A New Year – Wings within Spine

Circle, courtesy of The Sun Hermit (Tom Corsus)

With Christmas we are thresholding Capricorn – the thresher of the Dweller – for the midwinter Solstice came late this year, on the 23rd.  This morning in north Somerset the sky is as eggshell crisp and blue over the hills; the sun rose in fiery gold splendour and the parcels were opened.  And the light will begin again to grow.

Painting by Jung in “The Red Book” – Jung’s fabulous Odyssey in the Sun-boat

Mac Macartney’s bookThe Children’s Fire” deeply touches me in his un-mapping of Wales. Along the numinous borderland of Druidic Albion, through wet leaves, frosty nights and carefully concealed firelight, refuse was chucked at Mac from cars, but also he met the ageless kindness from strangers. Mac’s odyssey towards pre-Roman Anglesey turns my nose and antlers towards the re-wilding movement.  In the tiny pockets where this starts, a seminal abundance collects.  The outlets are not many nor yet large, but the pressure underneath them is great, for human has cut back, tamed, tarred and scarred, regimented the ground and stamped out the witch.  The magical force concentrates around the vents like the tiny proportion of liberators in the mass human entity.

As Earth rotates so the core magma passing centrifugally through geological planes converts to nature’s irrepressible force and beauty;  Gaia, the greening.

This year I will walk with the re-wilding enterprise and the global energy parliament  and my patch of ground in the Gene Keys field.

Look at these sacred geometries in the dance of planetary time and space (read more; this https://ecohustler.com/technology/winter-solstice-fibonacci-and-earths-alignment-with-the-galactic-core/ is fascinating about the present alignment of Earth’s polar axis to galactic centre at solstice) – the real world we live in; the living texture of astrology.  Behold the cosmic patterning which silences the interpreter!

My inner eye opens again to perceive the spheres, the Suns; their shape and energy. Pockets of florescence, like nutritious energy-balls or bath bombs, explode and fizz “in the air”. Dandelion clocks scatter angels with one blow.    When nature’s tide reclaims the urban-industrial blotch, she could do so beyond expectation like the breach of a dam – the vigour and abundance will astound.  Who knows when or how this happens? It seems unlikely in regions burnt by global warming – and the forecast even there is unpredictable.  Where a branch is pruned, many sprout.  It will probably happen as the human population drops – at any time during this century.  Our DNA is coded collectively;  in harmony with natural forces and formation, the population may start to physically decrease.  The DNA is omnipresent, lacing the human form with the molecular evolution, atom to galaxy.

Consider also the vital DNA in the gut, its garden, and the old alchemists’ wisdom of the black dragon, the white Chyle and the red and white roses.  By roses, I mean the instrument of life in the blood.  All the teachings now say, put your hand on your belly, breathe into your bum.  Consciousness of the Solar plexus and intestinal wealth cancels the old ignorance which chucked it into the road.  It means valuing this organ of the body and the substances passing through it which are acted upon by enzymes to release nutrients and the Sun.  In Heaven there is no dirt.  It is not random that pure sexuality flows tandem with the gut.  The Tarot Hermit – Hebrew letter Yod – rules with his lamp the whole region, darker than a cave; the galactic night of his mountain peak.

Builders of the Adytum Tarot Key 9 – the Hermit (Virgo)

My Solar-return Moon this year is the Hermetic sign Virgo, in 2nd house. Just now the sun comes into the room, and on my “altar” is a tiny spark of light – the facet of a gem between Yab-yum lovers.   It echoes and earths the candle flame above it, about a foot away.  I feel sleepy and still this morning.  In the night I was awake a lot – perhaps a download; the pressure of Nature’s fountain through “outlets”.

The natural outlets – dolmens, temples, stone rings and streams – flow beneath the urban grid on sacred Albion and bide time.  Lifetimes can pass in the dreaming. The perennial magic in this land was long crucified but will sprout –  according to the cosmic relation beyond the window of history we teach ourselves.  I will contemplate Britain’s underground occult river.  Planted in the generative mind, the holy places will manifest. The human need begins here and there to work with nature not as a mere resource but with profound cooperative care and love.

Kabbalah Tree of Life as a Garden – 1989

In a wildish orchard near Chesham, a large animal sat quietly like a cat and watched my presence with long large ears, wide apart on slender neck, probably a deer.   Long minutes we watched each other, without movement and at a distance.  Near the farmhouse behind hedge and gates, the creature sat in the long grass, alert as the dew;  my solstice messenger.

With the wisdom that comes through here, I can focus on the re-wilding initiatives under the defiantly ailing human crust.  The ailing human crust, solid as it seems with its cities, infrastructure and disease, is a collective dream we subscribe to.  There is a choice.  Subscribe to the magazine or media-misery with its shiny photo-squares or cultivate through nature’s Imagination the spherical “bombs” of consciousness;  the subterranean limestone rivers, the enormous abundance of leaf, flora, bacteria and fauna behind the human bungalow.  Imagine the dolmens, the stones and druids.  Many druids reborn nowadays are in the work.  Come here to refresh myself and drink when I get tugged astray with grief – come Home.  I live in the physical dream but I move with the metaphysical (supra-physical) Malkuth – subtle, secret and unlimited.

Here is Origin – the mountain peak down which flow as rivers the messengers throughout human time.  When the vision is open, I see – in collective resonance – the human form symbiotic with the Garden and with the beasts whom in another dreamtime it dominated and decimated; whom now it seeks to name and nurture, for they are our body.  The DNA serpent is our awakening to this fact. Genesis is timeless.

Come now to embrace the indigenous Dreamtime which encircles the human game which “got spoiled”.  The Dreamer runs back and forth in time’s great landscape.

