“Aquariel” is a companion to my other blog, Janeadamsart. Sometimes I feel the need to write a little differently, perhaps more privately, or more opinionated. Perhaps Aquariel will serve as a kind of commentary, at a slower tempo. We shall see.
“Janeadamsart” is a journal, bridging east and western wisdom. Aquariel is the same journal, walking with the Rose and the elements.
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4 November 2012:
Happy 100th birthday, Elisabeth. Scorpionic thoughts! Life below ground, and in the well, where the still waters run deep, the seed beginning its journey through the winter YIN. Above, is a painting of Domenico in 1969, also a Scorpio – his birthday on the 6th.
How heavy it rains, pushing all the leaves down onto the ground in a wild golden russet litter. I went for a walk yesterday afternoon – around Radlett in Hertfordshire, completing the circle in the dark. It is only a short train journey from where I live. Discovered I was strangely serene and at peace with the predictions and speculations about Britain’s trees, an imported European fungus which kills ash and other woods. The reason – they say – is that Britons have such a passion for planting trees and new woodlands everywhere, they import seed from abroad, and it is not quarantined. It is the usual story, of mass mixtures of terrain and travel, weakening the native stock; and so we have an immune-system breach at many levels.
No wonder in the 1930s there was a craze for eugenics, and the Nazi ethnic cleansing panic. It was in the shadow of things to come: the apprehension. The Nazis thought they were a threatened Master Race and began felling outright all the “diseased wood”. That is an analogy to stop to think about. I as each of us individually, have this cell-capacity to get it wrong.
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But on my walk, I didn’t feel the Devas of the trees are “upset”. Instead, they seem to tell me this:
It is more in the light of change, decay and growth passing through Nature, which remains constant. Humans are locked in tiny projectile dreams of dismay. In Nature the essence rises and falls and renews as the breath. Is a tree angry when the wind blows her down or a beetle eats her bark? Who knows! The trees are a collective, they are not of the testy persuasion of individuals.
We lost the elms. We are always “losing” something which reached its span, and the loss merges into the new upsurging growth. Many may come to stand dying, yet grey and delicate in the forest. Not every tree is afflicted. Some are strong, and resist the bugs.
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Reportage limits an issue to the local roadster view. For instance, the high speed to Birmingham railway, highly undesirable as it is, will NOT actually ravage the entire Chiltern hills area. But politics and local protest must multiply the slogan, to make the point. When I am out in wood and field and sky, chequered with farms and dormitories, there is but little sign of human pollutant. It is an environment temporarily fragile, but actually indifferent to, and far transcending any of our ideas or railway lines. (I suffer from those, as a “nature lover”.) Note also: the mindset which needs Nature in whatever emotional spectrum, as ENTERTAINMENT – a backcloth for us humans to enjoy, and act out our stuff.
And note another mindset which seems to occupy me now … which in some strange way co-creates with, and comprehends the natural process and its stems and stamens, and … sees right through the affliction.
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In the common Euro-culture paradox, what we see and speculate about the trees has its political analogy. Environment, politics, health, sexually transmitted disease, the depletions caused by zig zag travel and airports, imported foodstuffs, mental internet viruses, terrorist cells and legislation … all are this. They are the fragile cohesion of what I take for granted – I take for granted for instance, the skill of the linked keyboard I use. I would feel unhoused without it.
All this is yet a symptom of the Age of Aquarius getting into its stride; thousands of years ago they predicted that in the Age of Aquarius, human consciousness would take to the air and buzz around distractedly.
It is a thought, that Nature is less willing to be a sentimental playmate with the humans and their drama, and withdraws some of Her beauty and eco-systems at this time. Her immunity is in recession. Although more of us now renew and respect Her mysteries, we have to take the consequence of centuries of exploitation.
I accept this in the greater cyclic pattern. It is profoundly seasonal with the tides. It also reveals us to ourselves, consequentially. We are still Yetziratic beings; we live more comfortably in the mind, and in our mental trauma; we have not learned fully enough to live in our bodies, and respect the ground, our Mother. We do not yet, really walk.
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courtship with knowledge
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Consciousness seems insistent on one thing: to be experienced completely. Our worldview and its narrow frames are prompted from a psychology which is incomplete. The growth cycle of human conscience, though speeded up a bit with global warming and “the Photon belt”, is very very slow. Con-science is the union of two words: With and Knowledge.
Perhaps because of writing and picturing a lot about trees in my other blog, and the aftermath of the American storm, the trees and fields were exceptionally alive and beautiful yesterday. My spirit praised and danced with them, and the soggy soft earth of the paths awoke my feet.
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I discovered – re-membered – that the Cross for the Rose is a “latin cross” opened out, which folds up into a golden Cube of Space with the Rose inside. Carry it in and as my heart. It is a great help, to picture together the Seal of Solomon, tetrahedrons, pentacle as a concerted thought form.
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I have been walking along trying to “draw” the red rose pentacle petals, one set of five on another, trying to see and touch the way the petals softly bend and curl. Around this is the magic golden box, the Cube of Space. When you open it out, the Rose of Life springs open from the centre.
