Show Your Sacred Spaces

In response to Lupa's call for us to show our sacred spaces.

This was my sacred space where I grew up in Wokingham:

Here's what I had to say about it, a while ago.

Interestingly, it hasn't changed. Maybe something to do with the area being moneyed.

..and this is my sacred space now:

complete with canine companions.

Laughing Dove

An example of the Mask of God manifesting in a strange and beautiful way is the pair of young Laughing Doves that has been sharing our bit of landbase for the past couple of months.

As you all know, we already share this portion of Earth with two energetic and devoted PitBulls, who exhibit their essential PitBull-ness on occasion by catching and killing any bird silly enough to strut on the ground too close to them.

Scylla, in particular, abhors flying things, and won't have them in her territory - never mind inside the house. Taranis has been known to kill a Hadeda Ibis and then eat the beak. Please look at the beak on a Hadeda when you next encounter one.

Yet these two Little Ones regularly walk casually into the kitchen when the back door is open, sit in Scylla's food bowl, and scratch around in the soil just centimeters from Taranis' nose. The dogs make absolutely no effort to chase them, letting them do whatever the hell they want wherever they want.

I find this mysterious and lovely.

Just as mysterious and not so lovely are the other-dimensional activities which have been going on inside the house ever since we bought it - ten years ago now - involving missing keys, Mag lights and sundry auto parts.

Now, I'll admit that a lot of this could just be two people who are a touch negligent about putting things down and remembering where. Except that, while Warren does tend to be this kind of person, I most certainly am not. I'm a little OC about knowing where stuff is at all times. So when things go missing and turn up in plain sight a couple of days later, it's a bit strange.

As an example, Warren misplaced his bright yellow Bic lighter a week or so ago. Since I'm in charge of the laundry, I would be the one expected to retrieve it from whatever washed-and-ironed pocket it had buried itself in.

But this wasn't happening, so Warren bought himself a new lighter.

This morning, I see the lighter sitting in full view on top of an employee timesheet Warren keeps for his casual hired man, Alex. Sitting on top of these sheets, very visibly on the study desk. The same desk I had dusted and polished the day before. A bright yellow lighter would not have escaped my notice then - especially as we had been on the lookout for it for some days.

Both Warren and I,as has become commonplace, assumed that the other had found it.
When both of us denied responsibility for turning the damned thing up, we agreed, sighing, that we had "faerie" activity once more in the house.

It's nothing more than a little annoying, and frankly, it serves to keep both our minds open to the possibility that what we register with our senses is often not all that is going on.

Like those Laughing Doves, walking safe and unharmed in PitBull territory.

Mask of God, Part Ten Thousand

This is the mask of God:

..and so is this:

..and this:

This, too is the mask of God, unfortunately for some of our perspectives:

..and - sigh - so is this:

I allow myself to become angered by humans at times. I get depressed by their actions and apparent lack of any real thinking. I am sometimes enraged by their violence towards each other and to other beings.

But I get this, also, sometimes.

For this , too is the mask of God:

..and so, praise the thousand names, is this:

Blue Pearl

What do you see when you close your eyes?
Behind the eyelids, against the red-black-grey formless designs drifting, what do you see?

I have been having hypnagogic hallucinations for a couple of years now, usually just before the onset of sleep. I see faces, crowds..mostly people I don't know in this life. Not one has ever been threatening. I am not afraid of this phenomenon at all.

But this afternoon - while taking a Saturday after-lunch nap - I suddenly saw, behind my closed eyes, the most  awe-inspiring field of blue.
Well, I say awe-inspiring. It was more like frightening. To my body that is.
This wall-to-wall field of violet blue was an exalted sight to my soul. But my animal body was going "what the fuck was that??"

So I googled around a bit, and found reference to the experience known as the Blue Pearl (or Light) Phenomenon.(That link is a bit flaky-be warned).

This is something I have never experienced before - not in meditation, or shamanic trance, or Pagan ritual. And it has really struck me a little dumb.

As a bit of background, I have to add that I've been suffering from an unusually intense form of 'flu this past week. I wonder if this has anything to do with it? The meds my doctor prescribed are nothing I'm not pretty tolerant to, so I've tentatively removed them from the equation. The actual 'flu virus my body is hosting at present is, however, a more promising line of enquiry...




Pic: from Invoke the Presence

"In The End There Is One Dance You'll Do Alone"