Tree Man #1. Charcoal sketch and photo image, digitally combined and colored. Click for bigger view.
This vision-story came to me as I meditated on the yearly renewal brought by the spring time, and on the human awareness of the cycles, terrestrial and cosmic, of time and space.
“I saw their walker of worlds watching over them. He could feel the spirit move in each person, and the life of the people murmured to him like the wind in trees and the rustles of small creatures in grass.
“As he trod a trail upward, I noticed with surprise that he actively engaged, while he stepped, an unusual internal process. It was no merely intellectual exercise — it was palpable to him, like breath or pulse.
“It came to me then that there are places that cannot be reached by the unprepared, no matter how easy might seem bodily passage, for they exist mainly unseen though guised with earthly aspect. He climbed to just such a place, a high bluff where one could see far and feel most receptive to perception and realization.
“And, though others might see him going here or going there, to him it was as if the world itself, with all of its living things and shifting relationships, flowed around an enduring place where part of him was always present.
“As I contemplated these impressions, more followed.
You can trace the movements back to the place whence they come, to the changing of internal states that flow outward into action. There, small adjustments may have large effects on the patterns of becoming. You can feel its workings in your mind and body, and its nature in the space between your hands.
“I thought then of artful practices having a strong aspect of interior awareness, of connections strengthened in the brain.
“With due caution — perhaps we could allow ourselves to mythopoetically imagine that — somewhere — there is something like an inside-out, upside-down sort of place. There, a great tree grows at the heart of things, roots fed by fine emanations from stars, branches ever-spreading in ceaseless motion to form the world we know. Perhaps at times our walker finds it more effective to internally pivot, wend his way inward on a branch, touch where the branches meet at the trunk, then trace a different branch back out to the world. In this way he travels from place to place, or condition to condition, such that even a straight track may curve from outer to inner, and back again.
“In the exterior aspect of physical experience, the Earth travels its year-long journey around the Sun, during which a person might spend much effort to adapt his circumstances or to travel distances. In the interior imaginal realm of our psyches, inhabited by resonant symbols, one may watch the Sun, Moon and stars trail arcs of fire around the Earth as it spins — and at the center of all the turning grows the tree that roots itself in sky as much as in earth.
“There, the perspective grants keener sight of things needful to know, and by which our walker may quicken or smooth his way. Moreover, to those who know the way, it is the deepening place whence comes breath and movement, the birthplace of all paths, and where it can be seen that the way anyone ever really gets anywhere is to transform one place into another, over and over, and that this is how the world was — and still is — made.”
“As he trod a trail upward, I noticed with surprise that he actively engaged, while he stepped, an unusual internal process. It was no merely intellectual exercise — it was palpable to him, like breath or pulse.
“It came to me then that there are places that cannot be reached by the unprepared, no matter how easy might seem bodily passage, for they exist mainly unseen though guised with earthly aspect. He climbed to just such a place, a high bluff where one could see far and feel most receptive to perception and realization.
“And, though others might see him going here or going there, to him it was as if the world itself, with all of its living things and shifting relationships, flowed around an enduring place where part of him was always present.
“As I contemplated these impressions, more followed.
You can trace the movements back to the place whence they come, to the changing of internal states that flow outward into action. There, small adjustments may have large effects on the patterns of becoming. You can feel its workings in your mind and body, and its nature in the space between your hands.
“I thought then of artful practices having a strong aspect of interior awareness, of connections strengthened in the brain.
“With due caution — perhaps we could allow ourselves to mythopoetically imagine that — somewhere — there is something like an inside-out, upside-down sort of place. There, a great tree grows at the heart of things, roots fed by fine emanations from stars, branches ever-spreading in ceaseless motion to form the world we know. Perhaps at times our walker finds it more effective to internally pivot, wend his way inward on a branch, touch where the branches meet at the trunk, then trace a different branch back out to the world. In this way he travels from place to place, or condition to condition, such that even a straight track may curve from outer to inner, and back again.
“In the exterior aspect of physical experience, the Earth travels its year-long journey around the Sun, during which a person might spend much effort to adapt his circumstances or to travel distances. In the interior imaginal realm of our psyches, inhabited by resonant symbols, one may watch the Sun, Moon and stars trail arcs of fire around the Earth as it spins — and at the center of all the turning grows the tree that roots itself in sky as much as in earth.
“There, the perspective grants keener sight of things needful to know, and by which our walker may quicken or smooth his way. Moreover, to those who know the way, it is the deepening place whence comes breath and movement, the birthplace of all paths, and where it can be seen that the way anyone ever really gets anywhere is to transform one place into another, over and over, and that this is how the world was — and still is — made.”
The High Place. Oil paint drawing on paper, digitally enhanced.
Yin and Yang Hands.
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Tree Child #2. Ballpoint pen and marker drawing on notebook paper, digitally colored.
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