The fish would help me to connect to a novel perspective again. So far, they would encourage me to accept the fluidity of life and re-group effectively, passionately, aesthetically, happily, delightfully and much more.
The theory is - according to Stephen in Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm - that you go back to earlier ways of seeing to re-open the doors of perception. Hence, I started by seeing virtually nothing only darkness and gloom, but, very gradually, I began to see beyond the surface and start recognizing color and form and soon a shoal of fish in an ever-changing colorful grouping - from doom and gloom to amazing uplifting beauty!
But let's backtrack a little. This fishpond was an old discarded container for washing clothes, used before the time of washing machines. It seemed quite ugly without a purpose but now it has one: to suggest novel story lines for our lives as we meditate by means of its reflections.
Nothing stands still: everything must adapt or die. It is a wonder how beautiful the process really is!
So what do YOU see? Something prostrate in front of you. Maybe some sort of bird. To the left might be a leg and claw. Yes, there is a duck's head or is it a seagull's? If you look really hard and then relax a little, you might just see a fallen angel. For what you see in front of you is a piece of the Tree of Life. In essence it is everything, all creatures great and small.
"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on it rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains." Carl Jung
Witness a self-fulfilling prophecy... one that heals!
Yes, we had just had the first heavy frost of the year, so the last thing I was expecting to see was a butterfly. How it had survived I don't know, but I quickly understood what it had been drawn to - the sweet perfume of a 'nespereira'. So you, too, can understand that perfume may convey the heavenly promise of transformation, a life giving fruit, a means to the future.
I felt this calling, a strange sense of emptiness and found myself walking towards an abandoned house. And NOT unsurprisingly, from nowhere out popped a kitten. I scooped her up and looked at her. She mewed repeatedly, but it wasn't until later that I recognized what she was saying, Give me new faces new faces! Smart kitten?
I am getting to work on Equine Assisted English Education - language and thinking to usher in the Post Consumer Era - it is my inevitable return to teaching:-)
The idea is to focus on process not product. I imagine thinking that reflects 'doing' rather than being 'done-in' by misleading concepts defining success and failure. The greatest functional linguist Halliday pointed out years ago that the way English is structured in the form of nominalization makes it inflexible and inherently conservative. It is highly likely that such product-based thinking is going to be the death of us, so it is high time to recycle it, unravel the processes focusing on meaning in an existential sense.
Blake portrayed humanity's evolution in the form of a child being carried by a giant, but what would happen if we substitute the giant for a horse? The horse in its truth-bearing role? Something WONDERFUL!
A few words about my vision and perspective of the estate: many years ago now, I was walking over the Downs in Bristol, feeling low and unhappy when my dog barked abruptly, and I suddenly became aware of EVERYTHING around me right down to each blade of grass. In short, the dog had opened my eyes to the beauty that surrounds us and the amazing future that each of us can experience.
The phenomenon described is written about in mythology around the world. It takes many forms like the three headed dog, Cerberus, or, in other instances, three separate animals that show us the past, present and future -the wolf, lion and dog, for example.
However, what the myths have in common is the role of the dog that ushers in the future by making us aware that we all belong to a unitary state of consciousness, whether man, animal, plant or mineral.
If you look at the outline of the Forest Garden Estate doesn't it remind you of a dog's head? Our objective is to 'usher in a better, brighter future' and, naturally, we'd like to include YOU.
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