Ayahuasca–Rain Passage: An Inner Journey Soundscape
A Soundscape by David P. Crews
1. Arcana
2. Entering (8:15)
3. Rain and Visions (19:30)
4. Emerging (54:40)
5. Awakening (1:03:40)
[Total run time: 1:17:00]
Ayahuasca–Rain Passage is a visionary sound experience by award-winning musician David Crews, centered on a recording made on his second venture into the Peruvian Upper Amazon to work with the most renowned and respected whole-plant spirit medicine in the world, called ayahuasca–the Vine of the Soul. A jungle rainstorm arrived to guide the ayahuasca ceremony with the energy of Yacumama, the Water Spirit of the rivers and forest, bringing power and depth to the intense visions received from Madre Ayahuasca herself.
About the Music:
“This is a minimalist and immersive ambient soundscape. I designed this to be a deliberately slow and long work to suggest to the listener the mental and spiritual space one enters when working with ayahuasca in traditional ancient nighttime ceremony (which normally lasts from four to six hours). It is based on a 24 bit digital recording, made on location, of the natural sounds environment at SpiritQuest Sanctuary on the Rio Momón, a tributary of the Amazon. It includes the evening chorus of animals and insects, a large tropical downpour, and the post-rain night chorus. This is blended with the spirit songs of the shaman and my original deep electronic music ambient elements.
“Ayahuasca is best encountered when one is surrounded by and embedded into the vast living being that is the Amazon forest. My intention was to make a long-form piece centered on that rainstorm that, while containing creative electronic musical elements, remains an experiential ambient work. Great care has been taken to blend and guide the slowly evolving moods. In ayahuasca, each participant’s specific visions are unique, so I have presented a kind of impressionistic portrayal of the vision experience, very much centered in the entraining of the mind by the rhythms and white noise of the traditional songs, the leaf rattles, and the rain. At 1 hour, 17 minutes in length, this contiguous piece is best listened to in one sitting, when one is ready for an immersive meditational and transforming experience. It also works well as a low-volume truly ambient environment.
“The icaros (spirit songs) heard in this work were also recorded on location, during actual ceremony. They are the songs of don Rober Jarama, the highly esteemed banco ayahuascuero shaman associated with SpiritQuest. I have worked with don Rober over a seven-year period. He is completely authentic and simply amazing in his dedication to traditional mestizo and tribal shamanism in the Amazon. You will hear him whistle his opening Arcana to place spiritual protection on the participants, and also some of his sung icaros that help guide the ceremony throughout the night. Also prominent are the rhythmic sounds of the schacapa, a dry-leaf rattle that helps entrain the mind as the visions progress.
“The musical elements were created with LogicPro X on a Macintosh system and include timbres created in Alchemy, Air Xpand!2, ESX-24, EWQL Symphony samples, and other instruments and modules. Performance, production, and mastering completed at JaguarFeather Studios, Austin, Texas.
“My thanks and love to maestros don Rober Jarama and don Howard Lawler, and the staff and friends of SpiritQuest in Peru.
“I hope you find this journey into the incomparable vision space of ayahuasca to be useful, sublime, and amazing. Blessings and Light!”
-David P. Crews
June, 2016
Ayahuasca and the Return of the Hero
“A prophet is not without honor except in his own country. . .”
Mark 6:4
An observation about reintegration and sharing one’s non-ordinary experiences for good or for ill.
Anyone who has worked authentically with Ayahuasca, gaining sight and knowledge, healing and wisdom, is partaking in the mythic Hero’s Journey. He or she is a legitimate explorer–one who travels to dangerous places, passing barrier guardians, personally encountering the divine Spirit or Spirits, and willingly undergoing tests and challenges that are often terrifying and that threaten survival. When the exploration ends, we who have so ventured return to our mundane world once again, full and overflowing with what has been taken in and we are electrically charged with it. It is a boon for ourselves (this is why we took on the challenge). We wish it to be one for our friends, our family, our tribe: those who did not and would not ever cross the border we crossed; those who would or could not face the challenges and return with the great wealth.
