THE WAY OF WATER

If you must worship something, how about water? But don’t put it on a pedestal, it’ll just run off. ~

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

We are one-with a water planet and water is the boss. Not that it has the slightest intention of being so, rather it supports all things. Therefore worthy of greatest reverence.

Being memory incarnate, water embodies wisdom of experience and demonstrates naturally that when you’re on top, your downfall follows as the natural order of things. Just ask any waterfall or dead tyrant and you’ll get corroboration that transcends words.

As Niagara falls knowing no resistance, surrendered solely to gravity and its own nature, manifesting immense power effortlessly. Solace for the lowly, the safest place is below, from where life springs and on which all edifices depend for their existence.

The solution to the illusion of being a body foreign to the planet, is water. Both human and planetary body alike are composed of 65 to 71 percent water, the sacred living element of memory, wisdom, and feeling.

Water is liquid life. We are born from uterine water, we drink water to sustain and remain alive, we depend on water to grow food, as well as to prepare it. Our body too is a planetary body, sustaining within the body of the earth with her voluminous body of water.

Yet we forget, and let those who feel foreign to the source of all life, pollute the land, the sea, the rivers, the air and ourselves, as one-with water in common, flowing within and through all.

Blinded by, and under what spell, aiding and abetting, who can tell, what kind of creature poisons its own well? Or, since profit is the illusion, poisoning the wellbeing of the whole. The sanctity of the source itself. Such a one should take a water course.

So, with deep gravity of intent, and beyond mere lame lament, i concentrate this force, being as one-with the source, and never was apart, invoking it through art.

As is now known, the voice, in sound syllables of choice, resonates the solution, heals water of pollution.

Spoken from the heart, and crystalized as art, i do dispel the spell, decree the water well. So saying, hear the sound, fierce gale blows all around. Intent sent in the aether, an answer in the weather, we heal the whole together.

It really is some storm, heard inside where it’s warm, but this is no mere prayer, rains arrows through the air, roaring round the roof, blows flames within the hearth.

It’s just a way to start, when needing inspiration, a warm-up to the art, of improvised creation. From searching for a clue, to knowing what to do, and follow where it goes, the way that water flows.

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.

RAINBOW FIELDS.

Coincidences of rainbow signals and synchronicity. Rounding bracken brown bends of backroads in quiet late December, to cottage kitchen candles and a seasonal meal. Bare branch hedgerows flash past, talking of earth tone textures and topography.

”The land on the left always reminds me of your paintings.” Fleeting impressions of folds of fields smooth down to dense branchy thicket where water runs in a gully and all burnished and bushy as a nest of foxes.

Where the seed of a spark launches a surge of fractal trains of imagery and imagination, culminating and coalescing into meticulously manifested icons of intrinsic integration, yet who hears or heeds such subliminal seeds of harmony?

Kind shots of the spot taken, attached and sent, furthering fractals in microcosm and on turning to return, a rainbow, food for focus in folds of fields. So square the rectangle and sketch from the screen, long calm gazing into the scene.

 

Tentatively at first with a soft pencil, ticking and checking where the shapes go. Then bolder in black and with a matchstick making marks in the primer. Though works best to lay texture first, so when it’s bare bone bumpy and dry, drawing comes out like a brass rubbing.

Then lines become unintended tones when coated with varnish, the brush retains a residue of stain but neatly adapted serves to clothe forms in volume and shadow, tones of dark adding density within contours.

 

Dried by the fire, clothing the weave with colour, learning through layers of green a new mix of pigment. Illuminating hillside enclosures lighter than the slate grey sky. Delving in the substance and energy of veils of ancient green like a mantle.

While the bronzed thicket could still evolve through rain-darkened brown, though there’s always a stage or a stroke you could imagine modifying. Then promptly painted in the prepared rainbow arc.

 

Still thinking in the abstract like a soft patchwork or tapestry woven with dark thread and ancient harmonies. Textures in the flowing carpet of earth, pristine, primeval, and emblematic.

