Council of Gnomes Blog

Reminder from Mano: Bless the objects in your house that serve you and give you pleasure (for example, the computer, stove, flower arrangements). All of these are composed of the elements of earth, water, air, and fire. A friend joked the other day that perhaps this election was a great conspiracy on the part of the gnomes to wake us all up. From one perspective or another, the vitriolic campaigning, the great confusion about truth, the shock of the result, the fear and then new resolve the election…

Reminder from Mano: Soften your heart and send love to the flowers in your garden. This blog will be Barbara’s writing about her two-month commitment in the summers to spend several hours in the amphitheater each day. First, though, comes my introduction. The three-way agreement among Barbara, Mano, and me is that I will start each blog with something personal. When Mano suggested to Barbara three and a half years ago that she ask me to help with the blog, we both expected that I would just edit…

Reminder from Mano: Say hello to the Spirits of the land, the Geni Loci, when entering a park, going to the beach, hiking in the mountains. Knowing that Spirit (angelic or elemental) is always placing “next steps” in my path and that I’m committed to paying attention, in mid-September I attended a Gift Economics workshop at the Lama Foundation near Taos, New Mexico. Two of the presenters are authors whose books have been very important to me in the past couple of years: Charles Eisenstein: The More Beautiful…

Reminder from Mano: If you live alone, after sending blessing to the food, open your inner awareness and notice if you feel a spiritual presence sitting at the table with you. For several months I have been engaged in an ongoing conversation with this melanoma that made its presence known in early May. My first melanoma, in 2010, was in my eye; this one appeared as a nicely contained lump in my breast. Since it’s a re-appearance—even though it’s seemingly not related to the eye cancer—the diagnosis was…

Reminder from Mano: “If you see a face in the bark of a tree or leaf configuration, say hello, I send you love. Last night I picked up a book a friend had dropped off—Talking with Angels: Budaliget 1943—a transcript of the Friday afternoon dialogues with angels four Hungarian young adults had toward the end of World War II. An opening line caught my eye: “The angels said, ‘What could be more natural than our talking with each other?’ May this book help many new dialogues to be…

Reminder from Mano: Touch the leaf of a tree, bush, or flower and tell it you love it. Barbara documented the following gnome encounter in May 2011. It sounds so natural and matter-of-fact, someone unfamiliar with her dedicated striving through the years might imagine that she has a secret channel into the elemental realm. In a way she does—a connection she has been moving toward and cultivating in one way or another for all of her 88 years. Even now, I never observe her taking her communications for…

Reminder from Mano: Send blessings to the plants along the freeway. Mature elementals have volunteered for this difficult job. Back in the late 60s, I had a job for a while selling children’s encyclopedias door to door in San Francisco. The very charismatic leader of this group of young women was Werner Erhard, and the motivational tools he was using to encourage us to work on ourselves (while selling a lot of books) became the foundation for Erhard Seminar Training (EST). One morning-meeting “mantra” I remember was, “Every day,…

Reminder from Mano:When you see a beautiful view, tell the elementals of that land that they are beautiful. I have been doing Marko Pogacnik’s January meditation, “Staying Connected with the Matrix of Life” (you can find it on his website under “meditations”). As a first step, I become aware of my elemental heart, holding it upon my hands at the end of the breastbone and feeling its exquisite quality. Marko says, “The elemental heart is a holographic piece (a fractal) of the heart of the Earth. Human beings…

Reminder from Mano:When you step outside, say hello to Mother Nature. The “art as a cultural deed” theme brings me to the value and blessing of powerful places that teach us, through their access vortexes of beauty, to connect—up and down, horizontal and vertical, through prayer, art, imagination. The Amphitheater is a shining example. In her 2014 book Celebrating the Magic of Jim’s Road, Barbara tells the story of where she lives, a small, vibrant spot off Alba Road in Ben Lomand. Through the years, it called to…

I recently heard a talk about Joseph Beuys, a German post-WWII artist, extremely influential, who wrote, drew, painted, and created displays and action installations. One of these installations, or social sculptures as he called them—“Honey Pump in the Workplace”—had a system of transparent tubes conveying honey around a room, as people shared their ideas in 100 days of conversation. Bueys made the case that we are all artists, that we can moment-to-moment enliven the world with our thinking, our warmth of heart, our commitment to the deep rhythms…