Creative principle at play

 

"The same moon"

 

"Red bicycle in the rain"

"Red bicycle in the rain"

Perhaps close to a month ago, I saw a red bicycle in the rain while I was driving through San Luis de la Paz on my way back to Pozos. It was in front of a small shop that was largely in shadow. The afternoon was dark because of the dark sky cover. I was riveted! I was in love with the bicycle.  I wanted to know where I could get a bicycle as numinously brilliant and simple as that one. It was imbued with magic.  I had driven around the corner, and I pulled over to park, driven by an inner impulse, urging me to ask, to find out.  I went walking back in the rain, and I stepped into the threshold of the shop and ask "Where can I get a bicycle like that one?" And one of the guys, a good looking young guy who worked in the shop, said "I'll sell it to you."  I asked to be allowed to try it. He agreed. And immediately in front of the shop, riding it no more than two meters, once, twice, three times, I was enchanted, it was perfect, it had only one speed, the break was the pedal and you rotated backwards to stop, like my first bicycle... that took me everyplace with no complications. I asked and he told me how much and I said, I would need to think about it, I could feel I was under the effects of some kind of "magic spell of numinous attraction" to the bicyle, I was caught in a timeless moment in time... Later I did not buy the bicycle. But I get it, there are these numinous events that are like stepping into a tarot card, full of meaningful symbols.  Speaking in the language of your soul, holding up a mirror, to just what is at play. As Daria has oft said "Art is the healthiest form of projection."

Just looking at the image itself, it stands out for me that the bicycle seems to have a light of its own in a dark moment in time (due to the rainy weather)... the other source of light is an "inner light", the light that emanates from within the shop, that by the way is a carpentry shop, and I can deffinitely relate to the idea of building new resources from the inside. Yet that doesn't actually get stated symbolically in the drawing... light coming from inside, an inside space, that is clear... the color purple is related to me intuitively as change and mystery... though there are other associations too... royalty, which would say to me, a high level change or change from a high order in the self as well.

The rain is pale blue transluscent in color... and seems to capture the light, or even bring light from above beyond the dark rain clouds... it makes everything wet, so in one sense it is a challenge, i.e. part of the darkness and the "inclement" weather, and on the other hand it is an opportunity, a gift full of potential. And rain is literally the magical elixer of growth for the earth... even more so here in the arid lands of north eastern Guanajuato, so literally and figuratively, outwardly and inwardly.

The doors open outwards, so the movement is from inner to outer perception, movement into the world. The color of the bicycle is red which has to do with strength, passion (and love in its strong passionate manifestation). A color which nourishes the heart channel.  It also has to do with separation and agency... and so the bicycle is a tool of agency.  Because it is like the bicycle of my childhood that took me everywhere, it can also be representative of that freedom to move in the world, literally and figuratively, without the conditioning of fears or limitations that have developed.

The street (path) has uneven pavement, it looks a little rough... also comments on the state of things...

elemental orientation

 

memories

and the whole sense of orientation in the now

referenced by body to gravity and levity

condensation and expansion an eternal pulse

outside of bounds of past and present even future

become more elemental with age

or rather with the accumulation of emptiness

that gives rise to noticing

the code is elegant

water womb lake swimming pool saliva love making a glass of water

air breath sound dogs barking vibration out of nowhere

earth mud dirt excavation stone bones and hearth

fire wild raging candlelight stove sun warm skin sacred pyre

space beyond sky unbounded emptiness from which everything blossoms everyplace

god's vast imagination reflected in still waters 

here behind my eyes in their wetness

sky drawing me up 

or is it the transparent moisture of sight drawing the sky down

who is to say which is which in fact

on new moon night sky dotted with distant stars hides the world

in darkness levity and condensation are our only indications of verticality

last night barest bright crescent 

edges sharpened by clarity of space

glimmering through tree branches

while in silence under cover of darkness the land

invisible but for a translucent veil cloud enshrouding a nearby hill

while here in the stillness of inner pond

vast mystery 

shimmering

—Lorena Wolfman

Wholeness

 

Words moist like morning mist

blow in from from each side

right and left

meaning taking form in consonants and vowels

drifting

falling earthward

alighting on my wing bones

and sliding down into my hands

and into gravity's clasp

like an invisible handshake

reminding me of an agreement I don't recall making.

Yet here I am committing to it again.

I am remembering again my mother's last breath

engraved in the sinew of my soul

how I was there with her

holding her to the last breath

walking by her side 

right up to the invisible doorway she slipped through

going where I could not.

I stood there for a long time

feeling the expanding absence.

By the time she left

I who had come flesh of her flesh from her body

had been with her longer than not

we had the singular intimacy of having shared 

the space of one body

as the mysterious process 

of multiplication and differentiation unfolded 

into tissue and organs a second body my own

and I crossed into this world 

across the bridge she had tended

her body 

that had once grown within my grandmother

she my mother

ushered me into the world with a brave shout

"Come on baby!"

It had taken 2 days 

I had been in my own life and death struggle to cross the bridge or not.

She was barely 24.

(I was and remained an only child)

When she left

the one person whose rhythms has whispered to my marrow as it formed

left.

She the one who had rocked me her body's ocean belly

the one whose voice and laughter had rippled through my cells

the one whose quest and stories didn't allow me to forget

the importance of dreams and visions

(and something she encoded as "the dream"

something her father had shared with her

that was as mysterious as it was sacred)

she shared by example not only walking but water dancing

the love of mystery of awe and silence

and the love of words 

(and I know I reminded her of these things: 

towards the end of her life I remember her musing

about "how we cause each other.").

With words she had tried to make sense of our wounded lineage

and to speak of dream time.

But wherever she was words could no longer be pronounced 

where she had gone was beyond languages' syllables

she had gone to the place that some words only point to

like small humble guideposts at the edge of the untamed,

like small glistening gems reflecting the light of the stars.

The quiet was all that was left

an absence whose dimensions were beyond thought

and there was peace as inscrutible as it was enourmously generous

and space opened up like a blossom from the depths of everywhere.

Space had gathered her up

the same space that holds everything even gravity.

In the time that followed 

it was incomprehensible to me why we learn words and how I could exist 

without this other body of origen also existing

here in the place we call the world...

Recently in attentive contemplation 

sitting on my earth seat

I watched swirling smoke rising

from a single stick of incense into the cool fall air

tumbling upward in ascention

a dance of myriad curvacious currents and changes

fluid forms of liquid air 

the same dance as all the waters of the planet

waters of gestation giving birth to form.

I watched 

seeing myself in the mirror 

in those changing diaphonous currents

multifarious forms

appearing and disappearing 

arising from and absorbed by space itself

then I recognized myself as the space,

And again and again one and then the other 

dancing tendrils of form and then space— 

space that feeds and holds and consumes and is the same as the tendrils.

The two became one 

and I became peace

impeccably whole 

neither space nor form

neither one without the other

beyond creation and dissolution

residing in the eternal moment of aprehension beyond time

without conditioning

pure a mirror as clear as an untouched lake:

I rest in the absence of perturbation

I am that

body with no body

no body with body

I am the particularities and that which holds all particularities

wholeness

I am home

I never left

–Lorena Wolfman

Wholeness I

 

"Now I have my own bass"