Description

New Release – 2024

 

Breathing with the Earth – Published 2024

 

Art, the creative fire in every living thing, churns and burns to create constant change. It is the essence of evolution, a manifestation of the interconnectedness between all living beings and nature.

 

This book is about living, breathing, dreaming and dying well.

May this book bring peace, happiness and clarity to all beings.

 

I

Becoming Earth

“[It is about] feeling the polyrhythmic pulse of this place [the earth] – this huge windswept body of water and stone, this vexed being in whose flesh we’re entangled”. David Abraham

My eternal mother is the Earth. I deeply respect and cherish my primal relationship with her. I humbly feel the ground beneath my feet, the soft mountain breeze that plays with my hair, and the flowing water that runs through me. Earth is the only water world in the solar system and the only planet harbouring life.

This book explores becoming one with the Earth, humanity, and the universe in a time of cultural disintegration and conflicting worldviews. Becoming an “Interbeing” involves experiencing different versions of oneself through various moments and years. This journey involves studying the thoughts and experiences of many sages, teachers, and mentors from Western and Eastern traditions to understand reality better.

 

II

Development of the Concept ‘Interbeing’

The term ‘interbeing’ has unfolded as a new space in circular time. Over time, it mutated into a third presence or a living form that changed from a transitional space into a new-world space, a living being – a kaironic moment in a Being concerned with a worldview transition and consciousness metamorphosis.

In my work, the phenomenon of an Interbeing has mutated from a ‘transitional’ space to a Being, a third presence in the relational conflict between opposites of good and evil. It is not a god but something like an oversoul or Intelligent Presence that facilitates integration and eventual actualisation of ‘new’ humans, referred to as ‘Interbeings’—an integral mutational moment of creating a new world.

I envision and dream about ‘space and time mutations to becoming an Interbeing’ as the new polyphonic movement of the depth and praxis of blue water as waves (consciousness) and profound secret blue presences of the collective unconscious tucked away in hidden caves at the bottom of the sea of the cosmos. I hear the melody, the music, the magnificent symphonies of intertwining stars, sunlight and sages playing in the mists of pregnant possibilities.

 

III

A Web of Inter-Relatedness

Every being is a mandala.

We are our environment

As much as we are

The entity in the environment Robert Thurman

I feel and play with the threads of multiple melodies woven into a web, ornamented, glistening patterns pierced by the bridge of the Milky Way – a rhythmical and harmonious spiralling movement of orderly nebulas and stars. There is a glowing feeling in my solar plexus of joyful harmony and order in the Universe, a knowing that the future lives in us and that the vehicle of transference and transformation is Poetry and Art, which are both acts of Presence – a space of silence, where we can hear Beauty’s call.

 

 

 

 

 

 

IV

A New Language

This book, Breathing with the Earth, explores the creation of a new language that allows us to examine how the future is already present in the present moment. It does so through the concept of the sensuous body, which moves towards integration and mutation into an Interbeing.

The book aims to identify a fresh kind of thought by delving into the direct experience that connects us more deeply with the sensuous presence of the world, as sensed through the body in relation to other bodies and the world around us. What if the presence of the Interbeing, as an entity, is creating a language of the senses? This language unfolds in the “slippage between an organism and the terrain that it wanders,” as David Abrahams puts it.

A delicate thread runs throughout the book, tying all these concepts together and inviting us to consider new ways of understanding ourselves and our place in the world.

 

V

Opening of the Future in the Phenomenological Present as a Perceiving of the World as Truth

Integral reality is the world’s transparency, perceiving the world as truth: a mutual perceiving and imparting of the truth of the world and of man and of all that transluces both. Jean Gebser

This book’s poetry, haiku, haibun, aphorisms, reflections, and musings endeavour to re-contextualise the present for new possibilities. Every created poem, haibun, and painting attempts to open the future with a new way of thinking, perceiving, sensemaking and imagining the world.

It attempts to ‘open up’ the future as it unfolds in the phenomenological present, quivering with new potential. Seeds of futurist-oriented thinking are integrated with the knowledge that the past and future manifest simultaneously in every moment – a spiralling mutation of all possibilities.

“Our concern is with a new reality – a reality functioning and effectual integrally, in which intensity and action, the effective and the effect co-exist; one where origin, by “presentiation,” blossoms forth anew; and one in which the present is all-encompassing and entire. Integral reality is the world’s transparency, a perceiving of the world as truth: a mutual perceiving and imparting of the truth of the world, the human, and all that transluces both.” Jean Gebser

This integral reality that this book, Breathing with the Earth, explores is about recovering the present as a reality of transparency and truth—crucial work for pathfinding in a meaning crisis.

