Sleeping Beauty

(Image : The Earth Sanctuary, 2009, pic MG)

As I was cutting the brambles this morning, I was thinking about how this place looks like a sleeping beauty, all rolled into her carpet of ivy and brambles, like Cleopatra, lol.

We didn´t really start to clean the place before (we bought the property in 1998), because…hummm…there were too many Christians around! (And we weren´t Druids yet, back then, well yes, in spirit, but not in title).

My oh my, are the Romans wooky!! Have you ever seen them work, out in the country ?

First they barge in with their tools (pun intended) and boom in a deep voice (so as to frighten the wymyn and the small kids) : “OK, now, what do I cut?…” – Then they cut, wholesale, then they wipe their weary face with an elbow, belch, and say they are going for a beer, hey what a wonderful day!

“Naturally”, the women and the little gnomes of the forest have to make the bunches of wood, and generally clean after them…smirking behind their little hands, oh Goddess, how the beasts left the place.

…A negative view ? Naaaah, just jokin´.

We cannot get a consensus with the Christians on how everything works here. They have the weirdest sense of duty, and a still weirder connection with their body. Like, they usually work an hour more, because they don´t want their body to dictate to them whether they stop or not. Also, they feel guilty up to their whiskers when they do not match some crazy self-expectations. Everything has to be cut down, right up to the horizon, otherwise it´s not cleaning up the place!…

What´s the difference with us, by-now weathered Druids ? Well, when the bod gets tired we stop, enjoy the scenery,  go for coffee, or mead or a sandwich – have a laugh or a hug, or both, breathe deep, feel the contentment and the gratefulness for just being able to live here..and then, and only then, we go back to work. See? And we stop when we feel like it.

Anyways, I needed to say today, that Sleeping Beauty is awakening from her long slumber…

…and that she can do it slowly and nicely, we sent the royal… (expletive)  away to chase some mammoth for lunch!!

PS.- I´m joking again, “The Prince” has been away for years,  he is building a political career in the Canary Islands, far far away in another galaxy. Hahaha. When he departed, he told us that we were too slow for him. Oh goody, now we can breathe…

Wacky Romans.

Owning my Merlin-hood

(Image : The Earth Sanctuary, December 2000)

Yes, my Merlin-hood. As in : parent-hood, mother-hood, person-hood.

Ancient scriptures say that Merlin is not only a figure of legend, or the archetype of the Wise Old Man, or of the Hermit, but that the word also describes a function. Thus, you say a Merlin, as in :  a carpenter, a doctor.

And yes, of course, women make fine Merlins, too. (Oops, bring on the Epsom salts! The gentleman in the first row, with the white beard and the neatly pressed white robes, just fainted!…)

Merlins, then, are teachers, judges, counselors to kings, administrators, artists, poets, writers, visionaries, healers, and above all, Peacemakers.

Having finished the formal part of my OBOD* Training, let it be widely known that this is what I am.

OBOD : Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, UK.

Homo Noeticus

(Image : The Eye of Shiva, watercolours, SG, 2002)

As surely as the Cromagnon followed the Neandherthal, Homo Noeticus will follow Sapiens Sapiens. For the time being, Sapiens Sapiens hasn´t even got to the top of his potential, and might even disappear from the surface of the planet, as the dinosaurs (and the dodo, lol!) did before him.

Being a Sapiens Sapiens - that is : I know that I know - I´m quite a bit ashamed at how the “intelligent ape” (?????) is behaving. If I did not know why, and what to do about it, I guess I would drown in my own despair.

For the moment, here is an interesting and excellent interview about Homo Noeticus – and we´re not talking UFOS, Angels, Indigo Children and Ascended Masters…

Towards Homo Noeticus (John White)

I suppose that the next step of Evolution would be first to fulfill Sapiens Sapiens. There is no way the “intelligent ape” (mmm…we could question that description, now, couldn´t we?…) will jump over his relationship with his environment (and thus, back to maternal thinking, if you get my drift…)

The Enlightened Artichoke

(Image: Secret Garden, collaborative journal, SG, 2005)

(Shawn, you´re going to love this one!) *wink*

…One of my good friends (ohum…) told me : ”I´m reading your blog, but m´dear, aren´t you talking about yourself a bit too much?”

Well. Since I´m fascinated with LIFE, and I´m the nearest subject available for observation…

Besides, I´m not trying to uphold an egotistic singularity, of which I am by the way well aware, I´m just playing with the fact that in so many ways I am – as the Spanish say, “more normal than an artichoke”,  -that is, I share in all the glory and all the shit that it means to be fully human. And that is why, the stats say, my words have such a resonance out there in the big wide world… Aren´t we all, for good or for worse, in the same boat?

Mmm…I´m an artichoke, yes, but albeit an enlightened one! Hahaha.

