Friendship Poem

Posted on October 18, 2017 by janeadamsart

Let my face cave into your SELF.
Every picture of my thought
spills out of being wordless.

Let my fear of you go,
let lion talk. Let the lion see.
The sun doesn’t bother what goes on
when it rises and sets on earth.

The disk of the world’s hidden side
is a darkness on my light.
The wonder of that silent spreading corona
pulls away the cloth behind my eyes.

I have no support. The saying stops.
Let soles of my feet be eyes
to see and love, pick up the ground.

The darkness on the sun
is angel’s finger on my lips
stopping speech, making me hear.

EK83 Flower of night 86.JPG

I wonder much at my concerns.
As the reel unrolls, I clench in my seat
so forming views ; the Inward, inexpressible
gift of the holy, returns
as soon as I go.
No matter what happens
to me, my walls arise and fall, like
Rome on the ocean wave.

The safety in just looking
has no sense at all.
It takes the risk,
the leaping
of the absolute deer

and skittering over the threshold
pushed, each moment
opens from each point
of space a bright DAN DE LION —
Be brave ! be bold ! be
absent !
Let it go !

When chimerae collide
in the upkeep clashing, let
the Lion see
how in relationship,
several masks combine,
clashing and colliding
anxiety and peace.

Raising your heads together,
unquiet mother and fishy friend,
let your patterns pull
and drag you home.

The pull to drown within
opens the flower’s corona upturned:

a voice with
nothing to say.

from “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

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/

As we become still and look

Posted on May 8, 2017 by janeadamsart

My tarot reading last week – see Aquariel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1999, Poems of Eclipse

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

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

A Walk with Easter Bluebells

Posted on April 16, 2017 by janeadamsart

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

World turns upside down: sky through the ground

Sky, earth, water

living creature

living body

worlds meet: as above so below

tuning fork

like a bow

relationship, dancers

tingly tangle!

landscape every which way

Friend’s astrology on the Tree of Life

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

Sketches of Pallas Athene

Posted on January 28, 2017 by janeadamsart

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

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

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

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

4-botticellis-atheneaphrodite-centaur

The painting by Sandro Botticelli

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

… to mend my dolls.

5-centaur-athene-child

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

6-a-lesson-with-owl

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

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

9-drawing-of-centaur-athene-after-botticelli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mercury – Hermes – copy after Botticelli’s Primavera

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

Centaur and Athene after Botticelli – drawn with left hand

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

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

Aphrodite comes ashore with shadow.

Hear the sea. Walk in the sand.

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

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

Sound the Horn

Posted on January 24, 2017 by janeadamsart

Tarot Key 20 – the resurrection

For me the solidarity awoke when I opened another greenpeace email. It used the word ‘we shall defeat …’ This stirred me deep inside. I’ve been feeling defeated. What I stand for had taken a knocking. Wake up and fight! Fight, using my weapons as an artist. I thought of a young mother who lived for years in fear, her family hounded from one mountain village to another. When she decided to join her husband’s resistance party, and train to be a warrior, she was no longer negatived, she was positively charged, in tune with her destiny and the collective. The worm turns.

With HOPE we resurrect the Star … shoulder to shoulder; action.

I’m not very keen on yet more large crowds, politics and organisations. But this is a time to look carefully at where my values truly are, and NOT feel ‘defeated’, and to act with whatever way small or large, is given.

SOUND THE TRUMPET! – with Purcell’s bright anthem “make the list’ning fields rebound!” Do sing and dance with this magical clip! At school, I did Purcell’s Come Ye Sons of Art for music A Level, long ago. My sister and I sang to each other Sound the Trumpet over the washing up … like they do here.

Gabriel’s bright horn in tarot Key 20, opens the graves and changes the level of consciousness. This arcanum holds a mantric vibration running all the way down the fire-stick into earth. In days of old they twirled a rod in dry wood for fire, and danced, stomped and chanted rhythmically. The archangel’s trumpet note is uniquely for you and uniquely for me: each of us as we are born … and reborn. Find and hear it every day; learn well what it means and is for you. Then blow it back to the trump and be of good cheer! It is energising to have a clear common objective. It raises our voice from the shadows into the light.

