PREFACE

Writing and expression are intricately tied to Being which is eternal and comes into form. It is the same as the universe moving consciousness into expression, and moving that expression to awareness. This is living wisdom the ancient Egyptians understood mirrored throughout all of nature and the supernatural and in their own writing and artwork that closely mirrored the wisdom of the universe and displayed the potency and wonder of Being.

It comes from a very ancient and alive tradition that reaches further back still, as will be seen.

An open feminine text is going to be very personal, as intimately tied to life and the eternal as we females are. It shows our Beings. Our very bodies are the doors between, but we forgot that are internal Beings are as well. We forgot our Beings, the most important awareness, rootedness, vastness and eternal strength. Bound by domination of form, we were taught to forget. We were threatened and harmed to forget. We were hurt and damaged. Out of ego and dominance, we were vastly diminished. The symbols to opening the psyche and its powerful aliveness were closed and locked and forbidden to us by threat of punishment and death. Our very Beings were locked inside the diminishing culture of Ozymandias’s now crumbling walls. Literature, writing, art and Being, then, are inseparable here, and purposefully so, to give it full expression: a undeniable Being, a face and a voice so that others recognize their own and are vibrantly awakened, the cultural and personal reasons to be awakened—to Being and to a deep universal peace and dreamlessness that enlivens form in unfathomable ways. This is also done through the unbounded language of Song and Poetry, the ever-alive, pulsating and flowing music, those miracles of expression flowing parallel with the universe that remain consummately strengthening, growing and blooming outside the conditioned and controlled mind, a deep call to consciousness and expression, and fully alive in participation with eternity.

The masculine, in such figures as the Buddha, coming shortly historically after the Homeric epics, in which Odysseus, like the ancient even prehistoric rites, has “left” form for transformation and yet also to transform the worlds in order to return to form, transfigured—and for the super shaman, all form transfigured and opened to Being–as a social whole moved away for a time in dogmatic religions and limited understanding from valuing living form. While coming to realize what is interior and far more powerful, Odysseus illustrates this then vastly, illimitable exterior, now informed by the “real,” his apotheoisis. The masculine and social, even historically, thus left the feminine forms, including the valuing of her body (and therefore all forms including land and vibrant animals) and existence, her Being, and that of the Earth, for necessary transformation of consciousness and re-realization of forms.

But Odysseus did not forget her Being or her Body and this is both his ocean-depth of character and his enlightened brilliance. This is the prime difference from the Buddha (and even later with Christianity) and the subsequent movement of culture: 800 + years before Jesus and the borrowed mythology to write the Bible, Odysseus’s return to Her, to the female/human goddess in her realized wonder on Earth. Time here reveals the vast importance of both: coming to consciousness in the “flight” of the shaman, and the inspired, transformative return to expression and form. The leaving of form was to realize the eternal within—unequivocally necessary—and also to ultimately move physically, as will be shown, in a natural and powerful creation and transformative process aware of that eternity in Being, in a truer and more universally powerful path than the seemingly predominate uninspired or unenlightened governments, closed and dogmatic religions and endless wars and destruction, in manifestation towards the hard freedom evident in the spirit of the West of the eternal expression and sensory experience, and this quite literally to the second arrival of Western culture to the mythical and literal break to consciousness and ultimate freedom of body and spirit in the American Southwest and the Pacific Coast, and this by rite of Song as it always had been. The first arrival had been a blind, raping one in a limited, destructive world view that has culminated in the bombastic buffoonery of white male domination over life itself and women agreeing so that they can have a piece of the illusory status. Mirroring this rite of odyssey into internal/eternal into the truer vastness and energy of the external, and the recognition of the feminine in the in-between (as in Circe, and in the spectrum of realization coming back (having been at the trapped-between-the-worlds Calypso), moving from Nausicaa at the waterfront and the Queen of Scheria, Arete, the structure of the culture, but unable to be fully realized as they hide behind a “shield”), culturally the powers and the existence of the feminine and creation were left behind in thought in Greece for the movement West, also mirroring the natural movement of the Sun to re-arrival to her body across the ocean, place and form to arrive at illumination and recognition here, in both form and wonder, just as the inspired ancients–even prehistorics–the Poets, foretold. She arrives at water. The greatest and highest cultures arrived at the water. We can now look to our own Pacific Coast for that arrival, just as Odysseus returning, and just as the very water flow of life that comes from between her legs to give birth to further expression.

The return of the feminine to remembering her own Being, remembering what she has always been, even apart from time or matter—to knowing who and what she internally and bodily is and determinedly knowing and creating from there—draws the transformed masculine to return to the miracles of expression now coming from this eternal space created and sustained on earth. Having broken through and the work originating in the eternal and coming back in unsurpassable mastery in form, a weave between eternity and time—long understood in ancient artwork, as will be seen—Odysseus opens all the worlds, “heaven,” the natural “Olympian” forces at work, breaks them back open to their working and real state, bringing the universal eternal through to earth to realization and to immediate experience right here and now in this very moment. He steps beyond the seeming social limitation of even the mind of Zeus–itself a limited creation by humans which Michelangelo so powerfully will show. It is happenings of utmost wonder. It had become limited by cultures who shut off “art” as secondary and unimportant, trivial, when it can be the very flow of the voice of the eternal in truest embodiment. They hailed “Zeus” then “Yahweh” as the supreme limit of thought, shutting the doors to the heavens themselves and guarding them will concrete, violent ego.

This is a personal as well as cultural transformation. It is what newly inspires the society and flows into the deprived culture, giving it new, ignited and truly inspired, like lightning itself, life. When the power and realization of the epics and masterful artworks are seen and the wonder revealed, it is to literally re-arrive at a new kind of Place. The profound, life-shifting difference is that it is not a place centered on the empty-shelled values of the market place (the money-lenders in the temple) where surface, mere illusions and mad delusions, and the way things appear are held in fleeting and frustrating highest honor and esteem, and then pass meaningless again into pent-up expressionlessness, a creation of a hell in itself, but it is an entirety throughout all existence permeated with natural, resonate presence full of power, peace, love, sacredness, completeness and immutability. It is no less than a sublime arrival.

Wildly, astoundingly, this transformation is grounded in, flips and culminates on the culture’s prevalent image of the feminine. It breaks open when the symbols are re-broken open, which is Odysseus’s and Athena’s tasks. I show how it is done in these pages. I show how it has been done without anyone seeing a thing. This is the tapestry. It is Penelope’s remembering.

As this becomes seen, it radiates more and more through the art in divinely, masterfully delivered illimitable and living eternal truths and realized astonishing embodiments. It will demonstrate its own wonder. And the identities of the masters who created them can be seen in a new light. They are Odysseus returned. It is apotheosis in one’s own realization in the seeing. It is that for which the beyond masterful art in the Sistine Chapel has been silently alive and waiting, its cultural vat ready to pour at the entrance once broken open. It waits, eternally but in time, for the return flight of the Super Shaman back to form. It even says it will happen.

This is the kind of return that directly crosses the barriers having gone to the eternal and breaking it back open, as Odysseus does—when formally and actually seen in the universal expression broken through—to be proven—in human and written and artistic form come through also stunningly into Being and New Identity. It is the sublime and the cosmos breaking through in human and yet humanly-impossible ways into recognizable form that breaks the perceived thought barriers. It is done through masterful art. These pages, as I know they have suspended place and time, but blessed with the miracle of this moment in time and place, are to provide that voice and proof of where to look for the return, for the mastery and voices breaking through from ancient, and yet always immediate (suspended from time) design, so inspired and intricately structured with not one atom out of place, such an extraordinary bolt of an arrow of such accuracy across literal time and place, and not done by human hands alone, so perfectly that it cannot miss this exact mark in demonstrating the eternal radiance breaking through. We are standing in the “dining hall” of the music, watching it happen. It is the vital role of art and artists, as Joseph Campbell stated and showed with his life’s work, to break the walls through to eternity. As one will see, Homer left the intricate blueprint for this to happen. He left the message of how to turn over the worlds.

This writing is a delivery of a living message from one ancient bard, Homer, and from pre-historical and ancient sources, to our own Laërtes in the Bay, Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead: Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, and Phil Lesh—the direct arrow’s path will be shown—to be delivered by the Muse (who is naturally in-between) who sees the eternal weave, knows the cosmos in her hands, and weaves it anew with her own hands and Being, demonstrating the suspension into eternity, and thus again giving it its eternal into living, articulated words and existence, which are also her own. The unequivocal reasons why it goes to Laërtes, its rightful owner, will be shown. It is what Homer’s blueprint, his surreptitious “battle studies” show. Through recognizing my Being and following an intricate design eternally woven into the epics themselves, the message is to be delivered directly to Laërtes, and this also to honor him, the indisputable line and the true leader from the proven in-between. Seeing it reveals that the Iliad and the Odyssey are prophetic texts, as tricksters’ texts are, shown brilliantly by Lewis Hyde, and the epics are not alone. They are living, ready to breathe again, Songs to be played in the broken open “dining hall” that is provably between the worlds, opening both to each other. That is their ability to surpass even the living in provable form. The return is as natural as the Sun, which no religion can stop, lock or deny. Living Songs, when that River is broken open, break open all barriers and life flows inspired and truly alive as if for the first time.

Dante wrote in Canzone XVI: “Who paints a figure, if he cannot be it, cannot draw it.” It is in the artists’ Beings. It is in the eternal Muses. This becomes the definitive marker between what has masqueraded as the limited definition of god and what are the powers of the cosmos opened into Being, into our very hands. Who dares place a limit?

The re-arrival of the Sun and the life-renewing, healing Waters, the flow of the Song and the mythology, is first signaled by Isis, by Penelope and her tapestry, the remnant, the weaving Muse who knows her own eternal heart, and weaves back together the body of Osiris/Odysseus and the kingdom on earth for the return of the Sun. Her very heart surpasses all that humans think they know. Her heart is the path and the door. It takes a Brave Poet Heart to recognize it. It takes a Bard willing to reclaim her her dining hall.

The ancient “middle voice” which scholar Roland Barthes demonstrated in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, and Robert Scholes, Nancy Comley, and Gregory Ulmer connected to “Mystory” in TextBook: Writing Through Literature—this entering into the text and claiming a voice—as opposed to remaining excluded as if having no “proper,” “permitted” (by whom?) social place (a faceless, disembodied institution of rules barring Being?) or not actually being present in the face of that authoritative, forbidding, and eliminating

voice of traditional ‘his’-story of “only one” and “not you” (and most dreadfully not feminine or coloured) in closed symbols and rigid texts—is also the answer to a powerful and living voice that awakens through the capabilities of creation from the robust and burgeoning energy of life itself, reflecting the powers of the universe, instead of forever being succumbed to small-minded social elimination, division, exclusion, authority, embattlement and ownership, and held under what should be and are living and breathing mythologies, texts, creations, voices and Beings. The Songs are not meant to be dead on the page, as the traditional Western world in college classrooms and stagnant church sanctuaries would have them to forever be (barred from speaking and even realizing truths, let alone living them) in order to have identity, power and knowledge “over” others as a “chosen few,” (who did the choosing?) in the lifeless, uninspired, untransformed strongholds of power of parched and empty hierarchy built on blood money where the knowledge is instead rote, limited and “owned” where it should be dynamic and alive. The Songs are to be alive like the Apaches’ Songs as Prayers that give continual, renewed living energy to the culture and its People, directly into form, its living consciousness, an always coming to real life, a natural flow from the eternal into Being. What one comes finally to know is that the ancient “middle voice” is far more eternal and full of natural power than the authoritarian voice assuming the permanence of its unsubstantial prominence.

“Mystory,” in the sense that these authors mean (and not the “little me” story that Eckhart Tolle explains in coming into deeper awareness) and the realization of where the ancient middle voice is originating—from the in-between of existence, from the Being in form but that which is aware of its own Source, is the way to speak towards creation as a living Being, above endless killings and torture over lands that originate from distorted senses of self and place and a claimed “one word of god” filtered through conditioned beliefs and ignorant and violent to what is real and visible—forms bursting throughout the universe and in perfect bodies, knowable wonder right in to intricately detailed expression in infinitely astounding ways and moving. It is a way to realize the present gifts in their phenomena and the very real experience of paradise which extends from knowing Being on the inside first and then allowing it to Be through creation and voice, which is first embodied in in-betweenness in form as seen in the feminine, a woven-ness, and awakens the Song that flows, living, into transforming, vibrant and participating life that moves in changing ways like the Sun and Moon do, bringing a new day, from regenerative to self-renewal. The Song moves, even in culture, just like the blood coursing through the veins, bringing life and breath, the Song mirroring the natural and breaking through into the supernatural. It reignites the forms. It transforms energy into life. It is the flow. It first comes from her body, which is my body and Being, which realizes itself between the worlds, an eternal Presence very much inside and expressing out in this phenomenon of being alive. The Song is this alive language that flows in the expression and healing of the harmony of it all. When re-broken open, it is revealed to be sacred, and all it touches becomes sacred.

Through middle voice, through “mystory,” the phenomenon of this existence, I have (my realized eternal Being has) the living voice to speak and the mythologies live, no longer dormant on the page and restricted from the living psyche recognizing itself in their eternal aliveness. Mystory brings the text and the history/herstory, the epic, the stars, and the whole to life, without exception or exclusion. The realms become revelations instead of perceived emptiness, that perception dictated by the mere, filtered, fallible human mind. Coming from this source of Being is the power of creation. The realms brim with a newly seen energy and prevalent eternal consciousness, awakening to be seen in the undeniable eternal patterns themselves. Creation and expression is greater than (even positively propelled by) destruction, and all moves towards this healing and growth beneath their surfaces, whether restricted, negative and pent up, or regenerative and broken free to natural abundance. By speaking provably eternal words to the Poet, I show the Song is alive in all its ways, the energy of inspiration, a power of the Muse that comes with the power to timelessly speak from the eternal, just as the inspired ancients tell of the Muses, Oracles and Sibyls: when and as I choose (so that it may move as harmony moves, even sometimes unseen or unheard). It must be this way. Human will expends a great deal of energy towards contorting existence and the voice must remain out of that human hold. She speaks to the Brave Poet Heart; she silences others. The Muse brings to life transforming history (not trapped in patterns), epic, tragedy, astronomy, all the way to the silent realm of the constellations, and all the realms to the elevation to finally make audible and visible the natural harmony of the music of the spheres, whose Song is so sweet all of Nature dances, and the realms, even history, and the more true-to-reality creation of art, open to reveal their natural movements across time and space not by limited human hands, but by divine human hands, undaunted and changed masterfully into expression, just as Odysseus returning to Ithaca, journeying towards the brilliant and extraordinary in form, and known thousands of years ago that it would still happen, the arrow powerfully, steadfastly propelled through the air with direct and sublime accuracy.

It arrives in this moment, our moment.

It is towards the experience of infinite beauty and the expansive present now: the experience of rapture and aesthetic arrest at the wonder that, as Joseph Campbell, James Joyce, and Thomas Aquinas so eloquently stated in the line of true inherited ability and brilliance, stills the mind and awakens the heart beyond separation and the “kingdom” of “heaven” is known, just as is has always been here but not perceived. This awakening is back to the female form and the artist of in-between, those that go between the worlds, breaking it back open, just as Eckart Tolle does and the “place” from which he speaks. The very different kind of kingdom and “rule” is in being a breaking open to the internal/eternal, this influence coming from proven internal vastness and connected character of the heart, and not “rule” in the destructive sense of “overlording” in the common, learned conception of degrading others to “less than” and “overpowering” all of life. It opens the experience of Being past contrived divides and reveals itself to be very real in Body and Place to be known right in the experience of the flickering atoms happening in this very moment, even in the formerly perceived “mundane.” It is revealed to all be miraculous. This breaking back open is realized at the moment of the masculine/social structural return to the recognition of the feminine on earth in human/goddess form—a natural state—she being the literal and spiritual combination of the eternal and form, her natural in-betweenness in her body and that she proves with her creation and the masculine proves of himself and his true nature and returns in masterful, eternal feat, just as in the Odyssey, just as with Homer. That experience then, from the journey of culture and time, returns to its second, its grandest, but now most hard-won brilliant statement: the miracle of form and presence right here, the Poet’s arrow striking exact, right to the very heart, known in Penelope’s heart, the heart’s eternal intelligence, as she sets up the formidable, decisive contest. This reveals the sacred Mountain, all at once internal and external, grounded and touching the sky, the Body in time and in Place already participating in eternity, already participating in human endeavors but not “seen” before: the true, vibrantly alive world navel. In that transformation of vision through natural rite, the center is everywhere, the navel where divine energy is converted through the earth, through food and life, the female in the garden, and vibrantly present and now. Just as the perfectly timed returning Sirius star which signals of the returning Sun, the eternal proves itself to come into form removed from the control and thought of humans. The Song, the Nile, the River, naturally breaks forth, and with it Osiris returns, now spiritual in body form, woven “again” by her hands. In the Water’s return, it comes to our Beings and creations to burst its River beds and flood our existences, bodies and souls that have been parched and weak without having been opened. The effects are that all moves towards healing and life instead of eternally pent-up in the human-designed death and destruction in restrictions of consciousness and therefore restrictions of Presence, of our own Presences, which in turn are also restrictions of body, choices, thought and creation. The words and the music are healing and unifying across all divides and boundaries. That openness defies all human definitions and allows the Psyche’s surrender to complete Love. It is the most powerful denial of all its restrictions.

