COLD MUSINGS

I’m lying on my bed, afternoon sun streaming through the north window, warming my feet. Otherwise, its white outside, then I’m unexpectedly transported at my parents’ home a long time ago. I have a bad cold, not that a cold is ever good but this one means to stay a while. Something about the combination of weather, time of day, this cold and winter set my memory back to things and places long gone. I think this is what it would be like to walk into a house you haven’t been in for decades.

In front of the bed is a dresser that was already in my family when I was born. I remember it and the bed and vanity that went with it from the very beginning when we lived in Vallejo California. My parents passed it onto me when they got a new set and it has followed me through many stages and places. The other pieces fell away over the years. The bed is in Denver with my ex-husband and I left the vanity and lamp table in Cottonwood with our other Arizona furniture when we came back to Taos.

I’m remembering that I used to do crafts and decorative baking when I was in my teens and twenties. This memory is the only response I've had this year to the approach of Christmas. I don’t have the patience or interest now and I'm a different person.  I wonder what happened to all those candle holders I made one year. They turned out pretty neat. Made from old jam and jelly jars with interesting shapes they were glued one on top another and then pasted over with paper-mache elegantly patterned in Renaissance designs with glue dipped string, then painted antique Christmas colors, and finally highlighted with gold and silver paint. Then I made candles to go with them.

One year I did ornaments made to look like elaborately decorated cookies. They were made with flour, salt and water then decorated to look just like colorfully frosted Christmas cookies in shapes like snowflakes, reindeer, Santa Claus, Christmas Bells and gift packages. Another time I made marzipan fruits to decorate cakes and cookies. They were perfect miniatures of apples, bananas, peaches, oranges and grapes.

How can anyone say they remember their past lives? I can’t remember large swathes of the life I’m currently living. Occasionally, like today, a piece of the past floats to the top and I will wonder how I ever forgot something that was once a significant part of my identity. I’ve lived in four states and in one of those states (Colorado) for 47 years and yet much of the past is like flotsam floating on the sea. Unless a piece randomly floats into view, it is as good as gone.

I’ve told my life story to myself many times. With each telling it comes out different. There are actually many stories. So what is the truth? Who am I really? I’ve been puzzled lately by my almost visceral desperation to scramble over an invisible fence with many barbs to get out of Taos. Why would I want to escape from the place of my soul?

In a simple five-mile drive back to Taos two days ago, I finally got it. The sky was grey and so was the earth as far as the eye could see. Darker and lighter shades of the same grey finally drove monotony into boredom and my attention inward. Which soul belongs to which self? In an illumined moment I saw that my Taos self is only one of many selves and now there is another self that is trying to come to the top and It is trying to free itself from snags created here in the past. I think those snags are called karma, but it isn’t all bad.

I’m talking about layers, of course. None of the other selves are gone. They are just not visible in a view from the top. I can consult them now and then. They have skills that are often useful, but it is time to acknowledge the future self. It wants to soar.

ALCHEMY AND MEDUSA

I’ve wanted to write something since the wonderful premier of Awakening in Taos. It was a great experience. Many ideas have flickered through my mind but not when I had something on which to write or time to write. Usually, I start a blog with the desire to explore one thing and something entirely different takes over. It’s a bit like catching butterflies. Many ideas flutter by but I only catch a few here and there. It’s probably better that way. Actually, that is also the way I paint.

This week, two such butterflies laden with potent pollen flew into the living room from the TV. The first was a biography of Albert Einstein and the second a biography of Paramahansa Yogananda. They seemed to fit together well in my mind like two kinds of lights shining on the same exalted path. I still have to look to it in more detail but it occurred to me that E=MC2 was a pretty good start to explaining multiple dimensions.  At least it started a process in my mind. I find that insights are often like that. I know they are there lurking in the background teasing me with a delicious inkling. I once dreamed of an adobe building occupied by alchemical scholars probably somewhere in North Africa among the Moors long ago but yet timeless.  Curiosity drew me in and as I walked into a smoothly plastered mud room, empty of furniture and decor, I saw a man’s departing foot and trailing robe disappearing through an arched doorway into another room and then another. I could never catch up with this man although I followed him from room to room. It was so real that I could smell the adobe earth and feel the warmth  of the sun streaming through the tiny windows.

I believe this man represented my teacher and guide and my denied destiny. He comes from a place and time of great learning in science, mathematics and especially esoteric spiritual knowledge. I didn’t see it as odd that the building was very plain while the man was dressed in silk brocaded with golden threads. I’m sure it was set in the dazzling time before the inquisition when Muslims, Jews and Christians pursued the most advanced knowledge of the ages.  Nevertheless, I am sure it was also timeless.  It is still there waiting for another dream to take me through a very plain doorway to the dimension where everything imagined can be given substance.

The video on Yogananda was very rich in content, which isn’t often the case with such productions. It revealed how his Guru Sri Yukteswar had the future vision to recognize that Yogananda was fated to introduce the spiritually needy West to meditation and spiritual wakening.  This was truly enlightened parenthood because he recognized that Yogananda’s fears were a reaction to his life calling that in his immaturity seemed overwhelming. He went for the point of energy, which is often negative when an individual is confronted with his/her destiny.

While writing the above, I took a break and did some random web surfing.   I came across a thought from James Hillman, the great post Jungian analyst (I hate that word but don’t yet have a better one).

Winston Churchill, for example, when he was a schoolboy, had a lot of trouble with language and didn't speak well. He was put in what we would call the remedial class. He had problems about writing, speaking and spelling. Of course he did! This little boy was a Nobel Prize winner in literature and had to save the Western world through speech. Of course, he couldn't speak easily when he was eleven or fourteen - it was too much to carry.

Or, take Manolete who, when he was nine years old, was supposedly a very frightened little skinny boy who hung around his mother in the kitchen so he becomes the greatest bullfighter of our age. Psychology will say, "Yes, he became a great bullfighter because he was such a puny little kid that he compensated by being a macho hero." That would be Adlerian psychology - you take your deficiency, your inferiority, and you convert it to superiority.

