Moroccan Tea and In Love with the Mystery

We celebrated the arrival of the book and cd In Love with the Mystery, and Ann signed dedications to all the people who had pre-ordered. Now we are planning launches in Victoria and Vancouver in early November.
I’m really thrilled about this whole project and felt truly inspired to write this reflection on it:

Ann Mortifee, A Contemporary St. Hildegarde

by Carol Sill

A contemporary St. Hildegarde whose visions find expression in an integration of the  arts, Ann Mortifee has done it again with her extraordinary book and CD In Love with the Mystery.

Perhaps her most complete and integrated expression, a natural development from the masterful Into the Heart of the Sangoma, In Love with the Mystery reveals Ann’s core of wisdom and meaning that she has found in the inner life. A mature integration, it is born of the completion of her life now with her soul mate husband Paul Horn. Through this relationship a new love of the mystery has revealed itself. But make no mistake, as a woman whose inner guidance has taken her around the world (both inner and outer) many times seeking the truth in all its forms and manifestations, Ann Mortifee herself is a force of nature.

What strikes me most is the way she seemingly effortlessly expresses the depth of humanity’s greatest aspirations and most profound seeking. She is a contemporary shaman, whose work reveals a personal integration of the world’s highest meditation teachings and new age spirituality with depth psychology and the hard-won truths of existence. Her expressions are not wishful thinking, speculation or theoretical. They are lived and breathed in the life of a woman today.

“Sacrifice all your resistance on the altar of your own becoming,” is something that she is doing each day. Her voice is the voice of experience.

Musically I compare her to Hildegarde because her inspiration comes so much in sound, and In Love with the Mystery reveals an intimacy with the essence of sound’s source and the celebration of this that music affords.

The progress of the recorded pieces acts as a complete mystery process, enabling the listener to sense and feel the divine relationship: from aspiration, to removing barriers, to contemplative silence, then ecstatic union, and knowing celebration. Each of these is expressed and explored in music which speaks to the body, heart and soul. It bears much more than just one listening. Move with it, dance with it, or sit and contemplate with it: this music opens the heart.

Her book, on which the lyric of the music is based, offers rich images to enhance the inner contemplation of each of the passages. It is a book to be opened and savored again and again, as each time another facet reveals itself.  Ann’s inspired words bring home simple truths and profound contemplations in a stunning revelation of what it means to be human in these times of profound transition and change.

To me, In Love with the Mystery ranks with the work of the great mystics and seekers: poets like Rumi who whirled and spoke poetry in his love for Shams Tabriz, or saints like Hildegarde who heard, saw and felt the Divine. The whole work is a synaesthetic feast, an offering for the Divine Beloved.

Women’s Mindfulness and Intimacy

I’m very happy to be engaged in an upcoming weekend retreat on Mindfulness and Intimacy with Nancy Mortifee. It will be great to go back to the beautiful Cascadia Retreat Centre in Roberts Creek, BC, for an event that promises to be transformative, deep, engaging, supportive and nurturing.

Together we will explore issues that many women share.

We’ll work with new ways to uncover and express feelings, untangle ourselves from others and find our own feet again.

We will share the challenges and joys of re-inventing ourselves, discovering new creative outlets and having nourishing fun with other women.

The weekend of June 11th-13th is coming soon! There are still a few places left so if you are interested and wish to come, get in touch with Nancy through the links to The Cascadia site, or Mortifee Training.

Love that Experimental Micro-Psychokinesis

In the last edition of the Wholphin DVD series, there was a Select Your Intention experiment using random event generation. Data collected went to Psyleron.com – and what a world this is, one which sets out to prove that our intention does actually affect events.

PEAR research, experimental micro-psychokinesis, find out more at the Psyleron site, and on the stripmind video channel. Videos there explore the work of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory and also are part of a new consciousness course – so I wonder how much longer they will be on Blip.tv for free. Catch them while you can.

Resonance was such a strong understanding of the poets down through the ages, and the effects of powerful intention are seen all through our physical world. It’s great that people are quantifying some of what we have always known.

Interestingly, the video DVD experiment asks us to not only affect the baseline, high, low random event generator readout, but – here’s the kick – our present consciousness could affect it in the past. Time travel by quantum attention? Trippy stuff!