What spoiled our terrain?  The primary-school level of quarrelling.  Our future is not in that.  Our real future is that nothing can stop the human genome from growing up to take responsibility.  We grow out of our age – about eight years old at present.  Nothing can stop humankind from maturing, any more than the seasonal pulse be stopped – to live and grow with trees and earth and the animal kingdom, the fragile husbandry of climate change and the art of living; for it hurts us too much as a species not to.  If all I read on my window is war, starvation, nightmare media and consumer pollutant chaos … know that I see but darkly through the glass;  changing my focus from surface glaze to the inner eye, I may see the starry constellations in the raven’s wing. I may glimpse through the murk a mountain – each snowflake a unique hexagonal crystal; the living fact of the water I drink.

You may feel and be the awakening of wings within your spine.

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I feel as I rise into this, that the urban pollutant around our Earth is a dying genre;  it seems to intensify politically, but it is dead matter, a crust to peel away.  The crust, unconscious of origin and of the new order,  completes its own time.  Through it – in places imperceptibly, in other places outspoken or persecuted – emerge like green-shoots through the ground a new Homo Sanctus; the children already are born.  Imperfect we are, and painfully struggling, but persistent.

I don’t see this happening all at once – though in historic time it appears sudden and cataclysmic – there is a process of friction during which the worn-out strongholds increasingly collapse and the apparently weak prevails.  The “weak force” of gravity in physics exists (like homeopathy) virtually beyond the power of sophisticated instruments to detect.  Yet I guess as single gravitons unite with others, they condense into orbital waves which curve spacetime around stars, supernova events and planetary systems.  The force of attraction between ourselves as human beings, the mating instinct, has this infinitesimal origin.  And I feel that the magnetic mating instinct itself evolves towards Eden.

Such is cosmic consciousness – a quantum leap.  A single starling cell flying into the dancing cloud of thousands, millions in the Murmuration, enters the higher Intelligence: the geometry of I AM.

Or consider the bees.

The raised frequency level is not to be confused with the herd instinct in the market force or the lower “fear” vibration which conventionally governs the world.

Population explosion?  Visualise an immense tidal flow of racial varieties, Karmas and the surface tension of our suffering to cross-fertilise the gene pool – the nature of the tide leaves its deposit on the beach and flows back into the sea; then again it comes.  Gaia does not tolerate indefinite excess – just enough to force us as Her cells to change and realign. There are seasons and there are times; there is growth and there is contraction – Hesed and Gevurah on the Tree.  The universe breathes rhythmically, in greater cycles.

I am aware again now of our collective waste’s potential to transmute rather than to dump; of nascent technologies which rediscover and re-state the old alchemical wisdom with transmuting matter.  The human core potential to waken is limitless.  We are each a Solar-battery, still dormant.  The potential to biodegrade our ocean waste with the help of the Sun is limitless;  the intention is coded in old alchemic texts like algebra in modern physics.  It is encoded in our body, in the conscious threads of DNA we share with stars.

DNA helix – illustration from The Gene Keys by Richard Rudd

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From “The Glory of the World” …
Observe, how the seeds of all things that grow,
like grains of wheat or barley, spring from the ground
by the operation of the Stone                                                                                                      
and influence of Sun and Moon ;

how they grow up into the air,
are gradually matured,  and bring forth fruit
again to sow in its own soil.

The field is prepared for the grain, being ploughed up well
and manured with dung well rotted ;
for the earth consumes and assimilates manure
as the body assimilates food
and separates subtle from the gross.

Therewith it calls forth the life of the seed
to nourish with milk
as a mother her infant nourishes,
to increase in size, and upward grow.

The earth separates the good from bad,
imparting, as nutriment to all growing things,
the destruction of ONE thing
generating another.

Hermetic Museum of Alchemy, 17th Century

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Madonna holds in strong hands her wild sacred child, Buckfast Abbey, Devon: their pride in each other!

Any slight shift in worldview, in the personal consciousness, helps activate the ancient new science which is already manifesting.  The contagion travels from one to one; it pops open with the quantum hop.  Communities cannot wake up without ourselves as individuals – you and me – who can, who will, and who do.

I feel at such moment with the pain of our brittle dream around us, we yet approach the threshold of reality.  Look within.  Be still and let it breathe.

An alternative “Genesis”…?  for Christmas, solstice  – may Treasure come to you in the coming year.

When placed in its natural soil
and rained with dew from heaven
and roused to life
by warmth of the Sun and Moon,
it produces fruit, the way of its own kind.

These two sowings are our Art.
The Sun and Moon are grain
put into our soil, a soul and spirit,
and such as are the father and mother
are children they will generate.

Hermetic Museum of Alchemy, 17th century

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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 2012-2020. 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/

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

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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.

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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 9thGene 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.

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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 8th– 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.

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Click on image to view

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/

 

 

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.

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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/

A Walk with Easter Bluebells

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

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World turns upside down: sky through the ground

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Sky, earth, water

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living creature

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living body

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worlds meet: as above so below

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tuning fork

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like a bow

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relationship, dancers

tingly tangle!

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landscape every which way

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Friend’s astrology on the Tree of Life

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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/

The Mellowing

Woodland 1986

Woodland 1986

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

jane & quince at ventonwyn copy

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

No repeat
but savour
through and through
the NOW

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

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

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little boy by the sea 1954

little boy by the sea 1954

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

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Little girl in a meadow, 1955

Little girl in a meadow, 1955

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

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

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Yehudi Menuhin joyously 1986

Yehudi Menuhin joyously 1986

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

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Red roofs, Cornwall, 1956

Red roofs, Cornwall, 1956

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Elisa & Mary in Iona - 2016

Elisa & Mary in Iona – 2016

**

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

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

aquariel link

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

Tales of the Watershed – Chinese Torch Prints

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fish by Steven Szegedy Szuts

fish by Steven Szegedy Szuts

Dreams No.89   May 1975

IF YOU were Chinese …

If who was Chinese?   Me, you or history?

