Grace notes as a musical embellishment also add a sense of playfulness. My visual Grace Notes portfolios are different, but complementary, both evoking a similar sense of enchantment but in different ways. My Visual Echoes layer image and word together, stacked to create a new compounded impact ... while Walls That Talk are portrayals of the thinnest essence, whispering to me in the simplicity of texture, shape and color that creates a new ‘aha.’ Each one causes a personal response at a different level, revealing yet another nuanced aspect of myself.

I also call these creations ‘grace notes’ because they also feel like how I perceive the gift of grace ... unannounced but deeply felt ... something new suddenly easing into the cadence of my life, full of whimsey and wonder. Many of these creations came to me ‘out of the blue’ – in that space of reverie that often brings an unexpected insight and knowingness.

As I pondered my feelings about grace notes, I then started to think more about the meaning of ‘grace’ itself, delving deeper into what it stands for. From a spiritual perspective, grace is seen as a force coming to us from outside human consciousness – an unexpected gift bestowed with the goodness and purity of the Divine. As we open to receive such grace, it can provide a sense of that ever-elusive mystery flowing through us.

I thought the photo in the header above, of ripples of snow framed in golden sunset light, was a beau-ful portrayal of the sanc-ty and innocent simplicity of such a gift of grace ... and I laughed out loud when I discovered that Courtney named this image Grace, designating it as February 22 on his Pool of Possibilities e-Calendar. Perhaps my joyful response is a good example of this Visual Echo that I created several years ago, coming full circle with an invitation to ‘risk delight.’

Visual Echoes are a marriage of images and words – sometimes the words come first, when I am so struck by a phrase and I immediately know I need to combine those words with one of Courtney’s images to enhance the impact I feel.

David Whyte’s poetic words prompted one of my first crea-ons: “You walk both alone, and completely accompanied in friendship, by every corner of Creation crying Hallelujah’ .... this Visual Echo has bought solace and hope to many people struggling with loss.

The reader has encountered this spectacular image in Portal 1 ... how does it impact you here, with the added text?

David Whyte was also responsible for introducing me to Antonio Machado’s famous line from his poem, ‘Traveler’: “There is no road ... you make your own path as you walk.” The words immediately struck my heart, and I knew the truth of it would be perfectly reflected in this image of the Namib Desert:

As I serendipitously started weaving these word-image tapestries, I realized they are a manifestation of what ARAS calls Ekphrasein: from the Greek, ‘to speak out,’ to ‘call by name.’ Jungian-oriented groups oRen adopt this as a prac-se to enhance symbolic imagina-on, having par-cipants describe one artwork using another medium, thus allowing each form to illuminate and amplify the other – a common example would be wri-ng poetry while viewing a painting. I discovered, in fact, that I had unknowingly been working with this concept for many years, with my Third Note story about my rela-onship with Courtney ... when you bring two people together, it can be likened to a chemical reaction, as their interac-on creates a new compound that is different from the two original ingredients. Both can stand alone ... but together, a combina-on of those energies creates something new and enhanced, greater than and different from each on its own.

Enjoy these layerings of Visual Echoes by clicking the individual images on this grid below -- this will lead the viewer into an expanded experience of each image; clicking again will open a text page with the Visual Echo accompanied by my thoughts and musings, as well as the creative details about Courtney’s original image.

I hope these layers of experience will open new vistas for you that deepen and enrich your Landscape of Consciousness.

I was puzzled by these unexpected physical responses, twice, with such sharp and unanticipated emotions ... and was left with a yearning to understand the ‘something’ that cut so deeply into body and psyche. I was tapping into the sphere of invisible imagery and the corresponding mystery embedded in it. I didn’t know until much later that it was an awakening. I have subsequently witnessed this in others in the presence of this energy, a powerful emotional release bringing some people to their knees.

Having been activated by the spiritual energy carried by these Black Madonna figures, over subsequent years I was led into the works of the great Jungian teacher, Marion Woodman, as well as Ian Begg, China Galland and Margaret Starbird. Their writings address the desire of so many women (and men) to find a face of divinity they can identify with, that speaks to the deep primal spiritual perspective that is found in the archetypal energy of the dark goddess as the Divine Feminine.