But take a good long look at what’s going on in my blind spot – the log in my own eye – before I start projecting it outward. Then, and only then – the principle may get to work; with love.

Here is a good read!

The End Of Patriarchy

By paradox, what Mr Red Rag represents, may supply a catalyst for freedom to emerge from the wood. Better to have it out in the open, than trip over it in the dark. Knowing what we see and what we feel, we build on that. We sing to the moon, we run with the Silver Wolves, we care for our young. There is joy and clarity in the coming together. Each day raise the level again; keep walking, keep loving the work we do, and each other, keep it going, keep doing.

silver wolf and moon

Dancing with Pan, 1987

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.

Resurrect the Star

Posted on January 7, 2017 by janeadamsart

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.

The Beech Forest

Posted on October 2, 2016 by janeadamsart

Trees in conference, Alet 1986

When the brook
begins to flow,
a barque of impassioned words
appears.

At first, there is no bark,
there is the naked
pipe of a silver soaring tree
beyond my speech.

The standing flows
and flutes
the tap root of my soul
upturned.

from Poems of Eclipse

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 Mellowing

Posted on May 23, 2016 by janeadamsart

Woodland 1986

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

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

No repeat
but savour
through and through
the NOW

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

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

little boy by the sea 1954

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

Little girl in a meadow, 1955

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

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

Yehudi Menuhin joyously 1986

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

Red roofs, Cornwall, 1956

Elisa & Mary in Iona – 2016

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

aquariel link

Character in Birdsong – by Peter Adams

Posted on March 29, 2016 by janeadamsart

Among my late father’s writings, I found two essays to post here in his memory, this one on Bird-songs, and another: ‘Mutterings from a Back Desk’ (among first or second violins in the orchestra). His acute ear pleases me. I shall post his ‘Back Desk thoughts‘ later this week, in my other blog, Aquariel. (now done)

Peter died on 19 February at 93. I was with him as he went ‘through the opening door’. What a moment with a parent to share: in his own words – ‘as into the Now, I bow.’ We planted him in a green churchyard in the North Devon countryside, with his Yule ancestors. Rest in deep peace. “Fare forward voyager!” … This which he used to say, is from Eliot’s four quartets. Not farewell, but fare forward..

Character in Birdsong (1952-3)

Often the calls and songs of birds evoke a startlingly clear atmosphere; the long crooning purr of the nightjar brings to mind still summer nights never quite dark. The middle distant call of a partridge like the creaking of an un-oiled hinge suggests the hayfield in the evening. Often these sounds can spring the catch of memory. At all times and especially in lonely moments, bird song can be a part of life, and not just a background to it.

There are many people who take an interest in birds and enjoy watching them, yet really few can enjoy the songs in the same way. This is strange, for it is so much easier to hear a bird singing than to see it. The voice of the nightingale may be clearly audible half a mile away, and yet half an hour of search may give no more than a glimpse of the brown body slipping across a freckle of sunlight in a thicket. For the lazy man there can be few pleasures to surpass lying back in the sun just listening to the birds. And the ear when trained can give as much pleasure as the eye.

To name is to create interest, and recognition of the different songs and sounds is the first step. Like most beginnings it is the most difficult, but whenever a little progress has been made, the fresh delight of hearing among the mesh of woodland sounds a known bird-song and of being able to listen to it as an individual will whet the appetite. Concentrated and accurate listening are the requirements necessary to distinguish between the varying bird sounds until they are known so well that the mind automatically hears, recognises and criticises the songs while the body is intent upon some other task. This is the aim, to know and enjoy without effort whatever birds are singing at any time.

wood bird yantra

Certainly the easiest way to learn bird songs is to hear a song and see the bird singing it. To see is to believe, but it is usually far more difficult than just hearing and often demands more effort. In many cases it is not essential. Imaginative reading of word-pictures can enable the keen mind to recognise a bird note never before heard. ‘The Charm of Birds’ by Grey and the writings of W.E.Hudson contain some of the best descriptions of bird sounds in an extensive literature.