One of the most challenging parts of the Hero’s Journey then, is the return: the reintegration into the “normal” everyday world and trying to fulfill our role as conveyors of the treasures we found and the discoveries we made during our dangerous endeavor. It does not always work, this re-entry into our old world and it can redound to our discomfiture in our relationships with others. Joseph Campbell put it this way:
“[Prior to the Hero’s return from] the mystic realm into the land of common day. Whether rescued from without, driven from within, or gently carried along by the guiding divinities, he has yet to re-enter with his boon the long-forgotten atmosphere where men who are fractions imagine themselves to be complete. He has yet to confront society with his ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend. . . .
. . . As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes.
. . . How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void?”
This, Campbell says, is “the hero’s ultimate difficult task.”
–Joseph Campbell “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1949–Second Edition, 1968), pp 216-218.
After my first, most powerful and transformative foray into the realms of the Other, I naively presented my journey’s logs and observations to those who are close to me. The reaction was something like that one described by Campbell–the semantic and ontological challenges the very same as he outlined. Sometimes, I wonder if I should have done it, for he also wrote of the hero who might be tempted to “commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock-dwelling, close the door, and make it fast. But if (an obstruction to his retreat has been placed), then the work of representing eternity in time, and perceiving in time eternity, cannot be avoided.”
[ibid, p. 218]
And, so I continue to share what I have experienced. I do so in diverse ways, including (especially) in this blog.
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Costa Rica Waterfalls
Today, I’m presenting a virtual getaway, especially for anyone stuck in this year’s snowy winter. I’m pleased to offer you my short (7 min.) nature film I shot in November on location in the beautiful country of Costa Rica.
I love waterfalls, and Costa Rica has many lovely ones, both small and very large. All are situated in rain forest settings that invoke images of a lost, green, wild world.
This film also features my original symphonic music score. Be sure to go full screen and volume up.
I hope you enjoy “Costa Rica Waterfalls”!
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Big Bend National Park–Summer Photography
I have just returned from a short visit to the wonderful Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas, USA. I’ve been traveling here off and on since the spring of 1962, taking photos and video, hiking and camping, and doing inner work and vision quests. With some extensive new photography equipment in hand including a Nikon D5300 and a computerized slider, I’m setting out to shoot new cinematography and photography of the park in multiple seasons. This is to remake an artistic film I created some years ago using standard definition video. Now, I can remake it in full HD with professional rigging for camera moves.
I’ll post more of the video elements later, but for now, here are some of the still photographs I made this week, accompanied by some script excerpts from the original film.
I hope you enjoy them!
I urge you to click through to the larger images for much higher quality!
Time
In Big Bend
The scale of time is different from
our time – the observers, ourselves – who come.
It is a different scale of time and of movement than
our time – our movement.
We are too fast to see it.
We cannot slow down.
Slow Down
Wonder
There is an enchanted doorway –
a wonder and a sign.
A Temple of water
and air,
And walls of determination.
We briefly enter – and return again.
Heat
There is nothing between this sand and that yonder star
but empty space and a thin breath of blistered air.
A Weight Bears Down.
Relentless.
We cannot escape.
Our branches grow tough – and dark.
Our water, our blood, our thoughts
Dwindle . . . down.
The white light sears our flesh into dust,
and there is no wind to blow it away.
Stillness
The desert does not sleep.
It is an endless movement – the motion of survival.
We look and listen . . . and there is
Stillness
Silence
You can see it move if you are slow enough.
You can feel it, anyway,
if you are still enough.
Do not listen for it or watch for it.
Be Still
and Listen
and Watch
Change
This desert is young. This desert is old.
It depends on your speed, you see.
Some have come to change this land.
Some have changed it – some.
All who have come
Have Been Changed.
Some have gone now.
A fragrance lingers in secret places.
