Ah, to stumble upon knowing.
To find answers
To secret questions
Of sanity,
Of love,
Consciousness,
Impossibility…

I ask,
What is it like
To taste of a few
Carefully chosen words
That serve none other than you,
And no other purpose
Than to offer reassurance
That you are not alone in this life?

That you are not alone in this life.

This impossible, maddening, reality bending, terrifying, shattering, beautiful, decadent inner life.

You are the lucky one, aren’t you?

I ask this of you
As I sit here
Still wondering afraid,
Doubting my very existence,
And most certainly my sanity.
No one offers me anything
To ease my trembling.
I entrust the desperation
Of my crying plea
To the black silence of the void.

I only ever get to enjoy
A little less uncertainty
For a little moment
From time to time
When the swelling impossible crests
And comes to feel a little more real
For the blink of an invisible eye
And I find myself fully alive
As my entire being inflates with light.

Always after such little moments,
(though admittedly, they are not so little at all)
You return to your comfort of knowing
As I return to living in the dark,
Unknown,
Unwanted,
Unspoken.

I become incrementally
More or less
No one at all,
A person diminished
By the sole knower
Of my deepest soul truth
Forsaking me with an eternal promise
To deny my existence.

It is a long slow death
To be intentionally forgotten
By that out of which I am made.
The worst of all betrayals
Is to knowingly be
Abandoned by love
From the inside out.

Such things, I wonder, are they ever truly intentional?

“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere, they’re in each other all along.”

This one was actually my first real attempt at sculpting, and I am very, very proud of it. It was inspired by a poem I wrote, or better to say, my life at that time inspired me to make many different types of art on the same theme of … I don’t know what you call it.  Awakening, I guess.  Anyway, this sculpture is a mixed media piece, ceramic, stone, paper and ink.  The base is approximately 14″ wide, and the height is just under 12″.  It includes a glazed paper scroll with one of my poems, handwritten by quill.  The text of the poem is included below the image.

these unopened wings
black and sticky
left hidden for all
the long slowness of a life
of unending climbing

here upon the mountain
this heavenly monster
limps to find a place
to receive the open air
with arms outstretched

these lonely wings
will span the breadth
of all fearsome things
once thought too dangerous
as they open for first flight

this winged creature,
amid the horror and contempt
of weeping hands and feet
will seek the unending sky
and fall finally into its flying

In that spirit, here is a sculpture I made last year.  I never named it, because I am not very good at naming my art.  But Quantum Entanglement was on the short list, as was Identity Crisis.  Subatomic Tantric Fusion?

I have observed that this piece makes people feel physically uncomfortable when they try to understand what is happening.

This is a very difficult piece to photograph, since there is a lot going on.  It is probably about 8″ wide and 6″ tall, plus the arc of the wire.  The two figures are getting sucked into each other (or prying themselves apart, I guess) creating a vortex of sorts.  The wire feeds through the two bodies, creating an infinity loop.  The inside of the sculpture is glazed to look like outer space by using a high gloss black, with embedded white speckles.  Below is a view through the back of the male figure, taken during the preliminary phases of building the piece.

It was soft and long, striped and colorful,
but not brazen or vibrant;
It was the gloom of winter after all.

I can’t quite say what it was
so perfect about you and that scarf,
but I have truly never forgotten it.

The gesture of the wrap, lift and loop
before it fell, gracefully spilling,
cascading down your tightly zippered coat.

Your cheeks were warmed and pink,
I wondered if you knew I was looking or
if it was the heat of the crowded room.

Did you feel my shallow breathing
as I struggled to absorb the impossibility of you
existing outside of my deepest being?

I wondered how you came to be
a separate piece of me, across a crowded room
over there, afraid to approach me.

You are so magically beautiful
with that scarf around your neck
suspended in a cold and distant time, out of reach.

It stuns me still today to think of it.

It’s an addiction, really.  I was brought up and conditioned into this reality where everything I do is either validated or negated by the esteem of others.  Behavior conditioning as a child is all about positive and negative reinforcement.  And it is good an necessary, but it trains our minds almost immediately to look to others to confirm the relative goodness or rightness of even our most mundane decisions.  Report cards follow, always with additional comments that evaluate the child’s social behavior.  These are intended to encourage, no doubt, but we can not ignore the fact that they perpetuate the idea that an individual’s worth can be determined by another individual.  And of course, this same pattern of arbitrary hierarchy continues well into adulthood with job interviews, progress reports and salaries…

Of course these things are necessary, but I’m pretty sure it’s got us all trained to seek answers from others in all cases, not just the specific cases in which others have legitimate expertise or authority.

In my personal life, I know that I behave differently than most would deem “normal.” How many times have I asked another person, “Is that weird?”  The answer is always yes, and usually preceded with an awkward pause.  But the greatest miracle in my life is that I have never been able to place the “appropriate” amount of value on the judgment of others.  Hooray for me!  Of course, most of the people who wanted my life to be easy would not agree it is cause for celebration.  But I do celebrate it.

Now, as my adventuring endeavors turn inward, I am seeing another lingering side effect of this conditioning to seek external validation.  I find that without any sign of it, I begin to crave it.  I am seeing how much security is provided by knowing where I am in the grand scheme humanity.  Where is my point on the bell curve?  I am aware of my relative height, weight, age, intelligence, social status, economic status, employment, etc.  But once inside the self, the soul, the spiritual realm, there is no bell curve for anything.

It seems a boundless abyss of experience.  All are equally and singularly valid.  This may sound like a comforting thought, but I am encountering the nasty craving of certainty.  Ah, yes.  That is clearly the appeal of a rigid morality and social structure. That would be the only appeal I think, of living under the constant scrutiny of others -or rather, of allowing their constant scrutiny to govern my decisions.  There is only one authority in the inner realm, and it isn’t god.  Or maybe it is, but the truth of this inner reality is totally and unrelentingly unaffected by any external concepts- including definitions of god.  It merely is.

