Blinking your Reptile Eye 9/7/2023
wellbeing practices for changemakers The Omega Institute
DECLARATION OF WELLBEING - (wellbeing-project.org)
Daniel Mack offers a Loose Parts! Casual Alchemy Studio (a playdate, X workhop) where you can rest, explore, or make things from the boxes of curiosities he’s brought. It’s a way to turn thoughts, ideas, and feelings into objects using your native curiosity, playfulness, and intuition.
For 90 minutes. BE NOT a Caretaker/Changemaker! Nothing to fix or repair perhaps just a weather report! via “Loose Parts” Erratic-Idiosyncrasy-HAIKU of Creativity . In safe space Browse for Personal, Private Opportunities ways, rhythms Rituals, Meet the Near Enemies, gremlins and Hungry Ghosts…. of changemakers! Just off scene, but always THERE!
More practice, comfort with changing speed, direction, Confident in some Return to stability.
ISSUE burnout, misdirection, weariness. “Changemakers (at the forefront of addressing most complex issues facing humanity) are often simultaneously experiencing deep personal struggles with far-reaching implications on their lives, relationships, and their organizations. In chronically under-resourced environments, culture of the social change sector too often encourages care of others before they take care of themselves. “ Self-Care is suspect, possibly “Narcissistic!” There’s a hidden, high cost in that! Being personally attentive is NOT at odds with a greater Mission. It is part of it! Find ways to name, catalyze, model, normalize, HONOR a culture of inner wellbeing for CMs; to embed subtle wellbeing practices as core part of being a changemakers: (Is it different for the Generals or Foot soldiers?)
Goal not transient Happiness, but developing attitude towards the moving target of Contentment, of Meaning; Better appreciate yourself as an ” alliances of opposites”, ambiguities, impulses
Tolerate Ambuguity Learn how to hold and Integrate Impulse Energy into daily Life Delaying Action/Response TO FIX
Develop your DOG-self: Appreciating the Feral/Domestic at once; Being a vigilant Border Creature between worlds, managing the flutter of unpredictability. Explore the innate, elusive feral, venal wild, amoral, wounding, violating, destruction as valid, shadow aspects of Caretaking”Inner Well-Being”!
Explore Your Changing Mission/Meaning by recognizing your current talents and capacities.
Porosity: Searching for something together” for help: poem, animal today? Sick? to share discoveries
STYLE of talking about this is as important as “content”! (The medium is the message) It must model the accessible idiosyncratic. challenge, stretch and encourage casual, indirect, non-organizational, non-capitalist skills. Try PlayDate Model --not always at work or a Workshop. Scrapbook, Journal styleto honor idiosyncrasy and shared personal ways. Be underwhelming, unpolished, “inner” is just that, not easily, immediately accessible. It errs, wanders, dips, repeats, gets fuzzy. TO WIT Lean on Asides, discovery, accidents, coincidences. Break passive Audience/Leader role. Model losing control. Co-Create We each have a Piece: Throw together. time to be Quiet, feral, Creatively disorganized. Watching and Witnessing as action of integrity, relieved from ACTION Weatherman cant fix weather. Atmospheric, aromatic, a graze, touch… not a punch, poke of handshake.
Wellbeing practices for changemakers
“The soul’s duty is to listen to its own desires and abandon
itself to its master passion” Rebecca West
PREFACE: to see anew:
Ways of Approaching Wellbeing: to Revisit, Rebalance, Retrieve Meaning;
Leonardo’s:
Arte/Scienza: Balance male/female Corporalita: Integrate body/spirit Connessione: Practice love Curiosita: Seek truth
Dimostrazione: Take responsibility Sensazione: Cultivate awareness
Sfumato: Engage shadow no harsh borders
Kurt’s: Consider your intersecting Realities: The Imagined, Remembered and Perceived
Dan’s: Talk Less Play More Smile More Remember dreams Always ask “And What Else?” Notice Shadows, animal tracks and scat Did I already say “Talk Less”? Find something small and empty. What could it hold?
