Each day I learn so much...

 

Every day I learn so much in contact with the earth, as though my feet opened my nostrils, and I am sure they do, awakened to the  scents of the earth, they speak to me and tell me of their provenance. I am a "penca de tapón" or I am a "penca de duraznillo".  Today the plain nopal said very little to my nostrils, while the others reminded me of the taste of their fruit and its texture though it will be some time before they birth their fruit.  This year the winds have been gracious, generous, coming at a time stimulated the nopales and the mezquites and perhaps, most certainly, other plants.  The lavender that cohabitates this landscape and that I deeply pruned less than a week ago is emerging with new budding blossoms.  I can feel in the pruning of this plant and that, this tree and that, the mezquite, the tepozán, all variety of nopales, the lavender, they all breathe more easily when the air can move through their branches and their branching architecture is strenghthened with clarity of form—reaching heavenward from somewhere in the earth, even if that earth is limestone.  The tepozanes are undaunted by limestone, they seem to enjoy finding crevices and making the soft stone into their own white soil, donning and luxuriating in its alkalinity like silk.

I am in awe of the way the saw moves more smoothly on the diagnonal of the mezquites, it reminds of how our own bones grow in spirals.  Is there anything that does not grow in a spiral.  As I remove small branches or those that are dried out, I notice how the branches too have grown into place in a spiral.

I am in awe of the way the nopal trees grow.  To be able to prune them back so we can cohabitate the landscape,  I notice how their very heavy branches sometimes reach heavenward, sometimes reach earthward, most often play labyrinthine games of counter balance.  The branches that reach to the earth penca by penca most surely seek a place to take root or even to drop to the earth to make a life away from their parent nopal... 

Pruning nopales teaches you respect.  Where is your head, your arm, your elbow, the curve of your butt in relation to this dance?  Which way is the wind blowing, is it dry, or is it damp, is the sun now too high?  All of these are factors that must be considered in relation to their spines, some are very fine and fly like dust. What will the collaboration between weight, gravity, and angle mean in the determination for where they fall?

Yesterday was extraordinary in its density of lessons... early, before the sun even began to illuminate the sky with its first colors, I went to the kitchen.  There, in the honey jar I had left open on the counter, was a gray lump of a form, I looked again, saw it had small eyes looking up at me, it was a mouse... "Are you alive" I asked... she shugged, lifting her shoulder ever so slightly, just enough for me to see how stuck she was.   "Don't worry" I told her... "I will get you free"... I put the jar in a bowl of warm water which got cold quickly with the morning chill, again and again I refilled the bown and she was first able to dislodge her shoulder from the thawing stickness of semi crystalized honey.  I warmed water on the stove to dip the jar into, and slowly she dislodged part of her side, her forearms, but all while the curve of her tail seemed to be still firmly in place, at last she was able to free her front paws and reached upwards towards the mouth of the jar.  While still viscous, the honey was now fluid enough for her two move out of, and so, I tilted the jar towards the top of the cabinet from which she was able to reach up to a hanging cup, clime up on it, and find her way to the iron chain that held the hanging structure for pots in place. With increasing ease she was able to climb each link in the chain and then jump to the ledge at the top of the wall, using her now familiar route across the top of the wall to find her way out between the tejas of the roof, its iron "tubular" support structure and out into the last moments of night before sunrise...

I have another story to tell about all I learned from the chickens and the part the dogs and I had to play... but that will have to wait... 

Another early winter morning...

I am here again, this morning, still in the early hours of the sun low on the horizon, when its colored reflections are most illuminating and colorful on the landscape, and the sacred hill just across the way from the front door of my stone and adobe cabin... at the moment somewhere between golden yellow and lime green, making the leaves of the semi-arid vegetation, trees and all manner of cacti glow from the essence of what they offer the world: greenness... the shadows and the rays of light are long at this time, sweeping across the landscape from just south of east at this time of year... The sun rising has become visible now, as not long ago, in the darkest part of the year, it was so far south that only the arrival of its light was felt. 

"Creation of the Feminine Grail"

 

New creativities being born...

