New Colors to Bring in the Light

"Whatever you are about, be about it in everything you do"- anonymous

 

(From Omni's Colorbook:)

As a colorist artist, master of the ten thousand colors, and by the power and authority vested in me as a bellwether person, I invoke and declare some "new" clothing colors. For the healing of the people!

Dull and grey feels like an artifice at the moment. Not down to earth, not "natural". Just drab, dirty, and tired. I don't condemn your impulse to hide, and yeah, it's camo.

Black is a refuge that is so tired and overused that it is the defacto background of our daily life. The uniform of coolness that isn't. It is a cop out. 

 

The true background color is indigo like the sky. Like the many gradations of blue jeans. If Jesus walked the earth today, I bet he'd be wearing blue jeans. 

The super bright, fully saturated colors are nice. But at this moment, they shout. And shouting is the wrong tone for this time. For this moment in time, we need to strike a note that is a little softer, gentle, even loving. 

 

I mean, I certainly won't renounce those brilliant colors. They feed my soul. But everywhere I see, that seems to be all that is being made today, shouting colors with black, the most striking combo. 

 

Is it that we feel we must shout to get above the cacophony of attention sinks that constantly tug at us? I remember when society was too timid to rock a fully saturated hue. Such a loud color, how garish! Now neon jackets fly by on the running trail. A kindergarden teacher once confided to me her secret to being heard above the din: Instead of raising the volume, lower it a bit.

 

My new colors are soft, but present and clear. 

Cheerfully confidently assertive, even. 

Light infused. No shade added.

To invoke love and light. 

 

Right now, when you go around, you see way too much black and blue. Cold and dark. It is a downer! Black is dark dividing lines, black is shut, opaque, black bloc, black site, black out, locked down.

 

I do understand. Some of the things that people today have to put up with have left us vibrationally beaten down, all black and blue! You feel like you need to strap on a shield! No wonder we are tempted to retreat into the walls and shadows.

That is why it is time to wake up, turn the page, bring in some more light, some new colors. 

 

Forget white. White is too much a luxury, it would take me at least five changes of white clothes to get to the end of a day unstained. 

I scan my nice organized closet full of my collection of rags for body draping and I see none of these new colors. Wow, I've been in a funk I guess.

It is important to be true to your colors, wherever you find them, whatever they are for you. So I set out to find them for myself, in the shape of body wrapping fibers. Clothing is a form of expression and one way to feel and interact with my colors. 

I am aware of the symbolic levels too. These colors are like rays of new energies in our shared atmosphere, and clothing is but one way to invoke their presence.

 

I look around in stores. Admittedly, I go to used clothing stores that by definition aren't the latest thing, but still, find little. Seems like our whole culture is in a bit of a funk. Not that unreasonable, really. I decide to do something about it. A small thing is all I can do. But cannot one match start a roaring fire if conditions are right?

I end up bringing home a bunch of white shirts to dye myself. 

 

 Maybe you would call these the spring colors. The effect I'm going for is just a notch brighter than pastel, but without any grey added. The colors emerge when I put a dilute wash of a pure rich color over a white. A lot of light still prevails. I am delighted with the results!

 

For practical everyday use and wear, I like the feel of these colors, nestled in with the undyed naturals, the wool colors and unbleached tans. And of course, blue jeans.

Now, everywhere I go in the new colors, people come up to me to tell me how much they like them! I wonder what the butterfly wing fractal effects will be of brightening up someone's day -literally- might be....?

"Still not sure what I'm going for, but I'm gonna go for it for sure"- the Grateful Dead

PostScript: I happened to see what the New York Times was showing on its fashion page after I wrote this, and it's my colors! It is so refreshing that even the usually blank faced models are smiling:

 

Breath of Love

"Heaven is everywhere if we breathe out love like we breathe in air" -David Sunheart

(From the Tantric Tech Manual:)

A joy ride in the sky of your heart, a gift for you:

 

This a little way to clear your circuits and surround and fill yourself with love, sending it to all around you. The breath of love can be practiced just about anywhere and anytime that you are breathing and can devote a bit of your thought and attention.

 

Take a long slow in-breath, as you consciously want, know, feel, affirm, and intend your breath to inhale pure healing Love. Feel the love pouring into your heart.

 

Now, full with this Love that you are now loaded with, let your out breath gently blow out toward the way in front of you, blessing all. You can make a little blowing shape with your mouth if you wish, like maybe blowing a kiss. You can imagine that the Love shines out from your heart, even as you direct it with your breath.

 

 The next breath, and all others following, do the same thing, fill up with Love on the in-breath, and bless all on the out-breath. But this time, move your point of view forward to just in front of you, and blow the Love back mentally behind you. 

 

Now move to your mental right, and blow the next breath to your left. Move into this left Love filled area for the next one, and blow the Love to your right.

 

Then above to below, after that, below to above.

 

You are now in a radiant psychic box (or ball) of Love.

 

With this in mind, blow the love into the center of the box from the points of view of all sides at once. This completes the seven directions.

 

(Advanced Variations:)

Would you like to go on to other dimensions? Let's!

From the point of view of the center of your ball of Love, send this Love out in all directions, even as the sun....

 

This is about to get quite spacey, so here we go... 

Send the love in and out at once....

Next breath, send the Love to where it is neither in nor out....

Next breath, to all and neither!

Next, to whatever you may have somehow missed with all of the preceding. 

