IV. Essays (Ensayos) by Mike Mahoney

Painting by Wild Grace, from her Wayfarer series.

El poeta Mike Mahoney continua exponiendo su constelación de ideas escritas en respuesta a La chispa azul libro compuesto por nuestro socio JP Kruse. Para mas información sobre La chispa azul por favor, visiten la página siguiente: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark

Poet Mike Mahoney continues to expound his constellation of ideas written in response to The Blue Spark by JP Kruse. The Blue Spark can be ordered here: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark

Para información sobre el poeta,  sus libros y discos, por favor visiten la página siguiente: www.mikemahoneymusic.bandcamp.com 

For information about the poet, his books and CD's, please visit his website: www.mikemahoneymusic.bandcamp.com

“To overcome the inertia of a given situation, a new perspective has to be embraced with an almost blind faith, in order to rally enough force to break through existing patterns and to sustain itself whilst creating new patterns.” (JP Kruse, The Blue Spark)

And from Joe Chilton Pearce: “An ultimately serious commitment of mind . . . can be the determinate in any issue, overriding randomness and chance.”

No illness is cured by anxiously focusing on and worrying about the illness. Only more illness results from this, from self-amplifying the “problem” through anxious worrying and mental dwelling. Perhaps this is old-hat thinking, a kind of rough, blue-collar ignorance, and perhaps I picked it up from reading a lot of Henry Miller lately, but maybe it stuck because it's true.

If one is depressed, it’s the easiest thing in the world to be depressed about feeling depressed, and then to self-mirror this depression through so many lenses that before long you literally cannot recall a time of life during which you weren’t depressed. (“It’s Always Been That Way.”) The more one behaves and perceives and thinks this way, the more self-fulfilling it becomes. The same applies, however, to its opposite, with positive thinking.

Maybe a major part of any positive change comes more from placing our attention on the positive nexus of notions and actions that the new solutions spin around than in investing it into curing the maladies themselves, or at least in feelings and actions which balance out the dis-eased energies at play in our being. Perhaps a big part of it lies more in trusting that the maladies will diminish and dissolve away as the new growth of positive habits and perceptions bloom through our cognitive gardens, even if only in our imaginations at first. After all, the brain-body circuitry seems to have a rather difficult time differentiating between our dreams and what we call & think of as ordinary reality.

Yes, part of 'the change' is identifying & pinpointing what we want to change from, our problem, as it were, but dwelling on the "problem condition" can itself perpetuate and even strengthen the problem. To dwell means to live in, or reside inside of a place, a space, & to pack your belongings & move into the problem – living in it as if it’s a dilapidated apartment you can barely afford – is maybe not the best way to get out of it, let alone solve it, or move through it. It's perhaps a type of razor's edge, this conundrum, & one I struggle with myself in trying to "figure out" "how" to "let go" of my own fears and anxiety. But of course, there's no physical “fear-thing” to let go of, (outside of my mind), and part of letting go of something means to stop trying to figure out how to let it go. To an indeterminable degree, we seem to sustain the very existence of most our problems by believing they’re something we have to work to be free of.

We must stop our clutching and attachment to our problems, stop feeding them with the holy fire of our very creativity and attention. Yes, we must look long enough to clearly outline & identify them, to examine them, but then it becomes paramount we use our imagination, creativity, and the power of metaphor to transform the obstacles into stepping stones which enable even more positive change then was maybe possible without such ugly & clearly presented difficulties.

A change of story, a widening of story to encompass the old within the new, is necessary. And not just to include the old within the new, but for the new story to not be possible without the old, to grow from inside the shell of the old. To bloom its green leaves through the asphalt & cement cracks in the shell of the old. Nature always seems to build on top of and incorporate the old, after all.

This will take creativity, an inescapable part of overcoming anything, and of course in manifesting the new patterns which take the place of the older, ineffectual habits, whether bound up in our perceptions, our thoughts, our reactions and projections, or our emotional responses and fears. Creativity requires a type of relaxed and divine play with our perspective, our perception, and brings into forms the qualities and aesthetics of Beauty, so necessary and lacking in the world our cultural games have created and our history’s wake has left us bobbing up and down in, treading water for our lives in.

“It takes devotion to create and reverence to enjoy beauty,” writes Fritz Eichenberg in his Pendle Hill Pamphlet ‘Art and Faith’, from 1952. “We have sold mind, body and soul to the machine and, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, seem to have forgotten the formula to stop it. The magic of art…. Seems almost to be forgotten. But art is still the magic formula which can stop the robots who seem to run our world.” And later in the same piece he shares a quote from Herbert Read: “Art leads from play to fulfillment, from feeling to drama, from intuition to dance or music, from sensation to design, from thought to craft.”

Creativity is a ruling principle in transcendence, in evolution, in growth and novelty and the manifestation of all things new, all seeds blossoming. I truly think there isn’t a problem or hurdle or misunderstanding on earth or beyond perceivable to the human mind that is not able to be gotten around, gotten over or through, hurdled, surpassed, translated or understood, transformed, or, at the very least, softened & made manageable, by a creative rearrangement of perception, of language and processing. By a metaphoric transformation. A perceptual reframing. It’s all about our intent. Or as Joe Chilton Pearce wrote in his book The Crack In The Cosmic Egg, “Intent precedes both acquisition of knowledge and ability to do.”

Another of my favourite lines from that book, which reiterates what we‘re saying here: “A change of worldview can change the world.”