See souls as orbs of light
Visual meditation inspired by the Emerald Tablets of Thoth
Strip away reality. Imagine yourself in a black void and every being you meet is a glowing orb of light. Some are dim and smaller. Some are large and bright. âThese are the lights that are souls among men, growing and fading, existing forever, changing yet living, through death into life.â When you see people this way, you see us all the same. You see how we light the way for one another â banish the darkness that envelops us all. I see your spark of light in the void and I beam my radiance back at you â a cosmic wink â until we meet again.
How I stay grounded and soar in the skies
Me
Iâve seen what happens when a spiritual seeker becomes ungrounded. I used to believe I could only live in one world at a time, or have one and not the other, but thatâs not true. You can have both.
You can be a bird with legs that grow and stretch past your current point of existence and consciousness and you can also come back home â down to earth â whenever you want.
This image was actually intuited by Kathy Crabbe, who is an artist and soul reader, and a psychic I trust. Her energy is beaming with love and creativity and kindness. Iâve been getting readings from her for more than ten years now.
She saw me as this bird and when I heard her describing the bird, I got chills (chills and goosebumps can be a confirmation of truth). She had her own interpretation of what the bird meant, and said it was important spiritual imagery for me â and it is!
And I took that imagery and I sat with it and I drew it out and in that process, I made the final decision as to what it meant for me â and thatâs how all of this psyche archeology / psychic revealings should work â it can be collaborative, but ultimately, it is your fate to create.
How to draw closer to your mystery
The above audio is a reading from a transcript. It is a thirdhand creation story. They are not my words, but the story was told to me orally by someone I loved, and for almost twenty years has lived on a microcassette unplayed. It is an unearthed treasure and I wanted to share it with you.
TRANSCRIPT:
My dad used to tell this story about the beginning of the world. And initially all is covered in water and there are two animals on a row boat. And one was a Coyote and one was a Duck. And the Coyote was the creator but he didnât have any raw material with which to create the world because all around was water and the boat. And the duck didnât have any creative powers of his own but he could dive and the duck did dive down and took up a little piece of mud in his beak and brought it back to the Coyote. And the Coyote took that piece of mud and spread it out, spread it out, spread it out, kept working it and working it until he had a continent - and thatâs how the earth came about. And itâs the same with the creative process in that you have all the raw material you need to create but itâs sediment at the very bottom of your mind. The bottom of consciousness and the layers of the subconscious and you canât get to it, but at some point when you keep trying and trying you discover a diver â you discover a duck that will go down in to your subconscious and bring back pieces of raw material with which to work and you donât really know where they came from, but you found some part of your mind that is capable of retrieving that information. And then where do your stories come from? I donât know from the bottom of your mind.
Hereâs another way to put it. John Lennon was talking about George Harrison. He said George Harrison is not a very interesting man, but what is interesting is the mystery inside of George, and watching George discover that mystery over the years. And itâs the same thing, weâre all boring people, but in you is a mystery thatâs very interesting and the closer you live to that mystery the more interesting your life will be. And thatâs what youâre doing when youâre writing - youâre living close to your mystery.
Hereâs another one, Annie Dillard said âSome people can go to bed at night and sleep well without having written a single beautiful sentence all day long.â And itâs true - some people can sleep without a single beautiful sentence. But the question you should ask yourself is, âWhat do I have to do everyday? What do I so deeply need everyday that if I donât do it, I donât sleep or I donât sleep as well?â And thatâs your mystery. Whatever it is, whatever your deepest, deepest need is, so deep that you need it each day, thatâs your mystery. And just draw closer and closer and closer to that need and youâll be more and more centered and more and more beautiful and more and more radiant and ever more transcendent.
A New Temple
A New Temple is the completion of a three-month psyche project. It is a short, small book of poetry, dreams, visions and animal spirit messages. It is a quest for healing ancestral trauma and it is dedicated to my bloody, muddy ancestral mothers who made their entrance in the middle of my life and said, âYou wanted aliens, but instead you got us.â It is available here.
A form of cord cutting is becoming a new creature. This book was a quest to heal and to honor my mothers by building a temple with my words. Their blood is my ink. Completing this was a form of soul recovery. Now that itâs out of my system, my psyche has more room to play and imagine and create something new.
The book itself is 5 x 7 inches and 54 pages long. A New Temple begins somewhere in the middle and the rest is a visual journey through dreams, visions, poetry and animal spirit messages. Below are some pages from the book.
Late night revelations
Sometimes, after weed and wine, Iâll have a ârevelation.â Usually, in the light of day, Iâll delete them. Some Iâll keep forever, like this one:
Note: This post is an excerpt from my weekly mind dump newsletter, sent out each Friday.
Found notes
This note is not dated. Possibly an attempt to time travel. Not sure where the quote came from, but good advice nonetheless.
Dear Claudia of early â03 â you will get your heart broken a bunch of times more.
____________
âYou should be cooking on all 4 burners.â
High school wisdom
Here are scanned pages from my high school notebook where I collected what I considered to be sage advice and quotes.
A lot of these quotes, which now seem banal, really helped me survive the discomfort of high school and bullies and a broken heart.
Here are the quotes that still resonate with me twenty years later:
âBe tough in the way a blade of grass is: rooted, willing to lean, and at peace with what is around it.â â Natalie Goldberg
"Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question. The superior person settles her mind as the universe settles the stars in the sky. By connecting her mind with the subtle origin, she calms it. Once calmed, it naturally expands, and ultimately her mind becomes as vast and immeasurable as the night sky.â â Lao Tzu (apparently refuted)
âThe greatest unexplored territory is the space between our ears.â â unknown (to me)
Dream cards
These are words that were said in dreams and typed on to trading cards and watercolored.
Famous break-up letters
After reading the diaries of Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo and Courtney Love, I imagined what their break-up letters might have sounded like.
After reading the diaries of Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo and Courtney Love, I imagined what their break-up letters might have sounded like.
Visual poem: soon weâll be together
soonweâllbetogethermaybeeventoucheachandthenproceedtocrusheachother
