Sunday, May 26, 2013

HIGHWAY 40 REFLECTIONS, OR DRIFTING WITH THE TUMBLEWEEDS



 Coming back to New Mexico on I-40 the events and impressions of the previous week begin tumbling out of my disorganized and somewhat crowded mental storage locker, as if I’d just lifted the door to that dreaded and familiar scene of boxes, dust and cobwebs. I’ve been working up the courage to sort through to those hard to reach boxes toward the back. While in Cottonwood, I was too tired to think.  A minor bug perhaps, the ever present chemtrails, a dimensional shift maybe, but I was a bit under the weather on this visit. PQ was content just to be In Arizona, breath richer oxygen, enjoy the company of friends and watch lizards and birds from the porch with coffee and without worries.

We did accomplish our intended goal for the trip, checking out owner/chef Vlad Costa’s new location for 15.Quince in Cottonwood. It was quite a surprise.  It isn’t just bigger than the quaint Victorian cubby hole in Jerome, it’s on an entirely different scale with an enormously different environment.  The new place is huge, southwest style modern and able to seat probably four times as many. Of course, it has a lot more wall space for art.   
 
I’ve been reading Rupert Sheldrake’s new book, Science Set Free.  After a long spell of not reading, just letting my own process sort itself out, I’ve been hitting the books again. I believe this is part of the medicine path I’m on. Something new is emerging and I need to sharpen my tools. I read the way I cook or mix paint, a lot of intuitive blending and flavoring. I can tell when the mix is just right. Not scientific?  Of course not, science hasn’t arrived at that innate organizing of the creative process.

Yesterday, on the way up Oak Creek Canyon I was thinking about Sheldrake’s ideas and the outrage they evoke in the traditional scientific community. Perhaps Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance will require honing and reworking into the future, but from my intuitive, unscientific mind his ideas appeal to me because a similar concept came to me and others without any awareness of Sheldrake and I don’t think this is about being psychic. The popular saying of “it’s time has come” seems to automatically apply to major conceptual changes. Perhaps Sheldrake tuned into a need to find a new intention of knowledge.  The conventional science operates with a masculine thinking process of breaking down and analyzing the materials a thing or creature is made of, rather than what it is as a whole and certainly, not how it functions within a cosmic level of wholeness. Sheldrake, in this case, would be an advanced guard representing another mind and another perspective beginning to emerge into the consciousness of humans. This may be more important than whether or not he is theoretically correct.

Scientists and others who live in the world of intellect seem to fall into two primary types. There are those who adhere to and defend the current cache of knowledge like orthodox theologians and those that step beyond the boundaries of the prevailing paradigms with their accompanying doctrine. I’ve come to see this as a temperamental difference.  They are both necessary and yet predictably butt heads with each other.  This world seems to operate on the friction generated by opposing processes.  However, the concepts defended rigorously by the orthodox, were once considered heretical and frequently got their discoverers and supporters killed.  Somehow, the orthodox have never learned that making martyrs out of advocates of new concepts only empowers their ideas. However, this it isn’t about failure to rid the world of heretics as much as it is about the impossibility of stopping an idea whose time has come.  Scientists are the current priestly class and Scientific Materialism is the orthodox belief system. Simply notice how often science is used to authorize almost everything and it becomes apparent that orthodox science is the religion of our time. The mechanistic model seems strangely backwards. Since humans are the creators of machines, machines would have to resemble us not the other way around.

As we start down I-40, I’m seeing this landscape in a different way, how strange, and even embarrassing as I notice that my memory of this stretch of road is wrong or at least distorted. Next, Joseph City’s smokestacks are approaching. When coming from the east, I look forward to this landmark, as the first place from which it’s possible to see the San Francisco peaks behind Flagstaff.  However, I thought it was west of Winslow and now I realize it is actually between Winslow and Holbrook. Here and there, I feel that I’ve never seen this landscape before.  However, I’m enjoying the sensation of looking through different lenses.  I wonder which impression is closest to the truth and then it occurs to me that they are both true but incomplete. I’ve been seeing by habit and now the habits are breaking into fractal extensions or perhaps I’m just more aware of it.

When we pull off for gas in Gallup, PQ pulled up on the wrong side of the pump.  I had to remind him that our car fills on the right. How could he forget this? Then he dropped the keys on the floor, behavior more typical of me than him. This state of mind is either contagious or there is something in the air altering our perceptions and coordination.  Are the chemtrails getting to us, or maybe its sunspots or a consciousness shift to an awareness that is still unfamiliar? 

Next, I begin thinking about some of the people I know who are open to alternative medicine, science and spirituality.  These are not eccentrics or hippy types, not that it would be a bad thing if they were, but actually these people are well educated, highly functional and formerly from a middle class conservative socially responsible background.  They are not stereotypical woo-woo types, and they are middle age or older, well beyond adolescent rebellion.  Why are they looking beyond scientific materialism? There must be something unsatisfying in the current orthodox dogma.

As we drive on, we pass the fourth 18-wheeler within 150 miles, stopped by the side of the road with its hood up and a mechanic or tow truck attending. It is unusual to see even one.  Perhaps synchronicity has a theme. What is breaking down?  As we drive on, I notice another twisted retread on the road.  This one didn’t die easy. I wonder why retreads are legal. On one of our trips, one broke from a rear tire of a big rig right in front of us.  It almost caused a wreck. Moving down the highway at eighty miles an hour, they can cause a lot of damage when they break loose but still they are legal. Highway rules sometimes seem arbitrary.  

The mind conditioning runs deep.  No matter how often I experience synchronistic events, I still doubt my perceptions.  PQ reminds me now and then about my flat response to events that seem impossibly endowed with magic.  Our meeting was one of those events. When it’s happening it seems perfectly normal. Our minds dulled by reductionist teachings, we look through a dirty window.  When we see our surroundings with sharp clarity and joy, the priests tell us we are deluded by chemicals.

Our Goddess of Flaming Love
 An image of the Goddess of the New World came to me as we were moving back to Taos three years ago. Last week I decided to overcome my reluctance to paint in the kitchen. I found that she had a life of her own and I felt very inadequate to bring her in with paint on canvas. It seemed like an arrogant sacrilege but she wanted to come out, so I did the best I could. She is made of fractal energy flaming life visible and invisible into the space all around her. She is made of original power.   I will use her power as inspiration to lead me into the future. 


Back in Taos, hundreds of Harley’s are buzzing around town like giant flies. The Memorial Day weekend is the kickoff of the summer season and this is how it begins.  The weather is good except for being windy and dry, but otherwise open door weather. PQ is still recuperating from reentry but we are well and looking forward to whatever is around the corner. Our visit to Cottonwood was like old home week, but two among our Arizona family are moving out of the area. We were glad to be there before they left and we all had a barbeque for the sake of tradition. Nothing lasts forever, and spring is a time of new growth. We look forward to the next chapter of our story. Creation keeps happening.