A Bouquet of Unopened Bulbs

A woman walks across the square holding in both arms a large bouquet of unopened bulbs, the top of the clear cellophane wrap in which they are encased is unfurled and open. Like wet paint strokes, the brush flat and full of green paint at the base of the bulb and thinning to a point, dozens, or more. One could not know from across the way, sipping afternoon tea. The imagination looks for corollaries: domes of Persian temples, fat and ready to open; sepals the colour of Green Tara; or Celtic sidhe, mounds, hills, where the fairy folk live who love beauty and wealth, fertile, magical, of the realm of promise.

In the resurfacing of the Zocalo in Mexico City in 1790, Antonio de Leon y Gama discovered the greatest archaeological find of 18th century Mexico. Twin stones. A statue of Coatlicue (she of the feathered skirt of serpents) and the Great Aztec Sun Stone.

She is Teteo Inan, Mother of the Gods.

For centuries prior to finding her, Mexicans laid flowers on the square for the Mother of the Earth. She was never lost, only hidden.

I'm writing to you as if I were tearing the snarled roots of a colossal tree from the depths of the earth, and those roots were like powerful tentacles, like the voluminous nude bodies of strong women wrapped in serpents and carnal desires of realization.¹

Because the tourists who are in the news were kidnapped in the Danakil Depression it blisters the rotunda in which I sit, and I am twisted in the stunted roots of the dragon trees with broad-leaves and a stout trunks in the lowest place on earth. A festering place, 371 feet below sea level, lava oozing upwards, continuous fissures and hundreds of earthquakes each year, sulphuric pools, salt flats and salty lakes, unblinking sun, a scant few inches of rain a year, highs of 50C in the dry season.

Slow currents under the lithosphere, at the centre of a triple junction fault in the Great Rift Valley of Africa, with a seafloor spreading centre, moving at the rate of 1-2cm a year, Dankalia will submerge into a new sea in 10 million years.

How can the woman with the unopened flowers in her arms walk on a floor of lava? Magma wells up from the mantle, bones from the necklace of Coatlicue emerge as Australopithicus afarensis. She comes from under the earth. They find her in a gully in bits. She is a sky dancing with diamonds.

Can I dance with a hominid with one hip, a sacrum, a rib cage, a lumbar, a humerus, a femoral cranium? She is 3 feet 8 inches tall, 65 lbs and 3.2 million years old. She looks like a chimpanzee but walks upright. Lucy is a connecting link in the evolutionary story, and she was found in 1974 by two anthropologists, Johansen and Gray, near the Awash River, near the hot fields of basalt.

Buried earth mothers of the earth.

The shiny basalt floor of the rotunda heats and cracks as white-enamelled cast iron tables fall. I lay myself on the earth and lay the fresh, green, living, vibrant closed buds before me and they burst into multi-coloured bloom.

____________________
¹Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989), p.13.

Papilionoidea

You have no idea who you are. Razed, skinned, muscles exposed, then stripped to the bone. Marrow beating inside the sheath where you melt. Reorientation of neuronal patterns, old connections gutted as you renovate yourself from within. When the new circuits activate and energy flows, your thoughts aren't the same. A richer depth, a deeper resonance. You're more complete. New perceptions of the world and your relationships unfold like visionary wings inside your chrysalis. One day I'll see you gliding over the plains, an angel.

A Creation Story

The Creation of Adam is a fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti circa 1511.


Otherwise it would all happen at once. Our births, lives, deaths. In an instant, a tableau of everything. Time slows it, lineates it, notches it. We experience ourselves event by event. We attempt to feel the fullness of the great expanse in our awareness of the moment, pure, insightful.

Time is a way of perceiving: measuring our lives, our moments of meeting, that we age. We are time travelers touching each other as we pass by. We know the wholeness of which we are a part; we reach for each other, our feather-soft breaths.

Is time an interpretation carved out of the undifferentiated? And space a way to spread it out, a place to live? The way we are separated in our individual beings. How our egos map the terrain of the unknown. Ropes we grab to cross the ocean of raw life. Without fixing ourselves in time and space, as coordinates, would it fly apart?

My pathway to you who are reading this was always known. Who you are is inherent in the writing. Destiny is not predetermined but the unfolding of the moment in the wholeness of everything that has or will ever exist. Does it spin on the tip of Zeno's Arrow?

In my image-creating mind, time is the crumbling sand beneath my bare feet as the ocean pulls it away.

Time is the rhythm of each day, activity by activity. At night, fatigued, we let go.

In meditation, I knew I'd left time; not a euphoria of timelessness witnessing the flow of time, but absence, non-being, not in the learned experience of time.

Perhaps death is a closure of time, where it ceases.

Time is the energy I have

for living.

A little unfinished painting...

While I did this little India ink sketch and oil painting before seeing Susie Burpee's dance performance, "The Spinster's Almanac, A Cabaret of Solitude," this March in Toronto, down at the Distillery District, and though the figure in this is Victorian, there is something about her...

So I composed these words, I wrote them on the back of the painting in pencil, that were mostly a response to Burbee's performance, to perhaps add to the tiny painting (maybe 9" x 5") in handwriting:

Nails claw inside the breaking shell. Spinster's Almanac. Miss Haversham. Dance of downy feathers, beating heart, aloneness. Only windows seen or seeing. Escape into the confinement of solitude.

