and fascinated by the holistic work of a new generation of young scientists – a profound, positive message concerning also our individual untapped potential for the good.

 I also started to correspond with Global Energy Parliament – well worth a visit.  This Keralan movement grounds spiritual conscience, philanthropy and eco-initiatives in quantum physics – the journey into the Higgs-Bosen or “I” particle.]

Bio-chemistry never lost the helping hand of its elder sister, Alchemy – nature’s interior art of transformation is assisted just a little by humans.  Seventeenth century alchemic aphorisms describe red and white soldiers’ activity within the corpuscular bloodstream as they travel to the castles of our interior organs.  What ancient medicine!

foto of starfish embryo by Wim van Egmond

fibonacci pentacle by Keith Critchlow

Think again of this fantastic occult paradox: starfish larvae eat up and digest rose-thorns.  Starfish have five extensions (like Vitruvian human); the rose is structured on five petals.   HEH is the fifth Hebrew letter, it means seeing and the breath.  Y H V H, a Dvine shorthand to indicate the One Reality, is father, mother, child and (second H) the Family which seeds the new Yod.  Our technology towards Gaia is as yet crude. It will refine.

And what about this? – in Keith Critchlow’s “the Hidden Geometry of Flowers” is shown the orbital pattern of periodic positions of Venus with Earth around the years. There is no escape for us whatsoever from the beauty, the dance of Venus:

See also my post about the seven-year cycles on the Tree of Life.

..

What is Gaia?  The human bonding with the planet draws closer and it IS.

Tantra is the living web of touch.  Sleeping Beauty awakes within the briar.  A starfish drinks the thorn of the rose.  Everything dissolves in the Whole Life and Light.  What is Real is to be found, not pasted as formula onto a thought or an email.  It is off the beaten track.  It is cultured, nurtured, gardened, found again and again. The unspeeched song in the vascular branches replies to everything.

Earnest, serious analytical thinking is good as far as it goes; but it is not perception. It sees patterns but it does not perceive what is behind the patterns and behind the fear.  The pussy foot approaching the mirror must look behind it.

The character behind the patterns has a Uranian humour.  It overturns our apple carts and expectations.  The pattern seems real while I and others are wedded to its misery.  But actually it isn’t.  The pattern is Change and the Design around it is beyond the box.  Change can be a sort of eternity of misery including vulnerability to frackers, which pokes my mind away from serenity like the hellish toasting-fork.  But the Design wherein all change is temporary upheaval, laughs at locksmiths. What laughs at locksmiths? Love.  Compassion. What are locksmiths?  Weddings to misery and mistrust of life.  And what goes on?  Life, fermenting in fact with lovers and teachers and clowns and children and lighthouse keepers.  We are unstoppable!  We are not so obvious to the earnest thinkers of the pattern, but we shine because when we laugh or cry it falls away like a costume change.   It’s simple.  Just go on lighthouse keeping.  It’s stormy. That’s what lighthouses are for.  We are rooted quietly in the rock

Watch my predatory mind which grabs and fastens and worries any misery about environment, society or my physical body, just like a greedy market force.  Just recognise it and don’t go with THAT flow.  To help build a positive collective tree of life, attend to my environment in HERE and its collective contagion. This is I guess, my best intention with the extinction rebellion activists this week and next.  What are we rebelling against?  The old movie, the old machine.  The old machine for sure is not destined to survive and as long as I stick to it, it gives me grief.

I think there is a Kabbalah meditation this evening at D and M’s.  Let us gather together!

Recognise chaos (misery) and harmony (life force). Respect the fact of the dissonance towards sanity. Live within the given picture. Reading about the poet Rilke’s Russian journey with Lou Salome – the Divine beauty and vastness of that continent with its tenacious devout peasantry, his love for it, his passionate profound love for large Lou and her homeland – what flew into his poetry in subsequent years of the terror and rape of the timeless sacrament with time’s tyrant?  The serfs were an immense population in age-old bondage to Tsars; in young Rilke’s well of discovery they were beautiful like wild flowers in their dream time, their lives a struggle to survive, their devotion a hardy mystic blessing under the heavy foot of feudal taxation.  This devotion and faith met its hope in the soviet revolution and was slaughtered.  Long grinding holocaust.  In more recent times the devotion returns to the open places to build again with God.

What of the holocaust flew into Rilke’s metaphysics as terrifying angels?   The 20th century Tsars occupied his new spiritual homeland of endless steppes and skies.

What is my mind?  A sort of body which suffers pain!   My mind is a skinless lamb turned on the spit.  And what is outside, beyond and yet within my mind?

Each country will settle into his or her own nature in due course, including natural divinity and crown of thorns.  An idea wishes to be born this morning as I write.  What is it?  All things come to term.  All conflicts pass through each other.  In the middle (east) are concrete walls and religious war.   That isn’t the idea I had just now, which sank below the waves again, but let’s keep going. Concrete cracks apart and war becomes an outgrown fantasy.  Centuries ago, my soul carried weapons, now laid aside.  The civil war is in the middle east, concentrically.  Civil war is that between those of the same flesh and brotherhood, the same village.  So I have a picture of Christ wearing his crown of thorns.  There is a mudra of Transfiguration.  This is not the fish I almost caught just now, but never mind.

Lou Salome with her independence of thought and life style was a kind of beautiful Madame Blavatsky.  I’m also looking at her biography of Nietzsche.  I did these two sketches this morning – herself and Rilke:

“Devotion returns to the open places.”  This is the fishy phrase or feeling which prevails. Where people believe it is the End, this shy sly hidden card comes out of the sleeve.  What comes to its own end is the wall of conditioned belief, whether dumb or intelligent.  I see something.  I see nature, Gaia, colonising Her own.   I hear you talking about the millions of persons and children who will starve and die when Africa becomes uninhabitable due to human carbon emissions.

