meaning-making

At the chaotic edge of the chasm of last month’s story, from where the old paved road of word bricks lies all in ruins, the perspective zooms out across the foggy, murky mouth of the abyss, and suddenly you find yourself on the other side. It’s a pale and utterly featureless landscape. There are no words on the ground, nothing to give you direction or orientation. Try speaking and you realize even the air is different here—it can’t hold words; they have no sound. It’s as if you are dumb.

What do you have instead? You’re holding a symbol of the ankh on your hand—the pendant of your necklace. Try placing it on the ground instead of a brick. Suddenly an entire forest appears around it. Birds are there, too, singing— their voices, and the gentle rustling of leaves, are loud and crystal clear.

This forest feels familiar, reminiscent of the nostalgic (for you) forest beginnings of the original path that began between the massive, ancient trees. But, like the path, very localized and self-referring, lined with trees mirroring each other on either side, the forest around the ankh forms a circIe that is inward-directed, coherent but self-enclosed.

What other symbols do you have to try?  What else can you provide?

Lay a cross, similar to an ankh, on the ground and it makes a deep impact, like a agonizing brand burned into the tender ground, as if the raw flesh of the earth itself is seared.

Not that!

Try a pentacle. That yields not a forest but human-esque forms: the Devil, Pan, satyrs. With them comes a feeling of anxious fear around co-dependency and narcissism, even. You don’t want to keep that symbol on the ground, either.

What can you think of that is not laden or locked, as you find is also the case with the I Ching symbol you have considered but put away again?

You discover that a plain circle has power. It also has space in the middle, a common ground that is rampant with possibility. While the circle gives definition on the horizontal plane, it allows for other dimensions above.

Add to the circle an “s,” a symbol of a snake or a bird, and it flies up and inhabits or animates these upper levels, and actually brings them alive, also.

Whatever symbol you place on the ground is interacting with formless space to create a dynamic energy or liberate a particular element or aspect of energy that then becomes available.

That’s a lot to reckon with. Experimenting with the outcome of the various symbols you’ve applied has uncovered a lot you know you don’t want, even if you are not sure what it is you do desire.

Proceed with caution. You’ll have to try a range of symbols to test their impact, but already you have a sense of which ones not to play with, which ones would only recreate old and detrimental patterns.

Place a symbol with an unfavorable outcome and you can instantly remove it, as you have done with the cross and the pentacle, but indiscriminate or unjudicious experimenting will quickly cloud the field. You can wipe the landscape fairly clean of an unwanted impact, but each symbol will mark a trace; each choice has a consequence, and leaves the landscape each time a little less pristine than its original state.