Ask Dr. Druid .. day 25 .. Vulture Culture

Posted on September 2, 2007 by wendy fleet

Ask Dr. Druid . Day 25

Vulture Culture

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Vulture Culture

The Ords (who had shortened their name from Ordure) were odd ducks. Well, they weren’t really ducks, but they were damned peculiar. They worked for Lord Ord who was the Cosmic Keeper of the Odd, the Angels Too Fat To Dance on the Point of A Pin. His emblem was, proudly, a turkey buzzard in pink, rampant on a magenta field — the colors of entrails as the Lesser Ords scoffed cheerfully. Vultures liked guts and gluck; rot was ripe to them. Suppuration was succulent. The more stinking the ooze, the more toothsome.

Lord Ord had begun liking what the other Planet Designers liked. Babbling brooks. Roses, orchids, panthers, and emeralds. Smashing glorious snazzy gorgeous show-stoppers. But to have all the living things work, there was an engineering Unavoidable. Living things were lively, but in some span they ran down, wore out, fatigued. Their élan waned. Death was invented; despised, but required.

Lord Ord became, reluctantly at first then ravenously, rapturously interested in the Behind-the-Scenes necessities that support the splendid on-stage Show. When he had invented the vulture, he had felt a deep marrow-tingling pride. There are many quirks in the K1 solid Earth dimension. There were surprises such as the glamorous peacock’s awful cry. Lord Ord’s ugly vulture of ghastly mien could soar so sweetly that all gaped, envied. It was sufficient recompense.

When the gods wished to soar, they became vultures, effortless, cloudstalkers. Hot sun on the top of the bold broad feathers, the rise of the ebullient air under your wide wings. If you wanted to do enormous, you did elephant, hippo, rhino, whale. If you wanted to soar, you did vulture.

Some gods were too fastidious, too tepid of imagination to pay the gustatory price. Lord Ord’s sense of humor escaped many. Putting the galaxy’s most fabulous soaring with the galaxy’s most repulsive and rancid cuisine was a mobius twist trick that the prissier gods couldn’t follow.

Lady Onyx, his brilliant, deft partner, had also become intrigued by the design of the Odd. Her tour de force had been spiders. The challenge had been to devise a vertigo-less creature whose webs were art and worked as well.

Lady Onyx remembered fondly the morning when she and Lord Ord woke and she watched him gaze happily around the bustling planet which was getting quite habitable by now. He glanced up at the corner of their large sunny room and he was silent. He watched the patient tiny predator on its remarkable silvery web, the first spider seen by any other god than its designer. He shook his head in delight and applauded, “Wonderful, my dear Lady Onyx.” He leapt up to peek more closely at this new ingenious tiny toy.

Lord Ord and Lady Onyx had collaborated on the crocodile. Lord Ord had devised the massive musculature, the crushing jaws, whittled the interlocking teeth. Lady Onyx had devised the turreted hide.

The Lesser Ords were devoted to their Patrons. Once you got a feel for the Onyx and Ord touch, you could always pick out their practical, clever solutions. There was pride in dealing with ordure, preventing the spread of pestilence.

Much later after the planet’s bio-layer matured, Lord Ord and Lady Onyx were saddened to hear that their favorite, the majestic vultures, were no longer fed the felled biped. Strange religions had proliferated. The quarrelsome biped was the only creature which hid its dead in boxes. Few remembered that the path of the vulture was the only way to completely free the soul from its planet-bound bonds.

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Our American culture is hysterical about ‘prettiness.’ It glorifies young models who, tho vapid, are pretty and airbrushed. Norman Rockwell tended to go for the aww-puppy factor.

We are obsessed with bathing and odorlessness. When I was a child, I lived in the country on a dairy farm. <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Holsteins mainly, the black & white modern-art-on-the-hoof cows. I must have been about 8 years old when I went to spend a Wednesday Halloween night with a little blonde, blue-eyed china doll town kid, Peggy.

I was an only child. I was a useful child. I fed the calves. I’d get up at 4:30am every morning and walk across the fields with Dad to feed the calves while he did the milking. Cows have to be milked twice a day 365 days a year. Cows don’t take weekends or vacations. I loved being useful.

Dad had studied agronomy at Cornell and beginning in the late '40s was a visionary and pioneer in promoting commercial organic farming. (How I think of him every single time I buy organic milk in the supermarket now.) He was clearly an earth shaman tho he never would have known those words. He had his science training, but he spoke with the earth, the beloved and rare and fragile soil, and the roots and the nematodes. I watched him do it. Which may have been why I was always so comfortable talking to trees, listening to trees. (No, they don’t speak English. they speak Tree. One translates. I was bilingual. You swallow or taste and smell the meaning as much as hear it.)

I usually wore my knee-high rubber boots and my bluejeans. (I may have been the first female on the planet to wear bluejeans in public. Gods know it was considered scandalous. When we went to town once a week for marketing, earnest mothers scurried their little useless china-doll daughters across the street to avoid the pollution of the uncustomary. Change was dangerous. And they were right about that. I was about 12 years ahead of my time and look what them '60s wrought.)

Suitably clad in a stupid and useless little cotton dress, I arrived for my first and last overnight visit to town on Halloween eve for trick or treat. You can’t do trick or treat in the country. Places are too farflung down red dirt roads.

Mother, tho a brilliant sculptor, was lousy at costumes. I was swathed in an old sheet with eye holes cut out, the annual ghost costume. I recall nothing of the trick-or-treating, but with icepick horror I recall getting ready for bed. Mrs. Wilson said, “Come along girls, it’s time for your bath.” This being Wednesday. I looked at her matter-of-factly and said, “Oh no thanks, I take my bath on Saturday.” Both mother and child recoiled. True. They didn’t just start or flinch. They recoiled. They did a reflex full-body lurch a step back recoil of disgust and dismay. I knew at once I’d breached some invisible law of nice people. Not unlike when I learned that you didn’t tell people about talking to trees. I don’t recall if I took the bath or was allowed to rest filthily on the gloriously pristine whitest sheets the colored maid had ironed.

I do shower at least once a week still. I suspect most of my friends obsessively bathe daily, stripping their largest precious organ of essential oils so they have to scratch their poor dry skin in the winter.

Farm kids learn early that there is a lot more muck and gluck – mucho mud, mucho manure – involved in getting them their milk and vegetables than they could bear to imagine.

It is very hard to get unaddicted to the pretty. So try this week to make a special effort to greet spiders and other not pretty clans with interest and applause. No cringing, no recoiling.

…!+!….

Notes

ordure .. the ten dollar word for dung; the amusement is in its formality;

elan .. verve, passion, spirit, enthusiasm; juice;

mobius .. a magic figure eight figure, interaction;

mien .. face, bearing;

vapid .. devapor, as in flat stale wine;

obsess .. at root, besiege, from ob/against & sess/sit; also haunt;

colored maid .. in the horror still in 20th century USA, the Maryland town near where I grew up still in the early '50s had water fountains labelled Colored and White. Luckily I was born knowing this was sickening for soul, heart, and mind.

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If you know or are an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of druid material, please let me know at .. askdrdruid@gmail.com. Please put ‘agent’ in the subject line.

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

You may comment anonymously.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

blog title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy

excerpt image guillaume dargaud

article title image mike holliet 1gorilla

I’d be very grateful if you’d send pogblog’s link to a friend:
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email: askdrdruid@gmail.com

.. keep your heart bright. beauty is rising.

.for bombadilobo.

<^>..

the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military-Industrial Budget on education instead ..

………….<^>…………….

Ask Dr. Druid .. day 24 .. ShapeShifter

Posted on August 26, 2007 by wendy fleet

Ask Dr. Druid . Day 24

ShapeShifter

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ShapeShifter

“You mean you're finally going to tell us what it's like to be a ShapeShifter? Before we burn you at the stake? Now while the orange flames lick high waiting to eat you alive?”

“Yes,” she said, “I will tell you now. ShapeShifters, seem, of course, monsters to the flat-minded. Being a ShapeShifter is like being a photographic negative, as if your skin, your flesh, were some magic emulsion upon which experience imprints, engraves itself. As if you were a soft, warm wax in which events impressed themselves like a seal. You are like some spy's 'multi-sense bug' which overhears oversmells, oversees, overfeels, overtastes, holds, records, keeps the vibrations of people's souls, of sentients' souls. And all is sentient. ShapeShifting is why you seem to know their deepest secrets. You do. Because to a rare degree, you *are* them.

