I have decided to change the direction of this web site because the story that I have been living has turned a page and a new chapter wants to begin. The last chapter involved my coming to a deeper understanding of how the threads of the old story of the people were woven in to my life, distorting my relationships with nature, myself and other people.

Individuals who write about the development of human consciousness suggest that from the very beginning of human life we have used story telling, myth making and symbol connection to explain why we are here on Earth, what our lives mean and where we are going in the future. These parts include our hearts, bodies, mind and what I call our deep psyche. The first three being more subjective in nature, the last, if one descends deep enough, may be objective. THE OTHER WHO WISHES TO SPEAK AND TO BE HEARD.

Earlier in my depth work most of my experiences involved unearthing the various unconscious or darkened corners of myself that I had disowned, neglected, rejected or feared, those joyful loving parts, the dark/’evil’ bits and so on. I experienced a lot of suffering and pain going through this descent. Eventually I worked through to a place where I could begin to experience and understand (not rationally, more poetically/artistically) that something within me desired to speak to and through me and something outside of myself in nature desired to speak to me as well. I found that they are the same voice. And so my heart and soul desired a deepening of their connection with the inner and outer OTHER.

From the voices in the darkness within ourselves and in nature, the lament of the dead so to speak, a new story of the people and the Earth can be created over time. It is clear to me the old story  needs to die, is dying. In the end this dying will likely destroy a large part of what we consider the heart, the life force, and beauty of the natural world. In the ashes of this destruction as we open our hearts to a new way of relating to ourselves and the Earth we will begin the healing of Gaia and all life that remains.

Human adaptability can sustain life where it might perish. The will and instinct to survive  can be destructive when we live unconsciously, out of a balance with nature. This adaptability may also allow us to survive long enough to create a new mythology of the people using our creative gift, imagination. Tempered with the memory of our past destructiveness an organic new story of life can be woven in to the world.

I believe that the world of nature and of the human psyche are part of the same thing-the Mystery of Life. Through experiences in nature and in my dreams over many years I have come to recognize that I have been missing Mystery’s attempts to communicate with me. Now I am opening more and more to this joyful and difficult communication.

My desire is that my web site becomes a place where individuals can see the evolution of my story. Not in a narcissistic way but to have a glimpse into the creative and imaginative process any individual can undertake for their own healing and that of the Earth.

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.

In my last blog I wrote about the energy or quality of Eros being asleep or lying unconscious in most of us or just running away at the slightest sign of trouble. In the myth Psyche brings her illuminating lamp into the darkness, into the unconscious, into what cannot be seen. She is full of longing and curiosity. Holding the lamp aloft gazing down at his sleeping face she does not see a monster. Desire for him blossoms in her heart. A drop of hot lamp oil accidentally drips from the container onto his shoulder. Waking he sees the one he loves, the one he has warned not to look upon him because he is a God. He flees back to his mother Aphrodite. The darkness, the womb for the light of something new, is not able to give birth. It is a death instead.

The human soul, the life and breath that weaves in and out of ourselves delights in wondrous life, in all its shapes, colors, forms and textures. Our souls desire connection with the depth and breadth of matter or nature which we share with it. Our souls want to connect to and create with all of life. The spark that leaps between our soul and the spirit in life and in matter uniting both is Eros. The spark that leaps from the soul of matter to the spirit in us is Eros once again. Herein is a pathway to a wholeness of being, a wholeness of life.

In my conversation with David Abram he mentioned that he was interested in having individuals engage their senses in order to find or create that spark in relation to nature and in the outer world in general. I am most interested in how the spark or erotic connection is snuffed out quite easily in people and I believe that it has to do with emotional wounding particularly in love and desiring.

I say this because Eros runs back to his mother Aphrodite the goddess of love. He does not stay in the heat of Psyches desire. It wounds him. So David Abram is on the right track in that a quality of erotic connection needs to be brought into the world, in relation to life and creativity to help change our relationship to nature, to each other and to ourselves.  But why is it so difficult to do and lost so easily?

