Reflections on Weaving Words of Wisdom

It has been a full week since we were recreated by our retreat at Bellbunyah. All this week, I have been wanting to take some time to write down some of the insights and experiences gifted to me during that time, in order to bring the energy into a form which can be reshared with you all. In alchemy, there is an injunction to make the fixed volatile and the volatile fixed. Last weekend we attended to the first part of that exhortation quite diligently, lessening the gravity of our egoic identity and its crystallised beliefs about the way it is in the world and what we have to do to promote our own survival. Towards the end of the weekend, we were guided to identify, through backcasting, actions we need to take to birth our recreated selves into the world. Writing this is my follow on step to make the volatile fixed, something which I don’t find particularly easy, since my tendency is to relish the potentiality of the dream or the vision, while struggling with a belief that to take action, to commit, is to limit rather than to ground.

Indeed, this was the first message that my talisman from the weekend gave to me about why it picked me. I noticed how my pleasure at receiving a gift quite quickly changed to a questioning: “Is the really the right stone for me”? On first sight, the stone didn’t seem particularly distinguished or exciting; however, as I recognised the urge to ask for the bag back and to pick again, I simultaneously realised that this was my stone’s message to me: I need to choose and then commit to my choices instead of second guessing them, to learn through taking committed action, rather than to leak my power and energy to what might be or might have been. And of course, in committing to my stone, I opened to the other messages it had to tell me: its domed shape with a flat bottom told me to reach for the heavens while staying grounded on earth; a small rough patch in its smoothness that I worried at with my finger showed me how my focus goes to what I perceive as flawed or imperfect; the red that appeared beneath the brown when held up to the light showed me how shining a light on one’s passions can transform external realities, and so on and so on. So many judgements cast upon one small stone that when withheld became a window into my mind. And it dawns on me, even as I write this, that to embrace my stone is ultimately to embrace myself.

The weekend was rich in such holographic experiences; all week, I have been psychically hearing: “What is in the one is in the whole, what is in the whole is in the one”. There were so many instances where there was a recognition of our connectedness, or indeed where the sense of separation broke down all together. I looked into the eyes of another and asked “who are you?” and witnessed how easily normal perceptions of reality break apart to reveal their inherent emptiness of anything but the One. Just as the asker and the asked are one, the seeker and the sought are one; I am the One.

During the week, I came across some lines of Rumi’s that put it so beautifully:

My Beloved grows

right out of my own heart

how much more union can there be.

Such is our human condition, however, that we cannot sustain such levels of awareness. This notwithstanding, I was further served to see also in the human foibles of others, a reflection of my own. It is so much easier to see in others that which you have difficulty in acknowledging in yourself. In particular, I am thinking about the people I met on the weekend with amazing gifts; gifts that the world is hungry for, but which are withheld through fear in all its guises and manifestations. While we have to nurture and cultivate our gifts, we can at times be too precious about them. Depending on the stage of their development, exposure to the elements can strengthen them or bring them to flower. Our gifts and our ability to give is maybe not as fragile as the vulnerability of our ego would like us to believe; pushing aside the ego’s desire to avoid humiliation in order to offer to others rewards us in two ways: in the offering of the gift itself and in the space it creates to en-courage others to do the same. As the weekend unfolded, a momentum of the heart grew in which we allowed each other to be who we are behind the masks - and it was beautiful to experience. This is not to say that there were not times when less charitable thoughts did not arise; for example, when sitting in the circle of the open session, I could catch myself sometimes thinking, ‘I wish that person would be quiet’, or passing judgement on an individual line contributed to our poem. But a wiser part of me knew that I needed to reclaim these projections, breathe into them and let them disperse. And what reward came from doing so! The poem we created was stunning, the whole so much more than the sum of its parts, a product born of love, connection and simply allowing.