Walk Barefoot Sit in the sun Be with children
PART ONE Why, now, are you even drawn to this? Check Your Sticks and Carrots
“Bidden or not, the gods arrive” in Guise, as Needs, Hungry Ghosts, Near Enemies, Symptoms, Strangers, Children; As Nature, Family, neighbors, coincidences, accidents, injuries, weather and The Elements. Their work, play, role is to amuse, vex, confound humans. They tinker with meaning in human life, its form and flow. And, meaning migrates! It shifts with age, circumstance and asks us to move along -- or abandons us.
Feeling Ready for CHANGE: for other Ways, rhythms, Stories; that it’s time to meet your shy, deprived, deformed, dark, shadow selves living in the Creative Unconscious. Ready to explore that Homeopathic Melancholy you carry around. Driven by curiosity, adventure, a felt shift, wanting more PLAY, more comfort with Creative Disruption, Wild Order; to learn more about those “powers we pretend to understand”, Etheric Cords, Ancestral Karma, our Reptilian Eye, the Poetic Life. You realize your Story has worn out.
Stung: by Distress, Trauma, Loss, a Wound, a Transition, Grief, Imbalance, Dread, Feeling Stuck; Need a Break/Relief from Clarity, Utility, Practical, Value, from “tedious industry.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky was onto it: I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is predestined to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead somewhere, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it. Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction, he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, from Notes from the Underground (1866)
PART TWO Can I do it??
Not easy this and so esoteric, Occult. -- James Hillman
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.” – Mary Oliver
As you are, you have the capability and right to do the Work. The Work is always going on. Consider that meaning is about contentment and not happiness. Ego may just haven’t seen it yet. Special Initiations, Books, YouTubes, Programs, Zooms and Seminars are not necessary but may be helpful. There are “Technicians of the Sacred” (artists, poets, shamans, priests) around to help you. They are spiritual bricoleurs (handymen), helping make the Way more clear for you. You often encounter them by “accident”. It all has something to do with attitude and your Balance, shifting and adjusting to maintain contentment, not necessarily happiness. It’s what Connie Zweig named “the alliance of opposites”
There are Ways: Learning more about when to use The Head (Rules, Counting, Patterns, thinking, logic), The Heart (Intention, feeling, hunch, Intuition, Memory) and The Hand (Physical, Matter, mechanics, making, the technical) All to get More access/comfort/fluency with your inner Technician, Priest, and Magician-Intuitive. The goal is to integrate these parts, so they work differently, but together, not lionize one over others. “Well-being” is about balance.
You likely already have a solid tool kit: curiosity, memory, patience, attention, solitude, intuition, dreams and imagination. These are forces for change equal to storms, winds, quakes and waves Oh wait, there’re more: The Big One. Just be Playful. Put yourself self in charm’s way. It involves heart, mind, and hand at the same time. Oh, and the often banished one: your Melancholy, so easily vilified as mere evil “depression”; it’s really another fuel cell of meaning.
There are likely old ways tucked somewhere in you. Your Reptile Brain knows about, Balance, Shadow, We can. and do, get out of balance of Head, Hand Heart, KS Well-being” is about balance, seeing tending and repair as core activities. There are three ways to do this: Just be Quiet, Alone, Active, and With Others to find the clues, portals, the trails of crumbs to move along towards meaning. Each of these helps develop different creative capacities.
PART THREE Developing Your Imaginal Health practices:
We are being lived by powers we pretend to understand W. H. Auden
Consider and Honor your Needs.
We are always entangled with our core four or five or more Needs; they act together and quite separately at times. When they are active, they produce a life of meaning, a capacity for transcendence. What are they?
1. Need for Awe, Wonder, Novelty, Surprise, Joy: It’s the allure of sunrises, sunsets, waterfalls, animals, finding a bird’s nest or just a feather, baby anythings. It is the need for contact with other realities; “magic realism” -- delight in seeing one world shift into another. Sometimes it’s as simple as momentarily forgetting the tasks and agendas of the day as we are presented with the sunshine, air, the budding trees. There is a sudden simplifying. This capacity for wonder or appreciation is at the core of creativity, of making. Awe and Wonder is a step towards the Unknown. You have allowed to be out of control; porous to other forces:
to discoveries, deep surprises; It has something to do with Mono no Aware: an appreciation for impermanence, transience, wistfulness and tolerable sadness.
