I found this poem reblogged to http://wakingtheinfinite.com, and am inspired to reblog it here also, to read many times. For me it says it ALL. Enjoy!
If you want to change the world, love a man
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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Listening
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Words are the trivia of modern dead language as commerce, without number or resonance. The Word in poetry or in sacrament is hieroglyphic and alive.
The Word!
It is in and of the spine of my soul. In a Red Book footnote, I misread “the Anointed is supposed to return, but no longer in the flesh but in the spine.” Actually spirit, but I saw at first spine, because of the small print.
This is food for thought: be not of the flesh but in the spine! Here is the listening organ.
Then listen! For in the nerve threads, the coloured underground cables of my spine, flows Akasha, information. Isn’t that what Akasha the etheric element is? Akasha stores the divine memory of all that is and was and is to be. This is the domain of the High Priestess.
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Tarot Key 2 – Builders of the Adytum deck – her planet is the Moon
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I associate her also with “Earth-Receptive” in the I Ching – as in the Gene Keys (see link below.) Gene key 2 is my Yesod – my “sphere of attraction”.
It is good to reflect at length and organically here; where the powers of attraction and what is drawn into this field are determined.
The High Priestess sits quiet and still, but is a blossoming fountain of the Tree of Poemegranates, red-orange in the cool veil between pillars of Solomon. From her lap flows a leaping white river. Her womb is concealed by the Torah scroll she holds over it. The scroll unrolls a little, like a sea wave crest. In it is written all that was, is, and is to be: JHVH in the cross of Light she wears.
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Tarot is an anagram of TORAH, the wisdom and the Law. In Tarot, each of the 22 Keys carries the Hebrew letter/number which is one ahead of it. This is because Tarot begins with Key 0, The Fool, whose letter is ALEPH, letter 1 in the alphabet.
Through the picture-writing, each flower contains the seed of the flower: the script to be.
The Priestess is Key 2, but her letter is GIMEL (3) whose symbol is the camel. The camel carries water across the Empty Quarter between the wells, and transports messages among humankind.
The mystery of Two contains this natural 3, the Letter of fertility. It births a playful child, the One.
Return to the One. Be here and now. Unity.
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Letter GIMEL – wheatsheaf with man
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The Priestess and the I Ching Two illumine each other in my Tree-of-life foundation. Her planet is the Moon, she receives and reflects the Sun. The Yin right through the hexagram is a well, receiving the One.
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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.
COPYRIGHT – 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://janeaquariel.wordpress.com/
Move to the other side of the Hermit’s Face
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The Hermit: key nine of my hermetic Tarot
This morning has a deep gentle calm on the open sea.
The other day it occurred to me, to step round the Hermit’s Ba bird, and gaze up into his face, his dark eyes, his lamp with the Seal of Solomon. This is the light of stars, and also the inner light of man.
It is as any other face, a little wider than expected but … to face him thus, seems to cross the bridge between brains right and left – the walnut. The Hermit is consciousness, and I approaching from his left, am subconscious. As I step round to look up into his face, I align with his intuitive side. There is a taste of bread and honey.
I stepped round his Ba and his staff into the cave which he is: his own in-turned, heartward contemplation. I look at that.
It is like glimpsing the Furnace of the Universe. The galactic wheels, cauldrons, stars and fires throughout the Universe, turn. Within my spine I slowly turn, like the neck of a swan: axis mundi.
“Daily practice of the thought that the personal life is directly guided by a higher intelligence, daily remembrance of the truth that nobody can do anything of himself, daily endeavour to approach all conditions and circumstances from this point of view – these are the fundamentals of the training which makes us true possessors of the power of the Hermit’s path of wisdom” … and its contentment.
Paul Foster Case
Human life evolves by the play of contrasts.