Make stuff up! (Or so you may think...)

 

(Advanced Breath Yoga Variation:)

Using your finger or just internal control, breathe in your first breath through your left nostril, and out through your right. Switch to the other way around on your next breath and so on.

 

(Super Advanced Method:)

Condense all of these into one breath cycle, after mastering the sequence.

 

This cleans out and supercharges your energy field. The Breath of Love blesses the whole universe, everyone you meet, and of course, you. 

 

You have the breath of life. You will never regret using it for this purpose.

 

"Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise." - Victor Hugo 

 

SunheartSunheart

Language Learning Update

❝Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.❞
-Chinese Proverb

 

Since embarking upon my adventure of learning a new language at an advanced age one year ago, I have a report:

 

So, to update, around this time last year, I start learning a whole new language.  Swedish. Exactly one word of which remains in my vocabulary as directly passed down from my ancestors of four generations ago, "jah". It means yes.

 

Every day I say yes to a little Swedish. It is so easy to do on my ipad, what with apps, radio stations, free utube lessons and so on. Maybe five minutes a day, but I try to be consistent. I manage most days.

   

Slow going. Shockingly slow. At first I fear I'm just too old to learn! (What was it? I must have listened to that conversation phrases lesson a hundred times!)

 

But now, a full year later, jah. There are indeed a few conversational phrases taped to the inside wall of my cranium. I know some new vowels, which are written with funny little circles above them.

 

 I understand a lot more than I can speak still.

 

And oddly, unexpectedly, and completely effortlessly, another language, Spanish, a long dormant second language from my childhood school days, is magically returning to me as well!

  

 Seems that far from interfering with my learning a new language, once I start climbing around the brain tree of language, the whole thing powers up.

 

This project is a little competition with a child born into the family a year ago. Right now I seem to be ahead in the race! I speak more words of Swedish than this kid speaks of English. Today. Something tells me the competition will be much tougher next year....

 

I wonder how far I will have gotten with the Swedish another year from now? I'll let you know...

 

Basket Weaving

(from The Omniart Notebook:)

 

The ice storm brings trees down all over town. There they still lie, most of them, a month later, except for the ones that fell across roads, which have been cleared. 

 

Every block has a heap of limbs by the side of the street. Crews from the city roam around with roaring, barking, tree eating monsters called chippers. There's free firewood wherever you go.

 

I begin to wonder about how to make art from this grand natural windfall. There is all the lichen. You can make natural dye with it. You can gather tons of it as whole trees covered with it are suddenly quite accessible. It takes years for lichen to grow, so this is a real bonanza. But, it turns out, the dye making process needs ammonia, and months of checking and shaking in jars. This is yukky. The traditional method is to use your urine. More yukky. Never mind the lichen.

 

Then I notice all the fallen young tree top branches and shoots on the ground, in all manner of lovely straight and twisty shapes and colors. 

I've always wanted to learn basketry. Basket making feels like such an ancient art. But like most other weaving, handwoven baskets have long since been met with superior competition in most of their functions, save art and subsistence work. 

 

The Japanese for example, have taken basketry to amazing heights of artful precision and grace. 

But all over the world now, the five gallon PVC bucket serves far better for what the basket used to do. Then there is the paper bag. The cardboard box. The plastic trash bag. Each of these, we must grudgingly concede, has a functional kind of beauty.

Colorful hand spun art yarn and hand woven hats and scarves are nice, but in this world today the humble factory made tee shirt is far more important to humans everywhere, with its fine, flexible weave and fit.

But. Well...when I was a young student of art, everyone made fun of anything woven. A degree in basket weaving. That was the joke about the absurdity of learning folk art in a school I suppose. It is really the most low caste form of weaving, practiced by the some of the lowest paid women in the world. I got no support for that. Maybe that's why I never ventured there.. 

 

Until now! We make a daring raid on a beautiful broken branched wiggly willow tree in town. You have to suit up in denim and gum boots, climb out over the roaring creek on just blackberry canes, to reach the fallen tree branches.

 

I love the internet! You can learn anything you want, whenever you want! Your teachers are others like you who share what they know. Don't look now, but I honestly think that much of schooling today is obsolete. 

 

So I give myself a basket weaving class. I weave my first basket. And another, and two more.

 

Also, the branches themselves teach me. The way they want to go, to twist. How to tuck down the ends. The power and beauty of circles, figure eights. 

I notice that while in the pile, the branches seem to go every which way, but once you start winding them around one another, they fit together, harmoniously interlocking.

 

I pick some scotch broom, our local invasive plant, as suggested by one website. (Funny, the ice storm didn't do anything to them.) One basket gets a bit of it woven in. 

 

There is certainly plenty of it around. But I find the feel and smell of it, uh, yukky. Oh well. Oh but Wilbur the kitten loves it. He even nibbles on the scotch broom.

 

So I make some baskets. I love baskets, and use them everywhere in my fiber studio. Yet these baskets I have made are Art Baskets. Each one takes all day. Yes they will hold things.

 

 But I wonder if I will pick them up as readily as the subsistence baskets, those expertly woven in minutes, one after another, all day long, in practical, functional, traditional designs, by some poor person on the other side of the planet. The ones I can buy at the Goodwill for the price of a cup of coffee.

 

I just wonder...

 

"To value yourself less than God values you is not humility, it is pride of a most destructive nature." - Ken Carey