Yes, this is tragic for human beings, and I cannot spell out – (when in linear left-brain company and its deeply-read concerns) – the solar-plexus intuition’s sense of the natural DNA balances. They transcend what we humans think we do.  A vast cross-fertilised gene pool was born over the last century, and as swiftly it may become withdrawn, leaving a rich culture for the generations to thrive.  I can’t say such things, which seem heartless; when I awake, I think in paradox.  For the psyche which imagines the bigger picture, empaths also the individual sufferings of one of a million such families losing house, home and life through climate change – starving babies – the immensity of their fragile universe.  What do I know of the Karmic hinterlands of these souls, and of their future sprouting and rebirth?   Fires and heat scorch, and then there are ashes and then in the elder Chinese elementary cycle there is earth and water and wood:  a re-sprouting of human wilderness beyond prediction.  Compassion.

This is the Generation cycle:

The 64 I Ching Hexagrams are built from the pairing of the 8 trigrams (square root): Thunder, Wind, Fire, Earth, Lake, Heaven, Water, Mountain.  To these are attributed the five Chinese elements qualitatively.  In the Tao, wood generates fire which as ash generates earth which generates the metals which generate the water which generates earth …  (See the Great Treatise in the I Ching, and also ‘The Trigrams of Han‘ by Steve Moore)

this diagram shows also the Destruction or conquest cycle: earth soaks up water which puts out fire which melts metal which cuts the wood which conquers earth.

..

It is not just the regeneration of Nature’s habitat through the altered conditions: it is that the souls which may die in Equatorial and other regions are seeds of the life force, and they get planted again.  Between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, where Earth’s circumference rotates faster, are found polarities of good and evil. Dictators engage in tribal warfare and pillage, but at the same time, the land is sprinkled with VSO and other teaching-missions. They save lives; significantly they sow indestructible seeds of cooperation, intelligent farming, self-sufficiency and friendship. No longer are religious dogmas inflicted, which cut the people away from their ancestral roots. There is a movement of atonement.

Humanity cannot be assessed at the level of political gamesters, the turgid knots of the lower mind.  Humanity is assessed through the vivid peaks of her philanthropic responsibility.

The goddess Kwan Yin painted by Roerich

The ageless teachings nowadays emphasise this.  In the old traditional way, those treading spiritual paths sought personal liberation.  The new way is philanthropic: self being for others;  embody it.  Walk your talk.

There is no answer.  There is a kind of seeing of the patterns, in our different ways; and there is acceptance of the whole.  Above all, I should not hate or despair, but empathise – understand also the condition of those driven by unconscious fear of change, whose expression is aggressive denial.

I grieve the extinction of waves of humanity and their bio-culture. I may in my next thought deplore the crisis of over-population.   Can I combine these concepts?   Over the last century or two, Nature’s tidal wave embodied souls in billions upon earth, and is bound to reduce that component as She withdraws.  It is difficult to find a language for this: she turns the human acceleration of exhaust, ingenuity and industry to her purpose.

She will use also the human nascent tendency to outgrow our addiction to survival-sexuality. Following what may or may not be dramatic drops in population in afflicted regions … may come a slow diminishing of the birth statistic as we pull our horns in, and our belts.  Slowly but steadily, “marketing-sex” becomes replaced by contemplative intimate relationships in the scale of Tantric values.  The genetic structure of the new human grows apace, leaving the old state and its passion and its beauty and its abuse behind like a sloughed-off skin or chrysalis.

This takes time and is perceptible in fits and starts, but it is here with us today; new generations are born to meet the environmental challenges creatively; the nature of the family evolves.  Our real nature is ecstasy; not static.

This fact is alive also “unconsciously” in the outspoken fear of Extinction.  We humans carry a huge amount of perception of which we cannot speak.  I feel that the collective androgyne fears what it carries in the DNA –  knowledge of a reduced progeny; this is one of the oldest instinctual fears which fuel the blind.  Upon this fear ride competition, distraction and the market force.  So you can see its INTENSITY!

The terror began to disrupt the old order at the beginning of the twentieth century with tsunamis of world-war, the soviet engine in Russia, Nazism, nuclear weapons and pollutants.   Did not the terror shout in the depth of the poet Rilke’s elegies and angels?

Yet there is peace.

Sting flows as ecstasy, that tide of salty foam about to engulf the starfish on the sand, receiving the creature into Her own element.  Isn’t this like us?  Small i-thought cries and fears the sacrifice into the greater Being which grows within us!

Extinction fear is “a thrust into denial” … as in innumerable behaviours light and dark, sexual and otherwise. The extinction rebellion movement is an actual outspoken expression of this fear!  Pluto turning direct last week draws out the sting, and … is there a beginning of healing? … wholeness.

DNA is a fibre throughout the universe and it is without end.  Through DNA the cosmic serpent, each phenomenon is entangled and interwoven through the quantum field.  Only connect … ! Here I spread jam on toast and there a supernova erupts. The one is a MOMENT in my time; the other is a million light-years in expansion.  Or there, a Japanese pauses at work in his orchard.

Japanese farmer in his orchard looks like the Hermit in Tarot, in this recent oracle – flanked by the statements of Master Rakoczy and the Ascension of the child within us.

,,

“Almost all systems of thought create more constriction inside you, with the exception of those that lead you into deeper acceptance of your true nature.”

Richard Rudd,  the 25th Gene Key

• How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
  it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
  it gently up over you on to other things?
  I would so very much like to tuck it away
  among long lost objects in the dark,
  in some quiet, unknown place, somewhere
  which remains motionless when your depths resound.
  And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
  takes us together like a single bow,
  drawing out from two strings but one voice.
  On which instrument are we strung?
  And which violinist holds us in his hand?
  O sweetest of songs.
• To Lou Salome from Rainer Maria Rilke

 

..

..

..

Photo by Sarah Poland

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/

 

 

The Coin of the Sages

 

The Coin of the sages is an alchemist’s gift from heaven. It turns up in any crucible of life and relationships.  We polish our old copper coins (Venus) till they shine as the golden Sun.  

In an old alchemy journal I found this entry …  delicately it interfaces the timeless diary of today.  “The Glory of the World” and “The Golden Tripod” which are quoted, are 17th century writings in the Hermetic Museum library.  The Tarot keys discussed are in the Builders of the Adytum deck.