Goddess with swan – A childhood drawing, circa 1956 – probably copied from Leonardo
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“From intellectual recognition of the true nature of the central Self, to perfect identification with the cosmic memory … the cosmic process is meditation – the meditation of Kaivalya, ALONE”
Paul Foster Case
The Life Power that All is One … is alone. I feel this flow through my veins, as well as the resistant personal stuff. Where would flow be, without the dark bits to move along? … wave and particle. In my picture of the Buddha’s enlightenment, that wave flows across it, with its bits of grit and song. We feel its direction through us like the Dust in His Dark Materials. We feel the soft seamless glide, guide and shift whenever we slow down and hear. Whereabouts do I select to identify? Or is it by blind habit? The dial is given me to tune and turn.
Nowadays circles with dots in the middle have gone out of fashion, and it is by digital finger-tap up or down – little columns – that we adjust the wavelength. Use whatever illustrates the principle best. The dial is satisfying, employing the ancient delicate skill of thumb and forefinger. Digi-technology begins to atrophy this. Finger is gone – it is all thumb, like a growing ape, with much wider guidelines, a kindergarten primer. Even the wheel is going slow – with more people sitting at home to travel and rove. We have buttons on our brows. We browse.
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The Perfect Law has Beauty for its foundation. Eliphas Levi: “black magic is organized madness.” True magic is in the Will – an intense, expectant receptivity.
The Hermit Squares the Circle. This means the divine circle, the sphere of cosmos, submits to its expression on the little ground – four compass directions + up, down, and becomes a map, a terrain. A Mandala sits in a room, and its opposite numbers breathe together through the open Cup at centre.
A recent group work, with all the participants facing each other. Each represents a Path, a Sefira, a Zodiac and a holy animal. See Mandala – a Demonstrated Democracy
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I know in my own mind, that primitive magic and modern science-theory are bedfellows. The passionate tension to prove or enforce a phenomenon, feels identical. For instance, in straight psychology, the effort of mind to square a circle literally, is no different from attempting to command the laws of nature. I used to fiddle around to prove things, and get overwrought; I no longer try. A heart seeking honesty arrives openly.
An unobstructed channel manifests the Heavenly Order.
Hamsa Great Swan
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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.
COPYRIGHT – All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012. 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 http://janeaquariel.wordpress.
Goslings of Gaia
Rosicrucean Emblem 7 by janeadamsart – a Lily in a pot, growing in a garden: purity and root system
My plan for this blog is to begin participating in a discussion on AUTOPOEISIS – nature’s immune response: the planet’s systems as a whole, from which our humanity is in no way separate.
Earth’s immune-shield is in tidal retreat – a natural Yin response to our exploitation. The same symptoms appear in our bodies, our viral communications, and our obsession with health and safety issues. The AIDS miasm is a prime illustration; also the weakening of eco-systems in the human and vegetable kingdoms through excessive travel, commerce and spillage of DNA. It is a natural development, but in its early stages, out of balance, as we lack respect.
The visual image this delivers, is of roots being shaken out of their soil. Each organism has a ground on which it is designed to thrive, by climate and by local connectivity. A conscious farmer neither exhausts nor forces what a field can produce, by importing from overseas. Every few years it is set-aside fallow, to regain nutrients and vital force. All eco-systems – and our lifetimes – follow a cyclic rhythm – the fibonacci spiral.
Paradoxically, the local connectivity – grass roots – is identical with cosmic connectivity: the Law as it settles, like manna or rain. Travel is good for cross-fertilizing – seeds travel on the breeze from field to field. But excessive travel, worry and search for distraction, is no longer a pleasure or adventure, but merely unsettling.
Rosicrucean emblem 1 by janeadamsart – a Ship trailing anchor. Hac Monstrante Viam – “This shows the way.”
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Thousands of years ago, it was predicted that the early stages of the Age of Aquarius would see humans taking to the air, like insects beginning to swarm. The technology is visible, both physically and in cyber space. As in every other evolutionary stage, we have to LEARN TO FLY; but … we haven’t yet! So it is all in the mind.
Baby gosling jumbo jet, with acorns and distant oak 1987
The effort to fly ahead of ourselves – acceleration of industry and information beyond capacity – destabilizes our environment, and particularly our own relation with it. It compromises our health and immunity, as goslings of our Mother Gaia.
