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Shepherdess
The second in a series of explorations – ad lib – towards the Isis archetype.
I often wake up wondering – what should I say or tell you: what should I ask or risk, what is my responsibility? HONESTY – which is proper?
Actually, I don’t know. My belief is not the “right” one and I cannot be honest enough to cover all contingency. Let go, listen and keep silent. How to turn the event which Divine Providence holds? When the truth is ripe and ready to be said, speech drops into the right order – ignoring my hope and rehearsal. Let it go.
Alchemy – Heleen’s story of the tired crow and the eagle’s strength and the holy city: “How do I know what I see is true?” “Start from the premise AS IF everything you see is true, instead of your usual assumption that it is not.” With un-effort, grace, the fountain upward river flows down the mountain – crow flies, crow sees.
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My daily journal is a prelude or preamble to life as lived. When I’m out there talking to life, I cannot copy my prelude with my tongue and throat. Writing is a diving board into the heart. Talking is the swim. My everyday relationships swim, and try not to hit the rocks which the diver sees clearly from above. That is why I get anxious – the surface tension.
This is important to realise, because it is a PATTERN. The patter of my little feet is a pattern, a self maintenance.
Bunny hide and seek with the higher Self
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Communion is relationship. Writing is a communion of active and receptive poles in my inner dialogue, a warm electro-magnetic circuit: a secret inner lover. Being in the world, I face persons’ rugged rocks and unknown territory, with my unknown territory, and often shrink. When I meet Dr Livingstone “stepping out of the jungle gloom” (Moody Blues, 1970s), such moments are glorious. But mostly it is interestingly difficult to part my waves of bamboo and chattering monkeys. Progress is slow.
I grasped a lifelong patter clearly this morning – where is it? I was reflecting how important all my creative work is to me. I am sure it must be preserved and transmitted “to help others” – the landscape of my er – enlightenment.
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But – it occurs to me – what gives my light priority over your lighthouse?
The lighthouse is shorthand. Not only a man’s little lighthouse; it is each soul’s private inner world of which they are the lookout and keeper of the lamp: our allocated portion of the Infinite. Regardless of life’s puddles of hard set mud, each individual is a universe, a watery surface tension bonded and in communion with every single other in the deep. Regardless of the general gangster mentality we suffer in the street, we are the Temple. We are the human Template.
Thou art: I am.
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J.Krishnamurti at Brockwood, 1974
Such thoughts, incessantly regurgitated and delivered through my journal, are I believe, a transmission. Each time this realisation comes, it is fresh. As I learned with Krishnamurti, the inner human has no set mould. It overcomes conflict, every moment. It shatters the tower with the moving wave, the unbroken circle of the tide in and out. Each time K spoke, he sat on his hands and searched his way through the conflict, for the first time. We are not set like jelly. We are living, asymmetric transmitters of the discovery – “out of the jungle gloom”.
Why do I have these urges – to transmit? I feel like a cormorant storing fish in my throat to feed my young. It was always an urgency, since I was very small. OK, it is the artist’s creative urgency, or it is the magid in the higher, deeper world behind my spine. I am trying to break free of my walls, or soften them.
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Emily
This new pastel drawing of Emily is rather china-doll: my reaction is to think what her cher ami would say (he requires photographic likenesses), and to be judgmental; but my liberation is to view an appearance along the way, a supple way shedding skins like a river-snake. Drawings are expressions coming through, and this one slightly romanticised, makes her younger, her hair is not right, but her eyes are strong.
When I began it here at home, I danced as in the old days, the energy of creation with my leonine Liszt on the gramophone. I sat with Emily yesterday, and tried to remember to give her room. We discussed Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography of Prince Charles, and the current human lemming tendency with the deep. Stop butting in. Why do I think I am right, why do I think I must say something? Why not hear and learn, why not give her space and freedom to search and be herself?
We also discussed how unpleasant it is to have her carers put on her makeup and mess her hair, their blind fingers … I mentioned my grandmother’s tiny touches and fragrances of rouge in little jars, and how she removed more than she put on, leaving the essence. Emily is pleased about her new red frock and laughed bravely when I called her a scarlet woman, but she hasn’t tried it on yet. She mentioned she got into terrible trouble with Certain Persons at the weekend, for complaining about her Sunday lunch. I said I got a mouthful from them as well. I receive gingerly this topic with her, not wanting to “gossip”, nor get whisked into her surging interior indignities.
THE PATTERN – I saw this clearly through all my life, and I stand at a threshold to be delivered from it – I stand in the doorway. What is it?
The key to the door of dreams – use it (1987)
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Stepping back, I saw my, her, their, your … limited – blinkered – view we have of each others’ commodious priority and stress. I saw how we enclose and judge and distort it – like the church did in history, and the militant extremists do now. I start to give up my notions and that is a relief. I wrote the other day in my journal about Botticelli getting influenced by Savonarola in his later work. I saw this superficially. Now I see what it must feel like – the truth – to have these tight, flowing demons surface through my art and speech, inspiring fear, commanding obedience. He is being true to his inner anxiety, and Savonarola is the cloak.
I wonder if I was Botticelli. I can be whomever I like.
sketch sandro botticelli
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Everything I say about transmission through Daat and the benefit of my enlightenment and labour to humanity, is conditioned by my personalised obsession to live, to survive, to be justified (Yesod). It is an idea I espouse, to embody my meanings, and to justify the time I spend in my temple of Isis, writing and working things out.