Their song echoes lightly on adobe and wood and stone.
The mesa shrugs, and it is gone.
Life
She is clothed in riches. Bejewelled in green and yellow and brown.
An extravagance on this plate of rock – standing up, tasting the water.
Big Bend is not barren.
LIFE is everywhere in this Desert –
this Living Land.
Raising faces – arms to the air,
feeling deeply down for the lifeblood –
a watery current within.
Knowing how to keep that – and to hold it.
A Treasure.
Spirit
The desert is a mirror.
The desert is a portal.
It reflects our souls back at us,
and then offers a Way
into another Realm.
We are opened up
and slowed down.
The soft voices of the Plants can be heard.
The wordless brotherhood of the Animals is known.
The marvel of the Eternal Moment can be felt
In our very ground.
Big Bend is a Heart Land.
A place of shifting Shapes.
It is a healer of the Spirit.
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An Earth Blessing
Bless me, O beautiful Earth.
Bless me, O beautiful Earth.
For I have come forth from You,
And, I return again to You.
Bless me, O beautiful Earth.
Bless me through my feet.
Bless me through my legs.
Bless me through my body.
Bless me through my arms.
Bless me through my hands.
Bless me through my face.
Give me your blessing
As I gaze at your beauty.
I return your blessing
With every movement and
Every sacred Word.
I am filled up with You.
Bless me, O beautiful Earth.
I am your Child.
I am Earth.
[Click any image for a larger view.]
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Terrifyingly Beautiful
“Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”
“Beauty is the form perceived by the highest faculty of mind in the act of reflection. We naturally reside in the lap of a terrible beauty, terrible because it is devoid of sentimentality and utterly simple and just. It is also terrible because the emotion we describe as awe or wonder also has inherent within it an aspect of terror. If our ordinary experience is comfortable and banal, then revelatory experience is not, and the terror we experience at the edge of divinity in the country of the sublime is also terrifyingly beautiful.”
– Richard Geldard, “The Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”
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Dr. McKenna – Ayahuasca Experience video
An interesting graphic animation of a reading by Dennis McKenna from his book “The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.” In it, he describes a particularly awe inducing vision experience with the medicina. Dennis is the brother of the late Terence McKenna and his book is a good read about their relationship and their various pioneering adventures working with Ayahuasca and other entheogens.
His great vision, related here, is the kind of experience that draws people to Ayahuasca and can significantly alter one’s perception of themselves and of their place in the universe.
[Source: http://vimeo.com/80337226 — Voice Media Group]
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Ecstasy
“But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe, or to float through that door yonder into the Divine Presence?”
– R. Gordon Wasson
An original digital artwork by David P. Crews.
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Autumn Fire – Golden Aspens in Colorado
“He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Autumn is my favorite time of year in Texas because it lasts longer than spring and the temperatures are such a relief after our hot summers, but there is little leaf color until early December, and then only a hint of the kind of color one sees in the northeast or in the mountains of the great American West. I love to make a special trip to see the aspens change in Colorado. Here is one of my photos for you – just an autumn greeting and a wish-you-well for the upcoming Thanksgiving and other holiday times.
I took this one just outside Silverton, Colorado a couple of years ago.
What does autumn go on paying for
with so much yellow money?”
― Pablo Neruda
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Moonrise
From the swirl of
Unconsciousness
She rises.
A lantern
Glowing,
Revealing a
Pathway into
Dreams.
An image I took of the moonrise over the Gulf of Mexico at Surfside Beach, Texas on October 23, 2013.
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The Stars Within
A new poem and artwork today.
It speaks of unfathomed dimension and scale in the human mind and soul.
[click image for larger]
The Stars Within
Are we so small?
And yet are we many,
Oh so many, glowing here and there?
Bodies of intricate illusion,
Tiny swirls of light and bone?
Each contains a galaxy.
Breath and beat, independent
Engines that move us,
Just like all the others.
Fear and happiness
Shaping the face
Our mind looks out of.