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” From that Dylan Thomas poem
2. Need to experience Nature, as feral, organic, dangerous, amoral, bacterial; its hungry ghosts and small gods. It’s a deep interest (or aversion) to risk and disorder. Our carnal selves.As Wallace Stevens put it: “His anima liked its animal.”
This is about light danger, shadow, control, violation, the unexpected, disorder, chance, accident, the organic, fairies, demons, nature spirits and other ‘small gods’. This need has something to do with our inherited twitch towards the Hunter-Gatherer. Not just about legumes and meat. It’s about Longing, the primal need for what we don’t have. (see that Dostoevsky quote again) It’s about Feeding, Wounding/Being Wounded as part of being; the disorder before the new order;
SHADOW is more than just a feature of this need. It’s the elusive Other Way, is the atmosphere, the weather around all this. It’s the nagging, pesky other way of seeing, explaining. It generates anger and compassion. They are weatherfronts. They pass. It’s refreshingly primitive, dangerous, unpredictable and a constant, deep part of us all. It threatens Order, demolishes and allows, yea, demands, a rebuilding. Much of life is hidden, not inaccessible, just hidden. Much
of our “work” really happens in and away from conscious access or control, in The Shadow,
3. Need for Dexterity: Doing something with the Body. making, getting and ordering things. They are a unique, powerful, mute language of the soul. Matterings: Making this into that. There’s something seductive, a bit god-like, and inflating, about it. Making Musings Visible with Marks and Objects: a wordless language about Patterns/Themes with seeming opposites. Live/dead, dark/light, simple/complex, broken/fixed, nature/culture. Spare/dense, Big/small? What about Making Trouble? Making Do? Making and Objects, (personal art, cooking, gardening) are indirect with their own distinct powers: Unlike Words (psychotherapy), Body (exercise, yoga), Gallery Art (ego/product bound)
4. Need for being part of a Story, perhaps, Community. Because we are a part of messy nature, and not separate, we are a plurality, a mob, of souls; Loosely knit together, easily fragmented and “lost: Each has Deep Story Structures, --the archetypes--, sometimes confusing or in opposition They are milling about, repositioning, waiting, active quietly, shifting with aging, crisis, life stage. Stories are about the interplay, and collision, of our Imagined, Remembered and Perceived realities. (Thank you, Kurt Seligmann for this wording.)
Stories are our favored lenses we develop to see and organize the world and our place(s) in it.
Stories are about our need to hear and tell about getting Wounded, Wounding others and surviving. This telling helps us recognize the gremlins, -“Oh, you again!”- life-long recurring themes and characters. Our stories are often about: “Man in Hole, Man got out of hole.”
Find Others to share all this with. They may or may not be “family.” They may appear, by accident, … planning. And they change. Look out for an emerging Clan, new Playmates who help normalize, integrate the erratics of your life, helping find tolerably fearful responses
Shed or Avoid people who dampen you. It’s sometimes hard to tell a teacher from a toxic person. It’s called cord-cutting and may seem like estrangement. Be alert to this.
PART FOUR Asides and Attitudes:
"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, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." ~ Pablo Picasso
1. Be Curious and Pleasantly Suspicious about the curves and potholes in this Path. Call them Gremlins, Shadows, Near-Enemies, Hungry Ghosts. Bumps, Rumble Strips. They are the naturally occurring encounters with the venal-feral-wild, the changing weather, the atmosphere, the elements, yes, dangers, we live in. And for that reason, we have a hard time recognizing them. As a teacher of mine put it: “We don't know who discovered water, but we are certain it wasn't a fish.” ― John Culkin
2. You got a Reptile Eye, SHADOW is a core part of Being: People Wound and Get Wounded Recognize it! Accompanying Blame, Shame, pettiness, Mortification, Moments of Envy, selfishness, Grudges are card-carrying members of the territory. They cannot be banished but recognized! See Dali Lama Cheese/Fruitcake Story Then there’s Longing, Karma, Legacy: More Things that Blur, Blend, hang out on and with us. We are not distinct, nor orderly; we seep, leak, molt into the rest of the world. Impulse Energy is part of the feral[; its like any energy and can be used for or against. How much to use? When? Why? In service of what? Not easily answered, and “so occult” as Hillman would say.
