This Cocoon, My Heart

Jodorowski once told me of a photographer in Mexico who was shooting images of cocoons. “They are neither worms nor butterflies,” she explained, “I’m taking photographs of the nothing.”

For the Toltec, the alchemically transformed heart is represented by an obsidian butterfly.

Your heart is a cocoon. Inside there is a seed of the infinite, a silent void in the dark, a particle of the eternal night.

Let it be fed with the dreams of the best and purest of lights.

Neither moth nor worm,
the angelic cocoon dreams
with flutters of light.

Photography by Adumbrations Photography

https://instagram.com/adumbrations_photography?igshid=1ceuqz67s4rc0

When I Can No Longer Remember

What is this, penetrating me over and over again?

What is it that pulls me out of myself, over and over again? What is impregnating, causing me to give birth to words and stories and thoughts? What presence is sending these words out to see if any survive, to hear some of them coming back to die in the vastness of my mind?

Thousands of children created, all living inside myself; a few of them daring to come out in words, in teachings, in thoughts and stories. What is their life like out there? I don’t know. All I know is the swelling in me that sends them out; and they go out there not knowing why I sent them. I can’t tell them that. They cannot know why. That is for me to know. That yearning is mine, and I send them out, each one with its own orbit, to live and die, to one day come back.

More and more are created in me, from the pulling of that Goddess-priestess––her silver touch pulling all the way down to my womb. And that sun God! Harsh, brilliant and penetrating, hitting my flesh, burning.

This womb of my heart is ready to swell, to live, to yearn, perhaps one day to surrender into that vast thing I call the ocean, when I can no longer see it because it’s too big, when I can no longer hear it because it’s drowning me, when I can no longer remember myself stepping into the waters.

 

¿A Dónde Se Va el Silencio?

¿A dónde va el esfuerzo del amor
si tan efímero es el recuerdo
y tan feroz e indestructible es el olvido?

¿A dónde van las palabras que jamás se oyeron?

¿En qué rincones se quedaron los juegos de niño?

¿En qué paredes se vieron plasmadas todas las vivencias?
¿Y a dónde va la luz solar cuando en color se convierte
y se absorbe en la pupila de tus ojos?

¿En qué oscuridades cabrán tantas y tantas vivencias?
¿En qué rincones oscuros de tu cerebro penetra la vibración de cada palabra?

¿Dónde se pierde la comprensión de lo que nunca fue?
¿A dónde se va el silencio después que absorbe todo sonido?

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Check out SoundScapes—Otherworldly Sound Trajectories by Vox Angelus and Koyote: https://youtu.be/fR_D-AZSxEE

Sharing my Inner Space/ 32 years of Art (a book review)

I have read Martivón Galindo’s Sharing My Inner Space, and I realize now that with every painting and every poem she has been marking a special space in the journey that so many of us undertook back in the 80’s, when the Salvadoran diaspora uprooted us from the place where we wanted to live, love, die, and create. We left because we had to, away from decades of war and oppression, and everywhere we went we kept looking hard inside the most recondite corners of the heart for that something we brought with us, to make a life and create art, and to find ourselves even in places that forever made us feel strangers.

In this book, Martivón gifts us with a tremendous experience through the use of poetry, print, and painting. It is a powerful storm that penetrates your consciousness under the command of an accomplished artist who has dived into the depths of her soul, and confronting the turbulent history of war, exile, emerges in ultimate triumph a master of her perceptions. She takes us through her encounter with exile, an event that shaped an entire generation of Salvadorans, but she does more than make us look at the world, she takes us with her as the seed of her soul emerges from that encounter triumphant, and continues to create and define her artistic world.

Martivón is not content with showing us her skill and creativity. She shares with us that most intimate process of her genius: the process she has gone through as she discovers her true self. We witness this discovery when she manages to put in word and image the creative powers of a soul that is always seeking justice and always burning bright with the wild fire of truth.

Porque lo invisible es el misterio
encerrado en la lágrima de una estrella
Ayer como hace treinta años
busco lo que no está
para encontrar mi luz
mi propia sombra
en el invisible gran universo de lo posible––Martivon (pg. 160)

Every great artist has an inner process through which her silent, intimate center faces the vast expanse of the unknown, and every one of them produce art that touches in us that most intimate abode. Their art awakens somehow our own truth. Martivón’s art does that for us, of course, but she takes a step further. Sharing My Inner Space is a living document showing that invisible inner process through which her genius emerges.