The Black Madonna brings layers of experience ... mythic, religious, spiritual, energetic. This tradition is ancient, found in all the names of the Divine Mother Goddess figures of India, Egypt, Africa and the Far and Middle East. She is represented in indigenous psychospiritual traditions worldwide, in myths and shamanic practises of the Inuit, Sami, and original peoples of Siberia, North and South America, Mexico and Polynesia. She is the archetypal Mother embodied in the land and in ritual. All this exploration helped me to understand my nostalgia, as I pursued this connection further in my writing for Visions of the Goddess, the book Courtney and I produced in 1998.

All my experience and subsequent writing on the Black Madonna led me to a spiritual path of meditation and inner vision techniques. This intense work with inner images allows me to reach and explore metaphysical spaces and to know spiritual connections such as the Black Madonna. More than that, inner vision techniques provide a navigational tool that is precise, reliable and repeatable. A letting go of ordinary mental consciousness leaves me at a threshold that allows me to both witness and to participate in these transcendent spaces. Like Janus, the god who looked both ways, I can envision into the past and into the future, through images that come to me from those otherworldly realms. I feel this as a deepening of the enantiodromia I was reminded of in my dream of opposites recorded in Portal 2, but here I am at the bottom of the pendulum, with visionary experiences arriving from all directions as I swing through the fluid non-dimensional continuum of consciousness. I am reminded of Sarah King’s map to heal intergenerational trauma by recognizing that “we are the nexus between the dreams of our ancestors and the memories of our descendants." Half of our human inheritance is from past incarnations. My inner vision spaces offer me experiences of my ‘self’ in the constellation of all of those figures that I carry, a Janus-faced self beyond our notions of time and space, past and future. Then it becomes my challenge to explore these aspects of my consciousness, the ancestral memory of my Higher Self that I am being shown, as well as to accept the opportunity to integrate those ‘selves’ into my life today.

These are beautiful examples of how seeing objects and feeling physical sensations are talismans that can lead one into and through traumatic experiences, to healing. Saint George is a figure associated with guiding humankind in the development of consciousness. He is said to slay impulses that lie in both the physical and unconscious realms, to awaken humans to create a more spiritual awareness in the universe. There are many possible layers of meaning that could be explored here, but for me, the first awareness was a reminder to let go of ‘soldiering’ and to disconnect with ‘war’; I am called to awaken to the spiritual path that I already know at some level, as I recognized, in the session, that it is ‘unfair’ to kill me -- that I am bearing the flag and riding away from battle. It may also reflect my essential nature, in my ability to see problems, and possibilities, and thereby my penchant of taking ‘the world on my shoulders’ – of being at ‘war’ with myself and the world, ‘soldiering on’ as I take on too much responsibility for things I cannot, or should not, be doing. This has been a lesson in discernment that is a life-long ongoing practise!

It is not easy to portray the appearance and pass the space and the quality of this healing blue light that appears so often ... it feels like being anointed and caressed, coming in waves that open my heart and flood my inner visual space – it carries a penetrating physical warmth that enlivens my etheric energy, and at the same time, leads to a loss of reference to my physical body ... to an ‘out of body’ experience. This luminosity is a connection to high and powerful noetic forces that are immense, and indescribable – but knowable. I am reminded of a comment from Christin Lore Weber talking about death: “we had drained out of language all we could – we now had to face realities where language, once our great solace, could not help.” I could just as easily say this about the incapacity of human language to explain my inner experiences in any elegant way.

The closest I can see the quality and mystery of this light in the physical world is this image of opalescent blue water at Crater Lake, Oregon, the deepest lake in North America, made sacred in the creation story of the local indigenous Klamath peoples. The inner sheen has a luminosity that feels like it is penetrating the veil from another world.

Why do these images come to me, and especially at these times? I know it is not for me to question metaphysical timing. At times the images have a powerful direct impact on my awareness, and at other times they carry a subtle learning that I might not have noticed if I hadn’t experienced these sessions. As with dream symbols and figures, I follow these opportunities to glean what might be meaningful in my waking life. Reflecting the first session, in this life I have long been intrigued by items such as wisdom books, red stones and illuminated manuscripts. The sense of being able to reach into some sacred knowledge also resonates, along with a certain unease in being charged with the responsibility to protect and pass on these secret traditions.

