Cracking Seeds

Radish seeds

The seed of the heart yearns to be cracked open, receive water, sprout and grow roots.  Each of us will find our own path or paths to cracking open the heart. When it happens it can feel scary, ebullient, joyous, crazy, difficult, and strange.  If we are lucky, it is a slow process which pries the tissues of the self with gentle nudges until a nice open space seems to emerge from nowhere.
  
Sometimes, it is sudden.  This is truly a year for sudden openings, and I have witnessed several in the past few weeks.  

One of my friends was actually sectioned after going out in public following intensive meditation.  Filled to the brim with a happiness he could neither contain nor describe he did indeed appear crazy, wandering around offering smiles and hugs and good wishes to all he met.  Because he wasn't aware of the dis-congruency of his state with modern confinements to the human condition, he perhaps made choices that led to a bizarre hospitalisation. Known as a serious meditator to all his friends, he reached out, and they responded in droves to help him.  He has now been released and is actively working to tell his story and inform people of the difference between so called 'spiritual emergencies' and actual mental disorders. 

Prior to being released Raaz was asked to participate in an exhibition at the Tate Modern involving visual monitoring of meditative states. Monitors hooked up to persons in deep states of meditation displayed graphs of nueronal activity: the information was processed in such a way as to trigger different sound and visual images upon the walls.  Shadows of visitors projected themselves onto the same walls and an incredible installation of livetime neuronal activity and empathic nervous system mapping 'happened'. :D  

Here is a link to Raaz's awareness and support group. To contact Raaz regarding his experience please email him here.  

Yucca seeds

As mentioned previously, this friend is not the only one with such an experience in the past few weeks.  If you, or anyone you know, is experiencing an opening in the heart or any level of the self, here are some tips for you.

How do you know if what you are experiencing is real?  
       If you are experiencing it then it is real to you.  Managing the experience is key as this will assist you to keep a foot in both worlds as you learn to navigate your new landscapes.  

What does cracking open feel like?

      I experience opening shifts as large waves of shaking energies moving down my spine.  They cause me to jerk, as when you are first falling asleep, or to tremble.  Sometimes I get waves of hot or cold sensations throughout my body, my eyes begin to perceive different shades of sharpness/contrast/colour/pattern in the world around me, or I drift off into mild trance states.  Tingling sensations are common among my students, as are sensations of aching or rolling through the muscle tissues.  Some people experience vivid wakefulness while others feel the need to eat or sleep a great deal more.  Depending on the history of your body and the schemata within your mind your experience will shape itself accordingly.  

Is it wise or recommended to try to induce openings in self-perception-sensation?
     Opening cannot be forced.  Nothing will open until it is good and ready to do so.  If you are desirous of such an experience then just relax and appreciate yourself and your life, knowing that the paths which suit your journey will present themselves when you are ready for them.  

When I am in the midst of a big opening what skills help me to manage it over the ebb and flow of its duration?

1. Track your nervous system as you experience, by following sensations of hot, cold, tingling, ache, itchiness, pulsing, rushing, etc.  Don’t direct or respond to it but let it rise, climax and move through in its own timing.  Sensation happens in the sensory-motor and parasympathetic-sympathetic feedback loops of the nervous system: when we allow them space to complete their cycles, natural integration can happen.    
2. Be absolutely totally still as often as you need during or between opening sessions.  Wrap yourself in a blanket and focus on your stillness, observe it and hang out with it as a good friend, allow yourself to be recuperated.
3. Surround yourself with community, people who know and trust you and vice versa.  Place being with them as a priority.  Share your experiences when appropriate and ask for help when needed.  
4. Choose a path with a history.  Get to know its teachers and its past, and allow that sense of continuity to ground you. Keep that continuity going in your own body through a regular practice connected to your path.          *If* your path appears to be one of modern invention, search it out a little deeper.  People have been opening since we began, and much of our journeys are traceable at least back to the first cave paintings if not longer. You are not alone.  

dandelion 'gone to seed'

Eckhart Toole writes "Although body-identification is one of the most basic forms of ego, the good news is that it is also the one that you can most easily go beyond.  This is not done by trying to convince yourself that you are not your body, but by shifting your attention from the external form of your body and from thoughts about your body-beautiful, ugly, strong, weak, too fat, too thin-to the feeling of aliveness inside it. No matter what your body's appearance is on the outer level, beyond the outer form it is an intensely alive energy field." and also "Body awareness anchors you in the present moment, it is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego." A New Earth 2005 pages 52-53

sunflowers Luddesdown UK

Always check your inner state

with the lord of your heart.

Copper doesn't know it's copper,

until it's changing into gold.

Your loving doesn't know majesty,

until it knows its helplessness.  

-Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi-

Icaros

If I were to distill the last year and a half into one thought, one waveform which is shaping me, moulding the soles of my feet, it is this: Rhythm is Everything.  

There is a resonance which underlies the breath of life.  It is form and formless, cohering into nexuses of energy which then generate movement, or sound.  There is pattern to the coherence which expresses itself through all life.  