Like the Suitors and their treatment of women as chattel, and Helen, that erred, reigning surface-based symbol of the feminine, the internal is exposed to the new light of the returning Sun. The true inheritors take their rightful place. This is how the new worlds are opened. It is how the sacred is opened. The new worlds are divine and beyond words. It requires its Music to break open the flow.

This message is delivered in knowing and using the very powerful and ancient “middle voice,” as one will see in these pages.

Because the pages are alive, there is also sensuality, felt experience and “magic”—a naturally occurring cognizance and expression beyond the visible layer we are used to assuming is empty, not responsive, alive or permeable. The magic is not in our limited sense of the word, as sleight of hand or illusion, but in allowing the universe to reveal its own jubilance and perfect order in what the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, for instance, understood about the powers of language and art that live on as creations out of reach of human constructs, as is done in the Odyssey. Heinrich Zimmer, in his article “The Indian World Mother,” wrote of distinctions of the feminine being known and expressed in the “sensual,” the “magical” and the “sensual earthbound rites,” which are to be known as her realms:

On all levels there are rituals capable of transforming man. But it is everywhere the tradition and trend to rank the spiritual, sublime practices above the sensual and magical ones, since the general course of cultural development has favored the spiritual element over the material and feminine. This development has taken place under the predominance of the male principle. But with the cult of the Great Goddess in late Hinduism, the archaic heritage of sensual earth-bound rites rises once again overwhelmingly to the zenith.

These pages are tied to the aliveness of the experience of what is to be evidenced right in the body, felt and known. There is no exclusion. In this way this writing is also a rite, like the mystery rites and labyrinths, that opens recognition and participation for those consciously ready and who can match their internal/eternal beings to the goddess, dragon or hag at the entry of the labyrinth (recognizing the alive eternal in the heart) and from there she can show you your own far reaches. As Campbell writes in his article “Art as a Revelation,” these are the “orders of rapture (samādhi) which are intended and rendered, either by the rites of a mythologically grounded civilization, or by proper art” (90). From there, through the adventure, the arrival at the revelation at the center of the labyrinth can be achieved. Without this adventure, it would be too much to see all at once. This writing was also a coming to know—a recognition of my own Being—through the process, even for me in its creation. It caused an ancient remembering signaled by the art and sustained by a knowing of another’s heart and destiny across the last eight years in writing to John Mayer and his friends. This creation has given me the opening to my Being in my body that I struggled to bring to light and express for a lifetime.

Upon realization of the feminine, especially in this time to be realized astoundingly in re-arrival to culmination of Place right here in the United States, the land that reverberates with natural freedom, spirit and independence, and on the Pacific Coast, where the waters bring the realization in, the true embodiment of land and consciousness meeting in a final arrival—understanding where we are in time and uncovering a very different second arrival of the epics to our place and moment at this millennium (and the signals even of the transition to Beatrice and La Gioconda, like the 7 and 10 in Beatrice’s second arrival and the far reaches of her promising rainbow, the female messenger of the gods), and just as the moment the movement of the Sun of Set having moved into the American White House, burning too harshly and making a desert of vibrant lives and land, as the ancients knew and said would happen, and just as the replenishing star promises the return of Isis, who here recognizing herself first in Penelope and matching her soul to discover the labyrinth and finding her own Being at the heart of it, can weave back Osiris and give divine and inspired life to their inheritors, a new Horus, the spirit-ruler of the restored, abundant land. These realizations are all around to be known as already here when the ancient voices speak just as if not one moment of time has passed, free of time, as if they are in the room where you now read. They prove

their divinity. Their Presences are immediately known. Time transforms back into organic, loosing itself from the human white-knuckled grip of madness, abuse and control on this gorgeous, magical, miraculous expression happening on the one blue marble evidently inhabiting miraculous life. It is the beginning of miraculous creation and that creation is ours to know again, and to live, as if for the very first time when it is seen. It is a breaking open of the true dance.

I do not speak from an “ego” that fears or desires something not real. My heart knows what is true, and that to me is beyond priceless. I have wondered for it my whole life. I finally came to see it in the artists who showed it to me, reflecting the beauty of Being. Odysseus is true and exists. I know his heart. I knew it the moment I saw him. Laërtes is true. Athena is true. Laërtes is and has been at the bay, keeping the eternal waters, the consciousness eternally moving in, waiting. Athena, our own Katy Perry, springs up naturally right on the coast, just as the Greeks understood she does right when she is needed, as Plato shows. She is born on that coastline in our moment at Santa Barbara and she followed her Being and her heart against everyone who underestimated her because of her body form and tried to keep her limited to that. She has long stood in protection of Odysseus and in movement of the living Song. She will see it home and reignited.

I have longed for Odysseus, something of an inarticulable knowing my whole life, but I always knew he was truer than what I saw enacted and the unrelenting diminishment I felt until I understood Being. I know these things because I came to know them first internally. The writing comes from a place of shattered-open abundance into expression of Being, hearing the living Songs, and protected for a time by the wings of Nature and of Art until it could be opened all the way. I write as an existence of pure, wondrous creation now able to speak, having learned the powerful source that tends towards creation, and of a hard-won experience of seeing unequaled beauty that is also, like me, made to long to break through to fullness and completeness of expression in the phenomenal universe that grows towards that and knows no limits, not even of our very limited concept of “death.” In e.e. cummings words, it is “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” It is, “for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes.” We tend towards healing, creation and bursting in beauty even though we have not fully known it or allowed it, and have lived in contrived fear of loss and wanting empty, illusory gain and yet always in that, remaining desperate. It is provable that that internal desperation has never ended in our old ways of being. Our social conditionings kept us from seeing what we are. This writing comes from a deep, eternal source listened to in silence, stillness, solitude, an extended time alone in Nature and contemplation, and from being encouraged by a tribe of artists who gave of themselves for years to see me through. And then it also comes from a sensitive existence as a female in a culture and planet which has been distinctly cut off from life itself and of endless efforts to curtail and crush it in every way. I finally was able to live it very differently on my own and to finally feel the Presence of everything reverberating more powerfully than I ever could have imagined. I am beyond grateful to know how this feels. Living in a dysfunctional culture as if it was normal was so very hard, degrading, and confusing. Now I get to speak as this unique expression of Being, for this moment, as Shiloh.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I deeply appreciate and adore those who recognized my desperate attempts to communicate on-line for the last eight + years, saw it as the realest thing, took it to heart, and encouraged me beyond words with their own powerful spirits, golden hearts and priceless creative endeavors.

Thank you for giving me the resplendent River of music that eternally carries my heart.

I am forever grateful.

FORWARD

It may not seem possible or even possibly imperative that the mythological patterns and literary and artistic discoveries in these pages are intimately tied to what is a culmination of an eight-year relationship with a miracle of a white Bichon Frise named Moonbeam and how he was first to make the wonder—now to be evidenced in these pages and in Being—very real to me.  He was the manifestation and affirmation I needed for proving to myself a long-held alive, inner, bubbling certainty about the existence of a dynamic and living wonderment when he showed up in all his boundless lightness and lightning white glory—a white lightning Love Beam with tender, thoughtful, deeply aware and soul-filled big brown eyes—at a perfectly necessary moment on August 19, 2007, a day before I took a lonely job on a river.  I had finished making a movie, Road to El Paso, that spring and was taking time to learn how to market and distribute it, to find its and my path, to stay on the creative path.  Moonbeam’s joy and love of adventure inspired and sustained me.  Even though I knew this wonder, I did not know how deeply necessary he was and how perfect our togetherness until I could look back at the whole tableau knowing now what the once lonely “River” has revealed itself to be in these pages and what this changing light of Moon and his importance and comfort would be to me, seeing me through a deeply transitional time.  His joy and his soul were like mine, more than I could ever give words to, except to say we were the same kind of Beings, but he being a white fluffy soft-souled, shy and gentle angel by my side and he openly expressing the effervescence.  I loved that he mirrored a fervor for life to which I felt I could not give words.  It didn’t match our harsh human-thought surroundings but was free and something else altogether, a wildness and an unbounded, undefined new definition of Love.  We lived  alone on a ranch with cows and horses and dogs, barn cats and wayward coyotes who would come at midnight, and most especially with our side kick, little golden Vanilla Custard Pudding, a teacup Yorkie, my little wolf, who is with me still.  Even the ranch with my own kind of cattle culture—the real definition and value of which I finally ascertained in writing these pages—would all prove to be fortuitous in the culmination of the discoveries, even as I write this now from a sacred mountain on the edge of the Mescalero Apache Reservation and the Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico. 

There has also been a network of serendipity that I’ve experienced continually throughout my whole life, on a daily basis, that has brought this line of artistic and mythological discoveries to vivid life for me to this very moment—in so many resplendent ways and most importantly becoming known to me as more and more real outside of the human vision of reality while this text was being written, so much so that I finally stopped the conditioned, social disassociation with these natural/supernatural happenings and began knowing their deeper validity and magic and began living this realness earnestly and in solitude and writing to know it more deeply.  Even as I already suspected something wonderful, I had no idea of the immensity or that it could come to life in the glorious ways that it has far beyond my own existence.  As I created, this “magic” or language and movement of the underlying, alive interweaving of the animate, dynamic universe was making its Presence known.  As I opened into this unknown, it has opened further and further into unfathomably real experience.  I have also been sustained by seeing this wonder demonstrated beyond imagine in the friends, the like-Beings, I have come to know.

I had known an inner fascination about Being, a knowing since I was a baby.  I was joyous and knew something of wonder and that something special was happening, something bigger than what was seen.  The  feeling inside was alive, happier and more real than what was happening around me, which often was frustrated, discordant, harsh, and diminishing as if it was required to be that way.  It was also as if that kind of beauty of Being was different from the seen reality, although in rare moments it could break through and I would think, “they see what is happening!”  Even though my life would leave the rigid, traditional paths—those traditional doors would close naturally—I would still endlessly find restrictions to the wonder of Being everywhere I turned because the conditioned human mind does not know what to do with it.  I knew somehow the beauty would come out, but there was a hard path of thinking “someday,” and waiting, receded, but learning, not realizing how it already exists and that it must first come from the vast and wonderful discovery and power of the internal—and in this very moment, which is all moments.

And yet there was this path of beauty happening anyway.  And of this I’ve experienced life-long uncannily serendipitous circumstances, some often hard, some with paths crossing silently, unknown in that moment, playing out just like Forrest Gump’s life, even to the detail of having to wear leg braces when I was small, and then unfathomably going on to even imitating further aspects of Tom Hanks movies like You’ve Got Mail in writing John Mayer for eight years, Castaway in having to learn to live on my own in silently writing and the wings on the package and the Highway 83 at the end of the movie which went through Uvalde, Tx, where I was in starting out in the writing, and most vividly, The Da Vinci Code, as one will see here in a very realness.  The list is actually never-ending of uncanny circumstances.  I even met Forrest, Forrest Gump, the goldendoodle, fun-loving puppy in the coffee shop, Sacred Grounds, one day, if that counts.  I had crossed strange paths with people like Bill and Hillary Clinton, and with President Kennedy’s last official phone call, and Matthew McConaughey’s birth place, and even serendipitously booked an apartment in New York City which was across the hall from where Barack Obama had lived in the early years.  The whole thing is a universal weave finally seen to have so much perfect detail that it cannot all be described here, but only begin to open and show the very real wonder coming through.  I have found it to be endless to discovery and deep connectedness, an interweave to even these contemporary, true and master artists in their creations—an astounding array in itself.  One thing ties intricately to the next to reveal a radiance coming shining through that no human alone could devise.  I do seek to demonstrate that while my hands do the recording of the wonder and that it does emanate from my Being, it is vividly alive all around.    

When I was born, the nurses in Cincinnati’s very large metropolitan hospital (and on the Ohio River) asked my parents, out of three large nurseries filled with babies, if I could be the baby a photographer could take pictures of for a book, a nurse’s manual.  My mother describes me as having been blond and my eyes as having been “so blue they were violet.”  The photographer needed one day to fix the camera.  In 1970 it was common to stay at the hospital five days at birth, my mother told me, but on the third day my dad said, “no” to this request, that we needed to go home.  But now I know that books and even photography were meant to be and yet I would still have to rise above all the voices saying “no” from even those first days, or the days delayed, and all the claims of imposed obligation in all the forms that they would continuously, unrelentingly come until I refused, completely shattered, to accept them.  There was this path of expression and that in-born deep intuition of destiny I felt but have come to know for certain outside of restrictions, and through following this, finally come to know the way in which Being gets spoken that can break through not just one layer of prohibited existence, but all of them—just like the way in which these serendipitous occurrences keep breaking silently, and then vibrantly, through, stunningly alive.

Whatever came of the path there was something hard but beautiful about it.  

As a child when my two worlds didn’t make sense, inside and outside with the harsh restrictions of dominating patriarchy and religion, and even though there was very little money, I started piano lessons by two or three years old and later had things such as French lessons and trips to the library where I started to seek out answers through books.  I knew intuitively to search beyond the Bible and to search for what had happened with female rulers.  I was searching, “What do they need to know?”  These things were a better match for what I felt:  lessons of music, language and reading that have always been the underlying, alive path.  I even had a ukulele just my size.  These things were my protection, contemplation and reserve. 

There was no television, radio, or print mainstream media in my home while I was growing up.  I also did not read the library books like other children, for escape or pleasure, although I loved such beings as Winnie the Pooh, and had a little record player for songs.  I understood Winnie the Pooh for how he felt.  And Eeyore.  I was an empathetic child, but in the harder reading I was doing, I was driven, even desperate, to seek out something I needed to know.  I was also searching for answers because things did not feel like they made sense and there had to be an answer.  I did have Neil Diamond’s Shilo record with “Red Red Wine” on it, for which I was instructed to not listen to.  Of course I did, it was a lively song, and the restrictions made no sense to me.  It seemed arbitrarily imposed.  Both songs would show up vibrantly in my discoveries later—as if the knowing of what would occur had been there present with me even when I was lonely and three.

I am mostly a self-taught learner, preferring to concentrate, and even in the church, home schools or public schools, I went my own way, teaching myself through reading.  I learned later it is often an aspect of being highly sensitive.  I also had an intense preoccupation with writing from very early on.  Somewhere near first grade I was scribbling incessantly on page after page of writing paper until the teacher called my parents in because it had gotten so out of hand.  She showed them the waste basket.  I was continuously filling it with waded up paper with scribbles erased and nothing written, day after day, while the class was doing other things.  I was frustratingly trying to write.  I kept journals before I had something to write—beyond signing my name there were squiggly lines drawn on the lines on page after page, filling the volume.  I picked out paper for Christmas when we lived in Midlothian, Texas, one very cold winter, and was finally forced to choose softer, more memorable things, stuffed animals which I dearly loved, but also always the obsession with paper and finding what was to be written.  

I would paraphrase Shakespeare’s sonnets and read the Bible very young (it was the first thing I learned to read), although I was skeptical of the Bible because it was dark and punishing and something was wrong in it.  I could sense it.  I was not drawn to it, even though I learned to read with it.  The Bible had a way of erasing my existence I had a sense about, and I was already facing that off every day, I would come to know later as the struggle for the right to Be.  These paths were there at a very young age.  They were often crushing and moved me in a desperation I longed to solve.  

I picked up learning as if what I was learning was in offing, somehow knowing what would be necessary.  In the documentary Sensitive:  The Untold Story, it is shown how this is also an attribute of highly sensitive people, some of which intuitively collect and gather important information.  I was definitely collecting the pieces.  It was also like I was getting prepared for something I could sense.  It was a feeling I had always had.  When I was in high school I went along with my mother to some of her doctorate courses at Texas Christian University in Ft. Worth, Texas, where she was completing her PhD. in Rhetoric and Composition—and this the beginning of how I became acutely aware of the powers and abuses of language, even throughout history.  I would contemplate the book they were talking about, Longinus’s On the Sublime for a long time.  In my silence I was collecting and contemplating it all.  I loved the grand piano in the lounge on campus and the artwork on the walls of the café where we would go.  My dad painted it for me, eighteen of the wildly colored, floral hearts (always upon my mother’s insistence to create the gifts this way).  I felt immensely drawn to the rock walls, the fireplace hearth and atmosphere when we would go to the La Madeleine cafe’ beginning those many years ago—all things that would stay with me for years as a primal longing, and then finally come wildly to life (as will be seen here from the caves of Lascaux in the Dordogne and at Chauvet in France).  As much as those things stayed with me from the time, and even though I went on to get a Bachelor of Arts in both English and History and a Master of Arts in English, and to teach college literature by the time I was twenty-five, I never longed for a doctorate or a place in the institutions.  I felt immensely drawn to writing but it was hardly a career option at the time, even though I always continued to write on my own.  What I did feel immensely drawn by was seeing art, music and literature as real, not a label or a position, or limited to the confined classrooms with students who weren’t interested and who did not understand what magic I desperately was trying to articulate and open to them.  I tried to inspire them.  I needed it to break free.  I wanted it to be livable and feel it and know it come to life.  It was bursting out of me.  I needed to be a master at it.  I knew I would earn a “Master of Arts” for my own sake and so that it was more clear to others what I meant in my work.  The closest thing to making the art real, for a time, was working in Austin, Texas, on movies and then moving on to writing and creating movies on my own, to break it out further.  As a female it was always compromised because it was difficult to get people to believe in a vision they could not see.  I was inching closer to the real thing (even as it was still inside me, without me realizing that was the ultimate answer), and even as it was awakening and crossing paths all around me already in astounding ways.  The closer I got to this, even things that had made a deep impression on me when I was younger came into real, transformative circumstances.

