"You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you" and musing with 'Pathosophy' by Azul Thome...

You are engaging in madness. 
I feel obliged to accompany you.
​
Alejandro Jodorowsky ~

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eARTh art by Azul Thome - PATHOSOPHY series

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"The human soul is hungry for beauty… When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming". 

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John O’Donohue

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Water finds its greatest power by seeking its lowest point.
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-Zen saying

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the Ash tree under a microscope, sorry!

QUESTIONS to remember when remedies are offered for our illnesses including COVID

Are they blessed by our ancestors and by the living world? Do they hold sacred beauty of Life, are they woven with wild poetry, are you held while you compost the immense and subversive grief held in your body? Are you asked to identify with the illness or with the alchemist and medicine person in you? If not how can they be of truth and of Life these medicated pathologies?

Now please don't think that I am demining your or my pains, I am not. What I have been stubbornly exploring since the age of 9 is how to bring back the wisdom and the medicine to and of the people who feel pain and are suffering?  ​

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eARTh art in the forest by Azul Thome

“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you

Don't go back to sleep!

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep!

People are going back and forth 
across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,

The door is round and open

Don't go back to sleep!”
​
― Rumi

eARTh by Azul Thome

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"Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field, I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”  

Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

eARTh art by Azul Thome

"Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. " 

Francis Weller

eARTh art in the forest by Azul Thome

This morning I would like to write about the toxic spell I am under with COVID19, the proposed journey from pathology to pathosophy through the sacred work of grief composting and the vital feeding of Soul. 

What happens if we move from allopathy to allosophy? What is the root of the collective terror and disorientation we feel? Can the disappearance of our nomadic freedom be the awakening call for loving more furiously and for radical generous cœurage?

I am writing so when I forget again and fall under the strong spell cast on us, I can at least return to it. May it be so, inshallah and inshgaia!

I have no answers. I am sharing my experience of the last 2 months when I was not sure I would come back from madness and illness.

The last 9 months has seen me feeling dis-eased, very disorientated with a brain unable to do simple tasks 

I have been experiencing deep physical and psychic pain while feeling uncontrollable raw emotions. I am deeply exhausted with cough and breathlessness.  
The above list holds the perfect materials for an alchemist and a medicine person to be born and/or practice. 
The above list also holds dangerous materials and definitions for a corrupted system to use to control us and put on under a spell...the spell of terror, blind obedience and of course increase isolation from all that matters...

DEPRESSION in OUR SYSTEM unable to grieve
I took a risk to seek support from the allopathic system of my gp practice 2 months ago. I was immediately put on antidepressant, painkillers and valium. I took it all and walked again on that path of medicated pathology. I had to find something I had lost the last time I was there. So I put the pills on my altar and prayed for a safe return. After a few days of swallowing the pills I gradually stopped crying, the pains in my body dulled and a feeling resembling a voiceless stupor wrapped over me. I became controllable again, pacified and numbed. 

WILD GRIEF, MOVEMENT and FOREST
After a few weeks I stopped it all and allowed myself to feel what i had parked for the experiment. First my immense grief, sorrow and rage moved again. I allowed my body to move and paint, stitch and embroidered through the many stages of pain and I relearned to lay on the forest skin while breathing with the trees, my kins. 

I needed to leave the home of Soul to return to it with some refreshed clarity. I am unsure if it is wise to use myself as the raw material but sometimes we are required to be the laboratory, the alchemist, the temple, the dangerous path, the prima materia and the patient all at once.

PATHOLOGY and PATHOSOPHY
Being conditioned to pathologies, our experiences of pain, strong feelings and suffering all our life we seem to look for something to fit these symptoms into. ME, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, depression, psychosis, bipolar, autism, manic, etc... When tired and alone we just want to rest there, for a moment, for a sense of veneered belonging, a home, however dysfunctional it is. I noticed that when I think of dying it gives me the same feeling of rest and belonging!!!?  
That makes me suspicious, it awakes in me to the possibility that something dangerously unfriendly is going on in our world right now. A world that makes us want to rest and belong in the arms of the system that harms and controls us... 

Are we part of a human system that would rather see us dying than living? 
Looking at the evidence, it is probably the case. After all our healing system is all about illness, not about well being, kindness or the thriving of life. 
People who are truly alive are dangerous! Perhaps because they are fearless, interconnected to the web of life and compassionate...

These pathologies were named and defined by whom and for whom? Why have we accepted them with such docility? Same question can be transferred onto every part of our society, politics, laws, truths, all over the world ... 

These pathologies become prison cells, they take away our freedom, stifle our imagination and crash our dignity. They enable medication to be passed on without proper check about its true effect. Power is never shared with the sick and the suffering one. Our return to the web of life, to our wild grief, to our songs, dance, art, poetry, old stories and empowering myths are never part of the prescription. We are never asked about our relationship to our visible and invisible allies and to our well and wise ancestors. All of these threads are never spun by doctors and patients.. They are bellitelated, shamed and laughed at most often. They are flipanteley and dangerously named as irrelevant matters and discarded.
If you have ever been in a psychiatric hospital you will know what I mean. Hospitals are the same. We love you nurses and some docs. It is the system and the anesthesia I am addressing here.