3. You might still think Time is linear. It’s not. Kairos is a key, hidden sense of time: Things happen at the right, critical or opportune moment. Time has an organic quiet, ahistorical nature that is not chronological, not at all like a clock. Not Chronos. Kairos leads to a different kind of dai Gerund Living “wounding” Flutters pairings, not opposites: Watch/Act can be BOTH at once!: Feral=selfish and Noun and verb in motion; No start, No End A bit alarming Never Enough! Seasonal/Tidal Several Ways at once: get used to the dissonance of it; Ife forwards, backwards Zweig Kierkegaard
4. You might still think Life is like a Circle or Line: beginning, middle, end. It’s not. It’s a set of Wandering Spirals: Indirect—not so logical, rational, or always visible. There are recurring times of depression, suffering, loss of meaning and direction. The Spiral -gracefully- holds the tension between the familiar and the new. Yet, new life will emerge. Green Man does return. It’s a Feature of Kairos: overlapping categories. Life is a flutter between then, now, coming; The remembered, the experienced, the imagined. Chaos and Order. Piles and Files. Each of those can free or shackle us. The mix changes. As Auden put it: “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” In this flutter, Meaning Migrates. It must be found, tended; It goes away, to be found again, and again. Such is the Work and the Path. find Jill Purce’s, The Mystic Spiral.
5. The Ghost of Max Weber: You still might think you got to get to work, get something done, something Founded! Well, yes and no, or not right now. It’s a rhythm. There are different parts; they each need their time. As David Sobel puts it: Talking to trees and hiding in Trees precedes saving trees.
6. Implications of our Organic nature! Decay, renewal. an organic process loss (and return) of control a constant cycle (a gerund, not a noun or verb of harmony, disruption, repair; Finding Making Meaning, not Happiness; Kairos, not Chronos; Spiral, not Line or Circle; Shadow, The Feral, is a partner, one of the alliance of opposites
7. This Gerundic Life! (a gerund: not a noun or a verb, but both) implying, reminding of the constant cycle of harmony, decay, disruption, repair, renewal.
8. Impulse Energy Learning how to honor, hold and integrate it into daily life WAIT! Delay Action, the Urge, Response TO FIX, CHANGE; First Wait, Watch, Witness.
PART FIVE
Possible PlayWays/Practices for Wellbeing
Remember those “fast” ways mentioned earlier:
Rebecca West: “The soul’s duty is to listen to its own desires and abandon itself to its master passion”
Dan’s Ways: Talk Less, Be with children, Play More, Smile More, Remember dreams, Always ask “And What Else?” Notice Shadows, animal tracks and scat, Sit in the sun; Walk Barefoot
Just find something small and empty. What could it hold?,
Kurt’s Ways: Consider your various intersecting realities: Imagined, Remembered and Perceived
Leonardo’s Ways: Connessione: Practice love, Curiosita: Seek truth, Corporalita: Integrate body/spirit Dimostrazione: Take responsibility Sensazione: Cultivate awareness
Sfumato: Engage shadow no harsh borders Arte/Scienza: Balance male/female
You’ve already Started!
Whats on your cellphone: Select 10 pictures to Share. Watch what “story” emerges
Find your Other name… it’s an anagram of the letters in your given names
Each of the Needs (Awe, Feral, Story, Dexterity) generates ways to practice.
Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. M.C Richards
Free associate about your encounters and memories with Elements. Make notes.
Aether/Light/Air: Shadow, lunar light/reflection more on shadow, reflected, blown in/away, Birds, smell, aroma, dust, feathers, leaves Shades, Shadow, Wind, Storms; photographs, toys, mementoes. Fire: Cooked, warmed, lit, burnt, Sit in the Sun, fumage, candles, ashes, charcoal, onyx, ruby, smoke, blister, light. Earth: support, nourishment, decay, buried, hidden, old, nests, Be barefoot, wander; Find something interesting; Make Marks using mud. Dig a hole. Oh, The Garden: The deer, the soil, the fox, the rabbit, the rain…Look at Bosch’ Garden of Earthly Delights. Water: wash, drown, nourish, lubricate, flood, rain, washed away, out, in, diluted. Ocean, Coral Reef, Iceberg, Beach, puddle, Shells, thirst, pee Wait, aren’t humans 90% water? Include weather, bugs, animals, birds
EXPLORE THE FERAL “the enticing beauty and repellent brutality of nature” as Francis Jammes put it. There’s a built-in urge to change things, maybe destroy, violate. How much? And in service of what. Don’t deny the urge, but examine, welcome and modulate with it
Change your Speed: Likely, you’ll try to slow down. Find out more about it. Milan Kundera: Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared. Where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone those loafing heroesof folk song who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars tlks about how imagination needs moodling: Long inefficient, happy, idling, dawdling, puttering. Going Nowhere (gets you Now Here?)