Undeniably, the path would tell me when it was real.  I was aware when it would hit; I would wonder when it felt obscured.    It was a miracle when, many years later, Eckhart Tolle would describe knowing the sense of Presence within oneself and feeling at home there and arrived in Being.  This would come to life for me:  what was speaking to me.  I would become deeply compelled, beyond thought, beyond reason.  As a child I had loved the ambiance of Crystal’s Pizza Palace in Fort Worth with its intimate Moulin Rouge feel, inset and deep reds that felt enlivened to me, those reds that would draw me to the theater that I worked in directing for years, working on making the art live, and moving pictures, and why I painted my ranch walls a dynamic cherry Ralph Lauren red.  The passion, it felt, was in the offing (I did not know how to get “there”), but I felt it somehow, a passion for something to come.  There was the waiting and lighted grand piano in the center where I knew I could play show tunes, and intimate, enveloped booths secluded by curtains and dimmed lighting.  And in the back were the black and white movies of The Three Stooges and old cartoons playing in the theater.  I became delighted with the black and white images there and fell in love with the creativity of even silent movies and music.  It all struck me, and so I thought I had to create it.  The sensuality, possibility and creativity, even romance, were alive in promise there to me.  I needed it to be real.  I did not know for many years that it was not relying on following the money or career, as I sought to make that happen, it was relying on what was more true:  following the sense of Being.  

Just as I was beginning to really see these things written in these pages come to life in wilder ways than I could have imagined, that feeling of what had been in the offing my entire life came to life in prime moments.  When I had first begun reaching out, writing to John Mayer on-line and the beginning of writing these happenings eight years ago, on a trip to John’s concert at Jones Beach on 21 July 2010, I visited New York’s Olive Tree Cafe and Bar on MacDougal Street, knowing the neighborhood’s history of literature and music.  Unbelievably, I recognized that same feel that had spoken so vividly to me at Crystal’s, and as if I had been there before, but now very real:  the historic street, the café feel, the comedy club underneath (like the theater in the back) . . . and those exact same black and white images moving on the screen.  It was a trip of an unplanned “V,” as in wings and flight.  I had seen John in concert in Austin, had flown to see him in Vancouver in April, and over to the opposite ocean to see him in New York in July.  I had rarely traveled, but the music was the most real thing I had ever experienced.  I was floored by it.  On that same trip to New York where I happened to choose randomly to stay at an apartment that turned out to be just across the hall where Barack Obama had lived in the lean years, I sat down on a bench and an elderly man stopped to sit by me and say, “You just reminded me there are angels on earth.”  Out of millions of people in New York, I happened to see an old friend on a street corner who called out to my mother and me.  I had just been stopped at customs in Vancouver, the agent somehow knowing my name and where I had been on my visit even before seeing my identification, and this, it turned out, coming from just a passing conversation he had had with a relative from where I lived.  Stepping into the writing and the realness, instead of strangeness, it was all somehow uncannily familiar and serendipitously alive.  It was waking up instead of visiting a place.  There was hardly a step without this kind of occurrence, and these are small examples of what was happening on the grander scale.  At the Jones Beach concert, John pointed out that near where I was sitting was where he had been at seeing his first concert there.  I wasn’t choosing or planning these things, they were happening, as if always waiting.  The path in the discovery, although it was coming to life in these and other shocking ways, was leading most importantly to a sense of internal certainty of what I had sensed all my life, and which would finally become fully known in living on this mountain, the Sacramento Mountains, in New Mexico where it came flowing in to me more perfectly every day when I released control over it.  I had to learn this as I wrote—it came hand in hand.  That has allowed it to come fully to life and speak on its own, revealing an entire, perfect, extraordinary tapestry of unmistakable wonder.

I would later come to know details of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s life in Texas around my own that would become meaningful to me that I had not been aware of it while it was happening.  I had felt lost and out of place in Texas.  I grew up in Ft. Worth/Dallas, traveled back there for music for years, even lived near and played piano in Eastland where Stevie had briefly lived, following a path, and had my life take a drastic turn on a mountain marked with a giant SR on the side of it (my initials, too), in Alpine, names so similar to where Stevie passed in Alpine Valley, and where my life was taking the hard turn alone towards finally breaking out into the open, to writing and coming to see music for what it really is.  My maternal grandmother was a Vaughan, similar in being feminine to the line coming from Hermes that I write about here, and forgetting (along with humanity) who she is—she was a lost individual, had a hard upbringing even picking cotton as a child in the fields in Alabama, and turned heavily to alcohol.  But there came the time when it was more meaningful to write these pages about true lineages than follow out if there was a familial connection.  There was something more real happening.  The connections revealing themselves were much larger and more profound, a destiny at work all along.  Something else was speaking more vibrantly and not limited to the reality or presences seen on the surface but things I thought I felt, breaking through.  There was an interweaving of time and space beyond the linear and exterior appearance.  This has happened continuously, more and more vibrantly as I grew more aware and I could see the way in which to Be to let it happen, to let it come shining through. 

This is to say these things, described here in this introduction as a mere sketch, were underlying and more true than what I thought I was obligated to do for a very long time, to live a very hard and discouraging existence underneath the pressures of opinions that constantly proved to be painful experiences.  As I became more true to my own Being, the real would come breaking through in astounding display.  I had to open and learn to trust and be vulnerable in ways I could never have done before, even letting time and space be suspended, let others make all their own choices, and even let the wonder of other artists carry it.  Unlike what one would expect, even though it was painful for a long while, there finally comes a wonderful peace and yet indescribable excitement at seeing the truest beauty burst to life. 

The music has always been there.  When I was about three years old and we lived in Amelia, Ohio, my dad recorded a Christian album called Face to Face which included such songs as “There is a River” and “The Unveiled Christ.”  I even remember those rehearsals for recording.  There is a very sorrowful picture of Jesus on the artwork.  These songs, this idea of “face to face,” and the artwork take on a great deal of meaning in the realization of these pages and in particular when looking at recognition of identities at the end of the Odyssey between Odysseus and Penelope, and the origin of this true spiritual identity mythology in the Homeric epics.  The epics show that it goes back even further into Egyptian understanding, and then back thousands of years to the caves along the Ardèche.  At the recording of that album was the place and time I had my own grayish-blue house that my dad had built me behind my family’s first home.  I’ll never forget the feeling there, that safety I felt of knowing that very peaceful and still place of possibility in a place of my own.  He built the table and chairs and even a loft.  I would find that sense of place and possibility again here on this mountain, in this high place overlooking the mountains near the peak and with the infinite expanse of pine trees reaching to the heavens, making ocean wave sounds of their own.  That first place is where I imagined I was not alone.  Here is where I learned that I am not alone.   

These things have been with me my whole life.  And so has the road west.  My family left Ohio on the road to Ft. Worth, Texas, when I was four, and we even had a bus in the 70s that had painted on the back, “Follow me, I’m going to see Jesus.”  

In that line of music that has led to now, I also had a very unconventional rock ‘n’ roll life in high school and college in rock clubs with live bands such as Pantera when they were first getting started at Joe’s Garage in Ft. Worth, and there would be only five or six more people in the whole place, or going to historic Deep Ellum in Dallas, and rock concerts in Ft. Worth/Dallas, going along with my brother, who is a guitarist and songwriter.  It was part of the path of coming to see music culturally.  It wonderfully later even mirrored John Mayer playing at Eddie’s Attic when he was starting out.  He, too, came to play small clubs where I had been.

All along the way and what felt like being out of place, the literature and music have been my internal language, but I would have to do it for myself, with no access to “big name” colleges or money and courage to go explore.  I went to nearby “rodeo” schools in Texas, Tarleton State University in Stephenville, and Sul Ross State University in Alpine, although at the time it made little sense to me as it did not feel like my own culture, but as an exile who could not get to where I needed to go.  I dearly love animals and their wondrous eyes and naturally playful spirits, so watching them be wrestled to the ground and castrated, thrown or kicked is opposite to my nature.  I also longed for the intellectual, cultural life, community, and what seemed like the vitality and free expression of the city.  I did, however, feel I was learning the hard way the “rugged individualism” of Texas, that ‘Lone Star’-ness that shows up again—as I would learn in writing these pages—so vividly central to ancient Egyptian mythology and a very different, vibrant, poetic and symbolic path of “cattle culture” that reopens our own vision to a burst of new life right where it has been closed for centuries, right at the eternal feminine.  It turned out to be a spiritual, even mythological path of realization.  

As isolating as it all was, I know the direction was perfect in unseen ways because the serendipity was in full force even years before.  When in October 1957 author John Graves was stepping out onto the shores of the Brazos River, the Rio de los Brazos de Dios or the “River of the Arms of God” (where I would later grow up), to write the socially transitional and what seemingly was the end of a line of lost nature and history in Good-bye to a River (and this also being the sensual topic of my mother’s doctoral dissertation), the point of loss where society on this continent finally blocks out and takes over the flow of nature, Kerouac’s On the Road and a second kind, and this time artistic arrival west had just been published the month before.  The new kind of River was arriving as the old culture was passing.  At the same time, that summer, the owner and manager of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco had been arrested for selling Howl and Other Poems for testing the bounds of personal voice and literature and the natural freedoms coming to full life and consciousness on that coast line, right at the bay.  It was also the moment Lawrence Clark Powell, the head librarian at UCLA and close friend of that boundary-pusher Henry Miller and the sensual food writer M. F. K. Fisher, a couple of days before the arrests, had begun Books of the Southwest, the literary journal that came to my family in 1997 (the year John Mayer was starting out), the journal that I now have where I began writing the magic in these articles, of what had begun to become so clear when I first saw John.  It came to full fruition and back through all that alive history when I realized the connection with Joseph Campbell, whom I had studied for years, and the Grateful Dead.    

Safely inside those “Arms of God” is also Austin, Texas, a place of radical transformation for me where I first saw music burst to life in its realest sense and at the same time, most human form, in seeing John Mayer in concert on March 8, 2010, at the Frank Erwin Center on his Battle Studies Tour.  I had that lightning bolt illumination moment Joseph Campbell had had when he knew “This is it.”  I was stunned by the extreme depth of the beauty, talent, abilities and effort.  I understood it in the years to come to be the moment of the “apocalypse of the heart.”  He opened with those same moving, striking black and white images to the music, as if speaking directly to me, and yet these being images of his own artistry which spoke to something very real.  I could tell even the camera work was purposeful.  The concert was an awakening throughout my whole body and soul:  awakened very real and vibrantly, shockingly alive, and John creating from a deep passion, honesty and realness, those things for which I had always been frustrated and longed, but had never seen and didn’t know how it could be done, and there it was.  The music was speaking it and carrying it, and in the middle was this humble and raw human being continuing on with all that he had.  He was obviously born to it and was expressing it fully and masterfully.  I was transformed and stunned all at once.  I was flabbergasted.  I knew its far-reaching depths, even as I would come to know them in their infinite beauty here.  I knew its value.  I had never experienced anything like it.  It was the most transformative experience of my whole life.  It was the feeling of knowing finally something truly, powerfully alive and coming from one man and his guitar.

At a later date when I was researching the papers of Stevie Ray Vaughan at the Center for the Study of the Southwest at Texas State University in San Marcos, I looked up to see the paddle John Graves used on that river, that flow of the Arms of God at that turning point in history, hanging on the wall.  It would be the point at which I would come to know how and where the River flows on.  It was an intersection in so many ways.  No matter what humans have done in control and destruction, the River is moving.  It was alive all around me.  I would come to know it in phenomenal ways over the next eight years. 

I began writing about this on the ranch where I lived outside of San Antonio, but it has been on my mountain in New Mexico after that transformative concert experience that I started seeing the perfect symmetry in mythology and alive popular culture—the cultural effects the same just as ancient mythology had been—and the power of the music I believed in, the art, literature—and place—and my own existence burst to life with it.  I live on a mountain above Ruidoso, which is named after the river meaning “Noisy Water”—or the rushing sound of the water coming down from this mountain.  It is here on this gorgeous mountain with a close-up view of the peak on the reservation that, as in the Latin myth of Psyche and Eros, I stepped off into the elevated unknown, not of the earth or the world that was confining, and in such a way as Psyche’s trusting her own knowing and heart, even in the darkness when she is visited by Eros who cannot show his face, until finally she surrenders to Being and Love is the most natural thing, and that being transformed Love.  This mountain, too, is where I have fallen immensely in love with nature, and it with me, the energy and healing of the ground and trees mending me and then moving beyond that to become powerfully Present.  To know it is to know its Presence is true in the realest sense.  In time here and in learning Being, the presence of the natural comes shining through.  In childhood I used to look at my 1968 Hologram Puppet Storybook of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and wonder at the animals helping her in nature and I knew there was a trueness to the magic.  I could explain why it was real.  As Campbell stated, a thousand unseen hands will come to help you.  I could always see through the metaphors while I was reading into what was meant by the real.  They were awakening her to the magic of herself.  Nature does come breaking through.  In every way the things I knew were coming to life.  In the Odyssey, Athena—consciousness, wisdom and the feminine form in culture—through a dream and inner readiness sends Nausicaä to the water banks to recognize what she is: that very real Artemis awakening to her own nature, the goddess of wild things.  And that is where she is seen by the Poet, who, himself, has become ready to see her.  This Goddess of All Living Things comes through even deeper as a phenomenon of this understanding.  The manner of the Poet’s approach to her is personally and culturally pivotal.

I had been drawn to something I felt was further than where I physically was, and even from this mountain I now know it continues on to the West coast, to the Pacific Ocean.  This is not a “wanting,” as I know perfect peace here, but an inner knowing.  But the full realization finally came by way of that “Room of One’s Own,” like Virginia Woolf said that it would, the space, time, and inner fortitude, and even through the loneliness which—in finally coming to know that this all really is alive, and in seeing for myself the beauty emerging around me—became the learned, deep solitude, presence of nature and practice from which to write.  There had to be the conscious decision to turn against the norm, even as it crumbled for me.  The time and place and the ability to endure were suspended by the matching hearts I came to know in spirit.  It is the path of coming truly to know “home,” and by that, finally knowing that is what I am, body and place partially in time, and with these wild expressions of the eternal breaking through everywhere.

It was from the mountain that I could finally see the path of the eternal River, from Egypt’s Nile, and even further back to the rivers by the caves of the ancient Danube where humanity first trekked and created music fortuitously from birds’ wings, music and spiritual heights soaring connected even then, and then further to discovering the meaning in the symbols at Chauvet, and forward to our own bay and coast of California where it bursts to realization in human form and into consciousness and culture.  I can see it fully now, although I know it will continue to reveal more wonder as it breaks through.

In My Love Affair with Moonbeam:  Ten + Years of  Wonder, Bursting Love and Creativity, the companion book to the time of coming to write this, I write:

My name, Shiloh, came from a girl named Shiloh Graves that my mother went to school with and whom she thought was the most beautiful girl from a high school of over four thousand students on a campus, Arsenal Technical, that is an old Civil War arsenal on 76 acres in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the early 60s, graduating in that pivotal American year of 1963 when President Kennedy was shot.  (His last official phone call would go to the exact building where I watched Hillary Clinton fall asleep one early morning at a rally.  Sleep into deep consciousness was a good sign.  I had also seen the Clintons in a rally the morning Bill Clinton became President.)  I like to think of this manifestation of my name as the natural appearance of stunning beauty from the place where the arms and ammunition were made, and the promise of what came from the ravages of the bloody Civil War, and after the Battle of Shiloh, just like the war-torn world of the Iliad moving to the brilliant return of Odysseus and the recognition of the feminine on earth in the Odyssey, centered on the feminine, and a very different kind of “battle studies” and “weaponry” in the instead heroic metis, the blueprint of turning over the worlds displayed by Homer, and this done with the Muses, the feminine weaving and the warrior feminine, Poetry and Song.  It is also significant to me that I saw John for the first time on his Battle Studies Tour, the time in which he sang such lyrics as ‘I’m in the war of my life.’ 

