mysticism

In Resisting, Dung Beetle Falls

In Resisting, Dung Beetle Falls Backwards and Upside Down into the Monolithic Pantheism of a Kernel Containing Everything

As one resistant of labels, with equal parts zealous interior violence, comic irony, and a dash of cowardice, I walked the fields of this farm land counting my ewes and does, counting the rams and bucks, counting the yearlings, the lambs and the kids and the wethers. It is warm for February. I walk the crop land; the recent snow having melted in the winter sun. Walking through the corn stubble I stop to retrieve, from the earth, two large ears of “bloody butcher” corn missed by the corn picker last fall, missed also by the gleaning deer, raccoon, crows and the like, lying perfect and impervious to the recent moisture until the wet warmth of spring softens their hardness: two glorious ears. I contemplate my relationship to that particular variety of dent corn and through it, the land, and through it to Everything. I consider the blood-red kernels, possessed of this inner light, very much like jewels, but of a different telos. I encounter in there a bewildering and univocal intimacy, and before knowing, and without thinking I fall down into it. 

I recall my friend sending me a word, “Panentheism”, a few weeks back, like a gentle test, or inquiry. And I think of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French priest and scientist with whom I most readily associate to panetheism. I like him quite a bit, and his ideas, and I like the word. It is artful, that word. I said to her, I don’t much like labels, generally speaking, but I suppose I would often consider myself a Panentheist. 

Panentheism: the belief that the being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in Him, but (as against pantheism) that His being is more than, and not exhausted by, the universe. 

-from the Oxford English Dictionary

But now, facing the intimacy in the interiority of the kernel, it was in panentheism rather than in pantheism that I felt the limit. Indeed, panentheism’s caveats felt more like a weak-kneed parsing, seeking to hold-back and play it safe. It is in the same way that we tend to parse the imagination, classifying visionary experiences (artistic or otherwise) that we find acceptable as “imaginal”, while those that seem unacceptable, for whatever reason, remain just imaginary, made-up, or fanciful. I know why the distinctions are there (and I love Corbin), but sometimes they piss me off. And just this morning I had written in a bit of a headache trance: “Imagination is God, Art is God”. As if I had decided that I no longer had the wisdom or the will to sort these matters out, or distinguish between them. I watched a lifelong internal rift between God and art vanish in the twinkling of an eye, and it was good. 

Back in the kernel of red corn out in the field, instantly and unexpectedly I slip from panetheism into pantheism. As quickly as putting on a shoe- or taking off, I am in an entirely new dimension of the world. The fall is easy but precise, and not without risk. I have no will to be safe in regard to the Heart of Everything in the kernel. A pantheism of necessity where I choose nothing and where I choose Everything. And I am “naked on the horn of the world”. 

Over the years I have watched my discernment deliquesce, losing familiar boundaries amidst the univocal acuteness of the immanent transcendent intimacy of encounter. These moves which seem outwardly as a “falling away” are indeed a falling, but a towards-falling, a deeper-into-Christ-and-his-wounds-falling. A cascade failure into the mysteries and reconciliations of those wounds. A dung beetle descent into the earth and her wonders. The stigmata materialize and manifest and I pitch over into it. I tumble into the graven image. Image becoming likeness and circumcised on the heart. I might end up with a heart like Queequeg’s face. The wound and the eye are one. 

I emerge with a blessing, mined long in the trouble of the earth, fashioned from the resistant material of words. This blessing is backwards and upside down. If I understood it, perhaps, I would not offer it, but as it is so I must. So, I bless you with this blessing which is backwards and upside down. It is the blessing of the indirect way, and the willingness to endure it. It is the blessing of the third way, when you are only offered two. It is the blessing of wearing the wounds of Christ as a garment, dwelling in them. Not even Solomon in all of his splendor was clothed as one of these. It is the blessing of the Graven Image, the moment when image transforms into likeness, circumcised on the heart. 

This upside-down blessing defies the senses, it is supersensible in a left-handed way. What appears to be rotting is a flowering below, what tradition holds to be a sacrilege and profane is sacred and holy and pure beneath the threshold of knowing. It is Coyote’s blessing; it is Raven’s gift. It is Jesus saying, “you have heard it said, an eye for an eye etc., but I tell you, love your enemies, and so on”. It is the kingdom hidden inside the mustard seed. The upside down and backwards is resistance that looks like abdication and failure. It is a divine and holy silence that feels like complicity. It is losing explanation and definition for the awe and intimacy of mystery and paradox. 

There is never an interpretation for the backwards and the upside down. It offers no proof and no footholds. It is the mystery of the drunkard and the addict who find fire. It is when God becomes Imagination, and when God becomes Art- and not because the form is necessarily good or beautiful by established standards or sound judgements.

It is Jesus showing up as a Trans-person. It is the astrologers suddenly having the answers where the priests are blind. It is the water-witch locating the spring. It is Nebuchadnezzar raping Jerusalem and Jeremiah buying land from the pit. It is finding God when every other voice says “not God!” It lost the rules and burnt the patterns for sake of the seeking of the Kingdom of Heaven, forever standing the world on its ear. 

So, I bless you backwards and upside down in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. If you do not want this blessing, wipe the dust from your feet and give it to me. I will take it, I want the dust.

