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Archive for Light – Page 6

Transformative Fiction

What I’m beginning to see with more clarity is the awakening of a new medium… as I go deeper into this new erotic electronic world which gives me my work, I am seeing new horizons. The realization begins to emerge that all things are possible …

Standing on the edge of the hill, looking out over the city across the bay; more and more lights coming on as the sun sets, the light in the sky darkens and the colors deepen…

Tam

There s a screech owl in a branch immediately above my head, calling to
a mate in a nearby tree. A sudden flurry of sinew and air as he flies
across my path to her. In this moment, all my senses are alive with the magic of the place and time. I don’t want to move, though it’s cold and getting colder.

Stay with me in this place, and hear my words.

I’ve been thinking about something lately… cooking it like a long simmering stew. The meat isn’t falling tenderly off the bones yet, but the flavor is distinct enough to share a taste & the fragrance is intoxicating. It has something to do with a new kind of creative expression, a new genre. Something I’ve been imagining for many years is beginning to take form in me, although the form it’s taking is nothing like I imagined when I first heard the call as a child, knowing I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

For a while now I’ve identified this new genre I want to produce as ‘transformative fiction’. In a way that term doesn’t work to describe something ‘new’, since fiction has been working its transformative magic on readers since the earliest alchemical touch between marker and mark … but now the possibilities of form have expanded and the transformation we can envision has itself been transformed. Nothing less than a collective leap in consciousness is required; a practical grasp of the unity that underlies all things; a way to reach the world’s heart and open our minds to the gift of humanity and the natural world, to the light that suffuses all life.

What I’m beginning to see with more clarity is the awakening of a new medium. I’ve been honing words, visualizing images… Previously I imagined I would write and paint this vision of mine, but as I go deeper into this new erotic electronic world which gives me my livelihood, I am seeing new horizons. The realization begins to emerge that all things are possible within a creative medium that lends itself to the total recreation of reality and allows multiple senses to enter into a narrative chorus of sight, sound and story.

In Second Life, they talk about the social & pscyhological implications of creating the “world we dream of” before it manifests in the “real” world. The ‘transformative fiction’ I’m envisioning works with this same set of ideas and creative principles… I’m looking at the possibility of linking the mind and the body in new ways, of opening new views in our collective neurostructure … making space for transformation – the "great turning" or paradigm shift that many people feel is crucial for humanity’s continued survival.

Revealing Luminosity

I’m part of a study group on the work of the Bolivian spiritual philosopher Oscar Ichazo, who founded the mystical school Arica. This week we are studying the introduction to one of his new trainings, on the process of death.

Briefly, in it Ichazo is talking about the Light, or Luminosity that precedes birth, comes into this life with us (only to be largely veiled by our egos and attachments), and is revealed again in the process of death and afterwards. What was particularly interesting to me, though, was a reference he made to Beauty, or the apprehension of what is Beautiful, as being a force strong enough to cut through this veil during our lives, and reveal the Luminosity at the heart of all.

The reference he used was from Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates tells of his initiation into the Light, or Luminosity, by Diotima, the great prophetess & priestess of the Mysteries. She taught him to simply recognize & contemplate the harmony that is within all that can be called the Beautiful. When the internal Harmony of that Beauty is discovered, she says, it gives rise to a state of Love.  "This love", Oscar says, "having become the actual manifestation of the Beautiful, is in a position of purity, and from this position, it is possible to understand the Luminosity of the Good that is beyond existence and nonexistence …"

The Untrimmable Light

Moonhills

The other night at the end of my workday, a new
friend came by and whisked me off on an adventure. We drove across the San Rafael bridge in her little black convertible, straight into this sunset beyond the sacred Mount
Tamalpais… what a glorious, glorious life I have.

And then I woke up to this incredible poem in my in-box: ‘Mindful’, by Mary Oliver…

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.

It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

~ Mary Oliver ~ from ‘Why I Wake Early’