Isn’t this amazing? the Rose symbolizes Saturn and the Hanging Man – whose Tarot Keys 21 and 12 are in the point where all the axes cross. Saturn and the Hanging Man both signify the ripening process through frames of time. If I keep a small gold box, with a rose inside, it soon goes dead and hard, but if I keep renewing it as a living Thought Form – the sacred geometry of the gold cross and crimson Rose – in concert with the healing of the human condition and its trees – why! it is the Regeneration, the scent.
So, that may be partly why the trees looked so tall and majestic and soaring, and in wonderful converse with each other.
And I love the heavy rain now which keeps me indoors, and strange it is to have the human roof, the shelter of my “Gothic arch”. I feel particularly thankful for this and for the infrastructure, as so many of our pals across the pond lost theirs, lost their roof, their power-grid-connection, their belongings and their security.
It is likely that each country or culture suffers or will suffer its form of natural cataclysm, whether dramatic or in slow motion. So grow with it. Got to accept that everything IS changing – Changing for real, as our human obsession, and its fallout, manifests for us to face. Replacing for a time the wild, it leaves for a long time, concrete and toxic scars and roads to get grown over. These we have to see. They are that aspect of ourselves – the broken slabs, the skin diseases.
The irresistible force grows through our lives and through our curved planetary biosphere, like our hair. The seer Douglas Harding used to ponder First-Personally the mystery: “but God can’t see His own beard growing! – nor know how it does?”
Nature is the unceasing Fountain. We are yet unseparate from the whole process of cosmic adjustment: an acceleration and warm-up in the energy field. The human agency is but one of many. It is under inertia-momentum and can only see itself, in the tightening mesh of housing and transporting and industrializing itself – (all of which produce the carbon problem on our conscience): the environmental blot.
And yet this is a little thing in the Greater Picture. I cannot help but find this view. It is the viewpoint of the Companions of the Light. My personal indoctrination is from among the hedges of the maze – a lifetime’s thumb-print whorl. I can’t see over them: I grieve.
He and she see further, from above and from below – a much wider horizon – and they teach my eyes.
… and at night the gold fell away
for there is no person there ;
what there is, is carbon free
pure current, like the air.
Where I am, at the point of Jacobs Ladder with the ground, is PHILOSOPHICAL. Philosophy has a tendency to open like the Rose … far beyond, above and below the flat oblong screen. Philosophy gathers vastly her orbital views … like the sound, keep on sounding, singing, of the rain.
Nature is the unceasing Fountain.
Here is a fascinating resonance. In the Tarot wisdom, Key 15 the Devil card – through which we learn most, and whose zodiac is the Goat, Capricorn – is symbolized as the Fountain, the Eye, and concept of Renewal.
The Devil presents a flat, dense effigy of religious dictatorship; an advertisement of hedonistic bondage and despair. But when we – like the Builders of L’Art Gothique, in the middle ages – face up to the effigy in our inner life, it dissolves into the Light behind the shadow we believed in. “Keep practicing.”
The horrible figure is in fact, the irrepressible Fountain of Nature. It hardens into our inaccurate ideas and tyrannies. The mask, the masque, is in truth the Lovers’ open space and freedom. 15 dissolves to 6. But we must find this out for ourselves … continually … before we demand it of others.
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If you look down onto a Fountain (or an Icelandic geyser from above) it has the shape of an eye. The AYIN Hebrew letter assigned to the Devil/Key 15, means “the eye” – physical sight. It also means “a fountain”.
Nature is the unceasing Fountain from the seasonal rotation’s core, putting forth new life as ever through the eventful human crust. During war time in human affairs, there is a baby boom. Nature likewise, becomes more active, she fountains her green-stuff as it is cropped; and the forests grow a little faster. The trees have wider rings. On my walk I notice everywhere, new plantations of trees, the staked fur of very young woodlands. Maybe they contain the European spores which harm our native species, but nevertheless the tendency is irrepressibly copied; interwoven.
It is interwoven with the different forms; the fountain is in parts of the world, an eruption of volcanic fire, lava flow. Life is delicate, like gravity. The Fountain can be catastrophic to our habitations. But life is the inexhaustible capacity for renewal: to reattach herself to the toes of the Giant. Little houses, fields, lichen, the psyche… include relationships and the power to become conscious of what we are doing; and the event to heal.
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Still the rain falls, whispering and swishy in the street, as the sky and buildings across the road gleam through tattered golden branches, along dark veins, the moss of life.
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The Finger of God
Years ago, my oracle bottomed out
into Ramana’s Self enquiry.
Yet I love
the instrument of Kabbalah
having faithfully climbed the Tree,
each Hebrew quaver cherished
in musical discipline;
and in the overlapping dimensions
of Jacob’s Ladder, marvelled.
Source, not sorcery, saw these things.
and inward by the Hermit led,
follows that pointer to the core of being, whose art
the rainbow crock is cooking.
In the Work of Unification,
I the artist in a field, celebrate en sof –
“without end” –
the no thing with its mirage.
My Work of Unification
is pegged out on the clothes line
with the daily wash.
I distil my bright bow
as rain from the sun’s ray melts.
God takes prints of time as a whole –
a unique whorl
of valleys with their ridges looped is
God’s inky finger on my many landscape years
to toil; and yet
already deftly placed!
As I am led daily into this matter
I seek a stout tail ahead
for my trunk to hold.
These things first are teachings,
then they are life.
They take the entire time
for an elephant’s child to grow.
from Poems of Eclipse 1999
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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.
Aquariel 