Pixie Making Waves

In astronomy, the new moon is the time when the Sun and Moon are at exact opposite sides of the Earth and the moon becomes dark, no longer reflecting any light from the sun. This natural phenomenon has been the subject of myth and lore in cultures and religions around the world, marking a powerful cycle of renewal.

The rituals surrounding the new moon are typically in worship of the divine feminine and traditional circles are reserved only for women, as a time coinciding with women’s moon cycle or menstruation, where women gather to pass through their cyclical changes and renew themselves.

Historically, women have been excluded from major religions and rituals that worship the divine feminine in relation to the moon have been ostracized from mainstream religions and secular society. However, in seeking to transcend duality, new forms of spirituality are emerging that begin to blur the stark lines between male and female incarnations and recognizing that the divine qualities of feminine and masculine inhabit all beings.

The Shakti Sacred Moon Circle has been gathering for each new moon since June 2011, holding space for gratitude and setting intentions that serve the times. By gathering and sharing space with one another, we heal together and crystallize our intentions by consecrating them in a circle.

Each month we gather under a theme and journey together into the realm of energies that arise in each of our lives, holding sacred space in worship of the divine feminine which inhabits all beings, creatures and spirits on earth.

Inspired by previous new moon ceremonies, this group gathers under independent tantric teachings from a position of self-inquiry. We work with the principle of amplification to set intentions that will serve us in moving through our life journey and actualizing the unique expression of our ‘selves’ so that we may bring forward the gifts that we have to deliver in this incarnation.

Unlike other moon gatherings, this circle is gender-inclusive and open to anyone who wishes to connect with the divine feminine energies of the new moon. Building on the energy of previous gatherings, we gather in every lunar cycle to renew ourselves and seek a fresh perspective on our lives, checking in with ourselves and each other and using this potent time to set intent in the spirit of gratitude.

In the spirit of community we begin the ceremony with a potluck feast symbolizing the notion of sharing and abundance. With our appetites content, we move into sacred space to go within.

The format of the ceremonies uses the medicine of the moment and may include smudging, opening prayers or mantras, chants, music or art-making as the occasion calls for. The activities are determined based on the energies of the moment and the themes that we work with.

These activities present an opportunity to connect with the ripeness of birthing energies as they offer the purest spark of potentiality. In the luminal space of the moon’s renewal, you are invited to contemplate all that life offers to be grateful for and offer intentions that serve the divine.

Our darkest moments can be our greatest teachers.

For a year now I’ve been paying cautious attention to the events of my waking life and observing the stories I tell myself as though I were recounting a dream. This dreamwork on the human waking dream has given me some powerful insights into the messages embedded in waking reality.

But, as often happens, I have fallen off the wagon on many of my practices, and this one was no exception as of late.

After a few months of navigating muddy territory in the marshlands of my inner psyche, I was blessed with a brutal awakening last week when I was hit my a pickup truck while crossing the street, walking home from work.

Amazingly, not only did I survive the impact, but I escaped with no broken bones, no concussion, not even a sprain. I was off the hook with surface damage in the form of scrapes and bruises, but was shaken up on many other levels of the more subtle parts of human anatomy - my emotional and etheric bodies no doubt were the most impacted.

The events that transpired caused me to reflect greatly on my plight. This truck not only hit me when I had right of way, but cut its turn much too tightly and found itself in the lane of oncoming traffic when it hit me. It had no business being there at all. It was certainly somehow a part of divine order that I would be hit.

But it was also meant not to hurt me, rather to shake me up, ground me into my internal reality, and encourage a very firm wakeup call to some of the automatic behaviours I have been engaging in over the past months.

I was forced to rest after the accident, exhausted and emotionally depleted. I had very little energy or motivation to pursue activities that would normally bring me joy. I’ve ben shutting myself in, and instead of pursuing all the things that allow me to escape my inner turmoil, have been sitting squarely with all of my inner demons as they emerge.