Wander: It’s called “Derive”
“The gods are in the diseases” Note Your Symptoms? Bruises, Conditions? What Spectrum are you on? Times when you feel most like a victim
Follow Present Threads: Make notes or Cards of What’s presenting? lingers, vexes, haunts, peeves, annoys? Welcome Them as Directionals Clues, Puzzle Pieces to your Unconscious. They are not “Problems”. They are Your Familiars, Your Guides -- and your Gremlins.
Put a Band-Aid on paper or card. Do something to it, with it.
Consult/Manifest your Fears: reincarnate as failing landscaper tied to noisy broken machines
Recall Stories of your experiences in Nature: with animals, insects, weather… Get it down to a 4-5 minute rendition. Coincidences, Accidents, Oddities. Make a card for each one you recall.
What story lines, images, metaphors, characters you are staying in touch with? Family tales, Fate, Karma, accidents, coincidences. Are you Poor Me? Mom? or the one calling Mom? Look at Your Profiles, your CV and Bios. And what’s stuck onto your refrigerator.
There are Stories, then there are Meta-Stories, which we are only vaguely aware of; the ones we look for clues about; the ones about our shadow.
How is your STORY shifting? What are you seeing now, drawn to, averse to? When, with whom do you feel joyful, competent, playful, connected?
Describe Yourself in 50 words, or less. Now, do another one, a bit different. Start writing your obituary. See how You may be surprised! you want to be remembered.
ONTO WHAT YOU MAKE: this into that. A century ago, the Surrealists developed several Ways into the Creative Unconscious, being a little out-of-control, paying attention to the idiosyncratic, and shamanic, in us all. Learn more about: Aerography, Automatism, Bulletism, Calligramme, Collage, Coulage, Cubomania, Cut-up technique, Fumage, Frottage, Mucilage, Grattage, Cabbage,
Just Prepare Consider preparing a distinct, integral step. Collect, arrange.
Work simple, small, work with fragments, combining items from the desk or kitchen drawer or what you found on today’s walk. Pick an empty container from your recycling. Let it sit with you until you’re moved to put something into it. Or not. (Sometimes an old jar is just an old jar. There are even limits on the sacred.) Perhaps choose a piece of wood, or stick or driftwood, and just sand it till it’s as smooth as you like
Use Fragments and Empties: Blocks, Jars, Envelopes. What can you put in them? Use Twist ties, Blocks, Rubbings, Balancing, Make Piles, Bundles How little of something is needed to make meaning? Some words, some images, some objects. Card-size notes, 2 1/2” x 3 1/2” seem to be kind for this activity
Make in the spirit of Haiku. Though it’s usually a form of poetry, those same spare guides can inspire some interesting object-making by combining something seasonal, sensual and something from the cultural, technical world. Haiku. After you’re sitting there for awhile, let a few words, and images emerge about what you are seeing and feeling. a moment of insight, about the world or in your mind and heart. Try to make three short lines. Haiku is brief, clear, direct. Evoking a real image, like the PLOP! Of a frog It changes In tone, contrast or surprise after the first one Might use irony, humor as a way to temper too much straight out sentimeltality. Remember, living is about the fusion of opposites.
Making Deck of cards: What you were issued: Birth, Family, MyersBriggs, Signs suits of Feral moments+ pocket art, totemics , symptoms, accidents, memories, anxieties As Gerunds? Stuff in Drawers? Inlude your dear list of grudges, peeves as a suit in this deck
Make Marks Use Pounded Pigment from stones, mud or flowers. Try Rubbing on various textures; Try: mark-making with the smoke of a candle.