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

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

So far so good.

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

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

old tao sage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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child caught tasting pebbles - Art-Not-Doing 1987

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**

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.

Gene Keys Golden Path Program
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/

Oh Aquarius, Here be Dragons

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Blank on the Map, 1987

Blank on the Map, 1987

Here be dragons …

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Around Bridgewater are lakes and floods and evacuated villages and utterly distressed families, week after week.  Along south Devon’s coast between Exeter and Dawlish, the railway line fell into the sea.  All over the west country is wet emergency, a rising water table, and storm: while the east coast and its villas crumble into the tide.  Climate change.

somerset floods, Moorland near Bridgewater, daily mail

Think of these people.  Government officially visits and ponces around, yet hocked our economy reserves to an overseas power, to build an idiot HS2 railway for future businessmen.   We may be vulnerable to that power’s high hand in later decades, when it calls in the debt.  When Cuts are made all over voluntary organizations, hospitals and the needy folk, government borrows yet deeper from outside our shores, to maintain the blind engine, and to compete.

somerset floods, western gazette

There is little point in blaming central government or environment agencies.  We put them there ourselves, whomever we believe in !  Central government cannot act in any other way but foolishly, or with the surface tension of multiple conflicting interests.  The party system gives some safeguard. It blocks any one gaining the upper hand;  but conserves the lowest common denominator.

This is how my and your average mind works :  the rationale is our individual gear-automatic closed car gridlock.  Abandon ship.  Follow the monster and complain.

somerset floods, daily mail

Each personage disagrees/is in conflict with all the others!

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Or:  begin the change within ourselves. Connect:  build Solar networks in a delta of individual ways, which freely interact and move among the atoms into capillaries, roots and veins.   Life – the roots of life activate small flames of the soul, of friendship, and of neighbourly assistance:  the ancient work of the Sun.   Who needs to Channel the Masters?   Their sacrament is here in me, in you, and among ourselves, unlimited, touching Earth through our feet and hands.   We must know our field, our neighbour and our community.

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Menorah Tree of Sapphires

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zodiac with ophiocus - Version 2

The Aquarian Age is a human dawn through seeming chaos and catastrophe.  Aquarius is the Water Pourer – literally. We will no longer pass the buck, or require governments to do the caring.  We know the Divine particle is here within:  we see the old ways are chaos, dead and grey.  They are an inertia momentum against the brake, and it – the consumer economy – rides against it yet awhile, building a bow-wave of bigger vehicles and more and more cancer.  Sooner or later the frictional imbalance gets too much, and the machine breaks apart.  The fuel cannot reach it.

We are not inert.  We are conscious here and now, and we act.

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From another perspective:  Avalon is a place where dragons gather, peace.  The dragons are telluric.  You can see the earth-serpent visually from the air – along the winding Parrett river.

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And …  the Blanks on the Map?  Why, here be dragons.

My friend Genie left a comment on a certain dragon in my previous post:  “Lying on a bed in Goa, covered with warm Ayurvedic oils I saw from the corner of the hooded eye, claws edging a padded paw.  The Dragon of herbal power showing its fire.”

Touche!  For that is precisely what I saw, when I dreamed and drew this sequence in 1987:

Dragon's paw

Dragon’s paw

 

These are a few of a hundred dragons I drew.  It was the day I changed from drawing with my right hand, to drawing with my left, and brought the two sides together.  It was because I was going too fast;  I slowed right down, so as to draw and write consciously with the left-handed difficulty.  The line changed and became powerful, it spoke. The inner dragon felt like my sore ego, and bits of creative self – marginalised and shadowy.  So I helped him to come out of the cave and be seen, and thrive.  And coming out, these days, is a Big Issue, individually.

This post today, is about interior growing, and exterior frets. 

Movements in humanity begin with one individual reaching turning-point.  A grain of sand is the first to shift a landslide.  It took just one – Buddha, Yeshua, Sankara – to change the edifice of their times and start afresh.   Inertia swings back, for that is the nature of our unevolved bodymind, but … there remains our hidden “I”, the human capacity to move mountains and start a butterfly.

These daffodil buds awaken in many dark places, and begin something new.   Not me alone.   Us.   Morphic resonance at critical mass.  In the last couple days, my daughter and two others, spoke this same thought – with some surprise – that a single person starts the change, not a “group” or “society”.

young daffodils and narcissus

In the Aquarian age, the water table rises, walls are broken, and we put our faith no more in “heroes”, but in the heart. 

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This post is a mixed bag!   And I am still travelling with Jung’s Red Book.  I shall be, for many months to come.

He met Elijah and Salome, and reflected on forethought and pleasure.  The “forethought” is Promethean, the seer of the race.  He says:  “If a form does not contain and compress pleasure with itself, it cannot reach the higher, since it always flows like water from above to below.  All pleasure when left alone, flows into the deep sea and ends in the deathly stillness of dispersal into unending space.”

somerset levels, near Langport

somerset levels, near Langport

I find Jung’s thought and journey profoundly Kabbalistic, on force and formation:  and even Indian: the nature of Siva and Shakti:  the standing still, the moving pulse.   If we go deep enough, we are shown everything.

Pleasure can become jnana, meditation, advaita.   But ferment and friction are Nature’s requirement to keep the world turning and birthing, and sometimes our ferment is acute and jagged, and seeks pleasure hopelessly, in all the sticking out peaks of the graph.   It is ephemeral and indeed elemental, as the earth’s aeons of fire and ice before life.