The ways in which we observe the pattern occur through the lenses available to each of our brain-bodies, resulting in the 10,000 things of zen philosophies or the multitude of manifest forms in Western esoteric traditions.  Some paint, some sing, some dance - some speak, some play, some teach - some _____.  The main point is that observation-expression is always undeniably creative.  This is what is called living the creative life, and it is available to all of us.  

Harmonic Resonance by Farb

Each nexus of waveforms that is every living thing draws initial resonance into itself, where it meets and is shaped by the histories and pathways of the life.  The resulting interference results in geometries of sound movement which are at once universal, in their impulse and connectivity, and unique, in their blueprinting and expression.  Levels of density express at differentiated frequencies, creating magnetism.  This magnetism draws likeness unto itself, forming groups.  Exchange within the groups further shapes and evolves frequencies and fields emerge.  Fields are stable over time yet continually evolving, allowing each living thing to rest within the shared patterns of the earth while continuing to individually draw down resonance.  Thus shared paths emerge.  In time, we view these as linear progression.  In space, as place.  In the mind, as thought trains or loops.  In the heart, as emotion.  Tides, flows, spirals, skate back over themselves deepening grooves which at once densify into codeable transmissible energies while always and constantly continuing to shift at subtle interfaces.  The basis of all expression is rhythm.  Rhythm is the horse upon which resonance comes to life.  

Untitled by Justin Totemical

When I was in Ecuador sound opened to me!  I have always been a dancer, sensing, feeling, moving rhythms through my bones.  I became big ears in Ecuador.  I learned to sing.

One night in ceremony my ears extended, they opened and spiralled out, and every sound was available overlapping in harmony.  Insect, upward thrust of plants, gentle mist, breeze, clods of dirt, logs heating and waiting to be burned, rise and fall of bodies breath, huff and heave of animal, hair follicles growing, spheres and angels.  A burning desire opened in me - to know the frequency which is this Hannah with fewer and fewer lenses - to observe in simplicity and detail the tone and lenses of all living things.  

Mevlevi Taksim by Sinan Dogan

The fire of our heart is fanned by the rhythm of our movement.  As its resonance becomes clear the flames grow high.  The songs of the shaman clear the fields, open the lenses of our histories.  As they sing the flames of the fire brighten.  The flames lick the frequency.  Hearts blend.  

Guacamayito by Mira Jempe and Janicka

There, as we built the lodge, hard work, we listened to alot of music!  Pure joy! Beautiful sharing of forms.  And the music provided a thrust which offset the silence, thus making the peace recognisable.  

We Have Arrived by Matt Kirk

Do you hear/see/sense rhythm in your dreams?  Whose dreams are these anyway? 

                                                                                                                          

"Forget everything which did not teach you how to dance." Rumi                   

"Tie yourself to herds of mating camels." Hafiz                                                 

Ayahuasca Vision by Skyer

"Pick up a musical instrument." Rumi                                         

Mansions

I once saw a dance piece titled Many Rooms.  It was at The American Dance Festival 2001 or 2002, created and performed by a beautiful woman who has worked for Trisha Brown and many other beautiful downtown choreographers.  The piece had shafts of light coming from multiple directions in the grid above the stage.  She was dressed in simple blue pants and a blue long sleeve shirt.  Her blonde hair reflected in the shadowy light and her lines were intricately woven to precision between arm and leg flows.  She moved through the shafts of light as if they were the rooms themselves, stretching, turning back on herself, lengthening in multiple directional vectors at once.  That was it.  Stunning in its simplicity we felt the hollow labyrinth which is full of interior meanings.  

digital print by Anouk de Clerq

In Ecuador I had a vision of "our" mansion, the children and I and the multiple people who inhabit it...  The mansion is a large stone building, several floors, with windows stretching out along all floors on both sides.  Some of the windows are quirky and unique.  There is a gate into the estate and some mid size fields in front of the house which we use for installations and crystal sculptures.  

Behind the mansion to the left is a ceremonial field made of corn with a large circle in the middle of it and some tepees for sleeping and when we prefer to have a roof. Just behind the mansion is a large arts centre which we build ourselves, out of new technologies.  The centre is a circle once again and there are many artists studios surrounding the inner chamber, each with their own outer door.  The grid above the inner chamber is made of a fantastic new material which is resilient and lightweight, making it moveable and adjustable for total variety in use.  The panels of the space are oxogonal and the acoustics are amazing.  Behind and to the right of the mansion is a large kitchen garden where we grow an abundance of herbs and salads and exotic grains.  A small greenhouse rests down the hill to the right and is home to many tropical essentials such as lemons and coffee, guavas and avocados. We come in and out of town on our vegetable oil powered scooters, and our many friends there bring us fresh bread and rice and fruits because they love us.  

There is a river not too far off and there is an arrangement with the folks on the other side of the river for horse riding and possible stables.  Lots of people live there, there is a broad range of interests and the work is shared in a happy motivated energy.  Inside the mansion there are fabrics hanging at odd angels and sparkles dangling in odd corners and little detailed paintings can be found in the loos and elsewhere.  Broken coffee cups litter the counters and books and bean bags lounge about waiting for bottoms and minds which want a think and a rest.  There is a tutor who teaches the children in sacred geometry, astronomy, chemistry, calculus, theatrics, molecular biology, creative writing and other essential arts.  Eccentricity and the joyous harmonies of communal living are a part of the matrix and we manage it beautifully by living as our highest selves.  

