John & Anne Wiley

2010/12/12

Homecoming

Tonight we hosted a small party of “Mystics” – the group we formed for a retreat in Ballyvaughan Ireland with poet, scholar, Celtic mystic and former Catholic priest John O’Donohue back in 2003. It was one of those deeply enchanting and transformative experiences in life for most of us. We met here in SB, went on hikes together, did the 10 day retreat, and have kept meeting sporadically since. Tonight we enjoyed a leisurely potluck supper and regaled each other with conversation, memories and singing. It was a homecoming of sorts, including the sense of connecting with our ancestors. Part of the Ireland experience many of us shared was being welcomed back there by the spirits of our ancestors, and tonight’s conversation touched on that.

In looking over a few photos from tonight, I also glanced back at pix from our 12/6 flight to Neverland. Among those is this one of Brad Pitt’s place, where there also may be some sort of homecoming going on. Since he began spending lots of time in New Orleans, his waterfront bungalow West of town has been deserted except for the caretakers on top of the hill. I noticed tonight that there’s a white car parked down near the beach cottages and lots of cars parked up at the entrance. Maybe he’s visiting, or they’re preparing the place for a visit. There’s some odd black thing with white “doors” on pallets that I don’t recall seeing there before, and I’m curious whether it will be there if we fly out that way tomorrow.

3874 Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie's SB Beach Cottage

3874 Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie's SB Beach Cottage

2010/12/06

Sweet Pies

Our delightful friends Nancy and Dave were over for a DVD a few nights ago, and in going through my photo folders just now a rush of sweet memories was triggered. Right now my mouth is watering from looking again at this.

0897 Sweet Fluffy Delight

0897 Sweet Fluffy Delight

As I recall, the four of us finished it off that night. Part of my diet plan for the holidaze. It was delicately-flavored meringue with whipped cream and fruit on top.

Guilty pleasure, not just because of the calories. See, we dearly love these two people and time with them is always a treat. At the same time they most often share hand-made chocolates,  home-made bread (lately including the chardonnay yeast sourdough they invented), and always some new insanely delicious treat. Back in the early days of psychology a guy named Pavlov found that ringing a bell when feeding a dog would soon lead to the dog salivating whenever the bell was rung. When we see them, or even think about them, I salivate. Am I a bad person? Does it help that when thinking of them, warm feelings of closeness and shared discovery spread through my consciousness with memories of delightful and meaningful conversation?

2010/11/24

Flock

When I was a kid, on one or two years we had a “flocked” Christmas tree. In case you don’t know, it’s basically a cut tree that’s been sprayed with asbestos or something to give the appearance of being covered with snow. Well looking at cropped versions of my zoom pix from Monday’s flight in the mountains, I found this one where you might be able to see “flocked” trees at the top. Click to see the largest version, or better yet visit my Photo Page by clicking the link in the right column ->

3471 Snowy Trees

3471 Snowy Trees

This year we’ve been contemplating and talking about what this season means to us. Maybe that’s why the flocked trees stood out to me. Fun to remember the good times I’ve enjoyed walking in terrain like this, looking up at the trees, and hearing the song of a small plane humming in the distance. The more places we’ve been, the greater number of perspectives we can embrace where we are.

2010/11/14

Art

Filed under: Inner World,People,Random,Relationships — John @ 22:37

Well maybe you’d already guessed that this might be another short inward ramble, but I really thought today would be a standard photoessay. Here’s the deal: we watched “Smoke Signals” last night and having managed to refrain from zipping it were delighted by the ending poem, so I’m sharing it here with this “Their Father’s Daughters” link to the original poem from which this poem ending the film was adapted.

How do we forgive our Fathers?
Maybe in a dream
Do we forgive our Fathers for leaving us too often or forever
when we were little?

Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.

Do we forgive our Fathers for marrying or not marrying our Mothers?
For Divorcing or not divorcing our Mothers?

And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning
for shutting doors
for speaking through walls
or never speaking
or never being silent?

Do we forgive our Fathers in our age or in theirs
or their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it?

If we forgive our Fathers what is left?

-adapted from “Forgiving Our Fathers” in a book of poems
titled Ghost Radio, by Dick Lourie

Spiral

It can be fun to explore synchronicities, and to contemplate what we attend (as in notice and/or take pix of). I realized that two of my fav recent pix evoke an intense almost dizzying spiral energy in me.

0797~3131 Spirals

0797~3131 Spirals

So I googled “spiral” just now, and the first hit is a movie we’ll get from the library. The second hit is the wiki entry, and I skipped down to the symbolic meanings: “a symbol of the process of dialectic” and an excerpt there: “central to both Indic and Western philosophy since ancient times. …dialogue between two or more people who may hold differing views, yet wish to pursue truth by seeking agreement with one another.”

It turns out that in the relative silence of our life since the Citizens election campaign, Anne and I have been engaged in an especially deep, sweet, challenging and fruitful ongoing dialectic. Kinda cool to “feel” something in the pix and find this context.

Another “hit” I’m getting internally is about Chumash meaning in spiral forms. So I googled “spiral chumash counter-clockwise” and the first hit was an essay with two bits that resonate. First a reference to how low pressure systems make a counterclockwise spiral (a common feature related to aviation weather), the other mentions a Yogic tradition that “counterclockwise flow is the unfolding or dissolution of matter into energy.” I’m certainly experiencing some energy flow!

In a dream last night, Tripp’s number came in. You may recall it’s 66111, and that seems to have strong significance in ways I don’t understand. That entire number is the end of my pilot license number, assigned in 2006 and not consciously noticed until long after we bought Tripp 1/23/10. I graduated high school in 66, and that number has resonated for me over the years. In the dream there was something about 111 related to a date, maybe 1/11 (New Year’s Day) or Jan. 11? Anyway, it all seems worth noting so I can re-read this if anything else comes up, or perhaps sometime next year.

Further down the hit list is an Ojai item about a Chumash ceremony where “a screech owl swooped overhead.” On a quiet night in Santa Ynez recently a great horned owl (a bird I have associated with my father) called me and I walked to within 15 feet. We looked at each other intently before I tried to speak owl and he flew away in disgust. Two nights this week in different parts of town a screech owl has flown low over my head and called. I’ve heard them a few other times over the years, but never in flight. Coincidence? The item linked in this paragraph ends, “everything is a process of spiritual growth.” That’s been my core focus since soon after switching my life focus from technology to psychology.

Further down the hit list is an essay by Harry Marriner I’m going to read and contemplate more. “Many North American Indian cultures associate counterclockwise spirals (starting from the center) with the concept of rising, and the clockwise spiral with the concept of descending.” Earlier tonight I had noticed that one of my two spiral themed pix above is looking down into the water, the other up into the sky.

OK, enough of my inward spiral for now. Next post I’ll be back to “normal” for you. 😉

Harry A. Marriner
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