chose your ways of looking...

i should mention that the tumour in my breast is not an early-stage one, but about the size of a tangerine, which makes it a later-stage, aggressive grower... as cancer cells multiply they do so exponentially which is why early diagnosis is such a mantra. still, i'm not concerned or afraid and i should explain why.

when i first consulted my doctor and we aspirated what presented as a cyst but delivered contrary results, i asked him if it were possible that there was a malignancy growing inside a shell of cystic activity. he told me that would be unlikely as such a thing is very rare (LOL i always knew i was a rare sort of girl...!). this led me to wonder why my body would shroud such a thing, giving it plenty of opportunity to grow to an alarming proportion. i already concluded my trajectory is hardly a negative one since my instinct woke me up months before with an overwhelming and irresistible injunction to stop my self-destructive habits and begin a radically different lifestyle. if i was being lined up to quickly succumb to cancer, as many do, why would my body give me that head start? why not catch me tragically unawares and locked into a poisonous lifestyle? my point of view towards life has always been heuristic and creative, in the sense that i endeavour to start from the silver-lining, not end there, as pessimism and negative thinking only beget their own fruit.

i believe there must be a good reason why the tumour was hiding under a cloak of cystic behaviour that wouldn't concern me. i believe my body wanted to produce a growth of a good size so that i can more easily chart its progress, experiencing more dramatically and tangibly just how this process of self-regulating and healing cancer thru diet and natural means really works.

i noticed yesterday that my liability of excessive response was the first thing to get sweetly tweaked. never being one for moderation i started chugging back large amounts of very strong chaga and pau d'arco tea and by the end of the day for the first time i felt a little poorly. my kidneys and liver, one can assume, are still under stress from my previous lifestyle choices and the demands of detoxification and healing and they certainly let me know that last night. the reaction was NOT severe, just some headache (which i never ordinarily get) and a queasy feeling that made me want to lie down. within the hour i was feeling better again and have modified my zealous attitude.

not sure exactly why, but i've always been the sort of person who would think, if one is good, ten will be fantastic! its one of my character flaws that has really resisted alteration. the remarkable thing about this 'crisis' is the high relief the self is cast into and the low resistance to change i'm enjoying. suddenly the notion of being gentle with myself has a whole new appeal and i feel neither anxiety nor impatience in treating this cancer in the same way. i don't view it as an enemy i'm doing battle with but as a wisdom formation that has arrived into my life to teach and guide me towards the changes i've always sought out but have found difficult manifesting.

when i woke up this morning i felt clear and good. i turned onto my back and took my breast into my hand and put the other hand on top where the big lump can be clearly felt. in my mind i talked to it for a bit in gratitude and love and couldn't help but notice that to my perceptions it feels reduced by a fraction, more consolidated and organized, while the breast overall is less inflamed-feeling. i notice when i drink my green juice or my tea, i have sharp pains in the mass, which to me are the signals that it has actively begun sacrificing itself for me, which is the pact i have made with it... i contend it has come into being to take me on this journey which can only end in its complete destruction and my rebirth. it has come to do this willingly so that my own living can begin in truth, engineering my salvation.

i should also report that my instincts are strongly telling me that i should aspire to declining surgery as well, especially if i can demonstrate that my methods are proving effective at reducing the tumour. again life is furnishing me with a bit of time to do this as my doctor relayed it would be about three days before the oncologist's office would be calling to book my appointment. in my file there is now the first ultrasound to reference. before any decision about surgery is made i will insist on another ultrasound (avoiding a mamogram if possible) so that i can compare before and after to see how i'm doing. if there's even the _slightest_ indication that i've reduced the tumour i will move to protect the integrity of my body and continue to use my own powers for inner scalpels, gently working their magic.

because of the largeness of the tumour there is, of course, the possibility that the cancer has already spread invisibly to other organs in which case i will have a few questions about how much help or hindrance surgery would present. i'm open to the possibility that it may be necessary, but overall i feel very strongly that my body is saluting me in the approach i'm taking and that it's rising to the occasion to do what it does best. my breast doesn't look to be suffering, there's no puckering or discolourations (save the lingering bruise from the aspiration) and there's absolutely no changes in the nipple or any discharge. given the size of the mass, if surgery was done right away it would be very disfiguring and would affect the structural integrity of the breast, that is if an outright mastectomy was not recommended.

so there are going to be some interesting decisions ahead. i have no problem visualizing myself as a one-breasted amazon, but i similarly have no problem seeing myself harnessing the powers of mind and body and universal healing wisdoms to perform the operation on myself, preserving the form that be me. i've always been ashamed of my breasts and body and i can't emphasize enough how this single experience has totally relieved me of this wounded sense of self that i've struggled with for so long.

