Step 7: Fountains of Imagination

"Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." -Albert Einstein

Four years ago, a rural poet named Antler came to give a guest lecture at our school. He explained why he chose to live his entire life in the wilderness by the coast of the Eagle River. When he was in high school himself, he found that he could befriend Walt Whitman. Whitman had been long dead, but the content of his thoughts were inhabitable to the quiet, introspective soul of Antler. Using this inspiration, Antler became a Source of awareness in a timeless fashion himself. In his poem "What the God Says Through Me," Antler writes:

"No other sound but the loon,

And the night wilderness smells of September,

This is the place to hear my voice."

When Winton Marsalis' band played a trove of Thelonius Monk jazz classics, he explained:

"They used to say that Thelonius Monk was ahead of his time. He wasn't understood in the 1940's. Now it is some of the most elaborate and intricate music available. Now is his time."

When translating Latin poetry into English, A.D. Melville says:

"I have lived with Ovid in the Metamorphoses for a number of happy years."

The word fontis means "Fountain" in latin. According to "A Dictionary of Symbols," The fountain can be found in architecture within a cloister, garden, or patio with a central position, particularly during the Romanesque or Gothic periods of symbolist tradition. Psychologist Carl Jung calls the central garden fountain a representation of individuality, strength in adversity, and hallowed ground. Fountains are the Source of life-giving water, and in this way, humans may become fountains when their works become inhabitable to others.

Marble Courtyard of the Attarine Medersa, France

To become a Source of warmth and guidance to others, we must first be empowered by the imaginations of those who embedded their personalities through a medium of art preserved through time. If nature is the ultimate inspiration, then the next goal for every aspiring soul is to choose the paths that will yield the most generation of inspiration to others.
To put it bluntly, editor/author Jerry Phillips writes:
"The higher purposes of nature lay in Beauty. It is the artist who can convey, indeed remind, all people of their ability to see the beauty inherent in all things.”

Though Einstein was arguably among the greatest geniuses in history, he too was in awe of the magnificence of ideas and creation. He writes:

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." 

The most powerful emotions ever recorded on record might be considered to be the struggle-soaked blues of Janis Joplin. Early in her singing career with Big Brother And The Holding Company, she let the gritty, yet fluid vocals take their fill to the sweet, agony-tinged song "Take Another Piece of my Heart". The Source of her words are honest, authentic, and passionate. Her final recording sessions of the song "Buried Alive In The Blues" were never used - the song was modified to an instrumental. The raw, stagnant vocals must be imagined by the seasoned listener who has fondly befriended the wily Janis many atime before.  Though she died at the age of 27 of a heroin overdose, her youthful, passionate coo continues to scratch through the gentle surface of time.

Any materialization of life within the medium of expression can become inhabitable. With the guidance offered by individuals of blooming personalities, our own inner frameworks can take personification. Lebanese poet Khalil Ghibran says in The Prophet:
“Say not, I have found the path of the soul. Say rather, I have met the soul walking upon my path. For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, niether does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself like a lotus of countless petals."
The central core of the "inner framework" of our feelings is our Source. Self-expression, therefore, is a gateway to communication beyond thoughts. Once the Source is established, inner expansion of the life-embodying expression soul.

To end the barrage of quotations with a dense paragraph,  Hierarchy Theorist Joseph Tainter writes:

"A culture is born in the moment whe a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. It is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos."

Have you found your Fountains?

Step 6: Experience

"I used to live in a room full of mirrors; all I could see was me. I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors, now the whole world is here for me to see." -Jimi Hendrix

Now that we've been re-conditioned to the elegant rhythms of Earth, enduring both the thrash of violent weather and the gentle comfort of the ponds, a harmonious balance of strife and euphoria is beginning to permeate within. Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the balance of positive and negative forces as the "Equator of Life." He writes:

"The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit -- a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular experience, everything good is on the highway."

