SUNFLOWER FACE.

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 09:31 AM, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

SUNFLOWER FACE.

 

A bee sucks seeds in the sun.

Where can all the others be?

But for an abundance of bumbles

i counted only five this year.

Though friends say there's plenty

still busy here in Eire.

A sunflower success.

The tallest of four,

well over six feet.

I planted thirty.

Bold shadows on a lilac wall

beakleaved and dragonish.

Compliments the yellow crown

around sunflower face

spiralled buzzing speaker.

Sat looking from a low wall

up into bowed face humbling

silhouetted in gauzy glare.

Two tortoiseshells take place as eyes

in the round sunflower face,

wings open and close,

a wink.~

}{/.}{/.}{/.}{/.}{/.}{/.}{/.}{/.

rainbowmaker

Photos: SUNFLOWER FACE, martin law

WAY OFF THE MARK.

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 03:26PM , Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

WAY OFF THE MARK.

If you're looking for a way, you're lost.

If you've found the way, you're not where you want to be yet.

If you're not interested you'll stay the way you are and never evolve.

A way that can be described, prescribed, and followed is not the way itself. No way.

What's a way anyway? And who needs one?

( With the whole emphasis on WHO?)

If you don't know who it is who needs one how would you know if a way was necessary?

Or, you might say you've found the way to be just where you are. Impossible. There is no way to where you are.

If you need a way, you must think you're going somewhere else other than here and now. When were you ever 'somewhere else?' I don't mean outwardly. I mean you.

When were YOU ever somewhere else? Where ELSE can you be? Go there and see if you're somewhere else.

How on earth can here and now go somewhere? Why would it want to? I'm not talking spatially. Space is the context that seems to define you, by seeming to be where you think you are not.

Is that where you are? Always in the centre of where you're not.

Is this clear, or is it so damn confusing you'd rather go somewhere else and change your mind? If you've half a mind to change your mind you really will be confused.

Like being two people and one wants to change the other but they're both you, so if you succeed you fail.

But if you let your mind wander it'll fool you into thinking it's thoughts are yours, instantly.

So whatever thoughts occur, that wil be who you think you are, continuously, with never a break.

If you try and stop the process you will think that's who's doing it. Funny isn't it? Or not?

If you decide that it really doesn't matter, how then will you find out if it really does or not?

A conclusion is supposed to come at the end, not the beginning. Otherwise you just have a closed mind.

What's a mind anyway? Apparently nobody knows. Not even scientists, psychologists, biologists, yet we take it for granted and say,”I have one.”

If i say “Show me,” you can't because you've never seen one and neither of us knows where it actually is, no it's not just in the head. So you make a show of giving me a piece of your mind.

“Well of course,” you say, “it's invisible, but i can hear it.” Could just be those thoughts again, tricking themselves into thinking you can actually 'have' what you 'are,' and simultaneously therefore 'are' what you can 'have.'

Are you bored yet?

Don't we just set up situations that define us to ourselves, and they always involve a lot of other people whether we like it or not, and the majority of them are no longer present?

Who would we be without them? Or who are we with or without them? Do 'they' know?

To know your experience isn't it pointless to ask somebody else? Let alone believe what they may say. How, do you think, they could experience what it is to be you?

There's a lot of projection goes on. Everywhere, pretty much continuously. Movies of love and hate, advance and retreat, welcome and denial.

Funny isn't it? Not always. Not usually.

Especially as it's being acted out physically, collectively, against itself.

If you depend on what you're not, to define what you are, you're lost. Or at least can't claim to be independent. “To see ourselves as others see us,” no thanks. Don't think so.

More often than not, we're way off the mark.

But we don't like to realize or even consider that.

It makes us unsure who we are. But who am i to talk? ~

~~ Rainbowmaker/ ? ~

Photos: "Way off the mark", techman-moo for Rainbowmaker

Words For Birds re-feature

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 11:17 PM, Martin Law martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com wrote:

Words For Birds.      ( A Celebration.)

Small words, for small birds.  Common or garden words.
Words worthy of song for songbirds.
Almost empty, the brown paper bag of peanuts under the kitchen sink.

Feeding a small fire.  Down to my last bit of coal, awaiting delivery.
Plenty of chopped spruce chunks though. 
Stand them on end in the hearth, to dry out.

Economizing on the coal.  Fastidious and precise,
the frugal art of getting through, staying warm.
Small things mean something.  Small things matter.
Civilizations waging war over vanishing gold and silver. 

