Up,up and away!

If the idea of Earth being sentient, alive in the way we think of ourselves being alive, is a little uncomfortable, if not silly, then perhaps the word ‘sensitive’ will do instead.

It bothers me that so much digging, sucking and pumping out of materials, oil and gas goes on; processes that take from Earth’s body, but do not bother to properly put back. Surely this must lead to areas of weakness, as far as the planet is concerned.

Sure Earth is big and sturdy and can take it, but even so there have to be necessary adjustments made to balance out the whole, and in doing this new tensions will appear that will markedly alter surface conditions, including the atmospheres.

In ancient times, a few folk wandering the globe were hardly affected by ongoing change; nowadays billions of settled people can’t fail to suffer, either directly or as a consequence of alteration.

In short, to compensate for shrinkage and reducing surface pressure, Earth pushes more material outwards; a deficit on the surface leads directly to higher inner activity. Earth is cognisant of every square millimetre of Her being, and has the means and the intent to put things right.

From whence doth come mine aid

I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence doth come mine aid?

The words ‘From whence doth come mine aid’ were used for our school motto. The story was that in olden days wolves would come down out of the hills and attack the townsfolk, hence their need to call on the Lord to rescue them from the wild beasts.

After I wrote Cataclysm’s Day I was concerned that the fate for the few who survived would be very bleak indeed, that this story could also become apocalyptic and self-terminating, which was not what I had wanted to have happen at all.

I already had the makings of an answer to the dilemma, Rachael’s Prayer; the shaman woman had asked for assistance of the Guv’nor, she had deliberately sought him out, had brought the plight of Earth to his surprised attention, and she had no doubt that once the message was received, something would be done to help the situation on Earth.

Immediately the emphasis of the story shifted from a tight earthbound focus to one that was so broad it took it all the Universes, for the Guv’nor was the Gatherer and Balancer of the energies of Light and Dark, no less.

Suddenly ‘from whence doth come mine aid’ had real relevance for the telling of Earth’s story, but also for myself, for I had to let my thinking expand as far as I could get it to go, trusting that the words I needed would turn up out of the blue, as it were.

The Blessings of Dis, the second book of The Gatherers Trilogy deals with what is happening on Earth, but also with the way the Guv’nor and his two administrative assistants offer their aid.

When one has no doubts, everything is possible.

In a way I did not expect, the cosmic trio were immediately very droll, they became the comedy act, the light relief in what might have otherwise been a very gloomy and slow-moving saga.

With their appearance the writing was happily able to move to where I wanted it to go, the horror of Cataclysm was left behind, the journey towards a pre-utopian condition on Earth was started, and a new direction for the planet Earth and all the species there, could be suggested.

Accept from whence doth come thine aid, it may greatly surprise you!

Painted Posies

The bright, colourful header that caps off Tetralogia: Four Books To Change the World, these days, was scanned from a daub I did when I was twelve or thirteen. An art class effort, if the memory is still accurate, produced on real paper, as a reward for having made progress with earlier tries on printed newspaper.

To go back a bit: Our art teacher, Sammy S, was really something of a different sort of person. I’ve come to realise that now, although at the time we quietly accepted the fact that he turned up each day to work dressed in an immaculate deep grey suit with a fine white pin stripe in it, black shoes, polished, had his hair carefully brushed, and spoke in a very cultured accent. Sammy was genteel, didn’t get down and dirty, but must have done something, because dozens of small tins of poster paint were mixed up and ready for use every morning: black, white, red, yellow and blue. There were also dozens of good pencils sharpened and awaiting our command. We did a lot of line drawing, drawing a posing model, still life with fruit or flowers or both, and lots and lots of painting with large brushes and the poster paint.
In those days schools in my part of the world put aside decent amounts of class time for art and music. Both studies require a great deal of skill and practice, and therefore are excellent for developing the body and mind; for offering children the opportunity to express themselves anyway they liked, without undue criticism or censure. If you don’t use it you lose it, but if you never had it, believe me, you have missed a great deal.
Wednesday, from eight in the morning till lunch time – one pee break allowed, you didn’t get off that easy – we made paintings of flowers, usually dahlias, big beautiful specimens in lovely colours of red, violet, cream yellow, orange. Perhaps Sammy had a garden, and that’s where he let his hair down.
We were encouraged to do as much as we could in the time, spreading the wet paints over sheets of old newspaper, which someone must have torn apart and provided for our use. Or maybe we did pencil sketches of the same, to get a better idea of what we were looking at.
I have never forgotten Sammy, nor have I ever not done some kind of art. I got the bug back then, and have lived with it ever since.

Maybe so, maybe not!