Yet, suppose you take it the other way and read a person's life backward. Then you say, Manolete was the greatest bullfighter, and knew that. Inside his psyche sensed at the age of nine that his fate was to meet thousand pound bulls, with great horns. Of course, he fucking well held onto to his mother! Because he couldn't hold that capacity - at nine years old your fate is all there and you can't handle it. It's too big. It’s not that he was inferior; he had a great destiny. Now, suppose we look at the kids who are odd stuttering or afraid, and instead of seeing them as developmental problems we see them as having some great thing inside of them, some destiny that they're not able to handle. It's bigger than they are and their psyche knows that. So that's a way of reading your life differently....

In our culture, so unfriendly to the feminine element, and I’m including feminine qualities in both sexes, mothers and mothering are crippled.  The angry Medusa robbed of her beautiful face and magnificent locks rages subtly under the load of dishonor, abuse, and being demoted to the background. She can only succeed if she plays with a masculine persona. More importantly, she is hostile to her children in subtle ways. We are all victims of the shadow side of the feminine. It has distorted everything it touches and leaves a brood of writhing, angry cold-blooded predators in every hole and shadow. The mother projects on the child her own maimed face.

My own mother haunts me. I still want to comfort and heal her. We had several good years before she left this dimension. I didn’t try to change her although I know she came from a long line of poisoned and poisonous mothers. On the other hand, there is much deep rage about being blocked at every turn from following my own path. I came to feel guilty of unforgivable crimes for wanting to live who I am in the world. I could be intelligent, wise, creative, insightful, cutting edge and independent as long as I did so in near isolation. In the world I grew up in, children were not to be seen or heard and neither were women. 

As usual she is punished
for her own defilement

from Humphries translation:
She was a very lovely one, the hope of many
An envious suitor, and of all her beauties
Her hair most beautiful - at least I heard so
From one who claimed he had seen her. One day Neptune
Found her and raped her, in Minerva's temple,
And the goddess turned away, and hid her eyes
Behind her shield, and punishing the outrage
As it deserved, she changed her hair to serpents,
And even now, to frighten evil doers,
She carries on her breastplate metal vipers
To serve as awful warning of her vengeance.

Throughout my life, I’ve hoped for a chance to come out in the open to exchange knowledge with that richly robed figure that is always disappearing into the next room in that mazelike building. I wanted to be like Mabel Dodge Lujan and know the movers and shakers of the age, but I also wanted to carry the message myself in my own words but an invisible barrier always stopped me.

Well, I’m running out of time. I can’t have those lost years back but I must enter the door of that ancient adobe house of wisdom teachings as someone who belongs rather than in the tone of a curious and probably unwanted stranger.

BEYOND HERE THERE BE DRAGONS

I remember most of my household moves well. They usually involved a life-changing drama trauma. The fact that I could seldom afford to hire a mover contributed to such moves being a traumatic rite of passage from one state of being to another but it isn’t the most significant reason. The move from Denver to Taos was the most unforgettable. I’ve given the details of this event in another blog, but the reason it comes up now is because, after birth and the exit from public school in my fifteenth year and all hope of a normal life plan, it became the most significant life-altering move and the most evocative of a hidden dynamic, hidden even from myself.

Sacred Clown Balloon.
I got up to late too see most of the balloons
but this guy waited.

When I first extracted myself from the flypaper and brambles of my parental home, I quickly fell into a dreadfully alien pattern that turned out to be more authentic than the adapted story line. My childhood home seemed safely channeled along a deep groove of hopeless ordinariness.  However, the facade cloaked something dark, wild and wounded.  Ordinariness turned out to be far more fragile than I ever imagined and the part of an agreed upon protective fantasy in one’s life story can’t be overemphasized. We generally tell ourselves the party line over and over until we actually believe it.

The picture that has emerged, and it took years to move far enough from home to gain perspective on this picture, is that every escape from a problem reveals another problem and these problems usually are related, much as if long lost siblings reunited.  

My own progress through this mysterious dimension called life on earth has always been unplanned. It’s not that I didn’t want a plan and designed one after another but the outcome of each plan was entirely unplanned.  Life came to resemble a piece of shipwreck floating from one island to another. After each move, the sea lapped higher and higher on the shore until the new island having barely become familiar and charged with the sentiment of home, disappeared and it was time to float on. However, this wasn’t just coincidence floating on the waters of chaos.

I’m still trying to get my head around the discovery that there was always a plan much more compelling than the one my conscious identity pursued. The unknown has turned out to be the source of everything alive. Yet, before announcing that this is a good thing I am reminded that this background designer doesn’t give a fig about my personal comfort or my ability to work out a good compromise between the forces of life and my personal well being among other humans. It aims at a multi-dimensional wholeness that is bigger than individual comfort. Our world itself is at stake. I’m beginning to perceive the light of a bigger sun  coming up over the horizon.  

My identity as I know it does contain vestiges of the bigger self. I don’t believe they are necessarily enemies but personal identity is a snakeskin that ought to be shed now and then and like the snake, we are vulnerable during the shedding process. The practice of many indigenous societies to give individuals a new name at significant life transitions makes total sense. When I was younger, I felt partly victim and partly sinner for being different from the people I identified as family or classmate.   I was definitely an outcast but I tried to be a harmless outcast.  Much of my adult life was about finding a place where I wasn’t the enemy. Alas, the role found me in many hiding places.

This world is very complex and creation seems propelled by a constant interchange of apparent opposites.  I suppose by now I should have more trust in the invisible pathfinder and relax into faith in the final outcome. On the other hand, a degree of fear keeps me searching for the resolution that connects opposing forces.  The thing about being an outsider is that you really aren’t.  We are all just parts of one machine. How can anyone identify him or herself except by a dialogue between self and perceived not self. After falling off of the educational conveyor belt at an early age, I did end up in graduate school but not one that either my birth family or I would have imagined. 