Only my hard drive is full, and I can't take a better, more in-focus picture and upload it, or even one with the scrawled words on it until I rectify the situation, sigh. I'll upload the finished little painting whenever.

Inkspill in Red

After the simplicity of my friend's encouragement -why not, he said- I tried again to go deeper in my writing of my present bodily experience. Sharing the little piece (that's taken all morning to write, sigh):

No meditating on stopping it. I'm not appreciating deeply enough. For having it. This bleeding, useless, without sense or logic on the part of Nature. At fifty-five years of age it is only a bodily remembrance of the fertility that is past and now becomes a path of greater communion with my womanness, a spiritual deepening into an intimate, private being alive. On the morning of the fourteenth day, still the flush of blood, is it that I deny its importance, denigrate it, lament how weak I feel, how awkward it is in the work world, how strange at my age to flow so redly and opulently? Not that I seek to valorize it. Just to become comfortable with it. After forty-two years of continuous monthly menses, except during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and during the last year when it's been sporadic, I wonder if I have fully accepted my female body? Can I arrive at gentle acceptance near the end of many cycles? Acceptance without celebration or lament. Is-ness. This visceral reality, scarlet wash of haemoglobin on the white moon cloth. Ache in my belly, hidden tides. Loving my womb, inner bulb of fire. Its tender blood vessels.

Observing the Observer

Observing, naming, creating stories gives reality to our perceptions of the universe, which is creating itself for us. Observing the world causes it to shape itself into a reality for us.

In the current issue of The American Scholar, Robert Lanza, a proponent of Biocentrism, which builds on quantum physics, writes, "the laws of the world were somehow created to produce the observer....the observer in a significant sense creates reality and not the other way around."

Hmnnn.


If subatomic particles are "watched" traveling through a barrier (in the famous experiment, a box with two holes), they behave like tiny particles, and go through one hole or the other.

If they're "not watched" they pass through both holes, like waves.

But no-one sees this.


Quantum waves are never observed, only inferred from the behaviour of unobserved particles.

Quantum waves are waves of probability, statistical predictions, not material waves, hence nothing but a likely outcome. Outside of an idea, the wave is not there, it's nothing.

Since it's not observed, can't ever be observed, it's not "real."


Nor does the particle have any definite existence, until we observe it.

It gets worse. Quantum waves merely define the potential location a particle can occupy.

But it's all probability!

It isn't an event or a phenomenon, but a description of a likely event.


Dear reader, my golden muse, I shalln't take this anywhere at the moment. Only let me ask, rather than 'how are you?' and 'what's going on?', what's in your quantum fields these days? ::grins:: Tell me about your entanglements over virtual tea!

Krishna was a Butter Thief

Logic is tiresome, like madness. The brown suede cover of my pocket calendar, the one in which I write, was the back of a cow once. Tanned, dyed, stretched. I will not make a metaphor out of this. It was the book that I bought when I promised to jot notes, any notes, regularly. Pencil swatting words on the fly. Discreetly. Grab at slips of thoughts before they slip away. It's the layer below the layer. A veiny map of words pulsing with blood. A cow's shroud, but see, there I go. The skin of a cow covers my book. The skin that was composed from soft grasses that were nibbled and mulched through four stomachs until the ingredients could be usefully used. To make skin cells. Dermatitis of words. Scribbled suede.

It is the hair that seems wrapped on a bone, that sticks out at jagged angles, that I like best. She pushes the mail cart like a hospital bed. Back and forth, three times a day, every day. Slow, cow steps. Bovine mail delivery. I must get cows off the mind. Really, as I sit at the desk looking for something else to fix my attention on, the telephone cord, wrapped in that circular pattern, is interesting. How do you press rubber wrapped around a line into that shape?

Black and white spots today, a vest. Soft fur, brush it. Which is a lie, but it fits with the metaphor I refuse to make. Gibberish. Someone has gone out the door, someone will enter it, and I must watch all the time in case anyone has lost their pass or needs access, like a visitor, or a courier. My fingers race over the keys until they sound like a clickety cart. It's Friday and almost everyone is gone. I shift my eyes back and forth, checking my environment, people walking by. Am I seeing myself? What do I look like? How many people do you have to see before they blur? Into cows in fields bovinely chewing cud, walking bags of internal organs pulsing. We're walking herds. It must be environmental sterility that's making me this way. I cannot discount the effect of where I am. I'm not sure where these cowslips of thought are coming from. Inside the clover of my hair.

When I was a cow I had no time to give milk. All my attention was on my hooves. And then I ate grass until the cows came home. It was very good, if I recall. The gum that I chew is green. It's St. Patrick's Day. Do cows mind snakes? Cows don't get agitated often. I'm not talking about bulls. Mama cows. The ones mooing on the hill. Everyday I eat a fresh baby spinach salad that I make myself. With thinly sliced onions and fresh mushrooms, and liberally sprinkled with salted sunflower seeds, flax seeds, slivered almonds, chopped walnuts, and perhaps cheese cubes. Milk squeezed into solids and dried. Feta cheese salad dressing thrown and tossed until all the baby spinach leaves are coated in oil and dark green. Then I chew, slowly, while all my stomachs digest. They tell me that eating green leafy vegetables with an oil and vinegar dressing is good for us. It keeps us our minds agile.

Really, my hooves are the most interesting part of my anatomy. Everywhere I've been is remembered in them. Look at the indents. See the continents. It's time to move up the hill. I'm being rounded. Milked.