"The vagabond is rapping at your door"- Love IS

Love comes and love goes. Well that's not exactly right. Attachment comes and goes. At least in my case. Love comes and love stays. But lasting physical togetherness has never been necessary in my case, so all through my life I have been a serial monogamist, and at this moment I am at the end-stage of another beautiful lesson through a perfect mirror.
I have been blessed with many loves in my life, and I will continue to love each of my temporary companions for a life-time. I've often wondered how one measly heart can hold so many different loves and even feared that maybe one day this capacity will run out, how many rooms does one heart have to rent out to all the travelers of love?! What a tireless builder is love to have so much energy to keep on building relationships... It is born. It dies. It is BORN! It DIES!!
And then it is born again. And it is perfect for that time again. It seems there is no limit to how many times our heart can love.
Many won't understand. Aren't we taught, wasn't I taught- to find a life-time companion, that one and only?
But then I never followed anything.
Perhaps I was born a rolling stone.
Perhaps I have sold my soul to freedom. No- that is for sure.
I have never minded that, I have rather felt the luckiest person to have experienced so much love and loss and growing and withering, and passion- that too.
In my experience there is never a more painful experience than that of true passion being torn away from you, its a violent ripping apart that has no equivalent. But with each of these experiences of unbelievable passion I have known from hindsight that the ripping apart was the best thing that could have happened- passion comes without lessons other than that of impermanence, it isn't a contract of souls to enlighten each other in specific moments in our path, there is only one goal to passion- and its the purification through its death.
And then there are those partings, like this one- which are more peaceful and more loving than the time you spent together. When two people have actually come to a realisation about their mutual influence, when the message has been shared and understood and both sides are grateful and are simply moving on.
Its strange, but I have come to love ALL parts of love, the coming together and the falling apart. The yin and the yang, the ever-turning wheel and the multitude of teachers on the way..
Love is an endless rainbow.
Love is an ever-filling spring.
Love is.

Alex Grey- CoSM. A mind-blowingly beautiful sacred journey.

CoSM The Movie is a magical new kind of documentary experience, leading audiences on an enriching and sense-heightening journey into the visionary art cosmos of world-renowned painter Alex Grey.

Grey is our guide on a cinematic pilgrimage through the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors gallery in New York City, where his vividly rendered depictions of human anatomy and transcendental imagery reflect the universal human experience with birth, death, family, love, and enlightenment as the unfolding iconic narrative.

Fusing the power of music with stunning cinematography, director Nick Krasnic channels the raw power of Grey’s art into a potent film odyssey that captures the essence of this unique sacred space, and offers rare, personal insight from one of the most significant artists of our time.

The desert tales

I was very moved by a concert I saw recently by Tinariwen- a band of Tuareg-Berber musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali. 

It reminded me of the few encounters I had with people from the Sahara when I was in Morocco. I remember their piercing cunning eyes which were clear and full of both sorrow and humour, in an equal measure, their movements flowing and gentle, yet doing every action in an optimum precise way. These people had a presence which has left me till this day dreaming about the Sahara.

It reminded me of my own brief 2 day trip to the desert in the western part of India- Rajastan.

It was probably the most magical, fairy-tale experience I've ever had. My camel was a bit older so I stayed behind the rest of the group, really making me feel it was just me and her, the sand and the sun. Being in awe of the never-changing landscape as far as the eye can see, respecting the scrubs, every little insect and the miracle of life- growing out of the most inhospitable ground. Falling under the spell of the gentle sound of bells when a herd of goats or sheep were passing by, the tune of the shepard whistling along. You're in another world. A simple, natural, enchanting world you don't want to leave. Life is hard in the desert. I guess we are all living in it in a way. Trying hard to survive and at the same time trying to live without effort and to remember life's magical tune.

Terry Pratchett wrote, “Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads the have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.” 

Yet there is another way the soul of the desert emerges, it is through music and through stories..

Here's two wonderful desert stories I found online.

"Friends in the desert" 

(author unknown)

Two friends were walking through the desert. During some point of the journey, they had an argument and one friend slapped the other one in the face. The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, wrote in the sand:

"Today my best friend slapped me in the face."

They kept on walking, until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath. The one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire and started drowning, but the friend saved him. After he recovered from the near drowning, he wrote on a stone:

"Today my best friend saved my life."

The friend who had slapped and saved his best friend asked him, "After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand and now, you write on a stone, why?"

The friend replied, when someone hurts us we should write it down in sand, where the winds of forgiveness can erase it away. But, when someone does something good for us, we must engrave it in stone where no wind can ever erase it."

The Tale of the Sands - A Spiritual Sufi Story

By Awad Afifi

A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands of the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.

It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from the desert itself, whispered: "The Wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream."

The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand, and only getting absorbed: that the wind could fly, and this was why it could cross a desert.

"By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across. You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the wind to carry you over, to your destination."

"But how could this happen?"

"By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind."

This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality. And, once having lost it, how was one to know that it could ever be regained?

"The wind," said the sand, "performs this function. It takes up water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling as rain, the water again becomes a river."

"How can I know that this is true?"

"It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years; and it certainly is not the same as a stream."

"But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?"

"You cannot in either case remain so," the whisper said. "Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are even today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one."

“The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface. 

The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust. 

The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being. 

Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water. 

Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life. 

The only veil that stands between perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage. 

Dare to breach the surface and sink.” 

― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous -- however roseate -- unmoved mover. That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the church fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference passing on into oblivion it so richly deserved, while the paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand.” 

― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“most of my wandering in the desert i've done alone. not so much from choice as from necessity - i generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go. i find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.” 

― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Ozymandias- Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away". 