 

VI

Letting Go

Unfolding of the present moment, which ‘happens’ to us and fulfils itself in us. When we decide to let go, the mind becomes an intricately textured sigh – a deep breath that blurs boundaries as we surrender our judgements and opinions to the mystery of the in-between space – a space where human and animal, mind and earth meet.

 

VII

Living on the Horizon where Processes of Change are Possible

The only way to travel to the future in the now is to live on the edge or horizon of processes – the liminal spaces where human and non-human meet, like human and Nature, human and animal, human and the more-than-human, mind and earth, the soles of your feet and the soil.

It is a deliberate venture to illicit the space between exploring and elucidating the physics and ontology of the vibrational or quivering breath, delicately textured with mystery, movements, memory, and musings—a process of Breathing with the Earth through poetry and art.

According to Jean Gebser:

“In creativity, origin is present.

Creativity is not bound to space and time.

Creativity is a visibly emerging impulse of origin, a-rational, disarraying, transforming, and liberating.

It is the most direct, although the rarest, process of integration, and even when realised for only fractions of a second, it can never be lost.”

Through the ever-present consciousness of creativity, the timeless present moment unfolds, ‘happens’ to us, and fulfils itself in us. In my journals, I repeatedly wrote that I am not creating art, but that art is creating me.”

Jean Gebser writes: “But whatever pervades the heaven also pervades the soul; and for this reason alone, the pervasive, creative, is spiritual.”

“As a scholar, poet, and artist, I progressively realised that creativity is a flowing process of unfolding multifaceted phenomena in the moment”. (Carrying Sand to the River)

 

VIII

A Radiant Vision of the Unfolding of Human Consciousness through Art and Poetry

“I touch the paper, the pen, and the flowing ink with trembling fingers and quivering eyes, allowing my senses to cross into each other as a gestalt emerges. There is a willingness to let the phenomena emerge, even if I destroy it while caressing it”.

This book explores the beautiful and terrifying patterns of how the psyche of humans develops and manifests. It allows for a radiant vision of human consciousness that shines through art, poetry, and allusions to the mandala as a manifestation of the blueprint of how tomorrow is already shaping the patterns of being and becoming in the present. Breathing with the Earth preserves the infantile impressions of lived life and trusts human creative instincts while being indifferent to the outcome – simultaneously accepting that creation is beautiful and terrifying.

“In the rolling thunder of the immanent present, all that we are, all that we have been, and all that we could be is radically with us. Time is whole, and therefore, you are whole.” Jean Gebser’s Seeing Through the World – Jeremy Johnson

 

IX

Synesthesia: A Different Form of Coming–Into–Awareness

Breathing with the Earth is a literary work that delves into a synesthetic world where a new form of consciousness speaks through colours, smells, tastes, music, textures, and feeling tones. This alternate reality is beyond human comprehension and possibility, existing as an Interbeing ‘somewhere’, perhaps on the fringe of life, in a space of constant interchange that traverses a multi-armed reality of no time, spaciousness, and diaphaneity. Maybe it is an Avatar of a parallel existence that is forever present in the moment on the shores of a struggling world.

 

X

Flowers are Mandalas.

The mandala is Earth and man, “the atom that composes the material essence of man and the galaxy of which the earth is but an atom”. Arguelles

The earth and humans are living mandalas and, therefore, flowers. The one constant of the flower-mandala phenomenon is the centre, which symbolises the eternal potential – the inexhaustible source from which all seeds grow and develop. Cells, down to atoms, cannot realise their function without revolving around a nucleus.

The centre of the flower/mandala symbolises ‘infinite possibilities. The earth is a living mandala – a flower structure through and from which flows a succession of changes, elemental forms, and primal surges, each surpassing the other in an infinite variety of organic structures and impulses, crowned by the supreme attribute of reflective consciousness. The mandala – flower is an ordering principle in the universe through which constant transformation and growth are possible.

 

XI

A Final Thought

The book’s title emerged as I reflected on the art and poetry I had worked on over the last few years. Retrospective contemplation about this surprising title has unfolded phenomenologically at first as a circle drawn upon the ground of the Karoo at the bottom of the Swartberg Mountains. I dreamt about the mountain, the sky, the birds, and the trees and met the circling incredible sunlight at dusk and dawn, followed by the moon’s secret deep blue light at night.

Over time, I became a wild woman, Breathing with the Earth, chanting songs in verse to the stars and then the wildflowers who became real women braving the elements with a fiery fierceness, courage and kindness – the like of which I have never experienced beyond the realm of thoughts. I wrote in my journal:

I happened upon myself in a circle of wildflowers. Standing in the pristine Karoo veld, I realised I am a tiny wildflower in a forever-changing circle… a living metaphor of the Creative Fire. I moved with others in a circular ritualistic prayer. My skin softened as the air penetrated my earth body and ignited the twinkling stars of the Milky Way in my confused mind … my petals gently moving in the breeze of suppressed dreams.