The tide through the ages, goes in and out: the breath. Jiddu Krishnamurti – who faced many conflicting issues – once said “the tide going in and out has no in conflict in the one movement with itself; the essence is peace.”
And so it is with our history … today as always, along the borderline.
Kabbalah – in the Toledo tradition – teaches that the human soul is still learning to handle physicality. We are not fully descended from the garden of Eden in Yetzirah (world of the psyche) into the earth plane. Most of the time we are locked inside the little castle of our mind, and do not notice where we put our feet or throw our rubbish. Our experiential reality is mostly virtual: not Real.
The Age of Capricorn – 2,000 years or so from today – may well see a humanity which is better grounded and well rounded. Pluto in Capricorn at present teaches fundamental lessons in our values and in the transformation, sometimes harsh.
In Malkuth – the conscious Kingdom of the Tree of Life on Earth – the glory of all the worlds is, was and will be integrated.
Through the human ages so far, occasional societies, kingdoms and sages with the flowering wisdom of the stars, have thrived. Wisdom hears the tree, and rises and falls like the waves at sea. It is no different today in 2012 than at any other time. As the life trapped inside our lower mind torments us, as much as it entertains, the Mayan-calender tipping point arrives: to allow the Higher Mind to enter, which truly walks the Earth. As this begins to happen, the earlier situation is much less tolerable. No birth happens without some visible destruction of the status quo.
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Rosicrucean emblem 8 by janeadamsart: Angel sieves wheat from chaff – Discrimination
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“Aquariel” is “the philosophy of Aquarius” – the water bearer. We walk with the rose, through the woods and by the stream.
In myself I feel the dawning of this philosophy. It is not of the individual. It is the Individuation streaming through the individual, to all other organisms of space, time and beyond our time. During the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st, walls were built and broken down, catastrophically: ancient walls of tradition, society and family infrastructure … walls also of ethnic cleansing, projection and religious toxins, are built defensively, and shattered.
I cannot see how we can begin to farm our environment constructively, until these depth-issues we are wedded to, are conscious and addressed. Peace begins with the nearest instant of humanity, here at home. It is closer than our breath. Each to each response-ability passed on, is a butterfly wing effect which governs the subatomic world and the hidden Laws of Nature: the “holy and invisible order of gravity”.
“… all manner of things shall be well
when the tongues of flame are in-folded
into the crowned knot of fire
and the Rose and the Fire are one.”
T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets
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Gravity – like a flock of starlings – is the manifest flow of a myriad mini-conductors. The web-land can be used this way.
We are on the move towards getting some of it right – because a supra-Consciousness prevails among our cells, homeopathically – but the gross margin of error fills our vision. Sometimes we lift our sight above the troubled clouds. From embracing a wider view of ourselves and history, we may come to ground, act locally, and let the Aquariel contagion spread.
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A second birth – breaking through the caul of life into the Laws of Creation: an old Kabbalist engraving
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I shall be working also with a friend, Peter Chatalos, whose article/thesis “Gaia Living with Aids: Towards reconnecting Humanity with Ecosystem Autopoeisis, using Metaphors of the Immune System” is stored at http://www.interscience.wiley.com
Wishing you peace and blessings for Solstice … to hear a still small voice at the winter hearth by candlelight; the Axis Mundi through our centre turns. All is well, and all manner of things shall be well.
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The World Dancer, Tarot key 21
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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.
COPYRIGHT – All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012. 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://janeaquariel.wordpress.com/
Using Tarot to face Fear
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by jane adams 1991
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I am afraid above all else, of my own fear.
I am suffering from a personal-yesodic cyclone – shadow, projection and fear. It seems to be generated from my steward, desperately checking the wine in the cellar.
The Master of the house knows the wine. The steward goes to fetch it. Steward gets in a mess when he thinks he’s the Master.
My attitude to the teaching is arrogant. What the hell do I actually know about “the mars force?” I should read, study life with reverence, acknowledging my difficulty, not “oh-I-know-that”. I don’t know. If I did, I wouldn’t get in such a pickle.