I don't know how this mansion is coming to us.  In my current imagination I could see us squatting a place and buying it for about £1 in the divine deal of the century, or perhaps a large gift or lucrative work project affords the means to buy it outright, or one of us inherits it and is in love with sharing my dream, or there may yet be another way.  I don't know the timing of its materialisation, but it is walking toward us now even as I write.  The children saw this vision too, before I did even, and now I am putting it out there to the world so that in speaking it becomes one step denser and can find a place within the hearts of all who will live there.  Buyah!  May the angles send this post to those who are meant to see it :)

refrigerator art, my home

Yesterday in rehearsals Jeremy H and I walked onto an analogy of many boxes inside a large container, the likeness of many pathways connecting into pure potentiality for expression.  We talked and worked with a dance "box", the tempo and and flow and rhythm of release technique, its effortless effort, and the way this both frees the body for line and momentum and also inhibits theatrical qualities.  We worked with a comic "box", full of effort and fast rushing energy toward expression of one tiny point, which focuses attention on specificity of action and its subsequent absurdity.  We worked with theatrical "boxes" including text and voices, costumes and props, candles and lighting.  The space "box" is really cool...working with the consciousness of the space, whether that be a piece of land outside or the accumulation of psyche in a studio or the flow and history of a public space inhabited by people and the bustling world.  There are endless "boxes" and the container is fluid in its shape, accommodating whatever we choose to discover, play with.  Performances then develop their own unique crystallisation, whether that be planned or emergent in the moment, according to the rooms we choose to inhabit within that container, that mansion.

And what then, if the rooms are not boxes but emergent shapes within themselves?  

digital print by Endre Balogh

Christ said, "In my fathers mansion there are many rooms."  Mevlana Rumi said, "Let the beauty we love be what we do, there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground."  

Collaboration

Oh I am so lucky to have so many intense and beatific collaborators at the moment!  Just allow me to share the thrill of it all with you....

There is The Berlin Project.  Rosa, a former student of mine from Cambridge who is now living in Berlin, is organising and developing this one.  Rosa studied with me, taking everything I taught, for two years in Cambridge.  She performed with me in Circles of Light and was key in developing the Grief section. After she graduated she went on to study Butoh in South America and Japan, and is now working as a freelance artist and writer in the bohemian capital of Berlin.  Shaleigh, a phenomenal artist who worked and performed with me in "Body Stories", anchoring an authenticity to energetic and spiritual components within the piece, is joining us from North Carolina.  We are each rehearsing on our own, in studios and in our living rooms, and sending the footage to each other.  Rosa is guiding the explorations, giving us tasks, pushing our boundaries.  Our personal selves are embedded deeply in the rehearsal process and we are simply honest and real with each other and the material.  Our material derives from our recent journeys: Shaleigh to Israel, myself to Ecuador, and Rosa to Japan.  We are taking photographs and writings and embodied memories as beginning points from which to locate distance, temporality, and memory within ourselves.  We will use paper, photographic paper, ink, light, and nakedness to expand develop and disrupt the frames caused by photographs.  As bodies, we will re-inhabit the spaces we have been to, discovering the traces we have left there, and locating the traces these spaces have left within us.  We are all academic and articulate, and our process and performances promise to be rich sacred and deep.  Wouhaha!

at home

Then there is The Festival Piece.  Matt, a wonderful bright DJ and Musician in London, and James, a delightful Music Maker and Promoter also in London, are co-creating an event based in the fusion of technology and the sacred.  Matt and James are just opening up Abstract Studios for digital mixing and mastering in London, and it is so exciting for me to share the joyous clumsy flapping of my own takeoff with the beginnings of their adventures!  Inspired by and brining all of my most beloved forms of dance and play: whirling, belly, ecstatic, and performative, I am living integration and fusion through this piece.  I will have 10 dancers to work with, and we will just move and flow and flock together within the event space.  We will not be set apart on a stage, but will inhabit the masses of moving bodies around us, streaming with them and through them and they through us.  There will be moments of coordinated dance which are highly unified, and moments of free love in motion.  The event space here is reconceptualised as a space where we can all soar into the depths of ourselves side by side, practising ascension, embodying it, if only for a few hours.  What makes it different from other festival events is the intervention of the sacred.  Using traditional sacred music as a base and a frame, Matt and James will sample many other musics over under and top of these powerful sounds.  Techno beats and a pull toward the sublime will thread the moments of fusion together.  Spoken word and poetry will be looped as well, in part to educate concerning the traditions at hand and the sacred nature of them, and in part just for beauty.  We are working with chance and are developing story boards.  The stories which will develop on the night/s of the event are ever-changing, nonlinear, and spontaneous.  Following the crowd and the dance and the feeling of the moment, the boys will mix and play live, and who knows what can happen?  It is infinite, it is up to the sacredness of life to direct, and us to follow.  mmmmmmmmm.  