Bird-songs differ in four main ways. To take the simplest first, there is the manner in which the bird sings and its position while singing. Many birds sing from a perch. The starling finds the chimney pot useful as a stand for his useful collection of clicks and chuckles, his wheezings and his imitative notes; a clown’s song. Mistle-thrushes sing from the top of a tree leaning into the wind, and song-thrushes sit higher and sing longer than blackbirds. The robin sings from a lower perch and changes it fairly frequently. Like many of the smaller birds, wrens and dunnocks sing quite spontaneously as they move about. The lark is easily recognised, his song raining down from that high ecstatic body hung so close to the sky, and the meadow-pippit’s few liquid notes are thrown out as the bird parachutes down to a bush from the climax of its brief upward flight.

Secondly, there is the mood in which the song is cast. Blackbirds are never young; their song is calm and reflective, born of a controlled emotion, of ‘emotion recalled in tranquillity‘. The sentences are spaced and meaningful, giving the impression of thought and care, and there is fluency with mastery of the medium.

How different is the boyish attitude of the thrush, of constant experimentation and interest. He listens to his short sentences, likes them and repeats them; but he never does anything with them. There is no design to his music. Even so, the thrush of all birds seems to take the keenest delight in his own singing, and is often the last to fall silent at dusk.

Different again is the wild impetuous carolling of the mistle-thrush, a rush of swift sentences with little variety. Careful listening will reveal little variety in the song of the redbreast, but so masterly is his control, so effortless his phrasing and so sweet his tone that this lack of material is masked. There is great tenderness in this emotional little song. The willow-warbler sings in a similar mood, a single plaintive falling cadence, one of the purest sounds in all bird music.

4 Snowy Lullaby

Few birds are more self-effacing than the dunnock, and his slight musical tinkle is meant not to offend. How violently compares the ringing mechanical challenge of the wren! Once the spring is released to set the song in motion, there is no stopping it until all is said.

A rather more subtle difference is the tone-colour or quality of the voice. Many bird voices have the timbre of the flute; but each species has its own kind of flute. The blackbird’s flute is of green wood. The tone is warm and rounded, has a throaty quality; almost it might be said that the blackbird never quite clears his throat. Nor has his voice the carrying power that enables the song-thrush to light up the evening in a higher drier register. For the thrush is the descant recorder, a more even tone that never achieves the mellowness of the blackbird. The robin has a silver flute, and how gently he uses it. So do most of the warblers, but somewhere in their flutes there is a flaw which causes the voice to harshen on occasion. The hardest metallic voice belongs to the wren – a tempered steel that rings in the ear.

Trees planted by Peter, near Shebbear

Lastly, the shape of the sentences or what the bird says is often a great help in getting to know a song. All birds except the larks sing in more or less short sentences. These sentences may be set and identical, and are easy to learn. The hearty but uninspired descending expression of the chaffinch ending in a little turn is typical. So is the yellow bunting’s ‘Little-bit-of-bread-and-NO-cheese’ in a voice suggesting the quivering heat of summer afternoons. The tremendous vitality of the wren frequently sets in motion his long and pompous phrase with its bouncing rhythm and many trills. Probably the simplest sentence is uttered by the first spring-migrant to arrive. In late March the chiff-chaff is heard high in a tree stolidly repeating his single ill-articulated word with the rhythm of a carving-knife being sharpened. He calls in fact, his name aloud, for all to hear.

All the great singers bring variety into their songs with more or less differing sentences. Few translations of bird songs into the human language bear much resemblance to the original, but the following fragment of a thrush’s song written about a hundred years ago, is an exception:

“Worse, mocked the thrush. ‘Die! Die!
O, could he do it, could he do it? Nay!
Be quick! Be quick! Here, here, here’
(went his lay)

“‘Take heed! take heed!’ Then, ‘Why?
Why? Why? Why? Why?
See-ee now! See-ee now!’ (he drawled)
‘Back Back Back R-r-r-run away?’

