Sacred Space: Basilica of Agony

The Basilica of the Agony, photograph by Hans Mast

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed long into the night. The Basilica of the Agony is built at the foot of the Mount of Olives, near this garden. I like it that there is a church to mark Jesus' dark night.

Revelation

Amar-elo, by Nanda Correa

"I am Protennoia, the Thought that dwells in the Light. I am the movement that dwells in the All, she in whom the All takes its stand, the first-born among those who came to be, she who exists before the All....I am incomprehensible, dwelling in the incomprehensible. I move in every creature...

I am the real Voice. I cry out in everyone, and they recognize it (the voice), since a seed indwells them." 

    —excerpt from Trimorphic Protennoia, translated by John D. Turner

I'm fascinated by revelations. Somehow whenever revelatory in-spiration strikes, there is an element of creativity to it—playful, heretical, perhaps not the whole truth. How many revelations have been excluded from sacred scriptures because they don't quite match what religious leaders expect to hear? This creative aspect of transcendent experience is something I can't stop thinking about. To be willing to receive a revelation means to be willing to revise what is true. And if you keep revising "truth," what is true? 

Blue

by Joan Miro

"The gods live in a blue place of metaphor... 

The mind from the beginning must be based in the blue firmament, like the lazuli stone and sapphire throne on mysticism, the azure heaven of Boehme, philos sophia. The blue firmament is an image of cosmological reason; it is a mythical place that gives metaphorical support to metaphysical thinking... 

Alchemy begins... in the blue vault, the seas, in the mind's thinking in images, imagining ideationally, speculatively, silveredly, in words that are both images and ideas, ... the blue power of the word itself, which locates this consciousness in the throat of the visuddha cakra whose dominant color is a smoky purple-blue.

...Your mind moves in the caelum, touches the constellations, the thick and hairy skull opens to let in more light, their light, making possible a new idea of order, a cosmological imagination whose thought accounts for the cosmos in the forms of images."

    —from "Blue," by James Hillman

The Creative Work of Hope

Mechanitis butterfly chrysalis
(no attribution that I can find on the internet...)

Hope is a word that has been floating around on the surface of my awareness lately. Here are some of my encounters with the word:

"Hope is not an emotion, but hope is a cognitive, behavioral process that we learn when we experience adversity, when we have relationships that are trustworthy, when people have faith in our ability to get out of a jam." (Brené Brown on the work of C. R. Snyder, in her interview with Krista Tippet)

"I do like that . . . idea of hope as a function of struggle. It's almost like, you know, it would be counterintuitive, counterculturally, to say we need to struggle with this honestly, vulnerability, to cultivate the hope that we need to figure out what's next." (Krista Tippet in her interview with Brené Brown)

"There was a theologian from the mid-1900s who kind of described hope as an attitude toward the future that we cannot see, but we trust that somehow it's held by God and that there are possibilities beyond what we can even imagine." (Father Mike Surufka in his interview on Losing Our Religion)

Hope used to mean something escapist and fantastical to me, but lately I've been seeing it more as hard work, as practice in walking the invisible path. Hope has become a constructive enterprise that calls for creativity—anticipating future possibilities with the attitude of an artist who has seen the final creation in her head—as well as vulnerability—accepting the possibility of hope unfulfilled. Hope, these days any way, is a truly brave act.

Admiring: Midwife of Art, Ideas, and Healing

photograph by Carl van Vechten
April 12, 1934
via Yale Library

Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan was an influential salon hostess throughout her life, in Italy (where she hosted Gertrude Stein and Carl van Vechten, among others), then in New York (where she again hosted salons and also helped organize a post impressionist art exhibit). But she is perhaps is best known for hosting many great thinkers of her day at her home in Taos, New Mexico. Georgia O'Keefe, Carl Jung, Willa Cather, and D. H. Lawrence were among the visitors that Mabel invited to stay with her.

When her third husband moved to New Mexico, she soon followed, and when she arrived she was thoroughly moved by the landscape and the people who lived there. She saw the value in the pueblos' rituals and art, their connections to the earth and to each other. 

She was also interested in psychoanalysis and its ability to help people rediscover these connections, and she would invite guests that she believed could help her spread this "gospel" of reconnection to the rest of the world. Apparently her strong beliefs and goals also could make her manipulative and domineering. There are no perfect heros! But I admire her whole-hearted determination to bring healing to the world.

Philosophy of Sleep

from Caretakers of Wonder, by Cooper Edens
via phantasmaphile

Falling asleep at night can mean approaching the strangeness of pensée de la nuit, so says Hélène De Leersnyder. What a great opportunity each night to practice serenity, and accept our solitude with creativity and gentleness.

"If tomorrow morning the sky falls... have clouds for breakfast.
If night falls... use stars for streetlights.
If the moon gets stuck in a tree... cover the hole in the sky with a strawberry.
If you have butterflies in your stomach... ask them into your heart.
If your heart catches in your throat... ask a bird how she sings.
If the birds forget their songs... listen to a pebble instead.
If you lose a memory... embroider a new one to take its place.
If you lose the key... throw away the house.
If the clock stops... use your own hands to tell time.
If the light goes out... wear it around your neck and go dancing.
If the bus doesn't come... catch a fast cloud.
If it's the last dance... dance backwards.
If you find your socks don't match.... stand in a flowerbed.
If your shoes don't fit... give them to the fish in the pond.
If your horse needs shoes... let him use his wings.
If the sun never shines again... hold fireflies in your hands to keep warm.
If you're afraid of the dark... remember the night rainbow.
If there is no happy ending... make one out of cookie dough."
    —From If You're Afraid of the Dark, Remember the Night Rainbow, by Cooper Edens

Love Poem

Spring, by Shalisa Photography

A different kind of love poem, recycled from Ox Herding many months ago:

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.
  —Love, by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Robert Hass

I hope your Valentine's Day is filled with much love.