Just as when we form pictures in the flow of cloud shapes, emergent images of places and faces in the fire, follow that faculty. The hide and seek of forms within forms, forming features for further enhancement.

It’s one thing seeing a face never mind a race on the moon, or mechanical artifacts behind every rock on Mars, but reading images credibly into random is an art.

One where you’re aware of salient features but also see how you see what you conceive of. Change the picture by what sort of dots you join and the image conforms to the concept and so with the status quo.

Long looking meditation from along the shores of an impression, arrive at a landing stage where the tapestry all ties up, the patchwork pitch-perfect and the works on display are the jewels of play, so worth more than one might have to work for.

 

Maintenance of innocence and antidote to angst, co-creating fruitful fractals one with the biosphere. Authentic evocation sends an emanation, augmenting intent like a meme or mantra. Despite dark skies a bright arc of prismatic spectral rain. Immersion in the subtle transformation of an impression, unfolding in a fertile field of vision. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.

RAMBLE WITH OAK

I was what’s called, ‘waiting’. That is, just being, passionately but patiently impatient for inspiration and how to tie certain things together.

When the non-verbal insight arose by itself: ‘A rope is a flexible continuity which can be used for forward progress (leading, lifting, pulling, climbing,) or, contrarily, to bind something in place preventing progress.’

Not only that. When a rope turns on itself (enough to throw anything for a loop) yet insists on going through with it with forward intent, it meets a snag called appropriately ‘a knot’, which already sounds like a negation of progress.

If it does it again it’s in a double bind, which is fine if the intention is to bind. We’ve all tied our shoelaces enough times to not even have to think about it. But with inspiration, having been there enough times to train myself to be passionately dispassionate about seeming to be at the end of my rope, yet not making it a tug of war.

Better to pause, and neither push nor pull on the delusory conflict between complimentary poles, and not settle for another double bind. The battle of black and white and other silly loop-tapes.

To not turn on yourself as if you were a worm, sending you for a loop, yet still persisting no matter how patiently impatient, such being the nature of waiting. Whatever about religion, from the Latin ‘religare’ meaning, ‘to bind back’, which doesn’t sound very liberating and which may or may not have been its original intention.

Better still the unravelling, a mini- revelation. Trace back, revealing what you did, but without turning on yourself a second time, and with no loss of passion to heal the ‘not-happening’, simply un-do, comprehending the process inwardly.

Conscientious compulsion to self-forgive, may also still mask a ‘turning on yourself’, until it doesn’t. A snag is only a not-happening till it’s unravelled. We grow by correcting mis-takes, which otherwise plummet to the pole we call evil when we refuse to see and instead, justify and persist. We’ve all untied our shoelaces enough times.

Persisting without deviation is what may be called a straight line, and we are culturally coerced to deify straight lines. Which, as we were told, are the shortest distance between two points. Which may be so as the crow flies or on paper, or driving across flat terrain. But in a wiggly world such conclusions are questionable. You could fall asleep from monotony, run out of fuel, or die of thirst.

Besides, all answers are questionable. Being conclusions (endings) they put an end to further enquiry free of already biased assumption. In looking for answers and building a life on them, we might well have continued to evolve further by forming and refining more intelligent questions.

Why settle for answers when you can ask questions? Belief is ‘choosing to assume’, it’s not-knowing. Another knot. Only when you know you don’t know will you attempt to learn and grow.

Not to mention corners, which are the inevitable result of straight lines. Most of the self-evidently alien intrusion in the natural world is the insistence on straight lines, roads, buildings, weapons, the ‘cornerstone’ of which, being ‘economics’: All ‘nomics’ with no regard for ‘eco-systems’.

Corners are a binary system, alien to our essence as one-with wiggly nature, and nature abhors a ninety degree angle. Corners conveniently replicate as grids, a superimposition of cages within cages of blocked negative energy. Grids are graphs to control and inhibit free flow of natural energy. Alien to nature and taken for granted. Imagine straight intestines, you’d really be in the... system where you’re blocked at every turn.