“O thrush be still!
or at thy will
seek some less sad interpreter than I.”

The nightingale also employs repetition on occasion with great effect, but his song is perhaps the most varied of them all, changing not only the phrases but the tone-colour and the strength of the notes. He is the only bird to employ crescendo, and there are few things more wonderful to hear than his swelling repetition of a single lovely note until the night is filled with it.

To hear one such perfect note as this is worth much, and it is to this end that a knowledge of bird-songs leads. For in the height of the singing season the birds sing in chorus, and it is only by picking out and listening to an individual that the single strands of beauty can be heard. The ability to do this can be a great joy, and will open a new world of sensation and interest.

Written in the early 1950s at The Bows, Glensaugh, Laurencekirk, Scotland
Revised at Breck Farm, Bransdale, Fadmoor, Yorks.

Peter was under-shepherd at the first, and managing a big hill of sheep at the second.

Peter with Moss and Nell

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.

aquariel link

All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2016. 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 Golden Tripod of Basil Valentine – Reflection

Posted on January 31, 2016 by janeadamsart

“

Alchemy is child’s play, God’s game in the garden. The human physical and existential organism is wondrously subtle and infinitely textured, more to be breathed, yearned and died with, than to be figured out. It always drew the shy and enquiring alchemical minds to the mystery, like bees to the flower.

Here are some playtimes and discoveries around Basil Valentine’s “Golden Tripod” in the Hermetic Museum 17th century. They dropped into my delighted journal for poem-making, a number of years ago, and asked for a little revision now.

1955 playing by the sea

Alchemical Journal, 26 February 2002

The definition Paul Foster Case gives for the “Incombustible Oil” of alchemy is: “It cannot be found in the animal kingdom because there its nature is too completely veiled. It is incombustible because no fire can burn the essence of fire. It is mineral because it is the essential substance for whatever is mined.”

The incombustible oil is the living fire itself, the pure First Matter. It is only when the lower mercurial imp gets hold of it that it thickens and dies. If a Narcissus beholding the pure spring – spirit, soul and salt balm – weds it to himself and becomes ‘so proud he hardly knew himself’, un-firing oils of pride and small purpose are bred – a cold bed.

We should sing and eat the First Matter and digest it and let it pass through our gut – it is not enough to merely read or think it. Sound vibrates into wave patterns. Thoughts are things. Spiral, whorl, desert storms and water pass through sand; ripples coalesce, grains are atoms, sand dunes travel like stars. You can tap the sand on a membrane or whisper to it, forming patterns: the Glory of the World?

1955, girl with lighthouse

Alchemical apperception is a terrific amount of beauty to hold. When tired or too high or tense or worried or complaining, the third eye doesn’t operate. It needs nourishment and daily practice. The amount of beauty in Aleph breaks and shatters a conventional organism; the whole cellular body must change, to confect it.

Blood carries the substance which spirals through our bodies – the distilled moisture of the moon to marry to the light of the sun.

The One Thing, heart’s desire, spirals towards us by gravitation – a mental power (condenser). Self AWARENESS directs gravitation. Without this, firmly planted, every effort or prayer is flimsy. Key One in the nuptial chamber ‘flows’ through the Tower of alchemy as gold and steel. With consciousness, an adept commands gravitation.

Recall childhood: Daniel the donkey in the Yorkshire moors, the smell of the sack tied round him in winter; and the Doctors beach near Hartland in North Devon: hot sun, great rocks like up-ended books, sea-channels, the taste of joy, hunger and thirst, a piece of cheese for lunch, a scorching sunburn all day long between my shoulder blades. Recall some of the flavours in your own …

The desire nature is situated at the well of the throat; the core of human sexual desire is here, as well as hunger or longing. Within the belly it manifests. To change the copper into white, raise it to the moon centre behind the root of the nose and by creative imagination (key Three, Empress) to the level of clear recollection (key Two, Priestess).

