The Pattern

When I was a second-grader, the teacher sat our math class down on the carpet around a giant pile of legos. To prepare us for counting by numbers - 2's, 5's, 10's - she devised a simple lesson on patterns and how they repeat using these bright and variously colored blocks.

She linked a column together: yellow, blue, yellow, blue, yellow, blue.

Then she made: pink, white, black, pink, white, black, pink, white, black.

Soon she asked us to make our own patterns following her examples and my classmates seized their favorite colors from the pile to form their own columns.

"Red, white, red, white, red, white, red . . . . Good job, Laurel".

"Black, black, green, black, black, green . . . Very nice, David!"

Mine was purple, yellow, blue, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, blue, green . . .

"Look, Sarah" she said "yours is not a pattern because it doesn't repeat".

I was puzzled and indignant: "It is a pattern!" How could she not see it? "It repeats a long time from now. There aren't enough blocks".

I still feel that way sometimes.

MUSE

This is Brian Froud's video based on art from his latest book, BRIAN FROUD'S WORLD OF FAERIE. Featuring music by Australian artist, Lousia John-Krol.

Of these images, the artist says:

"I am inspired by Faerie and that inspiration needs to constantly move outward, seeking a variety of expressive forms and artistic techniques. Paintings elicit certain responses. And I have found other strengths by using photography and manipulating photographs. I work with these images as the embodiments of psychic reality in which gesure and form, in relationship to word, symbol and geometry, create a multi-dimensional portal into - well, I don't know where! I think it may be into a faerie place known as "Tir-na-mBan." or the Land of Women. As an artist and a man, women are my muses. In my pictures they are inspirational figures, conduits of healing power, and evocations of the Divine Feminine".

~ Brian Froud's World of Faerie, p. 90.

The Name of Love

It shall not be written in stone

Or upon mounded earth.

It shall not be penned in flowing water

Nor scripted in the clouds.

But by your hand

the name of Love will be

graven in fire upon my heart

forever.

~SCP

Bless this Ring

I bless this ring with the power of Air. May it inspire my quest for inner wholeness.

I bless this ring with the power of Fire. May it illumine my path to union with the Indwelling Light.

I bless this ring with the power of Water. May it nourish my commitment to spiritual service.

I bless this ring with the power of Earth. May it empower my dedication to bring my gifts forth into the world.

As the Light endlessly encircles the four elements, so may this ring hold outer and inner, personal and supernal, in alignment and balance.

As a circle is undivided and complete unto itself, so may this ring unite my ideals to my actions with integrity and honor.

As a wedding band is a token of earthly matrimony, let this ring be an outward sign of the inward pledge I have given to marry my life to my higher purpose.

My self-engagement ring pictured above was custom made by the awesome and talented Chuck Domitrovich of Down to the Wire Designs. You can check out more of his work here.

I have been a stranger . . .

One spring evening in 2002, when I was seventeen and preparing to graduate from high school, I sat at the end of my father’s bed trying to articulate a troubling feeling of isolation. Since childhood I suspected that I didn’t quite belong, not with my friends and peers, and not in the world or within the human experience. This statement, while not as dramatic as it sounds, is nevertheless true. My emotions reached exasperation and despair as I asked: “Why am I so lonely?” I meant it as a rhetorical question.

He drew on his Merit menthol and let the smoke escape from his nostrils. It coiled up from the lit end of the cigarette in hypnotic shapes that filled the dim room with the acrid, sweet smell I will always associate with him and these deep conversations between us. For a long minute I studied the plumes of smoke and did not expect an answer.

“I just had a flash” he said. That’s our code phrase for intuition when it flashes through his mind. I perked up and he reached across to the nightstand for his Bible. Like his forebears, my father is a learned and well-read man, and although he is not a staunch Episcopalian like his grandfathers before him, he keeps it by his bed. “You should check out the Bible. Some people say it has all the answers”.

I arched an eyebrow. This was far out of left-field, even for a “flash”.

“Really. We’re on to something here. Just open it up and pick a verse”.

“Just open it anywhere? And pick any word?” I couldn’t keep the incredulous tone out of my voice.

He passed the book to me. “Try it”.

I shut my eyes and felt the weight of the moment increase. I flicked the gold edges under my thumb, then let it fall open on my lap. With eyes still closed, I trailed down the thin recto leaf. My finger came to rest three-quarters of the way down. Then I looked.

“‘Gershom’. That’s just a name, Dad”. The moment deflated and I exhaled. “This is stupid”.

“No, no”. He smiled. “There’s more. Check the reference”.

Tiny superscript numbers above the name directed me to a footnote and I turned a few pages back to Exodus 2:22. Reading that line, I gasped.

“What does it say?” he asked.

“‘Zipporah gave birth to a son and Moses named him Gershom, saying “I have been a stranger in a foreign land”’”.

Eyes wide, I looked up at him through his cloud of smoke.

“You are a stranger in a foreign land. There’s your answer”.

"The Prologue On Earth"

"His road led downward to the main road, by the crick, which went to town and past the church and beyond. Thinking of early-morning dogs, he set out, thrusting his hands into the grimy familiar pockets of his jacket, familiar but not somehow his own. I'm not from here, he thought: and because that was true, it seemed to account for the shrinking he felt of the tender aliveness within him from the touch of this: this raw twilight, this road, that black train and its smoke. I'm not from here; I'm from someplace different from this. The road seemed longer than it ever did by day; at the bottom of the hill, the world was still dark, and dawn was far away."

From the "The Prologue on Earth" (p. 18) of John Crowley's The Solitudes, Book One of the Aegypt Cycle.

"The Prologue in Heaven"

"And out of that immense emptiness, ringing infinite void at once larger than the universe and at its heart - out of that nothing a something was being extruded, with exquisite agony produced, like a drop. It was not possible for anything to be smaller or farther away than this drop of nothing, this seed of light; when it had traveled outward for aeon upon aeon it had grown only a little larger. At last, though, the inklings of a universe began to be assembled around it, the wake of its own strenuous passage, and the drop grew heavy; the drop became a shout, the shout a letter, the letter a child.

Through the meshing firmaments this one came, and through successive dark heavens pulled aside like drapes. The startled stars looked back at his shouted password, and drew apart to let him through; young, potent, his loose hair streaming backward and his eyes of fire, he strode to the border of the eighth sphere, and stood there as on a crowded quay.

Set out, set out. So far had he come already that the void from which he had started, the void larger than being, was growing small within him, was a seed only, a drop. He had forgotten each password as soon as he spoke it; had come to be clothed in his passage as in clothing, heavy and warm. After aeons more, after inconceivable adventures, grown forgetful, unwise, old, by boat and train and plane he would come at last to Where? Whom was he to speak to? For whom was the letter, whom was the shout to awaken?

When he took ship he still knew. He took ship: those crowding the quay parted for him, murmuring: he put his foot upon a deck, he took the lines in his hands. He sailed under the sign of Cancer, painted on his bellied mainsail; at length there came to be two lights burning on his yardarms, were they Castor and Pollux? Spes proxima: far off, far far off, a blue planet turned, an agate, a milky gem."

From the "The Prologue in Heaven" (p. 11-12) of John Crowley's The Solitudes, Book One of the Aegypt Cycle.