Like many women, at a very occult level, I have a vague and mysterious resonance with lifetimes as a persecuted healer or ‘witch’: women with secret and powerful abilities that have literally driven me into hiding -- or for which I have been killed. The images of being pursued, imprisoned, killed or persecuted because of the secret knowledge I carry has a resonance in this lifetime, not in physically threatening situations, but in perhaps not speaking out as much as I could, not feeling confident of what I know, sometimes creating a certain reticence in the progression of my spiritual studies, or minimizing a recognition of connection to a profound spiritual thread. This echoes even now as I write this section, uncertain about how safe it is for me to be transparent about these and other spiritual experiences and the knowingness I feel at a lot of levels, both through intuition (such as Inner Landscapes readings) as well as higher spiritual practises. I am now ready to let that uncertainty go, and share my world.

The appearance of a women in blue or the blue light supercedes any vestiges of reluctance ... these blue elements have become frequent in my inner vision sessions, feeling like an angelic presence coming to assist ... and sometimes I recognize that energy as the Black Madonna. The blue light is a constant visitor, a healing presence that is indescribably and breathtakingly beautiful, and a powerful force in my body. My shoulder pain has gone.

These spaces are magical, other-worldly, filled with effervescent energy, and feel luscious – I am in them, as well as watching this. I include the above photographs not as an illustration of the experiences, but as an example of how some of the images generated from my earthly sensory and visual experiences resonate with my metaphysical experiences (and vice versa) and sometimes intersect with dream images. I visited this decorated underground passage grave at Gavrinis, France, years before any of my inner vision experiences – in fact, it was the same time I first encountered the Black Madonna. The physical caves held a magnificence, mystery and thrill that stayed with me, easily pulled up in the memory of my mind’s eye. The incised rock patterns are attributed to Megalithic peoples who used these underground passages for death and burial rituals. The gold, the obsidian, and the sacred texts in my sessions are like talismans or portals. Sitting on volcanic obsidian flows near Paulina Lake in southern Oregon echoes this sense of deep vaults of connection running through my body. These inner vision experiences feel like openings to after-death spaces, expanding my understanding of the vastness of this life -- and the next. I am full of wonder and awe that this human me can know this.

Over the years I have had a sequence of experiences in caves and underground passages that connect me with spiritual beings, symbols and rituals:

Many years before these inner visions, I was awed by the walls of this earthen cave (below), the so-called Ghost Cave at Pictograph Cave State Park in Wyoming. It is a temple-like place, embedded with shapes that look like a gathering of ancestors witnessing and protecting the memories of all that has gone on here below the earth. The lavender and gold-colored crystalline rocks seem to glow and vibrate.

There is a sacred resonance between these caves of the physical earth and the caves of my inner vision. In the metaphysical experiences, I have a feeling of certainty, a surety and a recognition of what is happening, and the ultimate sense of ‘yes’. I see the details of the rituals, I am that figure or in that space, I know what is going to happen next, and know the meaning behind that. This kind of recognition and knowingness in non-rational states feels profoundly true. Did the decorated stone passage grave somehow presage my metaphysical experience? Or perhaps it works the other way around, that I ‘recognized’ the physical caves because I knew them -- or sacred caves like them -- from another timeline or lifetime. I am reminded of that non-linear, non-local, multidimensional aspect of what we call ‘time’ – a coexistence of spaces at different levels, Earth time and Kairos time intersecting ... the past, present and future interwoven as in Aboriginal dreamtime or other cultural or mythic accounts.

I have long been entranced by this image of Courtney’s (below) from the winter pool. In physical reality it is a closeup of fractured shards of ice glinting in the sun on a background of sodden leaves floating in the open water. I didn’t understand why it was so thrilling until the above sequence of sessions (over a year) repeatedly showed me the similar geometry in my inner vision. The repetition is mysterious, leaving me wondering what wholeness it might be reflecting from an archetypal realm.

Triangles and other geometric shapes are seen in many traditions as archetypal symbols that carry energetic forces. I might compare them to sacred objects in the physical world that link us to a spiritual feeling or experience, but the interior geometries here are sacred structures that can take us into metaphysical spaces. They may act as anchors or portals into inner vision experiences, and can also reconfigure the energetic structures in our body. These visionary figures exude a sense of clarity, power and decisiveness. I can feel they are holding certain values and are willing, and geared into, leaving this lifetime for higher principles. They know what needs to be done and what they can do ... yet another lesson in discernment for me.