This dark and murky space I’ve been in for the past few months is clearing. As I confront the muddy reality of these inner swamps, I realize that the only thing keeping me from passing through is my own fears of treading unknown and swampy waters to get to the other side of this passage.

Metaphorically speaking, I cannot see the other side, but knowing that I am facing my depths, I know that if I cross in this dark space I can emerge into the light that I am seeking. The wakeup call is a reminder that the longer I stay in this swampy land waiting to take the first step, the more this mud can settle around my feet, and each step will of course rustle long-standing sediment, disturb creatures who have been lurking in these depths for a long time, and produces sights and smells the likes of which I had forgotten my inner being was capable of holding.

But, moving forward one step at a time, accepting the cold, dark and damp reality of swampiness, I move back towards the light, remembering that its warmth will be a sweet reward for this endeavour.

As I cross, in the dark, the light within will guide my path. The light without which there is no path.

They long for one another but do not mix, bodies of water running side by side, but never do they interwtine…

In Manaus, Brazil, there is a natural phenomenon of confluence between two rivers, the Rio Nego and Rio Solimoes, which run alongside one another for miles, sharing the same bed yet never mixing. This meeting of waters (Encontro das aguas) runs for 6km (over 3 miles).

Of these two rivers, one is dark, muddy while the other is cold with clear and pristine waters. The pulse of these rivers keeps their temperatures so far apart that their waters do not mix and keep instead their own course, even as they share the task of splitting and irrigating the same lands when running on the same track.

If it weren’t for their contrasting appearances, the conflict of their natures would not even be appparent to the human eye, yet because one is dark and murky and the other of a clear blue clarity, one can follow for the whole length of their acquaintance how they run side by side, always touching, yet never wholly mixing into one another.

How beautiful is it that the very differences that prevent them from mixing are also those than enable us to observe, from our humble human position, the extent of their common course. Completely committed to one another, these two bodies or water never lose their own essence, and it is both this contract and this confluence that offer us the beauty and wonder of gazing upon how perfectly two such fluid bodies can share a path and unite without surrendering their respective forms.

There are few moments that inspire beauty and gratitude as much as the sorrow of a hurting heart. These moments interrupt our daily mechanical operations; force us to look squarely at ourselves in complete honesty and request that we face ourselves, naked, raw and real.

When the heart hurts, its lament summons some of the darkest demons from the corners of our spirit, to be released.

I suspect this is because relationships are mirrors, and in intimate relationships that we care deeply about, the parts that are mirrored are often the most vulnerable parts of ourselves. parts that need healing, that need love and self-care and compassion, and that i reject.

The laws of karma posit that everything we have in our lives are the results of every action, thought and decision in all our life, and all our previous lives and the ultimate goal in this life is not to get what we want, to win something or even to have what our limited human understanding of success and happiness may be.

If this is true, then the focus of this incarnation should be nothing other than to clear karma, to end the endless cycle and transition from duality upwards into the higher frequencies of bliss.

So when our hearts break, we have rare and precious opportunity to explore how to make amends with ourselves, and therefore with the whole universe and all of creation. By making amends with ourselves, we are clearing all our karma and moving into bliss, letting go of needing anything and just being.

The lesson of a broken heart is to focus, i think, on the best way to listen to the universe and make peace with it. It is about making peace with oneself; when we make peace with ourselves, the whole universe makes peace with itself, and learning the art of letting go, and surrendering everything within ourselves that resists that which threatens to loosen our grasp.

The rest belongs to the universe, and we can but be grateful for the slices of time that we are granted the senses with which to glimpse its beauty and wonder.

So, they’re building a highway.

On this night when I drove past the site of the new highway, along the old rural route 105, and along the construction sites there was a new sight, a bright light that illuminated the side of the mountain at night.

If it wasn’t for knowing that this is the highway construction lights glowing I might have appreciated more the showing. The clear-cuts I was bestowing had suddenly a new way about them, not so foreboding.