“Both pleasure and forethinking are equally old and in nature intimately one.  Only in man does the separate existence of both principles become apparent.”

I feel the human race survives through enduring the CONSEQUENCES of our excess, perhaps time and time again:  excess, contraction, tidal, breath.   This is plainly obvious in individuals, in the seeds of the whole.  Each individual begins the human race (but has no beginning, really).   We now face a difficult Environment, who no longer sleeps while we ravage her.  She answers back with earth and water, wind and fire.   She is alive, she speaks to us.   Dialogue is evolution.

In the tiny well of humanity in my fractal depth, are eternal verities.

Just caught this rainbow in my kitchen window!

Just caught this rainbow in my kitchen window!

The Dancing Yeti wrote and said he likes my picture of the heroin addict in Piccadilly (in my previous post).  I just found – further along in the same sketchbook/1969 – a painting the young man did, and gave me at the time;  so here are both.   Thanks, Kevan, for the prompt!

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>>>>

The following day (11 February), I had to add this mini-post:  
A further thought, on the Serpent or earth-dragon.  The snake is electro-magnetic current’s circuitry around the plus and minus poles:  the man, the woman and their arena which extends the Child.  The binary must open into a triad, and it cannot do this without the snake in the Tree.  The snake brings in the whole element of conscious knowledge, temptation and the Fruit.  When man and woman are a triad – Adam, Eve and Snake – a vast dream pageant of history opens, to embody and toil with the sweat of their brow:  their childrens’ childrens’ children, and the dark lagunas which thicken wherever the ways twist over and become confused – the tangled web.

Arcana 6 Lovers - Version 2..

Ah!  how Genesis gets misunderstood!  All coming from JHVH, returns to JHVH, the One Reality.  The snake is – wherever evolution is real – the natural selection of conscious choice.  Darwin’s view was primitive, and yet contained its kernel of truth.  Was he, like Newton, misrepresented? Selection of the fittest in the animal kingdom, has a unique and EVOLUTIONARY expression in human consciousness.  It happens any moment, where an individual wall of time and graffiti collapses.  When we recognise and love this in each other, the Kundalini Snake is Transformation … as in Indian yoga philosophy and in the Dakini oracle.

My tent or cave is set a little apart from the rest of the family.  Live and work with human limitation and infinity.  His room is “unknown” to me, it is where he to himself, never had a beginning, and never ends.  But when I perceive that “unknown” I am mysteriously connected.  See and be from under the other’s eyebrows, without comment and with respect.  I see nothing but I am.  You are.  There is no fiddle faddle.  When you are talking or exploring something, you go very quiet and slow, like this.

You see, we are in kundalini, her coil.  Novices tumble into tornado, but the natural adepts turn with her spiral, as the light.  When a seer encounters one who goes quiet and slow and explores, her spiral rests and flows with his.  There is a transmission, and she reflects it back.  It took many centuries to set up, like an oak.  Honour it.  Meditate on it.  Be there and here for its work.  It provides a medium for the inner and the outer to work together in the Field:  the toil out there, the nuts and bolts, bricks and mortar, of life and humans.  Transmute.  Keep going!

Key 6 – The Lovers 
Jung said the serpent is not only a separating, but a unifying Principle. Here is the meaning of Tarot Key 6 (above):  Its emblem or letter is hebrew ZAIN the sword which deftly separates the parts and unifies the whole.  The sword’s memory is the alternation of fire and water to the fluid metal.  Fire and water are man and woman.  The ore is the mercury of the wise, and so this Key is ruled by Gemini.  Beauty is astonished at the rhymes and runes!  In Key 6, the active consciousness (Adam) contemplates the receptive subconscious (Eve).  She is an open lake.  In the lake is reflected the Law of Rafael above.

Adam put into the Lake his desire to see the Law.  Subconscious Eve is amenable to suggestion, and provides that vision.  If he requested of her the twisting dark lagunas, she would show him those, and these forms in turn would keep on conditioning his desire, and therefore his childrens’ childrens’ childrens’ modifications.  Thus the active consciousness makes a Choice – to alter our state of interior momentum:  to turn towards and into, rather than with, the current.

To take responsibility for our own palette, for the painting of our life, we co-create with God, through Eve.  I am a lake, and You write on me.  I am your mirror, and in me you see with yourself, the Archangel, God’s messenger:  the cosmic Law.  This gets practiced prosaically on my kitchen table:  practice in partnered writing, at first it is academic.

I feel then the rainbows in the splash of heavy rain and cars outside, as the cold wind blows the bare trees.  They slowly, softly, fill the water like a tide. Strength is never a mere show of force. The hidden soft power is in every sound;  it ripples the Snake of the Earth.  The strength is not me.  It is the Sky, and it touches down here, and flows along the earth and wood meridians.  Be well !

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**

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/

 

 

A Poem on Being the World

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Quantock 1

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I am actually planning a SITA Arrows post.  But during a search in my journals for something else, I came across this poem, written in May 2007:

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tao doodle

Pare, oil and cherish the bud seed
that glides along the ground
receiving flowers, fragrant fruit, leaves,
grit and human-ness.

She smiles
he enters
all shall be well
all manner of things.

As the Sun’s light encircles
earth without end:
no day, no night, but both,

dive into the ocean
and find upon the rippled sandy bed
your drinking glass !

Sand and stars and stone
and glass and waves with aeons turning slow
are sand and blood, patterns of the poet
to breathe and blow.

Plant David’s Psalms again in Isra-EL:
trees of fruit in bud, soldiery in caritas.
The soul begetting magic
became forgotten.