“We are not monsters. To a ShapeShifter, this coalescence is natural. It's *how* we know — by identity. Not dispassionately, but rhapsodically. As Indians used to take on courage by eating the raw hot liver of the bear, we take on all the qualities of what we observe directly, intimately. I suppose you could say it's a kind of cannibalism, of theft — certainly many do say that, and we have been burned, dismembered. But we do not consume you, use you up. It's more like putting you in an art book, an holographic (holo-audic, holo-olfact, holo-kino, holo-gusto) museum. Some see us as thieves, pirates, some as art collectors, archivists of your unique pattern, melody.

“I have looked out of so many alien eyes, smiled so many other smiles. It's a strange sensation. My flesh sensors, circuits can get clogged with you all “The tenderness of the knowledge, however, and the relative completeness is enchanting. I do not think we would choose the more flat, veneer way of knowing that the non-empaths employ. My eyes are like fingertips to touch you. Like an ice cream cone, I lick you. I am a very good pickpocket. You do not know I have stolen you. If I say nothing, you do not know, and it is painless. Only if I speak echoes of your own secrets then you resent being transparent when you thought your disguise was so impenetrable your camouflage so complete. “You see, we don't mind people's filthy little secrets. We have filthy little secrets too. It could be funny. We could laugh and shrug together. But you all are so defensive.Mortified. “Yes, ShapeShifters are certainly protean, able to shift shape. It's as if our being-stuff is magnetized to 'shape.' It feels like a kind of invisible embrace, as the very air embraces us. Or as the bird's wings feel the shape of the air as it flies.”
The burly brownhaired priest who guarded her wondered if he would dare give up his safe powerful position for the radiance she wore like a glory, an aureole. He doubted it. Radiance was dangerous. Yet had the pagans really lost? Somehow true art always still seemed slightly pagan, even in the sanctuaries. As if these fierce and radiant people wove their secret signs into the sacred text, as if there were lines between the lines that such as he could not see.

   His scarlet hood hid his keen blue eyes. He leaned toward her and whispered hoarsely, “Have you ever met another one?” This close, the huge fire was very loud. She smiled at him wickedly and tossed her thick glossy hair which looked the color of fire itself in this vivid light.
    “Yes, I've known three. What could I tell you before the even bigger bishops come to hurl me into your fine fire?
    “Imagine if you had been ice in the winter, lovely latticed cold crystals, still and abiding. You'd practiced that, were excellent at ice. Imagine then that you were twenty-five and by some magic Spring came upon you for the first time and all that abiding stillness melted into a bustling stream careening down the greening hillside past trees arrayed with apple blossoms. The hot yellow sun shone and you rose up into clouds which floated like lotus blossoms of mist across the sky. Now, because you had met another Changer, you knew all the forms of water. Meeting another ShapeShifter is the most simple thirstquenching delight sentience can devise. The knowledge of all that possibility of form, freedom of form, is a treasure your bishops cannot steal or torture from me.

“We are your future, you know, even if you kill us prototypes. Sentience must unfold to shapeshifting. ShapeShifting is intuition made manifest. It is the implacable black of coal transforming suddenly into the splendid imprisoned fire of diamond. Quicksilver quick playing of the spectrum from opacity to transparency — ahh. Remember tonight. Fare thee well. Be lucky. Next time round, let's be friends.”
. . .
. . .

Now that you’re beginning to grok that attention is a substance, a patterned, shape-able, plastic, elastic substance, shapeshifting will begin to sweetly, surreptitiously, and mysteriously make senses to you.

The rudiments of shapeshifting are something you already do constantly with the ease of breathing. You examine & explore your environment with unconscious empathy at all moments. You listen, you smell, you watch. (Your ‘senses’ are, of course, not really separate, but more on that anon.)Your senses manage, guide your attention stuff – it is to be hoped with symphonic grace.

Symphonic grace is probably a stretch right now, but we hope in this first month we’re moving you past cacophonic blundering or insolent or oblivious inertia with your attentions.

Remember that it’s expected that learning new skills will be awkward and lurching along the way. Be kind to your mind. Check that there’s no insidious whispering from your pesky Inner Perfectionist. Shoo it back to <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Fiji to grog out.

As you incorporate more consciousness, more deft alertness, more keen and delighted awareness into your experience, you’ll dwell in the blissed & blessed state of quantum attentions, of lambent appreciations. You’ll feel yourself shapeshiftily as wave in addition to particle. You’ll become halcyon with and within yourself.

‘Halcyon’ is the Greek word for ‘kingfisher,’ the bright bird. The word 'halcyon,' in the words as gems way of the Greeks, words as micro-vignettes, describes the kind of sweet day wherein the kingfisher can build her nest upon the bosom of the sea.

‘Lambent’ is a sweet watercolory awashed, with a hula of light, is when you grok the effervescent champagne of extralight that the opener lens of your attentions can now perceive, if not constantly, at least more frequently. Oh frabjous joy. Oh mirthmost merriment.

You see, if you begin, as a discipline, consciously distinguishing between AllElse and People, you will always have this fascination, this lavish oasis of unlimited perception and mobius thrill and delight to refresh you for the much more algebraic and baffling interactions with People. There will come, quite soon, a time when you know that that quicksilver, that molasses sweet AllElse part of your life can not be tarnished nor soured. This is a fierce, dear, and indelible freedom. Appreciation is the universal solvent.

Having this Wild Game Preserve in your mind and heart, a place of untamed attentions where you can be wildly wholeheartedly enchanted is essential to give you the delight, the courage, and the adaptability to not be felled or emptied by the advertent or inadvertent betrayals of People — who – Drat it! – so seldom seem to have read the clearly excellent script you’ve so elaborately written for them.

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Notes:

..see mobius in glossary.

..vignette is a little story, usually charming or quirky;

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If you know or are an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of druid material, please let me know at .. askdrdruid@gmail.com. Please put ‘agent’ in the subject line.

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

You may comment anonymously.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

excerpt & slice images terry pyles.

blog title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy

I’d be very grateful if you’d send pogblog’s link to a friend:
http://pogblog.blogharbor.com

email: askdrdruid@gmail.com

.. keep your heart bright. beauty is rising.

.for bombadilobo.

<^>..

the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military-Industrial Budget on education instead ..

………….<^>…………….

Ask Dr. Druid day 23 Review 3 gateau nature

Posted on August 25, 2007 by wendy fleet

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Ask Dr. Druid . Day 23

Review 3 . gateau nature

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It is disconcerting to begin to accept least of all explore our gateau nature, our layer cake of multi-D and multi-T experiences. Multi-dimensional & multi-temporal. Most of us prefer the less vertigo of amnesia or what the Greeks call Lethe, the river of oblivion, of forgetfulness; or a half-live lethargy.

It is essential to always honor K1, our shared kinesthetically persistent layer of reality, and be able to move among suitable awarenesses with care and discernment (which is why drugs are so ugh for serious study. I don’t mean serious as in grim but as in concentrated/distilled.)

Introducing you to Itshehimwe will have upped the hullabaloo, the octanes of your attentions. Your attentions will begetting more lithe, gallivanting beyond kindergarten.

Your Inner Perfectionist should be snoozily, woozily, groggily tipsy in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Tahiti, only sending postcards saying, “Hear you’re doing grand! Keep up the good play! Will have learned the hulahula by the time I return! Agog in grog, Your Inner Perf.”

Panda Bare is an intrepid explorer of extraphysics feastrealms of ecstatic tumult. Take part in art. Even if you never draw, sculpt, pen, or soufflé a mote, I will say you have a delicious responsibility (ability to respond!) to take part in the art of besotted appreciation. Get drunk drunk drunk with the delight of the champagne light in which you’re immersed, the brandy of daffily, daffodilly rapt attentions. Oh mirthmost merriment.

Of course our immersive, drunk with fascination adventures are subversive! It’s why druids went underground, undersky, behindleaf. The iron, ironyless, corporate manacles, the iron, ironyless, Religious prison bars prefer the dull, the narrow, the unwinged. Zombyoid suits the Profit Margin, the Pious Purposes.

The RatMinded Religioneers seldom dwell in Droll. They seem not so keen on your singing your own songs of raging praise, of delicate impeccable unique devotion. If your devilishly mischievous deity is named LaughMore, the story changes.

Resavor dearest Keats’ unclenched-mindedness, the not grasping irritably after certainty. Pick a favored thing — a daffodil, a soufflé, a vulture – and musing upon the Penetralium of mystery, meet the deity-inventor/s of that marvel. Then write a short fable in your journal about its invention or admiration. You don’t have to make anything up. Just listen and scribble.

