MARKINGS   are versions, reversions, revisions, retellings and ramblings in service of the ever-moving energies I've experienced in learning about Casual Alchemy.  No One Way, One Time, One Tone can catch the zap of it. So this website is a jumble of Markings, twisting back and foreward... more a bath, a shower.   

Casual Alchemists go by many names. They appear everywhere: as artists, wanderers, doulas,

Seekers, poets, Heyoka, Technicians of the Occult, The fangshi: "specialists in

occult prescriptions", The daoshi, "specialists in the Way"

 

Learn about the radical implications of considering:  Kairos and Near Enemies   

as overlooked key features of reality  GO TO: http://danielmack.com/Milkweed.html

 

Trying your 5D Etheric Biography, (perhaps an early obituary)             10.26.23

This is a self-guided encounter with old and emerging s’elves, your old and new gifts, clan, stuff, ways     

Approach like a Sudoku…  one step helps reveal another.  This is a Practice, not an event; like learning to look in a mirror, to see what’s going on.  It’s a series of questions to allow. Asked in any order. It’s likely “answers” will be delayed and disguised because this is essentially an encounter with your own tricksterself/god, Hermes.  It’s about learning, yes, even late in life, that you are on many different Spectrums; that there have been weatherfronts playing out your whole life you hardly knew about. This is about welcoming Psyche.      (Ask me about "Backseat Living")

                   

Why Do This?  Rilke had an answer in his  Duino Elegies:

“The trees you planted in childhood have grown too heavy.  You cannot bring them along.  Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold. "

 

Picasso, too: "The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, a passing shape, from a spider's web." ~

 

How to Do This?  Three ways:  Alone, Quiet,   Alone Active,   With Others        

Start anywhere! But do get to all three ways;  they have different inflections

BE CURIOUS, Make Notes, altars, herms, piles ABOUT :

?YOUR MANY S’ELVES  as Mate, Parent, Archivist, witness, Re-teller, wounded-healer, 

?YOUR MORPHING “GIFTS”:  what you Make, midwife; What beliefs you hold and Model

?YOUR TOOLKIT?   your favored go-to “tools” of dealing with others? Your First Stories?        

?Your STUFF  What gathers around you? What do you seek out?                               

?YOUR NEEDS Evolving Responses to Finding Joy, Awe, Encounters with Nature and

 the Feral, the Need to Make and the Need for Others                       

?YOUR PAIRINGS? saced/profane    Wounds/WOUNDING,  Fit/MisFit       

 How things are  Interstitial: Always, quietly, Between AND BOTH              

?YOUR VISITORS? Your Shadows, hungry ghosts, near enemies,  

The gods: Hermes! (wears Cap of Invisibility),  Hestia?   

?CLAN  Who are you most drawn to? Comfortable around?                            Fits or Misfits?

?CLANCESTORS  who do you count in your lineage?          Still?

?IMAGES/SHAPES/COLORS/PATTERNS you’re most pulled by.             Lines? Or Spirals?

?STRUCTURES of TIME/RELATIONSHIPS  Everybody “organizes” or sees the world a

bit differently; different, rhythms, metaphors

?Just Notice What’s Blowing In…   asides, blinks, Changes?          Stays?    Goes?   

This is Your Spiritual Kitchen drawer where Odd things stay until they’re moved   

Weatherfronts of anxiety, depression, "panic" indicate the presence of the gods, particularly Pan

 

?Your MOVES OUT   Your Gestures, Investments of Body and Time?

Figuring, puzzling out, Witnessing  the appropriate from the deadening and draining        

Trust that your psyche can, does and will find expression                                “canalizing”

Find the right Alembics,  or let them find you.

