A heart is what happens when a yes fills the space of possibility,
And the universe reaches out to gather it into her vastness.
She gives it shape and form so it can express itself through her;
She gives us bodies so we can learn how to love
Greenwitch sings alone in the heart of a tree, and yet not alone for in the heart of every tree there is a greenwitch singing. Her eyes are green with gold sparkles and her skin is the mottled green of moss. Her heart is pure gold and shines through her eyes and it is from her heart that her love flows and gives energy and strength to all growing things.
It is for greenwitch that the flowers stretch their heads to the sky and the sun. It is for greenwitch that the spiders spin their webs and do their dance of death. It is greenwitch that inspires the song of the birds and the whirring wings of the hummingbird and it is greenwitch that the donkeys love as they amble their slow way across the mountain.
Rain falls for her and rivers run and she sits at the heart of everything and sings her song of life. She is the weaver and she is the warp and weft and the fabric emerges from the loom in a thousand colours and in threads of silk and gossamer and gold and silver.
She is me and you and everything around us.
Back in the mine again. Back with my dogs, the big lump and dancy dog, back with the food from the cantina and some amaranth bars I brought with me which I am just now tasting and are a bit yucky, though that might just be the taste after vanilla sweetened coffee.
I had a dream this morning about a shriveled head which had been torturing women chainsaw massacre type or the saw or like those horrible ‘chase ‘em down and cut ‘em up’ films I don’t watch. Anyway I had him in control and was trying to drown him in water but he wouldn’t die. I was trying to suffocate him but the water was just a puddle. In my other hand I had control of the whip/chain he used. I decided to put him in a jar and fill it with water and close the top and drown him that way. I put small hot chilies in on top and a snake I had caught, though the snake escaped and got cut in half before I could close the top. He was potent, this head that has been torturing me and making my life a misery, small and mean and concentrated and I realized at one point during the dream that he couldn’t torture me, I was powerful, I had power, not like the other women he had tortured, I was a witch and I knew what I was doing.
That was the point of the dream, to realize he didn’t have any power over me. I was a lot bigger than he was and I was powerful and I knew it. The head of course is my mind which has been judging and beating me up since forever and the mind has invested a lot of control in maintaining the belief in us that we are our minds, we must believe what it tells us or we will die. The mind is the only thing that might die and it is terrified of this. It’s a very nice realization, to be able to separate from those thoughts that sneak in the back door and start chopping at me with a knife. I was feeling crap a few days ago and I could hear in my head a voice telling me ‘you are a failure’, ‘you have failed at everything you do’ ‘you are crap, you will never succeed’; usual stuff, heard it a thousand times before, the difference being though that before in the past I would try not to listen but a tiny part of me was wondering if just maybe it was true, after all who knew better than I what I could do or not do.
This time I suddenly realized that if this were someone outside of me were telling me this with the same intention of hurting me and keeping me down I would never speak to them again and I wouldn’t listen to them and probably, after I got over being angry at them, feel sorry for them that they had so much judgment in them. I guess I have been in a abusive relationship for years but it all went on inside me.
I have painted many women with stars over the years. This one is the painting I described here. She stands proud upon the earth but still she has her connection to the stars.
I have started painting on large paper. Good watercolour paper and masking taping the edges so when the painting is finished I still have those wonderful edges. easier to transport too.
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First came the in-breath, the gasp from nothingness, the awakening the awareness of being. Nothing still was, just pure awareness and stillness, waiting for the impulse to move.
Then came first pondering; A simple ?. No words as yet just pure question, a wondering of the awareness.
Next came second pondering, an awareness of ‘self’ as something different to ‘other’. In the vastness and wideness of the beginning of the world ‘self’ looked round and thought ‘I’ and ‘you’
The vastness and wideness of the beginning of the world did not say anything back, did not look back, just was, in its awareness there was no difference between ‘I’ and ‘you’
The self began to name things; self needed some landmarks to make the vastness smaller and easier to live in. Tree (big green fluffy), grass (green soft), mother (love),
The world began to turn and the stars began to move and the self was frightened. Self asked the world “Why are you so big and all? And do not pay me any attention?”
The world did not answer.
Self asked again “Why do you not do what I say?”