An adept is a person whose body has reached the end of the path pictured in this Tarot Key – no.18, The Moon. When I asked Tarot a question about my fear, it showed me the beginning of the path; with Karmic law to the left and Probation to the right. It challenges my personal (moonish) attitudes and beliefs. It shows me how fearful I am, and that I am only starting out, and under supervision.
Justice past. Moon present. Temperance future. BOTA Tarot Keys
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Fear is imagining that something in my environment is out of proportion.
Fear is fond of itself, so it fastens on any small factor and develops it out of proportion … whereas the one who comprehends and embodies the path of the Moon “is courageous because he has overcome fear. He never forgets the truth that all the activities of the universe are kept in perfect balance.” (Paul Foster Case)
This is a Testing Portal. Look at those two animals/dogs whose nice kennel has blown away – bewildered by the big bleak landscape and the Moon’s sharp rays. All the drops falling down on them seem to be disasters, but are in fact YODs of the eternal Life. The Companions of the Light seem to retire, eliciting the pilgrim’s solitude and effort. The Gate is two towers, as in tolkien. The opening between them goes beyond the present limitation.
Justice sits with scales and sword between two towers. The Archangel pours his severe elixir over two muddy creatures of Ezekiel, and seems to block the path to the Mountain.
Angels through Daat in the Tree of Life, cast shadows in Yesod. Daat represents the transpersonal unknown collective. Yesod is the sefira of personality – the local one, the filter. Here is Jacobs’ Ladder for thoughtful Kabbalists. To check this out in Zev ben Shimon Halevi’s books, visit kabbalahsociety.
Jacobs Ladder 1991, showing the dovetailing of the Sefiroth throughFour Worlds
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In Jacobs Ladder overlapping the fourfold Tree of Life, Yesod (the personal) and Daat (the transpersonal) superimpose. In the Solar system, the planetary symbols of Yesod and Daat – the Moon and Pluto, the nearest and the furthest – are almost the same size.
Jacobs Ladder – relationships of emanation, creation, psyche and body
These ideas are technical, and they distract a little from my actual fear process, but – they are pictorial. Pictures and shapes reach far beyond words, so far as the subconscious is concerned. The goal is for me to understand/standunder the way things work, as I dust myself off and keep going.
A prime element in “Courage” is restraint from reaction. Reaction is an effort to arm myself. Non-reaction, waiting for a fuller information to emerge, feels naked and exposed. The shadow invades my mind and solar plexus.
The recent sun and moon-eclipse seemed to culminate to a “heavy”, in my case. The two dogs confront the towers of Gevurah and Hesed. The Archangel stands in front of the path Yesod-Tifareth, and the path of Awe behind it. Both Keys (18 and 14) suggest that the Sun is hidden for the moment, behind the imagined situation which casts a shadow. Realising this, puts my feet one two, on the path, walk.
Pisces is the ruler of Key 18 the Moon, and of the feet – the soles of the feet. I will feel the Sun on my shoulders of his own accord, as the projection melts. Face up, and walk into what scares me … right through it. Perspective changes as I move – it comes alive. 
As I have Virgo-cusp rising, Pisces (Key 18) is my Shadow sign with Lilith in it, 7th house. Confronting a partner, and that which comes to meet me, can be scary and painful, like reaching … and then my heart breaking open, grief. After a while, facing it directly begins to melt it away – the illusion and fearfulness in my mind. Grief is good, it cleanses.
The severe Guardian Angel in Key 14 is actually Michael, Archangel of the Sun. Equilibrium is the royal path to gnosis. It is the path of honesty – between Yesod and Tifareth.
So this is useful, for this morning. I feel stronger, thus more able to see. The visualising journey: here I am, a primitive human figure on the path just emerging from the primal pool. As I move along (hobbit feet!) towards the rather grim towers, the landscape is no longer a two dimensioned flat, it is incorporated, it comes to life; it wobbles and moves around and through me – into no thing: my transparency. The towers and the gap between them are sometimes four-square and sometimes one nearer and the other further. As I walk to become, it becomes me, and the fact settles. I am out of the doghouse!