And then there is The Central St. Martins Project, which I am deeply implicated in.  According to Robin, the organiser and conceiver of the the project, I am the inspiration of the whole thing, and that's sort of a big weight to bear.  Yet I am bearing it joyfully, because it is so damn fun!  Robin is a professor at Cambridge whom I have been connected to for over a year now.  We met at a conference in Cambridge and found we had so much to talk about and so many intersections in our work, and events just seemed to pour out.  First Robin staged a night with dancers from across South England at Robinson College, and I shared an evening with a Kathak dancer from Oxford.  I whirled and spoke on Sufism and she danced from the Sufi tradition in India.  Then I organised and staged a symposium event centred on the performative last June, and Circles of Light was shown in its wonderfully re-concieved format in The Judith E Wilson Studios.  From this The Central St Martins Project has sprung.  Bringing together faculty and students from across the schools of drama and design at Central St Martins and the schools of Italian and English at Cambridge, we are all busy bees with lots and lots of small collaborations going on inside of the larger project umbrella.  We are all working with mystical experience in some form or another, seeking to push the boundaries of performance in every way we can, and drawing much inspiration from resulting discourse and rehearsal practices.  And Robin, taking flight in his own beautiful way, is travelling all over America right now lecturing on the  importance of performance and the performative for any depth of research in the humanities to come to fruition.  We will collectively stage a symposia in July and again in October, coordinating with The Festival of Ideas in London.  We will perform and present at both locations, Cambridge and London, in a variety of ways.
There are 3 major and other unforeseen minor collaborations within this project which are nurturing the process of my soul.  One is with Caroline B, head of textiles at CSM, and is the start of a much longer and far reaching collaboration that this project can contain.  We are making an enormous skirt meters and meters wide with many layers and methods of fastening and unfastening which is itself the performance.  I will "whirl" and we will play with light, directed focused light, and with what is not lit, and flutter and flight and weight and balance and proportion.  Caroline is a real diva, a total expert in her field, and I am humbled and delighted beyond belief to be collaborating with her!  Another one is with Jeremiah H, wacky and wonderful curator for The Judith E Wilson Studios at Cambridge.  Jeremy and I first worked together in the restaging of Circles of Light last year and found that we had a resonant and immediate understanding of each others working methods.  We are playing now with Butoh and text and multimedia/multidimensional performance processes in order to coalesce "the infinite" into some sort of shareable form.  We are honest and real with our bodies and ourselves and each other, and I feel that there is nothing we cannot do or explore or share within performance.  Like the project with Caroline, this collaboration will have ripples and waves and a life extending further from the presentation with CSM.  And finally there is my work with Jeremy T, a composer and musician here in Cambridge.  Jeremy is an exemplary musician of great skill and thought.  In his quiet way he is very open to radicalising processes, and we have begun working through skeleton structures.  We give ourselves a few parameters, put on some recording instruments, and play.  We talk to each other through the music and the dance, and it all gets recorded, and we return to it again and again, and never look at the tapes or listen to them either.  We have no idea what will be shaped, except that some portion of it will be shared with The CSM Project and a further development will be staged on its own in an evening replete with brilliant costumes, breakage of the fourth wall, fascinating acoustics and true mastery/breakage of our forms.

Beyond this there is even more....whirling for a Sufi musician from Turkey for a couple of concerts this summer, writing a children's book with my sister, reading and developing theoretical thought and an argument for my Phd, steady practices and ceremonies with the lovely lovely London dervishes, cycling forever in a week to get the kids to school and swimming lessons and play dates, and sleep.  The main discovery of the past week for me is that not only do I need sleep, I actually desire it.  I have never desired sleep before, but dreams are swiftly becoming a major part of my waking life.  I must needs dream, or I cease to be, and somehow, somehow, my dreams this year are intricately linked to my creative process...and this desire for sleep/dreams is intricately linked to the ayahuasca journey...it spirals together in a lucid state.  

I hope that this post is an inspiration and a joy to you, and that it does not come off in any way as gloating or self congratulatory.  Inspiration is divine!  All that fighting, sorrow, giddiness, newness, glory, expansion, cramps, pain, the leaving and the coming into, I desire to share it!  May that sweetness come through and through now, in writing, and also in the performative act of living the life which the universe has so thoughtfully and beautifully gifted to me in this breath.  

with fabric for The Festival Piece

To paraphrase one of my favourite quotes from Mevlana Rumi: "Dance when you are broken open, dance when you are in pain, dance with blood on your feet, dance when your bones have crumbled to the floor, dance, my darling dance, when you are perfectly free!"      ~In Endless Gratitude~

Dervish Path

This Saturday marks the two year date of my Mevlevi initiation.  Two years ago this coming full moon, I had an extraordinary adventure!  


In my MA course, for a module titled the Socio-Politics of Dance, I decided to write about Mevlevi whirling.  I had seen the government group from Konya, Turkey perform in North Carolina two years earlier.  Upon finding out that the practice had been made illegal in Turkey, only to be appropriated by the government for tourist and folkloric purposes 30 years later, I was intrigued.  Dance practices do not die out.  They go underground, they migrate, they re-emerge.  