The world did not answer
“You do not love me” said Self sadly
Then he heard a voice inside him “You are loved little self, you exist because you are loved, there is no difference between you and me, we are, look around you at the vastness and wideness of the beginning of the world and stop putting names on things to make it seem smaller”
“Who is speaking” cried Self
“I/You are speaking” replied the voice and suddenly Self understood, the world had begun and everything, self included, was part of it. Everything was on the journey and self was there to witness and be a traveler on the voyage. Self smiled.
The stars twinkled, “Hello stars”
The rain started to fall from the clouds “Hello clouds, hello rain”
Self looked in a puddle at the reflection “Hello Self”
I have a picture in my head waiting to be painted.
A woman standing with her feet on the earth and her head in the sky. She holds her heart in one hand and the other points to the stars. The land is flat and ochre and there are mountains in the distance. The land only comes up about a fifth of the picture and then the sky starts so my woman is standing in the sky it looks like. Her head goes all the way up the top of the paper. Her hair flows into the sky and becomes part of it. She looks out of this image with a proud expression, not an ego ‘proud’ but a sure ‘proud’ a sense of herself and her place in this world and her connection to earth and the stars. She is rooted in her own self and nothing can shake that.
Her dress is light blue with butterflies of white and yellow. Her feet are bare and around her neck is a necklace of green jade stones with a carving of the head of a jaguar carved from leopardskin jasper. The night sky swirls and moves and the stars twinkle and shine and the earth has faces that emerge from the dirt and the rocks, some eyes open some still shut but all looking upwards to the sky.
I have taken a break from constantly sketching ideas and drawing pictures to wait to see what comes in its own time. When I have an idea it comes fully formed into my head with only the details left to work out and how best to get across the original idea. It’s a new one for me; normally I am trying to have lots of ideas just in case I need them and I don´t feel good unless I have one in the process of being painted. This way is slower but I will see how it goes and what happens.
One resolution I made on my recent trip was to stop ‘doing’, to stop constantly trying and instead see what happens. Make room for opportunities to come into my life, stand still so they would know where to find me instead of constantly spinning like a top trying to get somewhere not really knowing what I was doing or where I wanted to go but doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing.
Anyone else care to comment on a picture they have in their heads?
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There was once a beautiful woman who wanted nothing more than know love and to love and be loved in return. She wore her best clothes always and make up and surrounded herself with jewels and the finest most expensive objects and love did not come to her. She was cursed.
If any man looked at her with love his heart would turn to stone and he would turn into a statue. She did this to them with her eyes. If she looked in their eyes and saw the love there that was the end. She would have them taken away and put somewhere in her gardens and soon the power of the curse became known and no more suitors came with roses in their hands and love in their eyes.
She lost hope and her wiles became desperate. She would have her picture painted and hung in palaces around the country in the hope of finding her love. She spent longer and longer each day on her toiletry to keep her looks and her beauty but to no avail, she grew older and began to grow ugly.
One evening, just as the sun was setting, a young man arrived at her door. He knocked politely and, when she beckoned him in, entered quietly and kept his face to the floor. He did not look at her. She anyway, did not want him to look at her, she had come to hate herself and believe she was the ugliest foulest creature on this earth. Nothing would love her ever and she had come to accept that bitterly and that knowledge and bitterness turned her evermore inwards and the lines on her face grew deeper and her eyes smaller and pinched.
He said, “I have seen your picture my lady and I thought it sad and lonely and I have an answer to your problem”
She did not believe him and was about to kick him out, angrily she hissed at him “how do you know what my problem is, and how dare you think you can fix it”
He did not move but, still with his face to the floor, said “Please let me try, what have you to lose? Let me try”
She was suspicious but agreed to let him try. He took a small round mirror from his bag and gave it to her. “It is very simple but very hard” he said “It will hurt a lot, are you sure?”
The woman was still suspicious but something in her really wanted to try and so she took the mirror and said “What now?”
“I want you to sit and look at yourself in that mirror until you look at yourself with the love you wish to see from someone else’s eyes” he said
“Easy” she snorted and he said nothing but just smiled at the floor.
