"Blackrock – Beyond Belief" – August 28, 2003

"… The Quest takes me forward, back to the City of Dreams, where I feel the energy of the Phoenix continuing to pulse through me in transformation. Having made friends with some of the magi from the Firedance, we encounter each other in synchronicity along Blackrock’s dune seas, discovering new territories and realities …"

The Quest takes me forward, back to the City of Dreams, where I feel the energy of the Phoenix continuing to pulse through me in transformation. Having made friends with some of the magi from the Firedance, we encounter each other in synchronicity along Blackrock’s dune seas, discovering new territories and realities along the way.

Once again I encounter Vogel in the endless sands, our energies pulsing with that shared recognition.

Ripples in the Sand

As I wander the realms of the playa, I encounter a faerie, a being resplendent with the silver hues of the Moon and the Sun. The magic of this place continues to astound me. It is as if the very sands themselves arrange us, causing us to intersect with the symbols and portents of our own mind. There is a significance to this. A quality of magic that permeates the atmosphere, drawing me forward, a sense that I am divining something, feeling into something in-between the cracks of my world.

Sign of the Phoenix

What is guidance? What is the basis for the idea that there are guardian spirits and intelligences which are striving to help us move forward? How do they appear in our consciousness and what is their significance? This idea is primal to the journey of being human and is a crucial part of the quest itself, and as I walk through the dreamscape of inspired synchronicities that is the playa there are patterns which repeat, which appear to me as symbols that are leading me forward towards an as-yet-unknown end.

The sign of the Phoenix is everywhere. I find myself moving across the dunes see, feeling the energies within me in a natural divination as the landscape reveals to me the language of my soul. True to form, the dreaming city arrives me in synchronicity to see a dancer moving and swirling next to the sculpture of a silver phoenix with arms raised.

Coming into the desert is a deeply mystical dreamscape, a moving sculpture of manifest mythologies. It is a place where the very archetypes that live within our deepest selves find expression, arriving as mirage or oasis on the strings of synchronicity across the burning horizon. This time as I wander I find myself next to a land speeder reminiscent of the Star Wars mythology, something that was a deep inspiration for myself and many others i'd encountered along the way. Feeling myself as the djedi and mystic of the modern times, I stop by it for a photo before continuing on my way.

Inspired by the speeder, I trek my way across the dune sea, the expanse of installation and inspiration that defines the landscapes of Blackrock where in synchronicity I re-encounter Jeff Mcbride, the magus I had met at the ritual in the mountains along the Western Shore. Here, he weaves a circle of transformation, the spiraling energy pulsing across the shifting sands like a beacon. Again I had come to the glyph of the magician, there in the shifting sands of the City of Dreams.

A divination comes to me as I arrive in the form of a wondering. Why, out of all the places I could have arrived in the expanse of the playa, did I encounter the magician yet again? What was the principle that was at work that led me to such circumstance, and how did it relate to my documenting the realms of magic? What was being shown to me through the synchronicities along the path?

Sounds of Creation

Here again the desert teaches as the ringing tones of sacred symbols speak the sacred sounds of Creation itself, the waves of their essence mingling across my mindseye with the snaking ripples over manifest form in the cracked earth.

For a moment the world around me fades, and to my fae senses the sounds were no quiet thing but a thunder, their very presence distorting and changing the clear horizon. Intuitively I knew it to be the very nature of manifestation itself, the world made from the sounds of color singing across the sky.

It was so clear in those moments, the waves of sound's color that I felt rippling across the ethers and the substance of the sand that formed in their wake.

Soon after this I encounter a series of playing cards in the desert, and will at a later date consider them the very essence of the tarot unadorned, stewards of the mathematical symbolism of the journey through the mortal condition made real. It is a sense of the akasha, that the elements of what would become my journey into the tarot and the arts of divination as a means of navigating hte ripples of form that are the material plane were present along my path before my arrival at the Academy where I shall make such things my study.

