The Direction of Intention

848. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I stood and watched the dragonflies at the pond. One came to visit me and I remembered a dragonfly a year ago that rested on my shoulder and stayed with me for nearly an hour. It was a harbinger of change. It comforted me and I knew that everything would ultimately be okay. That dragonfly was purple. The dragonfly today was vibrant orange and reminded me of a dragonfly statue that decorated the sill in a room that will always be sacred to me. Dragonflies have been with me all year.

Daphne caught up to me and gave me a large piece of obsidian. Barney looked at it and said, “The native people wouldn’t have use for this. They only used the pieces that were harder, blacker. They used the pieces that could hold an edge.” I thought it was beautiful: sienna, grey and speckled white. It was radiating the heat of the sun and also vibrant with the energy of the volcano that produced it. Elementally, it was fire and I didn’t want to let it go. I held it to my solar plexus and the dragonfly hovered with me. “I am in the most beautiful place on earth,” I thought as I looked up the hill at the vine terraces. I was standing at the bottom of a basin that forms the Benziger winery. It is a biodynamic farm. It is an energy vortex; a very powerful place and you can feel it pulse in you if you stand quiet and feel it. As Barney said, “This place is the cathedral.”

One of the Hermetic Principles is, “As above, so below.” Here, at the winery, it is not an abstract concept but a concrete, living dynamic. The roots of the vine are equal in weight to the parts that we see above ground. Unless of course the ground around the plant is subjected to weed killer or other additive chemicals, then, the plant protects itself. It cuts itself off from its deeper root. It cuts itself off from the capacity to thrive and cannot pull the nourishment from the earth. “The metaphors are everywhere,” Barney said. I was grateful; for once, it was not me seeing the metaphors. “People are like the vines,” he said, “Try to kill the weeds or cheat the natural process and they cut themselves off from deeper nourishment. Survival is the best they can do.”

Earlier I stood in a natural ring of redwoods. I stepped into the ring and it took my breath away. Daphne sat down. Barney smiled and said, “I knew you would love this place. This is your place. People call this the faery ring. It’s for air spirits.”

I am air and water and today I held obsidian (fire and earth). The dragonfly, vibrant orange and yellow, the color of flame, flicked around my shoulder and the past month of my life suddenly made sense. I held the obsidian closer and was quiet for the first time in months.

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774. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

A man played the harp on the ferry crossing today. He sat with his small harp on one of the long benches that run along the windows. He started playing and a crowd joined him on the bench. Some gathered on the neighboring benches. The usually noisy ferry quieted. People stared out the window, transported. Occasionally he paused and answered a question or two. We learned that the type of harp he played was in existence a thousand years ago. On this rainy day I imagined someone long ago playing a harp, ancestor to this man’s harp, the music weaving a spell while Avalon disappeared into the mists.

A boys’ baseball team stormed into the area and fell silent almost immediately. It was as if the music infused the air with a potion. Some of the boys sat. Others retreated to the other end of the ferry. I rested my head against the window and stared into the rainy Sound, grays and greens rushing by, the motion of the boat rocking us. The Sound has been here much longer than this type of harp but it took the harp for me to take notice. In the United States of America it is easy to forget that we tread on ancient ground. Our constructions are too new. We build things not to last. When everything is a resource time only runs into the future. For a moment I glimpsed the eternity in the ancient waters we crossed.

It is April. It is unseasonably cold and wet and gray. The harpist played a tune he had composed but it sounded medieval, something from the fairy folk. It was trance music. It was deep forest music. I was suddenly no longer in the 21st century but some other place, some other time, and this harpist was either calling me from the mists or wooing me into them. Or both. The metaphors were stacking, the passage of life a short ferry ride, living and dying and traditions and magic and music that binds us in the hearing.

Later, in my studio, I was listening to the radio and the interviewer asked this question: “Why should the government give money to something that can’t be measured?” It is a sure sign that we are lost when we come to believe that the most valuable things in this life are those things that can be measured. Metric madness is everywhere I look. There is no metric that can measure the true value of art just as there is no metric that can measure learning. Relationship cannot be measured. It can only be experienced. True value cannot be codified. How much does your life cost? What is the value of your limited time here? The insurance companies have an actuary table that reduce you to dollars and sense if it is a measurement that you need. We are lost. In that moment I wished that my harpist could play and call us forward from of the mist.

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