I have been led to reflect on our connection to various things recently. Nature, the spirits, and those who have left for the other world, most especially the loved ones we have lost.
When you lose someone in this way, and I mean for instance a spouse, it is difficult to describe what happens to you, and where you go, but you are not “here” in the same way, or here is elsewhere, and the waters close over your head so completely that there is nothing to do but accept the other world that you inhabit, now as your only world. From the outside this probably looks like a jumble, the idiosyncratic dance that we diagnose as “grief”, but it is something more profound than a psychological process.
You can return eventually, but something there always is inbetween. Spaces, doors and passageways to the old friends that kept you company in the water wasteland. You carry a part of the marsh with you.
Like a tree that has a part blasted history (and these things are quite natural), your life grows again, with a twist. That twistedness is your survival, your face beyond yourself, the understated testament of soul sunk in root, of sex and belly fire beached and recalcitrant, of flower and bee, starlings drunk on over ripe cherries.
You walk dry on dry land, breathe air, greet sunlight, and are at peace with the damp foot prints behind you. You live in memory and imagination, and the meaning of story, as all people have. And you live here again. You see that we change the past by not leaving it, but keeping on living. All things grow.
So your life grows again, with a twist. The twisted tree is the magic tree, everyone knows that. The strange form is how Nature mends, and the wound how She makes strangeness.
And in all these things there is beauty, and there comes new desire, the pulse of life through all.
Healing is something which interest me, not so much in the medicalized sense (which is of course an entire scientific discipline of verifiable treatments and outcomes), but in the colloquial sense of how we gain wholeness in our lives, reconnect with our vitality and inner resources, heal psychological wounds and oppressions, gain inner strength, coherence, integrity, and come to flourish as the people we really are.
This of course does have a bearing on physical health as well, as everything from stress and worry, to feeling loved and like we belong and have value, all can affect us, including the working of our bodies. That’s before we get onto the consequences of our coping behaviours, like smoking, drug and alcohol consumption, or poor diet.
I’m not much interested in model, “healthy” people, but I am interested in people coming into their own and finding their own choices again. Living their…
I think I have spent a great deal of my life in a state of fear, or allayed panic, or dread, or being overwhelmed. And I’ve spent a good deal of it avoiding those states, and situations that might induce them. “Normality”, as I think someone might have once observed, is a near record-breaking act of acrobatic, high wire balance, when you see what is going on underneath.
I’ve been going through a fair amount just recently, one way and another, and I found myself with that frozen out, panicked, unable to cope with what I know, but unable to escape, or really even explain kinda feeling, which is somehow very familiar to me.
I did magic and I asked for help, the way I know how, and help I did get.
Suddenly, obliquely, while watching TV, I remembered the first time I had felt like this (though buried in biographical detail), when I was 10 years old. It was the day I remember my childhood as ending, and it occurred around this time of year, during the Summer holidays in 1969, before my birthday.
Looking back, I realized that of course this was the time in subsequent years, during my teens and twenties, when I would most commonly get this feeling developing. I even came to recognize that fact, that it was around mid-Summer, when the Sun was in the sign of Cancer. But I never made the connection with that first event.
And suddenly, something was released. Not quite like magic (though it was indeed magic), all totally at once, but in principle, like a tap, or a dam, had been opened down stream.
That has kept going over these last few days, and I understand, something is over, but it is like an entire history of emergency, emotional and mental reactions has got unplugged, deactivated, neutralized. As the water level sinks, my flooded life comes into view, and breathes again, almost as if 46 years hadn’t quite happened like that. It can all always have been different now, inwardly, and my islands join up, to make my landscape.
It is funny that this kind of healing should come at the time that I become a Satanist, but not so surprising. About 18 months ago I wrote:
I could see as well, that you need to come down hereto do it, to the wasteland, to find the spring, the unsullied brook. That’s why demons are important, because they guard our innocence when the world has taken it away.
Of course that was not quite the sense of demons that I mean now, but it did say something, and intuit something. Healing that is deep and personal enough might not be done by the gentle hand entirely. The part of us that keeps both the wound and the cure is just not like that. The strong hand may be better. That’s why sometimes the soldier understands parts of the heart that the nurse cannot, and why sometimes the beast will love us best. Sometimes our healer must be fierce, otherwise it is no use at all. Sometimes we need to visit the wasteland and see who has been keeping our innocence for us, and how untouched our brilliant, original hearts are.
