Moonstone Mandala

“All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, more eternal man [woman] dwelling in the darkness of the primordial night. There he [she] is still whole, and the whole is in him [her], indistinguishable from Nature.” -Carl Jung

Enlightened by a soft yet vivid light the radiance in this mandala is more like that of the deep winter sun or a moonlit night, burning cool and bright in a darkened sky.

Circular forms, smooth and silky, eddy and glide into the centre and back out; their swirling potential hint at something forthcoming. In the heart of the mandala an arctic fire glows so cold that it emits a hot radiance; there is a sort of transition here where the darkest hour begins to shift towards the light of daybreak.

Ghostly reflections of that which lie at the centre are mirrored at the edges. Something like a passageway lies behind each, seemingly leading back to the interior: a return journey to the source of origin.

Dream-like in its cool burning radiance, trance-like in its circulating circadian rhythm, something otherworldly haunts this image. Like the lingering reverberation of sound on water, this mandala is an echo of an alternate reality. There is a slipperiness that permeates this image, a silky intangible fluidity that whispers of something ungraspable, like the dark cool wilderness of predawn.

A sense of solitude saturates this mandala. Although dark, much like shadowy oceanic waters imbued with the florescent radiance of a coral reef, it is not dreary. The solitude here is one of rousing aloneness rather than a sinking melancholic loneliness.

We spend much of our time in the tamed conscious part of the mind -thinking, planning, analysing - whilst the untamed mind burns in the depths of the subconscious like an internal wilderness, alive, awake even in the darkest hour. What would happen if we were to dwell in the wilderness of the imagination and subconscious, unleashing them into our lives?

A cold fire
An hour after sunset, Venus hangs
in the wintry mist of the west,
a cold fire burning above wet trees
and hills that fall and rise through fog.

We stand together a long time
hand in hand, watching
what we have watched
a thousand times before.

Darkness and silence join hands
and spread over us the cool caress
of their breath. There is nothing
to say, nothing to do.

Startled into being something we’d
only dreamed of being,
we enter the exquisite abyss
of the first hour before heaven.
-Sam Hamill

A subterranean wilderness

When I began to meditate I expected a cool, calm, eternally sweet Sally to bubble up to the surface and life would be forever nicely pleasant. Yet, instead of melting into a pristine stillness I discovered that life teemed beneath the shallows. Imagination and the dream-realm seemed to lurk in opulence and strength in this subterranean wilderness.

Meditation is like the submarine that can take me down into the ocean but like a child I want to get out and explore this secretive under-world; painting is my explorative means. On occasion I have had minor experiences from painting and meditating that have shifted my understanding of everyday reality giving me a glimpse into a greater reality beyond. (yawn…this all of course is nothing new to humanity.)

After such experiences I have felt both wonderment and unease; the uneasiness perhaps arising from feeling like a wee stranded human sandwiched between two disconnected realities. However, slowly the angst is beginning to dissolve as I begin to see human life as like a living passageway (that in my case at least for the time being mostly has the gate shut.)

The artist is like a magician wielding powers of transformation of who leaves the shallows and journeys to deeper waters. This may be to experience reality from another viewpoint, to encapsulate it, and transport it back to the surface to influence the waking world or perhaps to take something from the surface down below to be influenced transform it. Creativity can therefore be an alchemical process -this I believe is where the healing capacity of art lies. For myself each mandala that I paint certainly embodies a magical transformative journey into the deeper waters of self…I am yet to figure out how to breath beneath water long enough to find the gateway to the other side.

The wild path

We’ve returned; we always set out to return
to solitude, a fistful of earth, to the empty hands.
–George Seferis

In a recent dream I was in a hurry to come down from the mountains, as I needed to get to a race that I was to be running in. The race started in an hour and it was two hours to the mountain’s base. Yet in a magical warping of time I made it home in ample time to collect my things. My partner, who was going to drive me to the race, was being crotchety and difficult and refused to hurry. We argued and he told me to ‘just get off the planet Sally.’ I tried to get a friend to drive me but she was also cranky and said her car was too full of stuff. I made my own way but once I reached the racetrack I realised that I had forgotten my shoes. My lane was overgrown with brambles and sticks and thorns that I had to clear myself. It was a grey day and there were only a handful of people there. I never saw the faces of my fellow runners, who were always just out of sight and out of focus. Nobody cheered when I won the race but I didn’t mind, and then I just left as I had done what I needed to do.

This dream spoke clearly to me: life is a solo journey. We have to make our own way, clear our own paths, no-one not even our loved ones can get us there and there will be no-one to meet us at the finish line. In the dream I had descended form a higher place, (the mountains) to do what needed to be done on earth. The track to me represented the journey through life. I had forgotten my shoes meaning that my feet were connected to the ground exposed to life in its entirety, sticks, thorns and all. My partner told me to ‘leave the planet’, suggesting that perhaps I would find something up there; a balance between heaven and earth, soul and spirit perhaps. The warping of time to me hinted at magic -of the impossible becoming possible in this solo journey through the wilderness of life.

In the space of dreams and imagination an alternate reality gestates and brews, a reality perhaps even closer than this everyday waking dream to an even deeper existence. What if we were to let go of this waking dream and let the subterranean wilderness play itself into life?…

Midsummer Prayer

In midsummer, under the luminous
sky of everlasting light,

the laced structures of thought
fall away

like the filigrees of the white
diaphanous

dandelion turned pure white and
ghostly,

hovering at the edge of its own
insubstantial

discovery in flight. I’ll do the same
watch

the shimmering dispersal of tented
seeds

lodge in the tangled landscape
without

the least discrimination. So let my own
hopes

escape the burning wreck of ambition,
parachute

through the hushed air, let them spread
elsewhere,

into the tangled part of life that refuses
to be set straight.

Herod searched for days looking for
the children.

The mind’s hunger for fame will hunt down
all innocence.

Let them find safety in the growing wild.
I’ll not touch them there.

-David Whyte