Twin logs hiss in the grate, like rain.  Shift, settle, to crackle and spark.
'Mystic-peach' glow, loud sharp cracks.  Yellow flame.
Black tongues give a gift of coal.












Smooth branchy willow saplings, just a hand's-grip around.
Upsurge from an ivy clump of ground.
A gusty webwork, where, small head-tailed birds flawlessly flit and perch.  Perch and flit from branch to twig, bold punctuations on a musical stave. More new arrivals perch tier on tier.

Nothing ever, quite so Zen, as small birds.
Infallible flitters with a firm grasp.
Weightless, never subject to volition:
I witness many a tight 'U-turn' on an instant in mid-flight.

While my neighbours sit facing flickering football screens, i stand rapt,
cup in hand, in the kitchen.
Fast fluttering flits from peanut beak to branch, with never, ever, a single mistake.
Is that not cause for wonder?

They are more at one with the wind, than a weatherman will ever be.
If you wish to witness miracle, it will cost you peanuts.

When we were "granted dominion", so it is said, was it not meant that we would attend to our 'furred and feathereds’' needs and seeds.
The only 'reward', is endless wonder. 

Willow:  'Saileach', 'Crann saili,' a Taurus-totem tree, to 'the Celts.'
Signifying, 'The Observer.'
Ruled by the moon, and the lunar realm.
Mystical, intuitive, creative, and psychic.
With an understanding of cycles and seasons, (the patience attributed to Taurus).



Bursting with potential, though with a preference to working behind the scenes. It is the power of perception and memory, which allows the true nature to blossom.

I am blessed with a willow in the window, as well as the wind in the willows. A welcome compensation, for a Taurean, who spent ten years with nothing but a blank grey wall in every window.  Previous tenants cut this willow down to the ground four times.
So i'm happy now it's as high as the house.

My most frequent visitors are, sparrows, chaffinches, blue-tits,
(Blue-tits seem to function on a very high frequency.)
Then there may be a blackbird or two, male and female.
Sometimes a sudden band of speckled starlings will descend,
and, a lone robin.

Next in line, when they get wind of the chatter and flurry, are rooks, crows, magpies. Though my neighbours’ two ring-doves usually hear of it before they do, and the small birds don't find them threatening.

Unlike the rooks and crows, warily awaiting their opportunity,
from surrounding lookout posts.
Chimney-tops, guttering, roof-ridges and telephone wires.
Then, they swoop like black-cloaked witches in a raid.

Since they eat faster, i put the peanuts between the base
of the willow and the thorny rosebush
as a semi-deterrent to a direct swoop.

They are also, by far the most wary of human intervention,
and instantly alert to a clack of fingernails on a windowpane.

Let no man doubt their mystical cooperative intelligence however,
commanding respect, admiration.  Forget 'football.'
When we call them 'greedy', we might stop and wonder,
just who it is we're talking about.
So, no questions asked, why i don't have a cat.

A friend of mine was visited often by a robin, which regularly
came in the open door,
almost to the edge of her plate.
Seasons being somewhat seasonally cyclic, she's the first person i've heard of, to have a much-used robin-flap instead of a cat-flap.

Native peoples and others with long experience, say that the birds are
the sentries of the natural world.

They are aware, (naturally) of significant conditions and aspects of
the changing world around us, and signal it in song.
There is a book, on Amazon, i would like to read.  It's called:
'What The Robin Knows.'  (How Birds Reveal The Secrets Of The Natural World.)'
Written by, Jon Young.

Intuitively, i've been feeling something in the robin's song for a long time.
It always sounds like a direct message delivered as if with intent.
Always, uncannily close at hand, and at a specific moment,
and slightly modified within the context of the seasons.
I must pay closer attention, and with a silent mind.

Birds don't have a 'larynx' as we do.  They have a 'syrinx, located in the 'thorax'.  (Syrntax!)
Witness the breast feathers when he sings.
A plaintive, almost wise-sad, tinsel-like ripple
of crystaline quicksilver droplets, dribbled
like a wry timely reminder.


( A wren, apparently, sings about 56 notes per second.
How many do we register from our slower rate of attention?)
I wonder.

I painted ' The Irish Robin' portrait in January 1983.
Alone, in my small caravan, out on The Burren. County Clare,
where i lived for three and a half years.