i have always marveled how in life bad consequences can develop from well-intentioned acts just as great things can develop from tragedies. i definitely know how to file this experience already, no matter where it ultimately leads.

doing well, surfing the changes, in love and in light.

fasting begins tomorrow...

starting tomorrow i'll be following a green juice fast for a minimum 30 days, preferably 60 days if i can manage it, supplemented with my teas and three times daily hydrogen peroxide water in an increasing dosage until i get to 25 drops of 35% food grade H202 per glass.

i'm a huge fan of liposomal vitamin C but the cost has been prohibitive. only two days ago american osteopath dr. mercola of mercola.com came out with an affordable version of this technology so i've ordered some and will be keen to start taking it. i'll be continuing forward with a maca supplement so that i can have best chances to keep to my yoga practice even through the fasting. i consider it great fortune that i'll be able to fast during hot summer months.

eating the poison snake...

my doctor called me early this morning to confirm what i suspected, that i have a cancerous tumour surrounded by cystic structures, which explains why it presented so strongly as a cyst in the very beginning. i will be on a fast track to an oncologist at princess margaret hospital where arrangements will be made for a lumpectomy. i reported to my doctor that he should not be surprised to hear that i will refuse chemo and radiation. he said that often, particularly in cases where the cancer has not spread, or metastasized, to other parts of the body, a lumpectomy is often successful treatment on its own.

the wonder of all this is that, for someone with cancer, i'm doing very well, feeling good, and carrying forward with a strong positive attitude, even in the face of the inconvertibility of this diagnosis. part of me would like to avoid the lumpectomy and work with the mass in order to gauge the effectiveness of the ketogenic diet, but given the aggressive growth of tumour and the additional complexities involved once a cancer has spread to other organs, i think it will be a sufficient challenge to use the ketogenic diet and the other protocols to prevent the spread or recurrence of the 'disease...'

if the cancer has already invaded other organ systems, i will still have an opportunity to defy the odds with holistic methods as there is ample evidence, anecdotally and clinically, of people healing this condition with true hippocratic strategies even in even late and so-called 'hopeless' stages of the illness.

last night i dreamt that i had a few cats and one of them caught a small and thin black snake that looked almost to be made of crude oil tar. we knew it was poisonous. the cat, which reminded me of a runt cat i once made a home for called pushkin, pounced on the tiny snake and promptly ate it. the dreamer told me that it did this to protect the other cats. i nuzzled with it for a few seconds and could feel the poison pulsing through its nervous system. then it got up and walked away from me as cats do when its time for their passing.

i've been aware for some time now that the part of me that has been stunted and handicapped by my early life needs to be laid to rest so that i can start a new, more effective chapter. this presentation of cancer is a magical opportunity for me to do just that.

all medicine people go through an ordeal, a dark night of the soul, an encounter with death and risk. it ends up being the cornerstone experience that teaches us about human potential, sparks our regenerative powers and compassionate awareness of others. i embrace this cancer for the teaching and transformation it promises and feel newly committed to midwifing my talents, mind and ingenuity not only for my own benefit, but in order to make the contribution to culture and community that so satisfies our human instinct of connection and evolution.

AMOR FATI

a new journey begins...

a short time after i quit drinking alcohol, coffee, and smoking pot, alongside some radical dietary changes and the protocols of a long-term candida cleanse, i discovered a sizeable lump in my right breast. it behaved and palpated like a cyst and seemed a predictable healing reaction to the sudden changes. perhaps, too, a reflection of the load my liver was carrying in metabolizing the detox, throwing my hormones out of alignment, producing a fibrocystic breast. when i saw a medical doctor a month later for a routine physical and mentioned the cyst, he examined me and concurred that in every way it felt and presented like a cyst and offered to aspirate it for me. i thought this was a good choice since the aspirant could be immediately analyzed. a normal cyst would present a clear, serous fluid that wouldn't even need be sent to the lab. blood, on the other hand, would warrant further investigation.

while the doctor prepared the syringe for me, i mentioned a dream from over ten years ago, that depicted a mass in this same location. in the dream a felt a deep need to manually express the contents and all this old blood and pus came out. i didn't elaborate on the rich psychological associations this dream brings up that are especially germaine to me at the moment, i just left it as a curiosity. he inserted the syringe and began to aspirate the mass. i couldn't see the syringe myself but i did note that he moved his insertion point a few times as if not getting into the lumen he imagined was there. he abruptly ended his efforts and showed me the vial which was a quarter full of blood. he explained that this could just be a result of a highly nodular cyst, that he might have been repeatedly hitting the structure of it, but i could tell he was somewhat shaken, either by the synchrony of my dream or the reversal of his clinical expectations.