BOTA Tarot Tableau: three septenaries, seven columns: the keyboard. This deck is published by the Builders of the Adytum in black and white: each student colours and thereby empowers his or her own deck, following the Builders’ strict guidelines. The colours of the Keys have audial resonance also.

..

8 March 2003            COIN

The ripe Priestess  sometimes makes Hermit’s Mountain seem remote … winnowing out error and shattering the Tower.   These three Keys form a vertical column in the BOTA Tarot Tableau. In fact they represent the bud, the bloom and the bursting of the seedcase as from chrysalis … in nature and in any creative process.

Beginning my Sapphire Tree painting for a book cover:  I started as blind egoists do on the dirty surface.   This should grow organically from centre as a mandala — not in one rush like a face.   Sapphire means liquid pale blue fire.   The 72 leaves should be a delicate tracery of  seminal wave connections in the white fire around and between the Menorah branches. Working from the centre outwards, let it grow.   Here is a dirty pool.   Cleanse to begin with, its centre.

Paul Foster Case invites me again to dip into the alchemical forests of “GLORY OF THE WORLD”.   When reading these, fountain gently with them up and down, restoring the synchrony of heart-body which is today collapsed and tired.

On page 61 it discusses the COIN OF THE SAGES.   I can see this white Coin from the sky, so bright that I cannot see yet what is impressed upon it.

Our Stone has its head in the earth and its root in the air.   I read alchemical texts not with my Hod but with the breath, with my inside.   Then they glow.   It says the Spirit delights in nothing so much as its own Soul and its own body.  Delight is another word for the Higher Will; be comforted.   It is minted pure and bright and white within the dark.   Begin from the centre
but let it descend first from the white sun.   The work of
the Priestess lets it descend.   10am, School of the Soul.

Priestess, King of Swords and the Fool, 1987

The Priestess, Rosy Cross and Fool descending – 2003

September 2018 – The evolution of those two drawings (1987 and 2003) is my life today –  the heart beats within the tapestry.  A house to paint in, which I invoked  15 years ago and forgot about, recently materialised;  last week I beeswaxed the floor and began work there with a new Tree of Life – see end of this post.  I have not painted for years!

new art-room

..

2003 continued:

Hurly Burly welcomed her Mum so kindly last night at the Garrick wine-bar – Mum was feeling lousy because she’s forgotten how to paint.   HB too has been re-discovering how to paint — the light came in through her window.   I had a nice time there where she works,  but ate and drank too much, which paralyses my gut for the night.   But to read the “Golden Tripod” now, sprays white light into the Garrick; and I was introduced to a curly Paddy who has 400 (?) paintings he said he bought and collected in his house — the secret of a good painting is it invites you to take a walk into it.   Tall tales do not matter in conversation.   On my right, as I tackled warm goat’s cheese and fennel swordfish and a big glass of wine, sat Marta’s sister with her hyperactive three-year-old son Adam enjoying himself all over the counter with his tiny neat brown hands.

Enough:   now focus on Basil Valentine.

It is impossible for Yesod to sperm the Stone.  Yesod cannot remember how.  The sperming comes down through antakharana – the pipeline – and is observed and — as perception of it refines and begins to dispel the obscuring cloud — obeyed with joy: as in p.45 in the Golden Tripod.   Note the Source of the Priestess’s stream and her receiving element.   Male and female seed are the One thing, the Child within.   Wherever there is joy in creation is this natural intercourse of the Air, the secret fire, the dew.   The Earth is only the invisible thing that attracts union.  Out of no thing blossoms unicity.

Seek not our Stone in substances which cannot stand the test of fire.   Seek it in the incombustible oil that is the fire itself that ever renews and fattens the land.   It grows and gently shines and increases like a plant.   It increases in that it prevails.   Through all darkness, the stem glows and shines.

..

September 2018

Here is the beginning of my new Tree painting – just sketching out Malkuth, Yesod, Hod, Netzach in the Lower Face, based on  carvings of the Companions around Chartres cathedral;  Archangel Rafael in Hod has no face yet.  I hope for it to combine thematically the medieval flowering of Islamic alchemists and Christian sages, the Star, Cross and Crescent, the child and parenting, the cosmic serpent of our DNA, nature and the fountain of life … as the journey begins, let it lead me where it will.

..

Life has been too full-on for me to keep up with my blog posting.  But a month or two ago, I posted in my other blog Aquariel about a pair of Tarot oracles in June and July.   Here are the three links:

For Gaia
janeaquariel.wordpress.com/2018/07/20/summer-oracle-1-for-gaia/

Through thunder of the dew fall silent
janeaquariel.wordpress.com/2018/07/21/summer-oracle-2-through-thunder-or-the-dew-fall-silent/

The dying and the guardians
janeaquariel.wordpress.com/2018/08/01/summer-oracle-3-the-dying-and-the-guardians/

..

..

..

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 2012-2018. 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/

 

Castling for Old-Timers

Climbers on the rope – 1964 – a left-handed belay!

Early this year I took a few climbing lessons at the age of 69 – inspired by family developments.  I used to be a fair tree-climber and sea-cliff scrambler; I dislike any form of mechanical or competitive exercise. At Swiss Cottage climbing centre in London I learned to manage the rope and belay a climber safely, and to climb a wall and to abseil down it.  I felt scared but each time I came away with a stretch of freedom in my spine – like a cat.  I was hooked.  Recently I started at the Castle climbing centre at Manor House near Finsbury Park.  I go alone, to practice bouldering and to watch.

The Castle is an old pumping station, built as a huge Victorian folly with turrets and three towers – a handsome building.  Some 20 years ago it was leased from English Heritage and turned into reputably the most varied indoor climbing centre in the land.  It stands in an acre of organic garden; all the food is home grown and the place is run on self-sustaining lines.

I would like to be at the Castle all day, take some good reading and find a nook between scrambles, like writing in a coffee shop.  I could alternate climb-stretch exertions and scribing.  Yesterday I kept getting bored and tired and then caught up in it again.  Perhaps I want someone to do it with.  A brand-new bouldering room is about to be opened.