Step within to see the trick.
Vastness. Volume –
Filled with stars.
Each the color of a memory.
Ideas cluster and flare: suns
Lighting the dark lanes.
Hard and cold planets, some
Massive and others minor;
Worlds of water and storms;
Orbs of unspeakable beauty,
Filled with people and stories;
Turn themselves ’round
And whirl within.
Some we craft with careful
Intention, spinning each one
Lovingly. Returning there,
Spending time, comforted –
Renewed by loved lands and faces.
Others, uncalled for,
Rush up to surprise us –
Alien visions within our domain,
We wonder who made these
Worlds we did not plan.
Our galaxy is so vast.
The stars within swirl right around
And sing the strands of Life.
They swirl right ’round:
An unexpected gleaming nebula
Clothed in humble membrane.
An unchartable symphony,
An unexpected dimension within.
A million million stars and worlds
Dance and turn about
An invisible Center,
An obscured Mystery.
We are many and oh so small,
And when each one is no more,
A wide galaxy, a very Universe
Transforming, winks away
Into unknown night.
– – – – –
[© David P. Crews, 2013]
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Monument Valley – Artist’s Point
Click image for larger size and better resolution.
With my upcoming trip to Peru, I’ve been blogging a lot about Ayahuasca lately. I thought I’d give you some unrelated eye-candy for a change! Here’s a photo I took a few years ago at the incomparable Monument Valley on the Navajo reservation on the Utah/Arizona border. This is a special place not only to the Navajo, but to all Americans. There is no other landscape quite like it or the other great canyon vistas of the Colorado Plateau.
,
Emerge
Now,
I am in the greater void.
Reborn. Discontent.
Infused with intensity,
Straining for sustenance,
Comforted by reason.
Overjoyed by love,
Amazed by the newly seen,
Grasping for a higher throne
Made solid by the hand and mind
Of my recast soul.
There is much I would like to know about the nature of God,
but I should be satisfied with startling him.
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Ritual
“A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life.”
– Joseph Campbell
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A New Vista
In a New Land
Long I have struggled in the valley, only
To look up at the end and realize with a
Sudden start,
That I have arrived at the top of a
Mountain, instead.
The view ahead is one of beauty
And favor. The path before me is
Enticing, promising.
More hills in view, but
The slope is gentle
And green.
I’m anticipating a very big change in my life, which I will describe at the right time, but this poem came to me today to speak of the way change can sometimes come unexpectedly upon us, just when it seems that all things are stuck in an old pattern and won’t ever change. Maybe that valley we’ve been struggling through is not a valley after all. Maybe we will suddenly gasp as we gaze into a new vista. Then, we must not fear. We must take action and step confidently into our new world, creating it as we go.
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Let’s Lasso an Asteroid!
[Click image to go to one of the news service stories / stories about this.]
Image from The Australian via Rick Sternbach, Keck Institute for Space Studies.
I love it when science fiction taps us on the shoulder, excuses itself as it slips past us, and proceeds to make itself into gosh-darn science reality.
Reports are being published that one of the very realistic action plans NASA will consider soon is to send a ship up to lasso an asteroid, stabilize it, then bring it back to an orbit around the Moon. There it can be used as an experimental base and as a way station for future Mars missions.
I particularly agree with one point that was made. Just flying out to an asteroid and touching it to “say we’d done so” is OK, but not nearly as compelling as this practical mission. This has real meat to it – real adventure and actual practical value. It is not just abstract basic research.
In other words, it could be a PR prize. I hope NASA considers this program strongly. Let’s go capture one of those darn rocks and bring it back into our zone of control. It would be the very first time a celestial object was moved by humans. We can test it for mineral mining, use it as a base, study it for how to manipulate one of its rambunctious cousins into not hitting Earth, and maybe just inspire the world to take the next steps into a broader and safer future for us all.
Cool!
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The Overview Effect
“Humanity must rise above the earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond. For only then will we understand the world in which we live.”
