Wit is needful to him who travels far: at home all is easy. A laughing-stock is he who nothing knows, and with the instructed sits. Pocket Havamal, Old Norse sayings of Odin, collected and edited by Carrie Overton
A Current Retropsection
My visit here on Steemit, has been, at times - to quote Mrs Thornbury (in “The Voyage Out” by Virginia Woolf) - “one of those dreadful London crushes, where you don’t talk - you only look at eachother . . .” (“crush” here affectatiously refering to “party”). One’s blog here does not make a phail in which to store your dying breath. Not a canopic jar for your mummified heart or liver. People worry that everything you say will follow you all the days of your life. Welcome to my reality! No matter what I mumble where, it lingers. Perhaps, you worry that it will be taken against you? Everything you won't say can be taken against you just as much, take it from me, who has seen the inside of courtrooms.
It’s because of the etheric web in which your are suspended that you take a breath at all. The Akashic Record records all. Maybe, our current neurosis regards privacy laws is our recollecting this truth the long way round. May it make us speak more willfully, ie deliver speech impregnated by love. Conceive the possibilities of your true meaning.
The Tidy-Up
←Viking wood carving taken from the cover of Nordic Religions in the Viking Age (Middle Ages) byThomas DuBois, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 reviewed here - a site - with top ten books in this (broad) field of specialisation- that makes one realise the really smart readers live elsewhere.
As things are drawing to a close for me here, and I am departing from this sweet world, I am starting to tidy away topics in my “Steemit-to-do File” and reintegrate my reading materials back into my bookcases. I am thinking of my dying words and the last three days of no regret. For this period here can end quite easily without “if onlys”. All is but another dying breath - emphasised unpretentiously, pretentiously, or just as is, here, by the ever fleeting of one’s words, and the swift coming and going of one's .... fellow community members? Followers? ...Friends?? Readers, then? Let's say, visitors.
Color-coded Stora Hammar stone explained in detail by Timothy J. Stephany on his website, under Gotland Stones - Be amused by his Lunar Illusions too! →
Three Job-Groups
Despite the many groups and cliques and factions clear to the bots that help you track your life here, I have discovered but three camps, pretty much in line with the anthroposophic division of the activities we could be getting on with professionally (three work-spheres): those that relate to the Past, or the Present, or the Future. All time needs to be worked on to make the (ether) substance with which the New City can be built. A kind of karmic carding.
Our Society, unlike others, is based not on illusory human inventions such as programs and statutes, but on realities. - Steiner in a lecture on the Anthroposophical Society, GA253, Dornach.
I don’t recall the exact list, and Lord knows where to look, but the point here is that even if we are looking in different directions, have we all come together sufficiently with the same aim? I think a lack of understanding what such an aim might be (concretely) is the fundamental impediment to the lasting success of this social media platform. The days of ecstatic zest and doe-eyed idealism are long behind us for a spontaneous love-in here or a social collective with solid plans to change the world. We cannot expect a virtual sprawling ashram like the former "Rajneeshpuram", in Oregon (founded by Bhagawan/Osho) or some etheric Gudrijeff community, like the one in the thirties, in France. These humble beginnings of enthusiastic followers could once gather incredulous momentum in no time at all, pushing up an entire town out of barren land (next to the existing town of Antelope, Oregon). I think too many different folks of different strokes are now gathered here for that to happen.
It is great that many beg to differ. But they too, are only in a Beta phase of trying out various associations.
Ecstasy was seen as a tool to shatter bourgeois conventions, to return the alienated, mechanized modern subject back into harmony with the body, nature, and the unconscious rhythm of life. - Christopher Turner on the danser Laban
←Color-coded Klinte stone explained in detail by Timothy J. Stephany on his website, under Gotland Stones
There are paths for everyone, but we cannot ramble just anywhere. We do for a while, to self-express, to sow wild oats, and take a break from our karmic mission as people. But then it's back to the pilgrimage. For myself I discovered three paths. There is the Manichaen one (taking on dualism, and weaving the bridges of relationship); a scientific-philosophic one, that has me deplore I never became a botanist or an entymologist; and a compassionate caring, nursing, consoling life full of hope and tending to one's garden. The homo creativus may be attracted to any of these ways, with various emphases. These pathways also intersect and sometimes even merge.
Too many of us, though, never take to the road much and stay at home. It is very cute how some of us now feel we have finally stepped over the threshold, closed the front door behind us and have made it all the way through the garden gate to arrive here on Steemit.
At least, this tiny escapade does respect one of the first Golden Bits of Advice from Steiner I dug up (out of a lot that sounded like tripe, at first, in 1997): that you were, under no circumstances, to give up your day-job for the sake of self-realisation. Gurdijeff has Rules along similar lines of perception. (But don’t get me started on that iffy character, who wants a percentage of your income.... I who am not the most compatible with the Slavic nature must leave that well enough alone.)
It is not easy, right now, to see what way is forward and which goes round in ever decreasing circles - perhaps to reach the core, otherwise to self-implode.
. . . one important force for healing consists in getting used to being absolutely exact with regard to phenomena on the physical plane — truth in exactitude, and exactitude in truthfulness. (GA 253)
Mohair comes from the Angora Goat →
Them And Us
For me there were predominantly two camps to work with. There are those seeking to connect and the rest. Within the first group there is another stark subdivision of professionalised artists and creatively minded ones. I conclude it’s different for the pros. Their pictures become objects d’art in a post; their poems become signatures of their talent (or more often than not, the lack thereof). To me it felt more like placing mini gravestones. Art installations.Hmm..... Markers forThe Master Plan, perhaps, but not persuasively. Hmmm...
