A BREAKTHROUGH.

On Tuesday, July 8, 2014, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

   ('Work in progress.')

Cycles of creation. Death and rebirth. The Phoenix is a relevant icon for the creative process. As Van Morrison sings: ..."search for inspiration, sometimes it just isn't there."

Then, from the embers and the ashes another flaming form bursts forth.

Endangered species it may be, but a universal and not entirely rare bird. A Zen saying: 

 "You can't lose what's really yours, even if you throw it away."

Anything can come out of the blue of infinite possibility. It might well be an unidentified flying object. The kill-joys may say, "There's nothing new under the sun," but that's not so. Everything 'under' the sun constantly renews itself. Besides, it's likely to come from somewhere else entirely, consciousness for instance, and that's infinite and includes 'the' sun.

I was again up against a seeming wall, consisting of 'writer's and artist's blocks simultaneously. Being nothing new and forever an aspect of the path. But how do you get around that ? Water demonstrates the wise answer, flow on, around and over.

There's only a blockage where there's an urge to proceed and create something. The sense of block is when an adequate vehicle or channel seems not to be at hand and boredom as opposed to enthusiasm ensues. Simply because you want to move forward and not just repeat what's past.

So when 'the energy build-up without a channel' builds to the point of counter productive frustration, you take the most adequate vehicle available and drive it mindfully somewhere you've never been before

giving full undivided attention to the how of it.

Go by a route that contains possibilities for expression of feeling, putting that energy into the substance itself. So i move into action and do just that. Better than being laid up in a lay-by lamenting lack. Setting up your own road blocks ruins your drive.

I even have a tentative 13 letter title, to serve as a carrot in preference to a stick. You don't beat yourself (or the donkey) with a carrot. It gives you an incentive to move forward, something desirable to aim for.

Another Chinese saying, from Lao Tzu: "If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."

Like most wisdom it's just common sense.

Called wise to the degree that it's not very common.

So, feeling enthused and encouraged by being aimed, i went to town (so to speak) and got a suitably proportioned canvas and other preparatory aids.

 

Sat at an outdoor cafe table in a local alleyway in the sun. Joined by two other people (both called Denis and both wearing shades) in animated conversation over coffee, in the familiarly chacteristic Irish idiom of passionate common or garden wisdom.

Denis from Dublin expounding in unmistakeable idiomatic Dublinese about, among other things, going ahead regardless of what people may or may not think. Not be daunted (as i was, previous to going ahead) by seeming apathy and absence of a spark of response to creative output... "that sort of way like you know."

When you decisively choose and act on what does inspire you, often others appear who mirror the same back to you. In this instance instantly.

Expressing it mindfully in writing, dispelled the writer's block. Took some promptly improvised photos to augment the story. One such photo, not included here, is the suitable vehicle for what i'm about to paint.

Watch this space....

> R.B.M.

>><< >><< >><<

ETERNAL SUMMER.

On Wednesday, July 2, 2014, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Despite the war on life,

small wonders of nature,

untroubled.

~R.B.M.

Miraculously (all things considered), it's Summer ! Well, it is today, and as i recall, it was yesterday as well. But that's neither here nor there. Where is yesterday? Neither here, nor there.

'All things considered', being 'The War on Life',

which only a total ostrich is unaware of. A state maintained by 'Ostrich Television Trickery', O.T.T. (i hate abbreviations) which pours out fictional censored dramatizations

(read 'propaganda') of the war, so you'll think that by contrast, the world outside'the box' is normal. But as you know, O.T.T. Is over the top.

That's a condensed rewrite of three lengthy paragraphs laboriously proving the obvious, that a war on life is prevalent on all levels.

I decided a bit of levity was more appropriate.

An ostrich in this instance being a person afflicted with a will to ignorance, hopefully an endangered species. Besides, it's futile explaining anything to an ostrich, never mind pointing out what the contrast button is for, and a head in the sand is the most vulnerable position on earth.

So, 'miraculously, it's Summer !' This is a celebration, which implies a sense of gratitude.

Eternal Summer, though changing from moment to moment even as i write.

You might have a judgemental reaction to the word 'eternal', thinking it's either something sentimental or something to do with religion, neither of which is relevant. Eternal is just the natural state of the universe.

The dictionary defines 'eternal' as being "without beginning or end." But wait !

It's not possible to define 'eternal', because to define is to put a boundary round a fragment.

Eternal is the infinite whole without boundaries. Do you think you can put Summer in a box ?

