Desert Mind

In the cooling late afternoon in Tucson, I could not but notice glowing Venus at twilight. It got me thinking and making tie-ins to my own experience.

The next day, again in late afternoon, when the sun is so mild and the light clarifies everything and paints a gold tint on it, I hacked out some weedy flower stalks under a palm in my yard and later sat on D's flat concrete stoop while she sorted and photographed some of the gem stone jewelry she'd made.

Coming back to my place, I wrote some of what I had been thinking about; here it is.

Venus

Feel the desire of the plant to produce flower and seed. Try to name that feeling and the experience jumps a gap. Feeling is closer to being, seeming to emanate in a clear ray from source. Perhaps it is an older, more refined tool in the racial memory.

In the mode of apprehension taken in feeling, one senses the underlying stillness penetrating experience more completely. One feels beckoned into the fathomless undefined.

It is fertile ground—possibly the most fertile; the root of thought has not been pulled out, shoots come soon. One names and categorizes experience amongst innumerable choices, making stories.

Or one may analyze experience, which amounts to sending a light into a dark well, reflections from the dark bottom, as in a mirror, picturing earlier experiences. These may be ignored as desired. If one desires to penetrate deeply this way, the primordial image in the light itself makes itself known. Here is the true archetype, a creative power center, programmed by interstellar forces.

In this light one may live, still, either angelic or demonic existences; the duality still holds, though less obdurately and with greater clarity of choices.

Feel the plant progressing from shoot to flower to seed, all in a glance, and notice how that process is a function of, and of the substance of, mind. Reflect on the impersonality combined with great beauty and vibrancy . Be quiet often. It is like sipping thirsty from a very deep stream.