windthread

i didn't look long enough last eve….to even realize the impossibility of this.   Sun is behind me as i face the far fence setting all ablaze,  but casting shadows.  I was seeing it,  but i also couldn't consciously Realize it.   But here it is.  it's Real.

from Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm:

"If you decide to open your sensory gating channels more widely,  engaging the metaphysical background of the world more deeply, develop Gaian ways of perception, you, by definition, leave old forms of thinking behind.  You begin to move into the world the Tao Te Ching speaks of when it asks….   'Who will prefer the jungle of jade pendants if he once as heard stone growing in a cliff?'

To hear stone growing in a cliff,  however, means that a shift in consciousness must occur.  You can't hear something the linear mind has been taught does not exist.  The phrase "shift in consciousness" however has taken on mystical trappings.  As it must in any linear system making it seem something that only adepts in ancient traditions can accomplish.  But it is not as hard as it sounds.  In fact it's extremely easy.  Every person shifts consciousness thousands of times every day…it's just that,  because of our schooling, hardly any of us notices it.  For example,  every time we read a story  (work on cloth)*    we drop into a dream state….our consciousness shifts…and that story  (cloth)  comes alive inside us.  The story (cloth) literally becomes real.  We're no longer aware of the words on the page;  they have disappeared.  In some magical way, as the writer John Gardner puts it…..' We read a few words at the beginning of the book or the particular story, and suddenly we find ourselves seeing not words on a page but a train moving through Russia, an old Italian crying,  a farmhouse batterd by rain'.  

Each of us has had the experience of being awakened suddenly from such a dream by the insistent ringing of the telephone or a sharp knock at the door.  It startles us awake as if from a deep sleep and it takes a few minutes for  us to recall ourselves,  for our conscious minds to begin functioning again.   Yet even as we answer the phone or the door, the meanings, experiences, or people we were dreaming about linger in the mind like a wonderful taste on the tongue or delicate strains of music shimmering in the ear,  more real yet than the salesman at the door or our friend on the telephone.  A shift in consciousness has occured.     ………though we usually just call it reading.

During that shift, when we become immersed in story (cloth), a unique alteration in sensory gating channels occurs.  The gating of the feeling sense is no longer narrow, it opens more widely….and this is crucial in the art,  to the story (cloth) coming alive inside us.

There is a reason why gating opens more widely (and the more accomplished the writer,  the more widely it opens).  It happens because writers  (clothmakers)  learn , one way or another, to combine the visual and feeling senses into one unique sensory medium.

                                                                    its called synaesthesia

If done well,  when you read a visual scene in a story  (cloth) you also feel the deeper realities underneath  those  visual scenes.  You begin to encounter the metaphysical background of the world…the feeling dimension that is inside all visual phenomena."

Stephen Harrod Buhner            the parentheses (cloth)* are mine.

so i start out this way,  almost every morning,  looking at this Cloth that has Yvette's beautiful creation draped around,  embracing it.   It is Otherworldly.

 

 

 

 

from the Morning Chair,  i watch.  Watch it all assume different form as Light comes.

 

Maybe?   Maybe this is what i want to Claim.   This way of Feeling/Seeing/Being  that i might let become the Whole of the Day.   That i no longer draw a line.  Saying….ok,  now.  Go into the day.

Maybe i want to find a way to hold myself into that Morning Dream to wrap it around me and live the day from inside that?????   Maybe i want to Claim That.  Once and for All.  

Why not?   When would be a better time?