Patience, Patience, Patience

In early January I (Mary Jane) heard a two-day presentation—“Where Is the Elemental World?”—by Dennis Klocek, whose biodynamic agriculture work takes its inspiration from Rudolf Steiner. What I’ve always deeply respected about Dennis (I did a seven-month Consciousness Studies course with him some years ago) is that he is always working the indications from Steiner, testing them out, finding new applications, weaving them together by way of Goethe’s observational science. That’s what Steiner said we should do—move the original insights further, rather than simply forming and re-forming them from our intellect.

Initially, I had decided not to go. I am just moving along here with my elementalist “studies”, getting comfortable with my own dialogues with Mano, remembering to greet the trees when I go out my door, placing my feet onto the earth with acknowledgment and feeling. Dennis’ topics, in the vein of anthroposophy and alchemy, were going to include the four ethers, crystallization of gems, salt and sulfur in plant growth as symbolic consciousness, the spagyric process of the alchemist Paracelsus. It sounded very intellectual, and I am trying to romance the feeling life, sidestep the skeptical thinker for awhile, build up my trust in the unseen. Plus, I was still worrying about Steiner’s comment in Man as the Symphony of the Creative Word that “gnomes are actually the bearers of the ideas of the universe, of the cosmos, inside the earth. But for the earth itself they have no liking at all. They flit about in the earth with ideas of the universe, but they actually hate what is earthly” (p. 104). (“Hate”? I even contacted a German speaker to be sure that wasn’t a translation slip.) So, basically, I wasn’t ready to meld my growing consciousness of the elemental world, via Mano and Barbara, the amphitheater and Council of Gnomes notebooks with my roots in anthroposophy. Plus, Dennis’ method of testing everything scientifically, meticulously, always throws me into doubt about my abilities, and my willingness to be patient with a practice—any practice.

Through serendipitous circumstances, however, I did go to the lectures, and I was thrilled. What flooded back to me was how Dennis brings the same process, the same methodology, through all kinds of lenses. I’ve heard him do it with the study of bones, the Dinshah color gels, weather, contacting the dead, embryology, alchemy, and plant observation, and now he was doing it with the whereabouts of the elemental world—a topic of abiding interest to me. Here the process is what is important, along with the willingness to keep at it with diligence so that this new/old way of seeing can root and grow. As the weekend proceeded, I began to feel excitement and strength for settling down (again, I must confess) to deepen and broaden my practice. My mind, but more importantly, my heart, began to bring together exercises and understandings from such important mentors as Steiner and Dennis, Barbara and Mano, Marko Pogacnik, Stephen Harrod Buhner, Eliot Cowan, and R. Ogilvie Crombie (the ROC of Findhorn fame).

Barbara has been suggesting lately that we take the blog into the realms of some of these fellow explorers, comparing tools and findings. So for the next few months Mano, Barbara, and I will tread along in this direction. And just to set the stage, one thing they all agree on is that the pilgrim must be patient. They talk about practicing the same exercise daily for years, measuring the angle of the ice on a frozen pond for two hours a day for weeks (this is Dennis verifying the spiritual through the scientific), or understanding in their 80s that they began this journey with the elementals and nature when they were children—if not in a previous lifetime.

We are rebuilding a context of knowledge that was rather thoroughly wiped out in the West with the ascendance of the scientific method. I am always rather startled to see myself fall into turmoil when a scientist says, categorically, that something I have come to trust is stupid, without any scientific basis, detrimental to progress, and likely dangerous. And I see people I respect carefully protecting and hiding their participation in the nature spirit realm, or even the spiritual realm, for fear of ridicule. In my own experience, most of my friends just ignore this gnome blog part of my life, hoping (indeed trusting) that I’m not crazy but not wanting to know any details. No surprise, then, that healing this ancient rift, recovering the old without banishing the new, takes a good long while. This theme of uniting lost wisdom with new consciousness is foundational to Barbara’s work, and she has addressed it, in particular, in her dvd “Healing Burned Woman”—and also in the August 2013 blog. If Stephen Buhner is right, however, in saying that thousands upon thousands of people have been trained in plant medicine during the last few decades, this resistance to bringing elementals, humans, and the cosmos together is actively meeting with the joy of reconciliation.

Barbara can see, especially in retrospect, that her path toward the elemental world was charted long ago. Yet when I suggested that it has not always been straight-forward, in that she has had to patiently return to her practice over and over, she replied: “It has never been straight-forward. Mano had to work in a slow and steady way, giving me an experience or an awareness here and there, then letting me sit with it, ponder it, talk about this “funny thing” that happened—until I would meet someone who had his or her own connection and would say something like, ‘That’s for real, Barbara. Something is really happening.’ ”

Barbara gives a couple of examples. “In the 60s I did a lot of guided meditations with groups: Through the meadow, over the little stream, up the hill to meet a wise one who had a gift for you. Almost every time I started up the mountain I would see a cave in the side of the mountain with a lot of gnomes working inside; I never got to the top of the mountain to meet the wise one. Without knowing it, I was meeting the wise ones in the mountain.”

“Then, years later, after I had started painting, on vacation in Yosemite I did a painting of Half Dome. It had been hanging on my wall for a year when, in a darkened room, I saw the face of a gnome in the markings on the side of the rock formation. After seeing it once I could never look at the painting without the gnome face standing out, even reaching out to me. Twelve years later, still ‘flirting’ with the reality of gnomes and my connection with them, I came home after a year of traveling with Jim in Europe and, as we drove into our canyon, saw a gnome face in the rock outcropping behind our house. I told Jim and our neighbor, who had stopped us on the road to welcome us home. Neither of them could see it, yet for me the being was so real he was almost walking off the mountain to come shake my hand.”

“I met Mano two years later, and day after day all he would ask of me was: ‘Say hello, speak to the plants, tell them you love them.’ My discipline was more firmly requested, then, when he asked me to come with the computer each day for the three months before we left on a trip, to begin a dialogue. Many times when the gnomes asked me to come to the studio weekly and to open the Council of Gnomes, I would be neglectful, get busy, and miss four or five weeks at a time.”

In working with the three dimensions of Faerie (Brown Faerie within the earth, Green Faerie on the earth, and White Faerie above the earth) Barbara met two major teachers in the realm of White Faerie—Rama and Ramala. “Rama has been with me since the late 1970s, teaching me to hear and record spirit messages. Ramala came to guide me when my 40-year prayer to become a soul-infused personally was ready to be fulfilled.”

She continues, “This fits into an experience I had in 1960 when I had the same dream three nights in a row. Inside a cave I met three men dressed in white with long white beards. Each night they tried to tell me something. I could not remember what they were saying until the third night, when they said, ‘Three minds in one body.’ I have pondered this for years and interpreted it in many ways. Now that I have met the three Lords of the Mountain, passed my 80^th birthday, and moved into the soul-infused personality, I see this as my soul having three parts: one living in Brown Faerie, my personality self living in Green Faerie, and another part living in White Faerie. Obviously I have much more to learn about these three minds in one body.”

I am beginning to believe that Barbara’s lapses were not so much a “falling away” or a lack of discipline (though Barbara often feels it as that), but more a patient waiting until the time was right. She has come to her destiny task through Christianity, astrological readings, spiritual practices; she has benefited from teachers (human, elemental, and angelic) who showed up at strategic times; she has used all manner of “tools”, such as tarot and other “oracle” cards, the pendulum, painting and many other forms of art to clarify and verify. Ultimately, and with patience, she has reached a single-minded dedication to this bringing together of realms.