That's Kreativ with a "K"

Thank you Magaly, over at Pagan Culture for nominating me for a Kreativ Blogger award. I'm not sure what all this is, but at the very least it's an excuse to talk about some of my other favorite blogs because if I'm reading things correctly, I need to now nominate seven blogs.

I hereby nominate the following blogs for this here Kreativ Blogger award. I only personally know one of these people (he's lovely) but their blogs are incredible.

The Bloggess. Irreverent and surreal, often offensively hilarious, Jenny The Bloggess got blocked on Twitter by William Shatner and started a revolution. Or she would have if she hadn't gotten so drunk. Jenny will be in the bathroom for the remainder or until the xanax kicks in.

Lover of Strife. Because he's brilliant and this award will look so good next the goat entrails.

Six Word Blog. Condensed Haiku. (I'm figuring someone else will nominate Anne Johnson's other blog, the wonderful "Gods Are Bored," but just in case I'll link it here, too.)

Impotent Rage. I love Mamiel's intelligent and compassionate take on things.

The BHJ. No words. Just read it.

Jim Doran. Even less words, but in this case it's 'cause Jim's a visual artist.

La Tartine Gourmande. Beautiful pictures and wonderful recipes.

And I've got to disclose 7 things about me:

-I love William Powell in "The Jewel Thief" more than in the "Thin Man" movies (but I still love him *a lot* in the Thin Man movies!)
-I am an ardent Short Track Speedskating fan. (Go JR! Vancouver 2010!)
-I secretly draw, but I don't let on to any of my friends.
-My favorite color is orange.
-Hawaiian slide guitar makes me weep with joy.
-I support the public option in healthcare.
-I love the mountains, but I always dream of the desert.

Here are the rules for this little award ceremony:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award.
2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.
4. Name up to 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.
5. Nominate up to 7 Kreativ Bloggers.
6. Post links to the blogs you nominate.
7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know they have been nominated.

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).

Princess Dress

[Click Dogs to see all installments of the Legend of Fowl Feng. If you are reading this in a reader, you'll have to come to the blogsite.]

You remember hurtling through space. That’s what you’d say if there were someone to tell. Hurtling through space with great purpose and destiny, only there was no way to tell really that you were moving at all. No air to blow against you, the stars so distant they never moved day after day. At first, you really didn’t think about going anywhere.

Slowly the darkness grew gray and thin, and even more slowly you realized this must be light. Then you spent some time hovering or hurtling through the light until you started feeling that maybe your were going somewhere. As if your thought conjured it, a faint breeze began to press against your cheeks, if you had cheeks, which is about as certain as the day.

The wind, however, doesn’t seem to care if it’s blowing against a cheek, or a meteor, or a wave of energy, or any of the other things you imagined you might have or be. The wind just blows stronger and stronger, pushing against your every contour like a hand pressing back and you get the idea that you have spent something like time imagining all the things that hand might be touching.

You are really moving now. You are getting someplace. And now the idea of a destination comes to you, a place where this hurtling will stop and this idea in you head makes the whole light around you shift so that you are no longer hurtling though space but are falling towards some ground. Just as you realize you are falling way too fast to stop, you hit something.

You look down and see you are wearing a long dress. “Princess dress,” you think wistfully.

“Oh bloody hell! We’re rescuing a princess?” exclaimed a horrified Rubeus. Sophie gave an exasperated sigh at the interruption. Hydra kept silent, turning her long beak from one side to the other. Chalydrus rolled his giant dragon eyes.

“You will not be rescuing anyone, Rubeus. You have other duties.”

“Then why am I here?” Rubeus stuck out his chin and Fowl Feng thought Chalydrus was going to blast him right there, but instead he just held Rubeus' gaze for a moment and then turned to Sophie. “Continue, dear maiden.”

Sophie was silent for a moment. Feng wanted her to continue because it seemed so important to her. He put his paw on her leg and said, “I’ve never rescued a princess. Might be fun?”

She reached out and rubbed Feng's ear. “Oh you are a sweetie, aren’t you Fowl Feng.”

“Um, no, actually I’m not. Bit of a bastard really.” He nosed around in the dirt for a moment and then said under his breath so no could hear. “I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten puppies.”

Sophie just smiled and turned back to the fire to continue her story.

G*d (Whatever That Is)

Gods are those parts of existence that are bigger than we can understand as individuals. They are like mountains. We can see them in their wholeness only at a great distance. From the other side of the valley we can look across to the far horizon and see the triangle shape of the mountain. We can point and say, "Mountain," or "Amaterasu," or "Desire."

