Three

I'd like to talk about a symbol that's become important to me for a number of reasons. This is a triquetra withing an interlaced triangle and circle. A friend and I came up with a proposal recently for a circus training and alternative health facility that would utilize warehouse space in Brooklyn. It would also boast a rooftop garden and a juice/snack bar. We dreamed big, and no surprise that this plan will not be carried out. But the exercise was far from wasted, and we worked out some very important components while envisioning our future lives (in a warehouse). One of the things we thought was most important was a really cool name, Trifecta, which led to a whole discussion of what the three subcategories should be, body, mind, world, like the different spheres of influence we want to be moving in? or heart, soul, spirit, like the different layers of energetic imprints that surround our body? What I like the best is the illustration above, Body, Mind, Soul. It focuses my attention on maintaining a balance between those concepts as a stable equilateral triangle.

The name of our hypothetical, moonbrainchild circus? The Threefold Circus. Again, the fun would be in telling everyone who asks three completely new things that the name stands for.

I've also been toying with the idea of my own stage name, especially after meeting such cool folks at Wildfire. A name sets you apart and gives you a clear identity, a clear presence, so I have been thinking hard about what it could be. I came up with Delta, which is the greek letter d, represented by a triangle. In scientific notation it denotes change, as in temperature, slope, moisture content, etc., but basically a reaction or a transformation, it's the shifting variable. And I'm also enjoying the association with a river delta, the land mass at the outflow of a river where it joins the ocean. I like the changing and mixing aspects of that environment, and it's a fertile ground for the proliferation of the ideas I sow. I think I would be an edge species, so an estuary is a great place for me, dynamic.

I'm enamored with the three-petaled antispin flowers that poispinners call 'triquetra', which really do look exactly like the above.

And I've been looking for a symbol to put on a business card. And in my journeying work with sage, I joined with two other aspects of the plant spirit or myself to form a symbol, we held hands like we were in freefall and wove this design around us. Welcome welcome!

I love the Literary Book of Answers, compiled advice from great works of literature. I always consult it when I visit a certain friend.

Question: What do I do now?
Answer: Thou must gather thine own sunshine.
Question: How do I find my own way?
Answer: Be still.
Question: How will I communicate what I find to other people?
Answer: You shall not fail.-- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

I forgot to cite the first two answers.

Earthsea

I have reread Ursula K. LeGuin's fantasy masterpiece A Wizard of Earthsea. Always a good decision. Especially if you have trouble with your shadow. Predictably, I find nature sorcery riveting.
"Ogion let the rain fall where it would. He found a thick fir-tree and lay down beneath it. Ged crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen, and wondered what was the good of having power if you were too wise to use it, and wished he had gone as prentice to that old weatherworker of the Vale, where at least he would have slept dry. He did not speak any of his thoughts aloud. He said not a word. His master smiled, and fell asleep in the rain."

"He stood in the innermost room of the House of the Wise, and it was open to the sky. Then suddenly he was aware of a man clothed in white who watched him through the falling water of the fountain.
As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight."

Gifts found today

"Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear"
"a Boy I loved the sun"
--William Wordsworth, Prelude Book 1

"While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight." Gaston Bachelard, The Alchemy of Imagination

The gallery of an inspired artist. Charismatic megafauna have their own dignity, and as he says, the inspiring romantic or mythic images resound deep in the emotional consciousness. This is not merely simpering wildlife presented for a WWF calendar, but a visionary on the boundary, at the crux of nature- culture interacting and speaking in our lives through his art.

What if I could be yours?

Could we spend an eternity of todays in a sailboat of dreams
power our wishes with marshmallows and love
the fattest clouds that we herd around us
bobbing onto the seas of tomorrow?

And would that be the better part of a life lived on the water?

there aren't any
small cookies in my pocket
unless you count crumbs

What could I say to the unfolding of my heart?
The sigh of wings unfurling
Flex yet be silent, and test the breeze.

Three reasons to go back to a monastery

The umbrella in the night
looming dark beyond the flashlight's beam
hides a lotus.

A small orange and white cat
is Lucky
to call this place home.

Bluish white puddles in the dawn
and the ceramic basin of sky
brims over.

Three is a magic number

Or, to quote one of my favorite authors "Three is the number of those who do holy work." Which brings me to my three favorite authors: Clive Barker (quote and image), Neil Gaiman, and China Mieville. Concepts dreamed up by these men have changed my life and more importantly my dreams.

Clive Barker is a fantasy/horror/erotica writer, and also paints some of my favorite work (on the left is tree full of sky). The real reason he is on my list is because of Abarat. Barker took a break from his usual and started a series of intensely personal, vivid oil paintings, which grew into the hundreds, and then became a storyline, and then became a series of the most beautifully illustrated, weirdest, wildest fiction I've had the good fortune to come across, with here and there a glimmer of live, imaginative power, higher purpose and philosophical commentary that makes Disney squirm in their mainstream capitalist pants. And it's about to get even better. The next book is called Absolute Midnight. More information here: http://www.clivebarker.info/yaabaratunpub.html

Neil Gaiman should need no introduction. All of his fiction is enjoyable, and the past year I dove into Sandman, opening floodgates that I did not know existed. I'm still traveling headlong, through dreams, through darkness and all unspeakable, and I have no regrets (except that it's over, but it's never really).

China Mieville is the other side of the moon, an Author, someone to draw down the portals. His writing makes me want to drink coffee and cackle insanely, sit on a roof and burn deep into the night (not that i don't want to do any of these normally, well, everything but the coffee). London, or London as it could be, is alive and brooding, breathing, stinking, fucking, dreaming, behind everything he writes. The only author in a long while to send me searching through my thickest dictionary regularly. Even though there are no illustrations (I allow begrudgingly) there are thousands of composite images evolving organically from the smog and diction. Steampunk, socialism, magic and even stranger perversions of the natural world. Perdido Street Station or the short story the Tain are the best introductions to his work.