Golden Mountain.

This morning before dawn, we climbed The Golden Mountain.
Starting off in pitch darkness, shapes emerging gradually from the shadows. Nature emerging from the blackness of nothing. Why is it that you can never see things emerging? You just suddenly notice that they have arrived, are there, in vision, seen, sensed, perceived. The rays of consciousness illuminate. The rays of sunlight let you see. The dense forest around you through which you could only previously sense with your nose. Sensing the dense. Foliage green, volcanic earth, a different kind of botany. Fragile well formed, hardy, shiny, dry, crisp. something somethings else too. Other things and things and things. More things forever, and forever there will be things. 

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(Blackness nothing becomes daylight something, slowly. Mountain is approached. Golden peak. In awe.)
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Questions came to mind.
Why do we climb mountains? What are your mountains? What questions are you asking of the world? How did you get here? 

What brought you here? What are you doing here?
Do you have the desire to ascend? What is the goal of your ascent? What (or where) is at the top?

To see things from a higher perspective. To gain clarity. To achieve something you can measure in physical terms for once. To approach a dense being. How do you approach The Mountain? Simply observe its greatness? Attack it with vigour and determination? Humbly and slowly ascend in silence and solitude? Introducing yourself to ridges and scrapings of earth, rock formations, hardy shrubs and crumbly ice covered grit.

To see as a mountain sees.

 Feel as a mountain feels. 

To be mountainesque. 

A Mountainess.

To leave the 'ego' behind. The little life down there with all its push and pulls. To quietly ascend, breathing in mountain air. The nature stimulating many divine thoughts. To notice the world below has a hazy blue aura with soft pink edges. To see the ocean look like a small lake. That vast eternal ocean, reduced in scale, to a speckle on the hens back. To see the rays of morning sun bathe the earth in warm love. To see the event taking placing in your heart also. A dawning. A respect. A Thank You. Always a Thank You. 

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(Around and about the energy circles up, clarity is formed as if evaporated steam off heated water.)
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Fall in love with words again.
Respect their dripping content. Flush the system with golden nectar. Divine words flow. I invite you. They ask for space around them. 

So it is Space they shall receive.

There shall be plenty of space for a silent mind.

Language and adornment. Adorned in the first light.

To simply watch the morning arrive.

No thoughts. No thinking. No judgments. Not even stimulating words of reverence.

Just sitting and watching.

To watch those pink rays waft down, ascending down as if drawn, warming the cool night soil. Through what magical law allows the light to trickle down? Those first morning rays have a special glimmer to them. To receive those first rays on the skin, sinking into your pores, breathing them in. Ignighting the conscious awareness within. Peace and the space of love expand.  Seeing is being, drawing towards you the qualities of the perceived consciousness. To notice it you have to know it. To know it you have to be it.

Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno once said, "for the human being, to see amounts to the same thing as to eat". Perfect sentence. 

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(nothing you can say echoes the vastness of an empty mind. Its non-walls are the opposite of experiential. The exhibition space is now ready and clean to receive its next show.)
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Knowing is being incarnate. The act of knowing is when the words and the writer become one.

The mountain is condensed thought form. Many many hundreds of manifest thought vibrations. Its true that we create this world with our thoughts. Mounatins are formed, sunlight trickles golden, rivers flow, rocks sit, grass dances. They are all events we have written in our minds. Thought is the real action. Are we now experiencing our ancestors thoughts? Gods thoughts? My fathers thoughts, yours, mine? whose thoughts are these? whoever so, they left them behind to settle into matter. When a thought becomes solid enough, it appears. Simple as that. Mind is matter.

They float around us, creating invisible spaces, pockets of energy vibrating. Clearing or condensing. Rising or falling. Negeative thoughts are heavy and they sink. Positive thoughts are light and they rise into new worlds, meeting with other thoughts of their own kind. Creating whole planets. Spheres of delicious light, nourishing projects that call upon them.
I invoke thee. Lift the little rocks in my mind. Tie them to silver string and make a mobile of dangling dreams. Chinking, clinking dreams like the wind chime. How many times have I heard that sound in my inner ear when I feel my thoughts chiming with others of their own accord.  When my wonder filled friends speak their hearts in dancey combinations and all I hear is chink and chimes.