But to come into any relationship with the mountain, we must move in close, come into direct contact with the mountain, with the god. As we move closer to the mountain, the god looms and then disappears, breaks apart into meadows and lakes and forests and the innumerable details of its actual existence. We may identify the god in its entirety only at a great distance; we can only know the god a piece at a time. We must walk in this meadow, aware of these flowers and that ground squirrel and remembering the ridges and peaks and other places, as we smell the heather around us.

G*d (whatever that is) is whatever the sum of everything plus the knowledge of that sum and the ability to comprehend both the sum of the parts and the whole. It may or may not be what we were expecting. G*d (whatever that is) is represented in our minds by figures of old men, or women with a thousand arms, or a giant winged snake with the head of a dog that shoots lightening out of its eyes. (It could happen.) We may see g*d (whatever that is) as a force we call compassion or creativity. But whatever we point to when we say g*d is just a mountain at a distance. We cannot predict what the old man is going to look like up close. She may look much younger in places. We cannot yet know what g*d is until we walk through her meadows and breathe his air. And we can’t begin to do that until we are willing to let go of our nice perfect view of the mountain.

Next Steps

So there you are, down in the muck. You’ve putrefied and now you lie on the couch like a shapeless mass with just barely enough form to use the remote. Or you’ve calcinated, burned up in the fire, and now you feel like you are floating through life, an ashy ghost. It’s all well and good to know that life can suck for everyone, that everyone has times when it all flies off the rails. And yeah, people all over are getting their lives back together, so apparently it is possible, but how did they do it? And is it something you can do, too? Because frankly, there is nothing good on t.v. and ghosts can’t have great sex.

What we do when we are down in the rot and ash is pay attention and let go at the same time. Whatever you pay attention to without force or attachment, will change on its own. The stuckness will dissolve at the very moment we let go of the need to make the experience mean something, when we allow our pain to just be its own thing in itself.

The kind of attention we need to bring is not something we are taught to do. In fact, we are often taught the opposite. We are taught how to turn away from pain and deny trouble. We are taught to believe that things don’t change and the only way to avoid pain is to pretend it doesn’t exist. But everything changes. And pain that is listened to changes into something else, something a lot like grace. To learn how to pay attention properly and effectively, we must first practice.

What you want at the beginning is a field of intention for a while. Science says about 12 minutes a day should suffice. The intention is to simply pay attention. Sit comfortably in a place where you can be quiet for about 12 minutes without people thinking you’re weird or asking whether you took out the trash. You want to be comfortable so that the effort to sit doesn’t become the issue, but not so comfortable that you fall asleep. Keep looking for places to sit until you find something that works.

The only instruction for the next 12 minutes is: pay attention to your out-breath. That’s the action that defines your field of intention and makes these 12 minutes different from just sitting around. So for the next 12 minutes, every time your remember to do so, pay attention to your out-breath. What follows is some advice for making this possible.

If all thought is a symphony, the out-breath is silence. Whenever your thoughts get too intense and loud, too dissonant to bear, you can just catch the next out-breath outta there. This may sound like denial, but it’s not because you’re going to return to whatever needs your attention. Right now, you are building up trust in yourself that if you get into the pain, you can ease up again.

Turn the attention to the out-breath and feel the silence. The out-breath is always there. It’s the release, a built in letting go that is always available, always ready to take a little pain away. As you pay attention to the outbreath and notice the light easing it brings, say thank you because it helps to practice common courtesy and express thanks for anything that helps.

Now, your mind will wander and miss a bunch of out-breaths, but so what? This is not the time to waste belittling yourself. That’s old and boring and you want something, anything, interesting and new. So instead of harassing yourself when your mind wanders, laugh gently.

Cultivate an appreciation for how silly the mind is, the way it gets bored, goes off on tangents, gets lost. It’s kind of adorable really. Like a young child or a little dog. It knows it’s not supposed to, but the mind just can’t help itself. It slips off trying not to be noticed, but you always do see it eventually, over there, not thinking about the breath at all. You catch the mind wandering and bring it back, gently, like an innocent child or a happy-go-lucky dog.

Getting angry does no good. Yell at the mind and it just yells at you because what exactly do you yell with inside your head? The mind. So if you are yelling at your mind, then your mind is yelling instead of paying attention. So instead of yelling at yourself, give a little knowing chuckle, a smile, see the thoughts your mind found to get in trouble with. Say to yourself, “thought” and watch the thoughts ripple into nothing. Laugh a joyous laugh at just how exactly, perfectly, predictably, your mind is behaving. And then you're ready to pay attention to the next out-breath.

And when you’ve gone through this however many times that feels good or worthwhile or somehow right, or when your timer beeps after 12 minutes, you’re done for today.

Do this enough, and you will develop a way to bring awareness to anything. And for right now, that’s all you need to do.

[Photo: © 2008 Keir Morse]

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?