Living in the Hive

Here is a small collection of images from around the web detailing how hexagons are making their way into architecture. Crazy beautiful. Enjoy.

Here are shelving units featured at the Disney store. I don't know if they are a prototype or for sale or just part of a display.

Here is building cladding created in Austria.

A photoshopped image of an unrealized plan, a student project, I believe.

A floor plan of a hexagonal home.

On a smaller scale, check out the Honefoss mirror system by IKEA. 10 hexagonal mirrors (about five inches across) for $15.00 in the USA. Copper or silver toned.

Beehive Heart by Thomas Truax

Netflix and Beyond

Yeah. So I haven't blogged for a while. I've been settling in to Life in Portland, Oregon, and ignoring my greater responsibilities. Sorry.

Since I last checked in to Blogger I have acquired 5 viewers! What a surprise--welcome. I feel motivated to continue writing, now that I see folks are reading. It's very exciting.

What Kieran and I have been doing lots of, is watching movies on Netflix. We don't own a television machine, so we watch movies on the computer.

So...my plan is to now and again post a review of a movie that has a particularly shamanic theme. Shamanic themes in movies, if you will.

Tonight's selection is the the Spanish movie, "The Orphanage." Old-style orphanages seem to have died out sometime in the 1970's, but this movie, despite its anachronisms, plays upon the very fertile spooky possibilities of orphanages and the poignancy of neglected children. (Even though in this film, the wife is currently 37 years old, she appears to have grown up on an orphanage last decorated in 1910.)

A middle-aged couple with a young son purchase and move into an abandoned 19th century villa, with the intention of opening an exclusive center for a small group of special-needs children. The villa had formerly served as an orphanage at which the wife had grown up until she was adopted around age seven. The couple have adopted an adorable HIV-positive son, from whom they keep the knowledge that he is adopted and (possibly) terminally ill. This seven year-old has invisible friends, and begins to add more of them to his life when they move to this villa, which his parents find unsettling. Supernaturally-tinged things start to happen: spirits appear to move objects and inform the son of his situation, despite the parents' best intentions of keeping him unaware.

During an opening party for the center, the son disappears, and the parents begin a months-long search for him which involves local police searching for his body along the beach, as well as mediums who can feel the presence of unhappy children on the grounds. The medium (a fluent-in-Spanish Geraldine Chaplin!) reveals to the wife the importance of setting belief before evidence, and tells her to use her intuition to find out what happened to her son. Meanwhile, a strange former employee of the orphanage provides a logical backstory for the events which ultimately gets buried in the otherworldly elements of the story. What gripped me was the last quarter of the film.

Emotionally unable to take any more weirdness, the husband leaves, and the wife asks for just two more days in which to find out what happened to their son. Making use of the medium's advice, she follows her intuition to create a shamanic/theatrical ceremony in which she calls forth the spirits of the abandoned children with whom she grew up. The movie shows better than any other, to my mind, how the wife enters a shamanic state of transcendent consciousness brought about by sustained grief, desperation, and sleeplessness, which she works with and sustains in order to contact the spirits who alone have the ability to inform her of what has happened to her child. She both enters an altered conscious state, AND makes it physical: truly, she walks between the worlds. She creates a sort of (dumb, in the traditional speechless sense) meal to call forth the missing children, and then she engages in a childhood game during which the spirits appear and lead her to to hints that reveal what has occurred in ordinary reality. She enters a sort of shamanic-metaphoric situation during which she goes underground into the cellar (a classic underworld journey) to both discover what happened to her child, and retrieve his soul.

The movie takes a Catholic turn, focusing on self-sacrifice and redemption, which I won't reveal to curious viewers. However, the film was quite interesting in how it expressed the possibility of communicating with the dead through consciously-created ceremonial ritual, and how the Spirits can reveal to us what normally remains unseen.

Queen of the Sun

There is a new documentary out about colony collapse syndrome called "Queen of the Sun." I found out about it while walking through my new neighborhood in Portland: seeing the posters for Queen of the Sun had been tacked to every possible pole on Hawthorne Street. Queen of the Sun plays through this weekend locally, but I had also seen the Craigslist ad for a marketing person to spread the word about Queen of the Sun a couple of months ago, but didn't apply since my computer-skillmind still can't quite fathom Twitter.