we scheduled an ultrasound but not a mamogram, as an ultrasound will be able to tell us conclusively whether it is a cyst or not. the results of the procedure, which i underwent yesterday, will be known in full next week. at minimum, i know from the sonographer that its definitely not a simple cyst, but in fact a complex mass with its own vascular supply.

in this period of preemptive mastectomies and killer chemo and radiation protocols, i feel i've been gifted by my body with a wonderful opportunity. on the one had, it's having a conversation with me about the deeper issues in my life that need attention and transformation. on the other, i've been blessed with a keen intuition that started me on the path of healing before the mass in my breast presented itself. frankly, i'm excited to use my own situation as a living laboratory where i can apply the holistic insight and commitment to natural medicines that means so much to me.

until next week when i will receive more information i've adjusted my diet to a strict ketogenic one which emphasizes greens and organic proteins alongside green juicing and a rigorous practice of hot yoga. i'm hydrating with liters of pau d'arco and chaga tea, taking maca to normalize my hormones and keep my energy and stamina up, and supplementing my vitamin C and D, but otherwise keeping things pretty simple. the ketogenic diet with soon start to deprive the cell mass of its glucose needs and unlike healthy cells which can switch to fat supplies for sustenance, apoptosis will dominate and i expect the mass to slowly reduce in size.

as finances are an issue, not only for me but for so many people, i won't have recourse to other practitioners and so will have to develop a strong self-reliance and an ability to be resourceful and positive with the tools i have. luckily, since i quit drinking a few months ago i've been feeling healthier and stronger than ever. this foundation will serve me well in the coming months as i embrace this opportunity to heal this unitary bodymind i currently call home... as i have always felt, the physical organism that we are is not an enemy who attacks us unexpectedly... it's a creative, constructive phenomenon which, when worked _with_ instead of worked _against_, presents unlimited potential for evolution and transformation.

since sharing and narrating is an important part of the healing process, i'll be journalling my experiences and how i'm managing my care on this blog...

at last! absolutely clear and compelling evidence that cancer relies on glucose fermentation for its invasive proliferations and that this can be managed and reversed by exploiting the ability of healthy cells to use the ketone cycle instead of the glucose cycle... by simple calorie reduction, eliminating carbohydrates and emphasizing healthy fats, proteins and greens alongside non-toxic drugs which support the dominance of ketone, cancer can be cured without recourse to treatments that are worse than the disease, pollute the environment and kill millions...

"The new approach to health care will feature the healing power of story. In the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, our healers will help people use the power of dreaming to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through." [Robert Moss, The Secret History of Dreaming]

"If our society were serious about cutting the costs of medical care, dreamwork would be taught and practiced in every school, community center, and clinic. Dreams supply nightly health reports that are as precise and objective, when accurately recorded, as any X ray or EEG and may be far more timely, since they reveal problems that could result in physical illness before we develop physical complaints." [Robert Moss, Conscious Dreaming]

a vision for canada... how to address the legacy of the harpoon government

on the one hand i think we have to accept the value of transitional measures, to understand that while we work to reconstitute civic participation and the values that define this country at the level of law and idea, we'll have to venture and discard, venture and discard, while we work to dismantle the power duology of corporatism, installing in its place social and cultural systems that honour our resources, educate the willing, and enable local address of community issues...

on the other hand, we also need to recognize the power of en masse walkouts... opting out of the majorly shit way things have been constellated and instead just getting on with creating our own solutions to the rampant abuses, the crimes against the vulnerable and the environment, our enslavement to ways of life that keep us disempowered and ignorant, not to mention our distinctly unhealthy and out of balance ideologies of consumption and short-term, greedy willfulness...

we also have to bite off that we can't put power into the hands of a population that has been conditioned by a poisoned society/leadership to think the world doesn't need to change, that we can carry forward with this way of life and even benefit from it. we need our visionaries in their many domains and specializations to have the courage to start the conversation the average person is too cowed and bewildered to even contemplate.

in this way, the issue would become the exchange and debate of meritorious ideas, the best and most comprehensive of which coming to be widely disseminated, rather than being beholden to people in power, begging them to change our world for us. this can be done one neighbourhood at a time. in fact its extremely important to make our search for a better life function at the local level in a super spontaneous way, as the solutions that will spark sustainable goodness and prosperity in red deer will be radically different than those which might revitalize st. john's...

with the immediacy of networking technology at our disposals, one can dream of a day when this idea of turning our backs in mass coordination, shunning the old ways, one locale at a time, will spread like wild fire until the entire country has finally taken control back, leading instead with the abundant ingenuity and problem-solving skills of a people who owe their allegiance not to the harpoons of the world, but to the earth which sustains us and deserves our respect; the freedom and possibility to do good and thrive at the same time, which was once the spiritual charter of this country; and new articulated formats for living amongst one another without fear, and most importantly, without being enslaved to the ignorance and illusions our power prophets would willingly finish us off with... 