Make Tools (Wands/Talismans) Find 2-3 Things: feathers, shells, leaves, sticks, Connect with yarn, dental floss, twist ties, rubber bands; Add color.
Make a toy boat to float in the nearest water.
Make Things to Wear Hats, Masks, Jewelry, decorate a T shirt
Make Gifts for friends, family, enemies. Trade things. Make things together with others. Just Leave Them Somewhere
Stay casual This is an exploration, not a debate or argument or sales pitch. Light Touch! not full arguments, but allurements. Take Small Risks
Do Family members/memories appear? Remember, it’s all about MAterial/PAttern
PLAY! Seek Children as Guides .
Let Go of Words try Maps, Images, Doodles. Try a Softcover 6”x8” CVS Book
Try some ways of Making which are different from your normal ways. Get a bit uncomfortable.
PART SIX Scrapbook of Other, Older Ways: More to learn about:
Find that Portia Nelson poem, Autobiography in Five Chapters.
What do you think of The Five Remembrances
BRENDA UELAND has an interesting term:“Moodling.”
Notes on Spiral Vision: mostly from Jill Purce’s definitive book, The Mystic Spiral:
Morse Peckham on chaos
Enneagrams and MyersBriggs are good ways to help sort and re-sort all this
Zen Story: The Master Archer
There was once an old general of war who had spent his entire life fighting. Now at the end of his career, he became tired of fighting and had but one wish: to spend the rest of his days studying archery, the one art of war he had not mastered. He had heard of Master archers, living in distant monastery, who spend a lifetime doing nothing else but perfecting their skill. Their life appealed to him, and so he retired from fighting and found the monastery. He begged the Abbot to join and pass the remainder of his days studying archery. And for 10 years that is what he did. Then, when he had perfected his skill as an archer, the abbot of the monastery came to the general and said, “It is time to leave.” The general was shocked and protested, saying that his life in the world outside the monastery was over. His only desire was to remain within the monastery walls and continue to meditate on the bow, the arrow, the target. The general argued and pleaded with the abbot, but the abbot was resolute. He insisted that the general must leave. To advance his skill, it was necessary for the general to go out into the world and teach what he had learned. And so he left the monastery.
Once outside, the general returned to the village of his birth. As he neared the village, through the surrounding forest he noticed a bull’s-eye on a tree, with an arrow in the exact center. The general was surprised by this and then noticed more trees with bull’s-eyes and arrows in the center. Soon he came to the farmlands and there saw many barns and homes with bull’s-eyes and arrows dead center.
He became agitated and walked quickly into the village center. There, on every wall of every building was a bull’s eye with an arrow right in the center. The peace he had gained from his years in the monastery was gone. He was angry and indignant to find that after 10 years of study and reflection there lived an archer more skilled than him. In a rage, he approached the elders of the town and demanded that the archer responsible for this perfection meet him at the edge of town by the mill, in one hour. The general waited by the mill, but as the hour approached no one came.
There was, however, a young girl playing by the river. The girl noticed him and came over. ”Are you waiting for someone?” she asked, looking up at the general. “Go away,” he said, irritated. “you look like you’re waiting for someone said the girl, and I was told to come and meet someone here.” The general looked at the little girl and said, “I’m waiting for the Master archer responsible for the hundreds of perfect shots I have seen.” “Well, that’s me then,” said the girl.
The general, feeling confused and angry, looked skeptically at the girl. “If you are telling the truth, then explain to me how you can get a perfect shot every single time you shoot your arrow.”
“That’s easy,” said the girl. “I take my arrow and I draw it back very tight in the bow and I point it very, very straight and let it go. Wherever it lands I draw a bull’s-eye.”