There is a simple Douglas Harding experiment: to drive the world, the thingless Capacity for left and right, and marvel at what comes into view – but it requires careful attention on the road.
First-person drawings from “To Be And Not To Be” by Douglas Harding, illustrations JA
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I see or sense just my feet on the path, one then the other, move, keep going. The forbidding curtain transforms to space.
from To Be & Not To Be by Douglas Harding, illustr.JA
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sole, ear
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So who are you then, whomever I meet and fear? You look like Mara’s face, in the SITA Buddha enlightenment card. Mara is the Buddha’s opponent – the force which tried to stop the enlightenment. So get it out, and look at the devil, sex and death. Through all the blandishment, Buddha sits under his tree and keeps touching the ground with his open hand … the same as FOOT – keep walking, feel the ground – (like baby Buddha did when he was born.)
Sacred India Tarot
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Mara goes BLAH …
When I am tense and full of think, I am frightened of this stranger – Mara going BLAH – and above all, ASHAMED of admitting anything about it here, ashamed and scared of my panic and projection, lest it get worse. My panic and projection is a disguise – a whirling dust devil. But go to the root – does it really exist? No wonder it harries and drives me away from telling about it. Does it exist? Look at Mara in the drawing. Has he a body? Is he not just my scurrilous mind going WAH from behind a bush? Has he any root at all? Why, no ! just confusion. That is what he thrives on, when I let him settle in my city; and just about anything can inflate to look like him and drive me nuts. Confusion is the disorder. Confusion is the tension – giving it the power to damage and hijack my life.
This is seen in all the world’s trouble spots, cancelling Consciousness.
Well, good, good, keep going, this inner exercise will help my mind to clear. Mara forms a Grand Trine around Buddha, with a sly serpent and a siren woman. The Sacred India Tarot publisher put a bra on her, so this is the original. The serpent and the woman proceed through chaos, but the Buddha’s serenity is firmly established in the green and golden ground as Tifareth of Pentacles – his spine with the bodhi Tree of Life: the wheels of the cosmic Law. Death’s skull leers from behind the woman. Men consider Eve to be the gate of death because she gives them birth.
Sacred India Tarot
Do not let the metaphysic stray from the point. I am looking at Mara, my inflation of a magpie. It is important for me to check my euphorias and understand this entity in my being – who takes up residence in anyone who lets him in – this SQUATTER.
Look at the squatter, who does not own the house, and stops the owner from getting in.
This I find really terrifying. And see how the rats from it scurry over the world and build belief-houses occupied by squatters. Poor humans, we all suffer from this.
The squatter is the steward, getting carried away – a butler with megalomania.
Do not expect to overcome my terror at once, because here I am, in an opportunity to perceive and deal with it underneath the appearances. It is ancient. The light takes time to “incorporate”. Inevitably I end up thanking the Guardian Angel for showing me my fear, and what I learn from it, to attempt the next step. A mind like mine which teems with Providence and creativity, is vulnerable to occupation and entanglement at the lower levels. The steward gets in a tizzy.
The process is at last examined here. So now it can move on. I am frightened of occupation and hijack, and no wonder, as I am a sitting duck and make such a meal of it.
I Ching Wind over Mountain: Retreat
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The correct attitude is lightness of heart and foot. It is proper for the sage on the mountain to retreat into his sky thoughts, when the small social climber becomes a nuisance. This reminds me of the Buddha card holding the Bowl higher than the begging pilgrim. He says No I don’t descend to your level, my compassion raises you to make the effort. He raises the high-jump bar. The small social climber isn’t even looking at the Bowl, he looks sideways at his own busy thoughts and industries. When we are afraid, we do not look ahead, we glance from side to side.
Sacred India Tarot
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This Page of Pentacles/Disks has a beautiful composition – simplicity in itself. I am glad I am at last making some headway with this.
I am scared of updating my system – of things looking different, and having to learn them again; WordPress indicates it moves with the lion, leaving my snow leopard behind.