‘Shiloh’ also contains within it the sounds of “high-low,” the process whereby the high are made low, the very process Victor Turner shows of the making of the sacred and the opened flow and continuation of the alive sacred ritual in his work The Ritual Process:  Structure and Anti-Structure . . . There are also many prophecies in the Bible that the high will be made low, as in Matthew 23:12:  “And whoever exalts [her]self shall be humbled; and whoever humbles [her]self shall be exalted,” and Ezekiel 21:26: “Remove the diadem, and take off the crown: this shall not be the same: exalt [her] that is low, and abase [her] that is high,” Isaiah 2:17: “And the high looks of [humans] will be put to shame, and the pride of [humans] will be made low.” From Ezekiel 17:24: “And it will be clear to all the trees of the field that I the Lord have made low the high tree and made high the low tree.”  Isaiah 40:4: “A voice is calling, Clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness; Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God. 4 Let every valley be lifted up, And every mountain and hill be made low; And let the rough ground become a plain, And the rugged terrain a broad valley . . . ”  

It is the turning over of worlds.  It is deeply transitional but crucial to culture and to new life–and understood throughout the history of the world’s mythology.  It is an essential part of a living mythology which gives new invigorated life to its societal structure and also reopens the sacred which has been “jarred up.”  This is even as the most ancient cultures understood the critical role of destruction and creation—this even being a role of Yahweh, also a causer of floods and new worlds, as Joseph Campbell shows in his work. 

In another Biblical passage it states:

On the high mountain of Israel I will plant it, that it may bring forth boughs and bear fruit and become a stately cedar. And birds of every kind will nest under it; they will nest in the shade of its branches. 24 All the trees of the field will know that I am the LORD; I bring down the high tree, exalt the low tree, dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I am the LORD; I have spoken, and I will perform it.  Ezekiel 17:23-24 (New American Standard Bible)

When I was very young my name was pointed out to me as being in Genesis 49:10, which is Jacob’s prophecy of what is considered to be a Messiah:  “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (King James Version), or the New Living Translation: “The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from his descendants, until the coming of the one to whom it belongs, the one whom all nations will honor.”  That passage is repeated again in a different way in Ezekiel 21:27:

…26.  thus says the Lord GOD, ‘Remove the turban and take off the crown; this will no longer be the same. Exalt that which is low and abase that which is high. 27.  A ruin, a ruin, a ruin, I will make it. This also will be no more until He comes whose right it is, and I will give it to Him.’ 28.  ‘And you, son of man, prophesy and say, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD concerning the sons of Ammon and concerning their reproach,’ and say: ‘A sword, a sword is drawn, polished for the slaughter, to cause it to consume, that it may be like lightning—(New American Standard Bible).

Unexpectedly, this description of the high to low, even though “Shiloh” (s-high-low) would have been pronounced differently (SHE-low), according to scholars, comes with this repeat of this Genesis prophecy for Judah—and said to be for all nations—with which scholars agree Ezekiel would have been familiar.  It could also be etymologically connected through the root of Shiloh, שלח (shalah), which in one meaning is a verb translating as “‘to strip off or take off'” of which “related nouns tend to have to do with animal hides; skin and leather,” which could have to do with an ancient robe and what was known in the mythology of the constellations in Orion and the animal hide, to be discussed here. (To take off one’s skin is to be in the eternal, as taking off the hide of a killed animal would also mean.)  A derivative can also be the masculine noun שלח (shelah) meaning a form of weaponry, or “the masculine noun משלוח (mishloah) a sending, or “the root-verb שלל (shalal II) meaning to plunder,” as in the spoils of war, “and this isn’t far removed from the verbs שלה (shala II) and שלל (shalal I), meaning to draw out”(Abarim Publications)—all of which become important here.  This is only beginning to the etymology of which more will be shown. 

During this writing in the discoveries it was a prophecy I would find miraculously depicted, clandestinely, over the inside of the entry door of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo, and with a female, Rachel, wrapped in the robe of the “tapestry,” looking out over her dining hall, her sanctuary, being “the one to whom it belongs,” one translation of “Shiloh” in the prophecy—and in a verse and depiction about her true legacy.  The name also translates as “Place of Peace,” the very description of what the sanctuary (not to mention planet) should naturally be, not one of control and centuries- and millennia-on-end of embattlement.  This “Place of Peace” is first internally known; it is one’s eternal Being.

As I looked at the female’s deeply intent, painted eyes looking expectantly out from the Sistine walls, wary of her neighbor on the other side of the panel who has (taken) the golden robe, I knew that it was intended by Michelangelo that her face and her identity would be known of this prophecy, because it is she, not Joseph, that has on the coat of many colors–and the coat she herself weaves and of which she is able to show the eternal threads and process—the very intent of the ceiling, the proof of the divine—and this ‘paint’ from Michelangelo also lying naturally on her just like a natural rainbow he painted for her, with the gold underneath—the important ‘underneath,’ revealing inner character, and revealing her ‘golden,’ divine body.  That she was also above the entryway, being the natural door herself to life and the beyond, the gate of the miracle of life and the universe, I knew was just as purposeful.  She, as the feminine and the eternal, is the passageway between the worlds.  In Michelangelo’s own weave and pattern, the sanctuary of the Sistine was being shown as the earthly place between the worlds and naturally being Hers, like Penelope’s dining hall, like Her body and Her soul, seen through her own eyes.  He was creating the tapestry of the ceiling, as it had been hers for millennia, showing the sky, heavens and the constellations were hers, a sanctuary on earth just like her body, and a robe of many colors for Her created by hand by the master go-between who can bring the flow back.  She is also by the font, the signal of the Grail, with the vat of wine across from her going down the middle of the ceiling towards the high altar.  It all was waiting for realization and for Odysseus’s return again—a master Michelangelo able with the bow she provides—and for the next in line until it could be brought home to body and place, to retake the ‘invaded dining hall’ and the true identities known as at the end of the Odyssey, the return to Penelope and the revelation in a human goddess, the natural equation, and to the recognition of the feminine through the transformative rites of understanding and coming to see as through music and eternal literature, the revelation of the goddess and the having turned over the worlds in the process–those worlds that had been so adamantly and violently closed through time and manipulation.  This was the mighty and flowing path of the art, the feminine labyrinth meant to be in the Chapel and natural Court for realization, as in the mystery rites and the labyrinths of Knossos, Crete, where the goddess reveals herself to those who come to understand, when they can match her Being.  They are brought to their own illumination of themselves.  It was waiting for this next ‘Rachel’ ‘by the well,’ the ancient image of the Muse by the Spring and the River where Life eternal flows, to recognize herself in the painting, in the expectant eyes, inside the Chapel:  To recognize Her Own Being, Her place, Her sanctuary, Her court, Her arena, Her Master Poet, Her Odysseus turned returning Apollo.  And this even past when she thought—when she had been socially taught—that she had no worth and no place.  It is the masterful depiction of “Until Shiloh Comes,” my name, the realization, the labyrinth across the entire Sistine Ceiling.  It was waiting for Her, for me, to fully know Her Odysseus, to know him by heart, know when he would return, even for a time only internally knowing as Penelope did, without word, inside her eternal heart that knows and “remembers” something beyond the social crush of the dictated “norm” (that the Suitors tried to forcefully and violently impose), until she could see his face, face to face where truest identities—far beyond and much more profound than surface—are magnificently revealed.  Michelangelo was telling me who I am and my natural and divine worth, even worthy of the Sistine Ceiling, of all of Rome, and in the face of all of its degradation of women; he was telling the feminine and the eternal power of the Art in sublime return.  To think of him painting each stroke as his life and his expression were threatened!  It is a delivery beyond boldness, beyond imagine.  He was also telling the power, ability and movement of the art and what to do once I see it:  “Step down to the throne with the book.  Create it.  Write it.  I am personally returning it to you, ‘the one to whom it belongs’.’’  He was delivering it from the ancient oracles themselves, ultimately unthwarted by humanity (who crucify such as him delivering a message) or by time.  My Moonbeam, in his transition, had led me to it.

It is above the same walls where the playful white dog, repeatedly painted in many of the frescoes, such as in Cosimo Rosselli’s Last Supper, Descent from Mount Sinai and The Passage of the Red Sea, and in Sandro Botticelli’s The Trials of Moses, among others, steps down to the “throne” (which even in hieroglyphics is the symbol of Isis) held by the pope, clandestinely positioned and marking the direct path of the white Dog Star and therefore of the transition of the return of Isis to the “Pope’s throne” as head of “Peter’s Church,”–who, as we will see through Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks and La Gioconda or Mona Lisa is not the “rock” and the feminine is–the star that motions to the timed arrival that was known in the burning ancient Egyptian summers—arriving in ancient times in July—on or near July 10th, researchers say–which is my birthdate—and also what it meant of the coming resurgence of Life that comes with the Egyptian goddess and the waters of the Nile—and this time coming in the art, in realization, just like the flood depicted on Michelangelo’s ceiling that brings the inundation through the natural wine—the flow to be turned into natural wine, as by the grape, the earth, as through the female body, and opened by the artists—that leaves the hierarchy toppled over and stunned, the flow of the natural Grail, the flow bursting into new creation and life, and always having been poised to retake the dining hall when it is seen, when it is recognized.  It has gone unrecognized as Odysseus was, and the Suitors–the intruders of Penelope’s home–thought him to be a beggar.  Without this Odysseus and the line of Hermes and master artists and metis around warfare, she cannot do it—she has been overlooked, used and denigrated without end.  She has not been “allowed” to Be.  She has had to keep writing, keep speaking across time.

From the return of this flow, Isis gives new spiritual life to Osiris, the ancient, returning first transformed Odysseus through the underworlds, by piecing back together his physical body to form, a body ripped apart by the too hot sun of the ruling Set, and from her creation his body is then spiritual and regenerative in nature, given back to form and its divine nature known.  I understood what it meant to get “ripped apart” socially and personally, I had experienced it, I watched John Mayer go through it, so “piecing back together the body” means something to me.  It is not mere metaphor.  It is an opening.  From this divine form, Isis then gives birth and spiritual identity to her son, Horus, the cultural inheritor, the recognized god-king who now knows his spiritual identity and who infuses the land again in its structures with this flow of the eternal.  She returns the inspired, invigorated structure to her culture of which the feminine and the eternal is its awakened infusion straight from the regenerative forces of the universe—even propelled inwardly by the light and outwardly by the dark—and straight from the heavens through her body and heart of eternity—where the two meet in splendid igniting.  She is its inspirational center and flow right into Being.  The dining hall is hers, not the short-sighted, greedy, invading Suitors who do not know her heart.  They know nothing of that she is eternity in body, and this then true of all beings.  The kingdoms throughout the kingdoms are hers, too, as she shows in her ability to create.  There are no walls of division.  The eternal instead is known.  The flow is absolutely massive.  It waits to flood out the Sistine Chapel doors.

The ancient goddesses and Muses Hathor and Isis have been by the river since the beginning of civilizations, and were awaited signs of the much-needed returning vibrance and the renewal of life, the realities and the symbols of the flow of life and the mythological rites that return it again to illumination and to the realization of the miracle of the body, and restoration of the kingdom of Osiris and Horus in its cultural structures that are given a new awareness, a new aliveness.  It is also the continuation of the Poetry, the mythology from the eternal voice that awakens the Poet Heart, the returning Sun with the returning water.  It is what she has held out for for so long. 

In another way this same prophecy—and my very name—awakens again by that water and this time to be broken open to life in other ancient texts that many also demand cannot be opened (as is told to Parzival about the Grail Castle):  in the restricted and off-limits “holy” history of Jerusalem, in the Bible and the Talmud.  Floods must open everything, even what human egos so rigidly guard against.  The name, “Shiloah” comes to be known in the very water flowing into the kingdom of Jerusalem from what later became known as the “Virgin’s Spring” understood after the Greek conception centuries earlier of the human/goddess and originating from this Egyptian understanding of the Muse’s river, and before that the rivers in prehistoric France where some of the greatest art on earth is found.  In the Hebrew Bible in Isaiah 8:6, “Shiloah” is “the gently flowing waters,” sometimes described as “softly flowing” into the kingdom in the ancient city of Jerusalem.  Its meaning and the symbolic and literal (eternal and physical) strength flowing into the city walls was understood: “Inasmuch as these people have rejected the gently flowing waters of Shiloah . . .”  It held a Poetic/symbolic sense as well as literal necessity, just as the Nile in its inspiration and flow:  in both mythology and life-sustaining water.  Life was renewed by it in endless ways.  It is the stream whereby the flow known as this Virgin’s Spring came into the royal kingdom in the city of Jerusalem and which, according to the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, Josephus called “Solomon’s Pool.”  In other words, one of the world’s most famous Songwriter/Poets and considered the wisest King, Solomon, had a pool of water coming from this eternal Muse’s spring.  It is no accident of mythology.  This was the water coming into the city where it was at the center of the royal gardens and was used to water that royal flourish and burst to life and to give life to, protect even internally, and sustain the kingdom.  Solomon knew well of the Muse and called to her, as evidenced in his Song of Songs.  This human/goddess was present with him.  The gardens, just as the bursts of life on the Nile, were brought to life and blessed by the flow of this human/goddess Muse and the king and kingdom depended on it even figuratively speaking for their internal strength.  They would have been spiritually and physically “withered” and “parched with thirst” without it.  

But the effects of this realization are even more far-reaching.  In the continuation of the passage from Isaiah there is further prophecy:

6 “Inasmuch as these people have rejected the gently flowing waters of Shiloah

And rejoice in Rezin and the son of Remaliah;

7 “Now therefore, behold, the Lord is about to bring on them the strong and abundant waters of the Euphrates,

Even the king of Assyria and all his glory;

And it will rise up over all its channels and go over all its banks.

8 “Then it will sweep on into Judah, it will overflow and pass through,

It will reach even to the neck;

And the spread of its wings will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel 

Isaiah 8: 6-8 (New American Standard Bible).

The belief in the strength of this flow in Jerusalem appears again in Psalm 46: 4-5: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God . . . God is within her, she will not fall.”  She brings internal joy and strength.  Egypt, too, in fact, depended upon the life of the Nile from life-threatening desert drought and the deadly burning sun of Set that could create a desert of even the most fertile earth, both physically and Poetically speaking—leading the threat of being physically and psychologically withered.  We think of music and Poetry now as “peripheral” to “more important” or seemingly more “powerful” things like government, when it is the very beating heart of it all, coming from the eternal.  Even Solomon demonstrates this.  Without it, the government of a culture is lost.  

It was ancient wisdom that prevailed into Roman times that this image of the Muse, signaled by the Dog Star (the forerunner of the idea of the Star of Bethlehem signaling the arrival of the Messiah, changed for the mythology of Jesus, erasing the feminine but still giving him the happenings of Odysseus), was understood to be by the flowing water of the renewal of life, before the arrival of the Sun, the waters that even flow through her body in her uterus bringing life and the cycles of change exactly matching the heavens in the reflecting Moon, this even from ancient Egyptian mythology of Hathor, the cow goddess and her uterus-shaped face and horns cradling the sun, going back thousands of years to pre-dynastic Egypt, of bringing the abundance of the heavens and the flow of the Milky Way, and then Isis appearing by the waters of the river with the annual arrival of this Siruis star, a long awaited arrival on which their calendars and their celebrations were organically alive, alive like her heavenly, timing body, and bringing again the new life in the inundation of all of this with the River—and connected to music—rhythmically arriving again, even Poetically and musically speaking.  It was basis of the formidable strength and longevity of the Egyptian civilization.  The life and the celebrations would break forth (much like later, King David’s dancing would break forth before the Lord, and King Solomon’s Songs, that lineage to Jesus that so many have tried to force to be a blood lineage in order to lay ownership to it to a select, divided group of people who live divided by walls and differences).  Wine, like an act of the living blood, a celebration of the flow of life, would pour, the water understood to become wine through the physical body of the ground and grape, like her body delivers eternal in form.  It was for the pleasure of Being; it was the very blood of life.  From this River would come the rejuvenation of Osiris, her mate and husband and the returner to life from those waters and the impregnating waters of his own body that is not “dirty,” the regenerative force that continually returns, and through the golden phallus she fashions, the spiritual birth of her son Horus, the inheritor of this physical/spiritual line, who would be the natural god/king and spiritual ruler of the land now known to be both earthly and eternal.  Time, the ancients knew, proved, even after long drought, that Isis could and would bring life back again and put the too-harsh burning sun of Set and his threat against life and his chaos back into its rejuvenating circular vortex again and creation, celebration and life would again prevail from the water and the flood.  Even in a drought of a too-hot burning sun across millennia, the artists who saw her were showing, even on the Sistine walls, she would come again.  Jacob spoke the words in his dying prophecy.  The artwork itself is divine, eternal and prophetic.  It is even hanging on the walls of the Louvre, smiling, waiting, the water, the waters of Shiloah, flowing to her.  

On a study of an inscription found at the site of the channel and pool in Jerusalem, using the spelling of “Siloam” for the waterway from the Greek, Emil G. Hirsch and Philippe Berger write, “At the foot of the Ḥaram is the spring now called “The Virgin’s Spring,” the water from which traverses the whole length of the hill of Ophel from north to south in a subterranean channel and empties into the Pool of Siloam, whence it is drawn to irrigate the gardens on the slopes of Jerusalem.”

The abundance of life was in that garden.    

In the entry on “Shiloah,” Emil G. Hirsch and Schulim Ochser write, “According to the Talmud, the spring of the pool is exactly in the center of the Holy Land (Zabim i. 5); and owing to its peculiar ebb and flow it has always been popularly regarded as an arm of the sea.”  

