What an awesome blog! Paintings and photos
are married to prose, imagery becomes icon. You
abolish the sneer of zero producing a love that can only accentuate beneath the eyelid.

cool…’virgin birth’ is the image associated with my natal/birth venus in the sabian symbol system of astrology and venus is about beauty…thanks for that link!  I had not thought of it but many people have crosses in their birth charts, and I’m remembering that you do.  I am curios to look at that now.  I actually don’t, but some things we learn instead of inherit i guess…

Born on the Cross – Virgin Birth. It’s an ‘inside job’ as the Twelve Step Progammes emphasize. The suffering can either become grist for a much larger(divine feeling)Mill, or be a stew of petty resentment, violent greed. I like that Cross was invited into the blog, and love the painting!

It feels really good to

not matter to anyone.

To not be responsible

for anyone or anything.

It feels like freedom.

I want to get rid of

stuff and things and

the ‘need’ for money.

What do I really need

to live?

Air is free…so far, and so is water in many places on the planet.

Food, you have to grow it or harvest it from paradise.

The need for food can make us vulnerable.  What about Beauty? 

Our bodies live without it but what about our souls?

Corporations want to sell us beauty, but it is the artificially

designated flavor of beauty that makes ‘them’ money.

It feels good, so good

to simplify and start

to lose my things,

to lose responsibility

to feel free,

free of the suffering cross,

the one you carry,

not the one

you are born on.

a thing i DO miss is my camera, my tool for seeing Beauty-old pics

Gale, What a profound experience you had–I am the cross! Thank you.

Very nice. And I think we are all spirit, energy, and connected at every level. I also had a catholic upbringing, and I think my knees still ache from those old wooden pews! Beautiful cross.

exactly…i would not EXPECT casual and I would never EXPECT to hear God either so, there you go…haha on me…
it is really impossible to say which is which isn’t it, truly, is dying being born, is being born dying, or is it just being born or dying?  Yin/Yang, opposites, polarity, the nature of this universe…thanks for the encouragement on this one.  I was insecure on how it would ‘float”.

mmmBut a casual tone would also be one of the voices of God..Yes? I sense the yin and yang here too. Perhaps dying IS being born. Lovely, Gale, thank you so much for sharing this.

I am hesitating with
this blog.  It is very deep and personal,
and some may find it offensive and too contradictory to their beliefs.  Please excuse me and allow me the courtesy of
having a different view than you may have and I gladly grant the same courtesy
to you…

Over two years ago,
I gave up on obliterating the crosses that kept coming up in my paintings, thanks
to a fabulous and highly intuitive teacher. 
I started to vigorously pursue the painting of crosses and the series ‘Conjuntio
Oppositorum’ is what came out of that initial first year of exploration.  At least half of those I thought, were kinda
like self portraits, but I didn’t really ‘get’ it.  Then this past Lent, which I had not marked
in decades, I started a series on paper that are my stations of the cross.  This lasted way past Easter, beyond the
twelve stations to 21, and I found that the paintings were speaking to me and
there is a bit of writing that came along with each one.  I will get those up on my art website soon,
now that they are out of the closet.

To me, the sahuaro
photo on the top left of this blog is another cross (you can not see the left arm), and I see Jesus on/in that
all the time.  We are taking a different walk
these days, now that the snakes are below ground, because this particular path
tends to have a lot of rattlesnakes on it (interesting symbolism here) and I
avoid it in the hot months.  This sahuaro
is along the way and this morning IT spoke to me as I walked past.  In a casual and everyday tone, not at all like
a voice of God, it said, ‘you are the cross’…hmmm…i am the cross…holy shit… i got
it…i reeled for hours… i felt the truth in this…i know myself in a new
way.

I am the cross and
so are all humans.  We are spirit come
down to earth (in the vertical axis planted in the ground) to experience the
broad range of duality (therefore, ideally, allowing others a broad range of
beliefs) being manifest on earth at this time. 
This is what Jesus was teaching us. 
He did not die on the cross, he was BORN on the cross…born back to pure
spirit, just as we all will be, someday soon. 
I had been taught in my catholic upbringing that the cross was about suffering,
but I now see that it is about salvation and clarity.