Our gold is the same as our Stone – the stars of our inner heart, invisible to the eye’s external seizure.

Its female principle is the subconscious power to be fertilised and to multiply.

In the East it is said that without his shakti, Siva the Purusha cannot move or manifest. The King is stillness. His Queen is the centrifugal life-giving force of that stillness. The King is silence. His Queen is the sound-wave. The King is water. His Queen is the ripple of a breeze, a wave or tempest.

The spirit, the soul and the astral correspond to the three lower Worlds, whose holy place of meeting is Malkuth of Beriah, Tifareth of Yetzirah and Kether of Assiyah. Here the anointing takes place.

Reflect on thought forms, ways of thinking, of feeling and relationship: responsibility with the sharp edges. Be clear.

9 ramana embryo

In Svetasvatura Upanishad it says: Even as fire is not seen in wood and yet by power it comes to light as fire, so Brahman in the universe and in the soul is revealed by the power of OM – primordial sound. The soul is the wood below that can burn and be fire, and OM is the whirling friction-rod above. Prayer is the power that makes OM turn around, and then the mystery of God comes to light.

God is found in the soul when sought with truth and self sacrifice, as fire is found in wood, water in hidden springs, cream in milk, and oil in the olive.

There is a Spirit who is hidden in all things, as cream is hidden in milk, and who is the source of self knowledge and self sacrifice.

And now my digest of the story in Basil Valentine’s “Golden Tripod”. I put the Mage’s words into free verse. The story begins:

“Take a quantity of the best and finest gold – the best of your inner treasure – and separate it into its component parts (Four Worlds of the tree of Life), by love of the Art. Do it the way an anatomist dissects the human body. Very carefully, change your gold back into the currency before it became the world’s gold: go upstream.

“You shall find the seed – beginning, middle and end – from which our gold and its female principle are derived. You shall discover the pure and subtle spirit, the spotless soul and the astral salt and balsam. When these three are united, we may call them the mercurial liquid: Hermetic mind.

“This water was examined by Mercury, found by him in his excitement to be pure and spotless, and espoused by him as his wife. Of the two was born an incombustible oil; Mercury became so proud he hardly knew himself. He put forth eagle feathers, devoured the slippery tail of the Dragon (South node) and challenged Mars to battle.

“Captured by harsh planetary aspects, our Mercury was jailed by Vulcan, smith of the metals, until a woman should liberate him. All the planets led by Saturn, agreed he was a scoundrel and must be destroyed and burnt. Vulcan performed the execution. But the beautiful Moon appeared in the sky, all attired in silver and waters, and pleaded heartbreakingly for her husband the Sun – the secret Fire – trapped in Vulcan’s prison through conjunction with crafty Mercury. He, the fire in the oil, could not glow or burn. Their child could not warm the heart and grow. Lady Moon, like our Mother Isis, pleaded for her dismembered Osiris.

“Venus too arrived, in her most beautiful dress, and wheedled with Vulcan in the Chaldean tongue – language of astrologers – “A woman will liberate the prisoner from planetary deadlock, sweeten the aspects so they yield!” – But Vulcan (her husband in the Greek mythology) turned to her his deaf ear.

1957 Flora, after Botticelli

“Then the skies opened. Out poured a mighty beast; with many thousands of young. Like a tidal wave it drove Vulcan before it, swept him forth; and opening its great mouth swallowed also Venus its own fair mother. It roared: ‘I am born from her. Then she received into herself my seed and filled the Earth with it. My mother and my wife the same, her soul is devoted to mine, of one bond; so I must eat, replenish my own with her blood.’”

1957, theseus slays minotaur

The blood is the soul. The creature is born, weds and consumes the matrix, the One materia. Its voracious offspring followed it into ‘a certain chamber’, eating up all the incombustible oil also, digesting it with the greatest ease and propagating into every part of the world.

“The learned men and elders of the violet land all gathered, perplexed. Then a Great Mage came forth into their circle. Is he the higher Mercury, quicksilver of the wise? He wore the girdle of life – the serpent swallowing its tail – around his loins, snowy locks, silver beard and crown of elven jewels. His feet were bare, and his words penetrated to the depth of the human soul.