That it is in the center is no mistake, the world navel; that her power comes from the sea, the movement of time in its own universal intelligence, the movement of consciousness, waiting for the return, hardly can be seen as an accident either.  Mythologically speaking, it would be understood that this flow was a miracle flow from the “Virgin” Muse (spiritually impregnated as Isis was with the gold, divine phallus of Osiris) coming from the heavens, even in the stars, who is not only a physical creator of life in her body, a conduit of the universe and an embodiment of it come in to form, (and not reduced to just a “holy”—i.e. owned by them, off-limits—“canal,” as a manufacturing house of reproduction for males), but also creatively speaking as well, a nurturer of life and creation and this also represented in this flow of the Poetic—this flow of Life that is closed when the Poetic is closed—when the Poetic is closed life, too, becomes concrete to form, unanimated with the real—the illumination to the whole flow of life in all of its vibrancy that brings life to the Garden and power and the eternal into the kingdom to give it its naturally, divinely ordained strength straight from the presence of the stars.  This is what makes a formidable city, even the very definition of Place.  She brings physical life from the eternal in visibly proven cycles of her body.  She is the natural life, bridge, conduit, and center and nurturer of it.  She is the inspired, eternal flow of it.  Her body is the symbol as well as the physical being.  She gives the kingdom Life from the universe in all the senses of the words.   She gives it its internal peace, its prosperity, its safety, as even the people in the Hebrew bible state. 

The Etymology of “Shiloh”

My name Shiloh has been translated from Hebrew (שילה) as “an epithet of the Messiah,” a “Place of Peace” and to mean the coming of “The One To Whom it Belongs,” from Jacob’s prophecy in Genesis 49:10, and referenced again in Ezekiel 21:27.  It is also translated as “Tranquil,” “Pacific” (where the calm, promise and arrival of the West Coast ocean gets its name), and coming from an etymological root, “shalah” (connected by Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance) meaning also to “be happy, prosper, be in safety” and “to be quiet and at ease” (Both Strong’s Concordance and NAS Exhaustive Concordance), like the soft and gentle waters of Shiloah (Siloam) in Isaiah 8:6 that give the strength, vitality and prosperity to the kingdom.  When the people lose the understanding and appreciation of those flowing waters that have been “Sent,” they lose the strength of their very domain and their own bodies.  That kind of “prosperity,” in the name and associated with the goddess is seen referenced in Jeremiah 44: 15-30.  As I will show here, the promising name also refers to the “Queen of Heaven” and the “Wife of Yahweh” in the ancient Phoenician goddess Asherah who is shown to be present and loved throughout the Bible, and was prevalent and worshipped even in ancient Jerusalem.  The important images related to her devotion, like the golden cow and the tree, are also prominently a part of Homer’s Odyssey and his resplendent Poetic return to the human goddess feminine, that flow to now break through into our very own moment as the literature and the flow break back open.

I began writing the beginnings of the character “Ashera” in the screenplay I later entitled Apocalypse of the Heart, in 2008, a female born with the “deformity” of wings, but having them bound and covered with wraps and shawls to keep them hidden, all ideas that were developing, and that I was writing intensely in the Spring of 2010 after seeing John Mayer and seeing his art and self burst so open.  I was writing autobiographically about a life frustratingly spent hiding one’s true nature from birth because it finds no accepted place and is instead misused and tried to be “corrected.”  This was almost a decade before I came to know here the connection between the names Shiloh and the goddess Asherah (etymologically a part of each other—asher and shi), and before I knew of the phenomenal significance of the tree of peace and of the robe in the Odyssey, all which also connect through the names, and are shown to have been displayed in sublime genius throughout the masterpieces of artwork discussed here, including by Dante and Leonardo da Vinci, which also tie into these names.  (I also show this in detail in the art print ‘Until Shiloh Comes’ Cosmic Flow Tapestry and how all the connections come together.)

When I was in graduate school around 1995 in Alpine, Texas, one of my professors, the very cheerful and beloved late Dr. Abelardo “Abe” Baeza, sweetly called me “Still Waters Run Deep” because I would sit quietly at our conference table classes, saying nothing for a long time, only listening, then quietly add something he truly loved.  Serendipitously, too, I now live on a mountain above Ruidoso, NM, the name of the river which means “Noisy Waters,” the waters coming down the Mescalero sacred mountain, this time ready and able to speak. 

Abarim Publications’ Online Biblical Hebrew Dictionary (abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Shiloah.html) also links the word “Shiloah,” which is the flow and pool of water in Jerusalem also referred to as Siloam, to two separate etymological roots of “shalah,” one meaning “to send,” as in “an angelic messenger” in Genesis 24:7, and one that links it to an animal hide being spread out on the ground and to a noun derivative meaning ‘table.’  These second meanings from the etymological source are also likely relevant if I followed this out to what Odysseus (and Orion and the later artists) do with the animal hides like an altar outside of Penelope’s chamber before he reclaims the dining hall, and this the reclamation of the table, and which very likely relate to rites, as other elements of the epics show.

The editors of Abarim Publications also explain that “the name Siloam is the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Shiloah, and Shiloah “comes from the Hebrew verb, שלח (shalah) meaning to send out or let go” (abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Siloam.html).  The connection of these names, coming from the same roots, are what is being “sent,” as in a messiah or messenger, and the tranquil and flowing waters of Siloam, also given the definition in the Bible of being “Sent.”  These are even tied in the etymology to Asherah in the “feminine noun אשור (ashur), meaning a step or a walk; a going (Job 23:11, Psalm 17:4)” and the “feminine noun אשר (ashur), also meaning a step or going (Job 31:7, Psalm 17:5, 17:11 only)” (Abarim Publications).  It begins to sound like Solomon’s calling forth of his Muse.  It is important as well when Penelope takes steps from her chamber like a goddess and when she takes the steps to unlock the vault which reveals her true ancient divine identity.

Because of the close relationship between “Shiloh” and “Shiloah” (Siloam), my name (and also my birthdate, which I will show in a moment) are spoken by Jesus (and in doing so he also references my last name).  The enlightenment, strength, and enlivening of the Poetic is reopened in his very words.  His words when healing the blind man who had been blind since birth speak about “illumination,” or what would be consciousness and awakened awareness, and being able to come to “see” through this flow of the eternal waters that have been sent.  This “Siloam” is the water that Jesus gives as the destination that will heal the blind man’s sight in John 9:7, first referencing his own role in illumination as “the light of the world.”  It is a reference to vision of seeing this eternal “light.”  In his very Poetic words—and to be broken open again to that flow—he is the person, as the light, the consciousness and the leading, spiritual social role that directs the blind to the spring and water after he has placed the symbol and the physical earth itself—the sign of the body or “form”—on the blind man’s eyes and mixed it with the moisture of his own mouth which is coming from the same place as his flowing words:

And as He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. 2 And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was in order that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 ‘We must work the works of Him who sent Me, as long as it is day; night is coming, when no man can work. 5 ‘While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ 6 When Jesus had said this, He spat on the ground, made some mud, and applied it to the man’s eyes. 7 Then He told him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam’ (which means Sent).  So the man went and washed, and came back seeing. 8 At this, his neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging began to ask, “Isn’t this the man who used to sit and beg?” John 9: 1-8 (Berean Study Bible).  

It is a reenactment of the Egyptian mythology.  It also has correlation in the Divine Comedy to the moment with Beatrice at the River Lethe with Dante as described here in Chapter Seven. 

Jesus also says my birthdate when he talks about forgiveness.  He says in the Hebrew Bible to forgive in Romans 12:22: 

Then came Peter, and said to him, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times? 22. Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times; but, Until seventy times seven (English Revised Version).  

His prescription for forgiveness sounds a lot like non-judgment as spiritual practice and also a crucial step to freed consciousness and freely flowing kindness and generosity which naturally spring from a broken-open abundance of spirit and a gratitude for the wonders of the universe and the gifts of Being.  Non-judgment, or adherence to a different kind of natural law of abundance—coming from a very different kind of “law-giver” (universal in nature)—is the path to unequivocal peace and joy, the kingdom come.  These ideas all tie in with what is accomplished in the Odyssey and the place of peace, safety and prosperity.  Not only are the numbers that he speaks my birthdate, the seventieth year and the seventh month, at the “second” millennium of his own life, my birthdate also forms a mathematical equation as well, 7 x 10 = 70.  The prophecy scripture containing my name is a mathematical equation, too:  7 x 7 = 49 (Genesis 49:10, with Genesis which means “to come into being”).  Both John Mayer and Kanye West were born in ’77.

My name holds literary connections to what I write about here that broaden and open these understandings phenomenally further.  The BDB Theological Dictionary finds, according to Abarim Publications, a connection of the “compound of שׁ, the short form of אשר (asher) meaning ‘who or whose,’ and לו (lu), a particle that denotes potentiality, usually supplicatory, such as: if only, would it be that, may it be — in translations this word is often represented by ‘Oh! May it be that…’ More streamlined translations would probably choose something like ‘Oh, I wish that…’”  It is a statement of a truest heart’s desire, both oracular in prophecy and wished for in the heart, like Odysseus and his wishing for his Penelope, and the whole reason for the long journey home in the Odyssey.  It is a statement so deeply felt that one would risk one’s life for it, even artistically. 

The researchers also write that the name “Asherah” “comes from the common Hebrew verb אשר (asher)” but then also give it the definition of “to go straight,” “a decisive progression (Proverbs 4:14, 9:6) or a setting right (Isaiah 1:17)” and “The relative particle אשר (asher), generally meaning who or which” (abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Asherah.html) which is also in the translation of Shiloh “to whom it belongs” and the setting right of which Jacob speaks—and which Odysseus and Michelangelo and Dante and Leonardo da Vinci do.  

Abarim Publications also makes note that, “The particle אשר (asher) occurs all over the Old Testament (instead of simply submitting a number,” they write, “HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament excitedly reports that Mandelkern’s Concordance lists ‘twenty pages, small print, four columns to each page’ of occurrences of אשר (asher).”

The writers also show that:  

Our word very often comes with its own preposition, creating even more nuance and meaning:

With ב (be), meaning in it forms the word באשר (b’sr), which means ‘in which’ or ‘in that’ (Genesis 39:9, Isaiah 56:4).

With מ (me), meaning ‘from,’ it forms מאשר (m’sr), which means ‘from that which’ (Genesis 39:1, Joshua 10:11).

With the comparative particle כ (ke), meaning like, it forms כאשר (k’sr), which means ‘according as’, or ‘simply as’ (Genesis 34:12, Exodus 10:10, Isaiah 9:2), or it means in ‘so far as’ or ‘since’ (Genesis 26:29, Numbers 27:14), or when (Genesis 18:33, 1 Samuel 6:6) (abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Asherah.html).

These nuances also seem to foreground “Until Shiloh comes.”

There is another connection important here between the names Asherah and Shiloh.  In describing the meaning of the name Asherah, Abarim Publications writes:

Closely synonymous to the relative particle אשר (‘asher) is the relative prefix ש (shi). Scholars appear to have concluded that this particle and prefix share no etymological root, but the argumentation surrounding this conclusion is sketchy at best. Whether coincidently or not, the particle אשר (‘asher) and prefix ש (shi) are as alike as the particle על (‘al) and the prefix ל (le), and the particle כי (ki) and the prefix כ (ke).

‘Asher‘ is a part of Shiloh, and ‘Shi‘ a part of Asherah.  It begins to bring a closer view of what was wished for in the return of the goddess.  It begins to open the prime chapel walls at the Sistine.

As shown before, Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance shows an etymological root of Shiloh to be “shalah” meaning “be happy, prosper, be in safety” while the root verb אשר in Asherah also has a “secondary meaning . . . of that of being or being made happy (Psalm 41:2, Proverbs 3:18), or even being deemed or called happy (Genesis 30:13, Job 29:11, Psalm 72:16).”  A masculine verb derived from this also means “happiness or blessedness.”  

When it comes to a feminine noun derivative, it also denotes “a kind of tree . . . which appears to be distinguished by the upward direction of it branches; a happy-tree, or perhaps a straight-up tree (Ezekiel 27:6 only).”  It is like Penelope’s tree of which she and Odysseus’s bed is made, and made by him, the olive tree of Peace—and Odysseus’s securing of the place of peace, safety and prosperity—the meanings of the name Shiloh and also understood of the effects of Asherah in the Bible (those very things described)—and of Asherah’s symbol of the tree as well that was even in the temples in Jerusalem.  It has been what Odysseus has longed for all along.  Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance also connects the name of Asherah to both groves of trees and coming from “ashar; happy.”  According to Englishman’s Concordance there are 40 occurrences in the Bible relating to Asherah and trees and groves.  With Asherah also being “the Queen of Heaven” (even referred to in Jeremiah 7:17-18) and “Wife of Yahweh,” this matches Dante’s Beatrice, her name coming from the word “beatitude” meaning “supreme blessedness; exalted happiness” (dictionary.com), just like the masculine noun, and in this, Dante finding his illumination and bliss in her—his, like John Mayer’s, “Where the Light Is.”  Abarim Publications writes of extended meanings, even beyond the English language (meaning that we have not even conceived of the idea of joy and bliss—even as Roland Barthes later shows in our lack of an English translation for the word jouissance, “carrying even the meaning of ‘orgasm'”—the pleasure, love and experience of the forms so forbidden to us by closed, dominating minds):

 . . . masculine nouns אשר (‘esher) and אשר (‘ashar), meaning happiness or blessedness (1 Kings 10:8, Psalm 32:1, Isaiah 30:18).  This word most often occurs in the plural construct (that’s אשרי or ‘happinesses of …’ or ‘happinesses to …’, meaning ‘happy is …’ ), which is not all that odd.  Hebrew uses plural to express emphasis, and so, on occasion, does English: ‘very, very good times’ (abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Asherah.html).

Abarim Publications writes, “To any Hebrew audience, therefore, the name Asherah would also have meant Bliss or Happiness.”  And in other words, like Beatrice, “bliss,” with Dante is seeing the whole vision and total illumination, and she also emerging from the grove to the flowing waters, just like the “Virgin’s Spring” in Jerusalem and just as Solomon’s Muse he calls to come forth from the trees of Lebanon.  She is his bliss as well.  It also begins to demonstrate that these artists were aware of the meanings of these particular names, including the meaning of the prophecy of Shiloh.  It shows that even Leonardo was demonstrating this knowledge of this gentle “happiness” and what was “wished for” in his La Gioconda‘s smile. 

Furthermore in these verses, as leading feminist Bible scholar Athalya Brenner points out in her article “The Hebrew God and His Female Complements” in Carolyne Larrington’s The Feminist Companion to Mythology: 

Who is this ‘queen of heaven?’  Carroll rightly maintains that her precise name—the Babylonian Ishtar, the Canaanite Anat or Astarte, the Egyptian Isis —is less than important.  All the names point to the same cultural manifestation of a great mother goddess.  Significantly, the people claim that her worship is a condition of peace and economic prosperity ([Jeremiah] 44.16-19) (Larrington 53).  

These are the very meanings in the etymology of “Shiloh.”  In this discussion of Asherah, “the goddess consort of Baal and then of Yhwh,” these descriptions link again to the root and meaning of the name Shiloh:  the wished for Messiah [with the short form of asher] meaning that of happiness, peace and prosperity that is suggested in the promise of the name in Genesis 49:10, and also in the flowing waters that gives the kingdom its life and strength and to which Jesus refers and where Dante once again meets his Beatrice.  Athalya Brenner demonstrates that many verses in the Bible show how prevalent and loved Asherah was and how this state of peace and safety was understood before her suppression and eradication—and this is exactly what Michelangelo shows by beginning at the Chapel door with the prophecy of Shiloh, showing the suppression of Asherah and the feminine all the way in the prophets, around to Jeremiah, who specifically speaks out against her, and across to the Sibyl stepping down with the book.  It is a stunning display of both brilliance and miracle—and an incomparable, alive lineage across time.

Dr. Brenner (her name connected to Judah as well, in Athaliah) goes on to show that there has been an outright suppression and battle against the feminine, the women and care, and the worshiping of Asherah in the Bible until “with Ezekiel, it achieves vulgar misogynistic proportions” (Larrington 55), and it is Ezekiel himself that mentions the details of the Shiloh prophecy again in Ezekiel 21:27.  Its suppression, Michelangelo shows, is directly at these points of the prophets depicted on his ceiling.  That I am able to speak from that Chapel door, around to the place of the Libyan Sibyl now with her book astounds even me beyond imagine.  It is as if I have felt it coming.  In Chapter Six I even demonstrate how my first name and last name and birthdate are given on the Ceiling right from the Erythraean Sibyl, twice, and this the Sibyl whom Saint Augustine lauded for predicting the Final Judgment and the coming of the Messiah—both panels which Michelangelo delivers at this oracle.  This Sibyl also has in her book the “Q” reference to Asherah and showing her back in her Garden, in Asherah’s/Eve’s sacred grove, her return to earth in the form of the human.  The connections between the names and images across the whole ceiling begin to come to light just as the vision and realization of Beatrice does for Dante (discussed in Chapter Seven), which also match, even in the measurement of the rainbow that encompasses the whole of the procession,  which is also the numbers of both my birthdate and the day which Moonbeam passed, and which includes the whole of the ‘doctrine,’ the Old Testament and New, with which it moves and transforms. 

