Liminal Living 24x36 inches, collage and colored pencil on canvas, $1250
breaking through
Today I want to share more about the book that goes along with the Falling Together art series as well as my collage process and some fun tips for achieving altered states of consciousness.
Yes, there is a book! It's called Sparrow's Descent and includes every image in the Falling Together series beside a parable about incarnation.
First, why a sparrow?
Golden Crowned Sparrow, detail from Liminal Living
I initially chose the golden crowned sparrow as the protagonist because my house is surrounded by them.
I don't remember growing up with these birds, but they have become much more prevalent in Seattle in the past couple decades.
I was charmed by their mixture of drab coloring with that flaming crown on their head, along with their very distinctive song.
I didn't realize until I finished my book that their song is essentially the opening chord of Back to Life, Back to Reality by Soul II Soul backwards. This blew my mind!
The lead singer of Soul II Soul wrote this song in 1989 about her own near death experience. She was pretty mad about having to come back to earth, but the sparrow in my story is excited to incarnate for the very first time, so Back to Life sung backwards makes a lot of sense.
I wrote a bit more about all that in this blog post.
Usually the birds sing only a couple notes of their usual song, I guess they're lazy, but sometimes you can catch them singing the whole thing, and it's very cool!
Blue Grosbeak, detail from Liminal Living
The journey to earth starts with the sparrow's vague feeling that she is somehow different from the heavenly purple birds around her, that she's too drab to belong, even though they love her completely.
She sees a red apple pierce the purple world with a different color and decides she must follow it. The purple birds warn her that earth is a very difficult planet, but at the same time they feel the experience would do her soul good, so she sets off on her journey.
Sparrow's Descent then follows this quest through the rainbow backwards to arrive in a brand new birth on earth.
As the sparrow experiences each new color on her way down she encounters an apple of the opposite color. This represents how everything holds within it the seed of its opposite.
It's an idea found in the yin yang symbol, and it is exactly this little bit of the opposite that makes what could otherwise feel like an overwhelming experience bearable, whether it be extreme pain or joy.
Thus, when she gets to earth there is a purple apple, a way back to remembering her life in spirit.
That's what this collage, Liminal Living, hints at. We see both the red and purple apple in it, and the sparrow is hovering in between. It's the moment of making a choice about which world to inhabit, and then realizing that visitation of the other is always possible anyway.
I mentioned before a few ways we humans can "bite into the purple apple," and experience what spirit may have to say to us. Here's a little more detail on that, a list of five main methods.
Psychotropic hallucinogens: things like magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, LSD, and other drugs.
Rhythm and trance inducing music, whether that be the flow of playing or listening. I find that listening to a canon gives much the same effect too. Anything repetitive really.
Extreme physical experiences: These can include fasting, sleep deprivation, or breathwork.
Trance inducing movement: whirling, yoga, tai chi, and even sex. Sex can also belong to the above category since sometimes the insight itself doesn't happen until the moment of orgasm.
Meditation, dreaming or lucid dreaming, but also any spiritual or religious ritual. Breathwork can belong here too since it is often part of meditation.
This is not an endorsement of any particular method, and some may be dangerous or just not for you. The important thing is that there are many such windows into the worlds hiding inside your own head that may open you up to your spirit.
I actually have a lot to say about the sexual path, but can't say much here. It plays a role in my Little Mushroom Trips book series, and the third book is coming in December.
It has more sex in it than the first two, so yeah, these books are kinda spicy. More on all that in the coming months. Sparrow's Descent, however, is much more family friendly.
Another kinetic method of connecting to spirit exists within my own technique of collage.
As you can probably imagine, cutting out all these birds is time consuming and kind of tedious. It involves a lot of focus because I'm holding a sharp knife, but it also allows an opportunity to trance out, a sort of hyper focus.
I haven't experienced any cool spiritual messages while cutting paper, but there's a possibility there, same as with washing dishes or showering. It invites more exploration in any case.
These collages may look chaotic, but I actually labor over them more than you might think.
When working with a composition this seemingly chaotic the rules of good composition still apply, in fact probably more so. Negative space and a sense of movement must still be considered. I also consider differences in texture, in a musical sense.
There are many conscious relationships set up between bird cutouts where you can see them assembled in duets, trios, quartets, and quintets.
The movement is planned out the way one might plot out a flight pattern, and the artist must always keep in mind where they want to lead the eye around the piece as a whole.
Liminal Living is my first study in how to create a gradual chromatic shift using collage. It's a basic technique when working in paint or pencil, but collage adds a new challenge.
You're working with defined shapes in defined colors, so creating the chromatic shift requires thinking of these shapes like very large pixels, or perhaps similar to Pointillism, the 19th century art movement that evolved into Neo-Impressionism where gradations are built up with tiny dots of paint.
Apparently there's a 20th century musical counterpart to Pointillism too, and I just found out! Cool!
Now, what does an Italian Bach cantata have to do with this story of an incarnating sparrow? We'll learn more next time.