In Chinese philosophy, the  (Yin-Yang) symbol representing the balance that comprise the "temperate zone" as Emerson describes. The creation of one begins at the destruction of the other, and their centers are shared by the opposite force. The Yin portion (black) represents intuitive thinking while Yang (white) represents logical thinking. In order to put the logical hemisphere of your brain to best use (left side), it must be actively connected to its creative, intuition portion (right side). The Ancient Egyptians also applied this concept to their goddess Isis:

The Bembine Tablet of Isis, above, is currently housed in the Museum of Antiquities, Turin, Italy.

"[Isis] is sometimes shown standing between two great pillars, symbolizing the fact that Nature attains productivity by means of polarity. As wisdom personified, Isis stands between the pillars of opposites, demonstrating that understanding is always found at the point of equilibrium and that truth is often crucified between the two thieves of apparent contradiction."

-Manly P. Hall, "The Secret Teachings of All The Ages"

Psychologists describe the state of inner harmony as "Flow." In flow, one is able to obtain total focus and mastery of craft. This step means beginning to extend your abilities in a larger dynamic- and wield any color of a limitless color palate.

The band Pink Floyd pioneered the use of instruments and soundscapes to represent textures, colors, and surreal atmospheres. Here is their Any Color You Like.

-SubTemplum

Step 5: Seclusion, Intuition, Metamorphoses

With Earthen bass tones and vibrant rhythms, the prog band Yes leads the celebration of nature and life in sound. Album artist Roger Dean helps guide the way:

The magic of Dean's artwork is not in the detail. The reality of the paintings are intensified to the viewer who understands the natural feeling of spaciousness in the vast scope of surreal landscapes. The art is transcendent just like the utopian flora that serves to imprint its glory within the human heart and mind.

Here is the true dilemma. The human race has gone from 100% hunter-gatherers in the prime of its origins to 0% in the years of the industrial empire's expansion. Nicholas Roukes in his cryptic "Art Synectics" explains it best:

“Having created his own environment apart from nature, man has grown insensitive to the subtle changes and signals (biological messages that are perceived by every organism in nature, including man: perceived through senses by means of light, color, temperature, taste, touch, smell, sound and behavior)."

To rub salt in the wounds of our natural loss is the capitalist framework of society. Early sociologist Max Weber, writes:

"Materialist goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. No one knows who will live in this materialist cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise."

The battle has been raging since the industrial empire's inception. Armed with an arsenal of creative wordplay, emotional resonance, metaphors and synectics, the resistance to industrial expansion was waged by the 1800s-era realist, naturalist, and transcendentalist writers as a necessary force for combatting the increasing loss of natural environments and human instincts. 

Going nomadic means taking the bare essentials, renouncing society for a short or long period of time, absorbing the clash of the elements, building stamina and endurance, living vegetatively, and cleansing your mortality with increased instincts. Once you are bestowed with the skills of a forager- a unique element integrated into the forests and plains- you are ready to breathe anew the complex patchwork of life:

Spilling incredible evolving interactions onto the page, M. C. Escher has captured in his "Metamorphoses" (above) what Latin poets since 0 AD (See Ovid's epic intermeshing hundreds-of-thousand word poem Metamorphoses) have struggled to do: capture the profound brilliance of nature's limitless connections. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes of the connections gathered by intuition:

“For if in any matter we can simulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature; the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and metamorphosis is possible."
Henry David Thoreau spoke thoreaully of this in his 1845 work "Walden," which probes the depths of gathering intuition by living in seclusion. He writes:"Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness... we must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features."

With this in mind, recent studies are showing that Nature Is Nourishment. The results of a University of Michigan test proved that the human memory improved when the subject was placed in a natural environment over subjects that were confined to an urban environment. Similar studies prove that jail cell windows with natural settings outside reduced the need for health care. 

Humankind is given nature, in its ultimate chaos, to garner mammal instincts at his primal level, and endless inspiration from the grand integration of species and sensations at his most brilliant levels. The future between Earthen Man's untouched environment and Materialist Man's destructive indulgences hinges on the delicate balance of nature-infusing art. Today's artistic battalion includes the subjects explored below.

Sub Templum.