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There was silence. A magnitude of silence. A hush in the mind. A hush in the soul. One inherently knows when it is a time for inner stillness. A respect for the space within and the space without. How one mirrors the other. A respect for your outer mountain and the inner mountain too becomes calm and clear. An ascent to clarity. Through the clouds. And out the other side.  Though they seem windy, cold and bleak. That golden sunshine shines just beyond. And then you go to stand in it and its gone. Moves somewhere else. This elusive light, always moving about. Keeping you on your feet. Keeping you wanting. Keeping you human and just slightly removed from the proximity of divinity.

Transcending the limitations of the physical realm. The material realm we embody. 

To look up and say "I did that. I made that. I am that!" and then "I am beyond that".
I made that with my thoughts. I perceived it in my minds eye and then I climbed it. Whatever inner meaning speaks to you through that experience is yours and yours alone. We make our own mountains. We have a great force of thinking and creative energy swirling atmospheric conditions into the production of form. Emotions and elements interacting to form causal events.
When its time to approach the mountain you do. You suddenly find yourself there without having made any effort to be there. Its almost as if the Mountain comes to you.
Your location/ proximity to various natural phenomenon tells you exactly where you are. What your situation is.  Both on spiritual and corporal levels.

I am currently in-between a mountain and the sea. Stillness and wildness.
I'll have to mediate on that potent meaning for a while.

Devendra sings about how 'Mountains they move toward the sea.'

My heart knows.
But How much does it know? to what extent does its knowledge reach? It has made me realise that my heart really is the seat of all knowledge and wisdom in my being. It over powers the mind, makes it look futile and immature. It has also made me realise that yes, at our core is truth and beauty and health and joy and light and all the knowledge of the universe inside and out. And the heart is the gateway between these realms of knowledge, the life-essence as it trickles into the inert form of matter we have around us. The energy engaging with this inertia, makes it breathe. Makes it perform tasks outside of its self. Becomes the vehicle of the task. The energy is the real doer, the material is the host for the party of doing, happening through its walls. When you know the inner world, this outer one becomes so easy to reference. You can say… oh that rock reminds me of *some inner fact*, rather than the other way around. The outer world is the reference, the inner world is the fact. You can then engage with it all as a language. As a big clump of clay to converse with.

Mother nature is my Guru.

How do I get more words? Collect them. Scrape them together from the bottom of the barrel, find them coagulated and gooey in high potency formulas. Pick up a rock. There is a word there. Inspect the texture of a slug. There are words there. Uncover the words in your daily doings. Match in the symbol with its reference point. Make it a game. You are a child after all. Feel the feelings in the words. Word the feelings.


I'm off to go find some more words. Speaking in symbols again.

Joy. rainbow joy. liquid joy. Enough love to go around for all.
Belly aching laughter. Knee slapping hilarity.

Starting a catalog of personal symbols. Life as it brings these events to me.
The word is a replicate. These words are a replicate of my thought formations. Words make them transmittable, engagable, communicable. And so what exactly is the purpose of communication? To share ideas that unlock truths within peoples understanding of life. To bring people closer to themselves. aha! THAT is my divine purpose. Through things. Through yoga, through language, through art, through love, all vehicles for uncovering golden truths within. 

Everything/ anything can be a portal to your Self. This very moment is a portal. I am here. I am now.

Forms Emerging.

Sometimes you dont have to talk about it. The doing is a talking... but in any case...

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A form a day.

Learning clay. 

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Approaching it humbly as I ask it to share its elastic knowledge of emerging forms and pure potentiality. I am patient with it. Following its lead, responding to its demands. It yields to my fingers, I test its limits, its ability to stand tall, to retain shape, flow and structure in one single momentous curve.

Sometimes it says flat out No! I say, ok, you know best, so what shall you be?

The forms emerge then blend again. As soon as you think its going one way, it changes shape entirely. These are slow moves too, but so many things you have been already. So many things you could be. I could write a thesis on the potentiality, pure elasticity and consciousness of clay. The mystery of creation unfolds itself right through your very fingers.
Its an incredible knowing, this knowing of the hands. 

