A Church Without A Roof

©Robert Potts

Redwoods are a communal species. While they can grow from seed, more often they grow from shoots sent up from the roots of older trees. They form communities growing together in various arrangements. Whatever architectural style the trees choose, semicircle or something else, there is a distinctive feel to a cathedral of redwoods that isn't present in a grove or stand. I mean, sometimes you come up to a bunch of redwoods and they're just a bunch of redwoods, nice and beautiful. And other times you walk in and your whole spirit is lifted to heaven.

Driving to the Unaffected Coast

I think a lot about the wounds I carry. It has never seemed very fruitful to think of the injustice of it. There are always others worse off. I am never completely innocent or less deserving of receiving a random share of unfairnesses. But looking forward, I can see in the wounds, the possibility of something else. By staying with the pain, I can sometimes open up to something amazing, a connection, a feeling of being larger than I thought I was. Each wound becomes an opportunity to do this thing. 


 Also, hammocks are awesome. 

 

Something in the Twos

In which we examine the Twos in the Tarot, learn how to give ourselves a minute, and come to a better understanding of the nature of sex.

The tension between two things has an energy you can harness to create something new. When two ideas or choices or points of view seem irreconcilable, they often create the most dynamic, and certainly unexpected, third thing: a result, a conclusion possibly, but more often a whole new thing that hasn’t been thought of, a heretofore unknown resolution, a child of the two.

This is the true nature of sexual reproduction. All the Sturm und Drang we attach to it revolves around sexual reproduction’s inherent miraculous nature. Something is born of two that could not be known before because there’s never been anything like it. We can imagine “a child” but we cannot know who a particular child will be.

But we don’t actually have to have sex in order to go through the process of bringing two disparate things into relationship and having their interactions create a new thing. Sex is just the most titillating form this process takes. Learning to see the miraculous nature of the process in the smallest moments of your life can add some spice, reassure that yes the universe is created out of love, and possibily make you a bit leery of a culture intent on turning all things sexual into a profit.

So having two things can become incredibly interesting under the right circumstances. World changing in a literal sense. When we have two different things - two different blazing wills, two different hearts desiring, two different mental constructions, two different physical needs - we have the makings for something new.

Because of the portentous nature of the situation, we will also find a pause of sorts. The Twos in the Tarot show this pause and give us imagery we can contemplate to better recognize the pause and use it to advantage. All the twos have an indecision in them. They are all a moment of pause exterior to the energy building between. The essence of Two is “between”, the energy that is between is created by the existence of two things in relationship.

If you feel so inclined and haven’t done so already, you can pull out the Twos of your favorite deck now. The descriptions below are for the Waite-Smith deck, but you’ll find many deck creators put a pause in their Twos. If you’re not seeing the pause in a particular card, see if you are seeing the turbulence that comes between the pause and the creation of the third thing.

Two of Wands

Two poles of a Tesla coil, the energy snaking and snapping between them, laddering up to Heaven like Jacob with his pants on fire. Have you ever been still on the outside and pulsing inside with desire and want? The Wands, suit of fire, represent the existence of tension between true wills.

We often hear and think of our own wills as being singular always, indomitable, and irresistible. But as with all things, there are times when the will splits, just enough to allow this cool thing to happen, this creation of the new. In the Waite-Smith Tarot, the man stands between his wills looking out to the horizon only he can see.

Two of Cups

In the two of cups, we see two hearts and the space between them. The between that two people make. The purpose of this between is always the creation of love, or the opening of a channel to allow love to flow into the world. It is the filling of a space with love to create the third.

Cups, again and still, are receptacles, receiving the element of water that takes the form of its container. So the two of cups shows us the pause as two individual hearts approach each other. Two different desires turned toward one another.

Two of Swords

Out of all the Twos, the Two of Swords is the most still The tension here is all in the mind, the eyes are closed, inward, the removal of self from the outside world can look like peace, but the tension is there, you can cut it with one of those swords held ready for just that task.

This kind of tension is hard to stay with. It often masks itself in life noise. We prefer the sounds of our everyday lives over the tension shown in this card  because the subtle tension of ideas held tautly, choices and possibilities, leaning to either side of barely perceptible is uncomfortable. So we mask the quiet in the two of swords with traffic and t.v. and people talking around us about everything else. The blindfold allows one the stillness required to sense the underlying tension, which once perception is attuned to it, is clear as a bell.

Two of Disks

The two of pentacles is the most dynamic, but even here the coins are belted together by infinity. The juggling is not a sustainable act and certainly not the end result desired. You can only have a bunch of things in the air for a while until they start crashing down.

There is a fascination created by discs so solid put in rhythmic motion. In the Two we glimpse the underlying energetic nature of matter. The tension of the two pulls, the electron from the proton, keeping the needed space between them to make matter.