When I did a delineation of the New Moon which occurred only four days ago, I noted this could be a time for rest and just unplugging. For me I know I really underestimated the stresses I would need to be unplugging from, but yeah, maximizing rest and disengagement at this time has proved very necessary.
I’m now going to look at the coming Full Moon, as that can maybe tell me more about this process. Between the New Moon that seeds things, and the Full Moon which shows a culmination and acts as a kind of “attractor“, we might get a better picture of the quality of a time.
Here is the chart for the Full Moon:
First of all, it’s not till the 2nd July. Secondly, when I first saw this I thought “everyone just keep your heads down and ignore it”. But there are always silver linings. The restful potential of the New Moon came from a harmonious pattern made by Jupiter, Uranus and a Sun-Moon-Mars conjunction, but there was also a potential for undermining trouble from Neptune and Chiron. At the Full Moon everything has slipped round. The same kind of harmonious pattern is there, but this time it is Mercury that is harmoniously combined with the expansiveness and faith of Jupiter, and the freedom and independence of Uranus in Aries. Moreover, Jupiter is joined closely with a gracious but queenly Venus in Leo. There is some good self esteem that can be drawn from this, some solid values of self-worth that back up our independence and orignal insights, our individual positions. There is still a square from Chiron in Pisces to Mercury here, so there are wounds to be aware of, things we shouldn’t mentally re-wound ourselves over, but it’s not the Mars-Chiron square of the New Moon, nothing like as inflamed. Also to note here, Jupiter-Venus is squared by Saturn retrograde in Scorpio. That’s not nice for the regal pair in Leo, but it could be that some emotional perspective and forgiveness is in order. Water signs, feeling, is providing the challenges to the peace of mind and spirit of the chart, so how we handle feelings is key to how much good we do ourselves here.
The backbone of this Full Moon though is Sun conjunct Mars in Cancer, opposed by Pluto conjunct Moon in Capricorn. From my past experience, I’d say that when Pluto opposes something personal, it’s game over in terms of struggle. These are battles that can’t be won, power that can’t be challenged, perceived “injustices” that aren’t even acknowledged. These are circumstances where surrender and letting go are not only crucial, but unavoidable. And when we do surrender, we get deep healing, revitalization, a kind of rebirth. It can happen. The harder the conflict, struggle and dilemma, the more immense is the potential for connecting with your own real source of life and inner power, once you let go.
Mars here (maligned, demonized, indispensable Mars) is almost in an exact T square with the Moon’s Nodes, which means that it squares both the North and the South Nodes. The Nodes are in Aries and Libra here, and the growth potential is at the North Node (Libra), in the area of relationship, others, balance. Note: there’s nothing inherently “good” about these things as compared to the selfhood, spontaneity and independence of Aries, it’s just that the Node polarity is that way round at the moment. The South Node is where we have our “inherent” patterns stored in a sense (if this were a personal birth chart), our already achieved capacities, potentials played out, jobs done. The North Node is where the growth, the new, the potential to come is located. The relation between the two is important for growth and development. In this chart, Mars (which rules the South Node position) is square both ends of this. So how we handle everything that Mars comes down to: fight and flight, struggle, survival, drive, personal will, raw desire, the will to actively live, has what seems like disproportionate consequences loaded on it here, more especially as it is both conjunct our very lifethe Sun, and opposed to Pluto.
If such struggles are activated in us during the time of the Full Moon’s influence (which could be taken to be this whole lunation cycle in fact), then these struggles could feel very primal, threatening, and even hopeless. Being faced with these feelings is important though, because how we respond to the spectre of defeat; real, personal, utterly humiliating defeat (I am laying it on thick here) that strikes to the core of us is one of our fundamental life lessons (or skills). Whether this affects you a little or a lot, the answer is surrender, letting go. There are battles you just can’t win, and the ones you notice aren’t the ones that aren’t crucially important to you. The benefits of surrender can be just as crucial. As if to underline this, the soothing aspects to the central oppositions of the chart are provided by Neptune in Pisces, which is practically the archetype of surrender.
So this chart seems to really say that we have to recognize the battles we can’t win (and they will be battles that are genuinely painful for us), and surrender, let go, and also forgive (remember that Scorpio Saturn square). If we do that we can heal some things very deeply, and connect with our inner life and true power.