Druids chose the riches of attentions, the conquest of the Imagi and Fasci Nations. Killing dullness by filling it with shine. Live in a turtle mansion. One you always carry with you. Obviously you should prosper comfortably in the Outer Nations. But it is my job to illuminate and ignite your tyger riches burning bright for which you need nothing but your keened and preened wits, an eclectiking knowledge of the treasure hunt, the world and worlds as your private palace. This abundance is your birthright. Gambol on it.

Art – heART, eARTh. Art is just carrots. It’s what let’s you see brilliantly. Eating muchas carrots enlivens your vision. Eating muchas art enlivens your life-sight. The druid point is to give you the key to a sea of glee and enchantment in your daily round. If you also get to go to Paris France, more’s the thrill, but being eclectically electrically thrilled serves your life butterly better in a wholehearted and holohearted way. The electric eclectic makes for less ennui, less envy, and less inchoate longing. The perfect democracy of perception where all are equally free and rich and powerful – that’s where druids put their ingenuity. Eclairs of clarity all 'round.

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Notes

..gateau is cake in French (gat oh);

..ennui is boredom in French (awn newy);

..eclectic is choosing the best from all possible sources;

..resavor is re-savor, as in savor again;

..gallivant & gambol are both what exuberant lambs leapingly do in the Spring;

..Imagi & Fasci Nations ..imagination, fascination;

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If you know or are an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of druid material, please let me know at .. askdrdruid@gmail.com. Please put ‘agent’ in the subject line.

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

You may comment anonymously.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

article & excerpt images wayne thiebaud

blog title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy

I’d be very grateful if you’d send pogblog’s link to a friend:
http://pogblog.blogharbor.com

email: askdrdruid@gmail.com

.. keep your heart bright. beauty is rising.

.for bombadilobo.

<^>..

the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military-Corporate Budget on education instead ..

………….<^>…………….

Ask Dr. Druid .. day 22 .. Rhapsodology, the study of meaning

Posted on August 5, 2007 by wendy fleet

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Ask Dr. Druid . Day 22

Rhapsodology, the study of meaning

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“The study of ‘meaning’ is more pertinent and poignant than the study of ‘reality.’ The Eskimos, for instance, discriminate twenty-six words worth of snow variations or escapades of crystalline water. The Eskimo dialogue with snow is more complex in hues and shapes of ‘meaning’ than ours, though the presenting ‘reality’ through which you and I also scrunch is doubtless the same.”

Bunga Low was the favorite daughter of the famous fin-de-siècle low-cost housing architects Pavi Lion and Ken Nel. In the new century Bunga was being interviewed for the cover story of Galactic Gazette, a fiercely progressive rag. Bunga was transfixed by the architecture of consciousness — How do you get people to fling open their doors and windows to the zephyrs of awe?

The interview continued, “My night’s dream might sway me to sweat or to ecstatic flight — it might have intense meaning, but the ‘reality’ students would fret and feud over whether dreams are ‘real.’ The feud vanishes, and we can just get down to what’s interesting when we hark to meaning.

“Once we free ourselves from the blinders imposed by the stubborn and exclusive study of reality, of metaphysics, we step into the simply magic world of meaning, of rhapsodics.

“The world is awash, saturated, exudes, blooms, is radiant with meaning. The world is ebullient, rowdy, raunchy, arrayed, fraught with meaning. The question becomes not What is real, but How it’s real. How do we employ all the flavors and qualities of the spectrum of realities, of meanings, that we vividly inhabit?

“Rhapsodology, the study of meaning, the love of meaning, reveals to us that we dwell in a sphere, an atmosphere of swirling, cascading, parading meaning. It’s above, within, below, behind. It’s right at the end of the proverbial nose; the nose itself. Our senses collaborate to describe, to translate, to unpackage the present of our luscious experience. This gallimaufry, this wonderland.

“Rhapsodics, the study of meaning, of course includes intimate and unflinching knowledge of horror and power and their temptations and stupidities. Rhapsodics does not, however, dwell upon the lost and ghastly. Every rhapsodist has been to <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Atro City, tasted ashes and eaten the rancid meat they serve there. We have each had maggots in the soul.

“The cure for atrocity and its fetid ilk is celebration, is gratitude, is deft rapture.

“Atrocity wins when we do not train and keen and sheen ourselves to the tender splendor of details, to the facets, the fascinations of our hallowed home, our dazzling planet.

“Another sinister danger is the stealthy drip, drip, the leaking away of vitality from the pernicious self-indulgences of guilt and boredom.

“Distracted by our own pathos, we litter the psychic journey with the debris, the trash of unreconciled, unrecycled self-pity, that plutonium of personal toxins.

“At various crossroads, Rhapsodics may also be a cold wintry wind cleansing the soul, but we replenish our stores of verve and nerve when we turn our study outward. (There is, of course, no actual outward; it’s all a matter of perspective, a trick of the light, legerdelight.)

“I’ve watched people being bored, and I’d rather watch them being beaten. If they knew that time was emeralds, that it fell through the hourglass like an avalanche, gone so sudden and quick, they would be loath to waste jeweled time on boredom and guilt.

“You might say that sustainable rapture is the missing enzyme. In constant minute doses, it frolics the soul, as green grass gambols the lamb. I’ve wondered if rapture ought not be given to us like hemoglobin, but have concluded that it can not be, that it is a by-product of art, that it must be wrought. Wrought by the art of deft attention.”

Bunga concluded, “By limiting ‘degree’ of importance to either the readily real or the elusive ineffable, we miss half the carnival. Some times I want to shake people vigorously by the lapels proclaiming, ‘It’s all bloody fascinating. It’s all potent, poignant.

“All bushes burn. All tigers, kingfishers, dragonflies, palm fronds burn. We live in an incandescent world. Let it capture you, the rapture.”

…
…

As we gambol down the vivid paths, the paths of lucid waking and lucid dreaming, we’ll need to wean ourselves from a narrow knowing of meaning. It’s one thing , though quintessential, to become more intellectually eclectic – for instance, when you begin to coax the mind of the body in remreal to be more daring, more physically eclectic and empathetic. To embroider, to embellish your comprehension of what’s real and what’s possible. Eventually we add the mind of the heart, the mind of the foot, the mind of the feather. A gallimaufry of vivid, lucid minds. Oh frabjous joy.

As you become more seized by glee, we'd like to coax you to try some fabling in your journal or log. Fables dwell in a magic-struck reality between worlds, the corpus callosum of story. Honored Aesop used animals to have a little moral adventure. We’re beguiled by animals – and disarmed. It’s an end-run around our ever ready to porcupinally bristle ego. We take in the 'notion' being illustrated without the imperious intellect pontificating or retaliating.

For my part, I have to know the name of a character before I can write her/its/his fable because my writing is so closely, not to say obsessively, woven with sound, with euphony & cacophony, assonance & consonance, the mime of melody. The names just appear, like faeries or chickadees, presents from my dear The Blue, wily tender mordant Le Bleu, my pal. Sometimes the names-&-characters arrive with fables, little gem stories, attached, sometimes they just wait to be in the cast of another fable yet to come.

Dan Gero is a philosopher journalist from South Mars. His name fell out of DanGerous.

Bunga Low, the favorite daughter of fin-de-siècle low-cost housing architects Pavi Lion and Ken Nel just tickled me flamingo. I only knew that she was going to talk about the architecture of consciousness as I set pencil to white white paper. Because they aren’t saddled with a laden label like Mabel, these characters are usually magical or intraworlds travelers. They bring the greatest intraworlds’ coin, currency, treasure: knowledge and observation with them in unexpected packages. Because they’re not named Bill and Jane, they shake your brain out of its ruts. What the heck, science studies quarks; psyence studies quirks.

So consider inviting some character to just show up in your log or journal. Write down an interview with them. Be of good glee, they always come bearing fables. You just have to transcribe them.

You’ll learn along the way to do less steering, to do more listening.