Hey, notice the flagrant SEO ing of this post? Yes indeed, to have it score in the world, the phrase Queen of the Sun must be repeated over and over, up to five times. I hope the movie is great...it's made by the same people who created "The Real Dirt on Farmer John."

http://www.queenofthesun.com/ 

while you're at it, check out the remarkable documenary group

http://www.collectiveeye.org/

Taken With the Wind

Visionary, self-taught folk artist Vollis Simpson has stopped work due to advanced age, and his collection of intensely detailed whirligigs (aka kinetic, wind-driven constructions) are going to be sold and redistributed.

http://www.reflector.com/mixer/artists-famous-whirligigs-be-moved-new-home-42093


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38311137/ns/travel-destination_travel/


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/arts/design/06vollis.html

"The main part of doing anything that turns 

is to get it centered." 

– Vollis Simpson, whirlgig artist

Weird Emerging Sicknesses

In the shamanic traditions in which I was trained and raised, illness is the perfect expression of some part of the human body that is experiencing disconnect and denial by the human personality residing there. Experiencing any kind of discomfort, disturbed human response, lack of energy, et cetera, is always related to what one is carrying in one's field of energy that is asking for attention and integration. 


I bring this up because there is a heap of information being spread around in the light-leaning spiritual community that everything uncomfortable, shocking and difficult that folks are experiencing right now is "perfect," and not to be afraid of, and that one must trust Spirit and simply endure it. 

There is not a thing that makes us uncomfortable that is just something that Spirit is imposing on us, forcing us to endure for some unknown "greater good." It is never required that we endure difficulty and pain to satisfy Spirit (unless we believe or are implanted with beliefs that we must). 

at left: Susan Jamison, Lovelace
We ourselves open the door to enduring difficulty when we decide to refuse to lovingly and ruthlessly do the work to know and transform ourselves, despite being given constant hints and clues as to who and what we have allowed ourselves to become.

Now that we're in the Changing Times, illnesses that people could bear and build for centuries undetected are now showing up, demanding to be acknowledged and integrated/cleared. Each person is at a crossroads of evolution, and if they don't shift their reality and take action, they may bring forth these very obvious forms of sickness.

We know that everyone who was born during this time and place entered into the agreement knowing (certainly their numinous self knows) that they would be given plenty of hints and wakeup calls and opportunity to come alive to themselves and clear their morphic fields. The strange sicknesses now coming into reality are the final, most undeniable signal that the person has consistently neglected inner calls to shift their perception. 

Even though we call it cruel to "blame the victim," actually no human being is capable of getting sick unless his energy field is holding energy patterns created by his alignment with that form of reality in thought, feeling and action. Sometimes a pattern of sickness is magnetized when a person consistently chooses the same kind of experience, refusing over the long term to challenge herself to experience it's opposite...becoming overly developed in either the deep dark or the expansive light, not balancing her spiritual portfolio, so to speak. 

Whether patterns were magnetized in this life or thousands of others, or in the lives of our genetic relations, has no bearing on the truth of their existence. If it's in the field, imbalance will sooner or later take shape.

A friend wrote my dad, asking for his thoughts about some Youtube videos that show folks experiencing a sickness whereby their skin erupts in sores all over their bodies, and out of these lesions emerge small threads or minute insects. It's all on disturbing view at Youtube. Search for "Morgellon." 


There are also many clips showing dead bees carrying these threads, and anecdotal accounts of these mysterious threads quickly killing honeybees by contact resembling electro shock. One theory suggests that these errant fibers come from genetically modified cotton. Not a coincidence, then, that the spiritual tradition involving the honeybee is intimately and numinously related to the threads of fate and spinners of destiny.

Susan Jamison painted this featuring the spider.

The thread sickness is deeply symbolic, shamanically and mythically. In both Native American (Spider Woman) and European traditions (the Norns or Three Sisters), the spinner/s of fate, are the beings who tells us daily, if we acknowledge it, what our balanced place is in the web of life, and also that we are connected to all others. Chronic distraction and chronic overvaluing of individualism may be at the root of this sickness. Chronic refusal to keep one's spiritual weave intact and stay connected. The threads of connection in these humans are broken and scattered and the human has refused to acknowledge, energetically, his place in the web, refused to take responsibility for his experience as a human connected to the universe. These broken threads have no choice but to float to the surface and come out.

In the shamanic traditions worldwide, unacknowledged, unnecessary energy in the body shows up as writhing insects which the shaman can see. Infestation of this kind reflects a morphic field stuffed to overflowing with unresolved self-hatred and self-repulsion, a chronic deficit in self-love and an inability to integrate and transmute guilt. It is astounding that this universal watermark of shamanic spiritual extraction has recently become actualized in our world for all to witness.