OTHER WAYS
I am reminded of a few of my mentors.

Francis Weller about depression: " depression is a plea from the soul to stop all you are doing and go down on your knees to feel your grief"

Martin Prechtel who said to a director of a psychiatric hospital: "Aha this is where you keep your shamans!" and of 

Malidoma Somé : What a real shaman sees at a mental institution  


So if we look at the spell of
ALLOPATHY: "treatment of disease by remedies that produce effects opposite to the symptoms,"
The definition says it all. How can I break the strong spell of allopathy .
I call on Sophia, I call on Allosophy: "wisdom born of the other"
"Allo" means 'other..."Al": means 'beyond'...

Where is 'Pathosophy' in this? where is "the wisdom born of suffering, of feeling"
Where does she reside? Why is the breath of freedom and respect that come from the enquiry not encouraged by our medical system? I let you guess. 

SOPHIA
Sophia is the feminine aspect of divine wisdom. You can see that She is not what the people in power will want to foster in the people they are meant to serve and protect.

Recently I have been offered another emerging pathology : "long covid or post covid, or covid syndrome". In the uk the medical system is setting up a series of test at the end of November to identify us and create a new illness. The illness will lead to new medications . 
I rested there for a few days, in the seat of being part of the reffered one for the new experience. My ego and love of pioneer adventures got confused. I even felt relief again to belong to some study of suffering even if unknown. 

To fall into the void, to fall into the unknown frightens me, so I grab prematurely onto some offered solutions, like a shocked amnesiac, anaesthetised zombie.

I realised this morning that I had given up the fight for beauty. That by being offered a comfortable and easy solution my whole being was weakening even more, divatilasing. By being offered a pathology woven in the terror of Covid19, added to the growing control of our lives, the world wide authoritarianism and a mad making system I became even more unwell. I was under a spell. I am under a spell. And the forgetting keeps happening, the falling asleep - again and again. It took me to look into the eyes of a painting I made in the forest to wake up to my strength again. That tree is becoming my temple.

eARTh art by Azul Thome : "PATHOSOPHY"

SPELL
Yesterday after watching a very disturbing french documentary - Hold Up - about the possible horror happening behind the scene of covid I saw my giving up, my wish to die rather than having my freedom taken away even more. 

I did not want to see what will happen to me or the beings I love. I was horrified to not be able to see my family. I am experiencing the crumbling of my livelihood. Feeling the loneliness and powerlessness...but worst of all what could I DO in the face of such a worldwide sickening and so frightening madness ? I think we have passed the hummingbird story of doing individually all that we can. It might be a time for the murmuration of starlings now, working together in unity. And the teaching of mycelium is coming into our psyche again through books, talks, psilocybin and the return of the fungi. It is time to get together, go underground and create a mycelium of support and resistance. 

ALLIES and GUIDES
I remembered my childhood archetypes/sheroes and heroes like Boudicca, Mandela, Tree, Pocahantas, Hypatia, Robin Hood, Kali, Gandhi, River, Lords of the Ring, Le Petit Prince, the Suffragettes, Raven, Dr King, the courage of the people of Beirut, the Jumping Mouse story, the Four Sisters of the Last Forest on Earth story...

MADNESS and WILD GRIEF
Last night I howled and screamed in ways that could have got me 'locked up and down'. I felt fury, rage, lostness, fear, sorrow with stretched claws and thick fur, with sharp long teeth eating the moon.  

I felt in ways that no city dwellers can allow themselves to do or can dare remember how. For the fear of going mad or being ostracised and locked in is too great. So we take the blue pill even if its promised bliss is a slow killer. I remember days taking both the blue and the red pill. I propose a third element...


CEREMONIES and HIDING
I still hide to enable my wild grief to bring me back home to the wild truths, unless I'm in ceremonies with other humans. These ceremonies have stopped due to the 'lock down' and restrictions...it costs our psyche and our heart greatly. So they must be internalised, they must go underground, they must keep happening in secrets, in the forests and in our psyche.

The touching of madness, the crashing down beyond the level of gravity, the rage of my nomadic soul to be locked down, the disorientation and terror of the lack of congruence in our leaders and neighbours, the pains and suffering, the sleeping and waking in a state of torpor...they all become a gate toward the deepening understanding of my human family. 

LONG COVID
These are not just personal states of being. may we not be caught in the emerging net of the next pathology: Long and post COVID.