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Notes:

.. rhapsody — the root of the word rhapsody is woven song, includes strands from all the worlds;

.. gallimaufry = a stew, a ragout, an hash, a medley;

.. fin de siecle = end of the century;

.. re architecture of consciousness, the joak is Bungalow, Pavilion, & Kennel;

.. tickled flamingo — a flamingo is very pink;

.. Atro City, atrocity;

.. quint-essential = the fifth essence;

.. gambol = the fearless exuberant frolicking dance of galloping leaping lambs where you're so glad you can't even keep your hooves on the ground;

.. zephyrs = sweet breezes;

.. fetid = stinking, & slimy like forgotten vegetables left to rot to black gluck in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, yuck;

.. Le Bleu = The Blue in French, pron Luh Bluh;

.. hemoglobin = the stuff that makes our blood red and holds oxygen for delivery to our cells, a quintessential ingredient of la vie, our life;

.. ilk = is a disdainful way to say 'of that kind.' There is a sense of stench when one says it, that one's sensibilities are insulted by said group. I use it without fail when I say 'Cheney et Ilk.' The little joak is that typically one would say 'Cheney et al' meaning Cheney and others, Cheney and his posse, his cabal, his odious lickspittles — all that is implied in 'et Ilk.'

.. corpus callosum or quickpearl is the nerve-ends-rich tough gristly stuff that joins and communicates between the two hemispheres of the brain; quickpearl in alchemy & druidry;

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It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

You may comment anonymously.

……………….….<^>……………..

If you know or are an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of druid material, please let me know at .. askdrdruid@gmail.com. Please put ‘agent’ in the subject line.

……….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

blog title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy

excerpt image is alice munman

article slice is michael parkes

I’d be very grateful if you’d send pogblog’s link to a friend:
http://pogblog.blogharbor.com

email: askdrdruid@gmail.com

.. keep your heart bright. beauty is rising.

.for bombadilobo.

<^>..

the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military-Industrial Budget on education instead ..

………….<^>…………….

Ask Dr. Druid …… Day 21 …… The Part of Art 1

Posted on July 22, 2007 by wendy fleet

Ask Dr. Druid . Day 21

The Part of Art .. 1

This piece will read best for you

if you read it with your mouth as if out loud

[Ask Dr. Druid is designed to begin at the beginning. Click here.]

What part does art play in solving the quantum equations of the next human leap into a kinder destiny?

Art is as important as air in this glory of attentions, your life. Art is the brandy of attentions, distilled, golden, intoxicating. Among Dr. Druid’s subversive and blatant goals is the inoculation of your heart with art, with the haunting, daunting necessity of art. Art ain’t a luxury, for other people. I’m not saying artists cannot be belligerent morons who monger war and gigagreed, but 99% of art is a start away from being willing to do killing. Art can soak up & transmogrify the energies people otherwise insanely use to hate and to obliterate.

As Lord Byron would have it, “We thus dilate our spirits to the size of what we contemplate.” I add that we also distill our spirits to the intensity of the tiny glory we contemplate, say an ant or a grassblade.

Hinged

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Part of the point is to do as much art as you can and stay hinged. (The temptation is to dali or to bosch and to pterodactyl into the paisley skies of a benign madness.)

One of the rottenest and stupidest things is that people have attached success in art to frilthy lucre. Pifffle. Start your damn art today and be awful at it in the beginning. Bloody persevere. Eventually you get better. (I sometimes think that everyone should have an art that no one will ever see so they can just putter happily making mudpies in it and not worry what the spouse or the neighbor or any bloody anybody will say. People are so horrifically judgmental. Please allow yourself to be in kindergarten.)

The tender bud of creativity is snuffed out by other people’s Idiot Perfectionist, and your own. Not that they have ever even probably done any foray into the forests of art. Or maybe you’ve got them in the one they have a knack for. They should be required to try something they ain’t so handy at. (Like baseball players trying to play golf. Or in a class of 7^th & 8^th graders I had 38 years ago – all the language-kids wrote this riveting prose and when they read their stories out loud, the non-verbal shrank back into their shells. There was this kid in the fartherest away back corner who doodled fabulous flame-burning cars all day. I had the inspiration to have everyone illustrate their stories. From being the helpless worst, this kid was the fabulous best. When I stood with him showing his brilliant drawings at the front of the class, everyone got a glimpse of how we are all gifted and all clumsy.) I always honor most the folks who lurch out of their comfort zone and take that dangerous chance on the brave awkwardness of actually learning something entirely new.

I will give more evidence along our way, but I know, as a teacher and as a learner, everyone can learn everything. Drawing was my one exception. And Dear Rafaello in one weekend tricked me into my drawing brain and there is my running shoe, laces, holes and all still on a page to prove that anybody can learn anything. Now I didn’t stick with that trick, but I know it’s there. And you can be tricked by a nifty teacher or your nifty self into learning anything if you just unclench your brain and say, “By Golly, I will kindergartenilly persevere until I figure this out, tra la la.” It may take a long time, but you can get Very Very Good.

When I finally figured out how to teach writing, every single kid ended up writing killer stuff. Because I learned how to trick them into being real, not derivative. There was one kid who wrote about stereo components every night. I couldn’t wait for the next installment. Of course you can’t give a damn about grammar and spelling in the early going – any clod can fix that. What you want is their reality on the page, not yours – their passion for stereo components. (Once you hook them on the juice of the Zone, you can rather easily persuade them into the usefulness of grammar. The other way around never gets to zeal.)

To remind you to begin, renew, or sustain your journal/log or whatever other art you pursue: there only a few tricks to learning to write. First, you need to write every day. Make a vow. Put the whole date. (I have boxes of stuff that are dated May 6 or March 15. When I wrote it, I knew what year. Uhh, but now I have no clue. So 03.15.07 is good. I like to put 03.15.07 sunmon 2:14am. The date is necessary. The rest is idiosyncratic.) Your vow is to write something every day even if it’s “I’m too darn tired to write.” I have never actually written that though in my vow I have permission to.

Now I’ve done this vow for about 30 years so I ought to have it down. (Because I write allegorical philosophy, I wanted to make sure what I was saying would turn out to be true in a life before I foisted it on the public. I’m in a foisting mode now at last.)

So, write every day. And never write when you can’t write: If you can’t write it down, don’t think it. You’ll never get the pristine phrasing back. When I’m out and about, I’ll jot down a phrase or two, but I’ve trained myself not to indulge in turning the faucet on. I wait until I’m at a page or computer screen. Of course I often go out to write. That’s fine. I’m talking about when you’re driving or walking with no notebook. Observe. Don’t write in your head. Jotting is OK, but not full-fledged open the flood gates.

You write every day. You don’t write when you can write it down.

Some days you write literature. Some days you write glorified shopping lists. It’s the keeping faith with the Muse that counts. She (or he) ruthlessly believes in your honoring the relationship. You will be rewarded for keeping faith. This is a grail quest and you gotta be pure of heart. You don’t have to be smart or a natural sentence-slinger in the beginning. You do have to keep faith.

Write only for yourself and the Muse. Your horrid friends or family seldom have anything useful to say. You’ll find your writing friends along the way, and they only whisper sweet somethings into your ear. Say what you like about someone’s work and elsewise Shut Up. You’d be amazed at how many ‘friends’ read with a machete and think they’re being ‘helpful.’ Oh Gods, ugh.

Then, the best proofreading and editing you can do of your stuff is to read it out loud to yourself. Then you’ll see where it doesn’t work.

Remember, editing is easy. Flame for ink, ice for ink, blood for ink – that’s the trick.

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more The Part of Art .. Hie thee

I want to tell you about the kilim exhibit. Some years ago in the De Young Museum, I think. I wandered through the immense marbled halls hung with remarkable kilim or ‘Turkish rugs.’ The work, the dedication. They were beautiful. They were compelling. Their intricate symmetry spoke of a holy determination to honor God. Everything had to be tended — the sheep, the thread, the dyes, the wood of the loom. The apprentice becomes the master. How many moons rose gold and set silver? The songs chanted. The water fetched in a battered wooden bucket after morning prayers. The rugs appeared in a powerful and obedient symmetry.

There were rugs more than 700 years old. Some men worked on cathedrals. Some men worked on kilim. Honor was paid to the Creator.

After more than an hour of rapt contemplation, I came around a corner and saw yet another kilim. It hit me with such a shock, like I’d been struck by lightning — seared like that. From the 14th century, there like a message straight to the secret center of my heart was this magical, astonishing, asymmetric kilim. It was wildly celebratory, and broke all the rules. I felt a surge of joy so deep and fierce I wasn’t sure I could live past that very moment. Yes, oh yes, one could be different. I was not ever completely alone again.

S/he dared. I dared. As long as we sought as much beauty as we could stand, it was wonderful. Tears just ran silently down my face in greeting, in gladness. People swarmed thru the galleries, but somehow I was alone around this corner as if the universe wanted to grant me this special audience with this kindred spirit from the deep past.