If you have a loom and are asked to weave a tapestry, you also need some yarn. This is shorn from the etheric Shaun that we all are as one giant lamb of Man. Then it needs to be washed and dyed and spun and rolled into clues.
. . . if the Society were dissolved, it would leave behind a corpse. This characteristic tells us that in the truest sense of the word, the Society is a real living being. But the Society also possesses another characteristic of living things, namely the fact that it can get sick. (GA253)
← Angora wool is plucked from this defenceless rabbit
I have written about my life as it is being lived in this presence with you. To what avail, one may wonder. Survival? Enhancement of the quality of life? A sense of duty otherwise, to exchange life-energy (that carding again) with the coarse and greasy wool of words.? The pellucid etheric off-casts of others.... The soft touch of silica, those solar panels of dying truth.
. . . if you cannot find out anything at all, even by asking around among people who can be presumed to be in the know, that demonstrates a lack of interest and shows that our Society is a mechanism, not an organism. (GA 253)
Anyone who has come as honest as they are will learn from Steemit. In a sense, I too went back to school. I sat in a classroom, fidgeting, doodling, taking down everything that was said, not about to do more homework once school was out. I did just enough to scrape through my tests, entering competitions, following a whole bunch of subjects that actually bored me senseless, all the while keeping a watchful eye on my class-mates.
The thing is: I'm in school all day, every day, already. So this felt a bit like being sent to a community service rehabilitation programme. Therefore, underwhelmed as I was, doing the time for as long as it had been predetermined, it made me sit up all the more unexpectedly when certain things came my way to show me what they see looking in from the other side. After all that's what I had asked to be shown. Knowing what they see, we can see more clearly ourselves: we can better know which 90% to scrap.... We can begin to design a mode of communication that makes sense to our senses.
The last thing I expected was to run into some references to some bizarre details I had collected with tremendous effort and as much frustration, on subjects fairly alien to me, in my non-novel. I had put that project on hold for over five years, already.
On this I imagined I had to report - but in what language - to whom? I have six months now, to figure that out.
Hope it makes for that opportunity to write a children's picture-book. Will be back then to search for an illustrator.
Elfyn Evans braving his favorite road, the B4518 in Mid Wales - in a Ford Focus of all cars!
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A wary guest, who to refection comes, keeps a cautious silence, with his ears listens, and with his eyes observes: so explores every prudent man. from the “Pocket Havamal” by Carrie Overton, 2013
May it finally become apparent
Why I never meant to write bite-sized chunks for fellow Steemians. I have nothing to tell anyone they don't already know. Those looking for more to know will not have read me well therefor. No harm done to anyone. There's a guarantee on that.
Those who were looking for something to trust asked me way too many things, I struggled to reply to. The last thing I wanted was to betray trust, so you have all been given large scoops of the unadulterated version of me. Those who do read me, with just enough attention at least, have done as much or as little for their soul, as to help clear the table, or set the table, or arrange the flowers....
We are gathered here, today, everyday, in Chemical Wedding fashion, to wed our soul to our Spirit Self.
A still from the film Fandango - a personal favorite - pretending to be prepared for a wedding - with a prequel twist on this page!
The Register
All those Present say Yes, Miss.
Just like in any classroom there are a set of people whom you are not likely to bump into again after you have left. Your meeting had a practical reason, usually to sever karma or allow for diversity - which is an imperative noble striving in a spiritual researcher.
There are the activists you support charitably and tennis players you practice your backhand on.
Then there are those you don't know how to value: was it old or is it new karma?
There are the cool people (who tend to travel but are not afraid to come home) and understand “that Mahler thing” where location, location, location is the context for everything; and the ones who never stop following the bigger picture, cutting out the marginal details that don’t really make the difference.
And there was, thank God, the pilot of the Ones Fallen in Battle, who knew how to weather the weather.
Those souls in mind, specifically, I see the future of the Archangels (the Spirits of nationality) have changed their mission.
← Kummakivi balancing rock in Ruokolahti, Finland
For the rest there were the poets and mothers and painters and fathers and interior decorators (chefs). There are old-hands, dating from when one could live on the idea of living on art alone, and lots and lots of new gardeners trying their hands at resuscitating a very old meaning back to life. The lovers of everything (from love to movies) gallop and trot depending on the season. Aside the travellers, whom I select with caution, for they tend to be dissipatingly restless, there are too many to list who give signs of life with miscellaneous stuff.
Much work has been done, but who's to say exactly what stone has been rolled and in which direction? Who needs castles in the sky: better, then, that rocks fall down instead of remain poised on a pinnacle. Then again, all for art... and may it ever remain utterly unfunctional.
Credits:
- photo of canopic jars of Neskhons, wife of Pinedjem II. Made of calcite, with painted wooden heads. Circa 990–969 BC. On display at the British Museum, by CaptmondoCC BY-SA 3.0
- Detail_from_the_Stora_Hammars_I_stone,_image_stone_on_Gotland.png
- Odin riding Sleipnir(detail from the Tjängvide Runestone)