Notes from an Article on Twilight Language by Peter Levanda
“The coded works of the alchemists seem to argue for a system of communication that is the transfer of deception: a system that undermines the social contract implicit in the idea of communication. The initial function of language was to deceive. The lie is at the heart of language. Language is a symbolic system that uses symbols to represent things that may or may not exist in “reality.” Language is a medium that is based on fiction: the mere fact of tenses—past, present, and future, not to mention all the variations of these basic three, for instance, the subjunctive mood or the future perfect tense—suggests an imaginal realm of possibility rather than a report on tangible events occurring at this precise moment: With alchemy, we have a rich literature that is full of both language and art. These media are equally obscure, with alchemical art often being described as “surreal,” and indeed the Surrealist movement of the twentieth century embraced alchemy as a kind of proto-Surrealism. But alchemical literature and art seem to insist on using communication to create distance between the author and the reader, an approach that seems counterintuitive. Why did it become necessary or desirable to employ language to render communication less rather than more effective? The answer to this question is to be found in the very nature of language itself and in particular a subset known as “twilight language.”: language that defeats the purpose of language: a text that is composed of metaphors, obfuscation, and misdirection but which paradoxically is intended to reveal a hidden truth.
Are references to semen and the menstruum meant to be taken literally after all? Well, yes and no. Twilight language is meant to be both literal and figurative. Biological references are only part of the puzzle; otherwise twilight language would not be necessary. What the alchemical texts conceal, and what twilight language reveals, is a “science” and an “art”—(see Leonardo) we really do not have a word in the English language that encompasses both—that is a study of reality itself. This is not the materialist reality of the scientist alone, and it is not the reality of the artistic or religious spirit alone. Twilight language is a kind of notation that describes both physical reality and the consciousness that perceives it. To try to derive single definitions for the terms one finds in Fulcanelli or in any of the other alchemical authors is to miss the point entirely. Each term in the twilight language is multivalent as well as multivocal. Twilight language describes a process, and it is that process that is identical for everything in creation, since everything in creation proceeded from the same First Cause. To the alchemist, creation is ongoing. It has not stopped. The alchemists know that the universe is constantly expanding and that we are part of that expansion. Alchemists attempt to mimic that process, and it is a process that includes not only chemical transformations in the laboratory but psychobiological transformations that mirror the chemical versions. “Our mercury” is everywhere, as is “our gold.” While it seems almost insipid—a kind of New Age “we are all one” sentiment—the alchemist means it literally, and demonstrably. It is a way of telling the absolute truth, using the same language that we employ to lie and to deceive, and turning it on its head with all its metaphors and tenses and literary allusions by making it purely intentional and deliberate. It is the paradox of twilight language that makes it so compelling, and in that tension between the word and what it represents—between the symbol and the thing symbolized—is found the truth. Full Article
Notes on Dan Mack’s Objects of Animal Energies
Deer Scapula $80
a play on white, light and support
Cernunnos $50
for your collection of feathers
Basket of Carved Stone Animal spirit totems $30 each
for your pocket, home altar or a gift to a distressed friend
Trout from Rusted Flashing NFS
Garden Spirit Animals $40
hovering, skimming, riding the waves of the garden;
Protection from Deer? Hmmm
Objects of “natural magic”
Why might you want them?
To help engage with the spirit world.
To Reinforce and Witness Belief in Power of Found Shapes, Textures, Touching, Holding
To Allow for Other Energies to present in their own ways and times.
Reminders of the What Else is It? nature of everything we encounter.
Celebration of the unconscious, dreams, symbols, the casual
The Themes and Techniques of Making these objects are often alien
THEMES of Natural Magic Objects:
About Animism, Commonality not Domination or status
About Life as Piles, not Rows
Finding Meaning on the periphery sexuality, madness, l punishment, violence, deceit, secrecy,
About Viewer Engagement, Excitement, Participation, Completion, not just admiration!
Recognizing our shared common Four Needs for :
The Organic: versus technical (PRIMITIVISM)
Stories… usually about “otherness” a rebalancing, tipping (COMMUNITY)
Dexterity/Transformation: Making this into that: “I am becoming” (FETISHES)
Awe/Wonder/Joy/Play (ALCHEMY)
Four Key TECHNIQUES:
PAUSING, A BREATH, JUST WAIT, ALLOW for Multiple Realities, Fluttering Standards
PLAYING: just ordering AND REORDERING; Using “stone the builders rejected”
ABSTRACTION, Wabi-sabi, rough, manipulated, raw, elusive
VIOLATION of Geometries, Accepted Ways of working and civility