Sunday, October 21, 2012

Reawakening the artful heart

St. Paul's Episcopal Church on-the-Hill, St. Paul, Minnesota
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.  Howard Thurman

What has been making me come alive lately is taking pictures. I got a cell phone with a decent camera. This fall has been absolutely spectacular for colored foliage - it feels so good to be able to create something, to produce something of some tangible, something I can point to and say I made this thing.

I'm reconnecting with music..listening to more of my collection, having tons of ideas spring from the  finding a greater sense of power, awakening. I't's like falling in love - always a good sign! for my magical practice; when I re-connect with my surroundings, I inevitably find that synchronicities begin happening with more frequency and intensity. Desire formes into vision, vision becomes tangible, the dream becomes a life. My eye and my ear are becoming recharged and more alive. O phalle!



I think, for this week, I will experiment with an invocation in my practice, and see where it leads. I'm going to take this from the Who.

Only love
Can make it rain
The way the beach is kissed by the sea.
Only love
Can make it rain
Like the sweat of lovers
Laying in the fields.

Love, reign o'er me.
Love, reign o'er me, rain on me.

Only love
Can bring the rain
That makes you yearn to the sky.
Only love
Can bring the rain
That falls like tears from on high.

On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool, cool rain

The night is hot and black as ink
I can't sleep, and I lay, and I think
Oh God, I need a drink of cool, cool rain

Love, reign o'er me
Reign o'er me, o'er me, o'er me
Love, reign o'er me, o'er me
Love...

Should prove to be interesting. Will let you know where it leads. here's the planetary listing for the moment:

Sun2839' 7"
Moon2221'29"
Mercury221'14"
Venus2142'18"
Mars1024' 5"
Jupiter1553'25"r
Saturn153'22"
Uranus540'59"r
Neptune028'36"r
Pluto714'31"
TrueNode2622'30"
Chiron515'52"

Saw a film about Hubert Selby, Jr. last night - author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream. Even though his writing was brutal, his wellspring for all that he created came from this deep spiritual yearning. Hubert "Cubby" Selby, Jr. was born in 1928, which is the year after my mother was born. Quit school in 8th grade, ran away from home in his teens to enlist with the merchant marines, where he contracted tuberculosis. He remained ill for the rest of his life, undergoing multiple surgeries to save his life, but which ended up with the removal of 11 of his ribs. Drank a lot and became addicted to heroin, got sober and clean when he turned 40. His felt he needed to write and create so that when he died he wouldn't have left the world without something accomplished; he said he was "a scream looking for a mouth." He also said that the writer shouldn't put himself between the the thing that was being written and the end result. This is the aliveness that I'm aiming for in my own life and spiritual work. Here's a link if you want to find out more: Hubert Selby, Jr.

"Selby traced his desire to write to a sudden realization. He wrote:
I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life." From Wikipedia, accessed 10/21/12
Last Exit to Powderhorn...
(11:30 am, hour of saturn, day of sol) The saddest thing I saw when cleaning up my older brother's apartment when he was dying of cirrhosis in August of 1997, was this list of recipes he was going to send to my ex-husband. Another list, to send to my mother...yet another list, to some other friend. He spent his time, drinking and planning what he would do, what he would say, all the while not answering his phone, not replying to his e-mail. Cocooning in alcohol, blacking out, ignoring the reality of a small apartment off West Broadway, covered in half-drunk tall boys, kitchen crawling with roaches. He never left New York again, after his last trip out to Minnesota in 1996.

I looked at all these lists he wrote, all over his apartment, of things he was going to do, someday. This pattern, a family legacy, I know it so well. All of these beautiful things I will do, these pieces of profound wisdom, that I'll somehow share and give to you, someday...and then I sink back into procrastination, not showing up for my own life. I know this rut all too well...I have spent so much of my time gathering dreams, tending philosophies, having great realizations with no fulfillment of them. I am so tired of this way of being. This is the qabalistic Vision of Binah for me, the Great Sorrow of life. To plan and to list out and to gather with no sharing. It is Death, literally, for me. I need to end this pattern, end this holding back. Thankfully, I do not have the extra burden of drugs or alcohol to work through. Thankfully, I have an intact heart and mind and my will is waking up again. So that when all is said and done with my life, I hope that it will be seen that I lived with An Awe-akened Heart...that I will have been truly alive. That in some way, you will see that I lived into this Life, Now, with all of my Being.

This is truth of Thelema, of true Will. This is the Truth of My Will. To live into this Life of Mine, with, with all of my Being. Amen, Maranatha!





No comments:

Post a Comment