Life can move from simplicity to complexity in a flash and unless we totally isolate ourselves, the equivalent of dropping out of life school, we have to go with what comes our way. I dropped out of school before in order to survive but I believe that now it’s important to see it through. The present challenge is our 830 square foot house that has gone through many waves of occupancy in the past nine years. Beginning with one human and two cats, it first reduced to one human and then it was two humans, next two humans one cat, two humans two cats, three humans two cats, three humans two cats one dog and now seven humans two cats one dog.  Amazingly, I’ve learned to concentrate enough to write this with a TV, two computers and several cell phones playing in the background. This is a high wave, I'm looking forward to smoother seas.

P.S. The Ocean still disturbs me. It has no perceivable end. I know there is an opposite shore somewhere and maybe some islands in between but the emotional effect reminds me of the medieval description of an unmapped space, “beyond here there be dragons.”  

"MAYBE" AGAIN?

It has been a beautiful day, but autumn always makes me sad because it is the end of green, at least in this hemisphere.   I am living the autumn phase of life as well but I’ve always felt this way about autumn, even when I was a kid. In a way, it’s a relief to feel sad. Sadness causes us to look at the things we have been painting pink whether or not it’s a proper shade. Trying to avoid it is a job and now I can relax, quit trying to stay above my feelings and let-r-rip.

PQ Singing a Blessing at a Recent
"Awakening in Taos Fundraiser"

So what are some of the reasons I feel sad?  One of them is my love’s physical limitations he has discomfort walking more than a block at this altitude and has been experiencing abdominal muscle cramps more than usual.  I recently discovered that this is one of the typical symptoms of Pulmonary Fibrosis. Of course, some days are worse than others are, but his frustrations affect both of us. Most of the time, I enjoy what we do, even the simple things.  Last Sunday we visited our friend Lynn’s booth at a Kit Carson Park craft show and then had lunch at the Bent Street Deli. It’s simple and routine. Both are good places to watch people and enjoy those last warm days, but nothing new really.  Maybe feeling static is the core trouble. I’m unhappy with myself and need to be more active on all levels, just haven’t figured out where to start.  PQ needs to be at a lower altitude but we are stuck here until our finances improve and some of the family issues are more stable. PQ’s son and grand kids have really needed our support this year.

Life moves and then gets stuck again. This sounds very passive. However, to tell you the truth I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.  That is the problem with most strategies.  Our strengths are also our weaknesses. It’s just a matter of the tactic that best fits the circumstance and that is easier to define when a circumstance is history. In addition, sometimes a lot is going on undetected beneath the surface and we just don’t know it.

UPDATE:

A few days ago, my mind was running on a slow idle as my unfocused eyes drifted through the car window then a sense of vulnerability rolled in like the dark clouds above us and a thought drifted through my mind like the clouds that we would be in a pickle if something happened to our car. We haven’t had the truck for several years now and most of the time one vehicle is enough. Simplicity and lower insurance are good things, right?

Today we were on our way to the post office and something else, (I don’t remember what) when we decided to return the coat son Corey left at our house with it getting colder this week and all. First, we went to the bank and on the way, I remembered that I had rushed out the door without my phone. We were going to swing by the house on our way from the bank and retrieve it but forgot.  We turned left  up Placita but big road equipment was blocking traffic, so we turned around, took Paseo Norte and PQ decided to turn onto the north side of the Plaza. The Plaza was also full of road equipment with traffic funneling slowly onto Placita. It is a four way stop and as PQ pulled out, a red Ford SUV suddenly lurched forward. I guess the driver didn’t see us and hit us smack in the middle.  The cops didn’t give either of us a ticket because we were both in the center, but of course, there was all the fuss of calling the cops, trying unsuccessfully to call the insurance company whose number wasn’t on PQ’s phone, and then an ambulance arrived although nobody was hurt, well I have a slightly black and blue mark on my brow and cheek where the air bag hit me, but nothing serious enough for an ambulance.

The entire right side of the car is smashed, and the back and rear side windows shattered, but at least there was no mechanical injury, and we probably could have driven it to the garage and saved the towing fee but the cop had automatically called the tow truck. Paying the deductible on the insurance is going to be a big stretch. Nevertheless, we feel relief just to be home now, uninjured and to have dealt with the insurance people, made an appointment with a rental car company and are now preparing for a previously planned dinner at our house with son Jay, his girlfriend and the grand kids.  Everything is relative, and I’m sure even survivors of floods and fires feel elated just to be alive despite their property loss and violently assaulted sense of well being. 

I’ve allowed myself to worry about the shortfall of our income again, and I’ve noticed that an unexpected expense regularly pops up when I allow myself to worry.  This time I’m going to think positive and be thankful that I have an over overworked credit card and that nobody was hurt. 

For some reason, it’s all OK. Perhaps that’s because I believe that the world really works like the Maybe Story, and that in the big picture everything is a part of the grand design and that we only  partially choose our minuscule place in that design , although sometimes crudely.  Today the Adjuster called to say that the car is fixable although it may be three weeks before it comes out of the car hospital. I don’t know how this mini-drama will end, nor if there will be more to the story but for the time being it looks like we are stuck in Taos for a while and stuck in the house for a few days. Optimistically, I anticipate the next installment of the story.  Unlike a Netflix series, we’re not allowed to binge watch.

Life is a very complex jigsaw puzzle. There is no such thing as completing the puzzle because then the creative stream would stop. Probably the puzzle fans out into the universe as we work our way through. Practice is the small puzzle that is me.  Maybe learning to work that one is preparation for bigger things.

BEING WHO I AM

Coffee this morning in the green rocker facing one of my early paintings, “Spirit Speaks.” I read and write down insights in my journal while sitting in this old rocker between jaunts outside with the cats.

Spirit Speaks

This morning, George encounters his father, a huge tom that saunters silently in slow motion like a leopard. Shadow jumps on the latia fence, lowers her body and tries to be invisible. 

