Through Imagined Barriers Streaming Light

by on May 15, 2024 at 7:00 am
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Through Imagined Barriers, Streaming Light

The idea of the false start has been on my mind as of late. I’ve expressed it before, but I’m less haunted by it, and see it a little differently, perhaps in even more a different light as of this very moment. It seems a life is chock full of holding patterns, whole collections of incompletion, circuits of repetition that seem to console us rather than move us more deeply in or further along. And how we love the repetition and despise the uncertain and open ended, the mundane, the long waits, the feeling of no accomplishment.

So what’s different now? In my own case, waiting allows for the deeper intelligence to do its work, if we allow it, to better inform us about why we are doing the work in the first place. It was neither for the sense of completion nor accomplishment, but rather to get a sense of how we are bigger than that, deeper than that,  softer and brighter than that. That there is an obstruction revealed, wrapped in the clothing of our impatience, our vanity, our fear, pride or what ever human quality that is attributable is not the bad news. The bad news is not noticing what is revealed so that we might understand ourselves and pass through all the imagined barriers.

The Great Arkayan Fence: Pen/ink and Prisma watercolor. Almost done.

Yesterday was a nice long talk with Santosha Ma. I drove up her driveway with the pressure washer I borrowed to prep the deck for staining and was returning it to the garage. She and Prem were showing the land to a gardener hired to do some work. It was so hot yesterday.

“Is it ninety?” I asked Santosha, “Oh yeah,” she said standing beneath the bright sun. We drove the length of the steep driveway down to my cottage to have a look at the deck floor. She said she was glad I confided in her about my struggle to snap out of the last leg of my treatments. The beam radiation treatment threw me for a loop.

“I’m like a slowly opening flower, the inner layers just now opening for me to feel more myself.”

“I’ve always known you to want to quickly be through to the healing.” She said. It’s true. I just want to get on with it and be done, not linger. Sometimes our roll gets slowed big time  and as an opportunity to see what’s being offered–sight– of where we draw the line, where we force the repetition of all that we’ve done before and have not benefitted by new growth.

After having a look at the deck and walking about, we went inside to the air conditioned interior of the cottage, sat in a couple chairs and caught up.

“It was never the expectation to be fulfilled in a life (in my generation). I mean you had your kids and maybe worked at K-mart, but this generation has a deep sense that most everything should fulfill them.”  Santosha Ma said as we were talking about how the hype of the cultural story is thicker, heavier, unavoidable and must be harder to get free from and not be motivated by.

The machine gearing, story-hype machine sometimes gets stopped along a menacing line of contrast, a total obliteration that threatens demise, and yet if one slows down enough to see it as a lifeline to better get to know who we are, why the work moves this way and why we do our work, we better see the brightness despite the crumbling of our stories, false starts (narratives), all of them, their breaking way as a truer strength breaks open the doorways of our hearts to usher us through.

“It always comes back,” Santosha Ma reassured me as I confided my worry that last round felt like my spark was blown out. I felt, done adrift, but now with more of a grin on my face feel it’s return.

Perhaps, only then does the focused engagement come, filling the vacuum the contrast created? Hmmm…. well that sounds a bit more like waiting for my wish list to be fulfilled. I like to think the story is writing itself, but it’s comprised of all these broken bits I once deemed useless a false start on a deeper self portrait– garbage art, all my failures sewn together into a, pretty dress, a tapestry woven by an artist not suffering my old points of view.

I imagine “Tantric Series,” in a manner in which all the comic book novel chapters, the audio recordings, trailers and all my other pictures, drawings, and dare I say, AI art are just the window dressing to that which is waiting for me to catch up to it, something about vignettes, and short bits not obligated to do such philosophical heavy lifting– in their self importance– because the heart knows the way better than my strategic planning, has no expectation of fulfillment in the sum of parts. Still it has the enjoyment of flipping, and swiping through it all.

“That’s what I like about Instagram!” She said, as she crossed her leg and sat in the green arm chair across from me, “I’m not obligated to get through hours of it, it’s just immediate. I can look at someone’s fashion presentation and get right to it.”

“Yeah I suppose that’s why I like doing the trailers. There’s no expectation to really tell more than a minute of the story,” I said.

Our conversations bubbled in excitement about creativity, me excited always to talk to her about most things. She told me about her new short story, a very sweet story about two little girls coming back home to the mountain.

 

“Maybe you should just write a simple sweet story,” Santosha Ma said in response to my being vexed about not having much clarity about pulling Tantric Series together (I do think I will, but for now… waiting).

“Yeah, I think though it might be more auto biographical, I mean about my actual life.”  And why couldn’t that story be the simple sweet story of coming to this time, being in the company of my guru, and growing old in her company?

A story rife with false starts and struggles, all for the sake of deepening my love and opening my heart like a flower and feeling more deeply mySelf.

 

What a great segue to this months comic page as Ansa helps our protagonists alter their approach to entering a dream.

Oh…again, I am currently working on a version of The Last Khoorlrhani Warrior with a royalty free soundtrack to remove any obstacle against monetizing “Dharmic Sci-fi Fantasy,” so if you’re interested in listening to the current version (the way I envisioned it) do head over there before I start decommissioning those chapters. At this point I’ve redone the first eleven chapters. I just finished “Ursya,” last night.