february free page
is up if you want to meditate...
I have been writing to you, on Tuesdays, for over a decade. As a result of this practice, you have given me a structure and a reason to keep connecting with the deeper parts of this life we are living. I am grateful to the 1800 of you – some who have been here since the beginning – for sharing sacred internet space with me. Since I moved these weekly messages to Substack (over 200 posts ago!) I am also extremely grateful to the 81 of you in our paid Friday space.
There have been eras when it is really easy to write to you on Tuesdays, and eras when I have to meditate a lot in order to remind myself what my “job” is.
In easy times, my job is to inspire you, and to remind you to drop your bucket into the magical well that is consciousness as often as you can.
In hard times, my job is to fortify you from the inside out, and to remind you to hold fast to your visions.
In these, very hard (“historic”) times, my job is to help you comfort and revivify yourself and create/discover an inner environment that is generative and galvanizing.
Oh yeah, and help us all keep the door cracked open to life-affirming miracles.
Along those lines, the February Free Page is up and filled with four, full-length meditations that help us to recalibrate in different ways.
Here’s the line-up this month…
Also along those lines, interestingly, our meditation in this Friday’s paid Substack space is called “Your Own Planet”. In this one we essentially go very high up into the sky until we discover our own planet that we can populate and create however we like.
Upon doing this meditation several times recently, I was struck by how depressing and unnecessarily painful the version of “Their Own Planet” that our current oligarchs are playing out is. In doing this meditation – I saw so many alternative ways to “run” a planet that are beautiful, generative, circular and beautifully in tune with one another and the “natural” world.
I also emerge from this meditation with a few, actionable ideas every time; some specific to me, some for the good of all.
Until next time,
Jess
Dear artist,
I don’t know you but I need you. Art is a disproportionate part of my life and a substantial reason I am alive. Maybe you relate? I am not an artist but I work with a lot of you and after the disastrous hate crime known as the 2016 election, so many of my beloved artist clients said to me things like maybe I should quit making art and it’s kind of selfish for me to focus on my art now and I should help people in a more effective way. These are totally reasonable and expected grief responses to the shock and horror of our time but I beseech you: DO NOT STOP MAKING ART. I need it profoundly. We all do.
Anytime you start to feel overwhelmed by humanity’s impact on people, animals, and the plants, anytime you see the awful, smug faces of fascist leaders, anytime you think you cannot leave the house because the world is too hard, I want you to think about the art, performance, music, books and films that have made you want to be alive. Think of how those artists, like you, probably felt overwhelmed by their life and times but they made the thing anyway. Your future audiences need your work and you need to make it.
…
Depending on who you are, the current administration may not impact you drastically or you may encounter devastating, life-changing experiences. We don’t know what will happen day to day and that can be dizzyingly overwhelming. Historically, during oppressive regimes and fascist governments, it is the brave and creative ones who lead, who solve problems, incite, inspire, organize, comfort, satirize and reflect. Your work will be more important than ever. You have no idea who needs the art you are making.
You are not alone. You have what you need for your life, for art, and for justice.
- Beth Pickens, Making Art During Fascism, February 2017
“Corbin defined the imaginal world as an objective realm, existing independently of human subjectivity, yet only accessible through the cultivated faculties of the soul. For Corbin, the imaginal is the bridge between the sensory world we experience directly and the intellectual; the material and the spiritual. In Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, he wrote:
Between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual perception (the universe of the Cherubic Intelligences) and the universe perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world of Idea-Images, of archetypal figures, of subtle substances, of "immaterial matter." This world is as real and objective, as consistent and subsistent as the intelligible and sensible worlds; it is an intermediate universe "where the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual," a world consisting of real matter and real extension, though by comparison to sensible, corruptible matter these are subtle and immaterial. The organ of this universe is the active Imagination; it is the place of theophanic visions, the scene on which visionary events and symbolic histories appear in their true reality.
In this realm, archetypal images and spiritual beings manifest in forms accessible to the visionary consciousness. To perceive the mundus imaginalis, seekers have to purify their heart and do patient inner work, developing the faculty Corbin (much like Carl Jung) called “active imagination.”
- Daniel Pinchbeck
“A society that seeks short-term convenience will incrementally imprison itself in a long-term corporate cage of comfort, and forget how to live free. And, after a while that cage of comfort will cease to feel comfortable. Not only will you remain discontented, but you’ll now be locked into that state of being”
“You will need magical tools on a quest for self-discovery and magic. Usually, a magical tool brings to mind something physical: Gandalf’s staff, the divining disc of Pergamemnon, a cloak of invisibility, Glenda’s wand, or even your grandmother’s locket. Yes, talismans, wands, and other objects are tools. However, if magic is the art of changing consciousness at will, the magical tools for your mind are potent beyond measure.”
“Will you be at the harvest,
Among the gatherers of new fruits?
Then you must begin today to remake
Your mental and spiritual world,
And join the warriors and celebrants
Of freedom, realizers of great dreams.
You can’t remake the world
Without remaking yourself.
Each new era begins within.
It is an inward event,
With unsuspected possibilities
For inner liberation.
We could use it to turn on
Our inward lights.
We could use it to use even the dark
And negative things positively.
We could use the new era
To clean our eyes,
To see the world differently,
To see ourselves more clearly.
Only free people can make a free world.
Infect the world with your light.
Help fulfill the golden prophecies.
Press forward the human genius.
Our future is greater than our past.”
- Ben Okri
“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by the mind at large -- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone.”
-Aldous Huxley
“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
“It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by sign boards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them, too. It needs them now.”
-Wallace Stegner
“The world knows many religions but nature has but one truth.”
-Manly P. Hall
I am honoured to be one of your paid subscribers and very happy to subsidise extraordinary generosity like this. Thank you.
So many amazing tools to look forward to this month. Thank you.