The textures were divine, on the mountain incline, as the light hit the tree line, a slight alpine moment where light and stone align, albeit supine, the mountain’s spine offered no fault line, it was cloud nine.

Stone ablaze, my heart in a daze, I gaze, this beauty betrays what belays at the end of these land surveys. The malaise, yet stays, my glance strays, it’s not a phase, these displays of contempt, as we praise progress are like decays, on the earth it weighs.

So, they’re building a highway.

Right by old route 105, where now the beauty of the light conflicts with the awful sight of this construction site when I drive there at night. What a plight.

The universe is composed of infinite patterns. From those that constitute our behaviour as humans, to the fractals of dance that map the growth of flora, to the images that we can observe of constellations at astronomical levels.

In our search for meaning, we may come to belive in certain illusions so firmly that we cease to recognize that they are there. they become part of the backdrop. Only taking a step back and reducing time to a grinding halt is it possible to see things a little more closely to their essence.

Today I wandered into a book store on an errand and intuitively made my way through the shelves. Purchasing books is a bit of a fetish of mine and I had intended to hold back on this day and simply browse decadently without succumbing to the temptation to adopt one of these lovely works of art-knowldge and take it home to complete my collection.

As usual, one of them beckoned me, this lovely creature that speaks of mandalas and was decorated with luscious pictures the satisfy my craving for vernacular intercourse.

This book whispered to me sweet nothings about “A Brief History of No-Thing” and through this I learned about the simultaneous surrender and resistance of infinity. Indeed, the number zero melts into any numbers to which it is added without altering the number, but when multiplied, swallows other numbers up completely.

These are beautiful properties that remind me how beautifully calculated the universe is. We may imagine that we understand so much, and while looking more closely at patterns can yield fascinating observations about the infinite wisdom beheld in the universe’s mechanics, they often serve more pointedly to remind us of our own location of partial understanding.

So often we rely on our senses to access reality in a way that locates reality outside ourselves. But what happens when we look within and observe reality from the outside, looking in?

Today I had another one of my epic sneezing cascades, where one sneeze leads to the next and I keep going dozens of time. With each one I took a moment to go deeper within my body. I never thought sneezing could be such a deeply transcending experience and usually try to simply withold the impulse, resist the need to sneeze and want it to be over as swiftly as possible.

An entirely different experiences arises when I set aside my resistance long enough to explore this sneezing fit from a different perspective. Through this I learned what I had always been missing out on every time I sneeze without honouring this simple bodily function with all the attention it deserves.

It only takes a brief fraction of a second to pay full attention to a sneeze. In that brief second an entire universe is born and dies. My whole body expands and contracts, becomes effortlessly filled with breath of life and, if I allow complete surrender to the experience, will release itself from anything that no longer serves its direction to grow.

What else have I been missing out on in life, if I cannot call my attention on something so simple, but so blissful as a sneeze? What else am I not paying attention to in this very moment that could yield a surreal experience of embodiment? More importantly, what is required to gain it back?

Much like many things that beg for our attention in life, a sneeze is unintentional, effortless, an imperative calling to breathe and release. Having had the opportunity to observe my breath and my capacity to release so fully, what else might I glimpse of the universe’s infinite wisdom if I continue to breath in attentively and allow myself to let go on every exhale..?

Today was a day not unlike any other aside from the simple fact which called my attention very intently to everything that happened in my surroundings. I was so intensely present for the slightest moments, sensations, feelings, thoughts, emotions and experiences.

I celebrate my birthday today, completing a full revolution around the sun by this calendar, measurably marking the passing of time, taking the opportunity to be grateful for all the lessons and challenges that have graced my life over the past 12 months.

As the day came to a close I struggled with a simple task of driving home - far beyond the city limits. The highway was blocked and after three separate attempts at getting on the highway from different access points I found myself driving much further down to get what I thought would be a sure access point, forgoing any access points between my starting point and the last possible access point to get to this highway.