I want to make a form a day. To show the universe I'm ready to see some of my own emerging from the pool of potential I have floating around me. Inspiration is not the problem, wisdom and intention. Its action now that needs to take the lead. To start the manipulation of ideas into something more concrete. Something to spring from. The creative practice begins. The lump of clay is being approached.
Life, unfold before me.
I will yield to you and you to me. Together we will work to make something beautiful out of this earthy clump. We will not stop until we satisfy our need for beauty. I will approach you as a living,  breathing being. Just as wild horse is approached by a new rider. You must respect its nature, its power, you must yeild to it in order to tame it, show it you mean no harm so that you can work together for the same cause (like in Avatar, those bird things, you first need to make the connection). 

Then you become One. 

Breathe the same breath, think the same thoughts, feel the same energy, use each other to articulate things. 

This matter is not dead, it is not breathless, we think we use it but in equal measure it uses us to achieve its own potential. Like my friend Birdy as he tends to his Bonsai trees. He works with them, asks them first which way they want to grow. This respect for the spirit in things is imperative to making the world your friend. Building spiritual connections with all things living.
And all things are living - all things are animated by the same breath of life.
Charged by the same energy force.

In like manner, my life is this lump of clay before me. Learning respect for the natural qualities (spiritual as they manifest through the physical) within this particular new medium. Every act is a spiritual act. Making is the metaphor, the unfolding of theory into practice.
Floating ideas a they find their earthly symbol.
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Floating mountains on their way to a higher world.

The skills I will learn, through trial and error. God bless the errors. They are the truly defining moments of understanding. I am unafraid of mistakes now, unafraid of ugliness because it can always be smoothed over. Nature reclaims control and nothing is ever permanent.

Sometimes the moment requires you to work fast, gestural, fearless even rough in handling. At other times more quiet, humble, thoughtful, slow and patient proportions are needed.
With every working a manipulation of the once form turns into the now form. Nothing ever remains the same. A piece is never finished. It can always be re-worked. No thing is wasted. The clay remembers everything it has once been and everything it will be. It is knowledge already attained in its elastic being. In its mind-stuff. The same amount of matter remains at all times on this earth,

already this earth has been many things. Probably even everything.

So much I could learn from this elastic earth.
It has Truth as part of its molecular make up.
It holds the answers to my questions of life and the spirit of creation.

Forms come and go but potentiality always remains. 

The art of becoming. 

The art of becoming what the clay wants to be,

for this moment anyway.

Then it will merge again.

Day 1: Collapsed bowl. now plate.

 Day 2: Pinch pots.

The project of this life.

Am I relevant? Am I naive? Am I alone? Do I have a voice? Does my voice matter? Does it say anything useful to others? Am I using my hands correctly? Am I fulfilling my exponential potential? Do I hold the right relationship with myself? Do I hold the right relationship with the world around me? What can I do to help the world become more peaceful? Am I lost? Am I found?

What can I do with these hands who want to work; want to create, make, love, caress, tend to, heal, gesticulate, energise, harmonise? They want to express, press, hold, laugh. These laughing hands. Where do they rest? Upon whom? Drenched in what? which type of clay, what kind of pen, finger painting, folding paper, finger nail scratching, etching a way.

These questions are right next to everything I do.  My actions are encased in them.

I want to be unafraid to speak. To find my right expression. To let the inner waterfall flow. out.

The project of this life. Is unfolding the plan. Finding the correct path. Planting flowers along side the path for others who may follow. For my own self to follow. again and again. Its already been walked. I can almost see my own footsteps. For tiny steps I tread so deep. Noisy steps I have made. I've been here before. I'm picking up the pieces I dropped. Trying consciously to tread lighter, softer. Things will be rectified. The circle will be complete.

The blockage has been this pleasing nature of mine. Tailoring myself to fit what I think others want me to be. I observe what others are, I confuse myself with what others are. I'm just exploring myself. so little do I know.

I'm nostalgic for Gokarna. That beach. I was placed. Yet whilst there I was nostalgic for my own life. Always elsewhere. Every time we try to pin it down its not there. WHAT is that thing that is never there?  And how do we know we want it, if there is no proof of it? The proof that it is, is simply that it is not. How far can we break down an atom before we realise that at the core of everything is nothing but cosmic energy. "How do we know we are alive if we haven't once been dead?" Says Allan Watts. Things are only there, only distinct in the light of an opposite. If there is an 'I' there must also be a non-I? There must be gaps in the music for the music to be. It is the gaps of nothing which holds the real music, the real beauty. Music is a series of gaps of nothing. A dance of a series of nothings. Such is life.

