Put it in the Cosmic Cloud

The World Healing Bank was formally conceived in the early weeks of the pandemic of 2020. It runs on Reiki donations.

Reiki is just generic God-stuff, an undifferentiated healing essence, that we could also call life force, love, blessings, etc, for the purpose of this writing. You can “send love”, as they say. The main thing is your intention, combined with some effort in the form of an action such as a thought, visualization, touch, breath, or any deliberate and conscious action. So we are dealing with Reiki here, but to participate, you need only to have love to give, or need some.

World Healing Bank was set up last spring, and you can read about it here:

http://omnimountainskyrainbow.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-world-healing-bank.html

Though it is not a physical building, it is very real, more real than a bank with money in it. All you have to do if you need some healing, is ask for it. It is always free.

If you have some healing love to give, send it on in. It is always open.

You can offer it to any and all and know that it will be dispensed as needed. Reiki comes with its own wisdom guidance system. You can just give, and trust.

If, on the other hand, you perhaps want to send some healing love to a particular person, being, creature, planet, or ecosystem, or to an event, time, or place, you can just designate it and an account will open just for that cause.

Isn’t that what prayer is, you may ask? Yes. This is a form of prayer. But it is also like a food bank, where people bring in actual food, for specific actual people to eat, on specific actual days, when they need it. In both cases everything ultimately comes from the One, the Source, from Infinite Creator. And you can surely pray for someone any way that you may wish.

In this world, at this time, all ways of delivering help are useful. The ritual of consciously packaging and sending aid to  help out gives much needed healing to the sender as well as the intended recipient. 

The world is a stage to practice our love and act it out in real life. It is a dance you can get better at with repetition. It is a planet full of specific beings and particular needs, otherwise we need not be individuals with bodies doing things with things! If you pray for a loaf of bread, and I made an extra loaf today, then I get the pleasure and honor of being the conduit of the answer to your prayer. 

This is how the World Healing Bank operates. You bake the loaf, package it the way you would like, address it to your intended recipient or to the WHB for wise dispensation, smile, and know that you have made a contribution. You are blessed, and we are all richer. Your contribution is an addition to the great reservoir of “bodhicitta”, or accumulated virtue, available for all to draw upon. The whole world is uplifted.

“There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, ‘Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery.’ This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, ‘My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket!’

      Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine.”  -Elizabeth Gilbert 

Big Leaf Maple Art

Big Leaf Maple Art

“Appreciate and don't take for granted the things and people you have. Better yet take the good out of the situations you may face, I think 2020 came to teach us that.” -Hopal Green

These Big Leaf Maple trees in our area will grow nowhere else, though people have tried. And they make the largest maple leaf of any other maple. 

These trees are everywhere around us as we meander through the rainforest. They light up the understory in dappled sun, drenching us in golden light.

Their leaves pile up into crumpled papery paths through the woods. They read like naturally self recycling newspapers, littering our way, with the stories of the last few seasons printed on them. Pick one up, it has a message for those who can read tree language. 

There is the news of wind, rain, and sun, gossip about the affairs of birds and squirrels, and from this fall, the tale of the great smoke. We kick through them as we walk.

The rain turns them into soggy cornflakes that squish under your feet.

Here in the great northwest USA, we have boring fall colors. There is green, for evergreen trees, and yellow, for the big leaf maple. That’s about it.

So, in this pandemical moment of embracing what is around, whatever it may be, I take a deep dive into the fall colors anyway. I gather some fallen maple leaves, and play with the color palette. 

I mix them with light on my ipad. 

I begin to pull out bits of dyed fleece and sparkles.

I spin the the colors into yarn, and knit them together.

The main body of the blanket is undyed natural tan brown merino wool, from a small farm near here, where every sheep has a name, and each one is special and loved, and has beautiful fleece. I spin the yarn by hand, from super soft, four inch stapes that I’ve washed carefully and gently, and dried in the sun and breeze.

The finished blanket will remind me of the colors of the season when we all had to learn to appreciate whatever we have around us now, wherever we may be.