As it turned out, my tutor for the module had links to The Study Society here in London.  The Study Society is one of the places Mevlevi turning migrated to, mixing with the esoteric philosophies and practices already in place at the society.  In no time at all I was witnessing the full ceremony, enacted by British persons, in the heart of London.  I began attending practices and ceremonies regularly, and wrote my MA dissertation on the whirling practice as it is carried out in London.  As part of my research for the MA writing I sought out Mevlevi across the world.  I found them in America, as part of the Mevlevi Order of America, and in Australia, Mexico, and New York as sister sites for The Study Society.  I also made links with lovers of the whirling in Turkey, and arranged a visit to the birthplace of the tradition.

once upon a time...

Hours after handing in my dissertation I was on a plane to visit academic colleagues in Turkey, and to see the government ensemble enact the ceremony on the high holiday of December 17th in Konya.  The day before I left, however, my point of contact in Istanbul had to go away for a special and spontaneous performance event.  Not speaking a single word of the language, and not backing out of my adventure, I got creative.  I contacted the one woman I knew of Istanbul who spoke English, and she agreed to meet me.  I stayed at a hotel down the street from her house, and they picked me up for dinner a few hours after I arrived.


Well!  It turns out that her husband is a member of the Celebi family, the family of direct descendants of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi.  That very night, in their home, I received my initiation.  I had no idea this was coming for me!  We had hours of esoteric conversation, and after awhile they asked me, would I really like to be Mevlevi?  Did I really know what this meant?  I replied that I could not be entirely sure what it meant, but that I trusted the universal coincidence that I was there in the home with them, and that I was ready.


We performed a small ceremony and I stayed with them for three days.  They showed me around the city and we had a great time!  Then I went to Konya.  Several colleagues from Izmir came up to meet me there, and further loveliness unfolded.  First, I was asked to speak on Turkish National Television about the turning, and then we witnessed the ceremony.  Later we hung out with the semazens and musicians, smoking hookahs and eating pastries and drinking chai late into the night.  Over the next few days I met with and interviewed several of the Mevlevi elders in Konya.  This was an incredible exception and we were all amazed that it happened!  The founder of the government ensemble gave me his blessing and said, "Hannah do not worry about a thing.  You have a magnetic heart that will attract all that you desire to yourself.  We are brothers and sisters, I would pray at the tomb of Mary with you."  We visited the tomb of Mevlana, I bought my first pair of turning shoes, and made my night bus back to Istanbul with only minutes to spare.  We hugged and cried and there was love all around.

symbols of our journey

Once back in the UK I embarked on the 5 month intensive training process needed to be a semazen at The Study Society.  The Society received the practice in 1963 from Sheikh Reshui Baykara and has been transmitting it virtually unchanged ever since.  Several methods of training have sprung up in the diaspora of whirling, as it were, since 1925 when it was first outlawed in Turkey.  The method of training here in London is one of the most rigorous of the models, and I appreciate that.  


Being a dancer, I understand the need for repetition and discipline.  I appreciate an ever elusive practice which challenges one to engage at the deepest level on every instance.  Five months later, through tears of annihilation and surrender, glorious breakthroughs of joy, and deepening bonds within The Society, I turned/whirled in my first ceremony.

first sema

I have been turning ever since.  My life turned upside down, it is re-created.  This week, I take time to thank my lucky stars for this outrageous and special esoteric practice.  Each time I robe and enter into ceremony new vistas open, new experiences of the heart unfold, and I push my body to the limit.  It is a demanding path.  And a rewarding one.  And a life changing one.  Nothing is ever the same again.  I have become steeped in the lore and beauty and complexity of the whirling, it has influenced my artistic output a great deal, my academic path even more so, and comes into many of my daily conversations.  With enormous gratitude and sparkling eyes, thank you Mevlana.  Thank you my Celebim in Istanbul, thank you my Shehim and friends at The Study Society.  Thank you to my MA tutor, and to the many many friends who have witnessed/shared in the incredible journey thus far.


HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU 

Pure High White

Love. Action. Fire. Wind. Breath and Breathlessness.  Love opening up inside. Angel eyes looking out.  In all of us! Do you see them?  The lovely sweet innocent eyes of more and more people every week?  I do.  And I see myself differently too, a shadow full of light, a little flame upon the planet :)  Being something of a realist, I have been waiting and watching to see how the earths changes, her own blueprint for evolution, would actually affect us.  I wasn't sure how dramatic or not it would be.  I mean, every era feels the majesty and beauty of change within its cycle.  Today, yesterday, the day before, tomorrow, I just laugh because it is so real. Magic is returning....

At the pro-test site in London the sacred has entered at last.  On the 11th I participated in a giant sacred circle that became a peace march that became public ceremony at the courts of justice, the home of the prime minister, and buckingham palace.  I drummed my little hands blue and frozen to the frame.  And it was powerful.  This past weekend, as I walked about, there were little candles everywhere, i blew kisses to all my friends, we laughed, traded books on Buddhism, and it just feels radically less stringent, more and more free.  We are having visioning workshops now, and I co-designed and helped to paint a new banner saying "Visioning Alternatives to crisis. 99%"  100% is only a few years off I reckon. Something beautiful is here.