Terrifying, this is-ness is, when it defies the conditioning of our human interactions.  I am an extremely ambitious person.  My productivity level has been off the charts since I was a kid.  Even though most of my endeavors (art, music, poetry) fell outside societal valued achievements, I still always have had a lot to show for my efforts.  Paintings I could hang, books of writings that could be read, concerts, etc.  Volumes of work produced.

But in recent years, the focus of my efforts has turned inward.  My productivity is less and less evident in the external reality.  I meditate and have achieved staggering heights and depths of perception, have understood how the moment of creation is echoed in every action, gesture and thought replaying itself over and over and over as I silently observe.  I have developed certain empathic and psychic abilities which prove to be relatively “useless” in the external reality. Even the inner companion with whom I have been blessed is a person whose identity in the external reality is nothing more than a matrix of maddening riddles.  I can’t seek certainty from them any more than I could an arbitrary person on the street.  Inside, I breathe and move and experience with profound awareness of the perfect value and truth of my every living moment.  And I have nothing to show for it.  I can’t prove it to you.  I can’t translate it into a painting, or sell it for money, or put it through a diagnostic test.  It will never be rated by anyone for its relative merit, as this growing part my life has become a solitary endeavor, known only by me.  The truth is, without having lived my particular life, I’m not sure anyone could really understand the true merit of my inward explosion anyway.  That seems to be the way it is on the inside.  But it doesn’t stop me from wanting a report card once in a while.  A rail to hold onto.  The loneliness of being my own guide through this inner transformation is too heavy to bear sometimes.  But it is rooted in the addiction to validation.  The actual truth is probably more like none of it matters since it is entirely subjective.  But living my adult life as one long meditation without a destination occasionally strikes me as a torture chamber from which I will never escape.

The best survival tool I have for my spiritual adventuring is to recognize conditioning when I encounter it and eradicate it.  I don’t actually need to know anything.

About a year ago, I had a profound vision during a meditation that has stuck with me ever since.  I had unexpectedly been joined in consciousness with a friend during this meditation, which at the time was a strange a new occurrence. After some time together that day, I saw us sitting upon a giant sphere, presumably, the Earth, which had an illuminated grid system apparent.  We sat in a facing meditation position upon one of the brighter lines of the grid, which glowed brighter as we improved our posture and allowed the light from the grid to flow into us and through us into each other.  I was immobilized as I experienced this vision, as happens to me sometimes, but I began to feel myself rocking a little as this light shot straight up through me, out of the top of my head and sped to the outer edge of the universe.  This light became a laser point which was etching a symbol at the edge of the universe.  Above is a representation of the symbol I saw in this vision, which was busy filling in that blocked out area in the lower right as I snapped out of my trance-like state.  The difference in how I rendered that area will become clear later.

Fast forward approximately 11 months… I have since had innumerable maddening visions and dreams (many of them inexplicably shared with this same friend) which continue to leave me staggered and intrigued by the nature of consciousness.  I have often wondered why I have access to such intense experiences, when I know that many before me have meditated their entire lives never to have a single vision.  I only began meditating about a year and a half ago for totally selfish reasons I won’t go into here.  I never expected the explosion of consciousness that is a continuous result of these efforts.  Two nights ago, I had a dream:

It was a ceremony of some sort, perhaps a graduation.  I was there with this particular friend of mine, with whom I seem to have been sharing these cosmic experiences, and also felt the presence of certain entities I have come to recognize as guiding forces in this journey.  Well, not always guiding… sometimes forcing.  At any rate, these beings who really didn’t look like anyone or anything in particular were there.  Maybe there were three of them?  Maybe one of them was a woman. It’s hard to fully comprehend these things sometimes.  These beings were expressing great pride in our shared accomplishments (my friend and I) and gave us an opportunity to see the fruit of our work together thus far.  It was a holographic image, about the size of a football field, though contained within this room, and it was a 3 dimensional, transparent, illuminated Metatron’s Cube.  I felt a strong sense of the words, “It is nearly completed.” 

The next day, as I began to try to understand what I had seen, I found the (below left) illustration of Metatron’s Cube.  But I knew my image to have been even more intricate and complicated.  As I studied the cube, I began to wonder what would happen if I filled in the 6 open spaces (shown below right, highlighted in red) and drew the corresponding lines.  That image is a far more accurate, albeit 2D rendering of what I saw in the dream, and apparently teamed up with my cosmic meditation partner to build in the dream.

Now, some things about this seemed eerily familiar, and I remembered my symbol from my meditative vision almost a year ago.  I would like to say I was surprised the the conclusion I came to, but at this point, very little can surprise me.  I superimposed the digital rendering of the symbol I found myself etching into the edge of the universe, (see below) and whaddya know!  Apparently, that meditation signified the beginning of some mystery project I and my friend entered into.  One in which we have been both students and active participants.  I have no idea what it means, or what purpose our exponentially modified Metatron’s Cube serves.  Who the heck knows, but I’m a bit delighted by the discovery.

This is what I do in my spare time, what about you?

I remember yesterday,
a calm before the fire
that now burns so hot
that a simple question
can fuse all things into liquid light.

It wasn’t a better place,
uncertainty and doubt,
but it was charming and predictable
governed as it was
by gravity and physics.

One of the things I now know
beyond my curiosity
is that in some ways
it is luxury enough
simply to be governed at all.

Walt Whitman 1819-1892

Passing stranger!
you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
or she I was seeking,
(it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other,
fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me,
were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you,
your body has become not yours only
nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass,
you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you,
I am to think of you when I sit alone or
wake at night alone,
I am to wait,
I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.