The ground is damp and drinks the seed –
tiny roots out stretch
like to like as baby fingers mother Earth –
rain coming dew, breaks open, melting marriage –

the meanings rest
behind my day’s weariness:

the fish is in the egg.

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The Great Work gardened, watered daily,
projects a need to maintain Herself
with jobs and money and
skill with magic boxes.

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The New world order is a nucleus now present on this planet.
Esoteric wisdom is like dandelion seed – fragile in the pollutants of worldpolitik and easily overthrown, trodden under – fanciful, frail, devalued – and for this reason, let it be hardy handsome as the dandelion leaf and root;  let it withstand all toxic blasts; let it keep on and on being found, renewed, reborn and realised.

Use intelligence to cultivate the positive opposite to negative states of mind. It’s easy to run with bad news, tension and anxiety.  It takes real creative effort to be happy.  When in fear, be still, find where the constriction is;  let it open and expand. Make it smile.  Turn it to lifecurrent, release from jail.  The blessing of the tree moves into flower, within cottages and their gardens, in a pad, a dog, a lover, the stars.

9 May 2007

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drinking-glass on sea-bed

drinking-glass on sea-bed

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And … a Tarot Reflection, that same day.  Click to open gallery and see captions.

**

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/

The Family and the Wand

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Unknown-2

This winter and new year, terrible storms have battered people and homes around the west coast – waves breaking spray many times higher than the houses, and ripping up roads.  My heart goes out to these families and their homes, and to all who live on flood plains, and cannot sell or move.  How can we help each other?

Calm weather here in London with un-predictable clouds, downpours, and a touch of frost – my spirit is lighter than last month.   I feel the little seeds sprouting in the ground, the tender young Yang, the naked growing moon tide from the point of rock bottom.   There is a tiny oscillation, which grows and forms a pulse, a conic sound or psyche wave.

Here is an astrology Synastry:  a combined chart of two friends who got to know each other last year: a diagrammatic portrait of their relationship.   I haven’t put the Houses in. Her planets are black:  His are red.  Look just at that bundle of wands in the Nodal stem !  The lunar Nodes are the Karmic path, drawing souls together.

I feel the Swords of my previous post turn into Wands – a suit of Wands.

Synastry, A and D

What are these Wands?

In general:  his and her Mercuries and Southnodes hold hands, across the Aries Taurus cusp.   That by itself is interesting.  I feel that in each area of her life which was stuck, he gives it a shake-up and a joke:  they have a Uranus-Moon exchange.   If he was a father, and she a baby with wind, he picks her up and burps her.   At the same time they enjoy their independent characters – Moon square Moon, to each side of their companionable Suns (Tifareth, a shared enterprise in the soul.)

My mind being what it is, the chart with its past-life resonances feels shoes-on-my-feet authentic.   The past-life theme may or may not be historically true;  does that matter?  Who writes the history?  The hidden depth of the iceberg authorizes deep responses and imagery in my map, over decades.

The terrain to come this year in a general sense, is Daat:  the unknown cognition of the Tree of Life:  a space of union.

See the magnetic fields of person or planet - their curve

See the magnetic fields of person or planet – their curve

Unknown

Last Wednesday, new year’s day, New Moon Yesod was on the Capricorn Daat-Tifareth.   I feel the Unknown Quantum in any speculation.   It is a solar corona, a dark apple limned with gold:  the jewel of the north.   I feel and see alchemical gold:  anything in front of it is shadow.

800px-coronae_at_ggb

Anything could happen.

Friendship sustains itself, it has a good feeling which is very hard to break.   True Friendship is a wand which cannot be broken.  Family ties have a different energy, often they are too binding and close, and they snap.  But when a conscious guardian-friend function to the “child” is embarked upon, it builds a unique loyalty.   It is not compulsory.   It takes TIME … roughly of the kind for a parent and child to bond and get to know each other;   but it needs less time, because of the mature choice to bend towards each other:  to be inclined.   Astrology indicates the inclination.

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Harry breaks the elder-wand

I was just thinking of the bit near the end of the Deathly Hallows, when the battle is over, Voldemort is destroyed, and Harry has the Elder Wand.   He has the potential for total global Dominion “for the better good”.   But he takes that wand and he breaks it in half.

What a liberation – release!   The thrall is transformed to a snapped twig.

The wands and branches of friendship for each other, on the other hand, are Living Wood. It is so profound.  Harry’s intuition from his dead Headmaster, was to allow Voldemort to steal the Elder Wand, come out, and self-disable with it, in full.  When evil has no backup – because the horcrux portions were shattered – and faces the Light, it cannot prevail.   The elder stick shrivelled and drooped in Voldemort’s hand – a limp dick.

Harry didn’t know why, but he knew what to do, and his doubt was guided through Daat/Abyss, a step at a time.  When he took the castaway Elder wand from the fallen wizard’s ash, and snapped it himself … that is such a beautiful movement.

And I think of Wands, and what they are – the Living Wood through which the stellar filaments flow, which bind and release the Universe.  It may accelerate or slow down matters between people, and the processes in our Nature.   I once had a very strong Karmic wand with a man, a dark wood, which gave him glory and grief.   This was not a wand used for evil, so it doesn’t need to be snapped.   Its allegiance to Life is transferred.

GALLERY – roots and shoots

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Humanity’s deep desire is for the Family, and for its children’s children to go on boarding the red steam train to school in Scotland, term after term.

The fantasy that stood before the Family would blot it out;  this is the same in any political or commercial dictatorship, and in any belief with which we label one another.    Two best-seller archetypes, Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code, conclude with a healed and healing Family of humankind:  an open question, not a lid.   To “solve” that Greater Mystery would disable it:  to kebab it with our Wand.