Contemplation

The minor Twos in the WS show us four different ways to resolve the tension of a duality. If a Two comes up in a reading and you sense the pause in it is important, try one of the following contemplations. With all contemplations, your goal is really to not have a goal. You are allowing a pause in your thinking and giving yourself the opportunity to receive whatever message awaits you.

Wands: Take a long view. Find a place where you can see to the horizon. Let your eyes relax as you look out as far as you can. Don’t effort, just breathe.


Cups: Look someone in the eye. You may be able to find natural conversations in which you can look someone in the eye without it being weird or aggressive seeming. In our modern world, a surprising number of people find it difficult to look someone in the eye. If it’s too hard, you can simply go to a public space and look at people as they go about their business. Look with compassion. Again, don’t effort. Just breathe.


Swords: Put the blindfold on. It really makes a difference, allowing the muscles around your eyes to relax. In the darkness, breathe in focusing on the sounds around you. Breathe out, focusing on the breathe. Do this until you feel calm, then let the silence settle.


Pentacles: Fascination, focus on myriad movement, preferably movement that glitters. Light on a water surface is always good, but the light and shadow of traffic can be just as effective. Let the movement draw you in until you can feel it in your body.

How To Form Gold Out Of Baser Metals

You want to know how to make gold out of other metals? It’s simple and we already know how to do it.

Blow up a star.

The first stars started out as clouds of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very simple atom, just a proton orbited by an electron. It is the most basic physical expression of yin and yang, of Binah and Chokmah. Clouds of this stuff were floating around in the dim afterburn of the Big Bang. When enough of these atoms collected, gravity took over and the atoms began to fall. At first, there were many directions to fall in, but eventually the forces of complexity sorted things out and a single center was found.

The hydrogen atoms fell faster and faster toward that center until they were going so fast they started to smash into other. Now realize, every atom has a defensive shield called the Weak Nuclear Force that normally operates to keep out protons and electrons from other atoms. But when atoms go fast enough, they overpower this force, crash through the defensive shield and achieve fusion. This fusion of hydrogen atoms is the most basic recipe for light.

This first recipe in the life of a star calls for four Hydrogen atoms. There are several steps involved. First you have to make Deuterium. Smash two Hydrogen atoms together to get a Deuterium atom, a neutrino, and two gamma ray photons. Let the neutrino and the photons escape. When you have two Deuteriums, smash those together to get a Helium atom and a bunch of energy. That energy is light and heat. It shoots out from the star and may eventually land in your eye when you look up at the sky. When this starts happening, we say a star is born.

Now, in order to make something out of Helium, you have to achieve much greater speeds than you did with Hydrogen. So at first, the Helium just falls to the center in darkness. But eventually, it too starts going fast enough to overcome its defensive shields and when Helium smashes into itself at the heart of a star it makes Carbon and Oxygen and Nitrogen, Sulphur and Magnesium, Calcium and Titanium. The recipes for these elements are more complex, but this is how the air you breathe was made as was the calcium in your milk.

These transformations produce a lot of energy that keeps the star from collapsing entirely. The star depends on this energy not just so it can shine in your sky, but also for its structure. The energy released by element creation escapes toward the surface of the star keeping it expanded through convection like a pot of boiling water. Stars are constantly boiling over into themselves.

Over the course of a star’s lifetime, it will repeat this basic motif, creating new, more complex elements out of simpler ones and using the released energy to fuel itself until it gets to Iron. Iron stops the chain. For whatever reason, if you want to make new elements by smashing iron atoms together, you have to add energy. So there is our star, going along happily producing new building blocks of existence and wham, suddenly, it cannot go any further.

When Iron starts to collect at the center, the star begins to lose its source of energy. The flame under the pot is turned off and the star begins to settle in on itself. What happens next depends on how big the star is. A small star will just collapse becoming a very dense Brown Dwarf. But a bigger star will do something else, and here’s where it gets personal. When a big enough star gets to the Iron stage, it too begins to collapse, but being so massive, the collapse reaches epic speeds and ignites a supernova.

Supernova.

These conflagrations of stars release so much energy that they can be seen on Earth. The Crab Nebula was formed this way and even though it’s 6500 light years away, Chinese astronomers saw the explosion in 1054AD. These explosions - and frankly I don’t know if you can still call them “explosions” when they are this big - are so massive that they smash atoms together with abandon, and in the process produce all the heavier elements on the periodic table, including all of the other metals of the Alchemists: lead, tin, copper, mercury, silver and - you guessed it - gold.*

And because we have all these heavy elements here on Earth, we know that our solar system is at least second generation. Earth was formed out of the remains of a supernova. Otherwise we wouldn’t have all the heavier elements only a supernova can make. Otherwise, life wouldn’t be here.

