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onceuponatime
http://20six.co.uk/nimoi
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lyra
candleflame
Candlemas, or ‘imbolc’ as it was called in the bronze age and the time of the celts and in the pagan traditions… is the festival of fire, inspiration and poetry. This day, this second day of february marks the midway point between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, and like generations before us we choose to celebrate the slow return of light, the pregnancy of the barren earth and of the animals in their stalls, a promise of spring… It is a time to rekindle hope in the desertplace, to stand at a point of liminality between the deeply earthy and the most ethereal, and here to remember the entwining of the divine into one human story... a small child is recognised in the templeplace. On this night, twelve friends old and new gather and under the stars and full moon we speak old words, we read poetry aloud with the candleflame and the starglow, and hold the hot vanillamilk in our hands as we look up: we look up.
And she pours out seeds for each of us full to overflowing in our palms, dreamseeds for the year ahead. Some people let them sift through their hands into the grass in the stillness, some drop them down one by one saving just a few to eat, one girl hurls them into the deepblack at the bottom of the garden.
And the gentle wind is whipping now in the dancing flames, the people place their candles in the soil with the little lights still all around and leave them out there as they step into the lightwarm; some are still watching the silent fireflies there. The earth turns on, and here we are again, anew.
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Have been enjoying the spiral way, in more ways than one.
'How, then, shall we grow? and what shall be the curve that marks our progress—that “way,” as the mystics call it, which is a journey and a transmutation in one? Where, on the wide horizons or in the inaccessible heavens, lies the goal towards which we are to hew a path? Did we ask this of eager, striving Nature, she would be hard-pressed perhaps to answer us; for her achievements seem to lie in all directions, stretching sheaf-like towards every point. Since God is not Height alone but Depth and Breadth, transcending yet transfusing all, Life in her flight to Him may take all pathways. Her outgoing, expansive tendency may everywhere achieve success, for He is the Point in which all lines must end. This we see, and all the wonder and the greatness of it: we stand awed and bewildered before her innumerable adjustments and contrivances, her exquisite and complicated arts.' ---- Evelyn Underhill, The Spiral Way
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i wonder if living the chaos in all its fulness, if letting go with only the boundedness of recognising who we are becoming
is a bit like skiing full pelt down an arctic glacier, where the white-skinned slopes are dreams of art never penned, and the ice-wind swallowing your head is a million different entangled strains of music, and the powdered galaxies stretched into the black night sky overhead are faces and eyes of the extraordinary multitude of humans who walk this earth...
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The lines in the curved rock by the misted lake read like hieroglyphics here, the sky is high and even in the dark the space feels so wide I am afraid I will lose my balance. the scent of the silent pines reminds me I am a stranger in this place, I wonder if the woods are suspicious of me, or curious – I sense them watching, waiting Inside the candles and the bundles of coloured wool light up the third fika* of the day from the edges and people push in from the outside, their breath is steam and their words are a strange kind of ancient music, it brings the wide night inside And dreams are whispered in the corners here, they say there is treasure buried in the snow-capped mountains to be carried down and there are old rumours being lifted out of the soil there… perhaps these are all a part of some bigger shalom fractal, seeping south, out of the ground... maybe.
Sometimes you have to leave to be able to come back. * genius Swedish coffee break with coffee, homecooked sweetstuff and conversation…
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I don't feel that either, words falling, you don't know where, you don't know whence, drops of silence through the silence, I don't feel it, I don't feel a mouth on me, nor a head, do I feel an ear, frankly now, do I feel an ear, well frankly now I don't, so much the worse, I don't feel an ear either, this is awful, make an effort, I must feel something, yes, I feel something, they say I feel something, I don't know what it is, I don't know what I feel, tell me what I feel and I'll tell you who I am, they'll tell me who I am, and I'll have heard, without an ear I'll have heard, and I'll have said it, without a mouth I'll have said it, I'll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.
- The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
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how to grow a building
i have been looking at architecture, and thinking
about
these layers collecting year on year on year;
broken down, built up, downtrodden, erased... extended, remodeled, downsized, replaced; renewed, upgraded, stripped, renovated
blueprints on footprints on newsprint,
in fashion, outdated...
and how they
reveal
our walls we build
the spaces their ideas shaped
the scaffolding of yesterday’s desires
reaching sky-high in towers, dreamscapes and spires;
mounted bricks of belief bridging, eclipsing, competing, eclipsed
each shouting different words -
all this noise
the practical solutions, swept out of sight
dead by day, alive by night;
all these monuments -
the men you meant
to save
it’s hard to hear
And now
how to inhabit…?
see the habitat
kick the habit out
harder still to listen.
Our spaces...
nostalgic looking back, we shift it all about
see old objects in a new light
once a function now a toy, here is a novel joke,
a pretty collage, pastiche
spanning old fault lines – whose fault?
And above all
Graffiti.
Here is
my place, our place, in place, out of place, no place
Like Home
The cityscape.
The urban playground.
A canvas...
To rebuild?
To regenerate - each generation;
and re-collect, with new veneration...
but
Beauty?
In creation beneath.
Maybe possible
in creation above -
In expressive spaces, in normal places, with many faces? There are a lot of questions to be asked.
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being human
is
terrifying
and yet the veil slips easily, how easy to forget in the constant noiseimageblur of our televisions, caught in the web of cybernetic diffraction broadcasting HERENOW distraction and a thousand images of frozen-dream safe havens from another time. here is stuffed up longing and holographic belonging, welcome home. how ICONIC. and meanwhile how to maintain the
careful control
of our
daily
turning
circles.... Familiarity cloaks the peculiarity of my space
your face
our EARTH, But it is still there. THE WORLD IS STRANGE.
We are extraordinary. You are odd.
Nothing makes sense until you make sense out of it with your head.
And this is really good. Wonder.
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