And … why not sketch?  … from life!  I just did these from photos.  Keep practicing.

How odd that I was so snooty about the climbing centre my niece took me to, many years ago – somewhere in the east end.  She and her man monkeyed sleekly up and down fierce looking walls.  When I had a go I hated it.  There was no sea-breeze cliff or moorland view to lift or inspire my dragging body weight, no rock for fingers to love, just dead cement and coloured toy holds.  I felt like a stone.  I was amazed at the guys climbing along the ceiling like spiders.  I thought they were fanatics.

These two “boulders” on the 1st floor at the Castle are called Lust and Envy. They are great. I spend a lot of time on those – but not between them!

You know … in rock climbing for senior moments, don’t just try to complete a traverse or a wall;  be inventive with the holds and their funny shapes, seek out different things with them, stay on the spot, find out what my toes can do.   That pleasing tingling ache in my hands develops finger strength – the same delicate dexterity for playing the piano.  Blood flow increases and differentiates the tendons.  Walk tall!   Feet strengthen also.  Can stand tippy-toes better than before, I think.  Body core – gravity centre – I was aware of this many times yesterday when moving laterally.  I picked up some tips while watching rock climbing videos online.  Sooner or later I will strike up a friendship or join a rope or get myself a lesson with one of the helpful staff.  Wait and see.  Right now my whole body is delighted to be doing this.  I like the chalky smell there, and sometimes they play cool sounds.   In the 2nd-floor cafe is excellent coffee and restorative peanut bars to eat while watching high and daring ascents with rope and pitons  Nearby is a kid’s wall which I scramble up and down.   I love watching the kids; they come with their teacher and scamper all over the sheer slabs – I never grew up!

We older folk are sensitive or rugged individual types … the sweetness of the solitude on distant fells comes to this place, to keep in trim.

What do my molecules, cells, nerve fibres and enzymes of the Great Change feel about it?  I am a stretchy amoeba pattern of trillions of stars.  That’s nice – try to recall that, next time!  I would like my climbing to be contemplative as the technique slowly enters  my bones.  Yesterday it felt like stepping back.  At Swiss Cottage wall earlier this year, they said when you are learning you progress for a couple of sessions and then it seems you slip back and that’s natural because next time it is suddenly easier.  The oscillation moves forward and back, like when hung on a difficult place.  New agilities being built take time.  The muscle while developing is young, hard and unwieldy.  It needs to loosen into itself and become flexible, for the flexibility and grace is power.  These are lessons for life.

Line dance, 1988. When I drew these, I felt wonderful afterwards.  It flowed and danced up the street within me.  There is nothing like “creating energy” by taking a line for a walk to see where it might go.  As far as I remember, I drew these slowly, consciously, on the edge of exploration; that is what released their energy.

It is the same principle my David talked about, re any kind of physical exercise: don’t do it every day, take days off in between for the agility to develop as a whole.  While at rest, it sinks in to build new cells.

The same principle guides the inner work. The Spirit is in charge.  Awaken to it!  Advise and entice my stellar amoeba over the playground; then rest.  I guess as I cultivate my slow and dainty deliberation, the technique will come, because rock climbing isn’t with brute strength but with coordination.  Coordination is the core.  The core gets blissed out when she is filled with the inner star.   The beautiful lesson of Life:  Core Strength, let go and watch her reach and swing and flow.   Surprise!  Delight!

Click to access 55th-genekey-prelude.pdf

Hey, Gene Key 55!   Richard Rudd’s talk of molecules and blood circulation in the music of change brought to my mind a  starfish.  “The human being is nothing more than a symphony of interwoven rhythms, tempos and sounds.”   A robin calls outside: and Clive who loves Richard Jeffries, records vibrant birdsongs on his website Art in Nature.  DNA is structured in triplets.  All our relationships are triadic.  Musical form is ABA with C.  Abac-us.

I like my primary-coloured abacus and its beads.   The magus – my inner teacher –  is getting interested and encourages me with the climbing.

You know it is such a chance for magic – the inner plane – to river into embodiment and to fill flesh, bone and sinew with stars and to know and respect the tired crystals in our blood: the imagination illumines.

She is the beginning, and out of her unbounded oceanic “confusion” the male arises to differentiate and gather it into a distaff – Siva’s still point within the centre of each wheel within wheels.  The feminine Sakti movement giving birth to and generated through the stillness, plays on the loom of numberless threads.

..

..

 

**

View from Near Hope gill, Lake district

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 2012-2018. 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/

What is Ascension?

A reading from Caitlin & John Matthews’ Arthurian Tarot (cut deck once into centre of pile, right and left hands)

Re-reading some old writings in 2005 about 2012 and the ending of the Mayan calendar, I found a forgotten practical insight: to realign each day my “human terrestrial axis” imaginatively to the galactic core.

The actual picture we were given was: in December 2012 the configuration of planets interacting with stellar influences might pull our planet into a more upright position relatively.  Indeed the astrology during that time was quite loaded, an “eggs in one basket” situation with the Moon moving through those energy fields.  This could indicate a symbolic or gradual polar-axis alignment with galactic centre – perceived not geo-physically but as an evolving consciousness.

To uplift and straighten my spine with polar axis is a quiet conscious work. The same force of Nature in ages past raised early homo sapiens to stand and walk upright.    I have to keep reminding myself, as I keep forgetting … the “Schumann resonance” – Gaia’s slow pulse or wavelength; to lean with the mast of the Grail ship.

The idea of Earth’s polar axis tilting physically was – as I thought at the time – a naive and literal interpretation of the transcendent view which is:  Gaia’s subtle body moves into an altered resonance with her cosmic environment. In physical terms, this takes place in  waves over a geological period of generations.

Screenshot by Thomas Razzeto, 12.08pm, 21 December 2012 in Ipaza, Mexico

“The slow change of the angle of the axis of the earth with respect to the centre of the galaxy will bring no ill effects.  As far as Mother Nature goes, it is business as usual.  The sun continues to shine, the earth continues to spin, and the four seasons continue to transform from one into another.  …  Once a year the earth orbits into the special position that creates the galactic alignment, and once every 26,000 years this happens at virtually the same moment as the winter solstice.”