If time was a natural state, animals would need to wear wristwatches. It's we who are the captives. Willingly surrendering fully present awareness to the most unquestioned concept on Earth: The forward march of time.

Whereas if you're really put on the spot by a situation, time stops, or rather, ceases to be.

That's partly my understanding of eternal, eternity, timelessness. The dictionary doesn't have the last word on anything, it's not a sacred text. Just a rough guide, and who needs to travel with a rough guide ?

Free exploration is not a conveyor belt. Imagine what a truly eternal Summer would feel like. Or remember childhood before you learned 'to tell the time.'

Those who say "i haven't got time" have nothing but time with no relief. Time makes you a central character in an ongoing story.

The sun reappeared from behind a cloud (so to speak) as i wrote that. At least from where i am, it's relative. But nothing really did anything, it just is.

It's just Summer (so called) NOW, and 'now' is not a moment in time because nothing is going anywhere. Just eternally changing.

So never mind the past, it was never present anywhere. Nor the future, it's just an imaginary version of what never was anyway.

So how can now be a moment in time ?

It's always NOW and you'll always find it HERE.

Except of course if you try to grasp it. While at the same moment believing firmly that it's just gone. To reach for 'the next moment' is to deny the ever present. When were you ever present in a 'next moment ?'

The feeling of past, is just re-membering, putting it back together in imagination, in the elusive 'now.' But that doesn't make it a present reality. It's just a thought, obscuring what is. The same with future.

So how can there be a reality between two things which never exist except in imagination? We are collectively 'spell-bound' by language, mistaking the symbol for the reality.

A bit like these grey clouds temporarily (presently) obscuring the sun, which never goes anywhere either.

A bold blackbird (could be the same one) repeatedly returns to the crumbs on the bird table in the sally (crann saili) willow, only a few feet from where i sit writing. The sun bursts through a promising patch of blue, playing hide and seek with my arbitrary preferences. Or to be more exact, it's the preferences themselves doing that.

Then, in no time at all, out of the blue comes an invasion of ragged ominous grey from the South-West. Settling in and transforming all distance to a uniform opaque blanket, squeezing out all trace of blue.

This is Ireland, not Australia or Arizona. A climate conducive to a mutable philosophical temperament which, when thankfully bathed in solar blessing, circumspectly says "But will it last i wonder" (it depends on how long 'last' is present), "and anyway we'll see."

Climate change? Mad scientists apart, when was there ever a period on Earth when climate didn't change ?

Crows on roof tops grow restless and vanish for cover. Neighbours, hands in pockets, briefly exchange comments from doorsteps and disappear indoors. I bring the chair in and put on a woolen sweater.

In memory i recall how nice it was when it was nice. The clear hot blue and bright light bathing the street in sultry heat. Everybody saying " Isn't it great ! But will it last i wonder." Imagining the future. With the inevitable "Please god", implying ' are we redeemed enough yet to deserve a little pleasure without subsequent punishment ?'

Whatever it does or doesn't do, it's eternal Summer in eternity, not to be compared with any other place or time, there isn't one, not here anyway. Better not spoil it by worrying what's next. There never was any such thing as a next.

The plants will appreciate the soft drizzle if no-one else does, they look well and happy. Sun and rain go together like up and down. Nothing causes anything. Everything is every-thing (and i mean Everything). Continued in the eternal continuum. ~

Makes Rainbows.

~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~

FULL TO THE BRIM.

On Monday, June 9, 2014, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

"The highest good is like water.

It nourishes all things but does not lord it

over them."
~ Lao-Tzu.

Woke to grey veils of rain off the bay

and the round moat full to the brim.

Running off the roof with barrel overflowing.

Wind blown leaves a flurry in the

drenched green garden.

All of this is just a preambulatory excuse to share some photo images. The way it looks is what most interests me. Apart from being one of those typical niggles that occur everywhere every day.

People grapple every day with mundane conundrums, inconvenient glitches and head bangers. Sludge pumps, cracked axles, blasted gaskets, leaky carburettors, dead batteries, fickle fan belts. Not to mention broken homes, broken bones, broken hearts, house fires, flash floods, mud slides, car crashes, earthquakes, explosions, tsunamis, plagues, aerial bombardments etc.

I'm blessed with being spared most of these things in the experiential present. Doodling with word shapes and liquid linguistics, to momentarily express something minimal and unmomentous. If ironically typical enough to be mildly humourous from a detached perspective.

