January 12, 2007, Rejuvenation and deep adventure, By Tim Hazell

Rejuvenation and deep adventure

“Winter is yet gone, and the apple tree appears, suddenly changed into a fragment of cascade stars. In the night we shall go in up to its trembling firmament, and your hands, your little hands and mine will steal the stars.”

—Pablo Neruda

In the pursuit of ideas and dreams we encounter sunlight and shadow, feeling empty as they evaporate and inspired when the game is renewed. Everyone has the ability to follow an elusive trail of clues left by flights of imagination. The blocks that come from navigating a dark patch obscuring the elusive chimeras we chase are part of the creative process.

A quality of being in the world, mistakes and failures can represent becoming sensitized to other possibilities for evaluating form, almost understanding, before there are words to render it familiar. In the process of forgetting and remembering things unseen, Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was free to listen to voices from another world. “Adam Cast Forth” reveals the Garden of the Tree shimmering like the illusion of an oasis retreating before a traveler on the red desert’s rim:

Adam Cast Forth

Was there a Garden or was the Garden

a dream?

Amid the fleeting light, I have slowed

myself and queried,

Almost for consolation, if the bygone

period

Over which this Adam, wretched now,

once reigned supreme,

Might not have been just a magical

illusion

Of that God I dreamed. Already it’s

imprecise

In my memory, the clear Paradise,

But I know it exists, in flower and

profusion...

Holding an experience in memory allows it to gestate, producing elements of aesthetics and personality. The process of musing in an attempt to decipher that which is hidden and the state of disorientation that occurs as we shape experience into meaningfulness allows ideas to reveal their potential. Fantasies can add richness and texture to all kinds of daily work. For instance, we freely associate autumn with crisp air and a riot of color in the crowns of trees, followed by their dry cascade as winter approaches. Native literary traditions renew our kinship with nature as reflections within ourselves. In mythology throughout the Americas, trees grow at the center of the earth and provide a focus for this Navajo Shootingway Ceremony Prayer:

Shootingway Ceremony Prayer

Dark young pine, at the center of the earth originating.

I have made your sacrifice.

White shell, turquoise, abalone beautiful.

Jet beautiful, fool’s gold beautiful, blue

pollen beautiful,

reed pollen, pollen beautiful, your

sacrifice I have made.

This day your child I have become, I say.

Watch over me.

Hold your hand before me in protection.

Stand guard for me, speak in defense

of me.

As I speak for you, speak for me.

As you speak for me, so will I speak

for you.

—Anonymous, 20th century,

translated by Gladys A. Reichard

When readers are intimidated by poetry and unsure of how to react to multiple images and the phenomenon of shape association, it helps to understand that the ability to think creatively is not an innate but an acquired skill. If we lose the attitude that art expression is the unique possession of individuals operating on a different level from the rest of us, we succeed in making poetry the true collective voice of a culture. Creativity becomes a reality for the majority, not just the chosen few. We begin to identify with the poet and those mysterious forces that provide the artist with themes and inspiration as if they were a part of our own experience.

Sitting in a park as a passive restorative experience or actively moving through wooded countryside brings our accumulated knowledge and history to the perception of an environment. In pre-industrial societies, maxims for understanding nature and living in symbiosis transcended the secularization of experience, purporting to create harmony and unity. However, equilibrium between rustic science and aboriginal sensations was to be constantly disrupted and re-established. A progression toward more refined levels of ethics was circumvented by the contradictions of evolution or decline. Healthy formulations of questions and answers, losses of sublime products of the human mind due to catastrophe and a reaffirmation of standards as cultures were built upon foundations of others, were vigorous reflections of chaos and deep adventure.

Stages of growth in societies as extensions of ourselves can be monitored the same way that we record human development. Because communities are organic, comparisons can be made to states of well-being. These are synonymous with sound modes of thought, clear linguistics and a healthy physique. Cultures pass through infancy, adolescence, maturity and senescence as energies within catch fire, cause ripples of belief to expand, crest and become moribund. The living organism of a rural village, urban town or large metropolis constitutes a fraternity of individuals from different classes with diverse occupations. Together they form a complex network. When sifting through records left by settlements and civilizations of the past, we come face to face with social phenomena and connections over a period of time.

Physiological references in cultures of the past and in our own with its technological and industrial base often have religious overtones. When speaking of therapy and human relationships, the word “sacred” still applies. In modern native societies, rhythms of planting and harvest and the reparation and manufacture of ritual objects, tools and musical instruments belong to a world of transient things. Hidden within the complex symbolism of sculpture and painting, invisible forces of rejuvenation abide in an abstract realm of spirit power.

Tim Hazell is a multidisciplinary artist in the areas of painting, music, theater, education, writing and research, specializing in Latin America. He may be contacted at hazel@unisono.net.mx or at his website, www.tim-hazell.com