the ethereal & elusive light

Consciousness is a sign that we haven’t yet learned to live from the soul. I spent many years trying to become conscious, but all that effort led merely to self-consciousness, which in turn generated guilt, anxiety, and ambition. I was told that higher consciousness was a worthy goal and that its opposite, unconsciousness, was the result of laziness and ignorance. Around the age of fifty, my ideals and values began to change, so much so that any of them turned upside down and inside out. Now I see great value in laziness, understood as giving up both effort and the attempt to justify my life. I have come to appreciate the teaching I have found in many religions that praise holy ignorance. And I have been discovering how to live with little consciousness. To live from the mind is to balance in uncertainty on a high wire. The soul is more grounded, and indeed its proper territory seems to be somewhere beneath the ground. There is a fine word for this particular soul and its spirituality- chthonic. It is the level of ground where we plant our seeds and bury our dead. Maybe this is good ground for personal growth, rather than the kind that is full of intention and from where we can see what is going on. As events come and go, as we read and experience and learn, all this material metamorphoses into bits of images and becomes the imagination, which is the bedrock of personality. But for the imagination to flourish, we may have to surrender to a looser life and a more liberated imagination. We may have to say words and make things while not knowing what is going on. We may have to become somebody we never intended to be. We may have to let life happen in a way that challenges our plans, our values, and our hopes. It is this deep force of vitality, not intention and by all means not consciousness, that grants personality. In fact, a certain self-forgetfulness may be just the item that allows the soul to break through with forcefulness and creativity…..Thomas Moore

can we not trust what feeds us?…..skepticism follows us as we read the above irreverence of all that we were taught (grilled into us actually), yet our hearts speak a different language, one of unfolding, sanguine beauty in a confused world….our birthright is this intrinsic possibility…

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead, I believe in such cartography- to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste of experiences. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps…..Michael Ondaatje

offering up the soul to spin back down

Every soul is a celestial Venus to every other soul.

The heart has its sabbaths and jubilees in which

the world appears as a hymnal feast,

and all natural sounds and the circle of the seasons

are erotic odes and dances.

Love is omnipresent in nature

as motive and reward.

….Ralph Waldo Emerson