Our Wand of Man:  our human wand.   Yours and mine.  Ours.

The wand is the power of the Tao in all the veins;  in hands, feet, spine, breath.  It is pictured as a living dark wood, blackthorn or willow;  it draws the sky and galaxies:  dragons heartstrings and phoenix feathers flow in it like blood and song:   like – as the Upanishads say – the cream in the milk, the fire in the wood, the tree in the apple, the oak in the acorn, the atom, the still small voice, the child in the man, the seed in the woman.

The Wand is grown right here and now – in my heart;   in yours.

Menorah Tree of Sapphires

Menorah Tree of Sapphires

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**

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/

Observations on The Lilith Archetype

lady of shalot, 1956

lady of shalot, 1956

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As we approach Solstice, the turning year’s deep point, what better than to befriend our Shadow Feminine? Bring her in out of the cold, for Xmas!

My friend Actaeon and I wrote this article together, in 2005, and it is circulated to his students.  He is a homeopathic practitioner and teacher.   It is based on experience and on our field work.  My contribution was also influenced by George Macdonald’s extraordinary novel, Lilith.

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wicked godmother 1956

wicked godmother 1956

Who was Lilith?

The forgotten bride of Adam, she sought to rule and make herself known.  She stood alone, infertile, envious of Eve who bore his children, and she made mischief.  She is regarded as the feminine Shadow!

Historically, women – and the feminine principle – have been severely displaced at levels of creativity, culture and spirituality.  Certain mind-sets, principles and behavioural qualities in the modern woman – observable also in some men – characterize this Archetype:

1) She is manic, chaotic, and probably prone to insomnia.
2) She feels excluded, and doesn’t want to miss anything.
3) In our society she is a product of repression and abuse.  She looks everywhere for healing, but resists the healing process.

haughty, 1957

haughty, 1957

The first two points show a compensatory factor.  The manic process needs urgently to be in on everything, and to be at the centre of things.  As the feminine has been excluded, she feels her right to be included in everything.  The Lilith Archetype becomes obsessed with information and the need to know, but never attains wisdom.  Thus, her energy and envy become invasive.  All things must be hers at any cost;  she must be privy to the neighbourhood gossip – the one who twitches the net curtains, as well as the walking encyclopaedia.

4) The Lilith archetype wants to obtain the creative energy and power of the masculine for herself.  Why?

If the Lilith archetype is a mother, she is not satisfied with the creation and rearing of her child.  As society has undervalued the role of motherhood, she does not feel acknowledged or appreciated in this role.  In a healthy family unit, warmth, love and light shine from the father into the mother;  she reflects this love and light into the eyes of their child.  If the relationship breaks down, there is displacement in the psyche, and anger at the masculine.  Without his protection and support, she feels as a mother, disabled.  Her maternal authority carries no weight or assurance;  she starts to nag.  She, as Peter Gabriel said, “looks for the teeth to match her wounds.”

angry women

angry women

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The feminine role is a dual one.  Interiorly she creates the child in her womb.  Exteriorly, she goes out to work, or expands her creative and evolutionary process.  A man who protects and provides for the former, and supports her independence for the latter, can help her to fulfill both.   The key to this is a couple’s mutual love, respect and understanding as lovers, companions and parents.  But – and this is also due to today’s economic stress – more often in a woman, the one role gets over-ridden by the other, or both are sustained in a tense atmosphere of over-achievement and anxiety.

The Lilith archetype in a creative woman or artist, makes her jealous and envious of male composers, musicians, artists and scientists in the past.  Her traditional confinement to domestic roles, excluded her.  Openly admiring male creative qualities, she subconsciously resents masculine achievement and success.  She now wants that for herself.

The modern Lilith archetype, when drawn to creative men and women, usurps their inspiration and knowledge.  Having no respect for the masculine seed, she ignores its lineage, source and consciousness; the way it interweaves with her own.  Her powers of intuition and gestation became distorted through witch-hunts and repressive values in our history.  If she is unable to access her real nature, she resents the male!   She wants his seed to be her own.

Envy of male physical strength and ability, makes her competitive.  She did not accept her power internally:  nor is she aware of how strong her internal organs are. (Women generally live longer).  Yet, throughout nature, as in society, the balanced union of the male and female powers generates life, love and sanity.  Who cares whether the chicken or the egg came first?

someone's mother 1956

someone’s mother 1956

Secretly believing she is the more intelligent, Lilith may be fearful of the male gaining power and hubris.  The Lilith archetype in countless operatic roles, played her men off against each other.  Her old cliches are: “All he wants is his football and dinner on the table.”  “He’s useless in bed, he lives in his head.”  “He’s supposed to know what I want and how I feel, but I’m not going to tell him, and he should know!”  By conditioning, her collusion with her sisters emasculates and mocks their men, cutting them off from effectiveness, driving them to do office overtime, to computer games or the pub.  “He won’t step in the door – the wife drives him mad, the kids are playing up.”

By divide and rule, the Lilith archetype seeks Kingship/high Priesthood on top of her femaleness, and naturally she detests Eve.  Her efforts to be top dog, cut off her own power and love.  With the erosion of procreative male support from her life, things “don’t happen” right for her.  They seem to break apart.  She is left alone.  “Men are no good.  He hasn’t got a clue.”

Those who are subjected to her barrage, generally shut up or retreat.  Hungry for acknowledgement, the Lilith archetype feels deprived, and thank-you’s are rarely given.  If she gives, it is to promote her situation.  Her gifts may be inappropriate and misplaced.  She is owed something – the residue of past deprivation.  If this self image is coloured by previous-life inferior/superior roles, she may move towards the arrogance of the persecutor or the helpless hopelessness of the victim.  There is no true centre.