I was going to protect George and then noticed with much surprise, that he and the big tom were trying to work out a way to share this territory. “Big Boy” growls and sprays the Chamisa to the side of where George is laying and then lays down behind him. They sniff each other cautiously and the big tom saunters away carefully turning to look back every few steps. George follows him across the cul-de-sac and I hear yowls coming from a patch of sunflowers. However, this time there is no fight and George returns in a few minutes.

The morning is still cool but summer enough to leave the door open so that inside and outside blend comfortably. There are ecstatic waves flowing throughout my body this morning. This experience comes in pulsating surges lately. The most intense episode was about three months ago and then it gradually faded into to my ordinary state. However, the experience remained in memory. Not just mental memory but my entire memory, physical and emotional as well. I was not disturbed when it began to fade. I intuitively knew that it would return from time to time and that it was not a state that should ever be constant.

This morning I realized that depression, which I've experienced much of my life, comes from  external sources that are trying to neutralize and eradicate me. This destructive power resides in several erroneous assumptions partially synchronized with cultural beliefs and partially with family conditioning. I suddenly feel foolish for being victimized by such dubious sources. Then a moment of clarity flashes like sheet lightning and I can see that this identity is like old paint wearing thin and now chipping away in chunks to reveal something entirely unexpected but stunningly palpable.

I don’t own myself! Only this ego created by the illusions of family and social habits then rendered by my incomplete child self believes there is a factual form that is I.

Since I don’t own myself or anyone else, my charge is to be an experience within this multiverse of brothers and sisters that encompass the countless throng of beings expressing the creation we share.

Since I don’t own myself and am a product of millions of ascending years molding and shaping the manifestation of multidimensional powers extending beyond this universe, my consciousness becomes a tool of creation. Boundless powers invigorate the universe and all spring from the ONE.

Since I don’t own myself, this cloak that is my body transports my initiative to unite with the Universal Oneness within this instrument that is I in a form that is forever morphing.

I am but a minute pixel in a great holographic image. I am all in greatly abbreviated presentation. However, I am much more than a biological machine as the scientific orthodoxy might define me.

The machine is a crude replica of me, as I am a crude replica of the ONE. I cannot create anything that I am not, nor can I un-create what is. However,  I can jumble its various expressions into parts that seemingly conflict each other. This I do by living the Universe in bits, yet this is a judgement by one holographic particle within the illusion of separation from its essence. This is the “I am apart” of original sin.

Amazingly, that I can be alienated from the ONE is a miraculous manifestation of the ever-becoming One. The great fall that split our consciousness from oneness is also the unique miracle of creation. We carry onward the original complication of separation, thus enabling the Universe endlessly to swell in beingness.

We are one and one falsely separated by that most famous cunning serpent that awakened the temptation to taste a flavor beyond paradise. Again and again, we repeat this adventure with the alluring taste of separation.  A sweet taste that becomes bitter in time.

Splitting into pieces sparks longing to restore oneness. Separation from the ONE explodes into love and hate.  This Original Sin fires the engine of creation again and again and again.

The Universe is alive and so is each holographic pixel in creating the whole picture, otherwise how could I be alive and how would I ever notice that you are alive.

I have a shadow. That way you can tell where I am in relation to the light. Dark and light express from one, but light is power, dark is effect.

AWAKENING TAOS MEDICINE

Medicine, i.e. the spiritual component of our world, is all around us. But it seems that we must be prepped to receive it. This goes as much for societies as well as individuals.

Mabel Dodge Luhan House built by Tony Lujan

Timing is magic. Mabel Dodge Luhan came to Taos at the right time for she and for Taos, and ultimately for the larger world as well. Does that seem like an exaggeration? After all the big and the little are often matters of uniformed human judgment. While talking to Producer, Director Mark Gordon recently we discussed how the “Awakening in Taos” project seems to be growing beyond being just the history of Mabel, husband Tony and their associates.

There is an archetypal undercurrent to the story of Mabel and Tony and this is what we who are involved in the project have been trying to not only understand but reawaken. It’s about much more than this one individual and her accomplishments. There is something very powerful about the story itself that so far no one has adequately revealed. This is what Mark and his associates are attempting to uncover. Of course the gossipy aspects of a socialite and her famous friends has been used to tell a story many times. Its as if by telling her tale the storyteller can participate in her world. But no one has attempted to help Mabel with her mission or even better take her mission to another level. Ever since I first encountered the spirit of Mabel this has been a mystifying concern.

This little town in Northern New Mexico holds a powerful secret much like a stone geode. On the surface it seems plain, even a bit scruffy. Inside is something surprising that sparkles with magic. It reveals as much depth and magic as you wish for or have the ability to take in. So far a few people have chipped away at the surface of the story just enough to know that the stone is hiding something seductively intriguing. What is it?

I suggest that the problem is that this story is actually bigger than the characters of Mabel, Tony, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, Georgia O’Keefe and all the other players in the drama. In reality its still too big for those of us who are trying to understand. Mabel had the privilege of opening a dimensional door. Or perhaps she held the distinct honor of taking notice that it was there. This aspect of her life has frequently been overlooked. Whatever her personality flaws may have been she started something big that points far beyond her own lifetime. She realized that it wasn’t merely she who would accomplish this task of exploring the territory that this shape-shifting door revealed. Whatever her personal weaknesses may have been we should not forget that it was Mabel who volunteered to open that door. Often she is judged as a rich bored and pretentious romantic mystic because of her choice to approach that door. But why isn’t she more recognized for her courage. After all at the time that she chose to move to Taos it wasn’t outwardly a very promising location for someone who wished to become a “mover and shaker” in Western Culture.

Here in Taos the year 2012 is to be the year of the “Remarkable Women of Taos” (and Northern New Mexico). I believe this is a timely recognition that the energy of this place is counter and complimentary to what is going on in the dominant world. Here in Taos we live in an alternative energy field. We are a shadow image of the greater culture and as such hold resources that will be needed as that so-called greater world grows tired and needy for an infusion of energy.