Well , I’ve written
pages and pages today that I may feel like posting in the future…here is one of
the stations that actually has a discernible cross in it:

#9

The road to heaven

is paved with hell and

the righteous feels wrong.

I fear the sun will set

and the blood will cease to flow

before i can surrender.

Here’s a link to my Sublime Studios website, the Conjunctio Oppositorum series:

http://www.sublimestudios.org/conjunctio_oppositorum.php

GOOD ONE! I’ll send you the astrological writings of my friend and Tai Chi teacher Ulysses Smith.

I love having a
sense of where the planets are at and this morning I was thinking about the
ancient navigators up alone at night, studying the stars and getting a sense of
knowing where they were at especially when they were out in the middle of an
ocean (and GPS did not exist). 
I felt like I was there with them, a mixture of wonder, awe, and comfort.

If you get up and
look out to the east-southeast between 5-6 am in Tucson, just before the light
starts to creep over the horizon, you will witness the dance of Saturn and
Venus.  They are close Monday through Wednesday
morning but closest on Tuesday.   You will see them about a palm width above the horizon.

Astrologically,
Saturn is about form & structures (also discipline & duty) and Venus is
about beauty & values (also relationships) and their conjunction brings
these qualities into unity and harmony. 
I was born under this conjunction and often feel these days that I am
not fulfilling my ‘destiny’ regarding this as I did when I was designing and building homes, landscapes, and places.  These days the little bit of work I manage to
get is around organizing and implementing details; there is zero creativity
involved.  I know I am whining, but I am
also attempting to understand.  I have a
deep and mostly unfulfilled longing to bring beauty into form.  I guess this blog and painting does a bit of that, but it doesn’t feel very solid, Saturn enough.

The second bonus on
Tuesday is the lunar eclipse (and full moon) just before the moon sets in the
west around 7 am. It will only be partially visible from here, the maximum
about a half hour after moonset. 
Astrologically, eclipses are about the ending of somethings and the beginning
of new things.

So, as I watch this conjunction
& eclipse I will be praying for and questioning how to catch this Saturn/Venus
wave and ride it into a new chapter where I can regularly and abundantly bring
beauty into form.

“Emergence”, 2008, 60″ x 48″

Holy Kajeepers!

We have a dear friend, Adrian; we met on an adventure trip
in Central America and have been able to keep in contact with him.  He leads the most adventurous modern life I
know of and is working in the Congo right now. 
My husband emailed to be sure he was OK, because the craziness has spread
to that area also. 

Oh my…I just had to give you a peak into reality in a very different
part of the world…Adrian is in the Republic of Congo and the trouble is ‘next
door’ in Democratic Republic of Congo.  But they just recently had trouble with a poacher and
the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) and a “few armed army people were looking about.”  They found three elephants slaughtered for
their ivory yesterday.  It is heart wrenching,
but I think you need to see this.

Their communications had been down for four days due to a huge
lightning strike; can you imagine the thunderstorms there?  A Congolese gold miner drowned in the deluge
and got washed down into their swamp.  Driving
home, a hawk flew past carrying an unfortunate chicken from the village. When
he turned the corner, there was a seven foot scrub cobra in the middle of the
road.  So much life, so much death.

Finally, back ‘safe’ in Cameroon he jumped on a forklift,
dropped off a pallet, and woke a sleeping leopard. “He popped up and
stared me in the eyes from less than a metre.” !!! (…my exclamations, not
Adrian’s, ho hum…)   And I think staring
a swan in the eye is exciting, hahahaha. 

As he settled to sleep after this incredible day there was a
huge bang.  “The bottle of home brew in
my room exploded….cheers, Adrian”

Thanks for your ‘postcard from the edge’.  All our love, admiration, and wishes for safety go out to
you Adrain!!

Oh, too bad about your camera. I was once attacked by a swan. Pretty scary!

I loved the reminder that where we are located in the Milky Way allows us to look in and to look out. Another blessed reminder that I am not the center of the universe! And to know that there are swans floating in the Milky Way – Wow! Thanks, Gale.