Thursday 25 September 2014

Phoenix Feather & Sapling Leaf

Two symbols for Rejuvenation

From the dirt comes life. From the ashes comes renewal. From urban decay comes natural reforestation. From mental and emotional comes reinvention, imagination, expression. Pushed beyond the boundaries we are forced to re-assess and to expand our frames of reference. The wider perspective. How else can we become Pharaoh, the Far-seers? This is shamans journey; the ones who leave the safety comfort zone of home and the hearth, who travel amongst alien dangers and return as strangers. The Journey is in stages. Where we are today is the sum total of all our experiences. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Alchemical, it takes the toxins and converts them to fresh, life-giving elixir. This is medicine journey. A healer cannot heal until it has learned to; it cannot learn to without first having suffered injury; the growing pains, the birthing pains, of wisdom and maturity. This resource is our confidence. 

The city is decaying around us and yet it is reinvented. As urban spirits, we are that reinvention process. It is endless and eternal. We shape forms that are born of the necessity and desire of the moment. That which has been familiar and relied upon becomes aged and worn. It feeds the growing of tomorrow. We build and rebuild, endlessly. It is a process of distillation. Essences are purified as their spirit grows.

The sword in the stone is the flint that was blade and set fire, the metal smelted and forged into weapons, the fusion of histories as metal and flint became gun with addition of the black powder explosive. How many lives were saved and improved, enriched by harnessing fire, metal, machine, lightning? How many were lost by war for resources and ideologies? The sword in the stone is a myth told by the alchemical shaman of the lands where I live, my body of this earth. The sword in the stone is the digital universe where resources are smelted to become tools of transient light. The city is lit up against the night, a jewel in the dark. It is a crystal, a dream-space where fertile imagination can play. In the city playground, children play brutal games with hidden meanings.

The machines rust. The forests burn. The city falls. And yet; process, progress, cycles and stages of development. The city reborn. Newer, better, taller, brighter. Vitality and inevitability. Innovative Ability. It grows. It sprawls. The new spreads out and seeds the decaying, aging, the withered zones. My body this earth, these crude elements. My thoughts this crystal. My emotions, these seeds, tested by fire and toxin, drowned by deluge and time; forged, honed, tempered. Becoming.

This is what it is to be immortal. No form of energy ceases; it transmutes. The observer within; is that a form of energy?

Transition is to be neither this thing nor that thing. It is a state of chaos. We project a grid upon the chaos. We observe that in nature there is a natural grid, the ecological world follows the forms and functions of holistic integration. There are patterns there, a grid. It is at least one step beyond human comprehension. We are of it; it is not of us. Even our manufactured environments must conform to the natural patterns of decay and renewal. Everything is in variable states of continual transition. Only Nothing remains the same. We have a relationship with temporal states of stability. This is our only reference. In the physical world; spirits of hybrid elements bound into symbol. In the emotional world; assertion and flow. In the mental world; concepts. In the Imaginal realms; dream.

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