shifting focus

devotion to reports of the many atrocities and injustices at work in the world furthers the illusion that this knowledge is somehow akin to action and part of diligent citizenship. it takes us away from active participation in our less dramatic personal and local lives, while the outrage it fosters comes to influence everything from our habits in traffic to the general lens we apply to our experiences and thoughts. in short, obsession with the news and accounts of so-considered 'enemy' action takes us out of the grit our of reality and, worst, it obstructs the butterfly effect.

perhaps to constructively influence what's happening in the world, we could shift focus to the good and the true that we can accomplish with our own bodies, developing impulse control and exploring the mystery of our own inner space, working to fully embody our day to day living and patters of consumption, our immediate relationships and conduct in our local community. by changing the resonance within us and moving from spectating to acting, we create a ripple effect that not only touches our proximal perimeters, it creates a chain reaction that will touch every country, every person, every life form on earth. 

a critique of objectification-culture

i've always found the notion that women are the natural carriers of physical beauty or eroticism in the world preposterous. men are no less beautiful or erotic in their many shapes and guises. its a question of how one looks at people. 

women are objectified to maintain the power imbalance of a sexist world that prefers to reduce them to sources of visual and sexual stimulation, rather than human beings to be experienced. this furthers the edict that those of lesser value in society should be seen and not heard. quite unfortunately, the vast majority of women have adapted rather than resisted this persistent distortion, doing everything possible to turn their assignment as exclusive carriers of two-dimensional sex appeal into a virtue, a power and a source of self-esteem. 

in fact, the more sexually evocative and attractive a woman feels, gauged exclusively according to feedback from her environment and her adherence to popular trends, the more she feels buttressed against the inevitable core inadequacies that come when one lives skin deep, the more she is blinded to her own avoidance of deeper self-encounter, and therefore the more controllable she becomes. 

as more and more women prop up their self-concept with acquiescence to a climate of air-brushed objectification-chique, submitting to the politics of male voyeurism, the more such distortions are furthered in the culture of men who profit from this unexamined dynamic of carried-over but now laundered and subtextualized patriarchy.

the possibility of true equality, authentic relationship, and cooperative development rests on the ability of our culture to see objectification not as some playful and harmless trifle or a celebration of feminine charms, but as an insidious devolution which conditions us to ascribe roles to both men and women that no longer serve society or the individual. it has always been possible to create images and art that evoke the beauty and erotic vitalism of both men and women in ways that doesn't demean or trivialize the people being depicted, it is the culture and the culture alone that has demonstrated a disinterest and inappetance for it. 

until women master this possibility for radical change and create space for its development and continued emergence, until we reclaim the integrity of our whole bodies through a reunification of our sexual self-image with our deeper source-grounds, we will continue to lop towards the future, blind to our participation with and furtherance of these artificial roles which don't make us as happy or turned on or satisfied as we like to imagine they do.

perhaps even more important, we won't be able to model a way forward for men, for they too have been emotionally and psychologically crippled by this climate that still too few dare question, which, for purposes of power and profit, associates sexual desire with the need to reduce a woman to an 'it' that can be consumed and discarded at will and as it becomes her lot in life, rather than respected, known and experienced as something completely different but equal.

butterfly effect

devotion to reports of the many atrocities and injustices at work in the world furthers the illusion that this knowledge is somehow akin to action and part of diligent citizenship. it takes us away from active participation in our less dramatic personal and local lives, while the outrage it fosters comes to influence everything from our habits in traffic to the general lens we apply to our experiences and thoughts. in short, obsession with the news and accounts of enemy action takes us out of the grit our of reality and, worst, it obstructs the butterfly effect.

to constructively influence what's happening in the world, focus on the good and the true that we can accomplish with our own bodies, developing impulse control and exploring our own inner space, working to fully embody our day to day living and patters of consumption, our immediate relationships and our conduct in our local community. by changing the resonance within us and moving from spectating to acting, we create a ripple effect that not only touches our proximal perimeters, it creates a chain reaction that will touch every country, every person on earth. 

on the importance of touch

(first published in The Glowing Hive Spring 2013)

Human beings are unique among animals for our long period of utter dependency after birth. No other animal is as vulnerable and reliant on parental care as the human infant. Given our relatively narrow pelvis, our babies need be born before the brain case takes its full size. A longer inter-uterine period would otherwise be ideal, but an older prenatal baby would never be able to make it's way out the womb portal. For this reason we must birth our young after nine months and give them our complete care and attention until several years later when they become ambulatory and aware enough to navigate their environment and make tentative choices.