At the time, I reflected on how the weekend was very much about embracing the energy of the Divine Feminine, cultivating silence and stillness in order to receive her wisdom through the channels of intuition and imagination. It’s not that the Masculine was absent from the weekend; it is simply that in our daily lives, in the world we live in the Masculine is so dominant. Action is privileged over stillness, and we respect the trajectories of growth, production, achievement; we have substituted matter for mater/mother, and expect that it will take care of us. We are slowly waking to the havoc and devastation that this modern day myth of masculine superiority has wreaked upon us and our planet, but given the extent to how this fiction has enthralled us, the spell of addiction to unconscious action is unlikely to be broken easily. That’s why it was such a privilege to experience the quality of action that is born out of stillness, so different from action that is simply reaction, which creates endless karmic chains in which we bind and compress ourselves into smaller and smaller possibilities of being.

It is easy to worry that we have gone too far in denying the Feminine and that she will turn on us with the wrathful face of a Kali or a Cailleach. So it may be. But for those us who are fortunate enough to be able to listen to our hearts, one message seems to be coming through, clear and strong: It is time to step up. This stepping up requires the integration of Feminine and Masculine; we need to heed the soul’s call and act upon it, trusting the guidance we receive, committing to our path regardless of whether it takes us away from where we thought we were headed. Just as with last weekend, we are all needed and we all have a role to play; just as with the human sculpture, we cannot plan ahead to know for certain what exact form that role will take. Instead, from stillness, we instinctively flow into the obvious action to take.

It is time for us to step up; it is time for us to receive our divinity and act consciously so that our creations are worthy of us.

Aloha

For my father on his 80th birthday

Images of you

So here it is, four score years. Four score years rather than eighty, because that is the way I imagine you saying it, choosing words that reference Judaeo-Christian culture rather than mere unadorned fact. And right there, with that opening thought, I see yet one more connection between us: that fascination with words as a cultural semiotic, firing the imagination and granting entry into other worlds, and overcoming the perception of separateness through the vicissitudes of time and space.

We are father and daughter; in me is you, a blood legacy that is both distant and immediate. It is, of course, the immediate that most concerns us; we have not travelled far from Homer’s exhortation that “It is a wise child that knows its own father” or from Shakespeare’s relatively recent inversion that “It is a wise father that knows his own child”. So, to mark the occasion of your four score years, I offer up some images of you and, in so doing, I also offer up a little of myself. Let us begin by recognising two things. The first is that my views of you are shaded and refracted through the dark glass of my own understanding and experiences. What is it to know another human being, when it is the unfinished business of our life journeys simply to know ourselves? The second stands in paradox to the first: that it is possible for others to see us more clearly than we see ourselves; that what we attempt to keep most hidden about ourselves is often that which is my obvious to the eye of the beholder. So, without further musing on the nature of truth, I invite you to step back through time with me, revisiting the rooms of my memory in which there are images of you.

What is my very first memory of you? The images are blurry and most moments of clearer focus have a suspicious correspondence to oft-viewed images in photo albums or the storylines of family recounts. However, I am guided by the visceral nature of some recollections. I remember, for instance, you stroking my cheek and asking me “Whatsa matter with the baby girl?” and the welling up of emotion as I reconciled the love of your touch, the security of being held, with the foreboding feeling that if you, the person I trusted and loved thought there was something wrong with me, there inevitably must be. And I fuzzily remember the infamous ‘stop acting like a two year old’ incident; hiding in the garage at Grandma and Grandpa’s, feeling scared, sad, and ashamed (what had I actually done that precipitated the incident?) and somewhat defiantly determined not to reveal any of the above emotions to those around me.

I look back at those two incidents and muse about how they connect to my propensity to hide from others when overwhelmed, or to show anger and defiance rather than mere sadness when I’ve been hurt. I remember the youthful tears and hurt that combined with a child’s perceived impotency to produce the infamous tantrums of my youth, the melodramatic maelstroms designed to readdress the power imbalance in the only way I knew how; the heady mixture of fear and delight as I raised the flood of your ire and allowed myself to be carried away by the unleashed furies within us both.

