Glaswegian Crucifix

No-Self Discovery

I seem to have found it!

It is I. It is not I.

Let’s call it Christ, because Christ is the constant in whom all things manifest. It is Christ and I am. Yet I am not Christ. Such a claim would be ridiculous. It is I.

You see the muddle I am in?

Ha! I have found it. Here it is. The I, the all in I. Christ. I have it here in me like a bean. It appears transparent, flares up, moves from my sight, then reappears, here, then here. I hold it in my heart, cupped, in the palm of my heart, cupped, lovingly.

Christ the bean, which is I.

At sunset I almost had it, but it would have destroyed me. Red sky spaciousness. It burned me, tore my eyeballs to shreds, left me dumb and gaping. Such catastrophic beauty! The all in all in I. Almost. It.

One place I find it is the bench up there. It happily comes through the trees and the flies and the tyre factory, sits with me happily, as it should do, as it wants to. Jesus, I call it. Here it’s a gently exploding glass, a drenching in love. Here it sits. Jesus.

It leaps from the young lovers to the family enjoying a summer stroll to the little boy peddling his bicycle uphill. It leaps to me. It leaps like the moment you recognise the world and everyone in it, the I that they are. Yes, that’s it! That’s . . . oh everyone listen to the eye that’s new me not me. Swallow it whole! Digest it!

You as I.

You, not you.

Not I.

We seem to have found it. You in me, the I. It.

Crystal

The Mother and Son of Spirit Text

Meditation 1:

Towards the end of a long and troubled meditation, I began to imagine my body and soul as an ancient kingdom, where Christ was king and lord and overseer of a free and prosperous people. Coupled with this spontaneous visualisation was a deep sense of acceptance of my being as it was, right there and then, slowly emerging from its daily metaphysical wrestling match.

I was able to penetrate a secret region of the heart where Christ had his throne, and freely explore its royal chambers. I knew the kingdom was administered from my brain, a centre of government and bureaucracy, and my whole body was a flat, fertile plain, a rich landscape of agriculture and cottage industry, where the inhabitants dwelt in harmony and concord. I felt incredibly at home in this inner terrain - it was, after all, me, and I prayed for protection and peace for myself and everyone who dwelt here. Guests, visitors, travellers, tourists, and, most essentially, citizens, those who made their home in the happy land.

From this pious georgic, an image of the Mother emerged, a powerful archetype, metamorphosing from Christ the King, enfolding me her tender son. At once my whole being was in her arms. The sense of security and wellbeing was overwhelming, and she began to suckle me at her breast. I could taste the milk, the sweetness, feel it nourishing me, feeding every fibre of my soul. A faint sexual sensation stirred but was overpowered by the mothering instinct and the deep infant comfort I felt entrusting myself to it.

There followed soon a burst of kundalini energy from my base chakra, an outpouring of sexual energy flooding my genitals. I gasped and tried to relax, allowing it to spread around my body’s fertile flood plain, all the while saying soft, gentle prayers to the Father. Once again I was back in the land flowing with milk and honey, in the company of the Mother Queen and her mighty energies. An image of the Virgin flashed in my head, a sense of the Christ child comforted, the Saviour nurtured, before the world outside began to penetrate my consciousness, spilling into me from the street like an army of invading children.

Trinitarian Concrete Poetry & A Glimpse of Nonduality

These last days of summer have a peculiar flavour for me. There is a taste of salt in the air and on my tongue, kitchen smells and cooking clatter, the cry of gulls and a taste of freshly caught fish. Each day rises like a smoke ring, spreads itself out thinly, before fading into the breath from which it came. At the end of one week and the beginning of another, I practise the pure act, or art, of sitting. Sometimes when I sit, alone or with people, outdoors or in a coffee shop, a faint awareness arises of something more true to the course and meaning of life, a fine connection to an underlying mystery.

