Here in the Flow 11x14 inches, collage and colored pencil on canvas, $308
from one, many
Orange, sacral chakra, Gemini, D Major, Pachelbel's Canon.
What do all these things have to do with one another?
Here we have the orange collage in the Falling Together art series, which I call Here in the Flow.
Orange is associated with the sacral chakra, which is the chakra in your pelvis that drives sex and creativity. Both activities work best when you allow yourself to enter the flow state, hence the title of this collage.
In the 12 color system I'm using as a metaphor for falling to earth and incarnating, orange is associated with the musical key of D Major.
Rudolf Steiner associates D Major with Gemini in his tone zodiac, and here is the poem Steiner wrote about Gemini in his work called Twelve Moods:
Reveal yourself, life of sun,
Stir up what tends to rest,
Embrace what desires to strive
Towards a mighty prevailing of life,
Towards a blessed knowing of worlds,
Towards a fruitful maturing of growth.
Oh life of sun, endure!
Gemini is the sign of the twins, and while I already wrote an essay about twin flames you can read here, there are some other interesting ways to think about twins and duality.
Rudolf Steiner saw the sign of Gemini as representing the twins that are your "higher and lower self." I personally prefer to call the higher self your "larger self," because the term "higher" has moral implications that don't apply.
If you are unfamiliar with this idea the higher self is simply that part of your soul that is still in the spirit world and the lower self is that part that is currently in your body on earth.
Aleister Crowley called the higher or "larger" self the Holy Guardian Angel, and his practice of Thelema is supposed to invoke "knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel," often abbreviated as K and C of HGA. It is one path toward embodying more of your whole soul in this earthly life.
Many also consider this to be "the lesser work" of alchemy. In other words, we can't work real magic, "the great work," until we have become fully integrated spiritual beings, until the two have become one.
This is Gemini sacral chakra stuff right there.
The act of sex literally brings two beings together to create another being, but creativity brings at least two things together to create something new.
That form of creativity is what Falling Together is all about: finding out what happens when we combine seemingly disparate concepts. This is how we create meaning for our lives, for our incarnations, and continue to fill our days with mind blowing synchronicities.
I am continually amazed that while I have no idea what I'm going to write about in this newsletter until I'm sitting in front of the computer, the things I'm able to piece together spin a world around me that continues to spin long after I hit send.
This also reminds me of a particular musical form: canon and fugue.
Since D Major is associated with Gemini, I figured we could talk a little about Pachelbel's Canon in D, but really I want to talk about the concept of canons and fugues a bit more generally.
These are musical forms that work by taking one simple theme (and sometimes complex ones) and spinning them out into a much larger musical world. There is even a word for this process in German: Fortspinnung, literally a spinning out of a musical motif.
This can also be done visually. Think of cutting out a paper snowflake. One motif ends up repeating in a fixed spacing like a canon. You can see me doing it in this very collage.
Damask patterns are like fugues utilizing not just repetition but mirroring, and sometimes double mirroring. These are examples of taking a smaller element and creating something larger with it.
Conceptually I try to do this in these emails.
It's not quite the idea of "two becomes one" but more like "one becomes many." I reckon this happens with the reproduction of people too. Where in the beginning perhaps there were two, ultimately those two lead to many thousands of people multiplying across the earth.
Together we're a human fugue endlessly spinning out our own combined creativity.
Speaking about Gemini and twins, these wild complex musical works are often found paired with a simpler and more free-flowing piece, like the prelude and fugue combo.
Apparently it was Pachelbel who was one of the earliest adopters of the prelude and fugue duo, and the Canon in D also has a little friend. It is supposed to be followed by a gigue, which gets far less play than the canon that precedes it.
A gigue is a dance form that moved to mainland Europe from Ireland and England in the 17th century, a direct descendant of the Irish jig. We talked a bit about jigs in an earlier essay, but it's interesting because D is such a common key for the jig, and Pachelbel uses it here too.
This gigue is also surprisingly complex, using similar contrapuntal techniques found in canons and fugues, but it's still a dance! The Canon and Gigue is a pairing of opposites: the sublime with the rustic.
The Canon in D is a favorite to play at weddings, but symbolically it would be more appropriate to pair it with the Gigue as intended. Let two opposites come together! Let the two become one and the one become many!
In the 18th and 19th century the key of D Major was most commonly used in celebratory music - think marches, fanfares, hallelujahs.
A wedding is certainly such a celebration, as is the union of opposites within yourself. Achieving K and C of HGA is also worthy of a triumphal tune, especially since only about five people in human history seem to have actually done it.
And maybe it's less about a union of opposites than it is about bridging the gap between them. You can reconcile your contradictions and stop letting them fight one another. We always have permission to recreate ourselves.