He summoned silence, then spoke:

“Awake, and open your eyes to behold light
where before they beheld darkness.
Two stars God-given lead men to wisdom.
Gaze upon them steadily
and follow their lights to the secret of knowledge.

“The bird Phoenix from the sunny fiery South at high noon (midheaven)
plucks out the mighty beast’s heart from the East at dawn (ascendant).
Give the beast from the East wings
that it feel itself the same as the bird from the South.”

The tight right-angle aspect or planetary ‘square’ is eased by unifying the character of the protagonists. Like the Bird of Light, the animal nature must allow itself to be destroyed to be reborn. It must dissolve and meld with spirit at the point where they converge. The spirit needs the power to manifest that is in earth, the dreaming earth.

The Mage Continued …

“The animal from the East must lose its lion’s skin and wings.
Then it must plunge in primordial salt tears of the vast ocean
and emerge thence in renovated beauty.

“Plunge your volatile mind, your demons and distractions
in a deep spring whose waters never fail.
Their Mother is hidden within the spring.

Let them become as she.
Let them be born of Three,
of spirit, soul and salt, thrice distilled and great.
Hungary is my native land …”

Silence falls

and an earlier fragment from my Poems of Eclipse …

… I was born

among poppies, spiked speedwell and wild grasses,
primeval plain of sky and thistle flowers
ere the zig zag Tisza river, led by a hungry donkey, flowed …

In hypnos, Princess Erzebet’s little goldfish lost
when the royal Danube spilled
was in the dreaming Tisza found,
where fishers whittled reed flutes in the sun for grandchildren
and – telling tales of war in which they fought,
sucked mightily at long stemmed pipes
with yellow tassels.

Karmic Themes

I saw a path through almond trees
along the violet crease of your eyelid,
to the land you say you could enter.

I saw in silvery light that gleams around the clouds
wild horses roam, breath taking, undulating
floating patchwork cloth of meadows
whose margin into faery fades.

At home my pebbles, pictures and old porcelain
mismatch the elven valour of Arpad:
my grey and shabby fields – old Angol travelling east –
in sunrise drown.

Like all that lives,
we are a metaphor.

The river current does not concern itself with local agonies
of wave systems estranged, which in fast flowing course
carrying Karmic seed, collide, and through each other pass
the rivers of rebirth in seminal flood; but only with awareness.

A curve of the current is seen,
pushing at and into the rocky bend
while carrying sky-light, leaf-mould, colours of stone
and silt along a bed of generations to the sea.

The waters here scour deep and fast
deep fish of life to see: my urgency awakes.
Children of gods, in metaphor long buried gold
emerge from the rock, they are bursting to be told.

Their wake is somewhere in the curacy
of long years of tales from no man’s lland
on rock ledges shelved and waiting in a dark room.
No man is an island. We fall deep.

We are ignored by the main stream of the dreaming world,
for the glory of pure gold,
in the rain on a sunlit street or rock
has no currency to be held.”

Then the Great Mage went on:

“Hungary is my native land.
The sky and the stars are my habitation.
The earth is my spouse.
Though I must die and be buried,
yet Vulcan causes me to be born anew.
Therefore Hungary is my native land
and my mother encloses the whole world.”

Touching the riverbed … the smith Vulcan is a driver, he drives the sword through fire and water. Vulcan’s wife Aphrodite – Venus – encircles with her womb the sky and waters.

The Great Mage is the Sun, the spirit of fire and renewal, to find in ourselves. Fire lives in the twig as combustibility, and in the rock as gems and precious stones. Fire lives in the rock as coal and as amber from long buried trees. Fire is present, latent, sleeping and awake: the heart of the earth and mystery of our blood’s kindling, body warmth and auric radiance. Fire is the heart of a star in the rose, the buried Sun whose veins are twigs and trees, their fraction in the sky. Their cumulonimbus flints convecting one another, strike sparks, to flash and flow as lightning to kindle the earth.