To return to wiggly lines in lieu of inspiration, and my previous painting PRESENCE OF OAK. A friend suggested that a version with black lines instead of brown would work well, as with recent works, and i noted that could well be so.

Curiosity and desire to paint prompted me to transform the existing painting rather than repeat the process. Possibly enhance, evolve, and enrich it in doing so. Sometimes you can take things further when you have something already formed to work with.

So i decided to see if it felt right. A relatively minor challenge for sure but one that suits my style, and after it ‘not working’ for quite a while, i was ultimately far from being disappointed.

Having for a lifetime explored many inner avenues away from early revelations related to a certain subtle integration of form-enhancing black incisive line. With intent not to emphasize boundaries knowing none exist.

Yet, paradoxically, in delicately daring to define form, it is demonstrated that ‘difference is what everything has in common’, hence the richness revealed. The original revelations of which as i well recall prompted me to sing in appreciation.

After all, who owns your garden fence, you or your neighbour? Or if you take sides, is the bulk of it then shared? Or, if you must have definitive answers to such knotty questions as, “how is everything one while apparently separate?” Which qualifies as “a good question.” Then frame it like this: “Distinctness is the surest sign of underlying unity.” Relationally speaking. Everything is a network of distinct interrelationships.

As in art, so with everything, and that’s saying a lot. The part is not apart from the whole. Wholes don’t have separate parts that’s why they’re whole. They only seem to when we distinguish distinctions, needing to draw a line somewhere between the loved and the not loved.

The oaks return, along with vision, and every-thing is recreated new as it ever was, one-with a wild and wiggly world, and today is Winter Solstice. Silently celebrating the cyclic return of solar self-same celestial light. *

*** *** *** ***

Martin Rainbowmaker.

A SHAFT OF LIGHT

Recalling a quiet walk in the woods. Returning to revise and totally rewrite, after wandering way off topic and into subsequent unfoldings. In a complex world simplicity is a rare gem. So to resume the thread of inspiration for this painting, already titled ‘A Shaft of Light.’

Autumn sunlight streaming through, down a steep incline, moving among prickly underbrush, layers of illuminated leaves below silent sleeping trees. To pause on a single weighted footfall- crunch of brittle dry detritus. An unseen creature one with the woods. ~

Breaking the surface of sleep, escaping with a sudden gut-deep abandoned and inconsolable whimper, from some tragic sad and soulful dream. What a way to wake to wonder why and what in the world it may mean.

So arise and sit awhile in quiet, with warm cupped comfort of tea before more rest. After a whole night’s study and three hours sleep. Pale peach tints of blue-grey damp dawn before bird chirp, mountains still veiled in grey across the bay. The inner child awaits the returning wise warrior within.

Still unaware the dream had coincided with widespread floods throughout the land, leaving many abandoned without home, echoes of the waking whimper from the dream and images related.

Waiting watchful, listening inwardly for the sign, to resume the task in hand. The painting, the first stage completed to satisfaction almost a month ago. Still on pause, having subtle qualities easily spoiled by haste. With art, it serves no purpose to push the river, but go with nature’s flow.

So when the natural light is right, to illuminate, and not obliterate these intricate textures that arrived, since they’re uncontrived. A specific and precise process currently evolving, involving tactile textures.

Which, when you really focus, with soft sustained attention, deep magnification, you find there’s worlds in there, and diversified dimensions. In visionary relief as glimpsed archaic hieroglyphics revealed in the light of day, which never went away.

To see, you must sustain and not just glance off. It’s no mere insincere effect. Feel lovingly through the eyes and join the dots. Undistracted by all passing thoughts. Inner tension is inattention, beauty, the present absence of beholder.

I will have to take a gentle tentative approach. The black can blur and smudge when touched by water, that’s because it’s crayon and not paint, as when you take a rubbing from a coin.

But i took a very subtle chance, sealed it first all over with matt varnish. First attempt showed even that would smudge. So retouched with white and chose the softest brush, a Chinese bamboo one with hair that caused no friction, and softly sealed with no smudge anywhere. Even so must still proceed with care.