Hie thee to a museum. You will always be changed, rearranged, usefully deranged.

…..<^>..

Notes

+ Please remember the portable wisdom of my hypnotism teacher, Dobson: “Respond only to positive suggestion from any source . . . including yourself.”

+ hinged vs unhinged ..

+ If you do a google image search on Dali and Hieronymus Bosch, you'll see the sublime slide into the surreal.

+ images in excerpt & slice, anthony mccall (If you live near SF & you see this before 09.28.07, go to sfmoma & see mccall’s stupendous interactive installation You & I, Horizontal on floor 4. You’ll always remember it utterly.)

+ If you don't live near any museum, haul out a huge art book from your library and root thru it.

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If you know or are an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of druid material, please let me know at .. askdrdruid@gmail.com. Please put ‘agent’ in the subject line.

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

You may comment anonymously.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

blog title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy

I’d be very grateful if you’d send pogblog’s link to a friend:
http://pogblog.blogharbor.com

email: askdrdruid@gmail.com

.. keep your heart bright. beauty is rising.

.for bombadilobo.

<^>..

the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military-Industrial Budget on education instead ..

………….<^>…………….

Ask Dr. Druid …… Day 20 …… 77 Qualities of Gladness

Posted on July 16, 2007 by wendy fleet

Ask Dr. Druid . Day 20

77 Qualities of Swift Gladness

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This piece will read best for you
if you read it with your mouth as if out loud
[Ask Dr. Druid is designed to begin at the beginning. Click here.]

I know of some folks who have been meditating for a few years on the 26 qualities that the Gita’s Arjuna said were necessary to master for a noble life or somesuch. They have taken each quality like 'fearlessness' or 'forgiveness' and meditated &/or chanted it for forty days for each quality. Life-changing they claim. Well, who can gainsay that, per se?

I just happened today to be looking up ‘frolic’

to see if my latest e-dictionary fav Online Dict at DataSegment properly had the root meaning of ‘frolic’ as ‘swift gladness.’ This dict puts synonyms at the bottom of the definition page and there was:

Moby Thesaurus words for “frolic”:

antic, beam, caper, caracole, carouse, carry on, cavort, celebration, chirp, chirrup, clap hands, curvet, cut a dido, cut capers, cut up, dance, delight, disport, escapade, exult, festivity, flounce, fool around, frisk, fun and games, gaiety, gambado, gambol, glory, glow, have fun, hell, high jinks, horse around, horseplay, jollification, jollity, joy, jubilate, lark, laugh, lilt, make whoopee, merriment, merrymaking, mirth, party, partying, play, practical joke, prank, radiate cheer, rejoice, revel, revelry, riot, roister, rollick, romp, shenanigan, shenanigans, shines, sing, skip, skip for joy, skylark, skylarking, smile, sparkle, sport, spree, tomfoolery, trick, trip, waggish trick, wassail, whistle

Hmmm, I thought, Why not in some random periodicity, nimbly (imagine an sure-footed mountain goat on a steep hillside) improvise some commentarying on these 77 qualities of mischievous swift gladness, a non-creed, anti-creed, post-creed commentary? How droll and perhaps even glittering, sequined for all we know.

Since our babbling-brook stream of consciousness sometimes has the attention span of a firefly, relishes small delightful illuminations, this forty-day gig on a single quality ain’t on per se, but I thought I’d leave the timing in the legerdemains of the dear Greatest Deity Drolloa, patron deity of Vitamin I.

So, I thought I’d do my initial exploring and commentarying on ‘frolic’ for you.

Frolic is of course 1^st & 4most my panbeloved cat palanddream Frolic who is like patting a sunwarmed nuage (new-ahj) – an iridescent pewter-colored cloud of silvery softness, so soft indeed that if you close your eyes you think your fingers are passing over a fluff of warmed, sweet, whipped cream. The root of ‘frolic’ is ‘swift gladness,’ a perfection of cat description that was fortuitous, a gift from The Blue, who pours presents upon us from the gigantic cosmic constellation, Cornucopia.

[[In the interests of the rollercoastering chaos which the 77 qualities of swift gladness of mischief and of fun foments for us, nuage & nuée both mean ‘cloud’ in French. At the other end of the cloud spectrum from the whipped cream nuage, we find Nuée ardente (new-hay are-daunt), that ferocious pyroclastic (broken fire) flow of burning cloud which violently pours down from a volcanic eruption and is more sudden, savage, and lethal than the lava flow. In the great volcanic death events(e.g. 79 Mt Vesuvius; 1902 Mt Pelée; 1980 Mt. St. Helens) in history, it is the nuée ardente that encases and incinerates people and cities, and no doubt goats and spiders and chickadees too. From Wiki, nuées ardentes are “fast-moving fluidized bodies of hot gas, ash and rock (collectively known as tephra) which can travel away from the vent at up to 94 mph. The gas is usually at a temperature of 212-1472 degrees Fahrenheit.”]]

If we weren’t grim, if we couldn’t be grim, grimy, tarnished of heart, if silliness were our unsolid state, our legerdepieds, then we wouldn’t and in deed couldn’t daggone kill collateral (aka people) damage. We would sicken ourselves. $820,000 per minute on the bloated insane Military-Corporate Budget and the additional $233,000 per minute flushed in a war like Iraq would have been better spent if troops of brightly costumed clowns with enormous bulbous-toed pink plastic shoes had just stood on the corner of al Thawra & al Kulafa streets and the corner of Qutuiba & Waqas streets in Baghdad and just handed out fistfuls of cash. In a mere 48 days, we could have given each of the roughly 5,772,000 Baghdadians $10,000 apiece. Does anyone think this wouldn’t have won more hearts and minds than the turning of gold into rubble and bones and Zones?

Instead of all this cordite, a ferocious fascination with the permutations of fun, the facets of silliness, obsidian and nuage, vulture and dandelion, would serve our darling planet so much more nobly in preposterity.

Grok on, Frolic on, dear reader. If LJC, Siddhaha, MoHam, Jehovaha et al can’t frolic, can’t be swift of gladness, can’t do a vaudeville turn or twain, fire’em and hire up some jollier and more insistently kind deities. I am become so allergic to faux piety that I break out into a fever of irritation if I’m exposed to one pppm (piety part per million) – gimme arsenic or heroin before killers’ piety, thanks.

8888888

So, consider picking some qualities to contemplate in your log or of a musing afternoon or of a musing <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />midnight. I recommend keeping to the sillier side of qualities so you don’t get inadvertently drawn into the dreary or pompous seriousness so often falsely associated with ‘spirituality.’ Gods forfend we get bogged down in seriousness.

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Notes:
+ the 26 Arjuna qualities – most of these are much nicer and more serious than I am:
Gita, Ch. 16, Verse 1: The Blessed Lord said Fearlessness, purity of heart, steadfastness in Knowledge and Yoga, almsgiving, control of the senses, sacrifice, study of scriptures, austerity, and straightforwardness

Gita, Ch. 16, Verse 2 : Harmlessness (Ahimsa), truth, absence of anger, renunciation, peacefulness, absence of crookedness, compassion towards beings, freedom from covetousness, gentleness, modesty, absence of fickleness

Gita, Ch. 16, Verse 3 : Vigour, forgiveness, fortitude, purity, absence of hatred, absence of overweening pride – these belong to the one who is born with Divine treasures.
+ palanddream .. pal-and-dream
+ legerdemain .. light of hand, slight of hand in magic; cf coined legerdepieds, slight of feet, as a lamb gambols.

+ image of slithy tove above from drew bond, aka co nz

+ images of greys .. paul klee, google images.

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If you know or are an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of druid material, please let me know at .. askdrdruid@gmail.com. Please put ‘agent’ in the subject line.

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

You may comment anonymously.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

blog title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy

I'd be very grateful if you'd send pogblog’s link to a friend:
http://pogblog.blogharbor.com

email: askdrdruid@gmail.com

.. keep your heart bright. beauty is rising.

.for bombadilobo.

..<^>……

the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military-Industrial Budget on education instead ..

………….<^>…………….

Ask Dr. Druid . day 19 . Negative Capability 1

Posted on July 9, 2007 by wendy fleet

Ask Dr. Druid . Day 19

Negative Capability 1 . A Handful of Air

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This piece will read best for you

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[Ask Dr. Druid is designed to begin at the beginning. Click here.]

Please take it a little extra slow with this piece, as if licking molasses from a spoon.