And doing that, we can go our own way, the real kings and queens of our own freedom.
detail of photo depicting “the Burghers of Calais” by Julia Margaret Cameron [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped and digitally solarized
I can seem very down on religion at times, and indeed I do have very serious criticisms of organized religions, their teachings and their apparent effects. However, I feel a lot of understanding for people’s attachment to their religions, and their need for it. I know that religion has historically been the repository of values both admirable and appalling, and of identities bound up with people’s shared sense of being human (an association I think is inevitably problematic). Religion is virtually the design on the nursery wall of humanity, but unfortunately it too often keeps us as children. It’s true that there are problems with religion, but also true that the problems are not just with religion, but with all kinds of human society, at least as far as I can see. We work with imperfect materials, and we make progress like hallucinating builders, trying to discern reality from fantasy, benefit from harm, in the consequences of our creations, as everything constantly morphs, albeit sometimes slowly enough for us to hope for a subsisting progress.
I believe in the individual, and I am a Satanist myself, but I know that people are driven by pain and fear, and I know exactly what that does, and what the offer of shelter does. It’s the same process used in brainwashing, and what happens (however happily, you can hope) in every family on the planet. Human beings are malleable, vulnerable creatures. It can’t be my concern if the world is going to change; I have to be concerned with my world practically. But if there is a possibility of the world changing, and being less subject to fear of the individual, demonized source of all our talents and creativity, then understanding thepeoplecaught in religion is I think relevant. It’s honestly not that difficult, when you look into the eyes of common human pain. It doesn’t matter what I am, I am always going to feel closer to them than to some elitist plonker, because I know what it feels like.
We did see a quite astonishing documentary on TV about British jihadis, which was actually very emotional. There were quite a few people interviewed, some who had been really active in establishing the beginnings of the British jihadi movement back in the 80s and 90s. These were people who recanted their former extreme beliefs, and in some cases regretted the path they had taken with a kind of remorse that I don’t really have a sufficient word for. In almost all cases these youngsters (as they were at the time) had been driven by pain and deep problems, and had found shelter and solace and meaning, acceptance and a place, in a confluence of religion, distorted mentorship and the bad opportunity of foreign political conflicts. I don’t think the religious blue print was guiltless (to say the least), but it wasn’t so long ago that large swathes of young westerners believed that progressive change would only come ultimately through violent revolution or the use of force, and anything less was a bourgeoise naivety. But they were hippies and punks and students, and most of them weren’t actually going to do something. I remember that time. These muslim kids just had worse luck.
I think the situation has become somewhat different now, and I doubt that it all bears a resemblance to the people interviewed in the documentary. The horrors get worse and the recruiting has got crazy and chilling. The results are appalling. But I know people who grew up in the 70s and 80s with horrible racism directed at them and their children. Of course they will freakin’ well withdraw and stick together. I feel safer living in an area with a large Bangladeshi population (no “freak” or “queer” abuse from them, ever), so what the hell must they feel like? And then we have supposed left-leaning liberals who think they are being “progressive” by bowing down to religion and ethnicity. These are people that the mainstream society (at different levels) have applied both a carrot and a stick strategy towards, saying both “you’re hated” and “you’re welcome”, but only as something other, defined by traditional forms. I think there is a big place for secularism in our society, and we should not be giving religion of any sort political or legal power or privilege. But if you can break the spell, you are left with the people who needed the spell, just to live somehow. You will still have to look into the eyes of that need.
People don’t do deathly things because they want to die. They do them because it seems like life to them, compared to what they are getting away from*. That’s why they are a small minority within a minority. Religion is a factor, obviously a crucial factor, but it really isn’t the root cause of this. It honestly goes deeper.
Every psychopathology is attempting to articulate a resolution. If we want to solve that, someone needs to listen. Not accommodate the illness, not collude with the problem, but find out what is actually coming out of the throat of a situation. Because if you can’t understand hurt, you can’t understand anything about human beings.
If there were a place in human life to identify where our “trouble” is situated, it would surely be the mind. And if there were a place to identify where our talents and creativities and so many of our potentials arise, it would surely be the mind. Our Pandora, our Prometheus, our Lucifer; our Teslas and Einsteins, our Leonardos and our serial killers, it’s all in the electrical theatre of the mind.
Someone I once knew referred to psychedelics as spiritual laxatives, and while I have never taken powerful psychedelics myself, I have done holotropic breathwork, and had experiences that could be described as “psychedelic”, and I would entirely concur. It gets things moving.
