Sunday, June 7, 2009

Walking Lines




Unnamed and unnameable...boo!
I apprehended myself being unaware.
With the roar of a lion, I stormed out of my body, and whimpered as duckweed welcomed.
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  1. Winston RileyJune 7, 2009 at 2:30 PM

    DAY THREE June 7, 2009
    Anne went to church and Darby stayed home to read. After some Yoga and meditating, I planned to take an hour bike ride but it looks like rain. So I started in with my project.

    First I returned to Emerson and it was so powerful. Where I left off went directly in to the part about being in the woods and the quote of “transparent eyeball.” There are nuggets after nuggets in that same vicinity in Chapter 1, such as:

    • I am glad to the brink of fear.
    • I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the auniversal Being circulate through me. I am part or particle of God.
    • I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.
    • The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestioni of an occult relation between man and the vegetable (sacred plants, trees, the woods)
    • They nod to me, and I to them (reminds me of a poem I wrote a few days ago when the field became the voice of the Beatles singing to me, asking if I got the joke)

    Then nearing Chapter 2 he explains that this is not Nature but Man perceiving Nature or the two in concert. He says nature is not always “tricked” in holiday attire but takes on the costume of Spirit. In other words, he explains that the temperament of man or the observer overlays the view of nature.

    In the start of Chapter 2 he explains that all things break down in to one of four categories, Commodity, Beauty, Language and Discipline. And it is Commodity he addresses in the short chapter 2. And I stopped with this line:
    More servants wait on man than he’ll take notice of.

    That his me strongly, meaning that our consciousness is so rich and such a gift. Such a gift.

    Next I went to Ancestor Lu and read the line:

    In activity and quietude, know the source progenitor.

    This is so familiar to me because I’ve read these lines so often. And I’ve often reflected on the source progenitor. The ultimate. The source of all. The original One before duality. The unnamed. And the notion of work involved in keeping to the source in the midst of both activity and quietude.

    From there I thought about trigrams and what would follow the previous two days and decided that I would consider Yin within Yang, meaning Yang on top and bottom and Yin in between, which is hexagram 61, called Centering Conforming by the Ritsema and
    Karcher translation or Faithfulness in the Center or Truthfulness Within from the Tom Cleary translation. Also as two trigrams it is Wind above, lake below.

    The main thought of the hexagram, as far as I can tell is to reserve judgement carefully and be very cautious with action. It talks a lot about the “Yellow Woman,” being Earth. Which made me think about the stomach and the five elements, Earth being the stomach or spleen and the color being yellow. Faithfulness in the center means to be centered with the divine feminine—Yang holding Yin in suspension, and Yin being the force or the strength of the Yang. The most profound basis of the hexagram may be the simple thought that truth (and what I started thinking about Justice) will prevail and should be always sought out before any action is taken.

    Then I went to Chapter III of the Tao te Ching and read about Not desiring things prevents confusion of the heart. If nothing is done, then all will be well. This of course is building on the first two chapters, all saying the same thing basically about doing and not taking credit.

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  2. Winston RileyJune 7, 2009 at 2:31 PM

    Day 3 continued

    Then I went to Chapter III of the Tao te Ching and read about Not desiring things prevents confusion of the heart. If nothing is done, then all will be well. This of course is building on the first two chapters, all saying the same thing basically about doing and not taking credit.

    But the feeling was growing in me about becoming selfless. Losing self to find the source progenitor. To become the source progenitor.

    So I started doing image searches of The Source and one thing I found was the beautiful painting of the naked woman with the vase pouring water, painted in 1856 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. I loved it and was moved by it, but it didn’t quite fit my feeling. So I started searching something else, which I can’t now remember but I found the image called The Beauty of Urban Decay. It also moved me, but it wasn’t quite right either. So I photoshopped the two together with a slight change to expand The Source with a wider left panel and cut out the top of Beauty above the angel’s wing and then framed them as if it was one image.



    I felt like this captured my feeling. So I returned to the first two lines and wrote the bit about jumping out of myself like a lion, but I was left with the question, “to where?”

    And it came to me. To duckweed, which I had recently read about in a Zen meditation book and had seen earlier this morning in a magazine talking to Anne in Southern Living I think, about making a garden in a bowl and it showed duckweed.

    This is the hexagram:

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