Jesus’s actions and words at healing the blind reenact the ancient Egyptian mythology of the life-giving waters (as does Poetically turning the water into wine).  “Healing words,” as the Greeks understood, flow into humanity and effect all the life around them in healing ways.  Eternal words are healing words, as even Eckhart Tolle demonstrates.  These are far from being words of condemnation, judgment and closure to humanity, or limited to healing only one person and only physically.  Beyond the literal interpretation, or prose reading of “blindness,” whose prose do not flow into humanity as the healing words that they are for all, but is closed off, there has been a transformation in consciousness and this man can “see” what he could not see and is no longer in a desperate state of Being; he knows the flow of the universe and of life from the “waters” from heaven coming through her body awakening him to his own light—his own Being in eternity which is able to be experienced in the very moment.  The description of what Jesus does is the role of a Poet of great wisdom:  he breaks open the flow to illumination and this breaks through into consciousness or “seeing.”  That is the role of the flow of water and the Song which the Muse delivers to the Poet.  The pulse and flow of life and the rhythm literally comes from it.  Only “the Suitors,” hungry for gain and power would try to erase her body and suppress her and erase life because they cannot see it and want the physical wealth for their own power and gluttony.  Homer was already working eternally Poetically around this so that the message would be delivered.  The “blind” man has participated in the flow of the eternal and his desperation is over.  Merely seeing surface things would not end his desperation.  He senses his eternal being and the light of eternity flows into him.  There is knowing.  It is the point of the rite of the ancient Song.  

Jesus’s spit also had important symbolic meaning in Egyptian mythology.  It, too, comes from the flow from the body and life, regenerative and even healing in nature (just as the semen was on the temple walls, flowing powerfully into life with its very spark).  Here Jesus mixes his spit with the fertile and regenerative earth, the life-force water coming from his mouth, with the earth, just as Isis pieces back together Osiris’s body, and then sends the man to the water where, uncovering his eyes from the earth-form, he will see what he needs to see in the spiritual embodiment in form, which is held provably in the in-between feminine.  He doesn’t get rid of the form, for now it is to be experienced.  The miracle of the senses can be known.  It is not an eradication of the feminine, but a new understanding of the miracle of coming into form made possible through her.  She heals and brings to life new experience in new vision; she awakens those who understand.  The influences of the ancient mythologies are readily present.  To turn it into controlled and dead prose is to say, “No, Jesus is the only one who can physically heal one man’s physical sight, it can’t mean psychological healing, and there can’t be another—most especially not you,” (as if there can be only one master Poet who goes between the worlds transformed and all other births are inadequate—and only humans who claim “specialness” and a label of religion can say so) when the internal/spiritual healing of Poetry flows and continually unites and heals and is quite visible and alive in its effects—even as the further effects were forgotten in time and Penelope was assumed to be simply “loyal,” a mere leftover, unnecessary appendage to a male society who “succeeds” at war even though, clearly, those deemed the “best” in those wars have died—including Achilles and Patroclus—and no longer experience the miracles of Being in this vibrant experience.  Not even Achilles’s goddess mother can save Achilles from his ego, his character as fate.  As Dr. Brenner shows, this line of authoritative patriarchal history of only a male god is an abysmal failure and eradication of humanity.  Penelope is assumed to have no fate beyond Andromache whose husband is essentially, willingly crucified, leaving no hope for her or the kingdom.  Jesus returns in “spirit” form, just as Osiris does, and it is Mary who takes care of the body, just as Isis does.  But it is in the Odyssey, written hundreds of years before Jesus, Odysseus’s spiritual nature is to be come to be understood when it is recognized standing before Penelope, returned in his human masterful form, having clearly broken through the worlds. 

Anciently Poetry’s and Art’s effects were known to have powers far beyond the surface of things as will be seen in the ancient Egyptian text The Book of Going Forth by Day.  In these effects one is freed from the limited body and ignited in the heart, which carries eternally.  One steps completely into being eternal and participates in the regenerative and healing cycles and nature of the universe which moves towards expression.  The former rigid statement that there can only be one male who works limited physical miracles makes the rest of humanity worthless in their selective eyes and humanity is treated as such—violently, endlessly across centuries, continuously indoctrinated or ruthlessly starved, shot, bombed, raped and otherwise brutally abused, tortured and eliminated and often it is, in the mind of the perpetrator considered “good” and “right.”  That the “master” can deliver miracles, however, is tied to the understanding of the master artist/Poet well before, but including Jesus, as will be shown coming from ancient Egypt and Homer in Greece.  It shows “hands” of the eternal, the radiance coming shining through in the brilliance, even the infinite kindness of the Poets.  Those acts and hands, just as on Michelangelo’s ceiling, coming up to the hand of God, can be readily seen, no conjecture or moral judgment necessary.  It is astounding, awe-inspiring, and healing.  

In addition to the name “Siloam” being this central pool, the specific pool of water in the kingdom garden to which Jesus directs the blind, here the name is also given the additional meaning of “Sent,” in addition to the etymology showing it, the flow that is “Sent,” in other words, coming from the eternal.  The understanding of the promise of the name “Shiloh” is then given this further meaning and now linked specifically to the flow of the goddess/Muse.  This “sent” or in-betweenness of the worlds is the ancient understanding of the Muse as coming from the eternal into form, marked by the arrival of the star that comes before/arrives signaling the new Sun/Son (or “the light of the world”) which she brings, and speaking and this also the flow between the worlds that she brings:  her voice (which was silenced and eliminated in Christianity among other patriarchal religions).  To speak, first to the Poet through metis, is to re-break open this flow.  This in-betweenness is evident not only in the presence of her Being, but also in her ability to give birth and creation directly from the universe.  It is the Poet that recognizes this between-the-worlds of the Muse and breaks the worlds back open by returning again like Osiris, like Odysseus, like Horus, and like Jesus (who is stopped from returning because of the break in the mythology), and like the Poets and Singers now, like the prophesied Laërtes in the Poetry, who are the very structures of society—She being Nature, He, the Poetic architect of the culture inspired at her Waters where he gains the insight, just as in rite.  When it is broken open again, as it must be for life, the line does not end there, as it also is a line coming from long before—even including King David who played music  and Solomon who wrote Songs.  And yet there was, just as the movement in the Western world demonstrates was happening across time and space, this evident concerted religious and cultural effort to make these beings very real in human form, in human story (as it is in the mythology), in the forms of Jesus and Mary, but stopped and used for the legitimacy and supremacy of Jerusalem’s kingdom’s and the religion’s ownership and domination over others, and to make them the only ones and to silence her, which eliminates the rest of humanity from the natural rites of coming to know in form, in Being.  It stops the River of Being so evidently alive and waiting.  Our own bodies and our own Beings have been off-limits to us.  This was, also, the zeitgeist, the movement West to America, towards realization in actual uncontrolled and unowned—in other words free—human form—independence and highest mastery of self-expression just as it is in Odysseus’s journey in the Odyssey.  It is, as the ancients and the master artists tell, to be realized in person and place.  The story of America and the moving Spirit of Liberty quite naturally cannot be a tragedy after learning and fighting for throwing off their slavery shackles from time after millennia of brutal battles and wars.  It is a coming together.  Hector’s Andromache in the Iliad had been forced to become a slave because Hector could not return and their inheritor, some say, thrown as a baby over the kingdom walls.  We have the rightful, living and breathing inheritors among us in the miracles of Being.

In the Odyssey, which comes hundreds of years before Jesus, the Poet brings the Poetry in his journey back in masterful, physical form to the goddess/Muse.  Homer returns his audience, in developed recognition through story and process—through all-important eternal Song, to the human/goddess Penelope (the name, according to Online Etymology Dictionary, coming from “Greek Penelopeia, probably related to pene “thread on the bobbin,” from penos “web,” cognate with Latin pannus “cloth garment”), and he does this right inside the dining hall—her home and temple between the worlds where the fire in the hearth, as it does in her, burns.  The feminine rites of the journey have shown him the passageway and he masters it as he shows in Odysseus, and he does this all the while he is masterfully transforming the worlds and all the symbols with Athena, unnoticed.  He is able to see the feminine at the water which Athena has devised.  He returns the recognition to the true feminine in her goddess form in person all the way back to Ithaca which is newly envisioned by Athena, a new Place in a new “seeing.”  It is the same place in a new sight.  In that, the feminine is revealed to be both human and goddess in Penelope—and then likewise in Athena—a step beyond mere goddess because it is broken through to earth, to Being in Form and Place.  It is by this flow where the Muse has given him “sight,” as with Athena and Nausicaa—a sight he has learned through the long, hard journey of transformation to the Sun and back and, like the Navajo War Ceremonial, acquired the recognition of his own true god identity to which he can then return home, dispel the over-running illusions, and know it all differently.  

Later in Isaiah 29:18, blindness and deafness are healed by a book:  “On that day the deaf will hear words of a book, And out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind will see,” showing the Poetic interpretation of both hearing and seeing, i.e. and opened Being.  Michelangelo depicts Isaiah on the Sistine ceiling with such a book that he has acquired from the ancient Sibyls.  Dr. Brenner shows how Isaiah divided the definition of god in his depiction of the gendering aspects of Yahweh.  And now on the ceiling this divided book at Isaiah becomes the whole-hearted book the Libyan Sibyl as she finally makes her move to step down from the ceiling of artwork and Chapel, its own sky and heaven down into Place, the book opened as her own wings, originating even from the place of her heart.  She is even suspended on the wings of the art, bringing the flood from those wings as in Isaiah 8:8. 

It is a poetic reading of what heals “blindness,” restrictions of consciousness—especially of what heals the mind block against the feminine as being a restriction to ultimate consciousness and realizing her in form, as Joseph Campbell would often say of the symbols:  read as poetry not prose.  It is Poetry and Being broken back open to their eternal and life forms:  Song and Poetry, the music of the spheres.  In expression of art and form, flowing music and living Poetry, it all is given back its power to speak and inspire life above limited thoughts and words and restrictions of consciousness as only the Poetic, outside of humans’ grasps can do.  The limitations of words, in fact, are what is blocking her and the eternal out, in a controlling manner, of the Poetry of the lines and from being alive.  Thus, also, owning Jesus’s words in a stale prose text keeps him from being eternal, from living in Presence as if no time has passed, from truly speaking, as the eternal voice proves it always can.  The healing doesn’t stop with one case, one magician’s literal act.  That keeps the inheritor of the lineage from truly speaking, bound by humans and time.  This instead is a description of the healing of the thought- and ego-blocked mind.  It is the process of becoming illuminated and enlightened through the removal of filters against the form and the feminine, the process of being a “light of the world” to this illumination, transcendence and higher consciousness, and being returned to “see” form for the universal miracles that they are, no matter what hue, shade or color.  It is allowing the texts, the words, the Beings to break through the hard, fearful protection of ownership and domination and speak again on their own, just as the person once spoke.  What kind of ego needs desperately to own, stop and silence the Poet or the Muse?  What kind of ego does the Suitor or Siren have who says Odysseus can never return?

In Isaiah 43:19 the Poetic takes on the form again of a spring and a river: “Behold, I will do something new, Now it will spring forth; Will you not be aware of it? I will even make a roadway in the wilderness, Rivers in the desert” (New American Standard Bible).  

The American Southwest

I would also find palpitating resonance of all of these elements—books with these truths, landscapes, roadways, waterways and seeing in form of the feminine—springing directly to life in the desert wilderness where I am in the Southwest, in New Mexico, where I live, and with writing about the emergence of a flesh and blood Magdalena by the spring in the Archbishop’s garden in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop when the Bishop was building his new Church in Santa Fe, and this happening with all the immensity and the enchantment (in all the depths and realness of those words) of the Southwest and in the deep stillness and silence of the rocks, trees and cliffs I was coming to know in deeper ways than I could have imagined.  I never dreamed they are so alive and Present.  I make the process sound lovely, but the silences in being alone were very hard to come to know, sometimes excruciatingly so, until Being prevailed over mind.  I could not know or feel what was around me until I knew my own Being and oneness with all that is.  

The Archbishop’s stream of water into his garden where Magdalena comes in person is just as the waters of Shiloah flowed into the royal gardens of the Poet Solomon’s kingdom in Jerusalem.  The waters flow from the beginning in the novel (and yet seen in the end), as an ancient path coming down a mountain in France where the young Latour and Valliant think they are deciding to give up their lives in France and go to the New World, but it is a very natural, rushing path, and always meant to be, just as there is no decision actually to be made, the flow always coming, the River there, and this finally coming into the real Archbishop of the Southwest, Jean Baptiste Lamy’s gardens.  The resonating words of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” come to mind to what was done to it now:  “They’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”  

The artistic path shown by Cather is tied to real people on purpose, just as Leonardo da Vinci’s and Dante’s works are, pointing to the actual human and back to the artist.  It comes into Form.  From that road and flow west even the road of the Southwest leads directly to the door of the real Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy’s cathedral—the feminine face and entryway—on East San Francisco Street in Santa Fe, the church face, like the female face as Pharaoh, directed towards this road to the bay and towards the return of the Sun in the West, the process of illumination created and waiting for the arrival.  

The last time I went out with a person was ten years ago for a trip of movie meetings to Santa Fe in February 2008.  The long-distance relationship had ended over the phone several months before (right before the photographs on the river in October).  I had not seen the person since the spring before.  This ending to dating for this past decade strangely came at the exact same time of getting Moonbeam and this transition to a very different existence.  I spent Moonbeam’s life with him, even now.  On this trip I flew into Albuquerque and drove to Santa Fe where I was deeply compelled by knowing this change was occurring.  As in the novel, it was disturbing enough, troubling enough to make me certain I was finished with relationships until I could purposefully choose for myself and not accept pressure from anyone to date.  Sweetly, however, my “last kiss” would come later from a tiny blonde twin angel, almost two years old, for which I had serendipitously traded a very special preserved real Gerber daisy I had also worn to a Bob Dylan concert on July 24, 2011, at the Whitewater Amphitheater in New Braunfels, Texas, which turned out to be the 50th anniversary of the month Bob Dylan met Suze Rotolo in 1961.  She wrote in her book A Freewheelin’ Time:  A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties:  “I met Bob Dylan on a hot day at the end of July 1961 at a marathon folk concert at Riverside Church in upper Manhattan, a big, all-day music festival organized to launch a radio station dedicated to folk music.  Most of the musicians from the Village clubs were scheduled to play or to be part of the audience.  It was a big deal” (90-91).  Although one could hardly have known it at the time, nothing was out of order.

Leon Russell, who wrote “A Song for You,” released in 1970, and with whom John Mayer played at Leon’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in March of that year, 2011 (it also being the year Suze had just passed in February), opened for Dylan that night.  He and John had just played “A Song for You” together at the induction, John playing his “Rosie” guitar.  Driving into the venue of the concert that night I also arrived at the very same moment Bob Dylan did, driving behind his bus to this outdoor venue on the water without even realizing it was happening.  At the gate I was asked to wait to give him time to park.  Later I was doing photography of these two sweet little blonde angels, to whom I had already gifted the flower to their grandmother, the female minister who was ousted as the church building was torn down and I was writing about Michelangelo, and one leaned over and kissed me so innocently, softly and purely on the lips.  

In Santa Fe on that trip, I ended up spending the time alone and went off walking by myself with my camera.  I walked from the Hotel St. Francis to the San Miguel Chapel, the oldest church in the United States, I learned when I got there, built in the early 1600s, and sat inside the chapel.  I loved the feeling.  The chapel was also “built on the site of an ancient kiva of the Analco Indians” (SanMiguelChapel.org).  I could feel it.  The thought of that while I sat there was amazing, the ancient spirituality, the palpable history.  This happening, finding this church just to Be in, would become incredibly meaningful to me as I wrote these pages.  I realized I was more content in that sanctuary, looking at the art above the altars, and with my camera.  From that person’s strange actions I had even begun to fear for my safety, also like I would find later in Cather’s novel.  This person would out of nowhere say deeply negative and hurtful things.  That day alone walking in Santa Fe was Sunday, February 10, 2008, the day of the Grammys.  If I could have known what was happening, even though I felt something, I would have been astonished.  It had been exactly one year since John had won the Grammy for “Waiting on the World to Change,” and a year since I had released my movie.  Later before I left by myself at the airport in Albuquerque, we walked around an old Western movie set where the guide showed us the house where Russell Crowe had just been filming 3:10 to Yuma.  It was a part of the tapestry I could not yet fully see, but was alive all around, as if reassuring me with the surrounding mountains, its strong arms, present.  I had seen Russell Crowe perform with his band at Stubb’s Barbecue in Austin, on Red River Street, and that being, without me knowing it, a crossing paths in a very short amount of time (perhaps just a month) from when John Mayer had first played at Stubb’s Barbecue right before signing his major recording contracts.  That is the same street on which I would see him for the first time in 2010, ten years later, that would change everything.  I was already crossing paths with what would transform my life, and had been.  There are other ties, too, that when seen in the whole of things, were perfect.  The person I was with on that trip to Santa Fe was working near that time on a movie set with Jessica Simpson, with whom I also share a birthdate, ten years apart.  I had worked in Austin on the set of a Katherine Heigl movie, The Ringer, a friend of John’s at the time, and the set was in a building across from the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue, but on that set the director had adamantly instructed the crew to get me out of view of the camera and I was even given a newspaper to put over my face.  I just couldn’t seem to make it work, although the magic was there.  In those moments, it didn’t seem to make sense.  Looking back, though, it was unerring, even creatively shaping.  It had to be that way.  It would all force me to go back to my ranch to write and then later from the mountain to write much deeper until I could see it all.