A single handful of air doesn’t weigh much, but you surround a planet with an atmosphere and it adds up. Similarly (tho not identically), your memory of, imagination of, dream of a landscape has a photonic mass that has to be accounted for – it is most of barklian existents. (K1 is the kinesthetic or standard e=mc² daytime physics about which narrow-end physics obsesses and to which it grants sole proprietorship of the reality label.) Most of what I ‘know’ and experience has no K existence whatever. It may or may not have had a brief K component.

Repeatable science is important essential work. It should have funds and university departments up the yang. However, the 90% of our experience which has no immediate K1 component (& may indeed never have had a K1 flint moment of tactile, olfactory, gustatory or t-o-g interface at all), that 90% is all but discounted in its mass qualities. Masses of this photonic water flows through the brain pipe and does have complex physiological effects, but the correlations are hard to measure and impossible to repeat.

So we diss &/or ignore the physics of 90% of our real if glancing and evanescent experience. Chaos theory legitimizes the study of the turbulence of water through a K1 pipe, but we aren’t even at the stage of accepting the vast photonic universe at all, least of all allowing arcane or niche creeks of study off an established river of supposedly-repeatable flow.

Our established K1, repeatable Theoscience is very papal and dogmatic, and I think the initial insistent separation from other magics was a very good and necessary clarity at the time. But it is false – the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. It all interdwells and until we add the fabulously vast sea and the dainty filigrees of photonic psyence, we will know least of all honor little of the seamless truth. It self-evidently is unified whether we can explain it or not.

It is no doubt true that it is very hard to stay objective when studying the mischievous, seductive photonic realm. You can ask for smart and for wise perhaps — but objective, nah. (Objective is a crock anyhow which Heisenberg got.) You only get to study tame stuff in the repeatable-is-real mode. If you want to study tigers burning in the forests of the night, you need different scopes.

So what do you want in a photonic scientist, psyentist, or knower? I would say that an affection for the abzurd is handy. And especially useful is dear Keats’ Negative Capability: “ . . . which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a [person] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge . . . .”

In my experience, K1 science is dog-like – predictable, obedient. You can put a leash on it. Photonic matter or e=mc∞ or photonic mattergy is like a cat – it purrs, it likes to be stroked, but obedient? Repeatable? ¡HaHa! Nada, nunca. Never. There are patterns and fields one can discern and mention – but the sensitivity and malleability and shapeshiftiness of the photonic mattergy, the holopaint, makes and creates so sleekly and rapidly and rampantly that you can’t bottle it.

You can, however, teach people to keep some of their wits about them while exploring and studying it. First, we’d have, in the West, to learn to honor play as much as work. Of things useless or criminally-insane-equivalent in PhotonicVille is the Protestant Work Ethic. We’d also have to recognize the rampant flak of a huge and often appallingly puerile, sometimes enticing amount of raunch.

We are not souls trapped in gross earthly bodies. That’s way too staid and prettyfied. We are rambunctious, fractal holokaleidocopic coalescences of energy & pattern inhabiting an unexpectedly stable bio-suit for a tidbit of time. The linear qualities of ‘our’ life are a useful fiction. I’m all for lucid waking, defined and refined by science and art. We need to add lucid photonics and psyence (dreaming; memory; fantasy; imagination &c).

We spend a lot of tasty fluids and other substances to relax or vanish the walls between us and the wilder sea. (These walls or levees are very darn useful – full-bloom schizophrenia or helpless dimensions-confusion isn’t fun. If, on the other hand, we are taught whole life skills [which I would dub hololife skills to more pointedly include the whole 24 that we do indeed live], we can have choices of walls, or not — just like we put up and down the venetian blinds on the sunny side of the house.)

In 50 or 100 years, all these skills are taught in Druid Quantum Schools, but for the nonce, I’m plunking the more oneiro-skills, the photonics into Druid Clown School InterDimensional. The <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Quantum School stuff will take a smaller leap into schooling many more people better, but closer to the best of the prevailing model. Those of us who particularly love the future and the dear Penetralium of mystery can work on getting these fractal photonic science, psyence, skill-sets translatable to those linear folk still made vertiginous by free fall. The coming time will not allow them to remain in their familiar mode; there will be vortexes and torques of mind&emotion that require the new skills.

Today, with this holo-info in mind, notice & contemplate just how much of what is moving your piece around the Cosmic Chess Board is not K1, is not science fodder. This will begin the development of your Negative Capability organ, your unclenched, no irritable reaching after fact and reason organ. You’ll begin to add the delicious capability of being able to see the brilliant but shy denizens from the Penetralium of mystery.

…<^> …….

Notes

+ barklian existents .. Irish Bishop Berkeley (pronounced Barkly) thought & I agree with him that all we could testify to were mental constructs of one kind or another. But there is the semi-consensual hallucination and then there are the photonic psyence realms where we don’t yet share enough conscious experiences to make a lot of tests and claims tho we can poetically attest and resonate.

+ narrow-end physics – narrow-end refers to the narrow end of the telescope. A wry tho not unkind suggestion that standard science is leaving out a whole lot of reality in order to preserve the exclusive sanctity of this repeatable thing. Damn, us poetry witches & wizards either got burned or spurned. But our time is comin', darlin'.

+ holo-paint .. The photonic worlds are as if magically painted into existence by a paint which is 3D rather than 2D. It paints landscapes you can walk in rather than look at on a wall. Very tricksy stuff holopaint.

+ oneiro-skills .. oneiro = dream in Greek.

+ images title & excerpt Harry Tjutuna, australia dreaming art;

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If you know or are an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of druid material, please let me know at .. askdrdruid@gmail.com. Please put ‘agent’ in the subject line.

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

blog title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy

It’d be great if you sent pogblog’s link to your friends:
http://pogblog.blogharbor.com

email: askdrdruid@gmail.com

.for bombadilobo.

<^>..

the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military Budget on education instead ..

………….<^>…………….

Ask Dr. Druid . day 18 . Remote Viewing

Posted on July 4, 2007 by wendy fleet

Ask Dr. Druid . Day 18

Remote Viewing

This piece will read best for you

if you read it with your mouth as if out loud

[Ask Dr. Druid is designed to begin at the beginning. Click here.]

Remote viewing is a kind of teleportation, a visiting of a terrestrial place where your daybody is not. It is another way to practice making your attentions’ capacities more elastic and eclectic. Remote viewing is that variation, that facet of the out-of-body experience which doesn’t go gallivanting off around the galaxies, but rather to a Russian submarine harbor (a Cold War favorite) or to downtown Paris.

The underlying point of all our exercises is to make your kaleidoscopic life experience more keen, more jolly, more exquisitely luminous and breathtaking – your birthright. You’ve heard of a lot of capacities as occult or ‘weird’ or mystic. None of these really. You just weren’t taught them in your usual school.

I suggest practicing remote viewing in your living room where you can check and verify your impressions. Lie on your bed or sit some place comfy. Always have had a pit stop. My hypnotism teacher, Dobson, always said about hypnotism sessions: “Never compete with the bladder!” Ground, relax. Imagine yourself in your handy travel body walking off to your living room or other room where no one is and ‘spying’ on what’s there. Be deliberate, methodical, and thorough. Notice as many qualities of objects as you can. Whisper them to yourself as you touch them with your eyes and fingertips. Vase; red with yellow tulips; pear-shaped; narrow neck; lacquered; eleven inches high. Notice the shadow each thing casts. The thing; its shadow; the thing.

If I spread my hand wide, from the tip of my little finger to the tip of my thumb is eight inches. This makes a handy measurer for RV forays.

The coolest thing about remote viewing is that you can bump into things and not knock them over. (Tho poltergeisting is a whole ‘nother subject.) Whether in your daybody or your rembody, every time you blink, you unconsciously add a minute snapshot of emphasis to whatever you’re attending to. Making a conscious definite crisp blink can underline an observation for you. Anything you do to get info into more than one sense system will ratify that observation for you. You see something and then say your observations about it. That gives you visual and auditory. The crisp blink adds kinesthetic. All of this gets very suave and sleek and delectable and all but effortless. In the meantime, these remote viewing forays into your living room or kitchen can markedly tune up your attentions. You’ll certainly notice yourself quantumly more aware as you walk through those rooms in your daybody – in order to feel less excruciatingly embarrassed at what you missed when you do your next remote view session and review, if for no other reason.

When you’ve made a circuit or twain around the room, come back into your comfy body and review what you’ve viewed. Then get up and go scrutinize to see how precise and accurate and detailed you were.