“I will be back tomorrow” he said “It will take a little while, be patient and you will know when you get it right” and he left and closed the door softly behind him.
She went and adorned herself with her favourite necklace and earrings, did her hair just the way she liked it, she used rouge and eyeshadow and blusher and lipstick and when she felt she was ready she sat down and held the mirror up in front of her eyes.
At first nothing happened, she began to get bored and her arm began to ache, she looked at herself and looked at herself and she looked at her hair and her eyeshadow and her lipstick and her jewels and she thought how good she still looked despite her age and her lines around her mouth.
Then she began to see imperfections, this line too deep, this line too long, her mouth thin and bitter, her teeth yellow and that gap that she always tried to hide with what she always thought was a winsome sideways smile. Her eyes were too narrow and deep-set, the eye shadow only served to accentuate their positioning. She began to look at her make-up as ridiculous, who was she to try to beautify herself? It made her look like a doll or a clown. She put the mirror down and thought “this is stupid, I have never thought like this before, why am I doing this” and she went to get up but instead something made her sit down and she found herself looking at the mirror again. She looked so ugly! Her eyes like black holes with all the eyeliner, her mouth a hideous dark purple colour that stained her teeth, her nose too pointy, her skin pasty and caked with the paste she used to make herself fashionably pale. She remembered her skin when she was a child, how brown and smooth and clear it had been.
She got up and went upstairs and removed all her make-up and jewels and undid her hair and washed it. She washed her face completely clean and went downstairs again where the mirror was waiting for her. She sat down and again lifted the mirror to look at herself, this time with a little trepidation as to what was waiting for her. She sat and looked again and this time saw herself as old and pasty and wrinkly and bitter and lonely and she started to cry that no-one would ever love her. She had been living a lie all these years, how everyone must have laughed at her; seeing her look for love when she was so plainly ugly and desperate and unlovable. She wept and wept and she said to herself, “I will never leave this house again, I will stay hidden till I die, it is my fault all those young men are dead, they looked at me and I was so ugly they turned to stone in fright, I was selfish”
She cried for a while and then she began to get angry. It was not her fault the men had come looking to her for love. It was not her fault their hearts had turned to stone and they had become statues still adorning her garden. How stupid their faces looked, with their puppy dog eyes gazing at nothing adoringly, their hands outstretched that once held flowers or a gift for her. So much hope. Some had the beginnings of fear in their eyes where they realized what was happening to them but most were too stupid she thought. Stupid men. That was her stupidity, she thought, that she wanted to find love in the first place. Well, never again! She hurled the mirror in the ground where it smashed and she went round the house looking for other mirrors to break. Soon all of her mirrors lay in shards on the ground and she had to be careful where she walked so as not to cut herself. She sat down feeling pleased with herself. When that young man came back with his eyes to the floor she would give him a piece of her mind, how dare he come and upset her like that!
She sat there for a while lost in thought and then a great emptiness opened inside her and she felt she was looking into an abyss of nothingness. All her clothes and jewelry and hard walls and make-up and opinions could not protect her from that abyss and she felt herself fall into the darkness, a nothing, a spark of light extinguished by the oppressive blackness. She began to cry once more. I am nothing she thought; it is only me and nobody else to help me. She felt sorry for herself, she had been abandoned by the world and forgotten and rejected by it and it hurt her in every cell of her body to think that she was not worth the slightest bit of attention from the universe. I failed, she thought, I am a failure.
She lay on the floor looking out the window at the stars in the night sky. She began to feel something else strange to her, something she had never felt before in her life. She began to feel truly alone, but not in a bad way, she realized she was enjoying this sensation. Nobody else was here; she did not have to ‘be’ anything, not pretty or clever or dressed in the right clothes or, horrors, that anyone should see her without her make-up and jewels and with her hair done correctly. She felt peace, she thought, I can look after myself, I have been searching for someone else to look after me for so long, maybe I just have to look after myself from now on and not need anyone else in my life. She sniffed again, she could feel the tears of self pity starting, no-one would love her, but that was ok, she would love herself. She sat up and picked up a shard of mirror that lay close by and looked in it. And how strange, she thought, that a piece of a mirror shows the same thing as a whole mirror, maybe it is the same for us, that one person reflects the same as the whole thing, that we are all just shards of mirrors broken up into pieces yet we still reflect the whole. She began to see herself as part of everything and to look at herself differently. She saw her faults and they did not bother her, she saw past her outside into her real self and she cried for all the years she had spent avoiding herself. She whispered ‘I love you’ and smiled at her reflection, I will never again turn a heart to stone she thought.