..

12 sphere Tree of Life

The above is extracted from http://www.mysticmamma.com/solstice-12-21-12-end-restart-of-mayan-calendar-galactic-alignment/ –  which contains an article by Thomas Razzeto in 2008.  Because of the time lapse since then, I slightly abridged it.

He continues by describing as a “sacred tree” the sunrise procession of planets on 2012 solstice through the ecliptic path which crosses the Milky Way’s dark centre.  At solstice noon the sun transited the core point – as I understand it, a subtle but powerful event through all the planes.  “The Mayan sacred tree is an astronomical reference to the cross made by galactic equator and the ecliptic path of the Sun as seen from Earth, near the centre of the galaxy.  The sacred tree is part of the fixed background of the stars.  Its shape and location with respect to the other stars never changes.

“We should consider the location of the centre of the galaxy as the Mayan womb of creation.  On this day at this time, it is at the bottom acting as the source, the root system of the sacred tree.  So everything comes from source into our world of duality.  What a beautiful metaphor!  This makes much more sense than the false yet often repeated statement that the sun would be on top of the centre of the galaxy on this special day.

“When we look at the configuration at midday – the moment of the Sun’s greatest strength – we have the sacred tree being exhibited in an extremely interesting way.  When we consider the Sun’s presence in the middle of the dark rift while it is also in the middle of those four planets (Venus, Mercury, Pluto, Mars), I think we have found something that is quite remarkable.  …  We have the opportunity to align our thoughts and vibrations with others who wish the same for our planet.”  (Copyright Thomas Razzeto 2008).

..

This is a process to feel or empathise intuitively, rather than try to analyse.  Light is born through darkness.  Time dissolves into cyclic presence.   As the 2012 concentric continues to realign our axial relationship, I think we should listen more to this tender point in ourselves each winter and each summer, and keep still.  It may be that more terrestrial tremors develop at solstices where there is increased sensitivity to magnetic realignment.  We may watch and see and be shown.  In the sacramental consciousness, no humanity or atom of nature is separate.

Initially the impact is subjective: an addictive acceleration  – an interactive and  reactive technology overload.  Terrestrial beings who will not or cannot harmonise with the holistic shift, are flung onto the illumined stage periphery; they may live violently, acting out the drama we desire to watch and to entertain ourselves with; or they may suffer the pressure and upheaval.  Precisely the same rattling disturbs my lower mind.

The lower frequency (individual and collective) in disarray and discord shows in high-relief, man’s inhumanity to man and to the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms.

I am organically interwoven with this as a Sun-Moon Capricorn/Cancer with five planets in earth signs. Through frequent fatigue and my lower mind’s dismal chatter, I am yet aware during the years since 2012 of a progressive widening of the gap between my view of things and the mainstream worldview.  The distorted media version is here today and gone tomorrow; keeping my ear to the ground, I pick up only what is needful, to be informed.

Capricorn glyph with Hermes Trismegistos, 1988

It was said in the earlier days,  ”In the rollercoaster through the Photon Belt, those who evolve will tend to detach and stand aside from those who regress or exploit others at any level.”  We observe the polarisation in the politics, in land management and in business. The new and slowly growing holistic principle is profoundly philanthropic; the grass-roots flourish through my own extended family. Only connect …

At the same time I ask myself where and how do I engage with the regressive element and the agony of its victims and the homeless, as I am challenged with it daily?  It is like two sides of a widening crevasse or bergschrund dividing the mountain from the glacier; that great split is bridged for we are One.  The delineation and its depth are clear.

Master R said in 1947 … “Ours is no work of other worlds and planes. Here on this weeping, suffering earth, is where the Shrine of Love must be built, and built with action, not alone with words …  The can opener of the intellect is too dull to probe the secrets of the Heart of Life.  Knowledge goes deeper than statement. Love, and you shall know … Thy pain is my pain, thy sorrows pierce my heart.  I stand not aloof.”

Photo from dylanontherocks.wordpress.com

 

long ridge near Hope Gill, Lake district Cumbria (photo by JA, April 2018)

The real meaning of “Ascension” and the grounded Book of Revelation is – a daily grind!

Ascension is not “ascent” so much as discovering the path along the mountain.   Ascension draws the Light deep into the ground. I take responsibility for the illumining and clearing of my shadow and of ancient habits.  My tiny spine is Gaia’s – the invisibly vast polar axis with Her magnetic fields and shields and Aurora.   This perception throws up and out the baggage on the beach.  Many of us must embrace and clarify big relationship Karmas and their wounds as a whole at this point in time.  I evolve not through denial but through forgiving.  It is no use to pass the buck!  It is no use to paste it onto a mythical “Them” out there, or “They” in all our discontented issues and habits of speech.  The Change in humankind begins nowhere else but here:  in myself and in yourself.   There is no time like the present connectivity.  There is no time but the present.

My father once visited a Buddhist Rishi who replied, “The past is gone. The future hasn’t happened yet.  The present is Now.  Don’t waste it!”

Ascension is your and my compass: compassion.

Connect around the pyramid – a drawing I did for my father for Xmas 1987

A hidden quantum of lighthouse-keepers in the Change reaches critical mass.  There is no single event; there is a decade, a generation, a lifetime’s curve of changes in attitude to our environment.  The atrocities I see and am distressed by only emphasise the bigger picture of the Change at all levels, throughout the human gene pool.

Stained glass at St Monica’s church, Palmers Green in London.  This is no crucified Christ but one who strides from the tomb, embracing all the worlds

Uranus entered Taurus last week; he will traverse this threshold back and forth for a year or two, before proceeding into the springtide deep within Earth’s flowering.  Though there will continue to be battles with land grabbers, we are likely to witness an “unexpected”  collective turning point as the Gaia awareness gains environmental strength;  a hands-on questioning of our use of fuel and food and its waste.  The brakes were on for decades – the juggernaut against the brake, an immense friction of scorched tyres – but from about here the whole thing begins to slow down.  Slow down!  Personal and collective history demonstrate that we human beings individual and collective do not change and grow until it is unendurable for us not to.