Magically speaking, the area that I would find most interestingly relevant here is evocation, as described by Israel Regardie in “The Tree of Life”. Whether or not you use a “triangle of art”, the fact is we are all right in it, with our personal demons, that just might be our daemon, or its preliminary accompaniment.
The mind of course includes many things. In the East the mind is much wider and deeper than it has generally been taken to be in the West (until at least the advent of psychology, and more particularly trans-personal psychology, and even then I’d be cautious to claim too much). In traditions such as Buddhism the mind goes all the way down, and right to the centre. In the West, the profound area of the mind has generally be termed the heart, while what we think of as “mental” has tended to be termed the head. Whether we are talking about the “essence of Mind” in the eastern sense, or “the heart” in the western terminology, it is characterized by peace, bliss, and a resplendent, luminous quality. This is where we experience Oneness of Being, and love in the sense that mystics talk of it. This is where we are who we truly are.
But what then of the “mind”, the “head”? In truth this is surely the whole question, for there is no problem in “the heart”, and indeed no separation.
The heart is in fact the key to the head, but the head must be clear to allow it. Thus the Sufi’s talk of “polishing the heart”, because our thoughts and judgements obscure it. But the head is a wonder, and it reveals to us a distorted mirror show of our own divinity, a blessed freak show which we should honour. Sometimes reversed, sometimes twisted, sometimes heartbreakingly longed for, sometimes feared. It is a wonder, and all we take to be art and science and genius and poetry and vision, if it has any language at all, then it is the child of our head. Demons indeed, illumined by our daemon.
And this is where those psychedelic processes come in, and healing processes too. Between healing, and manifestation, and the tumbling cyphers of questions that we already have the answer for, the language we reach for, that articulates us.
So we can see, with clarity, and with cleansing, with what I call the dispensation of the heart, that all becomes simply mind, or simply heart, according to how it may appear to you. And all in relationship.
Yesterday was Solstice, and the Sun went into Capricorn. Now we wait for the Sun to start growing stronger again (in the North, and the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere), which it will do by about 25th December, the old celebration of Sol Invictus as well as Christmas. Today Uranus goes direct, which means that it is no longer appearing to go backwards in the sky, though it will take a little while to get going.
I did say previously that I have had an increasing sense of “spirit” this year, the influence and presence of the unconditioned, and that continues. I also associate that sense of spirit with healing (in the holistic sense), surrender, the truer realization of being, the nature of consciousness in itself. And unsurprisingly, I associate it with a functional and operative spirituality.
The last four years or so were ones which brought hardships, hurts, battles, as well as challenges and real successes. But I had rather lost my faith in “the Universe” (for want of a better term), in any sense of justice or karma etc. I would still be very circumspect about anthropomorphizing any kind of “justice” out there, but nevertheless, some sense of faith is returning (and I don’t mean faith in our gods, as the experience of them has never diminished, if I was paying attention), something broad and deep and unconditional. Even our family seems to be coming together again, on a new basis.
I had felt very far from the heyday of free spiritual experience which sustained me in the years before I really had much of a life. I was also aware that I just had to get some things nailed down in order to protect my loved ones, and that does take a certain amount of “unfree consciousness”, even if I will never regret that.
Now though, as I am approaching my second Saturn return, with Saturn about to go into Sagittarius, I am finding a sense of the same unconditional answer, of relief, of somethingbeing over, in the good sense, like when you realize that the nightmare was actually just a dream, but without denying whatever you went through, and what you learnt from it. I can remember and recognize now, that my life has had a “spirit path”. Without that path, so much of my past life makes no sense, and indeed the world makes little sense. With it, there is such a greater capacity for ease, choice, letting go, and responding helpfully or creatively. It’s as if you breathe out, and find a freer sense of meaning is already there, beyond conventions or expectations. Spirituality is indeed not just our great adventure, but our great game, our play, our craft, our art of love making.
I am at present going through that bargain basement psychedelic experience known as illness. Nothing to really complain about, but 16 hours of largely horizontal feverishness, followed by present recuperation is mildly mind altering. I spent a good deal of my childhood with high fevers, and my only memories before the age of 4 are of my father carrying me in from the garden on his shoulder, my brother coming into our kitchen and putting a paper down on the table, and (again) my father trying to teach me to walk in the garden, with my sister in front of me encouraging (it felt like being on roller skates, and I did not like it). I think being ill and out of it so much in early childhood probably did affect me, and I don’t regret that, it probably goes with having Moon in the 12th house. By all accounts, when not ill, I was a placid child, and I would sleep under the sycamore tree that overhung the back yard for hours in my pram. To this day I love trees inordinately, though I know many other people do too, and I would find it hard to understand not loving trees.