What was so important that it could precipitate such emotion? I remember a little Dutch porcelain shoe that you once used as an ashtray despite my begging you not to. You could not understand what I was making such a fuss about; I could not understand why you would smear grey ash over something that was mine. And most of all, I hated that I could not make you see it through my eyes, or even more frustratingly, that you did not instinctively understand. The powerful and frightening realizations that even those to whom you are bonded in blood and love are separate from you and outside of your control, and that, as a consequence, you can be set adrift in the world, alone and unconnected. Such are the traumas of a child whose psyche it is not content with being loved, fed, housed and educated. The personality wants endless validation, and once having detected the smallest wound to its sense of sufficiency and completeness, selectively collects evidence in an increasingly crazy attempt to prove itself right. We seek the reflection of ourselves in others, while capable of seeing only what we expect to see.

What is a child’s love for a parent? In essence, a needy, solipsistic thing made charming by the combination of strangeness and familiarity in which the parent recognises both themselves and something beyond themselves. For a child, love lies on the same polarity as hate. How I hated you at times for your transgressions against me. I remember the triumph of an accusation made to wound that finally found its target. Listening behind the kitchen door and hearing you say, “She really knows how to hurt a person”. At last a victory! This strange love is one that only a parent would forbear.

While a parent’s love may be uncoupled from hate, it is not so easy to escape from fear, love’s other dark companion. Age five, I am having my evening bath with my sister. Suddenly, some internal alarm clock signals and I attacked by the thought that it is past the time that you should be home. I start to cry and I am inconsolable, until you walk through the bathroom door and relief renders me exhausted. Age twenty eight, I am a new mother, unable to sleep at night, crying at the pain of the vulnerability to which my love for my son exposes me. Only those whom we love have the power to hurt us in such undeliberate, unforeseen ways to which no blame can be attached.

And yet we learn to cope with such pain, as we must, since life itself was designed to pull us apart: father from son, daughter from father, mother from son. I hated and resisted puberty because I understood it was a point of major change in our relationship. I hated myself and the changes in my body that I wanted to deny were happening. I remember how you said I smelled bad; I needed to lose weight. I remember when you said I couldn’t sleep in the motel room bed with you while mum tended to my sick sisters because people might get the wrong idea. I remember how you talked about sending me away to boarding school in Australia for my own good. I remember all these things and how they brewed up such a viscous concoction of self-loathing and misery that, in retrospect, it is totally unsurprising to me that I ended up hospitalised aged twelve. The blessing of illness was that it allowed me to see that you did care, the glimpses of pain and fear in your eyes perversely reassuring. From my very first hospitalisation, age six, I discovered that illness disrupted the normal operation on the world to place me forefront and centre. I still have the necklace you gave me on my very first trip to hospital, an adult looking necklace that seemed appropriate for my entry to an adult world. I was determined to be impressively brave at that time, and that very determination led to my fear of needles. I wrongly applied my observations of puncturing balloons to the puncturing of skin. Having observed that balloons were more easily punctured when their skin was tight, I thought the needle would go in more easily if I tensed the muscle in my arm. A wrong application of theory that led to other fraught encounters with each other down the track, such are the chain reactions that are set off by the seemingly smallest of beliefs.

Always this desire for you to be proud of me, and frustration and disappointment with myself when I felt that I’d done something that went against that. Even as an adult, I stayed with Mark longer than I should have because of the shame in facing you and telling you that I’d failed at my marriage. To my shame, I remember thinking how it would all be easier if you were dead, because then I couldn’t disappoint you. I understand the irrationality of such a belief, given that you have always allowed me to go my own way. But we allow ourselves to be imprinted young and then spend our adult years cautiously pushing at the margins of those imprints, while wondering what new designs we might forge outside of our self-imposed lines. I remember going to University with you, through those then magically impressive sliding doors in the library and seeing all the books. It seems my subconscious took note of what was worthy of my father’s attention, and sent me on a trajectory of learning and nail biting on which my current workplace is the latest pit stop. I remember back to my excitement at cracking the code of reading, an excitement made even greater by my realisation that you were impressed as I sat on your lap and read you “Alice in Wonderland”, not a baby book, but a real book of words and worlds that I had not met before. So in my mind, to learn and be smart is to earn your love, just as, for you, to give your children the best education was a way of expressing your love. Even now, past middle age, childish as I recognise it to be, I cannot help but feel a little thrill to tell you of yet another High Distinction, the truth being that it is only my parents and I who find worth in such a thing. You no longer joke with me now about the missing 2% from a score of 98, you simply say ‘Well done” and I realise that I spent too much time of my young life lamenting that missing 2% rather than celebrating its complement.