What is the Gaia consciousness?  For me, my spine, my core, is Earth’s:  and Earth’s alignment with the Solar system’s flower of orbits and magnetic fields, and with the galaxy and other stellar systems.

We humans are in no atom separate from nature, the soil, bird, beast, insect and rock forms.  We humans are in no atom separate from Earth’s internal dark magma – our unconscious – which bursts like a phoenix into fire and light the instant it encounters air … the song of the breath.  We humans are in no atom separate from our roads and our heavy buildings and our parasitic tourism and our blinkers.

Biro-amour drawing for David by Tony Wigg. The Greek lettering is ‘Phallos’ whose root ‘Shines’: the verb moves but does not name or fix the light. In the magma sphere within earth’s mantle, there is no air for light to exist. The analogy is with the subconscious ignition of creative imagery. Darkness holds the Shining within itself.

We humans along with all organisms are her breath, her pulse.   Wherever possible, if your life is inextricably busy, accelerated or pressured, pause for just a moment:  slow down to reflect a detail or be silent.   Creatures in the woodland stop their foraging, to look around … until the active fountain rises again within them.  Be refreshed.

These brief openings will grow in due course, and join up like the blue sky through clouds.  Join hands with all of us who try to do this as and when we can. In the inevitable flowering of Logres, find and cherish the Grail vessel in a hillside brook, and dip to drink.  Although poisonous and persuasive, the economic and military juggernaut fights for existence as it dies.  So called world leaders and magnates are puppets.  They do me a favour: they show me my hard drive.  Where am I greedy? Where do I want more and more?   It is actually a dream.   It is hard to wake up; but glimpses come like shafts of sunlight through nature’s canopy.

KEEP SEEING AND KEEP GOING AND KEEP PRACTICING.

..

..

..

Ramana Maharshi with young squirrel

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/

Resurrect the Star

..

Tarot Keys Tower, Star and Moon, representing the paths on the Tree which converge on Netzach

These three Tarots tell me a story:  the cracking of the seedcase, the watering of the shoot, the evolutionary journey to ripen.  When the Tower falls, it reveals its inversion, a well.

I was thinking along the archetypal lines of 2016, 2017 … and today brought a link to a colour meditation on the same theme, which feels timely:
http://colourconscious.com/aura-soma/2017-a-year-for-the-star/   … “By listening to our star and living our truth we take responsibility for the only part that is truly in our hands …” (Dominic Yeoman)

The ‘Philosophus’ chapter in Paul Foster Case’s The True and Invisible Rosicrucian Order offers 6 keys for lovers of wisdom to contemplate further: Death, Star, Chariot … Temperance, World, Sun children.

..

Sextet arrangement: tarot philosophus 7.1.17

..

Arranged here in a six pointed star – the Seal of Solomon – is a visual analogy  that natural man is the seed-case of the spiritual man.  I’m a dull stick these days.  “Philosophus” means cultivating clarity, and the word is derived from Philo Sofia – lover of wisdom … “who might be compared to a man who has learned to read the architect’s plans. The house is yet to build.”

What is clarity?   Clarity is a process of alignment, perhaps a desire to contribute to a positive humanity, a collective Lighthouse.

..

Lighthouse by my brother Simon, circa 1965

..

This morning  I seemed to be mouldering in a puddle – recovering from seasonal flu.  Then I thought of the Lighthouse:  a reflective focus.   Its shaft, its beam, penetrates the ocean depth and crosses the sea.  If I focus on that and give it time, my thought moves from fog into ‘precision tools’, into the quickening of community.   As I open into interior silence, I wait:  have faith: give it space.   The lenses above and below, converge.

click on image to view

Lighthouse under water by Tony Wigg 2016

sketch of alfred wallis 2016

lighthouse with golden birds 2016

 

The lighthouse shaft underwater, releases a flow of strength. Pictures are resurrected, taking on vibrance and meaning.   “May God be resurrected and his foes perish …  (Psalms).  As wax melts before the flame, as smoke is driven by the wind …”

 

RESURRECT … and my dark sloth slithers off the branch.  There is a golden sound now in the Archangel pouring quintessential water and fire onto muddy Leo and Scorpio creatures … beneath the shadow of his iridescent wings and rainbow …  dipping his toe in the bottomless brook:  “Guidance is not a mere article of faith.  It is a matter of daily personal experience.”

 

 

 

When it connects, it feels like scales dropping off as the Sun dawns.  There is a beautiful enigma with the androgyne who dances within the laurel of the World, and with the Children in their field:  they sparkle through the dew.   The smiling sunflowers all (except one – ) turn their faces to the children – the Seed of the Sun.  One sunflower-head watches the Sun, for form’s sake.  The childrens’ whole sexuality is in bud.  My fields are irrigated with the golden flow of their joy.  The world is darkened, but so is the closed interior of the unbroken seed.   The seed breaks into halves and into children.

 

 

In a nutshell, duties to life and community are perceived in a flash, which take time, labour and obscurity to realise.

..

The dawn comes.  I have to approach it again and again and again.  To repeat by turning back the page to see what I wrote before – or what anyone else wrote – is not sufficient.  The key is turned afresh, to enlighten.  I have no illusions the enlightenment will last but it doesn’t matter:  it will come again. The Oracle never clones itself.

..

Child and Grandmother, 2016

..

The other 3 Keys (in the sextet above, in this post) are Death, the Star and the Chariot.   Death scythes the fertile ground.  The Star waters it.  The Chariot stands like a hyacinth or … a lighthouse with its keeper inside.

Go into the lamp room with its lenses and reflectors.  It is simple.  Light a candle, light my fire and let it travel across the sea.   Light it with a match or knock a spark from two flints.   The spark is within the stone (I wrote snow), like the flame within the wood, the cream within milk, the Upanishad.   The spark is Netzach on the Tree, the mating game … only connect.

..

Netzach, Hod, Temperance on the Tree

..

In the hells on earth, there are gleams here and there, which give an individual  some strength to carry his child or to care for another;  persons leave their homes and go out into the thick of it.  The manna is directed into the core of Hope in the human seed.