ATLANTIS

 When I shut my eyes last night I saw a flurry of snowflakes flying about with the still green leaves and grass.  It was such a shock that I quickly opened my eyes to reassure myself with reality. Yes, the grass was still green and the trees have mostly green leaves but I believe an early winter is sending hints telepathically.

We have been here in Taos the entire summer. It’s been a beautiful summer but I must admit that sometimes I feel claustrophobic here. Of course, there is lots of physical space and the sky is huge, but the emotional space can sometimes close in like an inward swirling spiral. When that happens, I take a deep breath and write. It connects me to the larger world more effectively than the evening news.

Spider Rock Road on the Rez two weeks ago.

The Spanish came here looking for the Cities of Gold. They went through all of the pueblos in their search and each one pointed them north to the next and said, “It isn't here but you will probably find it up north.” Taos was at the end of the list. People still come here looking for paradise. When the Spanish came, they had to give up on the gold and settle for land and exploitation of the natives. However, there is gold here. What the Spanish and later the art community didn't take into account is that this kind of Gold is Alchemical Gold and you have to go through the whole alchemical transformation to earn it.

Locals sardonically refer to our Land of Enchantment as the Land of Entrapment. Like the Hotel California of Eagles fame, “you can check out, but you can never, never leave.” Unless you are wealthy enough to make Taos a vacation home, you may experience it as a patch of quicksand. You have to stay cool or you will surely sink. We have two houses here but we can't sell either one. We are committed to taking care of them probably for life. That is OK. I don't want to leave permanently; I just want the option of being somewhere else for relief and perspective, preferably Cottonwood Arizona. It always feels good to view life from a softer environment now and then. If we could afford it, it would be nice to travel out of the country now and then.

Being born here means that the Pueblo will always own PQ. That is both wonderful and challenging. As a Gemini, (at least I have a concept to describe my situation) it is normal for me to belong in several places at once.  I am connected to the soil of several geographical areas and possibly more than one dimension. I'm an alternative person and I don't flaunt it, but the world of working several low paying jobs just to survive has always seemed like life in a prison chain gang. However, I know it is my own fault for not believing in me. Bare survival is hell and I'm tired of it. Finally, I can say it without twinging with conditioned guilt. Now that I'm officially old, I don't want to waste any more time on hoping to get out of a hopeless loop. I want to paint, write and work with PQ to interact with the many people we meet who wish to drink from the well of sacred art and earth wisdom his culture and family tradition represents.

This place that reeks of the past is also a crucible for the future. This is the primary reason I'm so interested in Mark Gordon’s production of the video about Mabel Dodge Lujan, her Taos Pueblo husband Tony and her attempt to draw to Taos visionary people she termed “movers and shakers” of   culture. No one else has really bothered to look at the alchemical mix of Anglo and Spanish culture with the Native people of Taos Pueblo before Mabel or since. Not that she would have looked at it in just this way, but Mabel was quite aware and even uniquely aware for her time of the Earth Magic lost to her own people and also how important it was to retrieve this lost connection as well as honoring its preservation by the Taos Indians.

I was watering the garden a few days ago when a light went on and I realized that the story of the sinking of Atlantis was a projection into the past of a future toward which our society is heading. I'm not saying that Atlantis it is a product only of fantasy, but fantasy is somewhat like a dream, it contains meanings hidden from ego consciousness. Personally, I believe Atlantis is real anytime a society prides itself too highly for technology and intellect and loses hold of its life source. Scientists are now the priestly class, as they were in Atlantis.

Other sentient beings can remind us of what we are and what we share if we try to know them. Animal cruelty is rampant in our modern world. It is the cruelty of psychopathy, that is, lack of emotional feeling connection. We process our food animals as if they were pieces of paper or wood.  In the world economy, money is blood. We might as well see ourselves like the mink and fox trapped for their fur. We have also become a commodity. Everything is about money, yet does money have a meaning of its own? After the heart is numbed, money is the only value left and when there is no concept of love, only power over others is left. It's interesting that astrologically, Venus is the archetype of both love and material goods. I now see the connection. After love fails, there is only gold and diamonds, and there are never enough of these. The story of Atlantis is our fate if we don’t find our hearts.

CECIL THE MARTYR

A high level of individuality may be the Achilles heel of our species. Group intelligence saves penguins, many other birds, and fishes from predators and environmental challenges. This opinion may be a bit simplistic but it seems that Darwinian explanations fail most obviously with the human species.  Unless, of course, we factor in an unscientific but universally human recognition that we also deal with destructive forces operating internally that are just as threatening as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. We have added our human genius to this list of natural disasters in the development of weapons of mass destruction. However, these weapons are so terrifying that so far, America is the only country that has actually used them for a military attack. At last, humans fear their potential for complete undoing.  It’s ironic that a young country such as America initiated the terrible possibility for total destruction. I’ve long feared that the world may be falling under the total control of the mentality of a 15-year-old geek, all brain and gonads, and both under an out of control ego.

The world is brimming with human inventiveness and we are ever so busy getting smarter. We want all of our inventions to be smarter and smarter all the way to smart watches.  Even smart eyeglasses are on the way. I find it troubling that we are so smart technically and yet people are using their intelligent tablets and smart phones to take selfies, watch funny cat videos, and text about what they had for lunch. It is of course possible to get much deeper on the net and more creative with a smart phone  if you choose, but the point is we need to feel connected to others of our species  (as well as other species) and we are choosing this high tech environment to do less well what a natural environment  would provide. I’m wondering if anyone else finds it ironic that such advanced technology winds up in service to trivial and primitive purposes. It’s about money I suppose. This gathering of money is then about power: The power to make other people dependent on the purveyors of these addictive toys and the victory over competitors.  The emotional environment surrounding this sophisticated technology is quite unsophisticated.