For now, i’ll sleep on it. Then create a sacred space, with reverence for refinement of ancient Chinese art, where minimal soft colour is subordinate to form and line, and disregarding time, find quiet joy in the process.

Since we’ve lost the plot,

then why not stop the fight?

So many see neither wood nor trees.

Oh look, a shaft of light!

=== === = === ===

Martin Rainbow-maker.

A Shaft of Light - Nov 15 
           Martin Law

ELEMENTAL MUSE

Elemental: ‘Of primitive natural forces or passions.’

Primitive natural forces? Who are we to call natural forces primitive? It’s not as if we are separate from the force of nature and can force ourselves against it. Not without dire consequence for the whole which includes us within it.

So is it really a mystery why what we call ‘our passions’ tend to be so destructive? If we pit our natural force against what we are one-with, what other result is possible?

Duality is in the suicidal delusion of mind that believes itself ‘civilized’ by contrast with, ‘primitive’: 1. ‘Of an early simple stage of development.’ 2. ‘Basic. Crude.’

Whereas, if what we call ‘civilization’ wasn’t so perpetually, glaringly, pathologically hypocritical, then our natural passions might have a chance to be life-affirmative and creative. Which they are, when not trapped in self- contradiction. Elemental is the way nature is, naturally.

A Native American saying: ‘It doesn’t take many words to speak the truth.’ So, for those with a short attention span, think of elemental as meaning, earthly, natural, worthy of reverence, and not to be messed with.

Muse: 1. ‘In Greek mythology, one of nine Goddesses, each of whom inspired an art or science.’ 2. ‘Force that inspires a creative artist.’ Also means, to ponder quietly.

As mentioned previously, the dictionary doesn’t have the last word on anything. It’s a self-defining, closed circuit system of circular logic, and circles don’t have ends, let alone a last word. Though it helps sometimes to understand at least the title, in this case Elemental Muse.

Not that the force of inspiration is something distinct from the artist, or from nature as a whole. That’s unthinkable, unless you think the words are the reality.

How can there be inspiration without a one who’s inspired, by something that’s inspiring? So don’t imagine that, in exploring creativity to its full, life-affirming potential, there’s any risk of going mad, being plagued by demons, and becoming famous mainly for slicing your earlobe and shooting yourself in a wheat field.

Unless your passions are such that you think natural means crude, and elemental is merely mental, or anything basic is something to either conquer or be enslaved by. In which case you’d be well advised to dabble with watercolours till you’ve sorted it out. Besides, inspiration is receptive and to muse also means to ponder quietly.

Neither do you want to become a passionless politically correct robot, cybernetically entrained to invisibly intrusive synthetic nanoparticles, dictating your every soulless predictable reaction.

If that sounds frivolously improbable, then you’d be urgently well advised to imminently immerse totally in nature, and disengage undue dependence on artificiality lest your trinary synaptic flux be transfixed by binary pixels.

‘Rocks and Roots’, is the title of this most recent painting, which speaks for itself without words. Inspired by an actual moment in nature, though a moment is not a point in time. How do you pinpoint what’s omnipresent except perhaps in paint?

ELEMENTAL MUSE.

Dive in deep, richness of layered leaf mulch settled by seasons’ rains.

Footfall crack and crunch of scattered brittle sticks.

Soft spongey moist and mounded moss to touch, cloaking all. Cladding twists of root and fertile fungal growth in deep druidic green.

Stark stillness of boulders embedded, quartz clusters lichen encrusted, stray leaf-fall glistens.

Voluminous rooted trunks twist criss-cross overlapping, branching out in dark uplifted limbs against the light.

Barely a small bird chirp as silent ooze, trickles down between rocks and roots, vegetal, mineral, organic elemental muse.

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.

RE-ENCHANTMENT.

You may justify ‘OWN’ because it’s also ‘WON’, but it translates more sanely as simply ‘NOW’. ~

If we co-operatively put as much energy into caring for nature as we put into war, politics, economics, control, domination, competitiveness, destruction, ‘resource’ plunder, and industry, an expanded and deepened awareness of what and where we are would pervade perception.