Hannif is a word in the Sufi tradition meaning purity.  Hannif has been practiced since the time of Abraham or even longer.  It is the opening of the heart seed through fire, the fire of love.  Love is what is here, pouring into us and through us and out of us.  Yesterday, as I rested and recharged, walked in nature, and reflected on the intensity of change and growth across the globe, I spoke a little praise for hannif: My heart is split wide open, like a seed tossed into the fire, cracked and popping with sound and sparks, and little germ, baby soft, shoots into the stars.  

In Ayahuasca hearts are also burst wide open.  A great purging happens, and then light!  Our natural connectedness, which we often forget, comes rushing back to the forefront.  A sensation of all humanity, plant life, earth creatures, and star beings - as one - emerges through the body.  It is beautiful and wonderful.  Many many times this past few weeks that sensation has opened in my students, my interactions with friends, in ceremony.  This feeling, this which I am so clumsily trying to put into words in this post and this blog, is the crucx of our revolution, our turning point as a species and a planet.  It is the work of zillions of souls, billions of ceremonial prayers, thousands of years, and decades of activism, truly happening now. 

I wish I could give you a taste of
the burning fire of Love.
There is a fire
blazing inside of me.
If I cry about it, or if I don't,
the fire is at work,
night and day.
People make clothing to cover their intellect,
but the heart of Lovers
is a shroud,
inflamed in golden hues of Love  ~Mevlana Rumi~


May our world be full to the brim with love and lovers!  Happiness is our human birthright.  Laughter. Music. Dance.  While earth may never be a utopia of sorts, as it is a ground for evolutionary development which embraces both the dark and light, we can, as humans and creatures and beings upon this planet, know and claim our collective birthright.  I believe that is what we are doing now, in our communities, our practices, our pro-tests, and our occupations.  This is why it cannot be stopped, it is so much bigger than any of us! 

Pure. High. White. Fire. Love.

Blood Magic

Today the fire of the full moon swells in me once again.  I have spoken with many of my female friends, and something about this moment is awakening the hot divine energies of the feminine within us.  There are millions protesting economic injustices in America and across the world right now.  The wave of massive political change which swept across the Middle East is spreading!  And the earth herself is writhing, moaning, allowing her magnetism to shift and her relationship to the sun to reinvent itself.  In my opinion, humanity is responding to celestial changes, to the impulses of the earth, and to our collective consciousness.  


This past week I had the fortune to bask in the sun and warmth of Los Molinos, a valley formed of gypsum crystal in the Andalusian hills of Spain.  So lucky and so blessed in the space of friends, I witnessed an amplification of all that needs to clear, recesses which still need healing, and an opening of light from within. Walking barefoot on the dirt, scents of sagebrush and palm heavy and sweet, stars so clear, and the oasis of the river in the valley.  Magic. It was as if my body became the whole earth and I was the gypsum crystal, and shedding layers and layers of myself in rainbows and waves, I became so free. My blood time was with me and in her power I knew myself not just as woman, but as all women.  We sang together there and my bones will not forget, will not forget the freedom and the earth and the power they inhabited.  Since returning to the UK, with the strength of a fire and a blood moon to support the journey, flashes of a primal kundalini are continuing to sweep my system.  The wave is at once deeply personal - as I rise within - and global - as the occupy movement takes root and new languages, new desires are birthed in the collective soul.  Heat is flowing from the mother straight through all of us.


Authors Drunvalo Melchizedek and Llewlyn Vaughn Lee, among others, speak about a rising tide of feminine energy.  That tide is rising both in the earth and in the beings who inhabit her, for we are not separate.  whenthesoulawakens


And so, in the spirit of Helen Cixous and Luce Irigaray and the early heartfelt feminists, I welcome my cyclical self, as part of the cyclical earth and humanity, and with a roar of power proclaim that I am a flower.  

The Datura was flowering my last two days in Los Molinos :)

A flower, she blooms when she is sung to, she is frail and wide open, she draws her power from the earth and her delight from the sun and rain, she is not afraid of withering or death, she can sprout from the top of a skyscraper or from a bedrock of crystal, she is eternal in her willingness to share, to bloom again, and yet again.  She speaks through her fragrance, her heart.  In the words of Mevlana Rumi, "Become crumbled, become earth so that wildflowers may grow up within you, you have been stony too long."

Moon Tears

painting by Katherin Linn Sage

Oh! There is so much to write about tonight.  I have been traveling, inside and out, and the changes of the places in my bones have reached the escalation point - the sumit of the new - and my water is breaking....I am ferociously and graciously and with surrender giving birth to this phase, this full blood moon, this harvest. 