Major Arcana : Strength

(Image :  The Memory of Pain, collage on paper, SG, 2002)

My favourite way of inviting the Awen is through Tarot. This morning, I got a Major Arcana : Strength.

showing strength, knowing you can endure, having a gallant spirit, feeling an unshakable resolve, taking heart despite setbacks, having stamina, being a rock, being patient, dealing calmly with frustration, accepting others, taking time

maintaining composure

refusing to get angry, showing forbearance, being compassionate, giving others lots of space, understanding what others are feeling, accepting, forgiving imperfection, being kind,

Achieving soft control, persuading, guiding indirectly, tempering force with benevolence, demonstrating the strength of love,

Usually we think of strength in physical terms, but there is also inner strength. Inner strength comes from exercising the heart muscle. It is perseverance, courage, resolve and composure – qualities that help us endure when times are tough.

The Future of Druidry

(Image : The Ancestors, SG, collage on paper, 2007)

As I see it, Druidry is “an idea whose time has come”, as Werner Erhard said, and he added “Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come”. I agree. That is what I think of OBOD (Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, UK) and modern Druidry : their time has come.

What do I mean ? Druidry, having supposedly existed 8000 years back, it is thus an idea whose time has come back? No?

The subject being rather complex, given the number of Druidic movements and their differences,  what in Hel do I mean ?? Well, I´ll tell you my mind in plain English.

I think that Druidry – and especially OBOD - is a tool for modern times, for ecopsychological times. Druidry is truly about an econoetic experience. That is its importance, in the context of The Inconvenient Truth. No, it is not that ” The Druids” (of which nobody knows anything really accurate!) are coming back. It´s that since humanity is in such dire straits with the Climate Crisis, the crisis-this, the crisis-that – we are looking into the past for inspiration, for survival. Unfortunately, there is no healthy going back. We have to face the music, here and now, and create new solutions for the future, for the future of our children and grandchildren. Find new soul-utions, new soul-filled solutions.

I do not think that we should try to recreate Druidry, and especially not a romantic form of Druidry, in which all the real facts might get distorted by a wishy-washy  – and unconscious – view of reality. The sacred language of the Druids has vanished from the surface of the Earth, we know only fragmented bits of their teachings and of their rituals – and maybe we don´t even want to know, lol, what with this idea of human sacrifices that the old Druids have been accused of!…(By the Romans, so it just might not be really true!)

Humanity has evolved a lot in 8000 years, though it sometimes doesn´t look like it, and we simply cannot go back. The Druids are lost in Time. No, I´m talking about an intuitive creation, based on modern psychology. I´m talking about a training that would be up to the current times, in which such enormous changes are about to happen. Oh that the tsunami of the coming Change should not find us still believing in Father Christmas!…

It is no longer feasible – or indeed politically correct! – to accept religions and beliefs that actually reject physical reality. Our very survival now depends on us being able to manage the said physical level. I agree that there is more to reality than “just” physical reality (a good example is quantum physics), but let us courageously and wisely confront this absolute truth: if I hit you hard on your head with a brick, your skull will shatter and you will go down. And that, my dears, would be it. However much you may regard the importance of philosophical levels, with your brain in a bloody mush you cannot think. Don´t let the “channelers” tell you otherwise. That is the importance of physical reality.

Some of our most crazy ways of perceiving reality, and of being in contact with our environment, will have to go. No more “virgin births”, or winged beings dancing through invented rosy skies. No more unicorns, and fairies, and gnomes. Not to mention the metempsychosis of the individual ego. All this will have to be catalogued into the folder “Creative Imagination”…real creative imagination, mind you, but the step to give these creatures *the same* earthly existence as stones, trees, animals and real humans – will have to go. We will have to re-orient ourselves, re-connect with our true gutsy soul (not the golden rosy cloud around the head), we will have to get a grip on reality again.

What we know about “The Druids” is that they found *The World*  beautiful, and that, my friends, is why Druidry is “an idea whose time has come”.

(Don´t shoot the pianist, I´m only saying what I really think.)

The Lady Dragon, *in a rather rebellious mood this morning*

Mandalas

After all this subterranean stuff, I think this blog needs something more …airy. A little pause in-between two “serious” postings! So I will tell you that I not only paint stones, but also Mandalas.

There is a folder in my PictureTrail gallery, if you care to click there.

         http://www.picturetrail.com/gea2

Awen & Nwyfre

(Image, Throne of the Goddess, soul card 80, SG, ’04)

There are two Druidic concepts/experiences that I feel the Western world (=the Matrix) sorely needs at this time : Awen and Nwyfre.

The first, the Awen, is simply inspiration, intuition, particularly poetic, artistic, and also mystical. The Awen defines the Druid. It is the very breath of his/her Druidic presence and role. The Druid “listens” to the voice of the gods, and to the whisperings of the Otherworld, and transmits them as best he/she can to the “ordinary” (=conditioned by the Matrix) world. Besides his other tasks of management, administration, counselling, the Druid is always aware of the finer promptings of his intuition. The Druid is a living Oracle.

