Recently I have been packing the saddle bags for my bike with food, art supplies and extra clothing, loading them on my bike and pedaling down into the river valley to a park. I find my usual spot under a communal covered picnic area like a car port and set up shop. In my last blog I attached a watercolour picture that I painted there from a dream that I had not too long ago. Following the theme of creating art from sparks of connection from dreams, I held last night’s dream within me and let it connect with my imagination. I avoided the urge to interpret the dream and found as I moved around in the morning a connection to the edge of things, the new life in the world as earth is exposed by massive natural events. My dream contained earthquakes and drought opening up and exposing new earth, releasing new life and colour from what was covered over and familiar. New life seems to be at the edge of what is familiar, at the edge of things. Growth can come from destruction, death.
I sat for a bit and then had an image of what I wanted to do come into my being. I painted away for a bit. The completed image is attached below.
Then I read some poems by Pattiann Rogers. I will quote a poem from her book “Firekeeper-Selected Poems” which seemed to connect with the edge of new life I painted and dreamt about.
The Rights of Passage
The inner cell of each frog egg laid today
In these still open waters is surrounded
By melanin pigment, by a jelly capsule
Acting as cushion to the falling of the surf,
As buffer to the loud crow-calling
Coming from the cleared forests to the north.
At 77 degrees the single cell cleaves in 90 minutes
Then cleaves again and in five hours forms the hollow
Ball of the blastula. In the dark, 18 hours later,
Even as a shuffle in the grass moves the shadows
On the shore and the stripes of the moon on the sand
Disappear and the sounds of the heron jerk
Across the lake, the growing blastula turns itself
Inside out unassisted and becomes a gut.
What is the source of the tension instigating next
The rudimentary tails and gills, the cobweb of veins?
What is the impetus slowly directing the hard-core
Current right up the scale to that one definite moment
When a fold of cells quivers suddenly for the first time
And someone says loudly “heart,” beating steadily,
Bearing now in the white water of the moon
The instantaneous distinction of being liable to death?
Above me, the full moon, round and floating deep
In its capsule of sky, never trembles.
In ten thousand years it will never involute
It’s white frozen blastula to form a gut,
Will never by a heart be called born.
Think of that part of me wishing tonight to remember
The split second edge before the beginning,
To remember by sudden white involution of sight,
By a vision of tension folding itself
Inside clear open waters, by imitating a manipulation
Of cells in a moment of distinction, wishing to remember
The entire language made during the crossing.
An astounding poem. Many of her poems have an erotic quality related to humanity and nature.
Afterward I picked up a book I was reading by Martin Shaw “A Branch from the Lightening Tree” which is about ecstatic myth and the grace in wildness as he puts it in the sub-title. I was reading a section about death. Here Martin Shaw writes about courting death rather than ignoring her as we do in our youth obsessed western culture. Courting death, is like ”a form of archaic gambling” he writes, “to construct strange little dances to honor her, never to ignore her.” Initiation through a connection with wilderness is a wave in her direction he writes, “it opens a dialog that should inform the rest of our lives, rather than meeting her all at once, rather abruptly, at the end.”
And then he speaks about Cesar Vallejo’s writing, where, “as humans we carry a slight suspicion that we may be immortal, and this makes us miserable.” Cesar Vallejo writes as follows: “”Ruben Dario has said that the grief of the gods is never to attain death. Regarding men, if they were, from the moment they are conscious, certain of attaining death, they would be joyous forever. Unfortunately, men are never certain of their death: they feel the dark anxiety and the yearning of dying, but always doubt their death. The grief of men, we can say, is never to be certain of death.””
As I read the quote from Cesar Vallejo a black fly landed on the page directly below the quote with its head pointing towards the quote. I became curious, was this something unusual, perhaps similar to my experience with the bees which I wrote about in my old blog? Then the fly took off and landed directly on the area of my third eye. It stayed there for a few seconds and then flew off. Inside myself I went wow this is something to mull over. Then just after I finished reading the quote I looked up to take in what was written and the fly was on a post 5 feet from me looking in my direction. Take from this what you might. I experience this as nature speaking.
Then I had lunch and rode home still mulling it over.