I walk between worlds - and leap inside a gown made of gossamer against a backdrop of desert winds~

painting by Di Vogo

I have written sooo much in my travels, in my notebook, and posts will come, are coming now.  Growing wild, free in the October moon of fire and ice, melting into nothing, tonight I cup my hands like a mountain valley, roar inside the oceans undercurrent, rock on the luminous waves of dreams,


creating new patterns....resting...




and all that is left is a shining and magnificent holy silence!  Emptiness~

painting by Peter Van Oostzanen

painting by Michael Parkes

Love came searching, 
in the desert plains, 
in the salt of sea, 
among the crowded 
streets of London, 
and there, 
one bleeding heart, 
just opened - herself - receiving him... there were - no words....  

Natural Art

"All art is but imitation of nature." Lucius Annaeus Seneca

sand formations: Andy Goldsworthy

The spontaneous organizations of nature are powerful and emotive, far more emotive to the human soul than the finest products from any culture house.  I believe this.  The true elegance of nature is something I know and observe within my bones, however, I would like to challenge its relationship to art. The above quote, from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, true to a large extent, is also simplified, and I would like to raise two important points which open his perspective.

Firstly we as humans are obsessed with our own humanity (myself included). Blogs and personal pages proliferate on the web, and the personal memior has become a rite of passage. We are the generations of extreme navel gazing, and yet, I do not view this in itself as a bad thing.  Carl Rogers, psychologist, explains this natural drive toward wholeness as an actualizing tendency.  Mevlana Rumi writes, “without your even knowing Allah put this longing in your heart.”  Maude, in the wonderful film Harold and Maude, speaks of a playful yet constant interest in “my species”.  And - the main commandment of the Delphic Oracle stands eternally as “know thyself”.  We have, however, used this interest for centuries to place ourselves at the top eschalon of an otherwise symbiotic earth, and to confine oursevles within ever tightening layers of stratification and hierarchy.  Our collective self knowledge has been turned to baseless purposes which degrade us, and now our earth, and her natural elegant arts, are in peril.

In my opinion, one of the main reasons for artistic presentation and re-presentation to have a place within humanity is to provide a way of looking at, questioning, and relieving tension from social structures which seek to train our longing, our drive toward wholeness, our innate self-interest into conformist images and agendas.  The power of art to question and disrupt authority has been known and used throught our dark ages, (Shakespear was a prime example, the forest theatres of the soviet republic, and the butoh movement of the 1960's-just to mention a few) and it is vital that we contine to utilize performative power towards evolutionary purposes.  At this moment in our human story, to open ourselves beyond elegeant imitation of nature is also to open ourselves beyond imitation of what we have come to call normal, or civilized life.  The arts are fundamentally important to our future, for they open our internal creative pathways, they are our way back to our wilderness.

fragments create a new spiral: Andy Goldsworthy

Secondly, the semantics of imitation vs. working with are vital to the discussion.  If we, as artists, seek only to reflect and to imitate, whether nature or social structures, then we are foregoing our abilities for creation, we are dampening the spirit of sharing which is a spark of life within us. Further, while we learn vital information from imitating nature, such as which plants to eat and how to shelter ourselves in winter, we are also responsible for bringing the human element which is us to natures doorstep in sharing. The responsible artist and the responsible gardener are not so different!  I would call responsible sharing stewardship, and it is a call to stewardship which presses me to write these thoughts today.  

There is no wilderness which living beings have not touched.  For all of our efforts at creating national parks or saving the amazon, we will leave a trace,  we will make an impact.  So let our trace be one of conscious co-creation.  I would one day like to see the slogan, All art is but a service of stewardship to the nature within and around us, painted on a banner, pasted on a bumper sticker, written into the lines of policy makers and funding bodies whom artists (and the public) rely on. 

stick reflections: Andy Goldsworthy

In our times of transition the arts provide a powerful tool for opening us to the true nature of ourselves, the land which nourishes us, and each other. Through questioning, performance, sharing, and honouring, we can create new establishments more in line with the co-creative tendencies now ever emergent. 

Transitions

It takes a village to raise a child.  It takes visions and dreams to create heaven on earth.  It takes courage and strength to forge new structures which are working realities in this dimension.  As our old structures crumble and change, a vacuum exists in which to test out and try new structures.  I sincerely believe, based on my own visions and dreams, and the visions of others, that there is no apocalypse.  In the midst of sweeping changes to our economic systems, our helathcare systems, our educational establishments, our governments, and our earth, many new possibilities can be seeded.  Rather than be scared of how we will feed and shelter ourselves, create art and culture, govern ourselves, and provide basic services to the populations in the face of such changes, we can choose instead to remain positive and put that positivity into action.  

And I have faith, because so many people are doing just this.  Community is key, we are social creatures, and we have lived too long in isolated single family homes and little automobile worlds.  Eco communities based in permaculture and sustainability are popping up everywhere!  There are lots of examples, and one of my favorites is the Cal Earth project creating structures based on the writings of Mevlana Rumi.  http://calearth.org/  The homes are roomy, full of light, beautiful, and designed for communal lifestyles.  They are easy to build and hold real promise as a method for long term use.

just like the homes in my dreams :)

new tribal sensibilities

large community structure at Lake Hesperia

Waves of the time are catching fire at this moment, across the old boundaries of nation, race, and class, toward cooperation.  David Cameron, in response to the riots in London last week, stated "Moral decline is not limited to a few of the poorest parts of our society. In the banking crisis, with MP's expenses, in the phone hacking scandal, we have seen some of the worst cases of greed and irresponsibility and entitlement.  We are all in this together, and we will mend our broken society - together."  The ways and methods are not fully humanitarian just yet, there is some distance to traverse as a species, but we are walking it.  More and more open to the new each day, and as we stop trying to save what has come before, we allow space for creation. 