I recently had a dream about living on an island without electronics and motorized transportation. At first, I almost panicked and then gradually discovered how little I needed from the high tech world. Little by little, I discovered very satisfying ways to do everything necessary. In fact, it felt very light and free. Maybe it was a wish to go back to basics and sort out what is actually necessary for life and happiness. I wouldn’t be writing this without electronics but I don’t fully use those that I have and find it challenging to keep up with Facebook, Twitter and even an archaic venue like email. Sometimes I feel pushed onto a faster track than I want to run.

Cecil without a clue he would become a famous Martyr

There is more than one kind of intelligence. The heart chakra and its particular intelligence are undeveloped in our current state of evolution.  There is no equivalence of an IQ test for emotional and relational intelligence but it is vitally important for the continuance of our world.  The use of higher powers for lower ends defines black magic but also technology without a heart. It is the heart chakra that relates the physical with the spiritual, and the individual with the whole.

However, there are signs of advancement.  The outrage over the killing of Cecil the magnificent African lion is something unlikely to have happened twenty years ago. I suppose hunters kill animals like Cecil to magically acquire  their native beauty, wildness and power. It was sad for both the lion and the dentist.   He seems very wealthy for a dentist and quite egotistical to pay a fortune for the privilege of taking the lions life force  to hang on his wall.   However, I find some of the comments on this event troubling.  There is so much raw hatred and condemnation by the hunter’s critics. Many of the critics seem to be coming from a state of mind as uncooked and primitive as the hunter’s state of mind.  The heart of both the hunter and his enraged critics is in danger and won’t be healed by lion hunting or by hatred of lion hunters. Only a sense of belonging to everything that happens in this world will take us beyond victimization and revenge.  Leo the Lion astrologically rules the heart, courage and creativity. This present human world in need of heart and every action wittingly or unwittingly carries a cosmic stamp.  Isn’t it ironic that this lion has become a martyr for the rights of the natural world? Cecil is us.

Humans have a long history of destroying what they admire. The Roman's almost extincted several species of wild animals in their circus. They had great admiration for a brave death. It seems that such a death made life worthwhile. Although that philosophy seems barbaric to us we still have many attachments to Roman culture. However, modern hunters avoid putting themselves face to face with deadly animals and prefer rifles and high powered bows.  

SUNDAY AT HOME

I’m feeling a bit guilty, although I’m not sure that’s the right word. It’s Sunday afternoon and there are several events happening in Taos today. Shouldn’t I want to go to at least one of them? Also, there is a movie that one of my Facebook friends is co-producing about Native and Slave relations in North Carolina in the early 19th century. She needs financial support. There is yet another film vying for support that is about politics in our prisons and its previewing in Taos this afternoon. These are all subjects I find worthy but don’t have the means to support, and today I’m glad I have that excuse.  I am comfortably at home thinking small and making Strawberry Shortcake. PQ is watching Powwow flics on Youtube. While measuring out flour and sugar, I tap my feet in time to the drum. To be honest, I don’t want this comfortable flow interrupted by shoulds.

I intended to go to the pharmacy to pick up a recommended brand of cough drops for PQ. I’m not doing that either--maybe later. I wonder where this “you must do something,” feeling is coming from? Why isn’t it OK to “waste” time writing these words on the computer while the oven heats for biscuits to the background of Powwow music? Now I notice that clouds are covering the sun and it is very still outside, perfect weather for watering the garden and I’m not doing that either.

I step outside because I just don’t get what is trying to come through and stare at the grass out of focus.  I feel a sharp pain on my arm and involuntarily whisk the source off. The wasp tries to hang on but finally tumbles into the grass. OK, I get the point. I’ve been stinging myself instead of just blending with the flow of the day. My arm swells up and the pain moves in all directions. It’s going to remind me for several days that responsibility and covert righteousness is not the same thing.

Mountain Drama - Lots of storm clouds each afternoon, an intense summer.

Over the past three days, I took back the feral garden. The weeds were three feet high on the south side, and on the north two-foot tall grasses beneath which lay unknown scary stuff. I took the weed whacker and leveled the weeds to 3 inches. The next day I mowed what had essentially become hay, and on the third day, finished off by pulling all the tall wild grass from among the Hollyhocks, finishing along the edges with the weed whacker. As a reward, I uncovered decorative stones and flowers I haven’t seen for two years. This reminded me that lost dark places hide beautiful things as well as potentially dangerous things. I’m stiff and sore from head to toe, but it feels good to know why.

Maybe the guilty feeling is really covering the fear of falling back into stunned stuckness. When we returned from Arizona, we were barely recovering from the flu, or whatever it was, and encountering that wild green jungle was intimidating. Family responsibilities also struck immediately on our return before our feet landed right side up on the ground. Having three youngsters in the house on an everyday basis was too much under the circumstances, but their need was also legitimate. One stage at a time seems to be the message. They came by yesterday with their dad. We are trying to work something out that will be good for all of us. Isn’t that what this earth trip is about? Simple enough, but not so easy.

SUMMER IN TAOS

It is unusually hot in Taos. I still haven’t conquered the wild world around the house, although I splurged and bought a weed whacker. PQ tried it for a while this afternoon, but both he and the machine tired quickly in the 90 + degree heat. I accept the out of control foliage around the house in a way that I could never have done before. Everything in our life is different this year. The wildness brings back memories from a long time ago. I sit in the back patio and listen to crickets and softly whooshing leaves. It takes me to childhood under a cottonwood tree while cradled in deep grass in a state of perfect being. Nothing else is necessary when a moment is so perfect.

All is in the moment. Years are inconsequential during a full moment. It could be a hundred years ago, or yesterday or any time at all. The only reality is the sense of Earth functioning at her best and willing to share her being with me, and the company of old friends whose presence makes this

Shadow in Diminishing Shade

moment perfect. I feel at home with all the critters, even the weeds and tall grass.

PQ’s grandchildren are spending their nights and mornings with us this summer. Their dad finally got a permanent job and now has even a second job for several weeks. Their money drought is over. They are good kids, yet it changes our lives. There are two meals a day to plan and more expenses on our already challenged resources, but somehow I have faith that the changes will fall into place. It is obvious that we have to be here in Taos this summer. It is about more than family issues, and out of control gardens. Perhaps it is about truly being here without fantasies of being somewhere else.

