Powerful beyond measure, the future is ours to invent • Happy 2025!
Who are we not to imagine it?
Clouds in my coffee, clouds on my mind; invention on a roll as the future is divined
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Our Deepest Fear
By Marianne Williamson
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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.
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We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
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Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won't feel insecure around you.
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We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.
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It's not just in some of us;
It's in everyone.
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And as we let our own light shine,
Our fiery love gives other people
the courage to do the same.
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Greetings y Saludos
Happy New Year for 2025.
I'm a week late.
I try to be like an office worker and put stacks out on schedule; but good luck with that when your muse lives on another planet.
I'm on an arc of transition from the medicine in Pisac, turning seventy five to New Year resolve.
A fierce resolve to be a spark in the glory of creation. To so powerfully imagine a better world that it has to come about. And to share the Fiery Knowing with you so you can do the same.
To that end I'm going to share a little of my creative process. A moment of indulgence perhaps, and why not? Personal moments, the flesh and blood of an author, give the writing a more intimate feel. But there's something else. The more I create and the more I write poetry, the more I realise that the creation of the universe and writing a poem are the same. This is not hyperbole. It's real.
Percy Bysshe Shelley said poets are the unacknowledged creators of the world. And in the above poem, Marianne Williamson gives us all permission to shine. When you write poetry for long enough you get to understand the intimacies of creation—that's not a typo, you get to understand the intricacies too—but it is that intimate connection with an ineffable primal force that fills you with awe and wonder and—if you have the talent to listen—inspires your art to shine with some small part of of God's Grandeur. Which is the title of a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a masterpiece that begins with the world is charged with the grandeur of God.
Therein lies awe, wonder and humility: to appreciate Art that is far greater than our own.
But we poets, especially rebel poets, do not only reflect the grandeur of God, we advance it. This is expected of us, a point well understood by Shelly.
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I have got to the point where I permanently carried up on the wings of inspiration.
The coffee helps of course. But even when Ethiopé flies away and the glow dies down, I continue to live and thrive in my writing. In the shower, walking down the street, eating tclayuda in my favourite taqueria and in bed at night, ideas are always bubbling up out of the coffee pot of my mind.
And at night. Years ago insomnia (luckily the mild sort) used to concern me. I didn't like the random churn of thoughts.
My muse changed all that. The wee hours work for her and when churchyards yawn I find myself weaving and soaring in clouds of inspiration.
Thoughts bellydance in front of me. Writing shimmers. Words are formings. Words are knowings. With neither shape nor sound, words are the fragrance of becoming.
The mystery of absence and becoming. The mystery of Love free-falling through aeons of Airy Nothing.
God tried Nothing once.
He disappeared everything, including himself. But it didn't work. Airy Nothing was filled with a faint and tantalising fragrance.
Fragrance, that most underrated of senses!
Fragrance begat the poet. And the poet was filled with longing to find the flower, to bask in its beauty, to see its gorgeous colours. And to write about that which was longed for. To describe, to give life.
To love.
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Shakespeare skipped school one day to take a walk in the fields. Lying on the banks of the Avon, he looked up at the sky.
The clouds! The clouds!
The kiss of Seraphim. Caress of Cherubim. Clouds, wind, rain and weather arising as thoughts of creation.
Wind and weather, blowing in from nowhere. Primal longing touches the boundaries of knowing.
Staring up at the sky. Clouds, cumulus wonder and the impossible grandeur of creation. Airy nothing billows and the uncanny fragrance of Love blows gently down the Avon. Ripples in the water; ruffles in the dreams of creation.
Dart of a kingfisher. Hum of bees. Plodding ox; grunty call of the prodding ploughman; the here-we-are smell of freshly turned soil. A blackbird hops down to peck at worms.
Gazing. Gazing into the sky.
The clouds! The clouds!
Shall I? Dare I? On this summer's day?
Shall I torch the touched-earth shaping of creation?
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The clouds! The clouds!
That which I live in. And they really are clouds, which can be problematic.
Last stack I talked about Living Thinking. To give you an idea, watch the clouds. They are alive, shifting, shaping, concatenating and outwelling from within.
One cloud becomes another, grows big and then disports itself into a surf break on the distant shores of knowing; the puff, billow and crash of an immense cloud massing up into a thrash of furious white foam slo-mo rippling into a thousand bubbled-up mini-me mountains of Seraphic enthusiasm, each curly wisped puff of white innocence demanding a life of its own.
That's how inspiration works. A stack which ten minutes ago had a theme with beginning, middle and end has now morphed into a stack that took—stole, interbubbled, Prometheanised, outclouded—the middle bit and grew into a billowing cumulosity of its own, leaving the first cloud lost and forlorn, but not for long because it too is alive and soon upfluffs, outwells and shapes itself into three more clouds all bursting with a desire to be written. But what about that first stack?
Which cloud am I on?
Inspiration is great, but it drives me crazy.
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Now you know why I call the décor in Fearless Arts Café the Diamond Sutra of Revelation. I live in spectacular visions of the future, visions that are real, tangible and achievable. A future so beautiful and so close I can touch it!
I want to share the light, share the jewels, share La Bella Futura, Grenaissance and a Crown of Creation that is so real and so tangible to me as I soar on wings of inspiration. And as the poem says, it is a light that is meant to spread.
But there are hindrances in the world, hindrances that cannot be ignored. In the next stack I will begin to unfold the Mystery of Evil in a gentle and imaginative way so that what opposes can be transformed into the glorious future we all long for.
Remember, this is Alchemy. Know the worst and the best leaps out at you like a shooting star dazzling the world with unimaginable beauty.
Forget playing small. The jewels are in the clouds. Let's go get them.
We are going to invent our way out of Armageddon.
Just like the gods invented the universe.
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Love, blessings and all the best for an amazing ride through 2025.
We shall overcome!
Steve
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PS. Can’t resist a quick haiku for an odious little fuckwit
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Cui Bono?
What a no-no
to jump a bone from Groper Jono
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Close-up of the flowers that inspired this stack. (Along with clouds in my coffee.)
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