Most folks are leery of testing their ‘enlightenment’ and ignore their endarkenment altogether.

(“O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!/It wad frae monie a blunder free us/An foolish notion . . . .”) Doing this living room and kitchen remote viewing allows very quick feedback which is the way to learn anything most efficiently. You also get to do this privately so if you have remembered to shoo your Inner Perfectionist off to Fiji to guzzle grog, you can be observant of your failings rather than judgmental about them. You can do this exercise a thousand times and it will get incrementally more actual and vivid each foray.

We’ll go into the following in much more chiaroscuro detail later, but I want to introduce you to the druid notion of day-reality as an holographic language through which you pass like a 4D braille. It’s all hieroglyphs, oneiroglyphs, runes with stories to tell. You are living within a galactic language. Listen, my friend, to the dear wall.

I was lucky enough to grow up way from anywhere where I had no idea (yet) that people weren’t allowed to talk to trees. So I learned to listen to the so-called inarticulate before I had to lock them in that stupid lifeless speechless box because people were all stirred up about witches and ole cloven hoof satan and wicked pagans. Gee whiz those folks were dull who could stand having their church in a building. The hardest thing was disguising the wild and somersaulting energy of the rampant animist life. So much glee. A tree never minds how much glee you have. It has birds gossiping in its leafy bower after all so it is never shocked by astonished joy.

Anyhow, when you do your re-views of your remote viewing in your living room or kitchen, you will begin to feel the full-body braille-reading alertness as you grokkingly pass through the space. Your attentions will become less head-centric and you’ll become more electrically present in your present. It’s a blast.

To get these effects, you have to do the exercises, you can’t just read about them . . .

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Notes

..suave .. soo-ah-vay, in the Spanish manner, tasty. El azul suave is a pale robin’s egg blue.

.. RV .. remote viewing;

.. “Oh wad some Power the giftie . . .” from Robert Burns, To a Louse;

.. chiaroscuro .. literally bright-dark; noticing the contrasts between light and dark; Check out the remarkable and still more modern than we ever can be movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1920. If you love black & white films and photos –without all the distraction of color, Dr. Caligari will astound you forever.

.. Shadows are seldom black, interestingly – first noted most notably by Monet & the Impressionists;

.. hieroglyphs are the Egyptian picture writing. they are clearly more concrete with their languaging than we remember to be;
oneiroglyphs – oneiro is the Greek word for dream, so dream-picture-writing, except in this case, holographic writing, like day-life is. Runes are also shorthand for holographic writing;

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images.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye for title slice, aboriginal art.com;

excerpt image, craig allan charles, australian dreaming.com;

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If you know or are an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. askdrdruid@gmail.com. Please put ‘agent’ in the subject line.

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It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

blog title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy

It’d be great if you sent Ask Dr. Druid’s link to your friends:
www.wendyfleet.com

email: askdrdruid@gmail.com

.for bombadilobo.

<^>..

the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military Budget on education instead ..

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Ask Dr. Druid . day 17 . Pansexual

Posted on June 18, 2007 by wendy fleet

Ask Dr. Druid . Day 17

Pansexual

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This piece will read best for you

if you read it with your mouth as if out loud.
[Ask Dr. Druid is designed to begin at the beginning. Click here.]

in which the World, depraved, is saved

Itshehimwe doesn’t have a sexual orientation per se. Itshehimwe has an inclusive lust, an encompassing tenderness. Itshehimwe covets the stark vast beauty and ache of the distance between the stars. The stoicism, the chaste patience of the desert rock outcroppings. The gorgeous violence of coupling horses. The strut, the rut.

The sheer celebration and might of the oak tree’s offering its vast leafiness to the sapphire sky. The oak tree, master conjurer, turns dirt and water into bark, magnificence, elixir sap, and all those leaves.

The voluptuousness of a cup of cocoa. Eyes, ears, tongue, nose, skin, bark, pads of leopards, semi-permeable membranes of amoebas — all designed to savor.

The delicate tips of palm fronds crackling like fire in the setting sun, reading like braille the evening gossip of zephyrs.

Itshehimwe covets and savors each of these.

The Great Freedom of the 21st century on the planet EarthVuravuraJeegoo was our Escape from the narrow, genital-obsessed notions of Desire into the Delights of Pansex. Many poets had had glimpses of the unprejudiced lust and tenderness that floods the Whole Wide World, tiny and monumental, but only in the 21st century did we all become poets. After Itshehimwe’s visit.

It was on <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />11/22/11, November 22, 2011, of the Old Reckoning when Itshehimwe visited. Whatever you were doing, cooking a cheese-and-chive omelet, walking down the street looking at the new books in the store window, feeding the calves with their rorschach black-and-white hides and slippery wide rubbery noses, whatever you happened to be doing, Itshehimwe spoke. Wake up. Welcome.

Whatever you were touching or tasting or attending became riveting. Your own bone marrow, the glistening eyeballs of the first person you saw — in and through all of it, Itshehimwe spoke all the day. We were never the same after Itshehimwe came. The pungent, raucous joy; the simple, serene, silly revelation.

Everyone heard it. Was imbued, hued by it. No one had more of it or was more or less sure of it. All churches joined hands, danced — pranced. Sporadically, suddenly, frequently now, once a month or half-year, Itshehimwe would visit — Wake up Welcome. And when Itshehimwe laughed out loud, the thrill, the shiver, the chill, the lava melting of fear and hate, the hullabaloo, the hurrah.

In Panda Bare’s historic interview with Itshehimwe, she asked, “Itshehimwe, why did you wait so long to visit?”

Itshehimwe giggled. “Bloody hell, Panda, we thought we were shouting all along. Murmuring, whispering, cajoling, flirting. Who could look at their own hand and not know they’d been wrought by genius? Who could look at the big blue sky filled with cloud toys and not hear laughter of the gamboling gods?

“Do you know how much blue it takes to cover the whole wide sky? Who could see the sea and not see us? It was harder to pry open your eyes, ears, and tongue than we thought. Honey, we’ve been hollering the whole time.”

Suddenly Itshehimwe looked slightly stern and Panda Bare held her breath, hoping not to be turned to a cinder in a careless moment of deitific pique. Panda Bare had been chosen for this interview because she was used to stark naked encounters with the Nature of Reality. She was a metaphysical stripper who liked the magnificently turbulent Edge where the Future boiled into being in scarlet and emerald waves of ecstatic tumult. The raw rhapsodic Future before it was tidied up and pastelled down for mortal consumption.

Panda Bare was a shaman pilot for the disoriented in the interstellar time storms which buffeted some searching souls. However, cheek to jowl with Itshehimwe was violently vivid. Any mistake on either side and Panda’s molecules could be fried.

“Frankly,” Itshehimwe continued, “we’d like you all to work out if possible. Our deitific reputation is on the line. Somewhere along the way you all got tangled up in a spiritual snarl and you lost teleology, the belief in beauty. Even the most imbecilic, myopic detective should see the blazing evidence, the reason and rhyme, the luminous signs of design any and everywhere.

“The notion that Awe and Passion need interfere with Clarity and Focus is the error of so-called science. And then your Palaces of Piety neglect the splendid engineering particular to the daily solid plane — the fact that your waking life is so sturdy and reliable.

“We,” Itshehimwe pulsed and flickered like a huge sky full of restless lightning, “we are very proud of the engineering. Getting the joints in your hands to work so nicely for sixty years is a neat feat. Though we try to eschew arrogance, we are vain enough to enjoy an attentive appreciation by our audience.”

Panda Bare cleared her throat and licked her lips, “Itshehimwe, we appreciate your stopping by for such a special chat.” Itshehimwe beamed and tickled Panda with a boisterous splash of tingling color.

Looking mischievously sly, Itshehimwe snickered and added, “Remember that what is beautiful is not always pretty. We do bats, vultures, spiders, and fungus too.”

..<^>….

Notes: When Itshehimwe gets here, you’ll be a lot happier if you have already gotten used to wider octanes of attentions and plusdepan or more-all. The extra-light that will flood the planet will freak out your dear circuits if you are still stuck in DullnessVille. You’d probably recover, but your nervous frenziness would be darned uncomfortable. It will help if your grammar has gotten out of its whalebone corset. You’ll be lots more zippitydodah if you’ve horded up a huge stockpile of Vitamin I because Itshehimwe is nothing if not monstrously into practical jokes and whimsy and gallons of grog made with wry. You may wish Itshehimwe didn’t find making pretzels of your perceptions so darned droll, but c’est will be la vie. So cheer up. Itshehimwe will knead your dough until you do accept the yeast and rise. So if you’re already croissant and champagne of mind and heart and spleen when Itshehimwe arrives, luckier you.