Minor illnesses have always seemed like messages to me, especially ones that involve fever and periods of relative seclusion (I also have Mars in the 12th house, which could link to fevers). 12th house of course has a connection with illness (opposed to the 6th house of health, and also associated with hospitals), and with Neptunian mind expansion and seclusion (association with drugs, hypnotism, monasteries and asylums). When something needs to talk to us from the 12th house, it can “get through” in the language of the 6th house, disrupted health and daily routine. Sometimes when we want to listen to the 12th house, a holiday or a retreat is what we need. And there is always sleep of course.
Personally I’m just very grateful for many things. The messages aren’t always processed rationally, and they don’t have to be, so long as we get the message. I might have to make a few little changes, remember what’s important to me, and not waste my energy on what isn’t right for us. The importance of kindness always comes through, kindness and love, and those beneficent influences that accompany our lives from the unseen, and also the importance of selectivity, what you let into your life, your sacred enclosure.
Much to be thankful for, as the season changes to the clear chill of Autumn.
Here’s to sleeping under trees, and writing on water.
And a good week it was, including incidentally the anniversary of the reception of The Book of the Law on 8th – 10th April.
I don’t know which night it was exactly, but near the beginning of the week I had trouble sleeping. I was upset about a long standing tooth problem which had made me feel ill on and off for three years. That threw me into a really negative mental state, the kind that scare me a bit, because of having been there very badly before in the past. Lying there, I reached out to a spiritual figure that had been central to my recovery in the past, a guru called Meher Baba. Meher Baba once described his role as “washing the laundry of human beings”, ie taking on their negativity and bindings, and helping them to become freer in consciousness. I focused on him, and simply asked him to take away my negativity. No analysis, no negotiation, just “please take this away”. And the burden lessened, the cycle stopped feeding, I felt relief and, no longer afraid or distressed, I went to sleep.
I’m not a follower of Meher Baba anymore (I was during a good deal of the 90s), but to say I appreciate him would be a massive understatement. He exemplifies, with an eloquence that only his silence could express, a redemptive and lovingly liberating function which I consider to be quite real. Funnily enough, I first heard of his silence in connection with the “Maat Current” of Thelema. So I’m not his follower, I don’t really deal in the term “God”, but he and what he does is spiritually real for me. That leaves me, not with an intellectual question of where I am in all this (which would not be that important), but what itis spiritually, and where it may be in the spiritual landscape that I live within.
I do consider description and experience to be more sophisticated than definition, and the redemptive function that I know exists with a figure such as Meher Baba is I believe not just “him”. When you have experienced the feeling, the function , the taste, then your nose and your tongue can be a guide.I think one sees the same quality in Christ and in Krishna, and the mystical vision of Rumi finds the same in his “Beloved”. As I noted in another recent post, astrologically I associate it with the planet Neptune. Neptune, and the sea, come to me as my nearest association, and the experience which lies at the heart of this deliverance from suffering and negativity is that of surrender. I let go, without question, and give it up to the sea-like, beneficent, divine intelligence.
That has been my guide this week, my hidden, emotional practice. Surrender, and subsequently, a capacity to feel gratitude. And that surrender is a possibility (and so a choice) where it comes to the emotional content of any perception or reaction.
On the way through the week we went and had a nice meal in Greenwich, just the other side of our locally serpentine Father Thames, and then went for a delightful shop at the See Woo Chinese cash and carry. It’s the only place I know you can buy incense, religious statues, lanterns, dumplings, fish, meat and (should you feel the need) bags of pure, powdered food coloring. We love the place.
Thanks to my husband’s intervention, I ended the week having the trouble tooth pulled by a dental surgeon, ending three years of problems in approximately five minutes. The relief was immediate and, so it seemed, pretty symbolic. A suffering that went back three years, gone, wrenched, disposed of, just like that. Freakin awesome.
