What IS? Crazy?
this post is fractal--it functions in the way of its meaning, seeming to be in pieces at first
Feeling scattered? Shattered? Crazy?
Crazy, etymologically, is related to ‘cracked’. As in ‘cracked into pieces, not whole’. Though ‘the crack is where the light gets in’, as it did this morning during prayer songs at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, Australia side, at the moment we sang the first prayer song I was given in 2014, the water song.
I guess though if you feel ‘cracked into pieces’, versus have an opening in your shell to receive the golden god-light coming in, then that is crazy.
Interestingly, the word ‘science’ comes from a root that means ‘to cut or divide’. So science cuts things down and refines them, focusing in real tight and small. Science loses the All, the meta view. Though I'm sure there are scientists who look with wider eyes. Seems to me that Indigenous-ways-of-knowing and seeing are more overall, widespread, relational and webbed.
Makes me think of Sand Talk author Tyson Yunkaporta and his latest book Right Story, Wrong Story that is about “how we can talk to each other to shape forms of collective thinking that are aligned with land and creation.” Emergence Magazine has a great interview with him on Deep Time Diligence.
How do we bridge the two? How do we bridge the wide with the narrow, the relational with the separatist? How is a bridge actually built between two shores and across moving waters? My mission is to bridge the seeming-separate worlds I continue to live and learn in, yet bridge-building is a world in itself.
Just how is a bridge built anyway?
In a recent conversation with a fellow astro-geek who is also a channel/medium, he pointed out something I had noticed but not explored, which is that no one talks about the 4th dimension. Mostly those people who talk about such things refer to the 3rd and 5th dimensions and they do it from a position of having transcended, which often comes across in a tone of superiority, of judging a lower evolutionary awareness state, as in, “That person is stuck in the 3rd dimension.”
What was the bridge they crossed to get to the 5th dimension? What are the pathways from one to the other? The bridges, pathways, practices, ceremonies, communities, ways-of-seeing and being are the 4th dimension. The liminal, in-between “places” are where we’re operating.
We are bridge builders between worlds now.
As I’ve said before, stumbling is my main means of divination. I’ll stumble upon the very perfect “entertainment”, book, website, art exhibit, or post that becomes a path-marker to steer me onwards. This is exactly what happened when I found myself taking a break from environmental philosophy articles and the deep-time karmic dramas that have been showing up in my life lately (and that were taxing my capacity to stay on track with my dharma).
In looking for relief, I stumbled upon the 2016 Jeff Nichols sci-fi film Midnight Special.
If you haven’t seen it, and don’t mind a bit of car chase action hoo-haw, this is a great expression of different dimensions displayed side-by-side, in simultaneous time. The trailer doesn’t show it, thankfully, so you’ll have to watch it to see what I mean, but it’s beautifully done. And I loved reading how the idea came to him from being a new parent and having a baby monitor for his child. He found himself listening closely to every breath and movement, becoming, himself, the unseen yet all-seeing and loving Presence.
That in itself is an example of two worldviews—the one that leaves an infant on its own, separate from others, and the other that couldn’t conceive of such a thing. Both are true because both happen.
There are parts and ways to compart-mentalize.
AND there is all-the-parts-together, not a-part.
Particles in the departments and apartments and compartments, particularly so.
AND there is a more Makemakian view that sees thru and beyond, whose vision is wider than current spacetime, and who Alan Clay and I focused on in our book that is highlighted in this video:
In his myth, Makemake teaches the people, the mortals, how to trust the longer journey, how to pace themselves.
Last year I found myself (having stumbled my way there) living in a city of 15 major bridges over a loopy river with many more minor bridges over creeks and roads. All this bridging will be impacted by the climate change we’ve collectively co-created. Longer spells of hotter temperatures mean bridges and their components, the parts that make them, will respond differently to the extreme heat. The bridges we rely on could literally crack and crumble, scatter into pieces, or at least not serve their intended function of bridging the divide safely, leading to a greater likelihood of collapse.