By Book Two of the trilogy the ability to move to another reality beyond that on Earth is made known, and through the medicine woman, Rachael, the other refugees in Astar become aware of how to access this ‘other’ place.
I don’t think it is so very odd to suppose that another reality could exist. It seems to me we already employ bits of somewhere else and don’t realise we’re doing it.
There’s the simple Duhs-ville day-dreaming states, the kind where we retain a little sense of what is going on around us while we wander off, but then there’s the other deep, deep, kind when we click back into our present, with not the vaguest idea of where we’ve been, although our whole body seems to be perfectly comfortable with having gone awhile.
Strange!
Think also of the many occasions when we call beings and objects to us, or we ‘go’ to where they are, and continue on our lives as if nothing had happened.

Small example: We are feeding the hummingbirds right now. It’s winter time; you would think that these little birds would always be about the feeder, but this is not so. Every time, however, when I notice their absence, and say something such as ‘Where are the hummers today?’, within seconds one or even two will appear, hovering in front of the window or at the feeder to prove their existence.
The same happens with people. How often has one said; ‘Where’s so and so, I haven’t seen them for ages,’ yet in no time at all the absent one reappears.

Perhaps reality is something of a revolving door, and we don’t always stay on the one side. We can move about, carrying along with us sufficient basic information as to place and how it should look
The animal kingdoms are probably well aware of this sort of journeying and take it for granted; birds and fish are likely clued in too. Our young children often display an awareness of a dimension outside what we would consider normal, and are quite comfortable using it.

I well remember our eldest boy, at the age of four, coming into our bedroom in a state of great indignation, demanding that we go to his bed and remove the three foxes that had been stomping all over him. I asked that he hand them to me so that they could be let loose in the garden. It was done, and while we saw nothing and carried nothing away, we did it with great seriousness. The child was experiencing an intrusion from somewhere, and could not be pacified until the beasties, in this case, were got rid of.

Manifestation, illusion – names are possibly too restrictive for such matters. As I remarked in an earlier blog, the saying, ‘Things have to be seen to be believed,’ can also be rendered, ‘Things have to be believed to be seen.’

Go to it!

When I decide to ‘do’ the closets, everything gets taken from the dark, fusty places and thrown into the light of day. Consider: more than solid objects get tossed; those bits of this and that have merely ‘fixed’ in this physical reality other more ephemeral states, such as wants, desires, have to haves that have somehow failed to come up to snuff, disgust, greed hidden for later, artifice that did not work.
So much that needs to be hauled out casts a long shadow on the day by its very existence.
Those scary, unspoken concerns probably account for the fact that closet cleaning doesn’t happen often. But it will have to be done eventually, when the cupboard doors won’t shut properly; the last signal that the ineffable has caught up to the inevitable!
House cleaning, a vigorous, visceral act of coming to grips with what is, makes things right through action.
When the mind gets full of junk, it’s not a bad idea to remove it by whatever means. Head banging is a bit extreme, but maybe Earth had reached that point on June, 13, 2065.

eeny-meeny

Go to Google and type in – entropic degradation of the earth – the comments made there on a Physics Forum are so close to what I believe is the case, that I felt directed to refer you to them.
Mars is not a living planet, not now, and the chance of making it so again are unlikely this side of forever. Mars must have lost its atmospheric shielding somehow; maybe humans used to live there, and following a pattern of behaviour current on this planet, managed to send the Red Planet to its death.

Pray for Heavenly intervention to divert catastrophe, by removing the destiny of Earth from human control. The stories in The Gatherers Trilogy were written with that hope in mind. Earth is probably not without opinions. Can’t it also make application for redress from a higher authority?

Want to risk the consequences?

Cataclysm’s Day

Book One of The Gatherers Trilogy is ominously called Cataclysm’s Day; the opportunities for the few survivors to find safety being woefully short!

Earth has birthed a cataclysm, a very natural thing for a planet with a volcanic history to do, but devastating for those who are caught in the deadly process. This is not a post-apocalyptic gut-wrencher with few options, it leans strongly towards a pre-utopian future, and the characters in the tale, though finding themselves in a world torn apart, bring to the intimate disaster their own innate strengths. Instead of giving in, they prefer to open up to all manner of unexpected influences, some more believable than others.

Tinklers

…Some e-data that Via got up said that there were Tinklers and farmers in the valley, and both groups were hard-working, easy-going folk who went about their business and let their neighbours do the same. There being plenty of room to spread out in the valley, the folk had no reason at all to stand on each other’s toes, and over the years they rubbed along very nicely, taking comfort from each other.

Tinklers is an odd name to have, reported the article, but of any that might have been chosen, it was best suited to those who used it.
The Tinklers were not descendants of a single race of people, such as the gypsy-bands of old Europe and Asia, or the nations of peoples who called the Americas their home, or any other indigenous group that was distinct from all the rest of humanity, but gatherings of peoples who’d lived so long together and followed a particular way of living life, that they’d taken a common name.