The sensations of the push of authority that I felt with the magicians during the Firedance still echo within me, and as I come to a street sign which speaks it's essence back to my waking mind I simultaneously see a man basking in the mirror of himself ….

August 28, 2003

Everything about the moment was an art for me. The angles of the domes, the way the light and shadows met on the sand, the way in which James's gait and the small mohawk in his hair juxtaposed themselves in the space.

It is as if he is walking through a landscape inspired by Buckminster Fuller, an avatar of the geometries of art and design within design, and my appreciation swells for my brother and his talent, for the way in which he wields the art in service to the new world.

Weavings of the Earth King

There is a significant moment in this when Carl Bridge offers to dreadlock my hair. From my gaze in the Mythica, it is an act of Earth-magic, playing out in the Mythica as an offering of grounding. Of helping me to contain the energies coursing through my system. It carries with it a scent, one that is familiar to me, that speaks of the worlds of the deva, worthy of trust.

Later in center camp James offers to use his excellence in painting to bring the sigil of the phoenix on my back. Given how much I appreciate his artistry and our brotherhood of light I consider it a high honor, the inscription of glyphs upon me from someone who sees the portrait of my soul beneath the skin.

As I feel the cool strokes of the paintbrush on my skin I feel the energies all around us in a cacaphony of shifting and blended colors, the music, the dancing, the people and their conversations all blending together into a great song and for a moment I feel myself in the center of a gyre, dying and reborn as a fractal of a larger holographic organism of consciousness, moving through the dream of the old world and it's renewal in the dust.

It's a powerful working. All glyphs are powerful, yet like all pieces of art they are defined by the depth of our perception, of our ability to invoke and evoke that which is already there beneath the surface. Such is the majesty of all inkwork, of all paintings and murals upon all worlds, their very substance of lines and color opening the windows of one's perception of themself in a newborn way.

Doorways to Perception, Doorways to Love

The night brings new revelatios as my wanders bring me to a tunnel of lights which glitters like a jewel. It's design is simple, and like so many artifacts of the dune sea what it looks like during the day is a pale shadow to what it appears as in the night, and as I approach the set I am inspired by the chiaroscuro of the people and the lights, as if the people themselves were shadows and the light was all there really was.

It's an exhibit that comes with it's own talisman of entry, and in this case it's a pair of glasses which cause the light to bend and fractal into rainbows as one walks through the tunnel, bringing with it a remembrance of Aldous Huxley's idea of opening the doors to perception so as to see the glittering subtlety of form in it's naked light.

Even at that point on the quest I knew there was a relationship between the events that happened along one's story and the landscape they happened on. The potency of that in Blackrock was part of her appeal, the easily seen manifest reality of one's landscape of legend occurring in swirls of synchronicity across the playa.

This occurs profoundly for me as travels with Vogel through the dune sea lead us to a set of doors emblazoned with a brass panel that simply says 'Love', and I take it for what it appears to be, a manifestation of the doorway to love within myself embodied in a sculpture without, and give thanks to whatever artist designed such a thing such that it could serve the purpose it did for myself and others across the space.

The ritual of the space is clear to me, and I move to step through the doorway into love, hoping once again to experience it's embrace in my journey through the worlds

As I passed through the door I cast a lyrical, weaving words to power the threshold I saw before me in a quick rhyming for I know the doors to be a thing of passage, and see their appearance in the field as an opportunity to embrace what lay beyond the threshold of what I cannot yet see.

Temple of the Ancient Gods

Even in 2003 on the Quest the idea that we were building a new society from the temples of the old was present, and as I wondered thorugh the playa towards tha tyear's expression of the Man I saw avatars of those worlds framed within it's expanse, icons of the transformation experienced by us all.

I love this place so much. Nowhere else I have traveled is the flushness of manifestation of embodied mythology so profound. It is truly a place of divine dreaming, where I can feel an infinite of worlds coming together in symphony.

Seen from the depths of the Mythica, such is a mystical city, rising only once a year from the sands of the endless desert. A haven for the mystical and the masses to gather, touching the edges of a new world.