 

Most Simply:  Notice, Now,  Rearrange Things,  Be with Empties, Go for a Walk (not a hike

 

 

October 26, 2023
Liminal thinking is an approach where options, lurking gods (often Pan),  are always first recognized, hosted, welcomed. It relates to the practices in Surrealism, alchemy, kintsugi, haiku, knitting, cooking, carving, topiary, loose parts nature play, 
It’s a process,(not an action, it’s a gerund) of allowing the process to emerge and develop. It is Play-based, not Task-oriented.  Some learn to take a comfort and excitement about not really knowing the exact form of the outcome. You know you are just (and welcomed) as an interactor.

Ah, but be alert for a few near enemies (troublers disguised as helpers)  They both compulsively simplify the profound nature of reality, its transcendence; making experience of it more elusive and less accessible:

Capsule thinking is a form of liminal thinking that immediately surveys and sifts a situation for it edges, it's capsule "oh it's that!"  It tends dark. A quick sort, and an appraisal of Danger and  appropriate response, usually an avoidance, simplification or dismissal.  Magical thinking is another (stuck) form that stays quite light-- more a shower, a mist than a rain. Not much grows. It’s that aggression lurking in optimism; the bitter seed of positive thinking;  the controlling behind “helping”.     

     

There are Ways to practice Liminal Thinking, to balance.  (Alone Quiet, Alone Active, With Others)

Here are three:

Make a notebook: create "pages" from junk mail envelopes, produce bags and old tax folders. See wht yearns to be collected in there! 

Make a "tool"Hey, quick, just look in a drawer, for  skewer, chopstick, twist tie; Put it all together with something you found on that walk you just took. Yikes, what can you do with such a thing?

Make A Story … Examine three very recent events in time/space.  Imagine, roll over possible Connections, Allow Alt logics/connections: an example  My Gallbladder surgery.  Cannot keep stone;  cannot drive for two weeks Roots, Branches of this Story ?   “Protect you from head on collision with medical waste truck transporting gall stones to the refinery  They want to reimplant  And are being sent to a facility on the flat Prarie that building stonework monuments as part of an education vocational program for ex Ocy addicts”

      

“Canalizing”: cutting and allowing new channels for your waters to flow through.  The energy finds it Way… the gods arrive, bidden or not       More gods and clancestors: Hestia, Pan, Hermes

Revisiting Hestia               remember, the medium is the message          notes from early October, 2023

Tho I’m ageing, perhaps even aged, I resist looking at it straight on. I like the glances and side looks.  In that way it’s not a problem,  or condition, but more a puzzle or a challenge, not unlike what my 2-month-old grandson River is experiencing quite normally his life, as a series of arcs, flows, waves. There aren’t easy words for this approach later in life. It's often mistaken for "depression". The best I can do is call it “gerundic”. It’s not quite a noun, nor a verb, but some relentless activity, motion or process, quite adept at keeping itself out of sight, most of the time.  Ings??  Just when you think you’ve come to understand some part of it, it goes.quiet, or changes color. Something shes, moults,, changesAlchemy is probably the most accessible approach: learning to work on three (or more) levels of experience at once, most easily described as the head, the Heart and the Hand  Gremlins=Hungry Ghosts, mess with too clear a Way.  Buddha was onto it, with that tattoo of hers: “Things are not what They seem nor are they otherwise”.

But I digress. Gerundic, gerundic, a meson?  Leaving a trail of ambiguity: People muttering what was that?  We need a new messiah: preaching the comfort, the wisdom of the inexact, the impermanent. The gospel of the Gerund. Always a Motion: a falling away, rearranging, reappearing,  “Archetypal Gerunds”  Archetypes present as noun/verbs, not Characters wounding, pausing, seeing, doing, moving, comforting, engaging (versatile ways 5D/3D, “estranging”,  cord-cutting, Allowing