The thunder is the voice of the secret fire. It pierces and breaks the heavens. The fire spills forth, seizes and is gathered into dark lumps of earth. And the earth must then with wings soar heavenward, until singed it falls and drowns.

Reduce the Red Sea by boiling. The earth reappearing is ‘all in all’, re-appareled in the meld and heart of every element. By this, the dragon is released and contained. It shall ‘ascend with wisdom from Earth to Heaven, then again descend to Earth, and unite together the powers of Above and Below. Let all ignorance and obscurity fly from you.’

When everyone there had started to understand, the Mage spoke some more:

“Let that which is above be below,
let that which is visible be invisible,
let that which is below become that which is above,
let the invisible become visible, and the impalpable, palpable.

“Here is the perfection of our Art
with no defect or diminution.

“That in which death, life, destruction and resurrection dwell
is a round sphere with which the goddess of fortune drives her chariot,
imparting wisdom’s gift to men of God.
Its name here on earth and for human understanding, is the All in All.

“Let him who would know All in All
give earth great wings and let it fly up through the air
to heaven’s region – BERIAH.
Then singe its wings with fierce heat – divine AZILUTH –
and make it fall into the Red Sea – YETZIRAH –
and there be drowned.

“Dry up the water with fire and air –
evaporate Yetzirah by Aziluth and Beriah –
till earth – ASSIYAH – reappears as All in All.

“If you cannot through this process find it,
look around you. Look on nature.
The All in All is gravity of all metals and minerals derived from salt and sulphur.
Their mutual attraction is born of mercury.

“More I may not say
since all is comprehended in the all.

“My brothers, you are blessed
if hearing the wise, you find this Stone,
its power to heal and regenerate leprous and imperfect bodies.

“It has kept the vital fire in me so long alight
that I weary of life and long to die
yet cannot

“for I am bound to render thanks unto God’s wisdom,
mercy and gracious Gift
now and ever more. Amen.”

And the old man vanished. And all who heard him went back to their homes and meditated on his words, day and night.

The Great Mage was Master Rakoczy, Saint-Germain. He appeared also in medieval Britain, through Merlin’s form. In alchemy, the body through giving thanks and through repeated drenching in the fountain of life, becomes intangibly yet effectively cleansed and spiritualised. It acquires a form of renewal without having to die and start all over again. Old murks are cleared out at source, as the atomic lattice through Spirit is redefined.

It is a homeopathic process of gradual tincture. Slowly, steadily, the molecular web and cellular memory are modified through purification by the inner fire. Their composition is altered to support the higher frequencies, while maintaining the same general appearance. Robust physical health might not be inevitable, yet it is a by-product of this kind of work, particularly if not itself the main aim.

The Key to the golden Life is lightly touched in all matters.

Master Key

27 February 2002

I dreamed this morning I was shown four jars containing coloured liquid. I cannot recall the first two from left to right; but the third one’s contents were radiant apple-green and the fourth one was reddish-brown and cloudy like pale old paint-water. This one was ‘humanity’. A voice came, at some point: “Darkness it hath, that is good, (but) darkness it is not.”

There are wonderful names which awaken me with bells. Beleriand, Belisarius, the Bells of Rachmaninov and of Liszt. There was a small grey dream-pony a few weeks ago called Bellarus: and in Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham, Bellomarius was the greatest of all the dragon slayers in the realm.

Hermann_Reisz_Junge_Hirten_in_der_Puszta

Youngsters in the Puszta by Hermann Reisz

My activity all this life is to clean the cupboard. I spent a long time looking for someone there. The Magyar puszta symbolises a clear and open horizon within, filled with sky. Like Narnia through the wardrobe, it has no hedge. A door opens to it at the end of Liszt’s “Christus” when Jesus rises from the tomb. There is a captive inside, who strives to come forth, rattling chains, moving stones. An opus of his soul lay unread on shelves, buried under sheaves of litany and litigation.

There is someone to see right through and beyond, to a common source. There is a tree filled with white blossom in my window.