Winter Daydreams: Solstice 2008

Twenty five year ago, during the winter months, stained glass came into my life as a hobby. After ten years as a hobby I began eking out a living with stained glass doing commissioned work, teaching and selling retail. DAYDREAMS Art Glass. In the last five years I’ve returned to stained glass as a hobby and it’s been years since I’ve gone on a creative run with stained glass; I’m savoring being on this run. I walked to the village this afternoon to get away from the studio and give my sore fingers a break.

The Flower of Life came up in early Fall in a discussion about trading a stained glass sun catcher for dance clothes with a local designer/seamstress. I was hesitant to commit to that particular project, that’s a lot of pieces to cut. When circumstance further supplied an artist who was familiar with the Flower of Life and interested in trying to come up with a pattern with the specifications provided, I went for it. I wanted to walk into the project without any preconceived notions of what the Flower of Life was about and this meant I wouldn’t have to do any research for the image. I did know that Michelangelo used the Flower of Life in his drawings and I had seen the name Drunvallo Melchezidek in connection with the Flower of Life in an online bookstore.

I didn’t immediately realize I was looking at silk batik renditions of the Flower of Life on the temple altars at the Awakening retreat in November. There is so much to experience when walking into this kind of temple for the first time. When I did fathom them I knew I’d have to take pictures of the altars to capture the Flower of Life in four of the endless possible renditions. When we were instructed in our dance with throat chakra, to place the image of the Flower of Life over our throat chakra during the sixth day of the retreat, I was ecstatic.

My dreams since returning from the retreat are full of images of the Flower of Life, and people stepping onto the circle with me, stepping into an awareness of who they really are, stepping into their hearts. Veils are dropping and more people step onto the Flower of Life joining those who are already there. Information about what the intersection of nodes we’re standing on means and how to output and input energy from that intersection is shared. There is a vital, vibrant dynamic energy around people who consciously step onto their place on the Flower of Life.

The first small Flower of Life created itself after the small one I found in the Awakening retreat manual. I asked Court to make me a larger pattern and he’s been discovering and playing with the Sacred Geometry of the Flower of Life ever since. We’re both thoroughly engrossed in making this dream manifest. Life is art. The Seed of Life may prove to be more fun to work with and more cost effective. Last night I Googled Drunvallo Melchezidek and found this:

The Flower of Life symbol is being released once again into the consciousness of humankind. This helps to give us a model of unity amongst diversity, which we so desperately need to heal the fracturing reality we see around us. It is time to surrender to the unity that surrounds us. Our inherent unity was once unseen and ignored, but now we have the understanding, templates, and tools to truly see its existence and embrace this unity in our lives.

Sacred geometry and the teachings of the Flower of Life help us to see within ourselves the vastness of which we are all a part. Many humans have been conditioned to see and believe in a limited perspective of smallness. Elephant trainers of the far east tie a thin rope around the ankle of a baby elephant and throughout their lives reinforce the boundary of the rope. The adult elephant is fully capable of breaking the rope but the elephant has been so conditioned to believe he cannot, that he does not understand his own power to free himself. We are like those elephants, just learning about our self-imposed belief in limitation. Living with our limited perspectives of ourselves, we rarely see past our limitations and, as a consequence, we bind ourselves to our habits. With a little effort, the teachings of the Flower of Life and sacred geometry help us peer through the window of our conditioned beliefs and gaze at the vastness of our true selves and our infinite potential. http://www.floweroflife.org/toverview8.htm

One of the aspects of stained glass as a business or a hobby is the cost of materials, the more exquisite the glass, the higher the prices. It is fascinating to find that the patterns for the Flower of Life make it possible to use every scrap of glass. I will include some pictures if and when I am able.

Happy New Moon

This picture is taken with the lighting from the light box underneath the piece...doesn't do the glass justice. The project is ready for soldering. After studying the picture I posted a while back I realized I wanted to make a couple of minor changes to the gulls wing. I have really enjoyed this piece. The orange and yellow has made the perfect antidote to the winter rains. It's been sunny for me everyday I've worked on it.

The Dreamspell Calendar

I created a series of these glass on concrete for the garden, all abstracts that felt like they are their own universes. I'd like to put some of the crop circle symbols I've seen into this medium.

A fascinating old/new concept came under my radar a few months ago. There is a stone Mayan calendar decorating the wall next to where I sit typing. Court brought it back from the Yucatan fifty years ago. It was one of the few decorative items in the house when I moved in that didn’t end up at a garage sale. Like everyone, we’ve wondered what it really means, and how much credence to give those who claim it spells the end of time.

It was the words “Dreamspell Calendar” in a piece I was reading that started the search. I found that “a Dreamspell is "any agreed upon belief system which creates a continuing state of consciousness."