There are in the world, waves, ebbs and flows of tidal interest in whatever topic. An ear to the ground moves in circles, like the weather. Watch it drop maybe to the ground, and rise again, like a kite on the breeze. It is all illusion, illusory, because it DOESN’T EXIST! It is a cyber-thought. It is a way to communicate my thoughts at large, and to be able to see them and know that others can, too, and I theirs … we wave, as we weave. But materially my thoughts are on my sketchbooks and in my cupboard … for as long as I live.
Yesterday I went to tea with E, to help her start to organise her 80th birthday fest in January. I also showed her how to get onto my blog. The Companions of the Light came to assist me in force! E has a Macbook the same as mine, but weirdly … slightly different. It turned out, she is on the latest Mountain Lion, so I got a demo on how my admin could look.
Keep on examining fear, as and when it pops up and starts to manage me. Fear is the coagulation of any undue emphasis in my thoughts. Fear is a williwaw, a vortex, a dust-devil of the sands of Ganga.
A Sacred India Tarot reading – from left to right, past, present moment (with its unfolding quality j-h-v-h) and future.
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And now a gallery of drawings-of-fear, done in 1987
fear 87/ja
fear – trying to meditate ’87ja
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fear – utter fury
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unfolding – persephone
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fear – trying to be a buddhist
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fear – raise my glass to it
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transmuting fear – dragon song
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trying to repair the I
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I awake
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black swans
I painted this after a visit to a stately home in Staines, in whose gardens brooded a Henry James ambiance. The coal black swans were enchanted princes. The rose garden on the right, channeled into a different perspective (with peacocks), was painted while listening to Bach B Minor Mass – the Credo seemed to fugue itself into a flowering, divine affirmation; a mandala … a furled thought form.
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And now a few more swans:
Swan and Camel
The camel is a symbol for the Hebrew letter Gimel, (also a door) – related to Venus and birth. The camel carries the water through the deserts of the soul, and is considered a gomel chessed – an act of kindness.
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Swan, cygnets and owl
The owl is ambiguous – looks like a predator, but protects. The owl as the bird of Pallas Athene, is “understanding” Often we fear the mysterious guardians of our soul.
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Swan, Letter Beit
The Letter Beit – the second in the Hebrew alphabet – is “the Beginning.” We can learn a lot from the unhurried poise and soft yogic movement of the swan’s long neck. Beit contains the cosmic current which is Aleph, and is expressed through “the Intelligence of Transparency.” Beit is the concentration of what is born.
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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.
COPYRIGHT – All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012. 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://janeaquariel.wordpress.com/
We trust you, Sir
avocado 1973
8 November – my post-election thoughts, the other side of the pond
Well I hope we do. Presidency is the world’s dirty job.
Paul rang in the afternoon when I was immersed in my Reckless Fruit, and told me the Obama tide came in safely. As it sank in, I literally jumped for joy. Light workers shouldn’t be partisan to politics or emotional about them. But it is a relief. The turnout and the issue that carried it was cosmopolitan and ethical; mega-wealthy white Americans – as well as rural white farmers – are becoming a minority. The Republican ideal needs to rethink, because it slips behind the tide and the times. It is too polarized. It is not enough to skid from far right to conciliatory centre with the platitudes, promises, babies and banners. It is not enough to make the money and aggressive advertising talk, at a time of destiny.
There is a seismic shift in the historical tipping point this year, and in what goes forward. The conservative belief system is still a big block – almost 50% – on anything getting done; but something broke through. It has the precedent to continue, and to gain advantage. The collegiate swing votes carried the wave much further than predicted.
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Gaia under earth
Weeks ago, I had a hunch the result would be tidal, and that certain posters would peel away and blow in the wind. Jonathon, an astrologer-accountant – looking at the charts of both men relative to the American chart of 1776 – said he felt Obama is more aligned with the popular spirit than the other one is, even though he’s not a particular fan, himself. It is interesting how this turned out.