How can we know what words our children will covertly and unconsciously use as weapons against themselves, until they are adult enough to wake up from the stories they have been telling themselves? For all around us lies the counter-evidence to the fabrications we have been telling ourselves. Another image of you, leaving Matsuyama airport after a visit to check on me. We wave our goodbyes through a glass wall as you walk towards your departure. I see you stop and set down your briefcase and wipe your eyes. I play the game I think we are playing and mock sniff and pretend to wipe my own eyes. My host mother hits me on the arm and asks what I am doing. And with that I am struck by the realisation that my father, who never cries, is actually crying, and I suddenly feel small and confused, no longer proud of my tough shell of independence.

To love someone is to allow them to escape from the definitions we put on them. For so much of my life, I thought of you as rational and unemotional, a product of a certain generation in which boys didn’t cry and men expressed love by upholding their duty to provide for their wife and children. I mused a little on your personal history: what it meant to grow up as an only child, without a father, and with a mother who had to take on that masculine role of provider, but I never felt its true emotional impact. It may be that what was hidden from me was also hidden from you, that you waited until the circumstances of your life permitted you to travel to distant worlds to retrieve the missing parts of your life story, even now the facts and figures of geography and history allowing for some shielding from the sheer emotion of finally connecting to your lost father. I see your tears and I want to cry too. Tears for my lack of gratitude for what I have had that you did not, tears for the parts of my father that have been lost to me through my own limited perceptions, and finally tears of recognition that you exist outside of your role as my father, as a fellow human being seeking meaning, purpose and expression.

I cannot see you as an old man; maybe I will one day, but not yet, since the life force remains strong in you. That is inspiring, and, in reversal of the usual parent-child dynamic, let me say I am proud of you, not only for outscoring the biblical allotment of years, but for continuing to learn, grow and share.

So happy birthday father. I wish you good health, continued vitality and the ever expanding ability to know and realise the longings of your heart and soul.

In love and gratitude,

Ann

Why I choose to be an alchemist

My soul has declared to me that, while I am a magician, I need to be first and foremost an alchemist. Both magic and alchemy fascinate: their use of esoteric symbolism awakens my soul through the twin calls they make to both the intellect and the imagination. However, in alchemy lies a stronger and clearer invocation to action one’s visions and create one’s destiny. The duties of an alchemist are clear in ways that a magician’s are not: make volatile the dense nigredo of the personality and give form to the soul-contracted promises of the albedo through the action of the rubedo. Only through this process can gold be brought into existence and shared with the world.

An alchemist has no magic wand or set of spells by which to manifest their heart’s gold. Instead, alchemists attend constantly to their crucible, observing and learning through an ongoing process of transformation how to raise the vibration of that which is heavy, dull and restrictive to that which is light, bright and freeing. They are passionate about the process of transformation itself, knowing that despite its frustrations, growing and changing through vision-inspired action is the only way to escape the grumbling misery of the discontent soul. When gold is produced, the alchemist celebrates through releasing their creation into the world where some will marvel at it, and some will not yet have eyes to see its true nature. The alchemist is not fazed by either response, since they know that its true value lies in it having brought a part of their soul into existence.

Alchemy is revealed through the doing. While the basic premises and structure of the alchemical process can be taught, each alchemist must attend to their own ingredients in their own crucible with their own fire. Each alchemist’s initial ingredients will be subtly different; therefore, while they may gain some useful information from observation of the tools and methods of others, ultimately each alchemist has to trust their own intuitions in attending to their own creation. In witnessing how others have created gold from the structure of the alchemical process, apprentice alchemists can develop trust in the structure. However, we need to recognise that it is only in attending carefully to the substances in our own crucible that we will learn how to keep the nigredo at bay, and give space for the albedo to arise and inform us as to the type, amount and timing of the addition of the red tincture. With patience and equanimity, we wait for the gold to appear, developing our ability to recognise it, so that we can extract it whenever it appears and give it currency in the world.