Also strangely ironic/non-ironic at this point is that these unfortunate folks are being told they have created this, it doesn't really exist, and there is no help for them. It is a cruel denial of obvious reality, and yet: Yes, they have created this...yes, they are challenged to know what is real though previously unseen...yes, only they can change this, and nobody can make it go away for them. All of these things are true as the sickness has surfaced in our world which they have been unconsciously cultivating or carrying for eons in the other world of reality. 


I do not mean to sound so detached, ruthless and uncaring about this shocking syndrome. I myself have carried garbage and lies in my own field that I have worked mightily to either avoid seeing, or indeed, take responsibility for and transform. I have been successful, and at times I have not been, and have experienced sickness that I was desperate to change, deeply frightened of, and feeling powerless about. 


I was called to go in the opposite direction of powerlessness. To go to my power in order to find the solution. The solution is always self-and-spirit-crafted, regardless of which health professionals are helping. The solution appears always when the numinous self makes the decision at the deepest level to align with something else than what is apparent.

Our numinous selves want very much that the soul personality "get this" for once and for all. Soul-cleansing is what is necessary to evolve.

Human beings are conditioned to choose comfort, ease, and the known. How on earth do people learn to choose to align with going into the dark of the unknown in order to confront the ignorance of what they are holding? Desperate people want to go to what has worked before: the socially acknowledged experts, go to the medical professionals, to the place that says this isn’t about the numinous or the unseen. The mind wants to go to the "logical" solution.

My parents, my grandparents and me, by Frida Kahlo

In spiritual orders of old, the journey of any particular tradition had built into it work that took the seeker in a completely opposite direction of where their safe-modus-of-operation would normally go. The mind-blowing challenges meant to relieve our soul story of its accumulated content can only be activated by deciding to take them on, regardless of outcome...stepping into the void, being the innocent fool, yelling YES! no matter what.  YES! I trust that I am heal-able, that I am healed, that is is taking place, that it is real, it is done. 

So often when new diseases appear and strange happenings shock us, folks tend to align immediately with victim's story of struggle. When did humans forget that courage is necessary in the face of the unexpected, in the face of change? When did we forget to override the accustomed in order to allow new possibilities to be born? 

Whether or not we choose to undergo spiritual challenges purposely, fate’s spinners take us there anyway.  When we summon courage to surprise ourselves, we get to practice the power of intentional decision in the weaving of fate. Eventually we learn to choose all the colors and patterns and end up with a weave of our own design. I believe this is where we are headed, all of us.

New Face of Enchantment

Last year I wrote a largely supportive but ultimately scathing post about Amy and Monte Zerner's website.  While I was very enthusiastic about Amy's enchanted-intuitive process of working with textiles, I was somewhat shrill about the "purchase it now" vibe of the site overall: in this, my words and the site then mirrored each other. I felt then and still feel that the integrity and beauty of her body of work is not served by all the many 'wisdom decks' the art is turning up in.

However, I understand the two are attempting to reach as many people as can be reached to spread a very positive, loving and expansive message. I heard from Monte Zerner personally and he was very kind and level-headed despite my tongue-lashing and urged me to take a new look at what they are doing.

Well. The whole site has been re-imagined. What is wonderful is that they have shared vast amounts of images of her older work, and overall the site is extremely generous and informative. It is leagues different than the site I saw about a year ago. It simply gives more than it asks for.

Please look here to see her incredible art collection and to see how the work has influenced and pollinated art-to-wear.

Sure, overall the site remains commercial and blinky, but the lovely collage border of her art puts the emphasis where it should be: on the body of work, on a unified visual frame. Seeing the art can be a challenge: follow "art" links among the many video/interactive clicks. These many free interactive utilities: readings, videos, etc,  share techniques of self-insight and are fun besides.

It can't be necessarily easy deciding how widely to peddle one's art. It seems a real tightrope walk between over-exposure and sharing it with the world, for all artists. The Zerners seem to have decided that if their time on earth is limited this time around, that rather than pump up the prestige of Amy's art by limiting its exposure, they will instead share it was widely and encourage it to be bought in as many forms as possible. Clearly they believe the New Age messages the work convey are equally important to the work itself.

I still love the work more than I do reading about what it means. I love the mystery of letting the images unfold in myself, without prompting, and I believe this unintellectual, non-mental process it is one of the core occult strengths of the art itself. All art, in fact.

But from now on I put my stinger away for the Zerners, I wish them ever-increasing success and continuing joy in their collaboration, and I will always urge folks to have a look at Amy Zerner's enchanted textile art.