First we might ask why is it so important that we try to come into relationship to this connecting and creating impulse? Well frankly it animates a love of life and life loving us. Backing up for a moment we find that Psyche or soul, the living breath, the breath of life, has a quality of desire, our soul’s desire. When we are wounded, when our souls, our deepest selves are wounded, our ability to connect to and experience this desire is damaged. Living in a culture where rationality and egoism are the dominant qualities considered important for “normal” functioning, where accumulation of wealth is a religion, and where science and technology are used to rape nature, the soul of an individual cannot help but be wounded. Hence our desire, which I consider to be a human sense, becomes susceptible to outside influences and to our inner confusion. We are inundated every day by different forms of mainly electronic media that tell us that our desires are something other than what we might truly feel in our body and our hearts. When we are told by the media, through our education system and by people around us, that the deep inner truth which comes from our own deep essence or soul is off, wrong, or doesn’t exist, we become susceptible to the false manufacturing or commodification of our desire. For the most part this distortion or perversion of desire does not attract the Eros energy that connects it to the something else that needs connection. It is more the energy of the addict, narcissistic and devouring of self and other. For the most part people in positions of power and control want our desire to be like this. It keeps us in the circular loop of addiction. Deep inside ourselves our souls hunger for connection to real creative life. We are told by the powers that be that in fact they know what our desires are and hence know what our truths are. If we do not know the deep truths that come from our own souls then we are vulnerable to this lie. If we are cut off from the feelings of our hearts we are doubly vulnerable to it. So we consume to assuage our addiction and soon, after brief shallow satisfaction, the bottomless feelings of emptiness, anxiety and boredom start gnawing away once again. We cannot feed our soul this way and it lets us know. Then our culture tells us stories that we are, by these actions and even by our ways of thinking, separate from nature, competitive, always self- interested and in a race for the survival of the fittest in a dog eat dog world. And so the circle of the lie is complete. We are what they say we are we say to ourselves. We accept it. And we feel more pain deep, deep down. So we buy more, entertain and exercise ourselves into an apathy and a cynicism that is in the end a profound silence in the face of the living death we have created for ourselves and ultimately for life on Earth.

Our society and our civilization have created a set of stories, which we have internalized, that cut us off from our true essence deeply wounding us. We try to heal the wound with stuff and then more entertainment and then even more distractions or more expensive toys. In a sense we are devouring our own home, we are fouling the nest that we live in because of a false sense of desire and a great big soul hunger which grows larger with each passing day. And so it becomes quite difficult for us to know and engage with real desire in a way that connects us with something deeper in the world through Eros. Then our wounded sense of ourselves, our inability to deeply love ourselves, to trust our souls desire and our fear of vulnerability around being seen like this, makes Eros flee, back to a place in ourselves where we might regain some sense of support and  love. The problem is that Eros, our creative connection to life, goes back into darkness, into unconsciousness.

So it seems that we moderns are in a bit of a Catch-22 situation. On the one hand we can have a distorted sense of desire and lack of Eros connection to life and on the other we generally have a difficult time loving ourselves in a way that can support an exploration of desire and Eros. For me this is when our hearts must lead even if they don’t want to in order to help us find the path through the forest. Somewhere in each person there is the strength of heart to step onto this path.

In this website, Playing into Wholeness, I have been attempting to show different ways to walk this path. For example, dreams come to us because we have become so disconnected from the natural side of ourselves, the side of ourselves that used to connect with nature at a deep level. So in essence dreams are the world or nature, even the natural side of us speaking a story of image and metaphor to our rational egos. So if we were to take to heart that nature is part of our true essence, part of our soul, then using our imagination and creating something from our dreams rather than interpreting them solely for our egos benefit would be a way to begin. Eros will be there when we act.

As I have done here.

A picture that I did from a dream is attached below. Does it move you to do something else?