Expansion and collapse, like in Midnight Special when the spatio-temporal bridge that opens up before the young boy is like nuclear fission that lasts seconds only, or maybe minutes, but then closes and seems to disappear. Though the impact is far-reaching, as we know from our own daft and dangerous dabblings in atomic energy. Or like the wormholes through time that make time-travel possible, and also, in spatial terms, like the fairies and angels living in amongst our human forms.
Speaking of human forms, I had a full circle experience with the recent Spencer Tunick Rising Tide art piece. About 26 years ago, in the early days of what has turned out to be his oeuvre of photographing naked humans en masse in public spaces, I modelled for him solo in an old and empty West Village Manhattan townhouse. I left NYC shortly after for India so I lost track of him and those photos. What a gratifying feeling of closing a time loop by standing alongside 5,500 naked bodies on the Story Bridge over the Brisbane River.
This is a revolution close to my heart—that of de-stigmatizing the naked human body and instead revelling in it on an individual scale and using it as artivism on a collective scale. This re-seeing of nudity is another bridge between paradigms that I pointed out in PocaHauntUs when I stripped down and did naked cartwheels and then asked the audience if that was crazy.
The point being that how we’re seeing is what we’re seeing.
So it was fascinating to witness the journey of thousands of folks experiencing public nakedness for the first time ever...
Here’s a bit of poetic recall from our dawn parade:
a crazy quilt of a sea
of skin swallowed in
a river of WE
shall we see
me?
who is s/t/he/y?
say
the art is experiential
the photos incidental
documented ART proof
of the spoof
on each, on all
what’s your call? how do you navigate
being present fully
with all-that-is
and within this social experiment?
sit here, lie down, paw up, all together now,
5,500 people waiting on you,
shivering in their skins
and sins and wins and shins and spins and has-beens.
spinning their wheels in no-escape,
some literal in wheel-chairs, mirroring the patterns of steel girders,
metal lacework bridging river sides,
suspended over shimmering murky waters,
holding a sea of skin,
a murmuration of (woe)man,
spanning and spooned by stark dark wet steel.
their chairs holding up their soft pink skins and limbs and hair.
a being within.
Wow, to think what metal has done for us. It’s allowed us to bridge sides and support suffering skins. To hold ourselves aloft, and even aloof, from Earth. And to get us across, we yield to the boss. Because Rising Tide did have that in it too—the one godlike being with a megaphone directing the swarm of individuals into a unity consciousness experience. Enforced awareness.
The art is in the experience of each person’s journey with themselves, yet side by side and flowing along the same curves of bank and road and bridge with thousands of others. A susurration of swallows, the dance of dolphins, grass blades in the wind. The unity-in-diversity, in vision and action and experience and inspiration for an era still birthing into being—the Aquarian age of leaving no one out. No one left behind.
What is being born as the landscapes change before our very eyes? Like Christo & Jeanne-Claude covering over and then revealing to see anew a view you thought you knew. Having covered the Story Bridge with a surrogate sea of skin, the story of the bridge then changes—the structure itself and the social experiment we’re all-ways in. The social experiment is unconscious for some (3rd dimension) and conscious for others (5th dimension), evidenced in how we engage with all the elements of our shared world (with care or not). From the smallest iteration all the way out on the fractalized Makemakian scale of sustainability to our collective kindness as a species, as states (of sorts), as communities, tribes, politicos.
Some Turtle Island Indigenous folk say we have much to learn from our relatives—all those more-than-human sentient beings and elements and ancestors—that share our world. They have all been here far far far longer than we have, so we would do well to learn from them. As I said in PocaHauntUs, compare the past 500 years of cutting culture to the past 50,000 years of collective culture, or even farther back to the millions of years without humans. Honestly facing into the damage we’ve done by cutting into, cyphoning off, and compartmentalizing takes a brave heart to stomach.
Real relationships and intimacy are worlds apart from sado-masochistic domination, subjugation, and the “getting ahead” that people think they’re doing. Where are they getting to? It’s impossible to go it alone. We’re all interconnected. Individuals may feel cut apart crazy until they witness, and know in their bones, how we’re all inter-sewn into a crazy quilt of collective beauty.
The story bridge changes when we engage directly, boldly, and nakedly with it.
