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November 1, 2006Radiating auras of energycreated by love.I find this phrase radiating from my mind as I focus on a painting I own called “The Protector,” a stylized couple, one’s arm around the other, in hot colors with bold stripes emanating from the figures. Even though it’s a total rip of Picasso’s “Friendship” at The Hermitage, I like the painting for its message of solace through love and its radiating positive vibes that at the moment, as I fix on the image, are glowing around the edges of the canvas. It gets a pass. It gets to stay in my collection. The collection of my various collections. AND OH, HAVE I COLLECTED.Since my first apartment in 1977. It’s not even that I’m a pack rat. It’s not that I’m obsessed with any one type of thing, like antique silver salt cellars. It’s just that I’m a sucker for beauty. I can never get enough of it. Each new object speaks to me of its own beauty, reveals something of its maker and touches something different in me. But now everything I own is under scrutiny as to whether it fills its space or takes up space. Is it radiating energy into my life or sucking energy out of it? Would I buy it again if I saw it today? Because haven’t I told myself? One day I will walk the streets of Tibet owning only the robes I’m wearing. The letting go starts NOW. ON THE GLASS DOOR OF THE CAFÉ INTERNATIONALI am watching a pair of reflected tits bounce by at the Lower Haight Street Fair. I am in my regular Sunday afternoon perch on the left arm of the sick-yellow couch, with the psychedelic butterfly pillow I lay my laptop on, that makes my Mac look like it has magic wings. It happens though that this Sunday there is a neighborhood fair going on, and my people-watching post is prime. There are auras of energy radiating in all directions, like Indra’s net. Do I want to mix in them? THE NET VS. THE GRIDA friend said my “grid” of a couple Ax Files ago brought to mind the Hindi legend of “Indra’s net.” It is described in Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics:
Or, in “I Heart Huckabees,” Existential Detective Dustin Hoffman uses a blanket to represent all the matter and energy in the universe. Within the blanket are contained you, me, the Eiffel Tower, a museum, a war, a disease, an orgasm, a hammer. “Everything is the same, even if it’s different” is the message—if one could see the “blanket truth” all the time, in the every day stuff, we would realize, “Everything you could ever want or be you already have and are.” But Indra’s net is a wondrous shining web of infinite miracle and possibility whereas my clock time grid is more a prison. But wipe away all metaphors from your mind and live in time and space, you crazy diamond. The idea of the grid, after all, is just another artificial construct, the manufacture of my own mind. I disappear it. DO THIS. DON’T DO THAT.Today’s tub reading was The Secret Language of Signs, about paying attention to coincidences and signs that come your way. I have no recollection of even owning the book, much less the autograph by the author Denise Linn with the note: “You are a wonderful being!” I don’t know how I might have revealed the wonder of that being to her but it can’t hurt to compliment a reader. The book turns out to be a bunch of new-agey smarm, but it got me thinking. OH MY GODRecently I was supposed to catch a ride with a couple of friends to a party at a vineyard in Calistoga, but a different pair of friends came by to pick me up instead. On the way up Highway 128 at Petrified Forest Rd., a deer leapt in front of our car and lost its life. The grill of the car and one headlight were peeled off and there was blood and hide embedded in the hood. We couldn’t find the animal, but the other pair of friends, behind us, saw it lifeless on the edge of the road. We hit it going 45 mph. WHAT IS AN ACCIDENT?An unexpected happenstance with consequences. You hit a deer, the deer dies, the car is damaged, the people are unhurt but freaked out. You are late for the party you’re all going to. There is a jog in the time-space continuum which forces you to deal with the here and now. You wouldn’t have expected it, but you cannot continue as you were without reacting in some way. An accident happens when you either lost control or had no control of a situation. You were driving without incident when somone ran a red, when you hit black ice, when a deer miscalculated. When I think accident, I think, circumstances that align to draw attention to something you normally take for granted, like assuming your safety as a driver or passenger. An accident is a coincidence, literally two moments colliding, the moment of the deer leaping, the moment of the car advancing. A second one way or the other could change everything. Would the deer have not died had the first pair of friends picked me up? Would my other friends’ course of travel have been changed by my not being there? I DIDN’T KILL THE DEER.I was in the back seat. But why did this experience come to me? Why did I need to bear witness to an unfortunate accident at this time? Why did I not travel with the original friends I’d asked for a ride (not my choice, just happened that way), in which case I wouldn’t have been in the accident vehicle? I say vehicle instead of car because the car was the vehicle, not in which, but by which the accident came to me. Is there something I need take care to not take for granted? Will I be a bystander to some collateral damage? Am I being warned or do I need to warn someone? It’s unclear. Will circumstances collide to alter my life path? Contemplating these things I venture out into the fair and in my meanderings am drawn to a dagger-shaped silver pendant. A minute later I am also buying a heavy jeweled tribal bracelet with a dagger shape jutting from it. A minute later I am having the dagger hennaed onto my ankle like some sort of Celtic war bracelet. Three times the dagger. What is it saying to me? It is a weapon of destruction but it is also a symbol of strength and virility. To me it says power more than danger. Inherent in its power though is its danger; a dagger is only one letter away from danger. A dagger is a close contact penetrating tool. Perhaps I want to pierce through to the heart of something, or someone. I want to release the red blood from the swollen vessel, as if the heart could strangle on its own passion. Some of it must surface and be allowed to run free. It might be a dangerous or painful approach, but effective. INTO THE FRAYI am not one of those people who is in need of constant connection with other people. I live alone, I don’t have a cell phone plastered to my ear, I screen my calls, I don’t need an avalanche of ego reinforcement from my job or other people every day. I love my evenings of privacy. I am content to let a weekend go by without seeing or speaking to anyone. I am blessed by great friendships, but many of them are elsewhere—in New York, or Portland, or Sweden. I do not have one particular confidante I touch base with every day. Perhaps because I am so often alone, and don’t look to people for sustenance, I am more on the alert for, and receptive to, signs from the universe. And it is in search of such signs that I go out into that mass of radiating energy known as Halloween in the Castro. Is there a message for me out there? AX RULES!I did walk down Market Street (as Puss in Boots) literally adjuring the universe, “Show me a sign that I am headed the right way.” Come on, bring it! I’m all ears! Then I’m thinking, so what are you, going to walk around till you see what you decide is a sign, then you’re free to go? But strangely, just then, I did see one. It was crossed axes, raised in the air above the dance crowd, two crossed battle axes being pumped triumphantly into the air above everyone’s heads. The image also reminded me of a gate or arch I might pass under. “Look at every path closely and deliberately,” Capra quotes Castaneda at the front of The Tao of Physics. “Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question … Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use.” WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, RALPHIE?A dead deer, daggers and axes. Some part of my life will die. It may be an unexpected death with much grieving, but it will die because it needs to, its time has come. When this part of me dies, it will free me to do what I need to do, because my time has come; my dagger will pierce through to the heart of the matter, and the Ax will reign triumphant. The path with heart will lead to a life radiating with auras of energy created by love. The letting go starts NOW. Because everything I could want or be, I already have and am. Allrighty then! ------------------------------------------------------------ As quiet as it is dark
Willl you send some sort of sign? copyright Alexandra Jones 2006 |
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