Of course much has been written about this delicate period in human development and of the many conditions and features of this time is the sheer survival necessity of touch and bodily, particularly facial, interactions. Baby thrives when caregivers offer a tangible physical presence, when baby can feel that mother or father are an extension of their own fleshy business. The security of this connection allows the baby to develop somatic-mind, to inhabit the whole body of self, and to apply the true unfettered potential of how that body can interact with the space and circumstances it finds itself in. Spatial learning comes more easily, as does command and development of head and spine, rolling, crawling, walking, falling down and getting up, and so on.

On the emotional level, baby learns to express itself through first encountering the palette of behaviours and moods brought to bear on the environment. What baby experiences also becomes hardwired as presets, and like holes in a sieve, shape and limit how emotional contents will come to be expressed.

Ruminating on such factors attending our earliest experiences, the ones which give shape to our on-going development and unfolding, but which also reflect the areas of learning our individuality is seeking, I began to consider some of the most important features of intimate relationships. 

We very rarely think to examine, for example, the quality of our touch. The patterns of daily living obfuscate subtle distinguishing in a familiar topography of hugs, kisses, and hand-holding, and while these tend to become rote after a time, there still remains much that we could bring awareness to as portals for going deeper into intimacy and authenticity.

The hands and arms, embryologically, develop from the same cell bud as the heart, and in a very real sense they remain connected to this immense power point in the body. Not only do we use our arms to bring closer what is dear to us, we also find that orchestra conductors, who use their arms in large, sweeping, heartfelt gestures to lead an orchestra, are the longest living professionals as reported by American cardiologist, Stephen Sinatra, MD. Expressing ourselves from the heart center out through the arms and hands, in what they hold and touch and how, remains very programmatic, either serving to assist the free-flow of feeling from the heart out into life, or the unconscious obstruction of authentic connectivity to a world we don't really wish to grab hold of. 

The hands also carry in them the end point of a vast neural network that connects its sensate, tactile surface to the deepest reaches of inner space, to the organs vital for life and emblematic of the different emotional seats in the body, from the liver and anger, to the lungs and grief, to the kidneys and fear, the colon and loss and release, the small intestine with growth and learning, and so on. It is perhaps why we feel such a strong containment and closeness to the one we hold hands with and how this has so naturally become a human practice which gives much pleasure and security.

Quality of touch, then, becomes a matter of paramount importance. A playful slap or a thoughtless grab goes right into the tissues, and even if our rational minds put the kinetic event in context, the messages can accumulate, especially where there is an existing history. In this way we can both draw out of others and ourselves patterns of touch that have been imprinted from earliest life. Bringing more attention to the ways in which we put hands on each other then becomes an opportunity to unlearn old habits while exploring new, more effective ways to touch and be touched. The slightest interaction becomes a rich occasion to not slip into somatic unconsciousness, to take advantage of this sensual body that co-creates our inner conversations and outer points of view, bringing new dimension to all relationships.

on skepticism

skepticism is not only completely at odds with the spirit of science, its become a petri dish for the incubation of jingoism and reckless a priori assumptions about what can be known or worth knowing. it shucks and trades not with open-minded investigation, or confident reliance on the sufficiency of the scientific method, but with doubt (which is itself an assertion, not a question) and ad hominem attacks on either the query or the querent, both designed to poison waters and delimit the scope of true inquiry.

this world has become too enamoured with chain of command and intrigue... both of those, inspired by production line politics and the fruits of power, are, in the long run, mere wastes of human potential, barriers to progress and hazardous developers of corruption.

‎"The permanent revolution is vision, is spontaneity, perpetually renewed: every day the last day, or the first day, the beginning and the end. People are wont to speak of the necessity of a new order of things, but those in the grip of their personal ego can only give birth to an 'old' order. A new order is, correctly speaking, one which is renewed hourly."[Norman O. Brown]

regarding the following slate podcast, and the current controversy around sadomasochism: 

stanislav grof did much groundbreaking in this area... using holotropic breathing to return his subjects to the uterine period and its birth drama, he found that the expulsion from womb to the world outside involved pressures, sensations, and emotions that mix together fear, discomfort, asphyxia, and orgasm... we also know that our associations around sex and intimacy are coloured by not just our own experiences but the persona of the moment that we bring to bear on those experiences... in short, it's a fluid alive thing, in flux and subject to change. the BDSM lifestyle wants to remove self-inquiry from the link between violence and arousal, thanatos and eros, for fear of loosing 'kink' if its analyzed too much... yet these practices create more and more of an association between violence, powerlessness, shame and orgasm, and more and more of a handicapped need for these in order to access sexual release... the spiritual potential and kinetic apparatus of sex can be applied toward self-knowledge, growth, intimacy, respect and life-affirmation, but it can also be distorted by caprice, choice, or circumstance into a ill-thought-out quickening of the deconstructive instinct... what is certain is this, the more we reduce others to mere tools or instruments of pleasure that we "do" or are "done to," the more difficulty we will have looking at the world through grounded, compassionate, non-exploitative eyes...