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Watch your feelings as if they are energies manifesting within you. Visiting you. Expressing themselves through you. Becoming aware/ known to themselves through you.

I grab a handful of this earth. my knee. with both hands. I know its not really there. so where is it?

What am I really grabbing when I grab my knee?

tomorrow it will be gone? or something else. This knee will cease to be.

I feel tenderness manifesting. I feel motherly. female. the healing nature within.

Soon this will attract to itself another. A beautiful stallion. Soon I will ride, with my man, the stallion and the wind. The bees will pollinate. then they will relocate.

For ever I have been trying to find a reasoning for beauty. I've been defending it. Placing it within the importance of what life is. Now I realise it is beauty which gives life its meaning. Beauty is the crux, the aim, the reason for life itself. Creative prowess. Beauty let it be.

Elemental studies. The study of the elements. The way they feel, taste, smell, sound, look, are. An arrangement of life, of feeding energies, interlocking, weaving, working, breathing. Molecular beings, appearing solid, liquid, gaseous. States of being. Simple. Complex. Signposts. Pointing silently.

Studying the matter, studying the spirit. As spiritual qualities manifest themselves in material symbols. The medium is the message. Observational techniques. How to observe, extract, become the knowledge locked inside of them. Absorb it into our own. Observe the patterns of nature. Work with them.

We recognise it as truth because we know it already inside. We forgot it. Life is a remembering.

Shedding, dissolving, expanding.

One day I'm going to build a shelter out of twigs and drift wood. With gaps to let the breeze through so my skin knows the sky better. I'll sleep on a bed of grass and wash myself in a river. I'll let fire radiate, imitate the sun on me. I'll chop wood. I'll sing to the vegetables. I'll put energy back into the earth instead of only taking it. I'll know things I could never dream of knowing. I'll converse with all things. Understand the symmetry inside a flowers mind. Understand how trees grow upwards, how spiders weave, caterpillars cocoon, how butterflies realise.

When I know these things I will paint the riddle in the sky with stars. Then lay on my back and laugh at how funny the whole thing really is.

Morning Glory.

This morning I surrender myself to the rhythms of the universe.
The sun shines. I lie in it.
I fixate my mind on the peace and tranquility that surrounds me.
The water blue. Sky blue. All is a heavenly blue.
I ground myself in the dewy grass.
Warmth radiates around me, it penetrates into the depth of my being.
Light at its core, the sunshine meets itself in the middle.

I lay in Savasana.
I listen to the singing crickets,
the nattering tree birds,
the local sea birds soaring, preying,
the fish splashing,
the water lapping,
The oysters popping.
I listen to these things being.
To the morning being.
I acknowledge the soul in each of these life sources.

  

I thank God for this beauty.
I thank God.


My head to the ocean
My palms to the sky

I breathe.

I breathe deeply. Completely.
With every deep inhalation I feel my stomach rise.
With every exhalation it falls.

Rise

Fall

Rise

Fall

Rise

Fall.

My breath is a bridge. It connects my spirit with the physical world around me.
I breathe in the soul of the day.
I breathe in beauty. I breathe cosmic atmosphere.
I breathe heaven into my earth.

I am warm on my East side. The sun side.
I become aware of the parts of my body in contact with the earth.
The back of my heels,
legs,
buttocks,
the two small pointy parts of my lower back,
my lower back,
middle back,
upper back,
shoulder blades,
my elbows and arms,
the back of my head.
Gravity holds me down
I am completely grounded.

I become the moment where earth meets the sky.
I marry the two.
I am their child. Father Sky. Earth Mother.
And in accordance I become their union.
The blending of one into the other.
And with this knowledge I feel the boundaries of my self expand.
Then I feel the boundaries dissolve.
I feel at One.
I feel no I.
I feel not singular, the edges are disseminating.
Becoming All.
I feel day. Light. Awareness. Being.

This dissolving sensation is the most beautiful in the world.
When you lose yourself to the moment. Become the moment.
Pure. Bliss.

