FEED THE GARDEN

Welsh Crywth and phighorn

I was horrified this morning by some political news, and I was going to write something about it in my diary, but prompted by something a friend said, I pleaded with the Lord to give me some guidance about this, and I was given it.  Feed the garden, not the weeds.

This principle is long familiar to me. As a student of meditation with the Vedantists, I soon learned that one wants to encourage the establishment of the Divine within oneself by putting your mind in the lap of The Mother.

So, let us all go toward the Divine and put our minds there, and not on the nightmare of our political situation, shall we?

There are no female saints whose feast day occupies either today or tomorrow, so I have settled on Saturday's lady, who turns out to be Saint Cointha (aka "Quinta" or "Cynthia"), a martyr who died being dragged by her ankles through the streets of Alexandria, during the persecutions of the Emperor Trajanus Decius in about 249 b.c.  The brutal Trajanus Decius registers with barely a blip on my radar. It is the holiness of the martyred girl to which we aspire, right?

Cointha is sometimes depicted with a horse in the picture, since she was dragged by one, her ankles tied to it somehow. I wasn't able to find many pictures of her, though. Her feast day is February 8th, and that is about all we know of her.

There are so many of these female saints who passed into the mist of time with barely a whisper of a history! I have often wondered why so little fanfare is given them, while rather more of the male saints have some history to hang onto. I have often wondered why.

At any rate, Christian chronicles don't dally too long with the goings on of kings and princes. Men like Trump are a dime a dozen in antiquity and they provide no inspiration. The saints, however, are another matter, aren't they?

What are we supposed to get from the scant information about Saint Cointha? She gave everything she had for the faith, and I suppose that is enough to know.

My guru, the Swami Swahananda, used to advise me to compare myself and my attributes to those of the Lord. In comparison to the Divine Mother, my gifts of spirit and character pale in comparison. So we shouldn't congratulate ourselves much, if at all, right? Even comparing oneself to the saints is an exercise in humiliation, for the most part.

My mood was greatly improved by the wonderful reminders of today. Feed the garden, not the weeds.

Also, it occurs to me that, instead of getting wrapped around the axle about this era's version of Trajanus Decius and letting him destroy my peace, it is infinitely more appropriate to celebrate and imitate the Lord's creative flow through the creative projects I so love. After all, even the saints need some artistic outlet, now and then. Think of  Hildegard of Bingen and those of her ilk.

The day started with serious mourning and weeping but transmuted itself into the happy creation of a Saint Patrick's day shawl with a crochet pattern and some yarn a friend gave me. In the tween times, I began to write a song - the first in many years. Musical instruments will follow. And sheet music. And things of that persuasion.

During ALL of it; the mourning, the weeping, the writing, the painting, the crochet and the music, my mind is in the lap of The Mother, and we are celebrating.

I hope all of you can transform your sorrows into celebrations today and every day.

God bless us all.

Silver Rose
Sannyasini Kaliprana

(c) copyright 2020 Silver Parnell
All rights reserved.

THE PLEASURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

"Art Student" - 1997

Silver Parnell

Layers of consciousness pervade creations, whether a sketch, a story, a crocheted baby blanket, or a piece of jewelry made by hand, they are all steeped in experience, feeling and relevance, especially for the creator, the artist.

We aesthetic types are driven to produce beautiful things. Some artists produce stark and sometimes even ugly things, but those creations have a dark beauty that comments upon and reveals the dark aspects of our lives and our world. It all shakes down to some kind of beauty in the end.

Capturing a moment in time, and placing it onto a canvas or a sheet of paper (such as the one, above) merges the moment with the beautiful object produced. In this sketch is the inspired feeling of throwing myself back into the two dimensional art during a period of heartache, the end of a short marriage in which I discovered that my new husband was actually a con artist, though not a very ambitious one. He had lied about everything except his name, then rushed me into marriage on the pretext that he was so keen to have me, when the truth was considerably more modest.

The man was in financial ruin and had to hop onto someone - anyone - who would keep him from becoming homeless and thereby looking bad in the eyes of his parents. It was a disaster, most particularly because, while I had a rather good job as an office manager and litigation secretary, I had no money to speak of. At any rate, I got out as soon as I could, vowing to never go near another man as long as I lived. I have never been and would never be "lucky in love." It made me feel very little to have been used so badly for so pedestrian a reward.

So I furiously sketched out my disappointment and regret, channeling that energy into my classwork. I had never been so prolific. I remember the day I sketched my fellow artist in class, but it is more than intellectual recollection that is fused with the image. The energetic wave created while begetting a picture without looking at the paper feels something like doing a high wire act. At times, tears came to my eyes as I risked the daring trapeze - depicting without a net.

Birthing art into the world, even when fueled by despair and heartache, is a glorious thing because it arises out of body and mind and then returns to body and mind, gifting the mind with pleasing line and shape that strikes a chord in the brain. Consciousness of the object, in first the creation of it, and then the appreciation of it, is its own reward. If you can sell your work, that's really wonderful, but it's almost beside the point.

Today, I am disabled, in chronic pain, and am very slowly going blind and, although cheated out of an inheritance promised to me for 50 odd years, and living an embarrassingly mean existence on Social Security alone, I revel in the pleasure of consciousness. The drama and color of it all is remarkably pleasing, in the same way that a really good movie or Broadway play would be. Movies and plays would be dull, if not for considerable conflict. Books about writing will often counsel budding writers to be sure and include big conflict over which the hero prevails.

We are all the heroes of our own little dramas, and the degree to which we rise above our cares is the degree to which we 'succeed' in life. The weight of the cross that each of us carries through our own drama is a testament to our dignity as human creatures and, even when someone is discounting us or demeaning us, we are dignified by it if we can view all of it through the lens of gratitude for the consciousness of all of it. The greater the conflict, the better the story.

Today I am taking great pleasure in my perceptions of life and my own peculiar story, experiencing the movement of the Lord throughout, and I hope that all of my readers may likewise take great joy in the pleasure of the gift of consciousness and self reflection, today and every day.

Silver Rose