Visionary art

A small slide show that I made of some of my favourite visionary artists and paintings.

Symbols, intuition and a personal symbol analysis

Symbols and the analysis of those symbols which keep coming up for us, whether in our dreams, or in our waking hours, whether through the emotions of love or fear, can be a wonderful way of self-analysis and a deepening of understanding about ourselves, our paths and our challenges. This is a personal example.

I have been on a deep intuitive journey in recent days (and mainly nights- why is it that the night-time is more open for intuition? Is it simply that we are undisturbed or does the putting out of one light bring forth the lighting of the other?). 

Where I have been lead is a single symbol, an image, which exploded in me and has left me in a state of wonder.

It is the image of the Tree of Life and more precisely "arbor inversum"- inverted tree. 

"Alchemical treatises speak of the arbor philosophica that grows upside down. The alchemist, Canon George Ripley describes this arbor inversum  as having "the root of its minerals in the air and its head in the earth.".. The Qabalistic Tree of Life is the same as the World Tree of the Shamanic, Hindu, Egyptian, Sumerian, Toltec, and Norse traditions, also described in the Upanishads as a "tree eternally existing, its roots aloft, its branches spreading below. The pure root of the tree is Brahman (the Absolute) the Immortal, in Whom the three worlds have their being. Whom none can transcend, Who is verily the Self..." The spiritual rebirth of the world starts in human consciousness- in the mind of the alchemist. The tree of Life grows out of the alchemist's own heart, the center of his or her world. Spreading into ever-new infinities, into ever-higher and purer realms, it becomes the Tree of Enlightenment."

~David Goddard "The Tower of Alchemy- and advanced guide to the Great Work" 

"This tree and its gifts of immortality are not easy to discover. It is historically difficult to find, and almost invariably guarded. The tree of Life in the Jewish bible is guarded by a Seraph (an angel in the form of a fiery serpent) bearing a flaming sword."

"To steal the apples of knowledge, the Greek hero Hercules had to slay a many-headed dragon Ladon. In Mayan legends, it is a serpent in the roots that must be contended with. Similarly, the Naga, or divine serpent guards the Hindu Tree. The Serpent Nidhog lives under Ygdrassil, and gnaws at the roots..."  Src

All of these symbols were always meaningful for me, and I could not even imagine them coming together before they did.

I always saw myself as an upside-down growing being, always un-grounded, cause all of the higher chakras were open yet the lower chakras were not. It isn't better or worse to grow upwards or downwards, both ways of growing bring the same result and it is through the joining of the heaven and earth that we become whole. 

I have to wonder now if the image of the arbum inversum always existed in my subconscious, through the medium of our collective memory...

Second- my name Hille is derived from an old German name- Hildebrand. Its literal translation is the flaming sword. 

Snakes... Well where do I start about the snakes. With a phobia about snakes since youth and suffering re-occurent night-mares about them till recently, the snake image has followed me around since I remember. It has always been dubbed with the emotion of utter fear. 

"In Eastern Indian myth the Sanskrit word for snake is naga and these are associated with the element of water. Picking up water's symbolism of emotion, love and motion, nagas in this light are considered a feminine aspect and embody nurturing, benevolent, wise qualities. To wit, the practice of nagayuna in Eastern Indian alchemy seeks to achieve loving harmony between the physical and ethereal. Simply put, all of us striving to better ourselves by calmly easing into places of personal balance within the cosmic balance of the whole are practicing this ancient technique."   Src

The dice have rolled, the symbols are in place, now all there is to do is to understand, which is something that I can only try in simplistic terms right now.

The flaming sword was gifted to me by my mother. She had an uncanny intuition to give me my name and she gave birth to me in the Sun of Aries and ascendant of Scorpio, there is nothing more necessary to embody a flaming sword. :) (Of course perhaps our birth time is chosen by ourselves but for my name I can only give thanks to my mother). 

But the innate qualities, the external self and knowing that part of oneself simply means another road of growth and it is by no means an easy one. It is a path of its own- to fully let these qualities shine in the best way possible, and also to accept oneself as one is. For example I have always struggled with my instant way of jumping into battle, and I have used my sharp insight into others in negative ways when I have been hurt for example. Be who you have chosen to be, and be the best you can be. 

The inverted tree is my spiritual path towards the eternal self. I knew this was my only ambition in life since very young.

The snake figure symbolises the one true obstacle- which is fear. To get to the tree of knowledge we must dissolve fear into its counter-part which is love. But the message is clearer yet- to unify and find balance between opposites. To find balance in the feminine and the masculine. It is the serpent who is said to have caused the fall of Man. It is merely a symbol of man falling into the life of duality, in order to, on his own, discover who he is, and to directly know his unity with all that there is. By becoming both the snake and the flaming sword it is possible to unite the opposites- fire and water, masculine and feminine. 

So. To take that all together I am left with these feelings and thoughts most of all. Follow your own intuition, all the answers are there, both waking and dreaming life is continuously full of symbols and keys. The things in life which frighten us the most, like it was with snakes for me- are so powerful for us for a reason, they have come in peace and are actually the very things we have to approach and understand. Everything is connected and on our search of self-knowledge everything can be of assistance. All the ancient traditions, astrology, numerology, working with dreams, working with archetypes, yoga, ayurveda, shamanism, alchemy, all the ancient wisdoms of the world are all a piece of the picture because there are uncanny correlations between all of these when one begins to look. Life is a simply marvelous master-piece of synchronicity and inter-connectedness. 

"The idea that man is like unto an inverted tree seems to have been current in by gone ages. The link with Vedic conceptions is provided by Plato in his Timaeus in which it states..." behold we are not an earthly but a heavenly plant." ~ Carl Jung