BLUE STAR

While walking the dog to pick some violets, I also go through a few ritual steps. For instance, every time I get to a crossroad, I stop and watch. Usually there’s always something there that makes me think. But this is not the kind of thinking that I associate with being an intellectual – Lord only knows, I get enough of that already on the job that pays for my bills – but the kind of thinking that has my head completely in the service of my senses.

Being quite tired of the lying industry that the academia has become, with academics thinking and writing for big publishers whose voice of commonsense equals that of sales, I have to admit that I like to give myself the opportunity to eat my own head, as it were, and feel what it’s like to have it as part of my gut. In other words, the more of my senses that I can activate, the better. Usually this takes care of my frustration with seeing how little I enjoy writing anything on dictation and thus doing good business for the university. You know, the kind of academic business as usual, where the only question that we ever pose as thinkers is this one, also business as usual: ‘What’s in it for me?’ ‘How about living the moronic life,’ I always want to retort, but I keep such opinions to myself.

So, yes, the crossroads. Today a blue thing was lying in the grass, on top of the mound around which cars usually swing. I go to the top, while becoming invisible – I can spare myself the speculations from the drivers – and have a closer look. A glove. A blue glove. A rubber glove. I get even closer and read the writing on it. Blue Star, it says. Oh, how appropriate. Cosmic brightness – I have to admit that I love everything that counters the moronic life, especially the one that has us all talk the so-called rational talk, or the talk that then transforms into moronic books that other morons can endorse.

So here’s the connection I made. The Blue Star is that thing in the universe that the astronomers identify with the giant star. The Blue Giant Star often turns into a supernova. There’s a beautiful Blue Star right in the constellation of Orion, and flanking what the astronomers also call the Witch Head, which is a reflection nebula. What bliss to be able to turn your head and actually spot it. The Rigel Star area, formally known as the IC 2118, has enough light in it to illuminate the best of magic there is. A sorcerous encounter between a glove and a dog-walk at the crossroads. I have to admit that I love my life and some knowledge that’s in it.

Back home, I asked the cards about it – and for whatever reason, I thought I’d ask the cards I made myself in the image of the Lenormand Oracle. The cards I call A Helium Poet – must be all that cosmic gas and dust that’s in my eye. The eye in the belly, as my head was deliberately placed there for the purpose of the walk, for the purpose of the shamanic experience: To be out in nature and pay attention. Listen and watch.

Says the Helium Poet: ‘Ask the Moon about climbing to the Star to touch it.’

‘How difficult is the Mountain?’ I furthermore asked.

‘As difficult as your ability to surrender your Heart. Take a dive with the Fish,’ the Helium Poet intimates, ‘and you’ll find your Heart right there where it actually is. In the love of this: the earth and its sky.’

May you all shine brightly.

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Note on the deck: A Helium Poet, Lenormand Cards, Camelia Elias (30 cards) and Witta Kiessling Jensen (6 cards), 2013.

§ Via Taroflexions