I was so fixated on my route home that I even took an extra detour to avoid an alternate route. I did not want to surrender. I wanted to take my normal route.

As this was occuring I observed myself feeling frustrated, but moreso discouraged. My heart sank. I felt tears swelling. I wanted the release of a good cry, which had been mounting in me for months, and revelled at the thought of finally letting it go.

But it did not come. In fact, I gained access to the highway and breathed a sigh of relief that my plan had not been foiled. I eased into the drive home.

The rain consoled me, almost teasing me for I had not had the release I had been wanting. Then it dawned on me that I had been so fixated on the road home I had missed the point of this experience entirely. I gave up before the climax. I wanted things my way, and I missed a beautiful opportunity for complete release, settling only for a small breath of relief.

A moment of calm and stillness settles in. I merge with the rain and realize that the day is coming  a close, that these many detours have eroded my time away and that I might not get a chance to finish all the things I had wanted to do in a day. My intention has once again misjudged my capacity. Or so I thought.

Instead I realized that intention is not a measuring unit. One cannot measure success or failure based on achieving any intention. Instead, I’ve come to understand that intention is the driving force that brings us to the lessons we must learn.

That love will conquer all is probably one of the most common of clichés. However, the resilience of love will overcome any resistance, melting away its force and disolving any obstacles in its way. Its power is to a subtetly which is both insidiously disarming and terrifying when uncovered for what it truly is.

It comes in all forms, unique and universal, tragic and tranversal, deep with dispersal, ripe with reveral, mythic and magic like a force of endless dismissal.

What we scarcely realize until it is too light is the great price at which it comes. Love requests of us complete surrender, acceptance, facing our deepest, darkest corners and a willingness to look at them squarely, see them as they are without dressing them up, sharply slicing costume away, breaking down our illusions and unmasking our splitting realities.

In moments of great clarity, everything that the mind seems normally able to rest on begins to split at the seems. Initially this is an uncomfortable shift, it feels ruthless, brutal, almost violent.  We scream. We resist. But it persists.

I come back with my birthing metaphor, as it is so perfect an analogy for the growth that occurs and how love is the driving force which animates both the drive to expand and alleviates the pain of swelling and shifting into that expansion.

Stepping outside of our comfort zone, taking great risks and moving forward with faith is an essential component of growth. No growth can happen without this. On the flip side, the sacrifice of love is also found in accepting the discomfort of opening ourselves to unplesant experience so that we may transform ourselves, and those around us.

By allowing ourselves to be so open and vulnerable we create space for reconfiguration, reformulation, reiteration and reinterpretations of being and reality that shape newer ways of being into exalted expressions of the essential self, meeting our highest potential.

Below is a poem a beloved friend read to me recently, which emphasizes to me the stronghold love can have on us, the playfulness that can seem so harsh at moments, but in the end provides a threat to grow, ushering us into opening new spaces and flowering into higher forms of being.

To do this we must be prepared to accept our own humanity, greet it with a knowing smile that displays love and humour, occasionally dropping the sweetness of speech in favour of a tougher approach that ruffles our feathers, turns us upside down a bit and shows us the world from a new perspective. If we allow ourselves to be open to these experiences, the world upside down can suddenly awaken us into letting go of what we thought we knew and what we held so dear; reliquinshing the need to escape and stepping instead into a space of gratitude for all our silly human nonsense, where we may infinite joy and limitless love in the liminal space in between the stretch of the imagination.

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Tired of speaking sweetly (quoted “The gift” - Poems by Hafiz)

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us

Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and

Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,

He would just drag you around the room

By your hair,

Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world

That bring you joy

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly

And wants to rip to shreds

All your erroneous notions of truth

That makes you fight within yourself, dear one

And with others,

Causing the world to weep

On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,

Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself

And practice his dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants

To do us a great favor:

Hold us upside down

And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear

He is such a “playful druken mood”

Most everyone I know

Quickly packs teir bags and hightails it

Out of town

I’ve recently been taken with fully exploring sensations in a body as part of transcending established notions of space and time as containement, seeing them instead as vehicles for chanelling creative energy

As the connective thread of these blog posts demonstrate thus far, I quite enjoy metaphors as explicatives as they are the most sublime union of image and word where word is the medium used to paint an image that can only be seen with the imagination.