Just a context for some recent photos, expressing artistically an ordinary experience of water.

So, here we go, lovers of the liquid illusions of wordstreams and water. Long story short, not forgetting to dot my eyes and cross my tease.

After a moment's due deliberation of process and a contemplative cup of tea, on a dappled bench where pussy willow pollen falls softly through flickering sunlight.

Bow-saw grasp, cut the black plastic down-pipe by the water butt, "kark kark" (the rasping sound of saw teeth through plastic.)

The offcut piece half spliced to wedge fit and slope. A chopped pine chunk to hand, a neat wedge fit between butt and ivy clad stucco wall, supports the makeshift elbow joint.

Outflow end yanked up tight under barrel rim.

Knotted length of coated wire flex draped over and out hangs down. A handy plastic flower pot weighted with a palm size stone. 'Gravity feed'?

Perfect. Solid. All plastic and not a penny spent. Technology reiterates ontology,or something. Taoist solution to the way of water. The answer close at hand. Simple, Lao-Tzu would nod.

Worked well and why wouldn't it? Then the rains came. Freakish for June, unrelenting for grey wet-blanketed days on end, a wall of grey across the bay, Atlantic and westerly.

Chorus:

Woke to grey veils of rain across the bay

and the round moat full to the brim.

Running off the roof with barrel overflowing.

Windblown leaves a flurry in the

drenched green garden.

Due to go into town, Friday being market day in wet green Munster. The odd windwrecked umbrella passing fleetfoot in the street.

The guttering out front too, sagging and clogged with falls of crowpecked moss balls.

Rain spills sporadic, splashing and splattering on concrete before the front door.

Flooding the drenched and drooping lupins.

Two heavy wheely bin-fulls of rainwater in a row, barely a stopgap.

Never mind bailing out the banks, mine are full to the brim, threatening to overflow, right where the onions grow.

Black plastic bucket grasp to handle it. Bailing bit by bit to swoosh and dump down the drain, lowering the level of in-pouring rain. First cast the moat from thine own eye.

 

Around a hundred bucketfuls it took. Rain down the roof, flooding into the garden never mind the pipe, brimming ripples down the barrel sides too. May day May day both hands on deck.

Later, on reflection, with a ladder, having tackled the mudclogged gutters, and out back, the downhole blocked with crumbling dirt. Tearing away wet ivy to plunge elbow deep in the mud silted pipe, face down many times between showers until almost got it clear now.

Grasping and groveling to feel to find a U-bend, that dull hollow reverb sloshing sound underground. Acheived at least a slow soak away in case it comes again.

And since then, been out to buy bottled water more than once ! Ironic as rusty old pipes, and there's talk of extra water charges ! In a land like this where water is in abundance free !!

While, underground, below pot-holed roads

"Oh Danny Boy, the pipes the pipes" are crumbling and what comes out the tap is toxic poison.

While my barrel runneth over, full to the brim.

Hush ! ... The sound of rain !

//// //// ////

Makes Rainbows / RBM.

ANCIENT SYMBOL.

On Thursday, June 5, 2014, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

If i ever run out of paper i have a lot of experience to draw on.

RBM~

 

Ancient Symbol. Ancient; it comes from long before human memory. But it still lives,in the present, in cellular memory.

I remember well its emergence in conscious awareness. Teenage years in art school. I recall being in lettering class, also typography (which i found burdensomely left brain and tedious, like arithmetic.) I would always doodle on the side of the page for relief when my calculations didn't add up yet again.

I never lost touch with the intuitive hemisphere, it was a matter of survival. Art was always my world, i came into the world like that. I came through the trauma of school with my natural creativity intact.

Art school saved my soul, it was a time to reconnect with the thread running through childhood. A time of private introspective emergence, significant subconscious re-emergence, if still quite traumatic on an interpersonal level.

Doodling is important and not to be lightly dismissed as trivial. It's a direct channel to creative source, underlying superimposed consensus rational identity, which allows uncensored expression of what you 'actually' feel, as doodles do.

So i was obviously always very receptive and vulnerable to impressions. Rather than peer pressure induced ego projective as boys most often are. Though i was scapegoated for it even in college, which was a learning curve in itself. But i didn't lose that link with early years, the magic of ordinary things if you like.

Being impressionable to what other students and artists were doing was very formative. Particularly with regard to archetypal meaning of shapes and colour in a deep subconscious sort of way. Which retain a matured conscious significance still evolving after decades of nurture.