Witnessing this book is a most enjoyable experience. I promise you, the core of your perception will be touched by it, and you will find yourself on a journey through your own inner space. I recommend this book unreservedly.

We Create When We Read Poetry

The writer is an author creating the flow of the speech. However, when we translate a manuscripts from one language to another, we reinvent it. We create it again. Borges explained that the translator of poetry has to be a poet, because when translating poetry, we recreate. We do not just change the words from one language to another, we have to interpret it and reproduce our own version in a different language.

And even when we read the written word we must translate the meaning, and in that we reinvent it, recreate it, give it a form. We can’t help but be the co-authors of everything we read, everything we understand, and everything we perceive.

Without the Swelling of the Heart, No Story Is Worth Telling

In the silence between word and word, between day and day… in the silence between dream and dream, between knowledge and understanding, between thoughts and emotions… in that silence that exists before thought and feeling become one… in that moment of silence before the pushing forth of meaning, the foundations for the making of the world flowers from the depth of the abyss.

It’s in that flowering that the tides of the waters of my heart flow unrestricted; seeking who knows what;moving where they’re being pulled.

Without the swelling of those waters, without the emanation of that light, no story is worth telling.

Click here to listen to this Telling of the Oceanic Tryptic.

The Plumed Serpent Within The Inner Circle of Humanity.

The Inner Circle of humanity is the true source of knowledge and authority behind every esoteric school, every major religion, and every initiatory spiritual movement. Whenever an esoteric school looses its connection to this true source, the school carries only a carcass, an empty mausoleum of rotting remnants of what once was a living teaching. This sad situation happens more often than not, for every time an esoteric school seeks to have power and influence in the external world, they ground the energy flowing from above and settle in the external world. Once grounded, all they have is political intrigue, power grabbing intents, and petty wars to secure the few bones remaining of what once was a living body of Wisdom.

But the Inner Circle continues its work: initiating temples, schools, and even civilizations to achieve their evolutionary aims. To each region of the world, to each race, and to each historical period they gave seemingly different techniques and precepts; but in truth, all their teachings had the same aim and the same results: illumination, evolution, and the ability to become a receiver of gnosis.

Here in the Americas, we developed our own tradition, and the same situation is encountered again where a semi-mythical, semi-historical character appears to impart principles of knowledge, civilization, and science. He was known as Quetzalcoatl–the Plumed Serpent–in his first incarnation of a little over 5,200 years ago. He is said to be the one to teach the people of this region the principles of initiation, the techniques for contacting higher intelligence, the formulas for building civilizations and esoteric schools. He was the principal manifestation of the Inner Circle of humanity in these lands.

The Treasures the Invaders Missed

“…Lend me your attention for a moment, and I’ll go on a journey to a different place with you. 

In this place of power, something deep in you will stir awake and stand up in attention. It is then my aim to attempt to unveil, uncover, and reveal that which has been lost; but not lost as in gone forever, simply misplaced, forgotten. 

These are the hidden treasures that the Spanish soldiers missed, the treasures they couldn’t take with them, the treasures that had been buried deep in the rich soil of the American continent. 

And now, with the light of the New Sun, it’s time for this buried seed to sprout, to seek the light, and to share its perfume with the world.”

from The Teachings of a Toltec Survivor

I Am a Figment of Your Imagination

The one who speaks and the one listens, that is the “I” and the “you” implied in a sentence, are theoretical entities. That is, they may be actual beings as, for example, the person who wrote this and the person who is reading it, but the sentence itself exists even when no one is reading it and when no one is saying it any more.

This writing stays there somewhere without any real being saying it and no one reading it. It reads as if there is an author and an audience, even if no one witnesses it, but the author and the audience become actual only when someone reads it. It is the reader, then, that gives life to the writing, making the author and the reader actual, real.

And even then, the one who writes when this paragraph is being read is not the person who wrote it, but the theoretical entity implied in the mind of the person who reads it. I, the writer, am only an entity implied by these words you read. I am a figment of your imagination, only part of you created by you through the mechanism of this language, by the magick of these words you read. “I” am only implied by these words.

Your mind creates me in your mind, yet I could not exist in your mind as the author of these words without the existence of these words, these words that never really existed until someone read them, these words that were not real until now, when you are.