An earth-based caring consciousness, collectively established and lived experientially is equivalent to a renaissance of our original, natural, mystic wholeness with Mother Earth, already present in the timeless continuum. Urging us to wake from the delusive dream of separation and the currently prevailing estrangement.

More succinctly, a compassionate nurture for all nature, is synonymous with a new Earth, a new mind, and a new spirit, always and forever omnipresent, and made manifest by a radical change of heart. Outside of narrowed perception, but for misguided parasitic interference, that’s what IS.

Beyond language, conditioned concepts, inclusive of time, all that is natural is overwhelmingly wholly in eternity. First comes the urge to remain grounded in ‘the mystery’, along with the wish to share in consensus the intuited vision.

SO WHAT’S VISION?

The word means different things to different people. Depending on whether you’re an optician, a television salesperson, a strategist, a mystic, or an artist, and otherwise depends entirely on what you are able to envision it as being.

To envision is to use the uniquely human faculty of imagination effectively and creatively. You may say, “but i don’t have much of an imagination,” but what, do you imagine, became of the one you were born with? Perhaps you only imagine you don’t have an imagination.

 

Besides, we are actively miseducated, (why is that word absent from the dictionary?) and probably discouraged from exploring imagination. Yet you still do, naturally enough. The basic error is in the misuse of the words, ‘imagination’ and ‘imaginary’, as if to imply the opposite of what we call ‘real.’

The dictionary defines IMAGINARY as, “existing only in the IMAGINATION,” which it then defines as, “ability to make mental images of things that may not exist in real life.” To which i add the word, ‘yet’.

Thankfully however, it does make a clear and crucial distinction between IMAGINARY and IMAGINATIVE, defined as, “having or showing a lot of creative mental ability.” Similar words with very different implications. Just imagine saying to a Rembrandt, a Da Vinci, a Van Gogh, a Bach, or Beethoven, “don’t worry, it’s only your imagination.” Miseducated people do think like that.

So then the peer pressure of that basic error becomes epidemic, systemic, invading conventional consensus consciousness. Such that you could spend a life being out standing in many fields and still wondering where the Goddess has gone.

Meaning, it’s false to think reality and imagination are two separate worlds, they are blended and woven as one. When the mind dwells solely in the knowledge of war and mortal separation, the landscape may appear as a material wasteland, to be treated accordingly. As within, so without. A stranger in a strange land. The Earth is alive and aware and manifests like with like as does a mirror.

We are devotedly attuned to the wellness of our pet house-plants and garden patch and call it ‘ours’. Yet we surrender responsibility for our larger habitat to others with not the same priorities and sensitivity. Acquiescing to the concept that it’s ‘theirs’, (The Ministry of Concrete) and they will take care of it. When in reality we are it, and what happens to it, happens to us.

Would you frack and poison your house-plant and wage war over it? The Earth is a living intelligent organism, as aware of vibrations as is your sensitive plant, only more so, and we’re in it and of it. If sometimes your plant seems sad, how do you think the Earth feels? When you’re regarded as a mere commercial resource how do you manifest your full potential splendour?

The heart feels from inborn benevolence, graciously grateful for all that grows. Matures, tempered and tested by storms, distinguishing shadows as where the sun is yet to reach. Nurturing imagination as seeds of potential abundance when the wilderness will bloom.

Imagine Earth awake. That’s no mere whim, but a practical action we can take.

Depending on where you are in your heart, so the world will appear and be.

Better not leave nurture to predators who sell the carpet you walk on and only allow you a portion at a price. When, how do you ‘own’ what outlives you, earth, air, water, and fire? Arrogance is a product of ignorance and misplaced imagination.

If ‘owning’ is the name of the game, then the Earth owns us. We didn’t create ourselves without its full support and we are totally dependent on it. Gratitude and nurture is the only sane response, anything else is out of balance.