Summer is my favorite season, even when it’s hot. My best memories are of summer, partly because there was no school in summer or more accurately, the school of life progressed uninterrupted during summer. The windows and doors are open. There is little difference between indoor and outdoor. The flies and bees buzz in and out because we don’t have a screen door. I remember long ago summers when after dark we went about the house swatting flies so that we could be comfortable indoors. All of that was in a world that I usually don’t think of until something like the long grass and quivering leaves triggers the memory.

PQ thinks I spend too much attention on the past. I always have, even when I was still a kid and didn’t have much past. I get something very valuable from reviewing. I’ve never been content with only now which doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the present. It’s just that I want to enjoy it more than once. Even the bad stuff has more than one lesson to teach. The past is never the same twice. There is always the opportunity to find something we missed on the first round. The earth is round and so is life experience. No-thing really begins separated from an ending and vice versa. Surprises are welcome, not that they ever ask.

COTTONWOOD RETREAT

Here we are in Cottonwood and we’ve been here since May 19. We expected to go back to Taos last Friday but PQ was very sick. Now we are both sick. Apparently, we were supposed to be quiet and avoid running around. Thus, we didn’t do any of the things that we normally do but we did some things we normally don’t do. We tried out a Persian restaurant last week and today (Sunday) we tried a Greek restaurant in Old Town. Both were very good. Oh yes, there was a coffee shop/bakery that was also good but that was sometime last week and already seems long ago. That is how time is lately, jumbled, and although I look at the calendar, I can’t keep the days in order. Tonight is a full moon and the night air is very soft and soothing. I walk outside in my bare feet every few minutes to repair my bearings as an earthling. Yup, the moon is still where I’m used to seeing it. 

Coffee, Tea, Pastry and Songbirds

Taos can be an intense energy and it seems that we really needed a break. Well, I know we needed a break. You can lose your compass in Taos and forget who you are because there are always dramas here or there. They pop up like miniature geysers. We had planned to look for a little house we could rent but haven’t seen a listing for anything we can afford. My dis-eased body has probably influenced me today, but the reality is that we can’t afford anything right now. After paying first, last, security deposit and renting a U-Haul, we would be completely strapped to the credit card people for life and all would come to the same sorry end as our last effort to live here did, but we had more resources then. PQ is always optimistic and believes it will come out right side up, and I’m thinking that if this actually is what we should do the way will reveal itself.

PQ singing to the birds.

This is all a complicated way of saying we are at an impasse. I’m blank about the future, and this is probably where spirit wants me to be. Sometimes our human idea of what constitutes a meaningful life and where to live it is way out of date or something is changing up the road that we don’t know about. Maybe a rock fell from the canyon wall during the last storm and waits for us on the road as we come around the bend. I had this happen once, and I fortunately thought of that possibility just before that curve where fate was hiding. It pays to listen to intuition.

Ironically, a grounded approach is the best way to launch into space or the unknown. I’m emphasizing this because my tendency is to leap off the edge and hope for the best. PQ thinks I’m overly careful about money and taking chances but the truth is I’m actually trying to guard against my usual way of launching and hoping that maybe it will work out. OK, I’m confused. We are possibly at a crossroad and maybe the ground under our feet is tired of being walked on. 

In the meantime, we enjoy watching the mini-drama outside every morning whether here in Cottonwood or in Taos. The critters both winged and four legged have their own dramas and struggles. Yesterday, two lizards almost trapped a small snake between them but it successfully escaped beneath the rocks.  The mourning dove couple is doing the best they can even though the female has a broken leg, and the squirrels are aggressively harvesting mesquite seeds. We hope this satisfies them because otherwise they will eat our friend’s flowers. This won’t be on the news. Humans are very species-centric.

The plan is to go to Taos tomorrow but we need to get a headlight replaced before hitting the road. I’m not going to promise anything. The moon has to pass over Saturn to be full this month. Expect delays and Karmic trip-ups. Your plans will be challenged, especially if they don’t come from the intuitive heart.

THE MARCH WINDS OF APRIL

Weather is definitely different this year. March was very mild and still. The leaves began unfolding, fruit trees bloomed and in general, it seemed much like two weeks into April. Today on April 2, the wind is ferociously blowing dust and propelling tumbleweeds across the road then to collect against our fence.  We ran a number of errands and PQ’s lungs nearly closed up from the wind but at least we had one month relatively free of wind. As I remember last year, the wind began in January and blew nonstop all the way through June.

Weather is changing, becoming more extreme in many places and the social weather is also extreme. It seems that the news each day contains more violence that is senseless. The weak links in the human chain are giving way. Social and spiritual disorder seems to bring out both the best and worst in the human psyche. I’m willing to take the changes predicted for 2013 and beyond seriously. It seems that we are moving into the tunnel toward a different kind of time.

Full of blossoms this spring, the tree is happy to be free.

April 5, 2015

I wrote the above last week and didn’t get time to finish it. This morning is Easter Sunday and the Sun is shining. At precisely 10:00 am, the wind picked up as it usually does on spring days but my mood is ecstatic anyway. Life is beautiful even when I don’t understand the bigger plan. I was reading and meditating this morning as I usually do facing a painting I did a long time ago depicting the spirit of the Sun with a crown of the Seven Sisters ( Pleiades) shining on a group of seven spirit elders. For some reason this morning, it shined on me personally. I was simultaneously inspired and aware of how much I can’t see or understand of an unimaginably vast creation always in process. The reality of living in what seems like a small dark room with one brilliant light shining from a tiny crack was absolutely real and yet I felt very thankful for that tiny crack and the miracle of light.

