Still Sundays

April 24th.

Lavender dreams. Art is an opportunity to realize. “makers of the afterworld, the architects of heaven” ~ James Allen

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

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New York City was a dreamy postcard this Sunday morning. A photographer’s dream shot in black and white where somehow he or she was able to capture the dewy afterglow of the moist night lingering onto a morning without sun.

I am convinced that even if there were no Sundays our natural cycle of going through time would set aside a day, a time, where we float to have a different view. Perhaps the duration for everyone would vary: not 24 or 12 hours but 3? And the longer one stayed in flight in this stillness the more one would yearn to return and create a longer span.

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My mother loves lavender, not the manufactured smell in a lotion or perfume but the actual flowers. She says lavenders remind her both of living and passing. Their smell lingers in their seeds; their fragrance stays long after they are dead and dried. Sometime in 2004 she gathered and dried a bunch of lavender flowers and sent them to me in a bag. The scent doesn’t smell “lavender” anymore but there is a perfume available nonetheless. On April 17th I bought a small baggy of lavender seeds at a street fair. They rest on my bedside table now. They are not as fragrant as they were a week ago but smells have a life of their own: it comes and goes as it pleases. One “hit” and my breathing changes.  That’s all I know: it changes. The why and how and for how long doesn’t interest me which is atypical of me.

Yesterday after attending Marco Rojas’ yoga I took a miniature helping of a nap. I may have slept for barely 25 minutes.  I dreamt I was walking through a deeply sunlit lavender field with a friend. When the friend spoke I was surprised to hear my mother’s words: lavenders live now and then. I looked up at this friend and asked how much time did we have? The friend replied kindly, now no longer sounding like my mother, “Not very much.” I asked again, “How much?” The friend replied, “Not enough.” I didn’t have time to experience any emotion. I turned around looking for a man that I sensed was there too and I had to see him and woke up instead. I awoke to the tingling sensation in my left arm that had fallen asleep due to the placement of my body while I had napped. I reached for my phone to call my mother who didn’t pick up and sent a text to the friend that said nothing more than “Hi.”

I was neither perturbed by the dream nor interested in any meaning. The dream span felt at most a fraction of a minute. I only found myself intrigued: if a body part ‘falls asleep’ the mind which is ‘technically’ asleep wakes one up! A body part ‘falling asleep’ happens when the communication from our brain to parts of the body has been cut off. The pressure squeezes nerve pathways so that the nerves can no longer transmit electrochemical impulses properly.  When this transmission is interfered the brain has trouble telling the body part what to do and hence the ‘tingling’ sensation to ‘wake’ up. As if I needed any reminder of the fact that we are dual beings!

Time is offered in a moment’s capsule. We don’t have enough time but we don’t know what that means.

I remain fascinated by thoughts that are neither dreams nor imagination but sit at the periphery of both. Orphan thoughts: the first thought before falling asleep or waking up (unrelated to or without dreams). Where did you come from, you radioactive fragment? What do you want to change?

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You are not born an artist, you become one. You become one to the extent you are engaged with living. Who created these awards and honors and distinctions for living life? Art is an opportunity to realize the depths and potentials of human nature.

We can come up with whatever criterion for awards but the fact remains there really is no way to honor another for being an artist of life. Just like there is no award for being a good parent, you rise to the occasion no matter the age of your children. I am convinced that we have elitist distinctions so as to create a deeper chasm that only a few can achieve a certain honor, which is to say only a select few can truly live! What a mad proposition! That being said, I am well aware that although all are capable, not all live up to living.

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This Sunday morning I opened up James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh and re-read some passages. I would like to think this one was commandeered by today’s stillness.

The dreamers are the saviors of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which it shall one day see and know.

Composer, scupltor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the afterworld, the architects of heaven.

The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.

But James Allen warns: “You cannot travel within and stand still without.”

Allen continues,

[…] seeing only the apparent effects of things and not the things themselves [others] talk of luck, of fortune, and chance. They do not see the trials and failures and struggles which these [others] have voluntarily encountered in order to gain their experience; have no knowledge of the sacrifices they have made, of the undaunted efforts they have put forth, of the faith they have exercised, that they might overcome the apparently insurmountalbe, and realize the Vision of their heart. They do not know the darkness and the heartaches; they only see the light and joy, and call it “luck” ; do not see the long and ardous journey, but only behold the pleaseant goal, and call it “good fortune”; do not understand the process, but only perceive the result, and call it “chance.”

“Gifts,” powers, material, intellectual, and spiritual possessions are the fruits of effort; they are thoughts completed, objects accomplished, visions realized.

The Vision that you glorify in your mind, the Ideal that you enthrone in your heart—this you will build your life by, this you will become.

There is no award for what you choose to become as you pop in the pill of Time every moment.  Can we live for that? That’s art.

We all have the opportunity to be ‘architects of heaven’ for the afterworld we can very much see now.

~ a.q.s.

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