An invitation.
Field Notes of Rahgah - 20261004-S7
Every form begins as an invitation extended to whatever you are about to become. Something of you always stays in the disguise, and that is how you find your way back.
This week I tried someone else’s method twice. The first attempt ended in sleep, the second in a phone call. Neither got far enough to judge the method, but both sent me back to look at my own.
I have a pattern in this work. I find something that works, it keeps working for a while, and then it slowly fades. The focus point was one of those. It worked the first time and several times after, until it stopped.
Looking at it now, the technique wore out while the thing underneath it kept going. The focus point sent my attention through the brow, the place my energy already gathers on its own. That was the part doing the work. The technique was a container for it. Once a container works a few times, the mind learns its route and starts gripping it, and the grip is what kills it. The trouble starts when the mind decides in advance how the result has to arrive.
That led to something else. When I cast in trance, I’ve been asking. Show me this, tell me that. When I sit down to draw or work through a problem, I quiet down and the solution comes down to me. One posture reaches out from lack. The other leaves the door open.
So from here on, every cast is an invitation. The want stays as the target, and the invitation is how I receive it. If I need a scene for the next panel, I hold the scene in mind and keep the door open. When it arrives is not mine to schedule.
To keep the posture straight, I’m using a few lines from “I Don’t Ask, I Invite” by Just Fine & Goddess No Holy as a mantra:
I don’t ask, I invite
I don’t chase, I open space
My silence is permission”
Words can trap you and they can free you. They’re the same tool either way, and it depends on whose hand is on it. Nobody is going to free me but me, so I start with language and let it turn into imagery. That’s how I talk to the subconscious, the part of me that renders everything I see.
Which brings us to the ghost, crouched behind a rock at the foot of the mushroom, picturing himself as one of the spore people that drift around its base. He pictures the change and lets it come. The mustache goes with him, the way it does into every form.