What is the Star of Hope?   Hope is not an abstract.  Hope is the capacity to transfigure a dark situation into a light one.   Hope illumines the dark and turgid, and dispels hatred and fear.   One moment I am dead.  The next moment I am alive and kicking.   This is Hope.

This is what is meant by the Star …  the star the Magi followed.  Hope is an irrigation, converting desert into orchard and oasis.  It can begin nowhere else but here.

..

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.

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/

 

More Sketches of Beethoven

Beethoven and … Rostropovich? (circa 1972).  I found this forgotten early drawing from the 1970s, while searching for the two which I have lost. I used to find it ‘easier’ to draw him than I do now! I love listening to the Beethoven cello sonatas.

..

Continuing this “Beethoven series” inspired by Elene’s researches :  this post includes some journaling over the weekend, and portraits of the master by others, and from my new sketches.

First: a detail from my “watershed” series of dreams during the 1970s:

September 1976 – from “Paris and the Hollow Way”
(Watershed Tales)
“Smelling the flowers which grow around the end of Boulevard Malesherbes, I see the bright food in the brasseries, the Gaulish striped canopies over smoked glass. Avenues which radiate from this place are planted tree-deep with bouquets gathered this morning from the tart grass; the dew is still upon them – the waters of a river, where the pit of the railway once was.

“And yet this place in Paris has mile upon mile of shattered streets and dirty weathered brick.  The sorrow moves me, through field upon field of unhoused space, like Liverpool after the war.  As far as I see, no man lives here.  It moves me in strange ways.  I discussed these ways with the old hoardings of scarred planks and corrugated iron which give and take along the road. What tragedian devastated this land?

“No man,” they replied.  No man is an island.  But they live and speak.  Their answer is in nomadic ways, in syllables of philosophy I cannot recall.  They are my notice boards, my inner adversities that talk.

“So I came at last to an arrangement with Beethoven, of whom I was very fond.  I found him in a room without much light, and a musty smell … maybe a Viennese cellar during Napoleon’s bombardment?  I agreed to draw a portrait for him of his daughter.  She’s a small child, and her facial features are very dark.  For hours I toiled with each line and contour.  I saw Beethoven’s light within her, her soul so clear where she sat, but I couldn’t get it right.  The expression of her mouth and eyes, came into me, but I couldn’t connect.  I hesitated. I erased and drew, and erased again and drew.  The difficulty stared me in the face like having to learn all over again to walk, and made me cringe with pain.  I struggled to achieve at length an approximation:  my facility is lost, and I forgot the way.  There are no short cuts I can take.”

..

The young child Beethoven?
portrait by an unknown artist, discovered in 1972
and … how might he have looked?

Beethoven age 13 by an unknown artist – discovered in 1972

How might he have looked?

..

I was reminded of this, because I had rather a struggle to draw Beethoven over the weekend.  I lost two early sketches of him which I like – maybe I gave them away – so I tried to reconstruct them.  The creative process doesn’t always flow.  Beethoven often had titanic difficulty with his compositions, scribbling and shouting and scratching out and searching for what he heard in the rain and the trees, from God.

Beethoven on a walk … Pastorale

..

Autograph MSS, op. 111, http://www.beethoven-haus-bonn.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=&template=dokseite_digitales_archiv_en&_dokid=ha:wm33&_seite=1

..

Journal 24 July – Beethoven and Vera
He really is around … two new followers to my blog, who write about him and about pianos – did they come in through Vera Moore?

On Emily’s piano yesterday however, the three or four out-of-tune keys were very noticeable, and I couldn’t ride it well;  it was evening after a long tiring day.  When I played, the flowing faculty wasn’t there, and I stumbled along the up-down action.  I rang the tuner:  he said it could be tuned again in two or three months, but if it gets unbearable he will come and see what he can do.  One small consolation:  my own piano – a Spencer upright – is easier!

Strings and hammers – detail from a larger painting

It was a revelation for me the day before, that to play Beethoven we must meditate with love: that is, to wait and let him enter.  He reaches the soul universally and constantly regenerates and sprouts runners along the higher astral ground – a hardy perennial.  The perennial is love – the humanitarian love which strove and strode nobly with his wrecked health and domestic furies.

I need to tune into that love, spontaneously or deliberately, to play him at all.  I have to walk with him and feel the rain, meditate and imagine the wild wind in the trees I see, and the noble themes it whispers onto a sodden notebook page.  The love and the divine beauty had to force a way through discordant tinnitus.

Beethoven walk: by Julius Schmid

This must have made the silent sound of the outer world unbearably alluring – to see the movement and feel the wet rain.  On his walks the nature devas counselled him: he sang and scribbled and “raved”.  To rave is to be ravished in the elements.  People who knew him recorded the way his face opened into a raptus.  The raptus of old Beethoven fought the daily cacophonies inside his ears, and strode the serene paradox of the late quartets and the Opus 111 Arietta.

I did long ago, a small oil sketch of B walking in the grass hatless – can’t find it yet – did it get left behind at the red hedgehog?  Yesterday it was clear to me that my enormous labour of love at the red hedgehog in 2011 (a small and struggling concert venue), to clean and sand down and varnish the floors which were filthy, was for Beethoven.  I did it for the Peter Donohoe Beethoven series there – hook, line and sinker:  an esoteric assignment if you will.  If I hadn’t cleaned and brightened the floors, that wonderful Beethoven series might not have happened or touched earth there – a peak symbolic moment.  The sublime got through the chaos – the timeless touch spread fore and aft, and struck its Sound and Glory.

Klein, Franz / Micheli: Beethoven-Maske mit Lorbeerkranz, nach der Lebendmaske von Klein

..

As I mentioned Vera Moore above, suddenly my world with her is here too.  She is with me.  She was my piano teacher in Paris in 1965:  her eternal Life in a rickety household, rather like Beethoven’s – but she lived till she was 90:  her strong caress of the keys, like wrapping a baby – her reverent joy – giving birth to her “son of Art” and bringing him up through the French Resistance and after the war:  her powerful and abrasive personality as a younger woman and single mother – I hear again the obstinate ripple of her voice.  It didn’t bother her if her old Gaveau was out of tune – she couldn’t afford the tuner.