What is our centre?  How does it move and prosper? for it is never static.

marrying tetrahedrons: the point from in between

marrying tetrahedrons: the point from in between

The point from in between the worlds is a paradox, which blends the edge and zest of life. A child emerges from a fertile point between the parents.  Creative persons, pioneers and those who are not afraid to feel their love and pain, emerge from the fertile point between established conventions.  They learn to honour this awareness as their own progressive centre.

anangaranga 11 - gaining-restraining

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The Lilith archetype, starved of parental integrity, inhabits a static fantasy bubble.  It just touches Reality’s open hand for which she hungers, but it doesn’t quite burst or free her into her own ‘point from in between’.   Classically, she hovers between isolation and community.  She endures denial and frustration, as she tries to maintain her comfort zone.  Wounded underneath, yet avoiding healing, she wants to appear powerful, dominant and in control …  Knowing she misuses others and herself, she may suffer acutely from shame and disunity.  She is “trapped inside the evil container – a house where mother screams and father shrugs his shoulders … a vehicle where mother is paralysed with father yelling at her because she doesn’t work properly.”

Ultimately disliking herself and what she is doing, Lilith may conceal addictive problems.  Her disguises make crucial issues unavailable for confrontation or clarity.  In dialogue, she may frustratingly lose the thread.  She is not OK.  She plays on this, making other persons feel guilty and responsible for her lack of fulfillment and success.  She may attribute to them all her own power to make herself miserable.  “The world has passed me by!”  This leads to depression, and an inability to discriminate others from herself.  She fears she might pull people down with her.

queen with suitor

queen with suitor

Poor Lilith!   Her roles in theatre, opera and the celebrity industry, are legion:  Salome, Lady Macbeth, Lucrizia Borgia, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy (who would rather watch many men die, than give up her status), Queen Margaret, who took over the land from her King Henry VI and became a war vamp …  We have played or been accused of aspects of all these parts.

King Lear was betrayed by two Liliths, Goneril and Reaga.  His hard heart could not distinguish Eve from Lilith, until he held Cordelia dead in his arms:  “O, you are men of stones.  Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack – she’s gone for ever!

Lilith was unrecognised until her process had been lived, right through himself;  his heart and mind were broken open.

Blow winds and crack your cheeks - Lear's madness in the storm.  1987

Blow winds and crack your cheeks – Lear’s madness in the storm. 1987

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In the old days, in villages in India, menstrual rags after use were dug into the ground under stones, so the blood would not attract snakes and particularly cobras!

During a woman’s menstrual flow she is psychically ‘open’.  In matriarchal societies, she withdraws and becomes quiet.  She lets her interior pulse with Mother Earth awaken kundalini shakti in the root.  Fearing the unknown, could some invading patriarch have derived the notion of the menstrual blood being ‘unclean’?

wise earth goddess 1987

wise earth goddess 1987

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(Against the conditioning, that the flow and flux of female blood is dirt and pain … I began to feel my own cycle as a cleansing and renewal, “dropping through”.  The ache had a lunar rhythm, like childbirth;  when I was young, I intuited the way it prepares the bed for the child.  It kept me indoors, to be still, relax into the ache.)

In November 2003, a new outer planet was discovered – far beyond Pluto’s orbit – and announced on 29 July 2005.  It is named ‘Lila’, and presages a revolutionary world view. In mystic circles, the menstrual flower is represented as a lily.  The Graal lineage comes through a dragon race (the goddess Nibiru) whose key females venerated as lilies, were named Lili, Luluwa, Lilith, Lilitu, and even LIL-LET!

Pluto or Hades is our collective unconscious;  and beyond Pluto, the ‘new planet’ is feminine.  In mythology, Persephone daughter of Gaia, became his bride.  She descended into the Shadow and returned to earth as spring.  She goes further than any.  The discovery of planet Lila provokes our transitional time.

Hades and Persephone 1957

Hades and Persephone 1957

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In hyperactive modern life, who are wearing the LIL-LETS?  TV presenters, fashion gurus, polititians, powers behind the throne and business:  the high fliers, generally.  We are all aware of female ruthlessness in the media, and in the worlds of finance and crime.  We see women under repressive political and religious systems, becoming tyrants at home.  They may breed killer sons, by reinforcing unconsciously inherited attitudes.  We see the archetype in our families:  mothers and grandmothers who are intrusively possessive or who, despising the aging process in themselves, pass on this attitude to their daughters, and become sour, withdrawn and tight.

Men and women suffer aspects of this archetype in ourselves – anxiety, loneliness, insecurity, jealousy, hyperactivity, lethargy and being ‘not good enough‘.  The surgical nip and tuck craze bears witness to this.  A daughter of Lilith measures and compares herself with others, seeking inclusion.

talking

talking

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Single mothers are rich pickings for the Archetype! … It may breed a mistrustful mindset through daughters and grandchildren.  The Archetype in a mother or a partner can cause grown men and sons to withdraw – even into the tragedy of self-destruction.  These factors coalesce in the subtle genetic structure, and lead to infertility problems down the line.

The feared and devouring Feminine at every level, is Lilith.  Having gleaned what she thinks is enough, she will be off with the next craze or fad in town;  there is nothing more to gain from this or that person.  Failure and fatigue follow her around, and drain off positive qualities in her relationships.  It is difficult for her to be honest about this, because she is clever at camouflage.  She may dissemble, insist and believe that all is sweetness and light.  If you don’t supply what she wants from the sperm-bank, then watch out, guys!  She’s after your bottomless wallet.

Bothwell and Mary 1957

Bothwell and Mary 1957

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What is the solution to the dark Goddess within our soul?   Who will turn to face and commit to her sterile, disabling force?  While she assembles data from all and sundry to support her case, there is no commitment or devotion to any one thing.