All of my art depends on the Awen. I am unable to draw or paint without this inner surge of bliss; I´m really not interest in theories of art or technicalities (I don´t sell my work anyway!) – when the Awen surges I have to leave what I am doing, and go get a piece of cardboard, a white paper, something that I can use, anything, to “take notes”. It is as if I was looking inside my brain! The roof of my brain becomes, at that moment, a rather moved and animated Sixtine Chapel – only with my own images! (I wish I could photograph what I see, since I am self-taught I don´t have the dexterity to reproduce my visions exactly, which is why I admire Alan Lee so much!)

I also know that my soul cards, for example, are inspiring to other people. The Awen gets through the image and sometimes grips a person with a “wow” feeling. I know. This is the feeling that I experienced when I first made the card!…

So I become a sort of willing and very aware channel, or better said, a bridge. That is why my second name is Walker-Between-The-Worlds. A Walker for the Awen.

The Otherworld

 

 (Image : Road to Damascus, collage on paper, SG ’04)

Who cares if the Otherworld and the gods are “real”, or not ?

To me they are real. As a walker-between-the-worlds, an artist, half of my brain (and half of my time!) is “over there”, through the magic Gates, walking the Land of the Imaginal, which is not just fantasy. The images are real, they are inside my brain, and I can, if I want and need to, have a creative dialogue between these parts of who-I-am.

Or did you think that your Matrix identity was the “real” one ?

Give yourself the chance to discover what your hidden mind is up to!

When all is said and done, at the moment of your passing, will it have mattered if the wonderful encounters with archetypes, gnomes, the Queen of Faerie or Merlin himself that you possibly had, were politically correct? Is the Matrix real ? Hahaha.  Adam, my young friend,has a saying written on a piece of cardboard which says “Do not believe everything that you think”. Lol.

Are you so restricted in your perceptions that you think that only the physical is “real”?

Even so, I think that there is a huge difference between “path-finding” in your own neurons, and some of them are quite quirky, particularly the quantic ones, ya-hoo!!,  - and “imagining” things.

When you just imagine (which is quite OK too), well, you have a certain control over the images, you build them up, you actually create them in mind-matter (in sanscrit, chit, yup), you create what you want or what you need, and basically the images obey their master, your alpha mind (for example).

But there is another way of working with images, a much more mysterious way, which I prefer. The images emerge in your mind which simply acts as a mirror, and they have their own development, their own quirky quarky path. Very different.

In that mysterious world, Merlin really exists and he can even talk to you…That is what I call the “Otherworld”, a mysterious place inside my own brain, which has its own rules, motivations, and purpose, aside from my Matrix ID.

The process is the same as in art, an idea “is born”, somewhere deep inside, and the good artist follows this idea, to see where it is leading. All the art is in the letting go of preconceptions. The good artist is a master at “letting go”!…

And that is how I sometimes follow the gods and the various interesting characters that come and visit me. Can´t mistake the joy, the exhilaration, the enthusiasm, the uplift, in one word…the buzz. The bliss. We do not invent the gods, they come …or they ignore us.

 

 

Cernunnos

(Image : Cernunnos, collage on paper, SG, ‘o5)

…Being one of those crazy post-menopausal Wild Women “who run with wolves”, my favourite god is quite naturally Cernunnos, in his various aspects, Herne the Hunter, the Green Man, the Lord of the Beasts. As a woman I feel extremely comfortable with these energies, which is a paradox. More than a paradox, I see it as a (hard-won!) synthesis of male and female in me. I am him. Maybe my love for him is the only way I will ever get closer to the other gender.  Sometimes I perceive him as the daimon in me, something that completes me as a person, as a woman. And I perceive him as a wonderful bridge (in my mind) over the chasm that has been artificially created between the genders, through the systematic and intentionally distorted (my interpretation) application of social stereotypes to all children, male and female. A sorry situation, as I have discovered in my own life, as a mother and as a woman.

The pictures in this entry are two aspects of Cernunnos that I have felt very intensely, up close and personal, both of them an inner vision, one of them applied to a natural object, the other one a vision in a meditation. I thought I´d share them here, because I feel it is extremely important to balance the part of ourselves that we apparently are not, male or female, inside us. At my age I do not project the Animus  on men anymore, as younger women usually do (when they “fall in love”), and I do not let men project their Anima on me, because I think that this Anima of theirs, this precious archetype of womanhood in a man, is their own treasure, their own inner link with the Great Goddess, to discover and enjoy, rather than project like all adolescents do on “ideal” women (movie stars, fashion models, etc. etc). I must confess that I had a crush on Viggo Mortensen´s Aragorn for a while, perhaps because I felt the energy of Aragorn (in Peter Jackson´s movies) so close to my inner experience of the god Cernunnos.

I feel generally good about men, and if they want to see me as a part of the Goddess, well, they may, because I am. I´m no tantric diva, but I certainly embody a whole bunch of nice womanly qualities…!

(Picture : SG, drawing: La Grotte des Trois Frères)