My latest hearthrob is a finger pointing at the moon metaphor humbly borrowed from Bruce Lee, which I found while surving the web in search for videos that would somehow prove my theory that the universe does indeed care for us, or at the very least that the believe that the universe cares for us will provide enough trust for us to move forward rather than sinking into fear-based patterns that are ultimately antisocial and spiral downwards into pools of accummulated karma.

I came across this gem which seemed to draw interesting connections between this metaphor and metaphysical notions of trust in the universe, or at the very least, moving forward on a path with enough equanimity to cultivate growth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2WwFkspc04&feature=related

In this finger pointing at the moon metaphor, if pain (sensation, experience) is the finger, and the moon is the universe, trust is what enables us to look beyond the finger to see the “heavenly glory”. At times, pleasure and pain are almost indistinguishable and together paint the hues of the universe… who are we, then, as simple creatures, to select the experiences we think are pleasurable, only to leave out half of the universe’s beauty? were it not for the nightly sky, we would never be able to fully appreciate the moon’s glow, and when the moon retreats, still we can appreciate the depth of the nightly sky itself… 

Indeed, the forces of destruction and creation keep one another in check, they delineate the balance that spin the cycles of expansion and contraction, and the tension between them is the adhesive that binds them together in a dance of simultaneous growth and retreat.

For extra fun, here is the original bruce lee scene too:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7gz5deSQes&feature=related 

I enjoy the common metaphor of roads and travel as a way of alluding to the many lessons we learn on our journeys through this earthly realm.

I have been thinking lately about how central this is to the way we construct narratives of our life. We talk about the way we journey through this life, the way we travel on the road of life, the way we cross paths with someone, the way we come across a fork in the road, have to choose paths, or meet people on our journeys through life.

This metaphor, much like the image of a road or travel itinerary, speaks of a linear progression through time and space where the two correlate and meet up in mutually exclusive intersections.

I wonder if this metaphor is intended to account for the reciprocal relationship between our bodies and the land on which we travel. We leave traces, surely, on the land beneath us, but it also leaves traces in our bodies. As we move, our bodies carry the trace of the land to which we belong.

This process is not linear. It happens simulteanously for all the land and does not account for forward motion as we move through life. The road is a very narrow and simplistic sinnew vision of the outwards and inwards flux and flow of knowledge, memory and growth that happens at all stages, in all places, all over the map.

Our bodies, no longer crystallized movable parts, can be fluid, absorbing the plasmic wisdom of the land, and offering in exchange the humble offering of human situated experience as we move towards a glimpse of understanding unity with the world that hold us within its breast.

In the ongoing search to improve our lives, we may seek to arrive at sometimes elusive destinations that take our attention away from the road we walk.

The creative process however rests on a complete surrender. One must let go of all inhibitions and let their purest essence flow through them unhindered. As an artist this is my biggest struggle, facing an ego that is constantly judging my own work, imagining how others receive it and what they may be thinking.

I come face to face with my own fearlessness; that place within that offers itself uncompromisingly.

It is a performance, one the paves the path of perfection with perils, permutations and practice.

The creative act is not one that carries us to a product or desitation. It is a fleeting experience that we must lose ourselves in, lose track of and find again over and over as we walk the path. We must surrender to that real and spontaneous part of ourselves where truth finds expression in an impromptu moment of catharsis.

When the path and process reach synergy in an impromptu moment of ephemeral bliss, real art happens.

There is a term used in the trade of photography that refers to the point when algorithms fail to determine the reciprocal rapport between photo settings that will yield enough light to write an image onto a negative.