I remember so clearly being that one voice in the room at case conferences with all of the leading so-called master homeopaths... when they would trot out different caricatures from their materia medicas and barely be able to sort their disdain from the human material, I would always ask the inconvenient questions, prompting world famous lecturers to pronounce, "I am not a psychologist madame, and thank god for that..." as if the psychological aspect of the human person could be reduced to the mere monkey behaviourism of repertorialist homeopathy (as if there could be no greater oxymoron)... of course encounters with Edward Whitmont, Rolf/Feitis, Cousens and Cicchetti were reassuring, but what I'm about to quote is the synthesis I've been really waiting to hear, and my favorite teacher Alize Timmerman has just offered it: "Knowing ourselves creates the first step into knowing a remedy. The better we understand ourselves, the better we can create insights in the core of a remedy and the person in front of us. The more self-knowledge we have, the more connection we can have with the healing power of a remedy."

LIVING OUT LOUD

(first published in The Glowing Hive Winter 2013)

Life without creative expression is inconceivable. Yet all too often in this topsy turvy world we're portioned among rules and roles, inherited from one fear-based generation and unquestionably passed to the next, biding us to suspect, even exclude, that decidedly inward realm of the personal imagination from which creativity takes its instructions and breath. We're taught it's somehow of mischief and ungodly in its autonomies, that its fundamental urge to represent what is otherwise impossible to communicate turns it into some kind of admonitory Icarus. 

Yet creativity, this infinite, ever-articulating manifestation of space intersecting time, expressed by the human in its culture of life, the crow in its toolmaking, the dolphin in its 'languaging,' this sine qua non life force energy which breaks up the weighted stone of history under our feet is surely not ours to trifle with. Like water, though it can be obstructed and constrained, it eventually wears down its containment to find free run through the tiniest chink. 

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Imagination takes us beyond what consensus reality and habit deem possible, launching us forward into undiscovered territories and capabilities we quickly take for granted.

A horse can lend its rider the speed and strength he or she lacks,
but the rider who is wise remembers it is no more than a loan.

- Pam Brown

We so easily forget that not only our art, but our tools, conventions and technologies, were all once but a far-fetched fantasy, a mote in the eye of someone others called mad or outrageous. The creative act not only furnishes us with the culture and entertainment of ages, it creates and sustains our institutions, our modalities of medicine and science, our habits of market, travel and home, even our manner of dress, cuisine, and lovemaking. Still, we are taught to think the worst, to be guarded against things that are 'all in our heads,' against 'getting carried away,' with one's 'head in the clouds...'

Ironically, our personality, which many assume to be a fixed emanation of some indestructible uniqueness, is actually a living projection of pure imagination, nothing like the concomitant, indestructible core, what Jung termed the personal and collective unconscious, which in truth guides our fateful choices and shapes our sense of person far more than our waking self. Imagination gives us play with who we are, but its deep in the unconscious where the mystery of our truth lies. 

In fact, were it not for our ability to conceive of ourselves as dramatic characters in contrapuntal role with each other and our environment, life would loose its consensual interlocks and social coherency. Were it not for our ability to at least by degree quiet the trivializing mind, to invite the cellular footprint of life to express itself in dreams and images, we'd have no problem-solving ability, no concept of future or past. 

Only the rational mind objects to clear images of mitochondrial separation in the wall drawings of ancient Egypt, predating the discovery of their behaviour in the late 1800s. 

Only a desiccant skepticism refuses to see for truth depictions of the helical structure of DNA which regularly appear in the drawings of shaman returned from entheologic expedition well before the time of Watson and Crik. 

The ring-shape of benzene came to the scientist Kekule in a dream, forcing a reckoning among at least some scientists that their best ideas came to them not under labour, effort or stress, but during times of repose and reflection, in the bed, the bath or the bus, when imagination can run free. Even the ancient Greeks posited that all wisdom is within not without, that we need merely remind ourselves of what the body already knows... the body, hardly mute, speaks independently in our dreams, our feelings, and creative acts, in our sensations, intuitions, our embodiments and diseases. It's speaking, yes and indeed, but are we listening? and do we know what to make of its imputations and visions?

