THE WATCHERS

 Are you the same as me? Do you not feel the presence? What words do you use to bring them to your clarity? …Angels? Aliens? Devas? Little People? Fairies? Spirit Guides? Or are you like my Daddy - a mathematical minimalist with your Zeros &  Prime Numbers & Immutable Variables? When they touch you with their open eyes - see you with their brilliant finger tips - do you shiver like me? Suddenly it dawns on me. I stop in my tracks. The silence. I am never alone.

Dear Madame Blavatsky?

I keep getting these dreams of two wolves watching me? Should I be alarmed? Please send me a knock knock joke. So I will know.

R

YIN & YANG & THE IN-BETWEEN

The pillow clouds punch up the horizon of my sweet fatigue after a long journey across the municipalities of should & should not.  I man the tiller of my dream-craft to cross the Eidetic Sea to the land called Hypnogogia. The Hypnogogians till the two fold gardens with ceaseless mirth & befuddling invention. It is on those shores I see the creatures that inform the very spine of why of how & when. Three horses gallop full bore. Hell bent on leather. Across a landscape bereft of colour.

Dear Dr. Freud? 

Pray tell what does it all mean? I don’t see a singly sexual innuendo here. Please respond by return post.

R

 

FRIEZE

“Everything changes!”  The words the lonely wanderer spoke on the foot path into the Himalayas. The Cosmic joke : When you go as fast as fast can go everything comes to a full stop. Period. The speed of light arrests time. Simultaneity/Multiplicity. One dream-laden eyelid, shuttering down in the violet of twilight on the floating island of Mesmer. The elephant enters the lotus pond in time-lapse without a splash & it all comes into being. By the time the eye opens once again a whole Universe has been & now is gone. Like the elephant.

Dear Dr Jung

Any thoughts? Is it the three? Is it the black and white? Is it the mare or the stallion or the piebald pony in between? Please send a smoke signal or two. I will not be able to sleep otherwise, anyhow.

R

COHERENCE

Wolf. Horse. Mountain. Snow. Separate, they baffle. In the logic of the dream they all know their place & time. In the vision, I am the wolf. I am the horse. I am the cold wind. I am that distant mountain. I am that speed. I am that  stillness. It holds. It holds. But only for one moment. One moment. One moment.

Dear Dr  L. Tzu,

So what you have not said in any of the letters you have not sent in answer to the enquiry I meant to send about the meaning of my recurrent  dream of the three horses in the black and white -  please indicate what I am supposed to make of such an inscrutability.

Forever yours,

R

 

HIRUNDICHTHYS

Paexocoetus / Progni-ichthys Exocetus /Cheilopogon/  Japanese Short-fin / Spot-fin / Black-fin / Atlantic White-tip / Narrow-head / Blue  / Pharaoh /  Four-wing ‘/ Blunt-nose / Sail-fin /Black-sail / Butterfly /Mirror-wing / Stained / Easter Island /  Small-head /  Large-scale / Tringa / Yellow-wing  / Limpid-wing / Clear /  California / Margined /  Short-nosed / Blotch-wing / Beauty-fin  / Glider / Back-spot  /Abe’s

THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE 

The swell of the open sea - glassy, unbroken.

Fifty flying fish                     break free                   to open air.

My water craft tossed                           between

the depthless

                                    and the

                                    deep.

 

FISH'S DREAM

FLYING FISH! OH FLYING FISH!

Flying fish! oh flying fish!

Now i’ve wished my winsome wish,

Random chance or blindest fate

Water wings with weightless weight.

In what ether, thin and high,

Rose the shimmer of your eye?

Did the angels give a hand -

Not the water, not the land?

Hunted high and hunted low

Mahi Mahi from below.

From above, the Frigates dive.

Wings - the way to stay alive.

What could form so slight a thing -

Breezes light and ripple’s ring?

Who loosed the sinews of my heart?

What the science, what the art?

Nature slow or Godly Speed 

Helix spiral or piper’s reed?

Below the surface - above the deep

Did She who made the whale make thee?

Flying fish! oh flying fish!