Butt Tie Address: This arc of endless movement, elegant and nauseous at once, leaves a wake of debris, mostly deadstuff. People, places, processes, plans, photographs; Hard to see.  Best glanced at, side of the eye, Holding the question: Is this really part of meaning in life, right now?  Quite a sieve.  Shamans offer tools to thin out such calloused stuff; They are “Cord Cutters” for severing relationships that only present the illsion of vitality; in practice, they are the Hungry Ghosts, feeding  on us, hovering, lurking, lingering around as  Longing, (the core of discontent)Memory, Order, Clarity, Planning, Photography, Grudges, Haunting Wrongs, DoomSaying, Ethical Dualism                          

Buttery Regress: embrace Humor, play with children, preferably 2 and 3 year olds, Talk less, Find Clan, Practice misfitting in; Noticing the Changing nature of what’s compelling; what creates a sense of meaning in life.  Those may be two different  things!

Consult the Trickster    who sees, asks Questions

Must risk always tip towards the self-destructive with substances, raw abrasive emotions

How interested, excited, attentive might you be to the details of another person’ daily life?

Where, when, with whom do you find meaning, contentment?  Has that shifted during your life?

Your emerging Spectra?  More ASD? Like you Father?   Your gods? Muses?

Ah, how best, now, to use your gifts, experiences in service of  the well-being of your self and others?

What can do be Witness to at this time in your life? What do you know about Mnemosyne?  Heyoka?  Hestia? Hermes and his Cap of Invisibility. 

Explore/Draw the Comet, the Arc, the Kaliedescope, the Season, the Spiral, Umwelt, Yugen,

 

Welcome Your Pan Disturbed in his secluded afternoon naps, Pan's angry shout inspired panic 

in lonely places. Panic    feeling of total sudden fear;  often attributed to the presence of a god.

The Seven Remembrances 

1. I am subject to aging. No way to avoid aging. 

2. I am subject to ill health. No way to avoid illness.

3. I am going to die. No way to avoid death. 

4. Everyone and thing I love will change and be separated from me.

5. My favorite shirt will wear out at the elbows. There might be another on Ebay.

6. I am going to move out of my house someday. No way to avoid moving.

7. Only true possessions are my actions; I cannot escape their consequences.

Do not suppress knowledge of our frailty, impermanence and fears that lie

in the depths of our consciousness. Welcome these hungry ghosts as guests.

 

         

               

Blinking Your Reptile Eye, an Omega Institute conference on Well-Being, Sept, 2023

 

MARKINGS   (2014)

1. It is not passive. It requires some time and interest in self-reflection:

Why is this interesting to me?

What do I think it will do for me?

Am I willing to let this into my life/schedule right now? 

How do I feel about paying $25/week for this?  What do I expect?

2. It invites you to take charge of creating your own format. 

Limits of who else is involved: who are these people? Do I think there was some Hand of Fate that convened us?  Or is it just a seemingly random

3. There are echoes, models, resonances with related experiences::  Is this a forum?, a course? a religious experience? a scam? a club?  YES! 

It's a way for each of us to walk up to a mjirror and see what we see.  It's likely not what we saw a few years ago, nowr perhaps what we were expecting.  This is the invitation to be kind to your Self as you come to recognize new and old parts.  The MARKINGS exercises will help materialise (matter) lingering, stubborn, gestating and emerging s'elves

4. DAN's NOTES: Sense and Non-Sense:

objects??  What ELSE: Compasses, souvenirs, scars, guides, whisperers to the Missing, the Longed for , less visible
Making  and spirituality  Alchemical: head, hand, heart/  crossed with activity, risk,  story(new/old), joy/wonder
Self-directed in a group/ like a buffet    Different qualities (see needs) of contact/response 
What are your needs?  Now?   Hunt? Smell/sense, read signs
What are you Hunting? Look at repeated themes, stories, people  What risks are you taking or Not Taking
What Shapes attract, repel?   How much privacy? Rituals? Altered time waywardartists.blogspot.com/

SET TEMPO:  Send Blanks, Questions…

5. REFERENCES

http://www.shambhalaart.org/      http://skylake.shambhala.org/arts.php