But thinking this thought, her mind became fearful and doubt crept in, how can I love myself after all those years of turning hearts to stone, think of the harm I have inflicted, they must hate me!
Her fear came to the defense and with the same power she had used to turn to stone the hearts of the young men who had looked at her with love it used the mirror to turn her heart to stone and her last thought was it was too late, she would never know love, and love someone and be loved in return.
The young man came back the next morning. He did not knock, as if he knew what he would find. He stepped over the shards of broken glass and came across the statue of the woman lying on the floor with a piece of glass still in her hand, still staring that direction with one tear frozen on her cheek. He smiled gently and taking a small hammer from his pocket he took careful aim and hit the statue hard, once, over the heart. It cracked and the cracks spread and spread until the body was covered in a fine layer of cracks. He stood then and went to the garden and took a bowl of water from the fountain and carried it back inside. He stood over the body and sprinkled a little at a time over her until she was wet from head to foot. Then he leant down and whispered in her ear “come back”
She sat up in a shock. She was wet and covered in mud but alive and happy and feeling lighter than she ever had before in her life. She laughed and the young man in front of her looked at her straight in the eyes and laughed back. She had a moment of fear that he would become hard and still like all the others but it passed and he didn’t and she stared in wonderment at him
‘thank you’ she said,
he shook his head ‘I didn’t do anything, I saw your picture and thought you were beautiful but I had heard all the stories and I did not want to be turned to stone like the others, you had to break the curse, you and nobody else”
He took her to a mirror and there she saw herself young again, clear skinned and clear eyed and smiling, happy and free. She cried a tear of joy at the feeling of release it gave her.
He took her out the back and she freed the statues out the back of her garden and apologized to each one in turn. Then she turned to her new found friend and said “What now?”
He smiled “Now is just the beginning” he said
A story about a woman finding her heart
A story about a dog with one eye and a curly tail and one white spot on it’s back
A story about a life
A story about a mayfly that has one day to live, it watches the day getting brighter and brighter then darker and darker and then over
A story about water, deep and clear with frogs in it and dragonflies that are bright and purple and orange and yellow. The water is a cool shaded place in the heat of the sun.
A story about a boy who loses his parents
A story about a child with a rocking horse that comes alive
A story about me
A story about the end of the world
A story about the beginning of the world
A story about the morning after an intensely emotional night. Dawn is relief
A story about a man who can’t see his own life clearly
A story about a woman who can only see her life and nobody else’s
A story about a woman who can’t stop crying
A story about a path that is uphill. The day is hot and the hill is steep. Nobody is coming to help
A story about a dragon in a dream in a book that can’t be opened until the right time is here and the right sound is made
A story about a sound made at the beginning of the universe that will continue till the end of time
A story about a story that never ends
A story about a song that the stars sing, that my heart sings and I cannot hear it until I open my ears
A story about ears, the wind, the sound of crickets, of a cats howl, of a dogs bark, of a city where the streets make music
A story of seeing reflections in water. Calm still water, the reflection is in front of me but I have to see it as reflection and see past it.
A story about how we are all connected in time and space
A story about time and space being an illusion, how we are all light and eternal beings fluidly shifting from one form to another, from one existence to another.
A story about remembering. Seeing time as a deep pool of water rather than a straight line we travel on. Seeing our continuous existence.
A story about learning how to let go.
A story about a black widow spider and a mouse in the kitchen and a dead swallow chick in it’s nest.
A story about death, about diving in, about dreams and a cat called Xoconostle.
A story about my dream with the two cats I had to choose between. One friendly and social and the other smoke grey and hardly visible and spitting fury and in defense. The fact that I knew I should pick the social one but really I admired the energy of the other, its fierceness and unwillingness to obey.
A story about love and the light that comes from the sun that gives us life and energy and is our connection to the unknowable.
A story about the unknowable.