Ad Astera

– a piece of writing from The Diary of a Tree Standing On It’s Head

Ad Astera


awakened into the dark day desperate
the shame of days disused
heaved their defiling way into the new air
(the now air)
 tilting hope into a tainted air
peace pierced pressed throbs 
instinctively the leper calls unclean
a reflex of grief from deep wounds
unclean
son of David, have mercy on me

then a sign in the heavens
for the penitent under the stars, starwatching
and to see so instant a reply
to the cry, for mercy, so fleet
delicate and sensitive to the time
a meteor in a tiny blue white line
quits the bright sky to kiss me in the night

the stars now singing 
across my soul a song 
do they, great beings, all light and fire and mass,
who I see as a remote and pulsing brightness,
do they perceive me as a speck of distant darkness?
a black dot dancing upon great luminous eyelids
closed against the internal glowing abyss of their being

I sense the song singing
dreaming into my soul's slumber
heard by spirit into spirit waking
Everything's own sonorious drawl
near and warm as seems my blood 
distant and cool as seem the stars:

oh, my beloved, oh, my heart
do not be afraid, I am for you now
you, who have been thinking you are too slow
too slow of your hands you thought
and your feet and your heart you thought
too slow in your great labors you thought
but I say, no, not slow enough, no not yet
the trees are slow and the rocks still more
the earth prodigious in slowness
but not yet you, you must be slower still

oh, image, oh, self-discerning self
you, who have been thinking 
that you have become too small
too obscure and too insignificant
you who have been thinking 
that you can measure meaning
by size and shape and outward things
but I say no, no, not yet have you become truly small
not as the small beings whose life doesn't weigh on the moral scales
you must become as obscure as the undiscovered 
as insignificant as the poor
no not yet, my dear, you must be smaller still

dearest dear, heart of my own heart
you who have been thinking that you are too foolish
foolish beyond what is acceptable, even for an artist
even for a fool, and what miracles are there
to make it ok? 
but I say no, not yet
you are not yet foolish enough to contain me
be foolish until all is lost and squandered
and as a fool go on, and then we'll talk
I am not far  

oh, beloved god-knowing self
you who have been thinking
that you have failed too often
and too greatly too grievously
you who have been thinking much 
that I will disown you
that I would spit you out 
because the great practice you have made 
of failing and of shame
but I say no, not yet
you have not failed enough nor greatly 
not yet enough to receive me
when I come like water and 
when I come like fire
fail still, fail and fear not
I will not abandon you
fail and do not abandon me 

(silence for one minute)
(silence for one hour)
(silence for one day)
(silence for one month) 
(silence for one year)
(silence for a week of years)
(silence for a generation)
(silence for an age)
(silence for an epoch)
(silence)

the hands of the stars touch me
their billion flashing fingers reach out tingling
very nearly, but not quite, painful
pinpricks like little electric shocks
in a limb waking up from awkward sleep
and receiving blood again
receiving life again and new

something big entering into something small 
I wake
something high lifting something low
I rise

not slow enough, 
I sigh slowly into the long morning of an eternal presence
not small enough, 
I sigh quietly into the deep obscurity of Everything's smallness
not foolish enough, 
I sigh foolishly into the unknowing of Everything's beautiful foolhardiness
not enough of a failure, 
I sigh falling into the vulnerable nakedness of Everything's own fall into me

I hear the star's laughter now
like children they laugh without derision
for joy they laugh
and for love, they twinkle
like stars in the sky


Sacred Heart

This drawing is part of The Diary of a Tree Standing on it’s Head series I’ve been working on.

I also decided to make some prints of this one. They are for sale here at Baumwerkshop.com

The Great Beast

Exploring the Recurring Theme of the Great Beast and the Prone Man

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the recurring image of the Lion/Dog-Chimera/Beast standing guard over the prone man in my work from the past 2 1/2 decades. The Beast Himself shows up in many other works, but today I am concerned with His appearance specifically over this lying-down (dead?)man; an obscured self-portrait echo of Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ.

When I first started making these images, I was very uncertain of the beast. Is he good or evil? Is he standing guard to protect the man from being devoured or to devour him himself? As time has gone on plenty of uncertainty remains, yet I feel that the beast transcends the duality of good and evil- I could even venture that he transcends it as goodness.

Pushing a bit harder, I might say the beast is the Angel of the Holy Spirit- if that’s too far, I can retreat to the ground that he is “messenger”.

Entering into the imaginal space of these images, the land of spiritual vision, allows their merger with memory and experience. That’s a leap into what some call the realm of the unseen. As for me, I say it is a seen realm, but with other eyes. They are my memories and experiences.

The man, is he alive or dead or both. He begins to be folded into the Earth in later drawings. And fully inhabits the worship life cycle of growth and decay by the last image. The relationships have matured a little bit perhaps? Time will tell.

Walking Man Sketches

Walking Man Eats Alfalfa Roots

Walking Man Listens To the Roots Talking To One Another

Walking Man Looks Backwards Into Time

Walking Man Hefting Bodark Roots and His Water Pot

Walking Man Encounters the Spirit of the Lord In a Night Heron

Night Heron Detail

Walking Man Finds Strength and Purity and the Morning Dew

Tools of the Mystic (The School of the Transfer of Energy Lexicon)

Ministers of Beauty (S.T.E. Lexicon)

Hyper-Symbolic Tools for Use in the Transfer of Energy (S.T.E. Lexicon)