We are made of stars. And not just any stars, we are made of stars that transformed themselves, at least a small part of themselves, into gold. We have that history encoded in the physical fabric of our being. Not just in our cells or our DNA, but in the atoms that make those cells and that DNA. When Alchemists talk about transforming metals into gold, they are remembering the past lives of their own bodies.

*For those of you keeping track, the only planetary metal not made in a supernova is iron. Turns out, Iron is a gateway metal.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory).

Dissolution and Augmentation

The caterpillar shakes in time lapse like one possessed. It shrugs off its skin, like an overcoat, wads it up and sets it aside. You’d think you would be able to see it now, the real thing, the caterpillar naked, shorn of ornament and true, but underneath the mask of colored bands lies armor. We can never see the transformation itself: the rearrangement of cells, the shifting of body parts, the dissolution.

Inside the chrysalis, nothing has a name, but then, before the conscious idea of a form even emerges, the goo inside the armor aligns itself, the unnamed and unnameable cells have been shunted into a pattern and suddenly there is a body. The wings are carefully folded in on themselves, like a parachute ready for use, except that no one has folded them. Instead the cells have just arrived in their places to tell a story.

Once upon a time there were wings. We don’t even know what they look like yet, but we are becoming these wings.

The story breathes and the cells remember. And in remembering, they discover what wings are. The breath of capillary action moves through the wings and they become what they always were, what they were even when the caterpillar was scrunching along eating leaves. It could feel their presence, on another plane, waiting, whispering their story. As the imago emerges from its armor, the cells remember and slowly tell the story of wings.

What story do your cells remember?

Meet Aphrodite Epistrophia

turn towards
turn your eyes or mind
to a thing,
regard

turn round, turn about,
constantly turning, as if to look behind
turned to gaze on something
a lion retreating

curve, twist, distort
of hair, curl
of a tree, crooked
of fir-needles, bent

turn about, turn round
put an enemy to flight
wheel about
of a wild boar, turn
upon the hunter

go back and forwards
wandering over the earth,
observing, studying
turn to the place
of the sun, revolve

wheeling about
tossing, of a restlessness
renewed assaults of ills unnumbered
wheeling through a right angle
of ships, putting about, tacking
have a relapse

turn from error, correct,
exact, strict, severe,
be converted, return,
conduct oneself,
behave, earnest,
vehement
bring into action

flexible, supple,
modulated, varied
of strands, twisting
of a bow, bending
of a river, winding
of a bay, curve
cause to return to the source
of Being,

pay attention

that by which all the revolving
spheres are turned
thus turned about, changed
returned to yourself


This is a found poem. I found its phrases among the examples given in Liddell & Scott, the preeminent dictionary of Ancient Greek, for the family of words that begin with epistroph-, the root for Epistrophia, one of Aphrodite's epithets.

Pausanias* tells us that Aphrodite Epistrophia had a sanctuary at Megara. In Pausanias’ passage about the goddess, epistrophia is translated as “she who turns men to love.” This is a translator’s best guess as to what the epithet means, but the family of words in which we find epistrophia has little to do with love and everything to do with turning. Aphrodite Epistrophia is “she who turns men’s minds,” and because the she who is doing the turning is the goddess of love, love has to be in the equation somewhere. We are, however, left with the question unanswered whether she is turning minds to love or with love.

Epistrophia \eh-'pis-tro-fee-a\ She who turns.

[*Pausanias 1.40.6]

This Wonderland Called Life

THE ABSENCE OF SOMETHING. I AM BEREFT. I AM BROKEN AND UNWILLING TO HOPE.

When we last left our bodies, they were falling. That’s what matter does. It settles. Matter is just energy slowed down to stillness. It gets stirred up by the eddies of time and space either chancing to move toward the source it can never forget, or dropping helplessly back down to the bottom. It cannot move. It can only remember.

To move we need something else. Whether it’s the breaking of carbon bonds, the flush of love, the roar of anger, or the fusion of hydrogen, to move we need more than matter. How are you different from a table? You can move yourself. There is a spark within you that allows you to move faster than chance.

And it is so tempting to want to separate that wonderful spark. In depression, the body is such a burden and source of pain. We could just loose that spark from this leaden body and be free at last.

But-you knew there’d be a catch-that spark doesn’t know the way home. Set it free of the body and it will splutter around the astral planes like a burst balloon until it slows, falls, and becomes a body bereft itself, finally remembering in that stillness just where it came from.

For this whole life thing to work, that spark has to be in a body, the body remembering the way and the spark getting the body off its ass. We can call this volatilizing the fixed and fixing the volatile. That which is determined and still, locatable in space and time, is fixed. That which is known only by its velocity is the volatile. When we bring them together we get life. Alchemy is all about the different ways to do this.

One of my favorite ways is Earth Wind & Fire.