Rainy Saturday, Late November

Saturday afternoon, continuous misty rain.

This month has been a whirlwind of transformative experiences: don’t get me started. I’ll just focus on the first thoughts at hand, today, now, at this time.

Open Source Spirit.org has finally got started in earnest, with lots of interviews and posting. In this past month I’ve also got a client’s new site up and running, and helped them set up some initial social media presence, too.

Devendra Banhart is playing now as I sip French Rose tea. I’m wondering what to do about some old blogs that I had started and have now left behind. I need to bring these orphans in out of the cold. But for now, I’ll write up this moment.

The forced narcissus are starting, just, to bloom. I’m enjoying reading Malevich and Film, just finished Powe’s Mystic Trudeau.

I’m reminded that some of the Warhol Screen tests will be shown here next year (PUSH festival) Must remember to get the tix before the last minute and they’re sold out! When will these Screen Tests be put out on DVD so I can have them in my collection?

About Teatime: cup from NOOD (on sale), oakleaf teapot (made in Italy) was a gift, loose tea from Granville Island Tea Company, the cup with the tea: a few tea leaves, a little milk.

I realized this morning that the mind, my brain I mean, seeks deep image satisfaction.

I had a big dose of it this morning, making images to (maybe) use in a video to introduce OpenSourceSpirit.org. Here’s a little of what I was doing:

Signs for the Times

I had great fun playing at says-it.com, and lost track of one morning while making signs for the times. Here are a couple, and if they inspire you, let me know and I’ll share or link to yours here, too.

Many Moons

Here’s one of James’ more recent paintings.

Many Moons by James K-M, 24" x 24", acrylic and stain on plywood

For more on his work, go to his artist site.

Mindworld Overload

Mindworld overload and altered sensory threshold!

In an intensity of activity on Twitter Monday morning, I was involved in a kind of flood or overflow of following and followers. A Twitter surge. It fried my brain, I was too electrified – all at once too many new follows. I couldn’t digest it all.

Who are these people? Why are we doing this? What’s it for? I asked myself. And for a time, wished to undo it. Just gathering people for no reason is like asking strangers to a party, or like broadcasting on the radio to unseen listeners to a call-in show. Was I an attention-seeking twitterslut?

I realized I’d wanted to decide who, or choose sympatico people in the niche, etc. But why not be open to whoever, whatever, wherever? What’s the harm in being open?

This is the whole idea in the world of social media. How the personal is social media actually, and how social is this network? It is many to many, one to one and one to many all rolled into one.

Maxed out from this bolus of people, I found myself seeking solace in the relatively private world of friendfeed. Set up an account. Maybe there I could have some control! But after sweeping through my Facebook contacts to see who’s on friendfeed, I just gave up for a time, unplugged. It was like reading a phone book. Why do that?

Oh, just one more thing, I thought, and I opened Finnegan’s Wake to find a quote to post to the Open Source Spirit twitterfeed. The book opened to me, the words all (get this!) made sense! I danced with it, mind alert and light. It was never more clear.

The poetic mind was somehow triggered into integrative activity by the factual overload. Social media pushed to its extreme yields the poetic being. At least in me! “HCE” Joyce had said, Here Comes Everybody!

Warning: don’t turn your back on the ocean. Face it so you can tell when the big waves are coming and ride with them. When your back is turned, they can slap you down. (Or you don’t have to even go to the beach, of course.)

Video Talks from James K-M’s Opening

Here are the remarks from James’ Cave Paintings exhibition opening at SFU Teck Gallery in Vancouver from Bill Jeffries, James K-M, and Oldhands.

Harvest and Moon

A Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star by Samuel Palmer. Watercolour with bodycolour and pen and ink c.1830.

On the Lines

This is what they’re talking about
A body as large as Mount Meru
Can the heart survive the procedure?
Experiment after experiment
Produced only cast off Frankensteins
Our heart blood incompatible: wrong type
Now, remembering Whitman’s lines
On the body electric
I lay on the power lines
And fuse through the grid
Light zaps white
Nobody home anymore
Centers everywhere, no boundaries.