Artist’s Studio

A hermit’s heart and mind reflected in the sense world of “matter” … chronic knee pain, among a few other gifts of aging, confined me to my home – going for a walk in the woods not possible. Much work and play had to have its temple …

Each corner of the “square” room, from one point view, is a cross-axis of the Four Directions. These also have their own warding staff … which has no powers whatsoever, other than to remind of the related “idea” …. each of the staffs have their own story …

East – the actual direction the sun rises, and shines into this Wizard’s Aerie:

upper right, my Lady … a buddha by nature … an incarnation of kindness and generosity … we both like books and the house is full of them … both our fathers were born in Montana. I also went to Law School in Missoula, while years later she did a year of college there … she once ate at a restaurant in Denver – called the Broker, a place I spent some time washing dishes … In 2008, I was at meeting in the Concord MA library. She walked through a door surrounded by a golden halo. I got her phone number from the mutual friend who ran the meeting. First date, we talked for five hours, closing a Chinese place. We did not touch … then about two weeks later we were sitting together on a couch in her living room, and at the same time we leaned into each and felt “home” …

North (above):

Upper left, pacific northwest icon, opposite schematic of the Millennium Falcon

West (the sun sets and the moon comes out):

note the serpent flute, the warding staff was a gift … upper left out of focus, Happy thumbs-up Jesus from the movie “Dogma” … door to living room left, and to the master bed room right …

South (below):

red picture with odd light reflection … reproduction of the carved head of Steiner’s Representive of Humanity.

Favorite book:

many seasons of the forest that begins 23 feet from my study widow – eleven years love affair, considering I mostly can’t walk without a lot of knee pain …

all those trees outside my window, make a glorious dome, as they share the sun and the sky …

the forest kind of ends … perhaps a hundred feet from my window to the right, beyond which is houses three, tho’ barely visible … I was sitting in my study one day, and had a sudden impulse to grab my camera, having guessed She (a local grandmother three) might be interesting in the late afternoon sun. I could never have imagined this scene. I’ve always felt She mediated between the forest to Her left, and the 17 foot tall arborvitae that formed the tree wall between us and the neighbor on that side. The “owner” of the land cut Her down a couple years back, not seeing Her as anything other than a dead tree, in the way of things. I grieved a bit, and then realized the root system, of which She was a spiritual nexus remained ….

sometimes the clouds kiss the ground, and mists magical are present … the above bark-less grandmother tree in the center, I didn’t even notice until recently, She’s invisible in summer. the hawk that visits once in a while, sits on the horizontal limb in the left half of the picture. We have had the usual squirrels, birds, and racoons on the deck for food in the winter, and much of the year the squirrels frolic in the branches in front of me, with the usual daring and beauty. We have had a mother bear, and two little ones cruse the yard in the Spring. A dog of ours, that was near death for awhile and yet survived, called forth a vulture who watched for a few hours and then left. My favorite, was being on the deck after second spring visit and the trio of bears left – after 20 minutes grazing. It was night, and as I looked into the yard when they traveled away, first passing to the left of the Grandmother Tree, a silver fox crossed right to left in front of Her, paused and looked at me over its left shoulder, before disappearing into the Forest.

bear cub in tree … studying climbing, another year and in the daylight

an annual symphony of light and shadow …

Altars:

I wanted to build a kind of zone of passage, between the forest, and the study … something for equilibrium … In part this is from the vision I had one day looking out my window, where I realized inside the house, from the framing skeleton, to the walls, to the furniture, to my desk, to the pencils and paper, and “leaves” of my books, was She transformed by our hands …

around the time of the change, I found this chest in a falling down garden shed, of a place we rented … that was in 1971 … It was painted green, and empty, …. I cleaned it up, and its been with me now for fifty-two years …

lower left, turtle with the earth on its back, going up: a bear in an easy chair, (one of my Indian-like names is Lazy Bear) …. the center is a famous painting, and I saw in it the tension of attraction between the male and female architypes, … sort of: “sorry dude, no sex until you are seriously washed clean … you stink”. … the cork board is mostly a place for memories and tokens of falling through life … I write beneath its gaze …

some artifices of the desk, a pipe for dreaming, and a favorite book: George Adams: “Physical and Ethereal Spaces”

gnomic masters of existence

My Lady went on a trip of several days, and asked me to turn an oblong planter – that was in our front hall under a window – into a fairy garden … this is a small corner, and the whole slowly evolves with the seasons,

next, searching for faeries …. in the study … they tend to be out of focus, which gives the picture a remarkable quality

south corner detail

the one above and the one below are in the mediation zone

she below is just to the left of the West corner

this lady is guarding some books, while resting in a wooden mortar and pestle.

the chest is under the towel … whenever I look at my study, and feel off about the chaos, I take out my inner gnome, and clean and organize … fun part is how often this “cleaning” leads to me finding something I had misplaced, and perhaps had even been looking for with some impatience … in a certain sense we are playing hide and seek, …

This book shelf came with the house, and my desk is just beneath, while in between is the cork board of memory …

art supplies, and my shaman-lawyer briefcase, for whenever if I get to go to court ….

favorite cane, lazy bear’s electric chair … great for practical Franz Bardon studies …

more books … another cane and a gripper for reaching ….

books, and an art work in process – I want to make something wild, and large, and call it “Strange-fire”, the living and self-conscious space ship for exploring the astral expanse ,,,

needs no comment …

above and below, the alchemist mind needs to never forget death …

when we first moved in, eleven years ago, I could still go up and down the stairs to the Underworld Temple. Like the tree throughout the house, the mineral world is exposed here, what with lines electrical, heat and cooling ducts, a furnace and oil tank, as well as waste removal tubes … the house came with four fireplaces, and the altar to the left features Her, holding Him (curtesy Raphael), laid over a map of the starry world.

the paintings to the right of Her and Him, are by a friend: Robert Nuckels. I have others, … a sketch of his is the man with the gun in the lower part of the window. The group, on the brick wall in this picture, were done after he had read Patrick Dixon’s “America – the Central Motif”

The grass outside the window. The tree wound on the right was there when we moved in. Yard services suggested creating another wound (to the left), worried about storms and falling trees. I sought to heal the one to the left with a hexagonal natural stone discovered who knows when. The crystal standing on it was a gift that my Lady had received. The healing gesture to the right, was what I call my Hopi Stone (see below). The right tree transformed, and joined the ground over the years. My Lady’s crystal went inside her meditation room, and the Hopi Stone is now resting in the other wound, itself coved with moss, and encircled each spring with various kinds of mycelium manifestations.

Buddha watches over this part of the “yard”, as does St. Francis look upon the deck.