PQ’s son Corey moved out of our second bedroom and into his new home last night. He was so euphoric to have this place of his own that it changed our whole house. His new home is actually a one-room adobe casita with a fenced yard for Mini his dog. We saw it a few days ago and it is lovely; a great kitchen with new appliances, a wood stove in the living room and a portal for summer lounging. It is near my old neighborhood rich with trees and green grass. I woke up this morning and our house was entirely changed. Everything was reborn, a perfect Easter experience.  The cats were visibly happy not to be sharing their home with a dog who tried to chase them whenever they were outside. Their relief was obvious as they strolled confidently through the yard where Mini used to spend her days.

Then another reality interferes in the afternoon as the world goes dark. Kit Carson Electric has another outage. I hoped it would be short because I wanted to see the Sunday evening lineup on PBS. It was not to be and the electricity didn't come on until 2:30 am. This has happened many times, and the story is always the same, a corrupt underground line has broken and it is always for this particular cul-de-sac. Our neighbors in the next block are not affected. I wasn't going to let the trickster ruin my evening. PQ and I sat quietly in candle light until almost twelve and then went to bed. The darkness became very soft inside and outside the full moon covered everything in blue light. Not a bad day’s end after all.

Tuesday, April 07, 2015

Creation, personal and cosmic is happening continuously. Destruction due to squeeze hearted fear based hatred can never defeat the creative process because its sum is zero. Yet, dark fear provides a necessary contrast to the light of creative love, the glue of everything. Over the past year, I feel that in human time, I crossed over into the realm of old age but the major change has been that I’m not so interested in plans. I probably won’t do most of the things that I wanted desperately to do a few decades ago and some just last year but the present has become the great adventure, anything else is frosting. I feel enlightened like this about half the time now. It’s a welcome trade-off for the past. On my unenlightened days, I collect material for the next insight.

HOW CAN YOU CATCH A FLEEING INSIGHT

My best writing never makes it to paper. The best comes in a flash when I am somewhere, often in the car, without pen and paper. There are brilliant flashes of insight in blazing words yet when finally I can write them the core meaning evaporates and they become an ordinary handful of dust. The magic disappears like a punctured balloon. I wrote the following while trying to chase an insightful moment as it was making its getaway. I grabbed it by the tail and like a lizard, it left its tail with me and kept running, but the tail isn’t too bad.

Most that is profound and beautiful stays just beyond reach. This is my new interpretation of my lifelong struggle to climb the Monkey Bars that symbolized my childhood ambitions. We artists constantly struggle to bring the brilliance shining behind the curtain of mundane reality into the 3D physical dimension. It resembles fishing. When the fish bites, it is exciting but until you reel it in, anything can happen. The fish comes from a different dimension and it doesn’t want to come out of the water. In this case, I don’t want to eat it, just catch and release. I want to see a flash of what is behind being human.

Springtime on Taos Mountain

There are many lives that exist within this single stretch of time I claim as my life. Suddenly the damp cool spring afternoon air opens a window to one of these lives hidden below the surface of now. The light is fresh and strangely familiar, I look through a window to see if it is raining but unexpectedly it whizzes me to Denver many years ago. I don’t know why. Random slices of the past pop into my consciousness at certain times and then I may not experience them again until another mysterious trigger releases yet more memories. As I notice this effect, many other spring days from earlier times also rush before me like a slide show in 3D. Not just vision but all of the senses are involved. I am saturated.

So, tonight, I am in Denver during my last days in Cherry Creek. It seems ironic that I now live with a husband and two cats in Taos, the same social arrangement I had back then but with different personnel and stage set. The world, family members and I have transmuted and changed bodies, souls and personal history. Perhaps someday I will look at the current moment in the same way.

As time passes and the people and animals in my life move from present to past, I gradually morph. I am not who I was 25 years ago. In most ways, that is a good thing, but in other ways, I miss who I was then as I miss the people in my life at previous phases that are not present now. It isn’t that I miss what my life was then, but I miss the old self as another troubled friend I’ve lost touch with. I certainly don’t want to be her but I would like to tell her that everything will be OK.

Nostalgia is one thing but this goes beyond nostalgia. This seems to be entire past realities stacked on each other with the present at the top much like a double, triple quadruple exposure. As my life moves on, I am aware that there is not just one life but many and each one professes to be the whole life during its time. I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like to live 900 years. Could Methuselah remember all the stages of his life and the people and events of his years? I find myself losing pieces of time already. I’m wondering how one can write a realistic autobiography. Surely, it would only be a compilation of events that for momentary and possibly suspect reasons float to the top layer of consciousness. The present self judges and alters the past for its own purposes.

I have Cancer rising, Moon conjunct Jupiter in Cancer ruler of home and family and I have always wanted to hold the essence of each experience and make it eternal. That is the true nature of home in my estimation. To hold all of those times and understand their relationship with each other, and then understand how they create life as I now experience it. It isn’t either the true life or the mythic life, but to me something much more basic and tangible. It is the life recorded in the soul and senses. It ties us back to the distant past and yet it can bring the past forward to now. My Gemini Sun conjunct Mercury,  god of the crossroads likes the alchemical twist.

I wish to share the whole many-layered reality with everyone and yet I can’t bring anyone with me to this private picture show. Sometimes,  life is much like being at a big party on your own and it takes time to make one’s way through the guests, to walk through all rooms in the hosts home and taste the offerings on the table. There are also painful, embarrassing experiences one would like to delete from the memory bank, and thus avoid any room where such memories linger, but then it wouldn’t be this life.

Nevertheless, perfection is always here right now. It is the background; it is the theater hosting this drama. Chaos, fear, unrealized hopes, ideals, pain, grief, destruction and failures lay deceptively over perfection. This is my new reality. I gaze into the bathroom mirror and see an unfamiliar face. It’s older than the one I was used to seeing. I’m afraid I will forget what I used to look like, yet this new image is fascinating. I’ve noticed that since my mother passed I’ve taken on more of her looks and gestures. One would think that the older we get the more individual we would become and yet I’ve noticed that people become more like their ancestors as they age. As the world turns, we carry the past into the future.