While I’ve long become accustomed to the idea of time as an illusion I’ve never spent any time studying how we spend time right now. The Gregorian Calendar that we keep time by descends directly from a Pope Gregory in the fifteen hundreds. Pope Gregory tweaked the Julian calendar that was imposed as law by Rome in it’s heyday upon her subject states. In effect, we continue to live under a law enacted two thousand years ago by a conquering nation, Rome to keep it’s subject states subjugated. And we’ve lived this way without question.

During my studies of the First peoples from around the world, from the Kalahari Bushmen to our Native American tribes I found many common links. Taking dreams for real is one and the thirteen moon lunar cycle another. I often wondered what North America would have look like now if the Christian Blackrobes had accepted the formation of a rainbow bridge between cultures rather than imposing Christianity. Now I’ve learned it wasn’t just the Christianity that conquered this continent…it was also the imposition of the Gregorian calendar.

Which brings me to that fascinating new understanding of the Mayan calendar and it’s prophecy about the end of time.

“We are now at the end of the Dreamspell of history (time) and at the beginning of the Dreamspell of galactic culture. This means that we are coming to the end of the belief in the male dominant, warrior hero, fear and separation paradigm. And we are preparing to move into the love based, artist hero paradigm of natural time. All we have to do is change our view of time and open ourselves to the love that is inherent in us all.

Time is both spiritual and physical simultaneously. This is why it is the 4th dimension. It serves to bridge between the physical and spiritual because it operates within both.

When we are born we are not asked what calendar we want to use. We simply have one imposed on us by the people who have come before us. Time is a mental concept in reference to the way we perceive it. We simply have to change our minds and time will change. In fact, it will revert back to its natural state. This act alone will begin the movement of our culture back into harmony with nature”.
For more information a link…
http://www.lawoftime.org/2012/13step-peace.html

A New Alchemy

Dear Lynda,

I received The 11 Intentions Invoking the Sacred Feminine as a Pathway to Inner Peace through the mail a few days ago and find myself needing to share some of my pleasure with you. Like you, books arrive with perfect timing for me and this one is no exception.

I’m sending along a picture of a stained glass on concrete mosaic I completed in 2004. At the time I felt I had created a visual expression of my masculine/feminine menopausal self. This phrase from your book “a new alchemy of masculine and feminine energy” brought a picture of this mosaic to mind. When I reached the word "fusion" in my reading I knew I had to send this picture to share my joy at having language and a more complete understanding of my own feelings.

Thank you.
Blessings,
Anne

Slaying Perceptual Dragons

I'll start with an agreement, whether we agree or not for now, that an attitude adjustment is the most powerful moderator of human experience, and a loving attitude the most powerful of them all. I used the “silver lining in every cloud” analogy to good effect in teaching my children this concept.

Every human experience includes an emotional aspect. Our emotional nature is what differentiates the human being of light from other light forms. Yet, most of us, me too, have spent our lives circumscribing the parameters of our emotional life to fit within the socially accepted mores of our day and age. We have therefore not been spontaneous or authentic about our emotions. (As an ex smoker I can attest to the emotions I stuffed behind the cigarette smoke screen.) When such is the modus operand in our lives, in other words, when we lie to ourselves about how we feel, we eventually have to process or honor those repressed feelings. And like the game of hide and go seek, it is “ready or not here I come” time for all those repressed and unexpressed parts of our self. The solar phenomena that we are now and will soon be experiencing more of are part and parcel of this recapitulation of our feelings on a mass scale. That would be every single living being on or closely associated with the Earth… Oneness_Is_Us.

Often at work or play I’d know on a conscious level that I was putting off responding to a moment until it was more convenient or socially acceptable. Other times I was in plain old ordinary, denial. Either way, every time I refuse to acknowledge feelings, I am refuting part of myself and giving away what the shaman calls personal power. As Ram Dass said in the sixties…the moment of power is now. Waiting until it is convenient to be here now with our feelings causes the energies of those feelings to accrue and sometimes, no, often burst their confines to life changing effect. There can be no more waiting to be all that you are. Remove the value judgments of right and wrong to replace with what works and what doesn’t work; this dragon slaying perceptual shift can help the recapitulative process move at light speed, our choice.

We can no longer litter the universe with parts of ourselves we’ve treated like garbage. In facing our parts we find the missing pieces that we’ve hungered for since the first time we made a value judgment about how we felt. As I’ve remembered and embraced my authentic self I have known there could be a day when all of us had permission to be our whole human expression, whatever that may be.

How many children dream of a knight in shining white armor to slay the metaphorical dragons of life? I stopped looking for the knight when I grasped that I am the master of my destiny, the creator of my reality. That was when I stopped blaming the dragons and discovered how much I love to dance with them.

Many thanks to Jan Lindstrom stained glass artist extraordinaire for letting me snap this picture of her Dragon sculpture. Her beautiful rendition of dragon energy expresses the powerful transformative medicine that Dragon is. Jan spent a decade carrying this sculpture from dream conception through construction, giving the piece emotional life long before it reached the physical plane. The sculpture hangs in Glass Expressions a stained glass business in Comox, British Columbia.