This is not intellectual. When I write and the continents start to join, very deep feelings of unconditional love are stirred. Love has its own law: the law of cosmic love, the soul law. It is a FEELING. I love to describe it, but the feeling is more real than any verbal poetry. Verbal poetry caresses the feeling, and slides away off it, like seawater off a whale, or pilot fish around a shark: the foam marbles the wave. The FEELING has no social code, for it is of the deep, regenerative ocean. The feeling is Aphrodite-Isis – Botticelli’s birth of Venus coming in to land – the land rushes to cover her nakedness with a flowery cloak. Good heavens!
And why not draw/copy those wonderful figures who flank Her? She came in with the tide, on a shell, on the froth of the sea – the froth of Uranus’ dismembering, releasing sperm. She is the linga of Uranus.
I am moved by this archetype whenever I tune into painting or drawing in a special way with music. I feel her nakedness like a whale, and am discharged like lightning.
It is the Kabbalistic lightning flash to earth.
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This is not where I planned to go this morning. I tapped the membrane, and this is truth. In the Greek mythology, Chronos – Saturn as Time – cut off the creative organ of his father Uranus, and it fell into the sea and all the blood turned into white foam; and tritons bore the naked form of Aphrodite and her copper tresses to the beach on an oyster shell. Male sexual arousal is transposed into the feeling in the tip which receives and is feminine. My birth chart has Venus opposite Uranus – in Seal of Solomon’s resonance.
Where I planned to go, is why these images are important to me and fill me with life’s certainty and wonder: my obsession with them. They are tremendously clear to me, but my language with them is not easy for others to engage with. Be thankful I have the liberty to exercise this language at home; and to offer it back to the gods.
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I think I wanted to say, that all my life I am convinced (whenever the archetype surfaces) that it is RIGHT: yet it doesn’t fit into social or moral code. I keep it cloaked – but is it right, relative to others’ sense of rightness? I can grope towards spilling beyond boundaries in a self-realised, ontological way – inner freedom – but navigating it with others who are also right, is the Karmic setup. We all are right. We all have this feeling.
I want to “help others” but the attention to my inner housework is stronger. The artist’s necessity is stronger. The whale moves on !
Gaia covers Aphrodite with earth and flowers. Wild, wonderful and startling is the pagan flow of the birth of Venus! How difficult it is to “copy” the genius of Botticelli’s anatomical and gestural distortions. My Isis begins to stir and to awake.
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The patter of my little feet is a pattern, a spin, a self maintenance. I pasted this sentence again from earlier, for it was about to deliver. Where was it leading me? Accusations of selfishness … relationships are vulnerable, and make others vulnerable. Is this the way in which – through private relationships within the clan – sexuality became a hidden, sacred space? The sacrament is kept, to guard against invasion and injury. Writing music with it, we sought “the Isis tone”.
This theme runs through Dion Fortune’s “Moon Magic“: priests and priestesses serving Isis, encountered the living Mystery in the cave beyond the village, where the lamp is kept. They found they wronged themselves and Isis if they did not honour and explore the feeling. It didn’t fit with anything the clan does, so they kept the secret. There were terrible penalties for relationships beyond the pale. Yet these relationships nourished the life force of the clan. They became a shrine, engendering respect and sensitivity. This is an opinion; but it is more than an opinion. It acts through visualising. An evolutionary “tantra” touched the hologramic wave-pattern of human existence. If we were bearers, we would try to handle it with respect and delicacy, so it doesn’t just splash around in itself. Nature rises as a passing need in a little lighthouse, and delivers to a woman a white letter, and passes on; and as the woman reads it, she smiles inside.
This opens another image – my open book in Daat in the Tower of alchemy; and how its pages shine without a single word.
Alchemy – the eagle book in Daat
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My writing awakes the Fountain’s pithy clarity and creed from within, and it comes all the way up the centre stem of the Tree like sap and fountains to the fertile orchards around. It is again the Uranian linga.
How gentle this Kundalini is! Kundalini is the life force. This is in my belief system and my code. Look always at what is meaningful, alive and loving. Yogic methods are shed, they were useful but become irrelevant (as Parker Stafford said) when the Feeling is alive and vibrant. It needs no fireworks – it rises and falls like a barometer. The Alchemical Child has no words to say or read, but was and is written down through a complex maternal capillary of images and fire-screens.
At this point, mind stops in the summit of the mountain: wonder. “Above us there was nothing!” And I feel the white pith channel all the way down into the ground, the lotus stem and muddy roots. I am still. Butterflies surround me, but I am in the core of the world: mans’ seed in woman’s cave. Be still and know I am.
Even this is a belief: for beliefs when strongly held, feel good and secure. Advaita teachings recommend to discard each vessel up the mountain of Enquiry into consciousness. The paradox is, that as each vessel rolls away, another and more vibrant one forms from the deep … to spill and spell the Same Thing … the infinite adaptability of the One Thing.
Then the way is not to cling to any of them, but espouse the lovers’ space through which they rise: the sport of the Self. Ascend Annapurna.
Annapurna, 1950
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I think the light through the clouds I am getting is that we all act strangely with each other, and tend to make snap judgements when we observe this. We say, that is wrong or right or peculiar, because we have tunnel vision – we see a fragment or an edge through the keyhole, and interpret it in ourselves or others – so as to affirm our own ground.
Whereas, persons are usually in a long term private dilemma, something valuable to which they apply heart and soul. This is the terrain I do not know about, and peer through my tinted spectacle frames – as we all do.
The way here, is to contemplate the situation without opinion, as if it were an extraordinary portrait in a gallery – engaging with her story – and fling wide the door.
Reality isn’t a raincloud over her, but sun rays and a tree; she is running somewhere between her boyfriend and a buddha in the morning. Keep it open.
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Tunnel vision – open wider!
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