On one occasion, I was fortunate enough to be sitting in an open square at the heart of the city’s great piping festival. I had just eaten a sandwich and was watching the pretty girls walk by, when a cloud of dense, undifferentiated sound rose up behind me. From the sonic maelstrom, snippets of melody, patches of tone and colour emerged and disappeared at random, chased in and out of hearing by a hairy sound beast. My individual consciousness was ransacked, pushed out into the air around the square, into the energy and vibration of sound, into pure abstraction; melting, merging, welling up like the colours of the dawn, like a bliss poem.

I remember the girl who sat opposite me. I remember the stillness of my body. Who needs to move? Yet the vision of the girl and the physicality of passers-by felt wholly present and elevated in my mind as it lapped all around the square. The energy of movement became a dance, a play, held together as one in the wholeness of sound and mind I occupied. I remember my mother sitting beside me, trying for all her life’s worth to re-adjust a setting on her mobile phone. I remember trying to help her, hopelessly failing.

Tumbling Treated Windowglyph

Otoliths

Some stuff of mine at Otoliths. Yea!

http://the-otolith.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/stephen-nelson-ink-colours-of-kundalini.html

Newspaper Riot

Establishment Launch

I'm delighted to be part of the Establishment. Check this out, seriously, straight from the folks at Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. It's a beautiful thing. Congratulations to James McLaughlin, Jo Langton, and the irrepressible Alec Newman.


http://issuu.com/alecnewman/docs/est._issue_1

Blue & Yellow Dog

I have a sequence in the latest issue of Blue & Yellow Dog, if you fancy a wee look-see.

http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com/stephen-nelson.html

Reflections of the Sea Soul

At one point I skipped across an alien surface of flat, grey rocks, an ancient lunar landscape, already mildly transported.


music
toy


sea
shawl


gull
call


in


Waves skinned the rock below me, burst off the wall of rock, crashed and gulped through crevices and under layers. At my feet I felt the play of water and rock – soft, solid, soft, solid – the zen pond of fluidity and hard matter.


wave
rock

         let’s
play, skip, walk


Looking out over the Firth, the seascape was divided. On my left, an expanse of light, the sun burning through a thin veil of cloud; on my right, dark clouds, dark water, the long limb of Arran, cloaked, mysterious, dark.


yin of sparkle                  yang of deep dull grey


Over me a feeling rolls, the feeling I want my body to dissolve like salt in the water, my consciousness to expand, merge with the sea. A loss of self-consciousness, identity united. Finding myself wholly in a body of water, part light, part dark. More of the oneness. More of me in the other than I can possibly be alone.


sea being

sea breathes

sea

being sea

breathes sea


Arran, hidden. Lifeforce, hidden.


              long
 (lazy island leg)
        
       long
 (lazy island leg)


And then, an overpowering expression of my father in me, my father six years dead, and beneath that, the sense that I am uniting with the child I was. All the sensations of childhood holidays by the coast flooding me, that little boy, that precious time in my life, released, let loose, capturing my consciousness, filling my chest; and the movements and mannerisms of my father, in my body, facial expressions, melodic vocal nuances, overwhelming me. This double identity, this union. One.


swallows swim my bloodstream


I wonder if some genetic quirk has been fully activated by the limitless expanse of sea, and if it has, then perhaps buried in that genetic code is the essence of who I am, who I am in my father, the Father, a union of souls within the infinite expression of the One.


   sh
sh ore sh
   sh


Also, an integration of Self – my senses then are my senses now. Parts of me from different time frames coming together harmoniously. A profound temporal alignment. In the distance, on the horizon, Ailsa Craig, symbol of self, faintly outlined in the mist.


man with flock of
starlings on his head


Finally, I return to the bench where my sister sits with her husband. My mother calls my sister’s phone. She wants to know if she should buy a table for her bedroom. She’d like us to see it. We leave the sound of the seas and the smell of salt air and head back into town to look at tables, and, most likely, drink coffee.


Five Minute Snapshot

two crows pecking sand on the beach some distance from black dog, who spots them, begins the chase. boy in black hooded top runs from mother towards ice cream kiosk, called back, told to wait. another boy bouncing ball, finds amusement in overflowing swing park, ball dribbles, abandoned, into wire fence. child cyclist claims to have cycled 15 miles that day. low plane bends over beach, lands in airfield behind the town, all heads on prom look up.