So, shall we reap or weep? Now knowing that plant power is wiser than power plant. The dictionary defines eternity as, “endless time”, which we don’t have, and it’s not, it’s simply now. Defines eternal as, “without beginning or end”, so it can’t possibly have ‘the last word’.

Better to imagine eternity as being now and all that there is and it’s not going anywhere, where else would it go? I imagine you saying, ‘there’s no time for such imaginings’, and you’d be half right. There’s no time at all. ~

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

Martin Rainbowmaker.

A RING OF STONES

Stone, dense to hold in a hand’s grasp,

forming in present mindfulness.

To plant night-scented flowers,

in a circle of stones.

Some sort of portal

fills the field of vision,

to modify with no mind,

like a time window.

Washed clean by rain,

translated into pixels.

Archaic icon for meditation,

empty of all but earth.

In the fullness of nothing,

womb-like and contained.

Obscurely gestating,

inwardly the seed.

Till time takes flight

through the round window.

Over ancient future lands,

and eternities expand.

Imagination forms in folds,

fields, fallows left unfarmed,

and all is one infinity,

without a stain of industry.

Scrying in the magic mirror,

glimpse of when the dark cloud clears.

All that is defiled will wither,

when abundance reappears. ~

 ~~~~   ~~~~   ~~~~

 The Time Window.  (Painting.)  July 24. 
Starting with stones and soil, delineating contours with deep raw umber.  Encircling every molecular particle by hand and the feel of a fine brush tip.  Densifying the diversity of illuminatory texture in both the macro and micro.

With the faintest dilution of neutral greenish wash and wiping brush tip on tissue, proceeding with precision through fields and folds.

Pausing mesmerized between sleeping and eating, to photoshoot stage one of paint process.  Framing the focus for concentrated vision energy through the time window.

Three months passed since the previous painting.  Till a distant detail in The Stone Woman picture blended with the ring of stones in the garden.

Evoking in the empty mirror of imaginal mind, within a medicine womb circle ring, each white stone shape filled, washed with its own sculpted tonal ideograph.

Entering the ring and proceeding to scroll down the sky in measured bands of soft-tone grey, fine tone tuned.  Far cloud banks fade to streamlined mythical mystic horizons, where the pure whiteness recedes along a ribbon line.

 Fumbling to focus the exact tell-tale hint, that familiar blue-grey hue of distance, and a single line becomes a squeezed down horizon of far-away hills.

Where the blue-grey meets the furthest fields, entering the fringe edge of the tapestry, that first thin band contains a concentrate of the graphic glyph for skyline.

Distances are like ancient archetypes and glimpses of the Promised Land.  The further away the more mysterious and inviting.  Punctuated by rows of vague forms like notes along a stave, registering as tree-shape silhouettes to infinity.

Out under high muted skies and embedded and bonded in the biosphere, one with the vast patchwork network.  Wide central plains and puzzle pieces of panoramic pasture.

In silver singing silence, recalibrating colour combinations of enclosures like stained glass, modifying in the mode of rustic integration, fine-tuning tonalities contemplated in a quilted continuum.

Being a crazy abstract collusion of slumbering Neolithic gold and regalias of Gaelic green.  Resting to reconsider interrelated juxtapositions within the equation of wholeness.  Meticulous and mindfully modifying in silence of full attention transcending sub-vocal monologue.

Night-owling for nine nights and days, going slow, enhancing and enriching methodically without haste outside time, and augmenting what happens to emerge.

Winding up to finer and finer accounting-fors with endless gazings and dotting the details.  Stuttering down to stillness and a sigh of matt varnish.

Despite the odd hiccup quite a smooth flight.  Forging a shield in a Gaelic night.  Sublime earth-face icon simultaneously a sacred symbol of celebration, honouring Earth in the early light.

An abundance of energy focussed and sustained, contained, in a ring of stones.  May making the stones ring, resonate and resound, take flight. “ Go viral, Icon of Organic Light ! “~

               ~~~~   ~~~~   ~~~~
                 Martin Rainbowmaker.