I now see that these experiences of dis-ease are a response to our freedom being taken away from us. 
A gagged scream due to the trauma of knowing our elders are locked in their room with a key, unable to be touched by their grandchildren or by the sun. Future mothers are giveing birth with a mask, the children are beaten up and masked and forbidden to touch and be touched in kindness! Many of us cannot travel to see our loved ones.  

We know that what we are obeying does not make sense and that the root of the word obey means 'listening' not losing our humankind rights . Yet we want to be good citizens... But when a situation is called a war with an enemy to win over...we have lost our freedom. A very madening dynamic.

We know that there is a fat great lie seeping into our daily cup of tea. That there is no more debats, no press with integrity left, no freedom of speech about the situation of covid. If we say - hold on a minute, let's challenge this - we are called conspi-racists...or...or...
I let you fill the dots with your own experience...
It is deeply disturbing, I long to sit with each one of you unmasked in the forest around the same bon-fire to share our uncensored truth. But fear has sipped in our own hearts now. It will take great practice and discipline to stay awake!

So this morning I woke up pledging to fight for freedom and fearlessness until the day of my death.

The words came this morning:
I will die in the fight for life and freedom composting terror when it comes. 
I will find my tribe in the mycelium of resistance and join them in service to all that matters, 
I will not live and die in pacifying comfort . I will live and die for Sentient and Civil rights.  
I will keep feeding my well and wise ancestors while seeking their support,  
I will keep seeking the solace and wisdom of the trees, the children, the mycelium, the ravens and the river.  
I will let the bird songs remind me of mine.  
I will keep my appointments and gasp in joy at the rooks being on cue at dusk and dawn announcing the shift in things. 
I will keep painting and making the conversations beyond words to listen to our beautiful mamatay. 


OUR FOR-GETTING 
The memory of our ancestors were kept and passed on to the children through songs, stories, ceremonies and rituals. They also had the sonlines and the ways of seeing the invisible gold threads of the mycelium of connections of the great web of life. 

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“I had drunk so deeply of grief and innocently gambled so hard with fate and irony that a special kind of vision was gathering in my eyes, not entirely clear just yet. This was the same look people saw in your eyes when you have died for beauty and come to live accepting nature as life with no promise of paradise, and mad at people who couldn't see that.” 

― Martin Prechtel,

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An other musing


When we 'become ill' there are choices opening to us. Important and vital choices of how to position ourselves within the constellations and systems available to us for healing.

We can identify with the ill-ness or/and identify with the Alchemist, the Medicine person in us who is longing to be initiated into their full beingness.

WHat I am saying is that - We can identify with Pathology or 'Pathosophy'!
I have been deep diving with the word Pathosophy and its medicine for many months now...an astonishing and opening journey...

When we become dis-eased we must remember that it is not a failure, something to fix, to hate, to even adore, to shame, nor something to use as currency for all the past suffering never composted...

Illness is NOT an invitation to the insane medical industry, that grew around our suffering, to join in...not always and mostly not.

Our suffering is absolutely NOT a permission to be owned through the naming of our pains, by pathologising it, medicating it, categorising it and essentially owning and gagging our freedom&capacity to become intimate with the ecosophy of our living world!

I see too many people profiting and making insans fortunes by keeping people entangled in a system that is rooted in fear of grief, terror of death, dismembered from soul and beauty.

A system that has no more filament of connection to the living world, the invisibles worlds and the well and wise ancestral world.

I propose that -The illness and the disease can become the raw material, the prima materia that the Artist and Alchemist within us can create a workshop, a forest, a lab around .

.All is there to initiate us to become a fuller, wiser, ripened human being.

I have been ill most of 2020. It has become an experimental event. I am becoming the alchemist through also being, the ill one, the illness, the lab, the paintbrush, the paint, the howling, the despair, the delight, the awe for it all, the suffering and the wisdom born of it all. It became an entity and a deep exploration which is still going on.

I call Her
"PATHOSOPHY: The Wisdom born of suffering"
I drew a triangle with Pathos (suffering/feelings) Logos (reason/study/logic) Sophia (feminine divine wisdom)
Within the triangle lives an interrogation mark. Anima Mundi stepped in for a while, then the Field of Rumi and today it is empty again.

I thought that Pathosophy wanted to be away from pathology but today she turned back towards it and a marriage of the three, PATHOS, LOGOS and SOPHIA has taken place.

I am curious to know how this lands on your hearts, bodies and souls.
I sense that there might reside something here that could be of benefit to many ill and pained people right now...

To move from an over identification to suffering, to the wisdom born of suffering...to move from the illness within to the medicine person longing to be initiated within the ill one using the illness itself to make gold out of lead...and in that way we initiate our world a little.


Azul Thome

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​And words from  Khalil Gibran on
PAIN

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break,
that its heart may stand in the sun,
so must you know pain.
Much of your pain is self-chosen
.It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings,
though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter
​has moistened with His own sacred tears.”―

Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

eARTh art by Azul Thome: "PASSAGE"