"Orange presence"

I came back to a piece called "Orange presence" this evening drawing from a dream of a few nights ago in which the richest layered deep colores of orange arose out of the dream field...

I was feeling still there was more there after two previous approaches... I began playing with the drawing tools beyond the familiar playing with layers and transparencies and erasing, cutaways, etc... I needed play time with absolutely no idea what I was doing, almost blindly feeling my way through the strokes on computers trackpad... seemingly so far from the the inspiration for my work which is somatic, liminal, embodied experience and waking and sleeping dreaming in which the poetic mind flows...

Then I remembered something, after waking from the dream of orange, at sunrise, I was in the kitchen, it is a garden kitchen, that while it is enclosed, is is only partially so, almost half of it is glass and being there is to be very in touch with the elements. Suddenly, the most extraordinary orange light filled the kitchen, flooding, or more like, bathing my retina and mind awareness with the most extraordinary sense of calm, pleasurable joy, refulgent, and juicy with life.

This gave me the clue I needed for the third approach, for the new image, to the abstract play, I introduced images, moving out of the apparently entirely abstract. As in many of my images, if I stay with them, in the moment or over days, they unfold, meanings become apparent and a teaching unfolds.  I call the process "tending the images" as a way of working with soul.

This image "Orange presence" has something to do with the omnipresence of this essential quality suffusing the above and the below, and the spectrum of light of the ordinary, the tangible. There it was in my kitchen as I prepared tea and oatmeal, just as deep and even deeper than in the dream. Finally only very subtle elements of the underdrawing are actually visible...

I love this apparently "grounding" process when spirit becomes tangible, inhabits a form and a story, departs, if temporarily, the abstract All, but is in no way trapped there, simply shining through it all, as we do in this life, in this particular body, in this particular place at any given moment.

Passages

 

Ephemeral grace

 

The words ephemeral grace come to mind... The presence I sense from which this emerges from mysterious realms of creative consciousness is deep and strong and fluid, and powerful while ephemeral and mysterious.  

The images.  There was a dream several nights ago of a red eagle feather, the image has been with me for days.  A solitary image presented from a vast dark field of dream. 

There was the voluntary death of the moth who plunged into the ceremonial candle flame on the eve of the birthday of trees, or did she just fly to close to the light?

This morning there was a very different death of a young dove, as a result of an inadvertent accident while pruning, throwing her from her home into the jaws of a very quick streetwise beloved black dog... And, now, her sister dove, saved from a similar fate, is now being cared for in a cage in the home of native dancers and laborers, neighbors for years.  My balloons, bright mirrored glass candle holders and handmade paper flowers have been known to become adornment on their altar for the Saints, for the Virgen... And so I can feel my prayers get loft with theirs. The mother-grandmother loves to care for nest-fallen doves.  She is good at it...  

In an instant, everything changed by the shaking of a single branch, and what was unseen in the limbs of the nopal, intertwined with the leaves of a flowering vine was a home, was a nest for growing and launching into the world... How delicate and strong, and how ephemeral the strength of each moment is.   

Later, as though to register its displeasure with me, an old gnarly spirit of an enormous spreading tapón nopal, cast a large spiney branch against my leg—they have very long spines, only slightly less painful than cardón spines, and are also the most delicious, when cut you can smell their particular earthy green sweet delicately pungent aroma— With great precision, he seemed to be admonishing me, "So you haven't yet learned your lesson"... Oh yes, that one I was in the most violent and gentle way reminded of this morning, that one I have been practicing for a long time...  "Yes! That one. To walk with greater care, yes even greater, and, yes, ALL the time"...

Coming back to dream, the dream of the red eagle feather whose presence has been with me for days.  Deep, strong, intangible, as flight is strong and ephemeral at the same time... as our passage through life... our dance with gravity and levity, powerful, and fleeting... Somewhere between these forces of birth, death, gravity and levity there is healing... it is thick and salty like the red blood we share with our animal cousins, and almost unbearably light,  it flows to the beat of the earth... And everything that exits its form, feeds this dance and is to be loved for its grace, to be honored as an ancestor, as a spirit of place for its generosity and its continued lessons.