Eye of God

 

"Eye of God".  I began this collage, as I do, not knowing for sure where it would go, or if it was even time to "crystallize" the experience out of which it was born into an image.  I visited the beautiful Lake Chapala a few weeks ago. Not knowing for sure why I was drawn, other than reading the signs, a friend's invitation, the desire to be close to the water, and to descend from the heights at which I live in Arid-America to somewhere closer to sea level, the need to test, or rather exercise my ability to drive a longer distance after so long moving within a much smaller radius, were some of the things drawing me onward, and an inner knowing that it was some kind of pilgrimage.  This was my first visit back to the lake since 20 or so years ago. The lake is much recovered, full of water (it had been seriously diminished by diverted water flow), and full of myriad birds and subtropical plants, gentle winds filled the subtle perfumes of blossoming plants and trees. On my first morning there, I did improvised free-form "qigong" on the lake's shore at sunrise. I cannot begin to put into words what that was like, yet I will try humbly to say a piece of what the image is saying. I was cast into the dimension of embodied space where I was the lake and the sunrise too and me moving with the energies, allowing the energies to move through me, an experience which is hard to put into words because the structure of language itself creates duality.  We were a continuum.  All of us molecules vibrating at this sacred time of day by a sacred lake known to the Huichole indians as the "eye of god". Around the lake there are murals, some of which speak to stories of feminine divine spirits.  This was not the only occasion while I was at the lake that the perception-illusion of duality dissolved. The moisture in the air, the soft winds and beautiful blossoms and bird song were an elixir to my being.

As my image developed, starting by representing a sense of the twilight time of sunset-sunrise and the reflections on the water, the relation between above and below, new elements asked to be included... the Yantra I found when looking for a Yantra of "as above, so below", the "eye of god" cosmic nebulous (cosmic dimension) which formed a kind of cross and square base with the yantra, another background I used as a transparency to convey the rich blues that was a kind of kaleidoscope image, then Isis with her wings outstretched, a representation of the sacred feminine, then her swallows, a bird that is associated with her, expanding, flying out from the center to the four corners, a representation of the universal principal of expansion (consciousness being a synonym of ether as a friend recently mentioned to me, explains the expanding universe much more accurately than dark matter), also representing the mirroring of above and below, inner and outer, and then the lotus underneath rising from the center. And then there was the image I put behind Isis, the yantra, and the eye of god nebulous, an image from a Huichole yarn painting of a circle encompassing sun and moon, like yin and yang, feminine and masculine principals together in a unity beyond duality. And there is a rainbow in the collage as well, it is in the bottom half, and is reflecting for me a teaching the sky is giving me about color refractions at sunrise reflected across the hillside across from my cabin, the hues refracted reflecting back from the hillside run through the rainbow at sunrise. It feels like this teaching about color and hue is as deep and meaningful as light. The Buddhist mention of the attainment of "rainbow body" intuitively has some resonance for me, as I continue to greet the sunrises and walk through the hues of sunrise, receiving the hued blessings of the sun and sky. This has to do for me in this collage as a reference to the beauty of creation and our ability to aprehend and live this perception. This may sound very esoteric to some, and yet the experience and the symbols are very spontaneous, immediate, and references to embodied experience.

Then, this afternoon in the contemplation of beauty and love, specifically beauty and the blessing way of the Navajo's, and my own practice of "walking in beauty" and how this opens and opens and opens as a practice, I discovered the meaning of this lotus, as it felt that beauty is like a blossom that opens up in the body-mind... and as I experienced this my central channel energetically opened, there was a blossoming of energy rising and flowering through the head center, not choked off as is so often the case for me with neck and mouth tension (Bonnie Bainbridge addresses the tension in the neck related to tension in the mouth and this was in fact what I was experiencing in its release), all of this opened up like a lotus blossom.  The founder of Tibetan Buddhism, Padmasambava, is known as the lotus-born master—I have been watching some youtube videos as they relate to him, and as so many things, there was a great synchonicity going on as the collage developed, and then with my experience today. Life-Art bridges. The Egyptian Lotus is also Isis's flower.