– Socrates (469 – 399 BCE)
•Click image to go to the film (19 min) •
A short film from an interesting group [The Overview Institute] whose mission is to find a better way to leverage the incredible power of seeing the Earth from outside of it. From the time I was a little boy, watching the space shots and avidly consuming every photo or film of Earth and space, I’ve always felt the frustration these folks are talking about. I truly grasped for myself that “Spaceship Earth” idea, and the concept that we’re all in this together on a small, fragile rock in the middle of infinite and truly harsh space. It is frustrating because as incredibly important this perspective is, it is so inactionable by most of us that we say “Wow,” and then go back to our daily affairs, politics, and wars. Because so few of us humans (about 500) have seen the Earth Overview personally, the idea of it has been relegated to a curiosity or a head-nodding stereotype. Instead, we should be using this priceless insight for the potent tool it is to bring humans together to solve our problems before the fragile craft is so damaged that we cannot. Truly perceived, the overview of our home and the perspective it brings us causes a major cognitive shift. If enough of us experience it and are so shifted, it could cause a true paradigm shift for our species.
I’ve said in this blog and elsewhere that we are not Earthlings. We are not a random thing that happened upon the surface of the Earth. We are not invaders nor are we some unique creation placed here by the hands (?) of some god or gods. We are Earth itself! We are the life that this planet has brought forth and we are intimately connected in every way to this ecosphere. We have minds that are more developed than any that have come before. By taking a bubble of it with us, we can escape the ecosphere for a while and gaze back upon it. We can perceive ourselves as being the planet we gaze at.
We may gain wisdom and learn to regulate ourselves, or we may not and become a colony of spores that overwhelm our own resources until the ecosystem shuts us down dramatically. In either case, we are natural – a part of the overall description of the Earth, including a description through time.
We are Earth.
More from the Overview Institute site at: http://www.overviewinstitute.org/
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Burning Zozobra – a Modern Shamanic Ritual
Zozobra is “Old Man Gloom.” (Zozobra is “anxiety” in Spanish.)
Here is a link to a short (4 minute) film I made showing the ritual burning of the Zozobra in Santa Fe. It includes video, effected still photos, and some of my own original deep ambient music tracks. Run full size if you can, and please enjoy it!
Zozobra represents or symbolizes troubles, worries, and the problems of life. Once each year in September, the city of Santa Fe hosts a very unusual ritual: the burning of the Zozobra. This 51 foot tall statue is made mostly of paper and is actually a marionette – the world’s largest – which is ritually burned in front of tens of thousands of yelling participants, thus releasing all their collected sorrows and problems into the ether and bringing peace and happiness to all who engage with the rite. This ritual has been conducted every year since 1924 – for 88 years as of this year’s event.
[Click on any photo for a larger, higher quality view.]
I was lucky enough to be in Santa Fe on just the right day to attend, and I was truly fascinated to see this essentially pagan, shamanistic ritual played out in front of, for, with, and to a mostly typical American audience. Unlike some of the neighboring pueblo religious events, dances, and rituals that can be attended by non-Indians if they remain quiet and do not disturb the proceedings, this event, invented by a white man, is participatory by everyone and anyone. It is made to be palatable and acceptable to this presumably mostly non-pagan audience by one overriding fact: it is conducted as a very broad, humorous, tongue-in-cheek event. No one really appears to take it seriously and everyone has a party good time.
It struck me, however, that this is actually a very powerful ritual taking place here. Even through the fun and games, the essential and actual power of the symbol comes through for everyone who participates. It might be at a sub-conscious level, or buried under a layer of smirks, but there is no way such a grand metaphor, played out in live action, movie-climax style, cannot be effective as advertised. I have conducted similar rituals at home with friends and a backyard fire pit, casting our slips of paper all inscribed with our regrets and sorrows into the flames, and that was powerful even at that level. This ceremony is public, gargantuan, and potent.