Now i’ve wished my winsome wish,

Random chance or blindest fate -

Water wings with weightless weight

 

Triptych: Sutta 23: TWIN FLAMES

Love. Carnal, real time love between a man and a woman. Tango. Waltz. Two-step. Gavotte. Break Dancing. To truly dance that dance the lovers must be prepared to sacrifice all. Nothing left but the dance. A dance tempered in fire. To merge as flames. Twin flames. Lovers from the beginning. Across infinite galaxies. Across eons. To burn. To burn. To become the fire itself till there’s nothing left but the heat rising. The air pirouetting in slow motion. The dark of night - finally  - at ease.

 

FIRE DANCERS

& what of those beautiful tango dancers, Adam & Eve? You & me.  I pin so much hope on finding that one being who completes me. To jive, like the joyous, eight-footed octopod rolling in the deep of love-bliss, that Plato describes so succinctly, so comically. Complete. Married at the umbilicus. Yeshuah & the Magdelena. Yoni & Lingam. Romeo & Mata Hari. Judas & Juliet. & yet, & yet - I still - I still believe. Across the eons & vast expanses of inter-
galactic, inter-Cosmic time, each reaches out to the other. Yearning. Knowing completion is only a lifetime away. Maybe this time. Maybe. In the jostled crowd a face surfaces. A being. A recognition. Fingertips touch. A prestidigitation. An imbrication. The fruit is red, juicy with endless jewels locked into precision. The tango in the flames. For me, it continues. & who are you? Could it be you?

 

THE MOTHER TREE

In Genesis, we focus on the serpent, on the fruit, & on those two doomed lovers. The real anchor of the story is the tree that sits at the heart of the garden. My viking ancestors note that the whole cosmos is centred on Yggdrasil, the sacred Ash from which Wodin hung. The Buddha came back from ascetic starvation by remembering the fragrance of the rose apple tree of his youth. Of  course he achieved full awareness under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya. The tree connects the earth to the sky. In my imagination, the lovers dance, the sun radiates, the dragon curls , furling his angelic wings ,  hurling out blasts of tempering fire. All this drama is calmed to stillness  by the majesty of the eternal Mother Tree that engenders life itself.

 

DRAGON OF THE SUN

Man is built in the image of the Divine. The corollary is equally true. The Divine is built in the image of Man. The dragon embodies the highest ideal of how that mystery unfolds. Wings of the angel. The breath of catalyst. The origin in the birth of galaxies. The skin of rippling ones & zeroes. The body of the serpent which emanates from the heart of the Great Mother, our living earth. Dangerous. Ferocious. Fearless. Puissant. Of the world of dreams but nonetheless more real than every pebble in the rock quarry of reality. Look into the eyes of a Dragon ( if you dare ). The knowing is so vast, so contained - we surrender to a beauty that knows no bounds.

AQUIFER

Unbeknownst.  

The dark abides.  

Cool of the night. 

The dew descends. No breeze stirs. 

Bated breath. Hooded lids. 

Sleep invites.

Waiting. 

A willingness to wait. 

Waiting. 

In the stillness - a knowing. 

Silence within the silence.  Within - 

the silence.

THE SEEKER

In this briefest of lives, I  have often been alone. I know that way of being. In my tall, seamless tower of isolation. In my small craft, out in the swell, buffeted by dark green waves. In solitary confinement, in my windowless cell. Walking aimless through the crowds in the throngs of the market place. In my time capsule, lost in the space between galaxies. All I know in that emptiness is to keep going. To move onward. To keep moving. I feel the flagstones with my toes in the cool waters beneath. I keep my sight on that one unwavering band of light. One step at a time. One step. One.

SPIRIT GUIDES

There are more things in Heaven and Earththan aredreamt of in your philosophy.” So says Hamlet to his  “Just the facts, ma’am”,  friend,Horatio. When I was a young boy,my father, the hard-core scientist,took me to the engineering building at McGill where Rutherford,  the new-age Alchemist, unpeeled  the shell of the Gold atom, breaking the machine & touching the ghost of matter. Sir Ernest’s main ethos, “Prove all things”, was carved into the granite wall - as if with a little more perseverance all things unknown will ultimately become known. The principle I come to know : the unknown is so vast we barely touch the tip of our toes into that dark water. A silence abides. An emptiness attends. A presence that can neither be proven nor explained. How to  understand this? I could tack words on. Better simply to accept. Accept without the necessity of proof