When in doubt, default to droll.

….

images.. both from australia dreaming gallery; title slice from eunice napanangka jack; excerpt pict from craig allan charles;

..pan .. combining form meaning all;

..plusdepan .. more of all; pron ploo-duh-pan;

..Vitamin I .. vitamin irony;

.. rorschach is the ink blot tests you make by squeezing a blob of ink between a fold of paper & making up stories about the strange patterns. The black and white Holstein dairy cows look rather like rorschach tests on the hoof, or as I am wont to say ‘Modern Art on the hoof.’ As Mowgli was brought up by panthers and bears, I was brought up by the black and white Holstein dairy cows. As a very young child, I used to lie in the pasture on my back and they would circle all around me with their enormous glossy fringed eyes gazing upon me and they would snorffle me with their great rubbery noses. It was extremely comforting and we dwelt in a communing of happiness under the blue glory of the sky.

…<^>..

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It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

blog title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy

It’d be great if you sent pogblog’s link to your friends:
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.dedicated to bombadilobo.

<^>..

the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military Budget on education instead ..

………….<^>…………….

Ask Dr. Druid … Day 16 … Bylar, my other planet

Posted on June 11, 2007 by wendy fleet

Ask Dr. Druid . Day 16

Bylar, my other planet

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This piece will read best for you
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[Ask Dr. Druid is designed to begin at the beginning. Click here.]

When I first found out, I didn’t want to be from another planet. It’s like finding out you’re adopted. It’s disorienting. Like after your first major earthquake, you never feel the same simple sureness again. Obviously when people ask you where you’re from, you say, “The Eastern Shore of Maryland.” Saying “I’m from Bylar, a planet of intricate beauty where all sentience is irrevocably lost” is not an ice-breaker in the earth-based social swirl.

Oh Bylar. The last time she had been there, no animal or bird or grasshopper stirred. Only trees, grasses, and the wind. She stood for a moment in a graveyard on the top of a small hill. Here, crystallized, was why Bylar was wondrous. What had been lost. On Bylar, graves were not marked by cold stones. They were marked by large whimsical wind toys. The departed devised these playful mementos along as they lived, to leave in token of gratitude and delight. She put her right palm on the ground and then placed it over her heart. She listened to the amused clacking of the wooden toys as they played with the mischievous wind. Suddenly in spite of the rustle of the grasses and the droll clatter of the toys in the wind, like the wild creature she was, she heard the cold silence and tasted the bitter metal tang of fear.

In an instant with a last glance she stole the magic of her birthplace and tucked it as deep in her heart as she could hide it. She ran down the hill toward the glade, and the evil which had killed all her kin and kind scythed after her to slay this last consciousness on the planet Bylar.

She hid by a tree in the dappled glade in the deep green shadows, breathing silently. She muted her naked soul to almost death. She felt the restless bleak evil for only a moment thwarted. It had killed her kin without notice; it was not glad of that; it was just evil.

She felt it waiting to spring. She was perfectly trapped. She gathered all her heart and nerve and flung herself from her home into the ether. She smelled the scorched air as she fled. And knew somehow so strangely that somehow it had let her escape as if it could not quite quench every trace of Bylar from the Worlds. Or was it prevented?

Bylar. Only me to speak thy fluid fluent loving tongue. Rowdy soft splashing fire and waterfall of flame words are alive to us and I hold you in my words’ embrace with the passion and affection that I might kiss your mouth if I were near enough to feel your smile and taste your breath as we breathe together and do not know whose heart is beating louder.

Yes Bylar is a run-on sentence and a mixed metaphor as is all life everywhere. The grammar of truth is not what’s taught in your usual school.

Some people on her adopted planet were dismayed at her intensity, but she knew something that Earthers did not, that a beloved planet can die, and all the sentience be irrevocably gone. She loved fancy, extravagant, spectacular Earth. She was homesick only for the fluidity, the spectrum of speeds, the reverent complexity of thought that was so easy and essential on Bylar. The laughter always in the background like living next to a river running over rocks. Splashing, thought did splash on Bylar.

You could tap into the Knot and join the hymn and hum and chuckle and gossip of the communal interlaced sentience of the planet. Or you could take a spate of solitude. The communal had a telempathic intimacy. Because sensation was one whole of response to interaction, senses were not falsely separated as on Sol3. You tasted with your eyes, saw with your tongue. Alone or plugged in, sensation was an orchestral luxury. You were immersed in sensation. You surfed on a wave of sensation, then splashed in the froth of its breaking wave.

The heartbeat of a stone is slow. The heartbeat of a bird is fast. The Savors, or what would be called humans on Sol3, were capable of the whole spectrum of identity and speeds. It was their job to savor and to hold holy all the minutes and minutia of their experience and keep it against the Long Dark.

I believe I will find it or it will be found—the record, the preserved dream of the beloved lost planet, my Bylar, where most of all we laughed. My blood was born under another star. Coming from so far, the best I can tell you from my alien but sympathetic heart is “Wake up. Treasure it. This second and the next. This person and the next. You have been given a splendid planet. Tune your every molecule to appreciation, and wonder will accompany you. Oh do treasure your planet and its denizens. You can lose all of them, and that ache is a ghastly lesson, more horrible than I dare tell you. Against the vast sky of eternity, each moment of your life is a distinct star. Do your life honor. You are a miracle of sentience. Savor it.”

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I wrote this so long ago in my life. It was a shocking experience and reported as concretely as I am able. Perhaps it will give you a glimpse of why I’m so devoted to our darling Earth. I know starkly what’s at stake.

…<^>..

For now, let’s call me an orphan brought up by druids. An hardest aspect of darling Earth Vuravura Jeegoo is the cripplingly strait grammar. Tho English is a miracle of funky pirated adaptability, a bastard, mongrel language of stupendous vigor . . . compared to Bylar’s hololanguages, it is pretty staid. I try to push the language envelope in quirk and quixot without losing you, dear reader, in a reverent revelry. I implore you to read with your mouth as if out loud because all these pieces are songy and tasting the words keeps the melody at the best rhythm for grok.

Also I’m trying progressively to unclench your more rational mind as we travel through these days. (If you have just arrived in Day 15, it will serve you to go back and begin at the Intro of Ask Dr. Druid so the vocabulary and the eccentricky but sustainable sensibility unfolds in the alchemic way it’s designed to.)

It is my job to bring you safe back to your harbor after an adventure on the high galactic seas.

….<^>..

Notes

.. bylar means ‘to dance’ in Spanish;

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Ask Dr. Druid, 66 Days from Lead to Gold, Secrets of Alchemy You Can Use, a druid shaman’s playbook .. Intro; Prologue; Day 1; Days 2 & 3; Day 4; Day 5; Day 6; Day 7; Day 8; Day 9; Day 10; Day 11; Day 12; Day 13; Day 14; day 15 Review 2; Day 16; Day 17; Day 18; Day 19; Day 20; Day 21; Day 22; Day 23; Day 24; Day 25; Day 26; Day 27; Day 28; Day 29;……..……<^>………..…..
If you know or are an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. askdrdruid@gmail.com. Please put ‘agent’ in the subject line.
………….<^>……………..
It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.
…………….<^>……………..
Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.
copyright pogblog 2007 all rights reserved
copyright ask dr. druid 2007 all rights reserved
blog title image is a piece of andy goldsworthy
It’d be great if you sent pogblog’s link to your friends:
http://pogblog.blogharbor.com
email: askdrdruid@gmail.com
.dedicated to bombadilobo.
<^>..
the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..
.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military Budget on education instead ..

Ask Dr. Druid

Druid thought; obsidian humor; radically sane politics;

Category Archives: Merlin Myrddin

Ask Dr. Druid .. day 25 .. Vulture Culture

Ask Dr. Druid .. day 24 .. ShapeShifter

Ask Dr. Druid day 23 Review 3 gateau nature

Ask Dr. Druid .. day 22 .. Rhapsodology, the study of meaning

Ask Dr. Druid …… Day 21 …… The Part of Art 1

Ask Dr. Druid …… Day 20 …… 77 Qualities of Gladness

Ask Dr. Druid . day 19 . Negative Capability 1

Ask Dr. Druid . day 18 . Remote Viewing

Ask Dr. Druid . day 17 . Pansexual

Ask Dr. Druid … Day 16 … Bylar, my other planet