I clearly remember, working on it, painstakingly.
Sitting close to the window for the remaining daylight.
All those tiny feathers!
It was cold, even with the wood stove.
I award myself a tiny feather, for persistence.

'Robin Redbreast'.  (A robin is not 'red'. though the american equivalent may be.)
It's orange with a hint of brown.  There was no english word for orange till the 1600's.

A twenty foot caravan in a field of cows.  Very remote, very silent, quite alone.
It was snowing. Large soft slow silent flakes.
No 'facilities', such as electricity.  Just gaslight and candle.
My water supply, the river, a field's walk away.  Toilet?
An overhang of hawthorn hedge, a mulch of old leaves.

The painting was photographed two or three years later.
I gave the painting later on, to the youngest son of an ex-partner.  On his request.
He's now taller than i am.
When he was quite young we shared art interactions.
That is, i supplied him with endless paper and he created, the most astonishing things.
One time, with a stack of creations which he explained to me in profound detail,
I said, "Chris do you need more paper?"
"No", he said.  "I've taught you enough for today."

This is a celebration of, and a prayer for, birds:
'Words For Birds.'



{" I am very thankful for birds.  May they not fall foul of 'chemtrails.'}
(I say that, in 13 words, and may it be so.)

True peace, and strength, is to be found
dwelling in the heart, not in the mind alone.

I give thanks, to everything,
without which, nothing would be.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~martin rainbowmaker~ Jan. 2013

Photos : Bird Photos, martin law, july 2013

art : the irish robin, martin law, january, 1983
in the private collection of Chris

artwork : digital pan play - photographic image reconstruction & definition, JAN 13 - wfp for moo

re - featuring

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Words For Birds

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A PATH EMERGING.

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 00:36 AM, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

A PATH EMERGING.
 

Nocturnal doodling with pencil and paper. Envisioned an opening into a timeless realm. A long straight path between marker stones. Waves of ochre blond grass. A STRAIGHT PATH to ancient oak woods. A shower passes in autumn light.

From the original drawing only 7”x 5” small. Enlarged and transferred to canvas, only 10”x 14” small. Brought to life as a place to enter into imaginatively.

Photos show stages of the process but not the process itself. If it showed that, you'd see me gazing for hours over a cup of tea and that wouldn't be so exciting for you as it is for me.

Any more than you can observe grass imperceptibly growing but only notice stages of it. This glimpse occurred over a period of five days or so.

Once again, it's not 'just a painting'. Or even merely that concept 'a landscape.'

It's a playful but disciplined manifestation of imagination actualized. An artistic exploration.

Forget styles, eras, schools and movements, it's not in 'the art world', it's outside, seen from within. An inside out process.

Simply A STRAIGHT PATH to who knows where or when. A path emerging in consciousness, and no one knows where that is either. It's everywhere.

Perhaps the world is not so much a place, as a state of awareness, which is what's termed 'non local.' Art is a way of being present imaginatively, and imagination is a priceless human attribute. So this is not 'a commercial artifact,' just the fact of art.

Many people do themselves a disservice when they claim to have no imagination. How could they imagine such a thing? I bet their dreams are equally outrageously creative. It's not as if they were created by somebody else.

This is 'nature' outside the current age. Who in their natural state of being would wish to be defined by the current context of 'historical time', or any time at all?

This is the natural world in its timeless state, which is where it always is anyway.

As we also are, without the superimposition of temporal concepts of perception.

This understanding filters through the essence of each and every brush mark. It's not just that there are no signs or even a sign of telegraph poles or other infrastructure. It's that the organic flow pervading nature is not deviated from as the creative source.

If nature has an ancient look about it, it's because it 'is' ancient, sublimely so, and so is the soul and the human forms it takes on. A fact that so called 'normal perception' typically ignores.

The 'age' we are said to live in is just an optical illusion. So, to impose an arbitrary date or an era on the scene is to miss the mark entirely and not see it at all. It could just as easily be in the megalithic period. Nothing has changed but our perception of what is.

Painting is a way of saying it without words. Which, while they may describe, or even evoke, (if you speak the language), don't depict or demonstrate.

Whereas, imagination flows freely into paint substance and illuminates the land in breeze blown relief. The pictographic language of 'the way of the brush' inscribes the illuminated hieroglyphs of re-enchantment.~

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

rainbowmaker~

Art: A Straight Path, martin law, Oct 2013