Romney is a Piscean – a fast fish. Obama is a cool cat – Leo. Both have a strong Aquarius – Obama’s at the ascendant (axis of action) and Romney’s at the Midheaven (axis of will) – and are linked through this and other aspects to the destiny of America. Effectively, Barack Obama’s chart suggests, “I’ve done this job before” and Mitt Romney’s says, “God wants me to do this job. I shall get you a job! I’m in business, I’ll get you all a job!”
This year in the hourglass had in place already, a man with capacity for the moment – whether or not he is able to fulfill the brief, from the Founding Fathers.
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The American Constition was drafted by the Masonic fraternity. It has no room for division or intra-party resentment. Republican and Democrat both argue well, but should work together. The climate and fiscal emergency could assist just that.
Drawing of Masonic board copied from
“The Way of the Craftsman” by Kirk MacNulty 1988
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“Colgate” Romney is a boardroom barracuda billionaire – (as in Susan Howatch’s The High Flier!) He made his piles not in industry but in the murky monetary field. I think he is a “nice family man”, but easily pushed and pulled. I never heard him actually say anything. It was all “I shall” and air and promises, like his cyber-funding. He didn’t seem to understand much about politics or the international scene, and he looked frightened. But he made his losing speech gracefully, and his prayers. He is bitterly surprised, as it was his (and his father’s) third try and now it is finished; and his backers are “disgusted” and shocked. The Dream is shocked and very angry; it snarls as it wakes up. The two men – the fish and the lion – don’t like each other, but bare their perfect teeth and say it was a good, dirty old fight, they will work together now for America.
It is pure theatre – to see the tall Obama family walk out again onto America’s platform, onto the world. If the other had worked out, the pitting again of well-meaning religious fervour against other religious fervours, couldn’t bear thinking of. Blinkered religion mixed with statesmanship is a lethal cocktail. It possesses decent men and turns them into sleepwalkers.
2012 is a more significant election than the 2008 one which put Obama in. That was euphoria: this one is – battered by government, the economy and by Sandy – we trust you sir, finish the job, get the stuff through.
The photo in the wake of Sandy, spoke deeper than emotive reaction. it showed a man’s fate, who is well worn down in the peoples’ trouble.
Grief, Sandy, Obama 2012
It went deeper than personalities and public figures. The undertow is literally – the audacity of hope. It touches and encourages me, you, and countless others, to come out of the woodwork and pull together for the world. The Grand Cross last summer of Pluto, Moon, Mars, Uranus, is drawn through the collective psyche: crossroad patterns of tension, diplomacy and release … a step at a time.
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Hades, awakening and old China. I drew this in 1988 for a gifted friend who suffered from tendonitis, and the fracturing fallout of a 20-year Freudian analysis. She used to paint her sleeping subconscious groping from the deep … and still does.
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They talk of the New Year fiscal cliff – like coming to the edge of a continental shelf, where the land drops away into the ocean. This is crossroads. The US national character is Cancerian, and watery. The national debt crescendos, for as long as it “doesn’t go away”; for as long as the mega-rich clutch their tax cuts, and other abuses on the supply scale. The storm-prone Atlantic seaboard is now a sea-monster – The Depression – as China gains ascendancy.
repubs and demos … star spangled stripes
Thousands, perhaps millions of American families are victims of the global recession, the result of generations of greed. What is being done for them? As the election carnival passes on, how many are still sitting on the streets of New York in the biting weather, without power? What obstructs the salvage?
Commentators – the media level – agree that Obama as a president hasn’t achieved anything much, and he could have slipped out of history, un-great and un-remembered.
The deeper Watchers observe that Obama holds the ship steady, with enormous odds falling around him – literally, in the storm. Presidency is a dirty job. Having read his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, I think he is a man of destiny, put there for the job and knowing it since he was a nipper. It is providential, that his opponents’ calibre tended to favour him; for again and again they queered their own pitch. The real man of destiny is un-glamorous, a hero who falls again and again: a worker who keeps going. The authority of hope keeps calm and carries on. He is president-elect of the Tipping Point.