Zozobra is an older manifestation of the modern “Burning Man” event in Nevada each year, but the shamanic ideas and the ceremony of the fire go much farther back in time than even Zozobra, of course. Shamanism is the oldest of the “religions” of mankind and one would think it to be fully buried and fossilized, but that is not the case. Shamanistic societies, tribes, and individuals thrive all across the world. Once in a while, a manifestation of it shows up like a lava intrusion into the solid granite of the orthodox religious cultures of our modern world. Zozobra is one of those, even if it is, perhaps, not intended to be by those who conduct the rite.
In my little film, I tried to show this multi-level contrast between the broad humor and the serious symbolic work by juxtaposing the circus aspects of the gathering and the undercurrent of true meaning by incorporating the intense, austere soundtrack of my deep ambient music. I hope you enjoy it, and I’m always interested in and open to your comments.
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Perspective
A lifetime of knowledge earned
Along the paths of wisdom,
Will one day surely seem to you
Quite meager and in vain.
Not because you have failed to learn,
But that the universe has opened up
Infinitely before you.
– David Crews
The photo is of myself at Bonneville Salt Flats in the NW corner of Utah. It had rained recently, leaving a wonderful reflective mirror for the mountains to float above.
Ah, yes, those Bonneville Salt Flats. Thought I’d set a new speed record – for how slow I could go.
🙂
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Time, and Death as an Advisor
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“You have little time left, and none of it for crap. A fine state. I would say that the best of us always comes out when we are against the wall, when we feel the sword dangling overhead. Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
– Carlos Casteneda, Tales of Power
You may have noticed a recurring theme in this blog: that of Space and Time expressed in photos and essays about time and about the spirit spaces of our minds, as well as the grand physical spaces of America’s western landscapes.
I recently had my time sense recalibrated in a very direct way when my mother died this April. She had many illnesses and we knew her journey on this plane was limited. I was prepared for the event of her death, but, being very close to her, I wondered, aside from grief, how it would alter me after the fact. Grief is one thing – a powerful and human reaction that cannot and should never be denied. Beyond grief, however, I have been intrigued with the time perspective that her death has given me. This new and rather visceral perspective I have found to be valuable, rather unexpected, and somewhat alarming. All these reactions are useful ones, I believe.
When someone close dies, even expectedly, beyond the loss itself is the factual realization that that person’s timeline has stopped. That sounds simplistic and obvious, but I’m not referring to an intellectual realization of this raw fact. Rather, I mean a gut-level, “now I get it” effect. It is a combination of the cognitive knowledge with the emotion of that loss and then the application of that to one’s own self.
As I consider my Mother’s life, I know she lived 31 years of time before I was born. Now, barring accident or illness, I will have approximately that long to live after her life’s time is over – some 30 years if I’m lucky. I have a true feel for what 30 years is now. I’ve lived it almost twice. I can remember things from 30 years in my past as if they happened yesterday. I can project 30 years into my future with ease. I can see myself reaching that point she has reached as if it were tomorrow. That vision, so clear now, makes me flinch a bit.
This perspective, hammered home by Mother’s actual passing, levers me to be aware of and to appreciate my days more. It compels me realize with a deep inner understanding that I did not previously have, that my time, too, is very limited. I now view this future segment of my time as a new kind of resource, different in some sublime and deep way from the previous timelines in my life.
We are inundated by stories and reports of death every day in our various entertainments and news. It is another kind of thing to view it in stark reality and yet apply it boldly to one’s own life. This is the perspective change that brings the Third Act of life and can either make one angry and fearful, or inspire one to create and to play in the world to make a difference for one’s self and for others – what Carlos Casteneda called “following a path with heart.”
One of the very useful ideas in Casteneda’s books is when he has Don Juan talk about “death as an advisor.”
“Death is our eternal companion . . . It is always to our left, at an arm’s length. . . . It has always been watching you. It always will until the day it taps you. . . . One of us here has to ask death’s advice and drop the cursed pettiness that belongs to men that live their lives as if death will never tap them.”