Another of those words that sometimes gets people, that catches, like “God” or “Truth”. Understandable, because I don’t really deal in the term “God” anymore myself, I don’t believe in it in a personalized sense of a being – and lord knows I believe in all kinds of things, personages and entities. The bigOnethough, I don’t engage with in that way, and the neopagan fudge of an imagined female gender making it any different gives me the feeling you used to get sitting on those tiny chairs that were actually a little (ok, a lot) too small for you at the one size fits all Sunday school. I’m glad if you enjoy it, I enjoy lots of things, but you may as well say that Superman made the world.
I do believe in spiritualitythough. I value reason but I’m not a rationalist. I value the body, desire, sexuality and pleasure, but I’m not a denier of there being anything else of value. In part I do get what people mean when they talk about “God”, at least I believe I do (at the risk of presumption), in terms of an experience. I associate it with the Oneness of Being, and a liberated, blissful state of consciousness which I have experienced at times (sometimes extended times), and with love and with a very profound, released peace. It is awesomely freeing, and calling it “God” proved quite counter-productive after a while, as well as landing me with some really whacked out but sincerely conventional company. But it’s amazing stuff, when you can get it out of the tin.
I don’t know what to call that. Free consciousness? Consciousness-Existence-Bliss (from Hindu traditions)? Spirit? that last I am probably plucking from my long gone Christian upbringing, with its “Holy Spirit” milky bar pigeons of light, or maybe little tongues of magic luminosity. The esoteric idea of “spirit” can actually be quite different to that, more like ether, akasha, or some astral, amorphous source matter. Culturally when we say “spirit” we don’t mean that stuff, and I don’t think I do either here. And we’ve often been lectured by our good counter-cultural pioneers about the sins of dividing spiritand matter. You know, body, sex, the world, stuff = bad; transcendence, denial, ghosty stuff = good. And how that doesn’t work, and indeed it doesn’t. But that’s not to say there isn’t a valid question there, arising out of an experience, which maybe got hijacked.
If it comes to a question of “what is matter?” and “what is spirit?”, I would probably say they are qualities of experience. The former is characterized by separation and a binding at the physical senses and brain consciousness. The latter has a unitary, continuous, re-united quality, and does not feel bound by the senses, nor by separative location in space and time, within bodies, and thus intuitively feels closer to a source of consciousness which is not sourced in the brain as such. I hear people talking about spirit and matter, and matter and energy, as if spirit and energy were the keys to each other, but that is not what I intuit here. That would be materialism by an extended back door.
Within popular Paganism, what I mainly see is materialism garnished with psychology. There is a level at which those things are valid, especially where there are things to untangle personally or culturally. But it’s only as relevant as say health food is. If your diet is screwed, it is a good idea to sort it out, but as someone once said (I think it was in a Reshad Feild book): “I’m sorry but no, you can’t eat your way to enlightenment”. Well, you can’t therapize or politicize your way there either.
Spirit (if we want to keep using that word) isn’t just a tool, or a method, or an optimization. It isn’t even just a healing process, it is a whole other world. And compared to here, it’s the real world. I don’t mean that we should blacken or demonize this world (come on now, it’s bad enough as it is), nor that we shouldn’t appreciate the overlap and interaction (the other world is the real source and cause as far as I am concerned in any case), and certainly not that we shouldn’t work to improve and heal life here. But if you’re going to try and find everything here, you’re going to have to fudge things to make the picture look anywhere near complete.
When that other world impinges on this world positively, that’s when we often feel “spirit”, because of the contrast, the release. And if “Spirit” is an experience, and a world, it is also an influence. It’s an influence which human beings generally need at some time or other, and collectively we need. We may seem to screw up the whole thing over and over again in the guise of “religion”, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a real thing there. I think mystics understand that and get on with it, trying to alleviate the suffering that springs from being apparently, separatively incarnated in these bodies, on this wildly, apparently travelling wheel, and who knows what else, in all the permutations of apparent being, material and otherwise. That is why spirit is associated with compassion and healing. It’s not a sentimental impetus arising from within a predicament. It is a radical act of seeing and responding I reckon.
What to do with it, or be able to do with it, in a “world” such as ours, that is the fool’s choice, but it is at least not a lonely choice, not any more.
Living statue as Neptune (god of water and the sea) at the promenade between San Agustin and Playa del Ingés (Gran Canaria) – by Wouter Hagens (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
![1801-11-03-Farina-Brief by Johann Maria Farina (Farina Archiv) [Public domain or CC-BY-3.0-de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A1801-11-03-Farina-Brief.jpg)
Summer Thunder 