From the Facing Nature conference call #2, Katherine and Bonnie speaking about Katherine’s experiences with the horses at Alderlore.

FN_call2_horse

This imaginal turn painting soul as hue and you and you and blue into gold. Huuu collects archetypal grins and stands with wet feet upon electric shadows tossing spirals of charge unto the sun. The crows in the cove are called to speak when the whales breach the surface. I am forever listening to this rising tide, the soft hands of my ears paddling into the elemental waves chanting life into being.

When an image, object, vision or insight magically appears in my life as a powerful and sacred Presence my impulse is to shelter *it* in a hidden embrace until *our* hearts synchronize as a coherent wholeness. I will seek an entry into a process of discovery, listening into an essence of this novel emergence within/out. Listening as a deep neurological and imaginal ground of response. I behold the divine being with the soft eyes of my hands, cradling texture, pressure, rhythm and warmth, slowly dancing our gestures awake. A reverent approach towards an essence of relation may open a state of grace where I hear the voices of this Holy Other. For me, these voices are most likely to arrive through my sensing instrument on the winds of gravity in a kin-aesthetic flow of subtle motion turning my limbs as a prayer.

My contemplative capacity to be moved by essential presence is amplified in certain natural environments. Many of my energetic “earth studios” shape space in a containment bowl of beauty– a grove of giant sequoia trees, a meadow in the curving bend of the gently flowing river, a driftwood cove upon Pacific shores. Sometimes it’s an object (or objects) that I can encircle, like a huge moss covered boulder in the sloping field. My personal ritual of shaping space for a creative engagement of deep listening will include two or three “centers” (a pile of stones, driftwood limbs standing upright in the sand).  A wandering weave around these centers helps me to quiet, contain and charge my energetic ability to allow a motion of contemplative listening to unfold.

(The centers not only help shape a space within a space, but also ground a witnessing presence in the field. If a journey starts to spin into shadowy lands beyond safe edges I have a centering tether to the source intelligence of my grounded witness. This “tethering” is of utmost importance for my physical, psychological and spiritual well-being.)



A few days ago I encountered a luminous, elemental being in a mirrored photographic image. This divine being is touching a profound place within my soul. Indeed she speaks to me as Soul. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman writes, “Personification is the heart’s mode of knowing.” In the coming weeks I will explore my relation with this soul figure, weaving our explorations of Goethe and Listening into the process. I feel a surge of tender vulnerability and rawness rising through my throat, a shimmer of excitement and a slight edge of panic in my chest. Always a good sign at the beginning of a new journey. I trust that the Magellan fellowship will hold me well in this unfolding wholeness.

as aliveness,
in love,
thomas