For the apprentice alchemist, there are several traps into which she or he can fall. Some apprentice alchemists fill their crucible with ingredient excitedly chosen from the finest on offer in the land of plenty of the albedo, only to find they have neglected to dissipate the nigredo before starting the process. The nigredo, the ability of which to abort the alchemical process correlates with the degree to which it remains unacknowledged, quickly begins to coat the ingredients from the albedo with a black sludge, leaving the apprentice staring in dismay at the congealed black mess in their crucible. Of course, there is nothing to stop the apprentice from cleaning out their crucible and starting again, but often the apprentice will be tempted to look at the mess and use this as proof that they are not meant to be an alchemist due to some lack of knowledge, ability or capacity within themselves. Alternatively, they may reject the whole process of alchemy for being either too demanding of their resources, or somehow inherently flawed. In these cases, the apprentice allows the nigredo to possess them by using the beliefs and addictions of the personality and the comfort of the known and familiar to pin them further to the cross of matter.

Other apprentice alchemists are more aware of the nigredo and attend to their crucible with various tools, determined to make the nigredo dissolve once and for all so that they will have a clear window of opportunity in which to finally add the albedo. It’s grim work however, for just as they find a way to make the nigredo disappear, it reasserts itself in a slightly different form, subtly reinforcing a suspicion that their nigredo is stronger and more powerful than that of others or that they lack some resource or inner quality that would provide the solution. While they are waiting for the creation of the space in which the albedo can arise, they often experiment by adding the red tincture to the negredo just to review the action of the rubedo. They feel no qualms about this since they have ready access to the rubedo, which they know to be not of the same profound and mysterious quality as the albedo. They are often willing to lend their red tincture to others who are also locked in struggle with the nigredo, and this keeps them busy and makes them less depressed about their failure in getting rid of the negredo, and distracts them from the fact that they still haven’t explored the qualities of the albedo. They too are crucified by their beliefs about the need for ongoing struggle against the nigredo if they are to prove their worthiness in assuming the mantle of alchemist. Not surprisingly, without the leavening beauty of the albedo, such apprentices will succeed only in proving to themselves that they do not have what it takes to be an alchemist.

Other apprentice alchemists have no trouble temporarily dissolving the nigredo and accessing the albedo. They add great quantities of albedo to a crucible kept separate from that in which they dissolved the nigredo. Applying the fire of imagination, the volatile becomes even more volatile producing shimmering and enchanting dream-like vistas of such beauty and grandeur that it seems a shame to risk spoiling them by adding the red tincture. While its fragility and volatility mean that it is impossible to stay very long in the albedo, regular visits will go some way to appeasing the pain of living out if the nigredo; in fact, some apprentices become adept at using the remembered vibration of the albedo to coat the creations that by default arise from the interaction of nigredo and rubedo with an attractive glowing varnish that is capable of fooling both themselves and some others as to the true essence of the creation. However, ultimately, the varnish wears and the apprentice is left surrounded by leaden creations and they have to face the pain of the chasm they have reinforced in their consciousness.

These are only some of the traps for the apprentice alchemist. However, the only real danger for apprentice alchemists is in allowing the fact that we will fall into such traps at times to prevent us from cleaning out the crucible and setting to work again. As pure creative spirit embodied in physical form, we are created and creator, alchemical matter and alchemist, being and becoming. In incarnating, we have agreed to take part in a creator’s game of hide and seek in which our powers remain hidden to us until we acknowledge them and act to claim them. Learning to create consciously from our soul, in fulfilment of the contract under which we signed up to play the game, is our purpose. If we now turn around and choose not to play according to the rules we chose, it is like turning up with a cricket bat to play tennis, an invitation for struggle and frustration. We need to see past the veil of the personality’s beliefs and certainties, reconnect to why we are here and act on it.

I’m dispelling myself of the illusions that magic equates to discovering the magic spells that will fix your life forever. Instead, I’m choosing to be an alchemist who knows that the work of bringing their heart and soul into the service of creation itself is forever more.