Work produces a sweet essence

One of the Melissa Garden’s founders is Barbara Schlumberger, who does process paintings for the site, and is involved with the modern extention of an ancient spiritual order from Afghanistan, called the Sarmoun (“The Bees”) Brotherhood and affiliated Sisterhood.

“There are many legends about Sarmoun-Dargauh ('Court of the Bees'), and one of them is this. True knowledge, it is asserted, exists as a positive commodity, like the honey of the bee. Like honey, it can be accumulated. From time to time in human history, however, it lies unused and starts to leak away. On those occasions the Sarmouni and their associates all over the world collect it and store it in a special receptacle. Then, when the time is ripe, they release it into the world again, through specially trained emissaries.”

This 1965 article by Desmond Martin explains a few more tantalizing drops about it.

Elsewhere on the web it is written: Sarmoun is a word meaning bee in Old Persian, and refers symbolically to the practice of the brotherhood of storing the honey of both the traditional wisdom and the supernatural energy or baraka (Barack?) enabling it to be understood, and sending this double nectar out into the world in times of great need. The word Sarmoun can also mean “those who are enlightened.” The Sarmouni are believed to have secret training centres hidden to this day in the most remote regions of Central Asia.

The Sarmouni are a universal family who operate on a metaphorically invisible level. As Idries Shah paraphrased from the sufi tradition:

"The Secret protects itself by virtue of its implausibility."

Process painting is intuitive painting, and I didn’t know very much about it until I searched around more. Oregon artist Robin Urton shows very clearly how she experienced this method of working in her blog, wherein her painting of a woman transforms into that of a bird, by turning it upside down, and continuing to work spontaneously.

This transformation appears to have shamanic undertones: setting free this magnificent bird out of a vague form of a woman—a bird that was always there, just hidden. It illustrates beautifully how more ripened, fully magical art can develop only with time and with attention kept focussed on allowing the obscured truth underneath to surface and break through.