Identity Doggerel

 

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
— Jorge Luis Borge

 

Here is a street that I walked down last May
Catacombs in the dark where I wandered
Here is a song that I heard yesterday
with some of the lyrics a-sundered

 

Laugh at a joke that I heard before
tho now it comes from my mouth
Cry at a tale that I heard though a door
in a mansion down in the south

 

None of what you see before you is me
at most I must be a composite
of places I’ve been and people I’ve met
into my void, you’ll too deposit

 

Still there is someone who picks and chooses
the elements of life that I show
something unique that decides what he uses
a spirit that’s always in flow.
— G A Rosenberg

 

Blessings, G

 

Click on images to see full-sized:

Puppet ShowPuppet Show by G A Rosenberg

 

Enticed DownwardEnticed Downwards by G A Rosenberg

 

A Tale of a Thousand Dreamers

 

“We can have any kind of world we choose we just have to take our power back”
— Ron Adams

“If enough of us dream, if a bare thousand of us dream, we can change the world. We can dream it anew! A world in which no cat suffers from the malice of humans. In which no cats are killed by human caprice. A world that we rule.”
–Neil Gaiman

 

In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman story “A Dream of a Thousand Cats”, a legend is told of how cats were once giant beings whom humans served until a thousand humans dreamed the world as it is and caused it to change. In the story, a visionary cat travels the world meeting with other cats to try to get a thousand of them together to dream the world anew. One cat scoffed and suggested how difficult it would be to get a thousand cats to do anything together much less dream.
I believe that a thousand dreamers can remake the world. We don’t have to take our power back, it is ours inherently. The problem is that each of us have a different idea of what the world they want to live in looks like. In some cases there is a strong resemblance, in others it is vastly different. Some of us want peace, others want power and still others can only feel secure if they can control what people in other countries do. Social justice is another area that people disagree about. Everybody wants their idea of social justice and the ideas of what that is differ greatly.
I believe if we can get enough people to agree upon the dream, we can make it a reality. Getting people to agree tho can be as difficult as herding cats.
Blessings, G

 

Click on images to see full-sized:

 

Ophidian AwakeningOphidian Awakening by G A Rosenberg

 

Shaken by Outside InfluencesShaken by Outside Influences by G A Rosenberg

 

Shadow Sides and Fun House Mirrors

 

“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life…If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”
― Carl Jung>

 

I offer little resistance to my dark side. I let my madness move within me like a snake crawling and flexing where it will. Oh that’s not to say that I will randomly start harming people. How I express my insanity is up to me. I can let it move through me in odd thoughts or wild imaginings or I can turn it into art. Still in meditation I let myself feel it all, the torrents of emotion well up and subside and the dark mirror shows me my face. Occasionally it is a hall of mirrors where through the distortions I can see the me’s that never were or that might be but not yet. As an artist and writer I value these trips of both light and dark. It offers both inspiration and lessons in tolerance. How can I have problems with anyone else’s shadow if I can accept the darkest parts of my own. If the question comes up, which it does about who I really am at my core, the only honest answer is “All of this and more yet to be revealed”.
Blessings, G

 

Click on images to see full-sized:

 

6-ValefarValefar (#6 in Goetia Series) by G A Rosenberg

 

DreamscapingDreamscaping by G A Rosenberg

 

I Lived

 

“he asked if i wouldn’t like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: “when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living…it may be only a few seconds…a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime…”
― William S. Burroughs

 

What does it mean to live beyond existence? So much of our life is spent in day to day existing, some of it mindful but a lot of it routine. Every so often in retrospect we either look back at a period of our lives and think “There I was happy, There I lived” or perhaps the even rarer “There is nothing else I would rather be doing at any time or place. I am happy. I am alive.” Those moments make all the rest worthwhile. I know that choice can make all the difference. If we could figure out what gives us joy and purpose and focus on doing those things than we have accomplished something truly worthwhile.
Blessings, G

 

Click on image to see full-sized:

 

TransfiguredTransfigured by G A Rosenberg

Escaping Our Internal Prison

 

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.”
— Franz Kafka

 

Our truest selves and emotions cannot be communicated, they can only be experienced. Oh we can project like nobody’s business. We see someone in a situation similar to ones that we have been in and they seem to be expressing close to the same emotions and for a second we flash back. we feel good that we have become so empathic yet true empathy is rare. In reality we are locked inside our own heads pretending yet not to pretend can often be worse. Better though is if we can turn off the head show and really for just one moment perceive not only another person’s perceptions but another person’s heart. Oh it happens. At times if we’re some particular combination of lucky and open to it, something can jolt us enough out of ourselves that for an instance we can feel the heart of the world. All too soon tho we are locked back in our heads again and it will take years to process what we’ve experienced. When this happens we realize that having escaped once from our mental prison, we’ll do everything we can to escape it again.
Blessings, G

 

Click on images to see full-sized:

 

Plasma FieldPlasma Field by G A Rosenberg

 

Shadowed RealmShadowed Realm by G A Rosenberg

Silence Shared

 

“Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.”
— Frances Hodgson Burnett

 

Wordlessly I take your hand
I rub your back after a hard day
I smile and we hug in silence
words get in the way
I touch your heart
as I stroke your skin
I laugh at your expression of delight
We walk in nature
hand in hand
and watch the sunset
and enjoy the gentle breeze.
I feel the pain of the past
as you cry out in your sleep
and I take it away with my touch
we say more with our faces
and our hands than our tongues ever did.
— G A Rosenberg

 

Blessings, G

 

Click on images to see full-sized:

 

Freeing HerselfFreeing Herself by G A Rosenberg

 

Energy FlowEnergy Flow by G A Rosenberg

 

Random Thoughts – March 2015 Edition

 

“We all think we know who we are and what we want from life, but when it really comes down to it, I’m not really sure we know anything except that we’re all trying; we’re all surviving; we’re all living.”
— Z.M.

 

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.”
— Carl Sagan

 

We can and do create our realities. We cannot create anyone else’s, we can merely influence them. This both gives us responsibility and gives us hints where our responsibility ends.

 

People want desperately to believe in the inhumanity of others. Given a chance many will try to demonize rather than understand and define as evil what they don’t understand or what they don’t like. Evil is seldom the enemy that ignorance is.

 

We all have parts of ourselves that are unlikable. If you are determined to dislike someone figure out what it is about them that you dislike, No one is representative of any group except themselves.

 

Understanding has its good points but there are drawbacks as well. When we truly understand someone it is awfully difficult to hate them. Also to understand someone is to know something of the pain they have felt in their lives. Most of us can barely handle our own.

 

At no time in known recorded history has mankind been so aware of his flaws. I am not sure if this has made us better or rather given us a keener eye for naming the flaws of others.

 

Hope is always better

 

Click on images to see full-sized:

 

Sad ForestalSad Forestal by G A Rosenberg

 

Fading Sun TapestryFading Sun Tapestry by G A Rosenberg