ATTENDANCE

Modern life insists we are solitary specimens - mere byproducts of random chance in the all-inclusive Goldilocks paradigm. We  serve our  time, sentenced here after 3.7 billion years of un-spiralling DNA.  Love lurks as a complex mechanism of pheromones, subliminal signals & triggered orifice immersions. Our brains are complex wetware computers that create a facsimile of self as a biological safety trick to avoid the ubiquitous sabre tooth tigers & spitting cobras. Ever the doubting Thomas, I went along with this sincere puffery for too many years. One night in my solitary confinement  I became aware of a presence I could not deny. Not dreamed, Not hallucinated. Not imagined. In attendance. At all times. A fissure of light cracked the shell of my arrogance & all my former truths became relative. Insufficient. As if a match head were struck on the rough surface of the wall of a jet black cave.

DIVINE GODDESS

Binary. 

Yes or No. 

Either/Or. 

Once the question is asked there is only one answer. No ambiguity. Is the earth itself a living breathing being? If the answer is yes - is there a divine principle that radiates from the centre & infuses each & every fibre & atom of that living being we call earth? Last question: is that principle female? If the answer is yes to all three questions the Divine Feminine becomes manifest.  She has been present all along. Each breath confirms this. Each gentle breeze. Each pulse of the heart. Each ripple of each & every rain drop. All being emanates from her.  All becoming. She is always just beyond the veil of awareness. 

Watching. Allowing. Opening. Present.

GAIA

I, like you I suppose, am immersed in the narrative that what we humans do or don’t do, matters immeasurably.

A thread-bare waif overwhelmed by the sadness of the great desolation of the living planet - my current vision of Gaia. All visions are approximations - possibilities. The living earth - the Goddess Herself - laughs out loud at my intimation. The human story plays itself out within the embrace of a vast living system that encompasses the human tragic-comedy with one breezy breath.  

I ease back under the splash of the Milky Way galaxy in mid-summer. The Comet Neo-Wise is in the sky under Ursa Major for the first time in 6800 years. Seven thousand years ago, there were maybe three cities in the world - ten if you stretch the definition of city. 6800 years from now - Can you tell me where we will be? 

As Sherlock said “The game is afoot”

GUIDED AND PROTECTED

The cup that overflowed lies on its side - empty. The great bounty of the beautiful,  living earth becomes distant, untouchable. The heart succumbs to the sadness of loss. Grief.  Almost unbearable. The moment of complete aloneness.  It seems that Death will have its way. What remains in that desolation? What opens to the way of the heart? What certainty holds the centre? An abiding stillness.  The caress of feathers so light we forget they have never left. Not even for an instant. Not even in the time of our impenetrable darkness.

PANDEMIC

"Everything Changes."

Easy to say & think - until it really starts.  It has been coming for a long time. It had to come, did it not? It sped up & all of a sudden we are in a new age - on the other side.  We do not have the vocabulary, the protocols, the spiritual tools  for dealing with what is now expected of us. And yet, here we stand - resilient, adaptable. We persevere,   passionate for the transition to our next higher selves.  A new spiral for the turn of the helix.   It arrives. We know it in the marrow of our bones. 

BLUEPRINT FOR PERFECTION

THE SKY'S THE LIMIT

 Two summers ago I sat in a canoe at sunset on Anglin Lake in Northern Saskatchewan. The dragonflies had come out of their seventh moulting after four years under water. Thousands & thousands, clad like joyous mardi gras revellers, looping the loop & swooping the swoop. The mosquitoes were abundant. The evening was calm.  Male & female sought each other with kaleidoscopic abandon in their aerial courtship. I sat motionless in my light water craft, my paddle barely stirring the glassy surface of the dark water. Then it came to me. The dragonflies had one interest only - not food, not sunset, not love. They had discovered flight at long last. Three hundred million years in the making, the individual dragonfly rises out of the water. Those gossamer, stained glass wings. The 360 disco ball eyes. That aerodynamic, cantilevered body. Mother Nature, Gaia Herself, ever whimsical, perfected the nature of flight in an ancient, alien form then set it loose. The sky's the limit.