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Living through the current era of specialization has fractured our proto-historic wholeness. Once we expressed our creativity in everything we did. There was no separation, Eden was not yet lost, there were no activities done in a drudgery of work. Everything that was done arose instead out of a unified spiritual continuity between the unseen, the mundane forms and our theater of necessity. With the rise of resource-anxiety and tribal war-making, we began to ascribe to healers, shaman, priests and madmen these outposts betwixt sense and spirit, while the majority applied themselves to the practical affairs of survival, strife and war, outsourcing the creative itch to artisans and spiritual yearning to those programmatic agents separated from the lower concerns of life by their monopoly on celestial powers.

Inevitably, as civilizations progressed and our labour-saving achievements hit critical mass, people became less predictable in their commitments to these bifurcations. Accountants left their businesses and became impressionistic painters. Feminists became gourmet cooks and languorous knitters. Prostitutes became math teachers. Potters became architects. Stockbrokers became farmers. The pressure has been on to circle the square, to round out the partiality of roles we've assigned to ourselves for the sake of our completeness. And now, at the turning of the age, the distinctions have become even more subtle. For with all these many change of guises now possible, we have the opportunity to realize their relativity. 

For the common denominator in all of this searching is for sukkha, sweetness, the juicy well-being and happiness that attends any work done in wholeness, mind-body-soul, human-divine, practices and outcomes in which we can see ourselves reflected, see our creative fire given form and functionality, our lives, purpose. Consciousness itself is a projection. We thrive when we what we do engages us on every level. We find ourselves out of balance when we attend one set of needs, neglecting others. We might food and clothe ourselves but be starving for spiritual dimension. We may loose our grounding in esoteric exaggerations and neglect the fact of our material needs. We might develop an aesthetic, but neglect its solvency. We might develop business without vision and heart and drown in empty lucre. In all of these and other more benighted conflicts or confusions of purpose, its the mythopoetic language of the creative unconscious which can depict for us where we have our blindspots and extremes of polarity. It can guide us to acts that might better service our needs and the needs of our community, the abilities we'd be wise to cultivate in terms of our personal and collective evolutionary aims, and where we might locate ourselves in order to connect with situations and people more in keeping with the setting, lifestyle and values that suit us best at this moment in time. 

In our religious traditions we often hear evoked a thirst for the word of god, but the gods no longer reside in sacred groves and grottos, but in our being. They are the dramatis personae of our dreams and visions, and if we give them purchase, a dignified role to play in our living, the inspired guidance we seek will always be ours. We need not be artisans to express our creative powers. It can be in the moment that I allow myself to touch someone with unaffected tenderness, cooking a special meal that came to me on the ride home, letting the tree leaves moving as the feet of babes refresh me out of a sleptwalked day. The wild howls and skirts round our civilized veneer, tapping its withered magic branch on the window like a promise. Do you hear it?

We were eating a lovely homemade meal on the cheap and at our convenience when I got to thinking on the politics of food. 

We here in urban areas, these cesspools of pretense really, dressed up in all form of extravagant uselessness, and its boredom-inspired specialization, hyper-ornamentation and trifle aesthetic dogmas, we here in the big smoke take our foodie orientations for granted and at our leisure. 

We demand to be dazzled and seduced by our own luckiness, our luckiness to be feasting on such quaintly glamourous dishes, au courant feats of hipster panache come by flesh or field, a cuisine that cares little for our real nutritional or agrinomic needs nor for what it really costs to realize it's vision on our plates but instead tells us everything about the schizophrenic ambitions of the so-called executive chef, the cynicism of business enablers and the social climate that invites their kind of distraction-lionization, pandering to scales of tantalization and hollow, short-term delights instead of higher sense or respect for others.

So it was flush with my occasion to distaste this overwrought mangling of mother nature dressed up as cutting edge gastronomy that I lighted on the obviousness of our most important Canadian index. And it goes ruthlessly like this. The closer you are to urban centers and their wholesale capitulation to the mercantile ideogram, the better your goods, municipal services, quality of life and the like. But as you travel deeper into the wilderness and its nature-dominant, more at-one ways of being, the hunter and bush lands of rock and lake forests and low-brush straights punctuated by LCBO outlets, Tim Horton's and the long highway, the less attainable food, health, and nonviolent culture becomes for the people. In essence, the more north you go, the farther you are from consensual dream of the hive, the underwhelming central planning legacy of post-industrial Canada and the worst of legislative anglophile patriarchy, the more native and untamed the people, white, red or brown. Communities are less serviced and therefore, they're more shabbily educated, fed, clothed and housed.

Canada, after all, is a disassociative country of strict regional and language lines where harmonious ways of living with the land, and the honouring of our habitat and traditional ways, are not given equal weight through mostly misunderstanding. The world is shopping, not listening to the woods or dancing on the cherry pink lake line, howling to a milked-up tit of a moon.