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Still life with Tiru key
It is intriguing to observe this Kabbalistically – and to reflect rather soberly on the revolution and rioting that might have broken out across America, if “Mittens Colgate” with his rather unbalanced agenda had won.
Personally I smiled – on my way up to Waitrose – with every Equatorial person I saw. Their brother’s success and stature, greater than before, is not a novelty now. It is sustained, not as a reaction to the Bush era, but on its own merits.
“Colgate” achieved a lot of popular support and huge financial backing –
this seems strange to me, but remember the power of the Dream’s antagonism to cosmopolitan growth, fluidity and … ecology as conscience.
Perhaps the Watchers’ message through this election is: The Dream is Over. “Americans” are no safer from the elements than anyone else, and their economy is forced by the fiscal cliff to spread the wealth more evenly, to keep the debt steady. The bubble burst. Another storm battered the east coast front, they call her Athena. The big Republican New Jersey governor goes to work, with mop and bucket. That is the place – the elemental turbulence – where repubs and demos may conceivably cooperate. Yes they can!
Governor Christie and Obama
Well, I am waiting for the Fraternity to shine through my herd of sheep with Their view; but it hasn’t quite happened yet.
I was right – my previous post – about the ash tree die-back here. The disease is “out of control”, but forestry “experts” say it is not wise to cut them all down. Some of them will resist the fungus, according to soil and local conditions, to carry the healthy seed. My next posts will start to work with symbols and the devas of the ash: the nordic Yggdrasil, or world tree: awareness that our immune-shield as planet Earth is compromised (we are not separate); ways to understand and transform the autopoeisis for the future – ways to begin.
Destiny, a track of Destiny, is generally believed to be a high-profile success story. This is NOT the case. Destiny is in doing the job – the way of service. A man of destiny serves history, and is intuitively aware of it. Like the prophets, he has no need to tell lies.
There is a fine line of discernment, between accepting and doing the job, embattled as it is, and the butt of global criticism – and believing God chose “me” to do it. Me me me!
But history will probably look back and see a man in the White House, who upheld respect, and was not afraid to declare his failures and limitations, and who carried through what he set out to do.
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Jaques Loussier play bach trio, 1968
Let black soul blue thread
beat black and blue
soul cellar bruise
corn field song seller.
Jesus tell God’s spell
to my people; big time
pedlars sold the soul.
They sold him into white house
to carry their dirty pails
and in the White House now
the black man rules.
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O barrack-Alabama, yes we can …
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The black man in white house
is everyone’s reality TV hero, man,
the world today a pair o’pans
of refried corn and history
to tipping point.
Honour this man; from our mothers
he can get respect. Get real.
My people torn out, each root
around the fire, let me try
to mend your daisy chain
and hear you brother, give you space and see
the pain, to feel
the bruise and sing the blues …
From The Reckess Fruit Book 2, chapter 9
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Spliff 1973
One thing impressed me, in “Dreams From My Father“. Early in his political career, the young Barack developed an ability and keen interest to hear the other persons’ whole story – not just his own. In the Gurdhieff work, this is called “external considering”, and is crucial to maturity. The same was applied in an integrative way, to the wounds and lesions in his African ancestry – the tragedy in Africa being the destruction in many places, of the elder oral memory, or spiritual base, by colonial conquest.
This suggests, the same capacity to listen to, and hear himself.
Mr Obama’s interest in “the other’s story” is a key to his grass-roots support. His mind-type considers a situation multi-dimensionally – from different angles, cohesively. I feel this is unusual in a high-profile worldly office. It is more often found in those behind the scenes, or in the military high command. I believe it takes time, for such a gift to make an impression on the singular ways of inertia.
Additionally, his respect for the founding fathers of America; their spiritual core values. At the inauguration in 2009, he took the mantle on his shoulders like a well-cut coat, and gained visible stature and grey hairs: the gravitas.
Whether he succeeds or fails in presidency, the job is in his hands.
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Hands in touch across the seas
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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.
COPYRIGHT – All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012. 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://janeaquariel.wordpress.com/
The Fountain, the Eye and the Woods
“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 