I cannot help entertaining the notion that this basic principle of logorythmic reciprocity could be applied to other contexts and settings and wonder what it might be to imag(in)e reciprocity failure when applied to things other than photography.

On another front, downsizing and lifting the weight of the material world that surrounds me on a daily basis is always on the back of my mind and I go through spurts of time when I start systematically sorting all my personal belongings into what I want to keep and what I want to discard (sell, donate, gift, recycle, trash).

Inevitably during this process I hit my wall as an artist when I am no longer sure what I will need to keep in order to continue being productive.

I feel that this is a sort of reciprocity failure applied to downsizing belongings as an artist. Indeed, this is the focal point when the relationship between creative potential and support from material objects breaks down, and my earthly possessions become a hindrance rather than a catalyst for creative work.

After a period of intense gestation I have finally put forward my first blog post and face the deafening threat of allowing my creative energies to be visible to others. This is a terrifying experience, and this lovely little video (audio by Ira Glass and video montage by David Shiyang Liu @ http://vimeo.com/thedak) is testament to why that might be. Indeed, there seems to be a gap between my vision and my production, a gap that might appear to others as bad art, and appear to myself as the crushing feeling that my work is inadequate and somehow missing the quintessential originality that artists seem to crave.

This friendly reminder could not be more timely as I embark on a new phase of creative work, allowing my work to be seen and consumed by the masses, unhindered by the habitual inhibitions that hold me hostage.

Allowing my work to me imperfect, to stand on its own and to simple be without pretense is the most challenging position I’ve had to face as an artist and cultural producer.

The irony of this post is of course that in contemporary creative work it is quite hard to say anything that hasn’t been said before, or do something that hasn’t been done before, and the most unique contribution one can make would be not so much in the form, content or medium but simply in providing an original perspective on existing material in the world around us.

Reminiscent of found art, or pop art, post-modern cultural production seems to quote from the past, or even the present; redigesting existing materials and presenting them in a new light. It’s not as fresh as inventing a new style of painting or instigating an art movements, but it has its own flavour.

In any case, it is my feeling that crediting individuals with entire art movements is misleading and illusory and leads to the misguided belief that as artists we somehow have a task or responsibility to create a monolithic legacy to ‘make history’ to be successful as an artist. Crediting individuals or elite groups of artists with entire art movements in -HIRstory- does locate seminal moments of social and artistic transformation but it obscures the multitude of creative voices and spirits that inspired and supported the artists who enjoy the limelight.

Despite Ira Glass’ proposition that emerging artists have good taste and produce work that does not measure up to their own standards (does that ever change, I wonder, without succumbing to the syndrome of the egotistical diva artist?), I think there is a subtle joy that comes from artistic production that on its own makes it worthwhile. Producing large volume of work, yes I absolutely agree. But by decreasing the volume of individual pieces and tapping into the subtle grace of the creative process, we as artists are collectively doing the subtle work of influencing one another and contributing to what will, in time, be recognized as an art movement.

http://vimeo.com/24715531

Dear Blogosphere,

After months of gestation my modest blog is ready to launch itself into the big blogosphere. It’s a big intimidating world out there and adding my voice to the millions out there is a scary thing.

I am quite fond of the birthing metaphor as a parallel for the inception of this project. Though I’ve never given birth in this lifetime, the period of conception, gestation and birth provide a pungent impression of what creative projects are for me. Much like welcome a new spirit into the world, setting the stage for this new project is like laying out the blankets for a newborn, protecting it from unknown perils, nurturing it and above all else, accepting it as perfect in its imperfection.

For months now I’ve been feeling that there are so many ideas bursting that my mind is splitting at the seams. Of course, when the time comes for the project to be brought into this world I am wrought with anxiety and fears of what will happen to my project once I send it out into the world. Ultimately it will stand for itself and I won’t always be there to speak for it.

But, it will make its way, taking on a life of its own, and hopefully, carrying on a legacy of all the love and creative energy that went into sewing the fabrics of its existence.

Welcome to my little world.

Pixie making waves.