– Carlos Casteneda, Journey to Ixtlan, p. 54 – 56.
For myself now, I am glancing over my shoulder from time to time and asking my own death whether what I am doing is worth doing in my time. Is it a path with heart for me? The time for just “going along” is over. It is time for new ventures and the pathway to fulfill old dreams beckons me.
My long professional career has been fun, but not very successful monetarily, so it’s time to create something new and put into action a “plan B” for those very distinct 30 years I may yet have. That is what I am engaged in now with the full intention to follow my dream. I’ll not describe my plan until it is better underway, but perhaps this new perspective I received from the event of my mother’s death is just the catalyst I needed to begin such a major change, creating my dreams as I walk time’s path, each day weighed for value and for heart. If so, it is the final, potent gift of a very loving parent to me, the son who loved her from the moment my time started.
Heartbeat of Mother Earth
Heartbeat of Mother Earth __ photo ©2012 David P. Crews
“The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.”
Mircea Eliade: The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954)
“The Experience of Sacred Space makes possible the “founding of the world”: where the sacred Manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence.”
Mircea Eliade: The Sacred and the Profane : The Nature of Religion: The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture (1961), translated from the French by William R. Trask
My elk-hide shaman’s drum, from a spirit circle in Southern Utah. We drummed and danced as visionary artists Alex and Allyson Grey created a mural on the cliff behind us.
Texas Wildflowers
Texas Bluebonnet _____ Photo ©2012 David P. Crews. All rights reserved.
Texas wildflower_____Photo ©2012 David P. Crews. All rights reserved.
“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake – Aye, what then?”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (from “Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection”)
Seamus Perry, Oxford Univ. Press, 2002, p. 127
Derived from Jean Paul, Geist (1801)
The Texas Hill Country is one of the world’s most beautiful wildflower shows, featuring the state flower, the bluebonnet. The last few years, the flowers have been more sparse due to the record draught, but better rains and a mild winter have made this year’s show much better. I took a day to tour the Hill Country from Austin, to Fredricksburg, to Llano and the Highland Lakes for this photo tour. See the entire show at my Flickr site. Click here or on the title below.
Click image to see the entire flower tour.
Texas wildflower___Photo ©2012 David P. Crews. All rights reserved.
“The Amen of nature is always a flower.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table”, p. 184
Thomas Nelson and Sons, London, 1906
Bluebonnets near Fredricksburg, Texas___Photo ©2012 David P. Crews. All rights reserved.
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On Flying
What golden king of ancient time
Would not envy my simple pursuit?
The span I leap in minutes,
His fleet-footed messenger could not match
In months of arduous travel.
My eye gazes down upon a wider land,
From a vantage higher than any mountain.
I eat and drink in ease, and calmly survey sights no
Emperor’s eye of old ever beheld.
The Envy of Birds!
The Power of Air!
I, the every day man, an ambler –
Godlike, stepping on clouds to soar above.
The ancient kings would marvel and
Desire above gold, what now I plainly do.
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Air travel has become such a commodity these days that I find myself in some kind of strange minority in that I am still amazed and awestruck at the fact that we can don our metal wings and actually fly. I’ll take a window seat any time I get a chance to go. While everyone else is watching a movie or sleeping, I’m gazing out that window with a bemused grin, following the landmarks and geography below or glorying in fantasy cloudscapes and trying to get my brain to realize and accept just exactly where I am up here in the sky, higher than Earth’s tallest mountain, flashing across entire continents and great oceans in my cushioned sedan chair.
It is truly an experience of power (and wealth!) that no ancient King could have imagined. What is truly Amazing, however, soon becomes mundane once it becomes a commonplace method of travel.
All too soon I must turn away from the mythic views from my plastic window and the magic carpet ride comes to its earthy end.
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This is a blog about the Big Questions, Life, Travel, and Creativity.
DavidCrews 
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