The Gurdhieff teaching refers to our “Chief Feature”.  It takes courage to turn – metanaoia – to look her in the eye.   .  The Chief Feature is a negative intensity or ‘hideous creature’ within ourselves which we cannot bear for others to see, and try to keep concealed at all costs.

Behind every Shadow stands the light.  In every method of therapy or esoteric work worthy of the name, the key to the Spirit is through the monster guardian or Dragon within the soul.  This is commitment.

goddess with triton 1957

goddess with triton 1957

Dragons are serpents with wings and fiery breath, who guard the jewel.  They symbolise subtle currents of power – leylines – through the earth and through the psyche and through our body as acupunctural meridians.  A warm Dragon breathes fire and flame like a sword.  A cold Dragon coils and creeps along the ground, worm-like, with flickering tongue.

The snake is associated with woman:  the paradox of her primordial knowledge, with her capacity to betray or beguile.  Just as the venomous potency of a snake or scorpion reverses homeopathically, to heal, so Lilith may turn herself around.

kundalini shakti 1988

kundalini shakti 1988

How?  She is out in the cold, and frozen, and needs to be warmed right through.  Who will lie with her and warm her with his body? – for he receives at first, contempt.  Can he provide for AMMA and AIMA – the light and the dark womb?  The one nurtures his seed.  In the other is hidden the key to her evolution.

sleeping beauty, 1956

sleeping beauty, 1956

Centuries ago, the black madonna was walled up, who had something to say.  Allow her to arise into life creatively!  Then her expression is no longer distorted.

What in our life is dark, and cries out to be converted to light and awareness?   With hindsight and courage, a painful or broken love affair expands our heart towards unconditional love – we are not alone in this.  Without Lilith emerging to the passion of truth and light, the picture would be incomplete!  Let her awakening turn the dragons of the past.  Let our relationships become sacred, bestowed to future generations.

he and she tao, 2007

he and she tao, 2007

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The Role of Adam with Eve and Lilith

When a man’s awareness embraces the light womb and the dark womb, he is fertile.

The Lilith drama is enacted within our psyche.  The way our interior male and female personas clash and pass judgement, reflects our external social inheritance.  When we begin to commit ourselves to reveal, to see and heal, it starts at home:  with our nearest and in our inner life.  Lilith’s transformative potential is towards soul growth and maturity:  Eve’s is given to her children.  Am I both?

You cannot negotiate with Lilith, and if you are wise, you don’t try to.  But the shadow feminine may be encouraged, to realise herself.  The Kundalini serpent trapped through centuries, lies under the stone.  The stone cracks.  She is only the shakti interned;  it turns.

serpent egg 1987

serpent egg 1987

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Turning towards the Light, or metanoia, a man and a woman look into each other’s eyes.  They are liberated into heart centre.  It awakens and opens.  At this point of stability, they each embrace Her dual nature.  She bears his children, and attends to the active evolution of her soul.  The man she loves, protects and provides for this, in whatever way.  When he holds both sides of the vessel steady with her acceptance, both are nourished;  their agreement turns towards the Light.

They honour each other for their childrens’ children.

Triads and the Yin Yang Symbol The positive feminine accepts her duality:  the infant life within her and the soul's own life.  She helps her partner to hold her creative polar polarities - her own development and the needs of her family - in the Yin Yang symbol.  Both are nourished within himself also. The sphere or globe is the ovary.  Two dynamic sperms swim around a global womb, like whales.  One is black with a white light inside.  The other is white with a black light inside.  These are the dynamic of transformation.

The positive feminine accepts her duality: the infant life within her and the soul’s own life. She helps her partner to hold her creative polar polarities – her own development and the needs of her family – in the Yin Yang symbol. Both are nourished within himself also.
The sphere or globe is the ovary. Two dynamic sperms swim around a global womb, like whales. One is black with a white light inside. The other is white with a black light inside. These are the dynamic of transformation.

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lady with gift

lady with gift

The Role of the Feminine within Herself

Sometimes, as the pain of her existence becomes crucial, and thus unbearable, Lilith will allow her unmasking, a veil at a time.  “She is a child.  Let the child grow up and become a woman, and she will step over the dragon guarding her, and speak her truth.”

It is the dismantling of a scaffold.  With her willingness to stop blaming others – including herself! – and to become response-able, vulnerable, the crooked ways begin to flow straight.  For the Archetype is transpersonal.

She turns, changes and becomes conscious.  From the collective unconscious, blighted seeds, twisted roots, half-forms and abortions stretch out tentatively from the dark … becoming whole, engaging life. They seek the light, the sun’s lamp which at first entering their limestone cave, stumbled and cast grotesque shadows.

The serpent within the Stone is a deep, fertile underground river.  She flows and carries nourishment as the venoms disperse.

serpent and soul 1987

serpent and soul 1987

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In a controlled therapeutic dialogue towards simplicity, is TRANSFORMATION.

The Lilith Archetype, if ‘understood – stoodunder‘ can open the door to freedom and expression of the true feminine.  She can integrate with Eve.  At first she was trapped.  Then she no longer ran away, but became herself set free … from here … in here.

“Be still, and know That I AM.”

Actaeon and Jane
August 2005

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self portrait, left & right hands/brain

self portrait, left & right hands/brain

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“Then the Old man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning.  It disclosed a great hole. 
“‘That is the way,’ he said. 
“‘But there are no stairs!’ 
“‘You must throw yourself in.  There is no other way.'”

George Macdonald, The Golden Key

Fontanel - Chakras tarot Keys 2013

Fontanel – Chakras tarot Keys 2013

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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.

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All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2013. 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/