I see myself here projected

my skin is flame blue

in my belly lives a consciousness

when its eyes are open

I see the world and its spinning colored gyre

through the knowledge of creation

the core of life awakened to itself

I as life itself ongoing awareness

the faculty of embodied creation

the golden egg 

nucleus 

cell

cosmos

embracing the staff of life

the lotus materializing from beyond

one cell in the totality of all

all in the totality of one cell

I sit across from myself 

with deft hands to earth and sky

uniting both here and now

pure illuminated light blossoms from beyond

but all the same born of mud and suffering 

all part of the tree with deep roots

Self and Universe 

emerging feminine knowledge

yet in the balance beyond duality

in perfect dancing balance here and now

the golden sphere appears

the tree life understanding love

unifying body and spirit

flame blue golden glow

all in the awareness of now 

and now 

and now

—Lorena

"Healing thread"

 

"Healing thread"

I wanted to come back and write something about this image after posting it a few days ago.

The image has its origin in a dream image in which blue yarn or twine appears out of a dark dream field, much like "Orange" appeared out of this same vast field.  The blue yarn was curved and looped over itself.  It was a turquoise color.  I always associate the color turquoise with healing.

There has been a progression.  Red. Orange. Turquoise.  If I were following the chakras, I might think yellow was missing.  But it has been present in my early morning walks when I wake up just before sunrise to watch not just the sunrise on the eastern horizon, it is still south of east, as it slowly makes its way into the northern hemisphere. But I watch the sacred hill across the way and how it lights up.  Red, then orange, then yellow, then green... And two days ago I saw it!!! Purple. Yesterday I looked carefully for the green and the blue ... somehow they seem harder to discern, especially the blue... It is an exercise in watching, being present for the moment, and the essence of the sunrays lighting the landscape! 

This is the healing thread!  Being present. (Interesting that turquoise is a combination of green and blue!)

The jeweled sword in the image for me has to do with discernment. Being on the present sharp blade of awareness, able to discern the essences, the colors that fill, luminesce around and in us.  It could also be read as a kind of gordian knot to be cut with a sword, and that dimension is true too. The jewels on the sword are the essential colors, and the treasure that they are.

My turquoise thread became thicker in the art-making process, like a rope woven of pearls, or like a serpent,of life. Serpents are associated with life and healing to a large degree because they can feel the subtlest things from the earth through their skin.

In the background textures there is a hill outlined by the glow of sunrise... this acknowledges, or places, the ground of these experiences where they are lived, made real, walked, breathed, here on the land with the hill across the way that changes colors and teaches me to see.

I could add here that on a deeper level our senses are functions that occur, are functions that are beyond the physical organs themselves.  Hearing happens when you listen. Listening is a function, a capacity of our field.  I have experienced this directly.  Before I experienced this I had listened to a  respected teacher, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, speak about working with brain injuries and other injuries, in which the tissue of an organ is missing or damaged and recovering function in working with deeply with awareness. Recovering, reweaving that part of the field held in the physical form into the function of the whole.  I now know that this is possible.  I feel that in a way it is related to a somatic movement/dance student I have had who could see others moving while her eyes were closed... and other abilities people have shown from the field.  I believe they are experienced from the field.

This has to do with the healing thread, in the way that perceiving the sunrise has to do with the healing thread. It is not seeing just the sunrise, but the whole phenomenon, the broader field, of life, reflections, the music of the sunrise...

I feel moved to go on... Here where I live, on this side of the hill... the northern side, there is a base of caliche, a white limestone that forms much of on the mantle of this area, of Mira Uri.  It is directly exposed due to erosion, mining, deforestation of different sorts... But there is also a lot of rock that is dense, filled with iron ore, red and ocre tones, that was torn out of the earth in pieces during mining operations.  It holds heat.  The rattlesnakes love this piece of land it was explained to me because of the heat.  While, by contrast, just down the way, there is an area that is preferred by the Chirrioneras... a long snake with a small head.  It loves the grey stone that stays cool and holds moisture.

Taking the smallest of leaps, the earth, the soil, is the other healing thread.  How to build soil. The compost pile is so small.  The pruning piles (of nopal, maguey, wild grasses, fallen and pruned twigs/branches) are small relative to the size of the landscape too, but there is soil!  There is more and more of it!  And how, how, how to terrace the slope so that in the torrential rains that come some years more than others, it doesn't wash away?  That is my burning question... 

Spiders, mice, scorpions and snakes (and chickens) don't fear for their lives here.  And mostly we have no problems. Still, this last year rattlers and dogs got into like never before.  It is all a process of learning to live together... Some lessons are hard and ask for even deeper awareness.

"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.