I relax in this state for a few moments.
Mind fixed on nothing but my own Being.
My own breathing.
I breathe
I breathe
I breathe.

I start my Yoga. Union with the Divine.

I spiritualise my day.

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When I am finished my practise I walk myself down to the moment where earth becomes water.
I immerse my feet.
I crouch, cup my hands and fill them with the salty ocean water.
I bathe my face. Wipe wet fingers across my closed eyes. My forehead.
I repeat these words aloud;

"Consciousness. Truth. Awareness. Love. Beauty. Peace. Joy. Compassion."

I sprinkle another hand-cup full over my head and let it drip down over my face and body.
Like Holy water blessed by the suns sattvic morning rays.
I repeat the Universal Prayer to the vast expanse of peace and stillness before me.

I begin my day.

This is my Sadhana. 

The Boomerang in my hand.

I've been moving here, moving there
looking for a way to define.
Writing something. Crossing it out.
Making a category only to change the name another day
when I think 'oh no its really more like 'this''
'this' is constantly redefining that which I am;
Not working!
Possibly because I've realised I am That which is undefinable.
I see myself in all things.
I notice myself in all things.
Sometimes being in the world feels like that moment when you glance at a reflection of yourself and your not expecting it. Your mind goes 'holy heck that person looks exactly like me' before you click that it is you.
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She found it!
She found it through words
He found it!
He found it through sensations
They found it!
They found it through praying with the body
I am going to find it too!

I am going to find my way home!

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Through using these things, by being these things until I realise the sensations only give you a taste,
a minute little fragment of what is to be explored
beyond
saturation of live elements
The saturation of life.

Letting it come in, letting it reside, feeling it to the bone, then feeling it beyond the bone...
This is my mantra.

...beyond the deepest aching part, the willingness of the body to receive the souls words
only goes so far, yet it reaches further, it penetrates through you starting from within and like a boomerang it comes back to the starting point - in a rhythmical circular motion moving outwards and inwards simultaneously. 
Like a broken heart. Did a broken heart not begin from a place of pure bliss, from love? I don't understand, but I can FEEL it. And for some reason that is a form of understanding too intricate for the mind to conceive. That clumsy mind. Why do we trust it so much?

This is the way to feel things. To let them move in and beyond our capacity to understand them. They are beautiful. These earthly sensations. They are a blueprint. They are surface but grow from within. All things grow from within.

When I see this combination of earth sea and sky, I can't believe how much it moves me. I imagine myself exploding and shattering into tiny glittering molecules and scattering out like a heavenly cascade into the corners of the picture. And I KNOW I'm not seeing the whole picture. Into every little crevice I run, I land, I be, I sea.
I mountain. I grass. I earth. I blue. I sunshine. I cloud. I ether. I glittery ripples on the water shimmering. I am. these things. when unconfined by my body, I am these things. Even whilst confined, I am. My heart sings with this picture because it recognises itself. Such a perfect expression of beauty.

When you constantly think in waves of beauty and peace, and then you find yourself immersed in this image... its the Boomerang!! It produces laughter this boomerang. You throw it out into the world, and here it is, back in your hand!

When your only desire is for your life to be beautiful. When you ache from within with it. When beauty gets to that achy stage, you know its hit the bone. It has manifest itself so deep it hurts. But what is pain? When hot and cold feel the same.
Its pulsating. That's what it is, pulsating beauty. The mind drips with it, it licks it up off the blade of grass covered in morning dew. The earths atmosphere condensed like heavenly water. Diamonds. Sunlit diamonds on green blades of sword grass. Ready to be touched, aching to be touched. The grass needs love as much as we. Its needs passion, and to delight in the sensation of its own being.  To rub against another thing, to feel itself against another thing. To feel itself.

This is what we do, when we rub up against another. On a higher level we are trying to feel ourselves.

My clothes allow me to feel my body. My lover allows me to feel my heart. This bed, this cup, this warm tea, this song… all touch my senses and allow me to experience myself. In external form.
Life is feeling from the outside, what we find is inside. This whole experiment on earth is to imagine what life is like from the outside. Yet its all within. The whole thing. That's the irony.

That's the Boomerang!