“There are so many things which we have but have not paid any attention to them. If only we can learn to appreciate our blessings, we can enjoy great happiness.” -Awdhesh Singh

The Age of Sharing

 The Age of Sharing

“I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.” -Georgia O’Keeffe

(from “How to Do What You Really Want While Saving the World at the Same Time”:)

Some guy claims that “The Artist Is Dead”. He wrote a book. It whines about how you used to be able to make a middle class living at being an artist, but now, because of the internet, (He calls it “Big Tech”) sadly, everything is free. (In truth, he means IF you were a white male fancied by the gatekeepers like the record companies and galleries and rich art collectors and fine arts endowment founders)

Hmmm. I’d say the artist is very much alive. More like, it is the death of the gatekeepers. Now, it is a direct relationship between an artist and the discoverer of the art. It is now, yes, a game of discovery, not selling. A million books a year are self published. There are billions of beautiful photos floating around on the cloud, with millions more added daily.

Kids are making zillions of little movies every minute. More self published songs bubble up on the interweb every day than you could listen to if you played them all day for hundreds of years.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.”- Dr. Seuss

Some just don’t bother to look for this stuff anymore, and allow the lowest common denominator to feed them cat videos or whatever. But the beauty, creative miracles, and free richness is here now, if you want to look for it.

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.”- Neil Gaiman 

“But are they good?” (Scream the unemployed gatekeepers.) “ Are they professional?!” Well if you mean, “not free,” then, no...

“Every artist was first an amateur.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

New curators will arise to help us sort through it all. Networks will arise to share this creative bounty. It is as if we have been through a long winter where the only flowers you ever saw were in some exotic orchid greenhouse and suddenly spring arrives and the fields and roadsides everywhere are thick with abundant carpets of velvet flowers blooming in every color.

Actually I like the lowly common dandelions. And cat videos. And Etsy crafts. This great blooming of art, from the most basic to the most highbrow, is to be celebrated. But it is time to mentally unhitch art from the cart we have been making it drag around, which is the stated need to make it pay us money.

This is the dawning age of everyone as artist. The age of the gatekeeper is over. You don’t need a degree in art. You might get one to help you understand it, but not to do it. Most of us do not get a degree in talking, or walking, or eating, or singing or lovemaking, though all of these things do require immersion in the culture to learn and do well. There is some technical mastery in involved, but this is no mystic priesthood.  Art is no different.

This is an age in which you can, for the first time since we lived in isolated tribes, just do it and share it with everyone. Only now the tribe is global. You have the whole world in which to look for and find the ones who like the things you do. This is not a problem!  This is awesome!

In the past, you needed to have money if you wanted to be an artist. You needed a patron. Customers, to buy your work. A job on the side at a university to train others that they needed to appreciate and buy your work. A network, a circle, a fan base, a mailing list, a go-fund-me, a spouse or relative to support you.

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”- Oscar Wilde

But now, you can just do it. Yes, the math does not support superstars anymore, especially if we are all artists now. If everyone is either an artist now, or about to realize that they are, there will soon be a one to one relationship of artist to art appreciators, formerly called “consumers.” You will not become a superstar. Nobody will. But do we need superstar eaters? Superstar sleepers? 

Everyone and anyone can and does take photographs all day now. Gradually we are getting better at it as we share. Yes, share. It is a word that means give it away free. Not sell.

You can now turn your photo into a Van Gough, a Picasso, or a Peter Max, in seconds, with an app. Another app composes your tune as you sing it, into a fully orchestrated song in the style of your choice. And what is the limit to how many stars there can be? The more deeply our telescopes peer out into the universe, the more stars we see. Every pinpoint magnifies into a whole galaxy or something.

The age of the superstar is over. It actually peaked decades ago. There is no shared mass media anymore, so no superstars, except for the star of the day, or hour, or... minute? And only among your cohort of shared interest in that subject.

“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”-Charles Cooley 

Art is just what we do. It is just who we all are, really. There are still some indigenous cultures left on Earth in which everyone sings. Pretty much all day, often together, in lovely intensely coordinated patterns and harmonies.

Give it up, gatekeepers, you time has passed and you are now historians.

“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”- Ernest Hemingway 

“The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint.”-Keith Haring