Vera Moore when I knew her – this drawing from memory is from the early 1970s.  I can imagine her sitting with me, and what she might say about this note or that note, wrapping my fingers round it like a baby with a shawl … her way with poetic images and her LOVE … her instruction to play what I am learning, like a chorale, without any inhibitions – sing it inside, with the touch.

I read somewhere that Liszt could draw forth the heart and soul from an out-of-tune instrument and captivate his listeners.  There must be a way of using those odd sounds.

One of Vera’s students helped her to write a piano Method.  I don’t think I heard Vera play Beethoven, but when Beethoven’s window opens in my soul, I may be pretty sure she will come through it as well.  Her gift like his, is a delicate seed of power, grace, humour and peace, in a turbulent nest.

I think Vera taught her piano students the “horizontal” caress which holds and rolls along the white and black keys, and on rare occasions comes through me in a moment of delight (I soon fall off !).  I believe Liszt played like this, glancing sideways with seductive smile (“isn’t this amazing?”); and Paul Roes aims to reconstruct it in his “Music – the Mystery and the Reality“.

Vera Moore in the 1930s – from Winifred Nicolson’s painting of her.  Search ‘vera moore’ on this blog, for my two posts about her.

I do prefer old uneven character pianos to the mechanically-perfect electronic keyboards.  You can hear straight away, even through a high open window.

..

A sketch of Beethoven in his teens. This one ‘works’ for me – and took just a few minutes.

..

Here is a timely message from a fellow blogger:

“Draw a circle
place inside of it
every aspect of your
human experience …
all emotions
all actions
all shame and guilt
all the things you would love to forget
and all that you hope
you will never forget.

“Make it a place where all of it fits.
Let them no longer be strangers
to one another.
Let them take off their shoes and stay a while
rub elbows
break bread
toast to one another’s health and long life.

“When everything that you have experienced
is located in one place
you are
finally
‘One with Everything’.”

Charlie Morris wrote this poem … this morning, about everything in his life, the human texture, difficulty and joy, being in this one room unconditionally and inclusively, which is “God”.  It is not spiritual or unspiritual.

So Beethoven poured basins of water over his head to cool the fire of composition.  Now see and breathe interior peace in and as the room.  Nobody is alive without depending on something or someone for their well being.  No one goes it alone.  Look at what I depend on!  If my path with the Inner School was taken away, where would I be?

..

Gallery, working from Kloeber and Carolsfeld’s portraits
– click to view

Beethoven on a walk – an attempt to reconstruct my lost oil sketch

Sketch of Beethoven in 1802, after the Hornemann portrait – Heiligenstadt Testament

Beethoven, the original by Kloeber. The master liked this drawing, in particular the flowing hair.

Pencil drawing by Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1808

Sketch after the drawing by von Carolsfeld, circa 1808

Sketch after the drawing by van Kloeber

 

I spent the rest of the day trying to draw Beethoven – three more efforts.  It is much more difficult for me than it used to be – and so is playing the piano.  I found my Robbins Landon book which has lots of pictures, and an interesting photoshop idea online, with B’s life mask.  I got very bogged down and stuck.

I also extracted from my 2011 journals, the gist of Peter Donohoe’s Beethoven series at the red hedgehog (zum roten igel in North London) – I might put it in my next post, with my sketches of PD’s master-class.  Then my energy was all gone.

Gallery – click to view

http://fotosketcher by lvbandmore.blogspot.com

photosketcher by http://lvbandmore.blogspot.com

Beethoven 1940s style. It intrigued me to try to sketch him in this way that someone saw him – he put on the costume for a joke. But I lost it! I rubbed it all out and …

… re-did it in period style – a trial and error process

Klein, Franz: Lebendmaske Beethovens im 3/4 Profil – Foto von Simon

study in notebook

silhouette by will bithorn, postcard

..

Gallery

Painting by Joseph Mahler

Beethoven, after the Joseph Mahler portrait

Beethoven kept this painting by Joseph Mahler on his wall throughout his many changes of lodging.  It must have been among his few possessions – apart from the thousands of pages of his notebooks – which survived.  He will have identified particularly with its heroic quality.  Another of his treasured paintings was the one of his grandfather.

I decided to ‘have a go’ with this one, but quickly found the pose too artificial and romantic to reproduce convincingly!  So I switched to the idea of him conducting from the keyboard – keep practicing !   Keep trying  …

..

Helen Ede in 1974, on my last visit to her. She is knitting a sock for ‘Old Bonesie’, my grandfather. Through the window in Jordan Lane, you could see the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh

I hear the severe ecstasy of my grandmother, Helen Ede – her face and eagerness shaped somewhat like his. She used to play Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata on her Bechstein … in whose dusky dark tones I explored his slow movements.  When her memory went, or she fell off a note, she would say ‘h’ai’ crossly.

We spoke together about the Arietta in his Opus 111 – after listening to her old record of Claudio Arrau playing it. Her face lit up: I cannot reproduce her voice, but she said something like this:

“… the long trills where the sun comes out.  You have in the beginning an austerity, and through the variation the austerity slowly relents, letting go of its own form, to melt and smile and dance.  You know that place where the dotted rhythm begins to go around, and around, to break it up – dissolving the form into light without ever quite losing it … ?  it falls open and time stops.  It seems to me that through that light, very gradually emerges again the variation.  The theme didn’t quite disappear, but is transcended and transfigured.  Then slowly the bar lines return, and the theme resumes.”

..

 

Imagining old Beethoven in private, his deaf face, his pain transfigured, alone in that mess of a room, having just poured another bucket over himself … I hear in some of his piano music, the Dionysian cyclic mandala or mantra rhythm, like Dante’s cosmic rose, dissolving into light.

..

“Ochh Jane,” says my grandmother in her Scottish-German accent, “Oh what a sight to see.”

..

Claudio Arrau 1986: from the record sleeve of Opus 111

..

..

..

**

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/