In Latour’s flesh and blood Magdalena in his garden and in his creation it is just as there was the discovery of Rachel “by the well” on the Sistine walls reclaiming her Cathedral and her robe.  Cather’s Archbishop knew it was coming to life in a human being.  Cather, too, knew it of the enchantment of the Southwest.  Her own “on the road” was published in 1927, thirty years before the masculine would begin to come again, searching—in a search of Being and its in parallel path in literature and reverberating music—a second kind of arrival after the intrusive, abusive one of Spanish and Anglo overtaking in religious “authority” and conquering the land and its peoples (just as the Suitors trying to take the kingdom in their gluttony and greed) and paid artists working to shape it for this domination.  This time it was on the true search into the Southwest and into the enchantment and freedom of the soul in Kerouac’s On the Road that went on to the coast and San Francisco.  Cather found it alive in the images, the rites, the rocks, and in the landscape, and alive in the understanding and ceremonies of the Native Americans, and this also coming from a path there from before.  The place itself was birthing from its eternal enchanted spirit, the darkness meeting the dawn of the West, as the Native Americans know it will, and with the Song, weaving, suspending time, and waiting—and meanwhile trying to protect the sacred flow of the water.  The Archbishop had gone past the mere controlled and owned miracle of the painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexico that holds her from becoming human and does not let her have her own presence and step free, and was watching it come to life from the enchantment of the land itself and was building his Church for Her, just as the painters of the Sistine were reclaiming the Church, waiting on the day it could be recognized and known.  From the very Cruciform tree, Latour in Cather’s novel had taken the path into the Southwest following the feminine symbols and his own true nature to the river in Agua Secreta and then on to her robed body becoming evident in the landscape, nature and adobe buildings in Santa Fe, right where I had been, beginning to feel it.  The art and nature continually move toward stepping into form and the masters understood this in their own Beings and in their eternal, prophetic works.

The Enchantment Come to Life

While my first name, Shiloh, is in Jacob’s prophecy, is the message of the Sistine Ceiling, and is even the message of peace, safety and prosperity in the return to the goddess in the Odyssey and to the Place of Peace of the olive tree, and is the return of the flow of the River of Poetry of the Muse even spoken by Jesus, and the bringing to life of all the discoveries written here, my last name and birthdate are in the prophecy as well.  In German “Richter” means “judge” or as in the prophecy, the “lawgiver.”  My birthdate of 7.10.70 is in that particular scripture verse numbers with 7 (July) x 7 (1970) being 49 and the 10th day, 49:10.  There is also reference in the Genesis prophecy to a transition of what became a phallic symbol but was formerly an ancient symbol of power coming from the eternal, the sceptre.  In the Odyssey the right to the kingdom comes with the speaker’s staff which is also Hermes’s healing caduceus, the herald’s staff—speaking and healing intricately tied.  (I show in the Shiloh Tapestry how this staff is also connection to the Minoan Snake Goddess.)    

Photography taken December 4, 2010, Fountain at The Southwest School of Art on the San Antonio River Walk, the site of the former Ursuline Campus, est. 1851

In My Love Affair with Moonbeam I write:

When I was little I noticed that my name upside down makes the numbers:  407145.  Playing at that time with those numbers, I came up with variation after variation showing my birthdate being both in the name “Shiloh” and in the numbers of the scripture verse and Jacob’s prophecy in Genesis 49:10:  7.10.70 is right in the three numbers the middle of 407145 (with 071 of the “ilo”—so very much like “Io,” who from the cow transforms into the returning goddess Isis) secured with 49 on the outside numbers.  Ten is even on the end: 1+4+5, the scripture verse again, right in my name.  Even the numbers of the year 1970 are there.  The prophecy contains both my first and last name, Shiloh, and Richter, which means “judge” in German, being in the reference to the “lawgiver.”  1049 is also the number of the road leading to the ranch where I lived by myself outside of San Antonio when I began writing about this in 2010.  While the dates of April 7, 14-15, are in my name, in European format, or in the long, hard Western movement towards freedom, it is the U.S. Independence Day, 4 July, 14-15, a very conscious-freeing statement indeed (while the name also being the Civil War battle leading to the independence for all people, also taking place on April 7th).  

There were other strange and wonderful  perfections in the alignment of numbers.  When I was 44 years old—the only number that appears twice—and writing this, I was the age of the year my dad was born, 1944—a line of three men:  father, son, and grandson, born 1922 (on Michelangelo’s birthdate of March 6), 1944, and 1966, and my dad at that same time was the age of the year I was born, 70.  It happened again when I was 45, also in my name, the year my mother was born, and she was 70.  That was a time of immense transition in my relationships with family, a separation happening at SR Mountain in Alpine, Texas, in 2014, so that I would finally follow my own voice, heart and path, and, just like in the Psyche and Eros myth, a time I spent alone on my mountain finally seriously writing.  It was the last year I spent with Moonbeam being right by my side, 2014-1015, and this being right in my name.  (We also had our 44th President of the United States in Barack Obama, of course the first black President, and now our 45th, with the threat again to all those of other races, religions and “colors,” and against the very definitions of values of individualism and freedoms in the United States, just like the Civil War, and also most unmistakable in importance here, an effort to dominate over the female Being and form.)  The continuation born of the ’22, ’44, ’66 male line in my family is female, born directly on the millennium in 2000 and on Jack Kerouac’s birthdate (who was also born in ’22).  I would have graduated from high school in 1988, following that line, but was held back a year (from transferring from church and home schools, which was, actually, learning independently, a life-long pursuit) to graduate in 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the massacre in China’s Tiananmen (meaning (“Gate of Heavenly Peace”) Square in the ‘89 Democracy Movement.

The path and the details of the discoveries are written in these pages with always this dimension of these elements actually happening in magical ways—as if the writers and artists knew they would and were moving towards it, along with a cultural movement as well, the alive zeitgeist.  The Bishop in Cather’s novel was traveling from Cincinnati where I was conceived in ’69 (at the time when humans walked on the Moon just as to higher illumination in the Divine Comedy) at the time of the burst of music (and also where we had French provincial furniture like Latour’s homeland) and arrived in the Southwest, up through San Antonio where I had lived on the ranch nearby and where the Archbishop had also been stopped with his books for a time, and into New Mexico, where I now live on a mountain top on the outskirts of the Mescalero Apache Reservation.  While I was writing this I had experienced the birds fluttering as in the novel on a fortuitous day of my own—an incredible day of the awakening and powerful love of music and of the magic I had experienced alive in New York City.  My day that day had been just as the birds fluttered around Magdelena in Latour’s garden—but this time in art and photography, an experience in San Antonio along the River Walk at a fountain of birds at the former Ursuline campus, a Catholic school built at the same time as the one in the novel and where I had gone for a photography workshop at the Southwest School of Art, and this before I had begun writing about the novel and discovered the astonishing likenesses to that day.  That was the day, December 4, 2010, when I got home after taking those pictures that I saw John Mayer’s “A Face to Call Home” on-line where he had played it for the first time on his acoustic the night before at New York City’s historic Village Underground.  I understood his message.  During this writing, then, has been a real time dimension of what has been experienced during these phenomenal discoveries.

One time soon after Moonbeam’s passing in 2015, and in my desperation to see his face, I came across a picture of a puppy that looked like him and who was in Mora, New Mexico, but needing a mother, and who was playing with his toys in the picture.  Mora is the place in Willa Cather’s novel where Magdalena knew she was finally safe with Valliant and Latour.  It felt very much like Moonbeam was with the masters, because of the date of his passing and other things, and what felt like a very loving force that cared enough to speak that it was a “safe” place of arrival.  While I write about some of those happenings here, mostly while I kept this text moving in academic research and discovery, which became more vivid and clear upon Moonbeam’s passing, I documented those things on-line to John whom I  began writing  in the Spring of 2010 after seeing him in Austin, and which I write about here and in My Love Affair with Moonbeam.

Communication from the Spirit World is not new to me and is often connected to when I am on the right path.  Years ago, when I began reading The Da Vinci Code, at home on the ranch alone, Pope John Paul II fell ill and died while I was reading.  I could barely read it because I already knew real things about the symbols beyond of what the author was aware and it was causing me to shake with the television on, watching what was also happening in Rome.  The following days while the Pope was lying in state were the dates that matched my name in April.  This also happened when I picked up a book by a former professor of mine who had passed, a signed copy of the Texas literature scholar Tom Pilkington’s book State of Mind:  Texas Literature & Culture.  I knew that during the time that he was a professor his house had burned down.  I began reading the book and looked up on the internet to find that he had passed.  Upon these discoveries, Big Tex, the giant statue known as an icon on the Dallas skyline from the Texas State Fair since 1952, went up in flames.  A few days later I had a candle burning in a bathroom and a paper towel or a piece of paper somehow caught fire and left ashes in the shape of a burned note on the counter, as if purposely placed there.  These happenings have been continuous.  When I was writing about the Egyptian Book of Going Forth by Day, on New Year’s Day in January 2017, things were clearly coming to life.  I was studying the cows in the Panels 5 and 6.  Hathor’s leg is known in the mythology to enable the deceased to walk again, in stepping over to the “other” side, into the eternal.  In Plate 6 a young calf’s front leg is cut off for Ani, the deceased.  It is directly related to that cow enabling that crossing over for him.  Depicted is a little cow bleeding and bleeping at its mother because its front leg has been cut off for that one step into the next realm.  After studying this I stepped outside for a walk and reached down in the wind and picked up a receipt which had blown to my front steps.  It was not from there.  It was from a “Tiny’s Burger Barn” and the ending credit card numbers were printed there, 7170, the numbers in my birthdate, with an “Approved” and “Thank you,” and more numbers of 31010, or 3 10s.  I had sometimes called my little Yorkie Custard “Tiny.”  Only weeks earlier I had had the same thing happen with another receipt in a similar situation blowing directly to the door.

There is a certain prevalent perception—judgment and consequent, often hostile, imposed prohibitions—a culture of judgement and absolute “no” (certainly not one of forgiveness and freedom), or usually a brushing off—about personally taking the spotlight, let alone manifestation, or saying what I know and feel, in living let alone in such important matters as showing a path of the feminine through the Western world’s most striking art.  Penelope was almost brutally forced over years to give up her identity, her room, her bed, her soul mate, her position, her inheritance, birthright, and poetic weaving—for outside claims on her personhood and body.  And why?  Because earthly money and power were at stake?  Because the government was being claimed?  I have been told so many times and in so many ways to keep my “place” (which is for them, no where, and to be erased) and to never say a word and to obey and be a slave to the systems, that the social confines of mere opinion and peoples’ own fear protection of status and power, and the dead, empty and uninspired status quo somehow became unrelentingly my silent prison walls—until I realized no one has the right to confine or define me, limit or silence me, or to choose for me or to apply pressure one way or another.  We are all born the same way and no one has authority over me.  (It would take this step then to later understand the imprisonment was my own mind that I had brought in from my social conditioning.)  But I did also learn it must come out painstakingly and in a very deep silence and solitude through the art and it can come out no other way.  Otherwise, it cannot be “heard.”  I also know the social and structural importance that the Poet has to come to the River and be inspired by it, and so I had to to write, even reach out in writing in vulnerable ways.  The flow has to be there to be seen and that can’t come in mere talking about something.  The power is within me to express the eternal and the effervescence of the wonder, in the aliveness and in the presence of life all around, and what I see in its expression in the wonderment, those things in Moonbeam that showed me them in myself, he always a part of my Being, expanded by him, as well as the hard-won skill and dedication I saw in John Mayer taking on his life’s destiny in the hardest moment in resilience, fortitude, and gratitude because he had to, it is the expression of his Being.  It is his character and his destiny.  I write it because it happens within and all around me—something much grander than human concepts and limited views of the laws of the universe.  I use no mental filter while making the discoveries and therefore the voice comes from a deeper source and something far more real.  It is driven and sustained by a surrender to powerful Being and the opening of Love.  It is also my Being and obligation in awe, wonder and gratitude to meet that immense beauty and eloquent symmetry I see and experience and to know and speak to what I know I am inside and this my role given to being here, born to it, my birthright.  This is what it is like to live through Being.  Consciousness, animals, humans, the earth all need the help that comes from it.  I understand how necessary it is to turn things upside down and create anew, especially when rigid, selfish judgements and actions keep wars and starvation and abuse and lack of water the norm and life itself having less than zero value up against “the marketplace” and commonplace usury and outright lies, where all forms of life including children and animals are worthless, empty, usable and expendable.  Even with the wondrous showing in their eyes.  I stepped into this knowing that on the power and presence of the feminine, upon entry into culture, these things break open—when it re-inspires through the Poetic and through the masters—society through its very structure, the masculine, reinvigorated—even honored and shown for these truer, harder-won identities.  It is a truer and proven love of men and humans.  Whatever has been forbidden in narrow, self-centered minds and yet borrowed from world mythologies to form harsh and punishing religions and socially passed on as the “only way,” (and where I am to believe I and the symbol of the feminine are merely “whores” and “wretched” instead of miracles of Being, or do not even know ourselves) or to state it more directly:  that the “return” after the transformation of consciousness to form or the “second coming” is impossible or dictated by the owners of Christianity, and most certainly, above all, must have absolutely nothing to do with the feminine, I will say this:  Homer, the master Poet and Bard and his “nobody” Odysseus who returns home, came well before the stories of Jesus—who himself was a Poet in his use of words that were turned into the frozen river of doctrine (the reverse of miraculous, stopping the flow)—and Homer weaved into his eternal work with the voice of an oracular god—an ancient voice as Eckhart Tolle also shows as coming from something much more eternal than ego—a guarantee that his line would be back and would return to Her, bringing the Poetry and Song with him.  He defines that cultural lineage so exact as there is no doubting its mark.  Its precision is incomparable, nonpareil and undeniable.  It happens when the Poet sees his true identity and true lineage based on character and mastery—not social domination, greed, usury and limitation—and comes to take it back with the help of this lineage and the eternal wisdom and Muse, Athena, who naturally springs to life at the culminating water, at a burst of life and consciousness of the brightest civilizations’ coasts of ultimate arrival.  This all happens when Penelope recognizes herself in the eternal and in form and she creates from that.  It happens when, through the text or the painting, she speaks.  It happens when the tapestry is revealed.  It is eternal permission to Be, right here and right now.  The Poetry is transformational to the culture.   

As a child I wanted to figure out what female queens and royalty needed to know in their educations that would enable them to succeed in world maneuverings—and to be the difference.  I read the biographies of the European feminine royalty, searching their lives for both the answers and the inherent vulnerabilities.  I was deeply struck at Queen Elizabeth I’s education and successes and, importantly, the concurrent works of the Poet Shakespeare, but also the vulnerabilities and naivety of Marie Antoinette who was not prepared for her role and was in no way aware of the desperate needs of the people during a dire shift for humanity and for freedom coming in the severely bloody French Revolution.  I later studied the philosophies and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft’s corresponding A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, always contemplating, searching for the path.  For me, the struggle to know and express all of this and to write stayed concurrent in their external prohibitions and internal frustrations.  Being was tied to writing.  The spiritual body was tied to the ability to express into form.  I couldn’t say it fully yet.  But still I was learning and it would take time.  I turned 46 and was finally able to write the opening to it, and in this, to step from the page into a different existence.  But also, in this, there is no time at all.  Time becomes organic again.  We get to live it and there is no bigger, immense gift right now than realization of eternity, Being, in time.   

My Moonbeam

There still had always been an inherent joy, yet finding little place in a discordant, harsh and abusive world, but from the moment Moonbeam and I saw each other an affinity awakened, and what had been harshly judged and described by those who knew me as “living in a fantasy world of books” became outwardly pure and real, a true living joy, what I would finally find in the meaning of my name and lead me towards the understanding of what that deep joy is, and with Moonbeam, this was real without a doubt to me, even though I had already tried to tell people that something of miracles and the wonder inside were real.  In my college classes I could show them the literature coming to life.  I showed them how Mrs. Dalloway’s parties were both an affront to war and an answer, the goddess throwing the party.  I was inching closer to knowing.  But now the joy and pureness existed and was better than any human thought-pattern from which came peoples’ outward extensions of control, rage, opinions, and personal expectations projected onto me with intensity and from which I often felt crushed and always isolated and lonely.  I did not know that until I knew my own Being, I could not see these projections of their own identities and egos that were not loving, but negative and harmful.  It was unconsciousness being lived and it needs to tear down and control what is around it because it feels so unresolved inwardly. 

