The Jewel of Ideals and Despair
The physical earth keeps particles of light compressed for millions of years in total darkness and then this jewel that was created from great pressure and aloneness, separated from all other light particles, surfaces—and what brilliance, what transparency we see in this rare solitaire!
Such is the crisis of the soul in its darkest and most critical night, which is not twenty-four hours but eternity, for numbers do not stop; they go on and on forever.
The Jewel of the Soul is the birth of transparent brilliance in which all faces of life look into the light contained within and see their real face. And how much truth can you bear?
In our history, we have pushed our rarest teachers and masters into the ground. We have wanted to cover the brilliance of their souls. And when we have driven them into the ground, we find we cannot live in total darkness; we cannot live without love.
Like orphans and abandoned people we seek and search the four compasses of our world to see, to find, to seek forgiveness, and to return the brilliance of their souls in a world that has gone mad with either pain or indifference. As people we need the fire, the light of love.
Such a small light contained within, but what turbulence and demanding presence it has upon others who want to bury it again in the earth! The creators of love contain such ideals and despair and reveal and share such a light from the night of the soul. This night has no division of time: it is from the fire of all forming stars. Look closely at “Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh and you will see the many suns that burned in his exile and on the canvas of his soul. When you listen to Ludwig Beethoven, you are transported into the intimacy of desire, his “rage against the dying of the light,”10 his deep longing to share his soul and music with us. He believed that music could change the world. He contained “truth and beauty,”11 and yet he lived in total silence and exile. Is it silence and exile (or solitude) that feeds our desire and longing to create, to invent, to explore, to play above and below the taught rules and dogmas? Even Galileo wrote his most evolved work when he was under house arrest. It is at these times that one refuses defeat, surrender, and nihilism. Instead, one defies without a violent revolution and keeps true to their authentic self and design, which creates beauty and truth in the expression of their life.
I have been in exile and have been writing in my heart, in my head, on the sand, in the sky, and on the tail of the mermaid, long before the world taught me language, long before the world gave me permission to breathe and dance.
For many eons I did not wish to speak with anyone. I had realised that I had fallen into hell. Look at the world through the eyes of our troubled children and you will see the deadness or the rage. Look at Don McCullin’s photography and you will see that we have made a hell out of a heaven.
I was driven and separated from the “memory” of another home.12 As I witnessed injustices small and large, I kept the memory of love alive. This is not how we behave where I come from. I first thought this when I encountered my first injustice when a girl was being mocked because of her deformity, and I could not, and would not, join in. It was as if I had a memory from another home, that we did not behave like this. In later life, when I read Plato, I understood about this former home and this former memory of the good. Where does love come from? Why do some of us carry it? And why do some of us relinquish the right to live in love and then proceed to remove that human right from others? Such a memory of the good requires solitude and devotion to one’s life, and to their purpose and meaning in this life. One learns and discovers many untouched and unnamed galaxies in this solitude, and the time has come that I return from exile to surrender to others what belongs to them, to offer to others what was left with me for safe keeping. What I found in my exile, in presence and absence, is deep love for our world. My “art” is my way of living; my creativity breathes and tastes of deep humanity.
At the age of twenty-three I whispered the word “flight” and disappeared into the exile of wilderness and solitude. For ten years I measured the depth and sides of the dark abyss, and in my mad dance I decided to call the abyss my sandpit of forming stars. I could see the stars and I built castles and stairs and climbed into a deeper wilderness and forest of imagination and deep vision.
I fell in love.
I fell in love with the beauty and tragedy of this world.
My next twenty years were spent searching and seeking, of swimming in uncharted and unmapped waters and travelling the roads of chosen solitude and exile.
I have decided to return from my exile.
I decided to return because I desire to devote my creativity to the “young and tender,”13 as the previous generations have left their questions and the nakedness of their lives to be explored to find a way to each other, to find a way to evolve and enrich our lives so that we do not live in fear and that we are fully in our lives.
I thank the earth for waiting for me. I thank you for waiting for me.
I have struggled to bring this to you, for I am painfully shy and do not seek the attention or recognition of the world. This work is a gift to all our ancestors who have stayed awake at the wheel to navigate our human journey.
This work is a gift of love to all that have passed before me, those that are with me, and those that will find me later.
I am a “citizen of the world,”14 and at the expense of sounding ridiculous in the world of relativity and appearance, I am a lover of the world and the many worlds that live and breathe in others.
“If we want the Sun to return
we have much work to do,
much struggling as a united people.”15
The Fire Maker
Of all the fires of the heart, love is the only inexhaustible one.
I am a shy, backward, and awkward writer of myth, fact, and nonsense, and I find it impossible at times to write what I sense in the stream of collective imagination and in the stream of our soul and our humanity.
I find it almost impossible, because I fear attention and the confinement of what is from the profound, sublime, absurd, and ridiculous. To take the risk of baring your soul for all the world to see and judge is both dangerous and ridiculous, but this is the marking and habit of the Lover for life, who is both determined and deeply tender.
There are many who have left their mark on my mind, heart, and body, but there is only one I have always sought and followed: the laws and dark passages of my wandering and seeking psyche.
I am accountable and responsible only to the ways of love. I wrote this for my teachers and mentors who left their blood affirmation for me and others, for those who seek and love my incorrect ways in the moment, and for those who may seek another voice in the song of making, weaving, struggling and creating—the world of the Lover.
The lessons of war are that “we must fight, not in the hope of winning but to keep something alive”16, to keep love alive.
“I am consumed by a deep longing to find my way home, therefore I know of Ulysses’s wandering and searching. I know of his tricksters and phantoms, including the Siren. He was tricked and delayed because she knew the secret of his heart.”17
I have been consumed by Penelope’s plotting and planning to remain true to my nature, choices, and destiny, which is usually, if not always, in conflict with the opinion and direction of the organised might of the barbarian (“men with hearts of stone”18) without a heart, without love.
Both of these archetypes have travelled with me, along with the teaching that in order for one to remain Alive and In Love (I don’t think anyone is fully alive if they are not in love with life and the world), one must learn the ways of Anathema and Athanasia.