The politician serves the dominant marketplace valuation scheme and it alone. He can never accord with the environmental person who looks first for the best way to pass and then thanks the bush for letting her travel as she makes her way unobtrusively through the branches and trunks as if weaving through honoured elders at a long house, instead of hacking bushes down in juvenile spite, rationally dissembling about deadweight clearing and production efficiencies.   

If we could find a user-friendly and economical way to spread permaculture, mycology and guerrilla gardening, water-health and purification technologies, alternative energy networks, bodywork and movement practices, music and arts guilds, food and health scenes, narrative report and literature forms, if we could get these features out of our delusions and into genuine action, out of the centers and back into the periphery of our poorest communities and most distal outposts, we could make the government and bourgeois neglect of the past a self-solved opportunity for a reborn Canadian culture of the future.

"Lakota women's robes, late 19th century. You can see the impact of the recent conquest which disrupted the entire lifeway, not just land tenue of the Plains peoples. Instead of buckskin, navy trade wool; dentalium shell collar has old roots, and ribbonwork with trade satin partakes of a cross-nations style movement shared by peoples from the Potawatomi to those settled in Oklahoma territory, replacing quillwork and other older arts." 

[Suppressed Histories Archive]

"The energies that move the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies, then, are the source of mythological imagery; in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say a mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life."

Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Joan Marler, in The Yoga Journal, Nov./Dec. 1987

i've been reflecting of late the obtuse bullshit shrouding the hallowed ground called science... we forget, at our peril, that every breakthru in theory and practice came at the price of the dude or dudette that broke the news to the establishment... researchers who stumbled upon inconvenient truths were castigated and punished real good for their courage... highly ironically, today, in the post-truth century, we laud science for coveting the 'truth' when in fact it has been and continues to be the greatest obstructor of truth, dragged kicking and screaming its old ways, on record... for the interested, here's the story of one such suffragette... Ignaz Semmelweis....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

“I have noticed that the way women look at children is different from the way men do. There are two ways of looking at a little kid in an airplane toddling up and down the aisle: one is the way the woman looks at the child; the other is the way the man does. That’s why I say that the prime female power and virtue is compassion: the lack of egoistic isolation , the opening to participation. Even in sex, the man is aggressive, but the woman opens. The opening to that ubiquitous presence which is the ground of us all is compassion. Recognizing that spontaneous feeling, embracing it, and manifesting it in action is the female power.”

Excerpt From: Campbell, Joseph. “A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living.” Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2011-08-01. iBooks.

artwork Ming You Xu

in mythology we access the human of human theme and its encapsulated truths, like in the example i'm about to quote. it's not just abstractly interesting as anthropological report. it describes the evident tango between rationality and creative imagination at the global cultural level...

"The male serpent deity became the phallic consort of the Great Mother, sometimes a "father" of the races, because he was the Mother's original mate. In some myths, he was no more than a living phallus she created for her own sexual pleasure. In other myths, she allowed him to take part in the work of creation or to fertilize her world-producing womb. When the serpent-creator turned arrogant and tried to pretend that he alone made the universe, the Goddess punished him, bruising his head with her heel and banishing him to the underworld." [Barbara Walker]

"Snake Witch," as these dragon-suckling goddesses are called in Sweden; this one from Gotland Island, carved about 1100, in other words at the cusp of christianization.

on "science promotes and thrives on open-mindedness"....

the average scientist is just as constrained by articles of faith as the orthodox zealot, they just enjoy to proclaim otherwise... 'science' routinely excludes inconvenient facts from its literature and research climate, and then uses its own conclusions to curtail exploration along any lines that would challenge its persistent, cartesian hangover. 

what science likes to derogate as 'supernatural' can't be understood through the rational functions alone... as the quantum physicists you've quoted before will attest, our consensus notions of the physical world resemble not in the slightest what underscores that world at the post-atomic level. so too, the examples brought up to ridicule the 'supernatural' can't debunk the niggling fact that while much of our encounters with things "that can't be explained" can be reduced to simple causations, a lot of experiences cannot... like spontaneous remissions, remote viewing, ESPs and so on.

the notion that an exclusive, uber-credible approach to the world is to be found in the scientific method alone, that merely applying the criteria of the sciences as currently constellated will give us some edge on the truth, is just as absurd as the circuitous logic of purely magical thinking...

science is always going to be curtailed by the assumptions it leads with, even einstein attested to this when he talked about how the experimenters expectations had a definite influence on the outcome of tests, something also discussed by heisenberg... the scientific method is a valuable method, but it's only a partial method. it doesn't strike me as odd to imagine that our approach to investigation will continue to evolve, but we for the moment are still polarized by a rational/irrational lens. in short, this video is great for arming oneself for vindication with unreflective thinkers at dinner parties but its slightly hilarious for not realizing its just as guilty of myopia as wishful, primitive thinking is.... just my two cents.

[artwork Robert Bissel]