But this Being knew me.  In Moonbeam’s existence and in his eyes he proved the wonderment I knew.  He was the living embodiment of a joy of an eternal feeling and effervescence on top of it, now that it had come to life, just as if he, too, knew the proof his arrival meant.  It was like an invigorated “I told you so.  It is real.”  It also turned out, unplanned, to be an experience on my own as we spent the next eight years together (and now three in his passing as I finish writing this).  Instead of romantic companionship in that next eleven years from 2007-2018, there was this buoyant and playful white fluffy adventurer by my side to both hard moments and wild discoveries, and all of this held together by our little Cus who still, as small as he is, takes mountain trails with fearlessness and ease.  Custard and I are both crazy about the powerful flow and the company of the Ruidoso River as the snow and water come down from the mountains behind the coffee shop, Sacred Grounds.  I can tell, though, he misses his brother, too, still.  He looks out the bedroom window every night, something he never used to do.  I did not plan to spend eleven years in discovery with them and what turned out to be my only companions, mostly with them sitting by my side while I learned and wrote at 4 a.m., and the morning light being in Moonbeam’s wonderful effervescence and passion for all things life, waiting for the Sun to rise.  

I will tell you some more of the magic so you will begin to understand how it ties into these pages.  It is both awful and opening, a direct step into the eternal.  These are such things that I documented online for these eight years to John as they continually happened.  

I was photographing an old log cabin Methodist Church in Ruidoso, New Mexico, in September 2015, that was set for demolition and this being during the time when I was beginning to write about what Michelangelo and Dante were actually doing to the institution of the Church as in the Divine Comedy, a taking down of the corruption and intrusion of the accepted establishment through his own brilliance and mastery, his experience with Beatrice, the feminine leading him to his illumination and realization of Place on Earth.  Here I was photographing these local walls that were being forced to come down by nature—a sagging roof, no less (as opposed to Michelangelo’s divine one), that was said would likely give way to the next snow—and what was also being revealed as a supernatural act at this exact time I was about to make more incredible artistic discoveries.  Moonbeam and Custard were in the car hanging out the window that day waiting on me while I did the photography.  That was Tuesday, September 1st.  Moonbeam was healthy, strong and happy.  He was vibrantly awaiting our next adventure.  The Sunday almost two weeks later was the service to “deconsecrate” the church building (and this led by the female District Superintendent along with the female pastor, Judy Shema).  I was there that Sunday morning photographing and streaming the deconsecration service, but Moonbeam was home very sick.  I was beside myself in what to do, he was so sick.  Something had gone severely wrong.  In spells, he was backing up, not recognizing his surroundings.  Salivation foamed from his mouth.  I had repeatedly called the veterinarian, begging for answers, and it was the weekend when it worsened beyond anything expected.  That Saturday night he ran for what seemed endlessly in circles, out the back door, in the doggy door, through the house, circling, circling, stopping to beg me for help.  He looked up at me, asking for relief.  He tried to get in bed, to lie down by me, I curled up next to him, only able to give him pain medicine and wait for him to get better.  It was overwhelming to see my beautiful baby suffering.  I let him run down the back stairs so that he could run out back like he loved to do, but on his way back up the pain in his head made him stop halfway up the stairs, frozen, looking off into the distance.  I didn’t know what to do.  I was experiencing premonitions but I pushed them aside because of how much I dearly love him.  There was a stick in the shape of a seven sticking up through the elevated deck.  It was the last day I would see Moonbeam alive, as I had to rush him that evening to the vet to leave him overnight for help, that day being September 13, 2015.  On the way it started raining and a rainbow came through directly in front of us.  So that he could hear my voice, I told him that it was all going to be okay.  I knew it wasn’t.  Along that mountain road that he loved to go down to get to the park, Gavilan Canyon Road, there is an old river bed running alongside it.  In its timeworn course, it ran along bedside us.  We had to cross that old river to arrive at the veterinarian.  I had little idea of the pain coming.  The next morning Moonbeam waited until I was in the building to pick him up, a scenario so very much like the day we found each other across a room in San Antonio, this time I had the car packed for Albuquerque to get him more specialized help, when he, before I could see him, turned around in his kennel and laid down and released his last breath.  It was a premonition I had had about a week before, lying in bed beside him, a breath and leaving the body while he was resting in the bend of my legs.  I had cried my heart out that night from loneliness, and now Moonbeam was leaving.  The veterinarian, Dr. Favis, came out to tell me.  She was in disbelief herself, she had just walked by him.  That was the morning of September 14th.  I would later learn that even Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and the beginning of the Jewish “High Holy Days,” the “Feast of Trumpets” had begun at sundown on the 13th.  The 14th was the seventh month, the tenth day in the ecclesiastical calendar, the numbers like in my birthdate.  Later I would learn Dante was providing the music for the transition, for his entrance to finally claim his “laurel crown”:  for Dante’s own passing is also written as the unmistakable September 13/14, 1321.  The 13th, that number of Olympian transition and breaking back open the eternal like Christ past the Olympian and Disciple twelve, is the last day I saw Moonbeam alive, with his passing on the 14th, the next, the second to come after the transition, the two sevens (like John Mayer’s birth year).    

Like Moonbeam’s tightly-curly white coat, Dante had written in Paradiso Canto 25 1-12 a prophecy of his own of a return as a lamb, with “other voice” and in “other fleece”:

‘If it should happen . . . If this sacred poem–

this work so shared by heaven and by earth

that it has made me lean through these long years–

can ever overcome the cruelty

that bars me from the fair fold where I slept,

a lamb opposed to wolves that war on it,

by then with other voice, with other fleece,

I shall return as poet and put on,

at my baptismal font, the laurel crown;

for there I first found entry to that faith

which makes souls welcome unto God, and then,

for that faith, Peter garlanded my brow.’

The Divine Comedy, Paradiso Canto 25 1-12 

(Allen Mandelbaum Translation, 1984) 

That weekend after Monday, September 14th, I had to photograph a wedding.  It was like photographing from outside of my body, my Being missing, needing to go with him.  The bride, Dasha, is a sweet, gentle soul and I couldn’t cancel, even though on the inside I was pure tears.  A wedding was taking place on this passing.  It was not lost on me.  I understood, too, through the Odyssey and the passing of Argos what was passing to me in coming to know my own Being.  I had been writing it all along.  It was coming through the most excruciating pain.

In the next couple of weeks it was this pain of his passing that made me notice as I looked at the Sistine art work the white dog moving on the Sistine Chapel walls, even stepping down to the “throne.”  (That painting alone would have gotten the artists killed.)  I was realizing the reference, unbelievably so, to the white Dog Star and Sirius meaning the return of Isis to the throne, the dog, Canis Major, being the signal of the transition.  I don’t think I would have thought it through thoroughly otherwise, but I needed my boy and there he was in the artwork.  The desperate pain made me seek him out anywhere I could find him.  And, too, Moonbeam was becoming a part of me in a very different way, a step, a pull into the eternal with him, to know his Presence without a barrier.  It was just as Beatrice had urged Dante on past the pain to discovering the eternal through her and through the art.  These messages were breaking through.  Because Moonbeam was the definition of joy, passion, adventure and love to me, my heart and part of my Being went with him, and I understood the awakening past “death,” just as Beatrice drew Dante on past the socially-constructed walls blocking off eternity and illumination to lived experience.  He had felt naturally ignited by her, and she, like the feminine in the Song of Songs, tells him to follow that.  I started to see there is more that we’ve been harshly, socially conditioned not to see, feel or know.  Our knowing, our awareness and our senses have been socially off-limits to us.  This discovery is directly tied to understanding the feminine in the brilliance of the universe’s forms, like the masters’ created forms that honors life and the eternal coming through, where existence literally bursts to life and She being the spiritual and natural bridge between the worlds, her very body and soul proving it.  My Being was being expanded into the eternal by him.  The art was speaking to it all.

I knew the rigidity of religion, individuals or any institution for that matter, be it the staid, uninspired and dying patterns of universities or governments, would never allow me to be anything of real value, let alone be the “feminine” or a realization of “goddess”—as in beautifully expressing the eternal—in their limited perceptions.  All that can exist to them is what they already believe, even though these things are well understood in ancient mythologies from which they all borrowed—the appearance of avatars, real gods in rituals—even in the accepted and revered human appearance of Jesus.  But here the universe and the spirit world were breaking through with no one’s permission and it didn’t need any.  It was my lived experience.  I am blown away by the experience of it.  

In the meantime, to show the extent, it was more than just physical walls coming down on a small church.  It was the same thing reverberating across a nation and a globe.  Just like the Suitors in the Odyssey, some of the older, menacing, patriarchal members of that church rose up in the predictable, social-collective anger, hostility and self-righteousness against their female pastor because she was female (they were also perturbed because they had had two females in a row), even accusing her of talking too much about her own experiences (that tie to life), verbally attacked her openly and viciously in public inside the sanctuary, and coldly and conspicuously had her replaced specifically by a male—to which the larger institution of the Methodist Church secretly and then publicly complied with zero mention of misogyny.  Some of those same group members are also the ones who take their closed, selective, and below-the-surface vicious male doctrine to a mission of Native tribe children deep in Mexico, from these gorgeous mountains where the Mescalero are, to another place of supreme natural beauty, Copper Canyon.  All of this was happening, too, on the larger scale.  At the international Methodist conference that same year of getting rid of the female pastor, was a larger looming split:  a threatened world-wide division in the institution over the acceptance of gay Love in the Church—the rupture of an institution supposedly based on love and acceptance of all life forms, claiming even the words of Jesus.  This little church, in the madness of what they were already doing to the feminine, got together to discuss that specific matter, as if their personal judgments on the differences of other people’s love and who they love somehow needed discussed by them.  That, too, happened while I was writing about the females in the Sistine, including Michelangelo’s Pieta.  It was a microcosm of what the nation was about to do with the same aggression and hostility that year against the feminine in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election in the outright attempts at the humiliation of Huma Abedin and with the efforts of personally tearing down Hillary Clinton based on their femaleness—but rarely spoken as such.  Hillary has prepared her whole life to fulfill that public role.  No one knows that role and its requirements better.  That is not to say we did not all have more to watch and learn.  I was also certain the return of the artistic comes before social change and before change in the political, the “Art Epoch Theory,” art always leading the return to life.  The ancients knew these things.  The River comes with the art.  The return of the feminine comes through art, the return of the Poet and the resurgence of the River, and that is necessary cultural transformation.  Still, there were demonstrations of character and of the differences between internal and surface to be seen, and the work itself to be done, the story unfolded.  False veneer would instead win that day to do its destruction and tearing down—but only for a transformative time.  

That has been my experience here on this sacred mountain of the Apaches and watching what the patriarchal and social mind will do—just as Homer says it would in 850 B.C. with the rule of “talk” and rumor over internal character and essence.  The Dakota Access Pipe Line and the defunding of Planned Parenthood are the same as the Suitors taking everything they want from the kingdom for their own gluttony, ripping through the feminine land and body, and threatening the very Waterway, threatening that Odysseus will never return and so it doesn’t matter, they can take and destroy whatever they please.  They treat the feminine as objects to be ruled.  Nothing has changed for them and this mindset still cannot see the natural after millennia.  They inherited blindness.  

But I here are the ancient, eternal truths.  I have been learning and writing and listening to my own Being.  This is the path of my coming into my own, without public recognition or permission, and I bring recognition to both the literal and the figurative Waters desperately necessary to our lives.

The experience with Moonbeam’s passing and the discoveries drew my attention to Sirius, the white Dog Star of the ancient Egyptians and their by-far, pre-Mary, pre-controlled revelation of the regenerative life-giving Isis along the poetic Nile, the Muse of life and creation along that very alive, golden river leading to the burst of the miracle creations of Greece and the birth of Western civilization, and to seeing a very different path of the Western world of the feminine staying by the powerfully moving water—the art and inspiration of the mythology and Song that perpetually moves to a delta—our own delta—and bursts to life.  It universally moves itself to return to life and expression.  It has moved through the Western world to even manifestation—as each master artist written about here proves it does and says it will.  It truly is an energy force in which the feminine, in recognizing herself, comes to see her own energy and internal/eternal power bursting into form, into creation and the power and nurturing of creating new worlds.  It is a very different “his”-story—not one of governments and battles that we were taught in hard-backed chairs and the lowly student dared to move—but one of the artistic trickster Odysseus and his master abilities to return and to finally, after millennia, to emerge from war, to change the definitions, to make it home, right on earth past all of the rules, regulations and expectations.  It is what Penelope knows in her heart.  It is what I know.

At that time of the passing I had already written about Odysseus walking past his dog Argos while Argos breathed his last breath while he laid on a dung pile, the current state of the feminine and dogs.  I had hoped it not so that any dog would pass while I was writing.  I had learned to watch out for these things.  But Argos’s passing was a sign, just as the Dog Star rising before Isis, like the crescent Moon brings about the full, the whole reflection.  Not being recognized, too, for a time was necessary because if Odysseus looked at him at that moment it would have drawn attention to identities that these pure Beings know, and so Odysseus walked on without drawing attention to what this dog meant about kinds of identities—inner character and loyalty—and about knowing Odysseus himself after many years, no matter what the disguise, and what it also was showing about Odysseus’s footsteps towards Isis to which attention could not be drawn as he moved to take back his dining hall and his home.  In Odysseus’s lineage was also the monster Argos, too, a reference to being watched by the many-eyed “monster”—the eyes of the Suitors and challengers, even Helen, who do not allow Isis her home and freedom—the morbidly watching and opinion monster (much like our social monster who watches for breaks from the status quo or the patriarchal, or displays talent or freedom of spirit) who had guarded Isis when she was in the form of “the heifer-nymph Io.”  The monster was killed by Hermes, Odysseus’s ancestry, and now his unrecognized steps were moving to the new revelation of Isis in Penelope, the human goddess, a movement further, and another slaying of that social, overgrown abnormality.  His footsteps, too, signal the return from slaying the Minotaur, the inner, socially-distorted monster within the feminine labyrinth at Crete, the monster created by the social structure that does not recognize the white bull and honor it, and in the shell of a “hollow wooden cow”—a hollow replication of the feminine—the empty feminine mates with it, creating the entrenched monster inside the female rites and eating life and culture themselves.  During this, the significance of Moonbeam’s passing had been alive in these ways to me in the pages even as I wrote, just as Penelope had to keep weaving.  It had moved from art to form. 

Moonbeam asleep on his American flag blanket 

while I wrote in the dark in the a.m.

This coming-to-life effect isn’t limited to a portion of the discoveries of this book.  It has been in the entirety of daily writing for eight years.  And from the very beginning of this relationship with Moonbeam there was this magic and I knew it.  It was in Moonbeam’s eyes every time he looked at me.  I had been reading Jed McKenna’s Spiritual Enlightenment:  The Damnedest Thing trilogy that begins in his ashram in Iowa, and it was the same as this little white lightning burst of furry energy that had bounded into my life in a pet store—against my will to purchase from a pet store, but my heart had appeared—straight from Iowa.  Where he loved to play in the dog park in Ruidoso,  there is a bench memorializing a McKenna and facing the peak of the mountain where the sacred legends come to life for the Mescalero Apaches.  It was one of our favorite spots to play.  I would sit there and Moonbeam would put his body against the cool ground and watch in delight.  It was some of our best happiness.

We adventured together onto the Mescalero Apache Reservation where, watching him walk across the dam to a cove on the lake at the Inn of the Mountain Gods on an extremely windy day that almost blew us over, I would later realize, his spirit was gentle, soft, light and pure like that of Child Born of Water, symbolically born at something like this cove, quiet and secluded, like Being itself, and it being much like a place I had loved as a child at the Fort Worth Water Gardens where I loved to stand with my bare feet in the water and feel the fountains flow.  With Moonbeam I was better understanding the depths of the legend of the reflective spirit Child Born of Water and the unseen dimensions of the Apache “warriors,” very different internal Beings and Spirit Dancers and what was being described in the Navajo War Ceremonials of becoming when they go to the Sun.  I took him on that walk on April 7, 2015, the date that matched my name, Shiloh, upside down, 4.07.15.  It was the day I finished writing Chapter One.  The year was marked in the name, too, 407145, matching the last year we spent together of 2014-2015 (along with my ages during that year, 44 and 45).  My white dog is in my name, and therefore, also in the prophecy, like the Sistine walls.  Custard is more the “Killer of Monsters.”  There were harrowing experiences with him, too, in that vein.  Years before, my dad had given him his nickname “Thunder,” before we came to the mountain.  I had talked to Custard about “going to where the bears are” from the Navajo legends when we would go on mountain hikes.  It was not to be spoken, only sung by the Singers.  I knew to be respectful and not to say it out loud.  Within a week or so of that he was hit by the “lightning” of an electric fence set to the voltage for cows while visiting a friend’s house.  His hair was singed black and he hid under the bed for a week.  But in visiting the lake with these two and looking at the Apache sculptures at the Inn and watching the ceremonial dancers at the female puberty rites on the reservation that July 4th I began to understand the reflective and the warrior soul, the White-Painted “Clown” dancer, and the hole left in the weave for transformation, to let the eternal through, the realization of White-Painted Woman, the place holder that turns over the worlds.  My pure-spirited companions were helping me to see the unseen elements. 

Moonbeam, My Heart and Soul, Stepping Out from Vincent Van Gogh’s The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night, C. 1888

In 2007 at a 100+ year old cabin on the Frio River, Concan, Texas