As we transition our emergent structures are equally transitional.  This is a good thing, it is a response that reflects the perfect holography of reciprocal relationship.  There is reason to keep hope, to move forward.  I have been dreaming these transitional centers since 1986, when as a small child I began to write out the types of healing courses and ceremonies which would be offered at the centers I am part of creating.  I observe my friends having visions and creating centers too.  These centers allow us space beyond and outside of the industrial age we have built up, space to focus on our inherent human drive toward wholeness, to connect and reconnect to spirit.  As we do so, the policies ethics and focal points of New Earth will find ground to grow roots.  It is written within us that twenty-fifty-one hundred years from now, we will be happily handing a better situation to our children and grandchildren.  We have done this before, we can, and are, doing it now.

Fathers

This morning I had a long conversation with my dad.  It's a little more than one year ago that he passed away.  It's been a busy year, and though I created an entire dance piece about grief, there were still more layers to dig through.  It so happened that my second set of Ayahuasca ceremonies were on the weekend of his death anniversary.  So, I processed alot of the passing, as well as alot of the spiritual heritage he left me on the first night of ceremony.  That was really dark, and I'll choose not to write about it here and now, as the moment at hand is positive and soulful.  What opened up in the days and weeks after the ceremonies is communication.  

Our sheikh in London, who has studied death and near-death experiences extensively, sometimes talks about the passing of his mother.  He talks about the life of both love and tension, of her last years in which there was a nice shift, and of her continual presence.  My journey with my father has been similar, only I didn't understand the continual presence until now.  It's hard to describe, it's something akin to a knowledge in the bones.  Present, real, undefinable.  He has this huge smile and I just feel it everywhere.  The struggles he faced upon his death have passed, he is really happy, happy is the word.  I don't know when he'll come back to earth or in what form or where, and I don't know if I will register that and notice a quality change or not.  What I do know is that he is so pleased with the directions my life is taking and that he supports me fully.

dad and I at a High School Football Game

 

 

Of the legacies he left me, some are in books, some in memories, some in specific advice, and of course in his example.  The first two books he had me read were "The Mindspring of Human Progress" (now out of print) and "Back to Eden" by Jethro Kloss.  The former book was all about the mispresentation of global history and there are two components I remember clearly.  One has to do with the nature of human mind, about how it can be close to that of bee communities, and how we can choose to embrace bee mind or to create new group mind patterns for new communities.  The second had to do with a flowering renaissance in Africa during the dark ages of Europe.  I remember how much that shocked my American teenage understandings!  The later book is all about how to build your own sanitarium for health, grow and cook your own healthfoods, why not to drink milk, the benefits of your own soy patch and the like.  From it I found other books which became my favorites, including Spiritual Midwifery and an excellent cookbook from The Farm in Tennessee.  I never did make my own tofu, but I have been baking most of my bread and making my own granola for years and years now. 

The most important legacy to me is my fathers study of herbalism.  About three years before he passed a huge box showed up on my doorstep with several mixing jars, his favorite texts, and a bunch of starter herbs.  He was crazy because a large portion of the house was devoted to his practice, but the only people he ever treated were family members! :) His concoctions were powerful and they helped me to doctor both myself and my children extensively.  My favorite was a skullcap and flowery tea he brought me after giving birth, it completely relaxed both hard muscle and smooth muscle and induced an amazing sense of peace.  Well done dad!  His favorite concoction was a coffee enema he loved to take, he would just laugh and laugh about that.  And my sister will never forget being paid to measure cayenne pepper into capsules by the hour. 

He was a high school drop out, and so he hustled in life.  For the majority of years he worked as a prison guard, and with pluck and spirit educated himself on the night shifts.  He read so much, alot of it conspiracy theory, but alot of it helpful analysis of investments which he put to good use, and alot of spiritual books as well.  His stamina for life, his conviction in his ability to heal himself, the way he would sit still and quiet for hours at a time, and his enthusiasm for discovering hidden knowledge remain with me still, now.

There is a way of passing away from the personal,
a dying that makes one plural.
Hundreds of thousands of impressions
from the invisible are wanting to come through you!
I get dizzy with the abundance.  When life
is this dear, it means the source is pulling us.
Freshness comes from there.  We're given the gift
of continuously dying and being resurrected.
With constellations in the night sky, some look up
and point.  Others can be guided by the arrangements:
the Sagittarian bow piercing enemies, the Water Jar
soaking fruit trees, the Bull plowing its truth,
the Lion tearing darkness open to red satin.  Use
these words to change.  Be kind and honest,
and harmful poisons will turn sweet inside you~
Mevlana Rumi

And so the relationship continues~