Reflections

Hecate William Blake (1757– 1827) O Féminin O Vierge Au regard amoureux Imperturbablement asexué O Mammifère Qui déborde de lait et de sang sa générosité maternelle Paradoxalement vorace O Prostituée Soumise à la volonté de puissance de l’homme élu Médaille d’honneur, honneur vaincu O Amante Nourrice Déesse Cloaque O Reposoir Viens! Manifester Qui tu es Chacune Femme particulière Toi! Que ton destin soit Ni cela Ni cela Ni cela

The Briar Wood Edward Coley Burns-Jones 1833-1898 The Prince makes his way through the briar patch growing around the castle that had denied entry to others before him. He is the hero that intends his fortune, the Prince that manifests his Princess, bound by a vow, not to her but to the Light within himself, the only beacon that he needs. For he is Love. The bramble is tangled and spiny like a wrathful Castellan. It jealously guards the red rosebud that will open inside the grand delusion wherein everyone sleeps. For she is Wisdom and she too was intended to unfold under the right conditions. The Princess thrilled to the wheel. She couldn’t help it, she was young. And as the spinning faltered at her touch so she buckled and fell, piercing herself with forgetting. Exiled but undying was her curse and blessing. And now the Prince has endured and in enduring found what in faith he knew was always there. The two are conjoined in The Kiss. And as the wheel is set on its axle once ...

The Awakening of Adonis John William Waterhouse 1900 Crisis and change. The one begets the other. This is how things evolve. It's a curse when you want to hold on to something good, and a blessing when an untenable situation gives way. The word “crisis” comes from the Greek krisis which means turning point, the point that Hippocrates thought was decisive to one’s surviving or succumbing to an illness. Crisis is the harbinger of a cure whether that cure is life or death. An existential crisis is essentially creative in that it can give rise to a more concerted engagement with a bad situation, as a quest for its resolution or for salvation. Sometimes it culminates in a conversion or rebirth. Sometimes, though, a bad situation just stagnates, giving rise to that oppressive sense of being "stuck” (like a baby whose head is engaged but cannot descend into the birth canal). It is a dire predicament in which the parties involved, instead of feeling a sense of urgency or cris...

Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around. ~ Douglas Harding, On Having No Head Without egotism, the mind is as large as the universe. ~ Helen Keller, The world I live in No eyes, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind: no color, sound, taste, touch or what the mind takes hold of. ~ The Heart Sutra Where am I, the locus of my mind, where the ego arises in consciousness? When I am awake and close my eyes, it feels like I am hovering vaguely behind them in the darkness, still peeking out at the world through the mind’s aperture. But what if I were blind? Would “I” be more likely to be found spiraling along the dark and noiseless maze of the inner ear waiting for sound? And if I were both deaf and blind? Maybe “I” would have completely migrated from my head into the palm of my hand that “binds me to the world” anticipating touch (Helen Keller)? And if sense deprivation complete...

Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs. ~ Adittapariyaya Sutta (The Fire Sermon) We used to define addiction as a disease resulting from dependency on an addictive substance. Then the list was extended to include dependency on the objects of normal appetites such as food and sex when pursued in excess. Now we acknowledge that people can also get addicted to computer and television, or to relationships, as in so-called codependent personality disorders. The state of mind sought by the addict is not necessarily the high of a drug-induced bliss but is more commonly a sort of mindlessness or “zoning out” intended to extinguish the flame of unfulfillment. Moreover, this unfulfillment is not created by a force exerted on me by things outside of myself, but by my own belief that I am lacking something I need. As TS Eliot says “We think of ...

When birds fly in the air and fish swim in the deep,they do not do so with any conscious art. (...) if they knew this, and set their minds on doing it,they would inevitably fall down and be drowned ~Shen-tzu (from William Scott Wilson’s introduction to Chozanshi’s The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts ) When we are preoccupied with ourselves we cannot trust. We second guess with second thoughts the unspoken agreement between ourselves and circumstances. This creates a gap where the winds of doubt rush in to fill the void, resulting in turbulence. To close the gap we must forget ourselves.

Where Am I? You have forgotten me Or you love someone more than me Sappho Loneliness arises in solitude. Like in Plato’s great myth on the origin of love, I am oriented to what I am not. Beyond the gash of separation, ever nostalgic for the two-headed beast we once were. Singularity born to be reunited. No choice but to be consumed. No cure. (Sappho says to Eros, “You burn us”). But what a blessed flame uplifting us like flowers, fragrant with longing.