Lullaby

Costa Bounce (for Mike Cannell)

mind fathom liquid lamb
unbounded BO(iii)NG bus -
limitless.
cuss cess
castration pond, pool pounce
uncaring.
LEGO oud. id


(id
 oud
 odd
 out
 oddity) oudity. nude.


napalm frond. pine coal
carcinogen with


(ith
 outh
 ath
 oath


 banana) bone.

cleft urgent (ramshackle)
constabulary. organic
mead menstruation through
deciduous foreign organ.
rain flow organ.
rain florgan.


cellphone. cellophane.
cellotape. cello.
chill orange. cinnamon testicle.
CRUELtea CROUTon.


MONK VORTex of
lemon tart espresso.

The Kite Flyer

Dream Poem & Interpretation

My dead grandfather speaks
thru the telephone, sickened
by the world he haunts, its
ecstasy of suffering; appears
& complains the world abandons
him. Late, the Mother enters,
her seductive confidence &
dripping saliva jacket,
confront-
ed by my grandfather who
threatens her with kisses.
Neither is Danny dead; he lives
in tents up the Cauder,
ensconced in hippie liberty;
creator of waterfalls, spirit trees,
sound gardens, jungle highways,
smokes the ash end of the reefer;
dull actors in
1950s sports cars castigate
his absence.
                  My view of it all
is Arran through windows, binoculars,
too late to go to church, tho apparently
not London.




Interpretation:

My grandfather (on my father’s side), not the most approachable man, is paranoia, fear of the New World Order, the awful state of the world. The return of the Mother is the return of the feminine, the goddess, the female energy that begins as spirit, then filters into wordly affairs, politics, business. My grandfather, that old male domination, is threatened at first by her liberty, her sexuality, but gives himself over to her. The skip to my old friend who died recently is a leap to the personal, and speaks of escape, liberty from my old ways, old hang ups about God (at least a mythic God, the dull actor, not God who is One) a leap into spiritual liberty, light, peace. My friends, pleasant aspects of the Self, are creative; the water highways are subtle energy channels running through the centre of my body, uniting earth & sky. Finally, the detached view at the end is a view of mystery, an embrace of mystery. Arran represents mystery, as it did when I was a child, sitting on a beach looking over the Firth of Clyde to its majestic peaks, reading Lord of the Rings. The escape to London is the leap into the now, or perhaps the healing of old wounds at a time when the church is going through its last days on earth. In this situation, though not recorded in the poem, I am with friends and am whole with them, though not without tinges of insecurity.

My Mime Me

What belongs to me.







What I may possibly be.






What is solid, and relates to others, solidly.






What rolls and bridges.






What breaks down, weeps, is reflected in another.






What mirrors in the eye, the I.






What ascends?






What climbs?






Ladders?






What I am when I hide, when I merge in you.






What I am constrained.






What when I am you,






when I am you.






And when I am what.






When when I am.






Or am what.






What I suffer.






What I offer.






What I give back.






What I impersonate,






regale,






glorify.






What I manifest when what is whole in me.






What emerges,






is planted,






is beyond recognition, knowing,






nowing.






What is known.






What.





Now.





Is.





What.

A Week Without Air (Babylon)

sub
ject
ion

ab
duct
ion

con
ceal
ment

Odd Magazine

An odd short in an Odd Magazine. Scroll down to read a strange story of mine. And check out the rest of the ezine for work by Marton Koppany and Alexander Jorgensen:

http://oddarticles.blogspot.in/

Vital Source (The Return Of)

My ebook on contemplative spirituality is now available as a pdf at Lulu:

Vital Source: Diary of an Urban Contemplative

Please have a wee look. You can now download it directly to your laptop or pc. Even if contemplative spirituality isn't your thing, it's pretty autobiographical, so may be of interest to readers of this blog.

beginfinite