Instances of being moved on a subterranean level by large abstract paintings are as alive and present today, even though i was on a graphics course. A very informal, lenient, and helpful one at that time. I assimilated a sense of the significance of primal elements as if by osmosis, and a lot more besides including manual and perceptual skills, and it sustained and remained my primary focus of being.

Plugging in to the universal wellsprings of the timeless world of the world's art, actually since the age of four, when i was much encouraged by having a drawing published in a magazine, thanks to my humble and well-meaning working class parents.

Solitary retreats into the college library, discovering revelatory impressions precisely imprinted in memory, otherwise insignificant details of moments still easily recalled in the still present.

Receptive as a dry sponge. Even if it was all i could do to push the heavy library door and walk in without feeling i might faint in public from so called 'self-consciousness'. Still hadn't formed a self assured social 'identity.'

I'm fond of this symbol and others similarly related to it. I have a personal/impersonal relationship with it. An innate ability to read such signs by instinctual feeling, it's a timeless language written into the human psyche of the planet herself, by herself.

It's also literally written into the rocks and stone all over the world. As one might expect, here, in a 'Celtic' country, only a few miles away, variations of this shape are profusely carved on a flat expanse of rock, previously overgrown with a thin layer of grassy tufted turf and carved before formally recorded history.

I spent one sunny afternoon running my fingers along the cup and ring marks,(this symbol.) So much for time.

Symbols embody and invoke many interrelated layers of meaning simultaneously, in the most succinct form possible.

This one embodies many references, including:

Primal containment and gestation, whether by womb of the Earth Mother, or human home and hearth. It's both, sexual and biological, and identical with a floor plan of ancient dwellings.

The centre circle is Sun, Spirit, Source, unfertilized egg ,and embryo, the soul in utero.

So i celebrate it, suspended and brooding symbolically in a suitably ancient setting. The pyramidal mound with beacon pyre-amid, while being male, projective upright triangle, is also androgenous, being a bosom of Mother Earth. The two interelated, invoking fertility.

I'm pleased to see the annual crop formations manifesting again. Prior to June 1^st, some of the early ones seemed to be of questionable origin, as the authenticity of non manmade ones is subtly discernable.

This particular symbol has occurred many times in genuine crop formations in unequivocably clear exactness. The latest one, recorded on June 1^st in Dorset. England, has this same form again, ingeniously depicted in one continuous line. Enclosed within a diamond shape (also female), within a circle (Spirit.)

Curiously enough, that same pattern was forming itself in my mind on the same day before i discovered it, and that's not the first time that's occurred, by a long straw.

I've even painted a complex design (Rainbow

Embryo. October 2007) and then discover on the internet the same theme had manifested in the fields around the same time, on the other side of the Irish Sea.

One very instructive instance of this kind of synchronicity only in reverse, happened some years back. A formation appeared in Wiltshire, consisting of a triple armed swastika (an ancient sun symbol) neatly integrated into three sides of a cube within a circle.

I did an accurate drawing of it as it seemed a bit of a puzzle to construct. Much later, drinking tea at a friend's cottage and while leafing through a very old book of Tibetan Buddhism, a surprise happened.

At a turn of the page, there was the same symbol, illustrated, and i mean identical (i'm into precision.)

The text explained it as being, an esoteric 'yantra' (visual mantra) used for meditation and known as the Antakharana. It further stated that it can only ever be used for benevolent purposes.

I doubt that anyone with a low level intent to hoax and deceive would have also known that.

Unless of course UFOs are full of ancient Tibetans.

Many crop circles have consisted of esoteric symbols from long ago not known by anyone but a most studious scholar of civilizations.

Some years ago a very strange thing happened. Studying the latest crop circles on the library computer, i distinctly saw, studied, and drew acurately, a complex twelve pointed star formation. Shown in a series of clear photos on 'crop circle connector' website. I can still recall the atmospheric feel and perspective of the photos as it made an impression.

Most impressive was that it was identical to the design on the cover of Patricia Cori's previously published book dealing with twelve stranded DNA. So i sent her the drawings and drew her attention to it. The book was written long before the discovery of these crop circles.

Well, we both searched the web, including the other circle sites, and any such photos were nowhere to be found. They were never there.

But i saw them, or else how could i draw them, complete with small additional details?

She promptly and warmly replied: "The Siriuns do that sort of thing you know."

There's far more to form than meets the eye.~

>><< >><< >><<

> Makes Rainbows.

Artwork:
     ANCIENT SYMBOL, martin law, 2014