I often receive these experiences reluctantly, but I am compelled to honor and allow their indications of knowingness and ability to strike my curiosity; I want to avoid hubris, but be open to exploration and experimentation. I keep my humility in line by again remembering Courtney’s vision for his work: “to reveal the unfolding mystery ... not to try to solve it.”

I am then drawn into yet another cave of transformational symbols with spiritual guides:

I feel this as a symbol of ‘the sword in the stone,’ a Grail-associated mythic object that holds and transfers power to the one who can release it from the stone. I feel the fiery effect on my subtle bodies, especially my heart and belly – a yin-like softness, like a womb feeling of aliveness and expansion. It feels like being encapsulated in a huge warm ‘egg’, all of my subtle bodies expanded and held, my root/charge energy softer than before, but also more powerful in its holding below. This is accompanied by a wave of emotion, with another sense of nostalgia and recognition ... and a feeling of ‘belonging.’

Imagine my surprise, more than a year later, seeing a television program on Derinkuyu, an ancient underground city in present day Cappadocia, Turkey. This concealed place is a multilevel labyrinth of temples and tunnels thought to have sheltered up to 20,000 people, from the time of the Hittite tribes in 1200 BC to early Christian colonies seeking refuge from Roman entrapment in 17 AD. But for me, what is so startling and intriguing is the resonance with the underground spaces I have experienced with inner vision, and the quality of the underground light, seen here as electrical light, but with a luminescent quality similar to the light in my vision.

This next sequence portrays a level of transformation that is quite frankly almost without words ... a sense of disbelief, but also a knowingness ...

The light-filled horse guides me past my castle home, the place of worldly nobility, of elite human power and prestige, of defense and protection from the outside world. I no longer need this ... both my horse and I are carrying the light of our spiritual quest – the horse takes us up the hill towards a tower which then turns into a golden temple ... the gold of the tradition ... the gold flame of the lost tradition of the ancient Christ ... where my spirit-horse then transforms into a unicorn, the feminine aspect of Christ on earth ... the unicorn’s single midline horn resonates in my Third Eye, my energetic antenna that links physical and phenomenal worlds, connecting my subtle energy bodies with Spirit. Our spiritual forms have overcome the illusions of the physical world, in the light of grace.

The next magic appeared a year later, in the form of a winged horse and a secret codex:

The spiritual evolution of horses are powerful symbols of transformation and connection with other realms. Archaic and contemporary traditions acknowledge the intuitive nature of the horse, and its ability to understand human needs ~ modern-day equine assisted therapy is based on those principles. Anthroposophist Rudolph Steiner talked of the spiritualization of the horse whose intelligence, he said, was a necessary forerunner to our human intelligence. The Hindu Vedas symbolize the horse as a spiritually evolved creature of purity, beauty and speed, often pictured with wings and linked to many deities in the Hindu wisdom pantheon.

This feels like a disentangling with my earthly ego. I could compare the function of the repetition and recurrence of images to the physical world of somatics and myofascial massage, where the therapist holds the areas of the body until a physical (and often emotional) softening and release starts to happen. It is like the alchemical principle of waiting for awareness to be ‘cooked’ (as in my ‘Uncooked Chicken’ dream), until it has matured to the point where it can be ‘digested’, or integrated ~ an enhancement of consciousness. It is almost like stepping over the raised threshold of a temple, passing through the liminal space, leaving behind the world of the temporal and profane, entering sacred space.

The possibility of a deceptive cadence reminds me that there is always more to experience, to understand, to be awakened as a new motif modifies the melody of my life. Perhaps, as CS Lewis suggested, I will be ‘surprised by joy’ ... as I dwell in that liminal space, the threshold of beginnings, where the noble chaos of life cradles me. It is in that fertile nexus where I may gather together all the ephemeral images of my inter-generational ‘selves’ --past, present and future -- as they permeate through the porosity in the veil of separation, weaving my inner connections and expanding yet another layer of my experience of Self.

My creation of Grace Notes is a further expansion of this theme, with new angles and layers of awareness emerging through the weaving of words and images in my Visual Echoes, or in an expanding sense of rich interiority through the images of Wabi Sabi.

The mystics tell us that God hid the light of Creation in the world for us to see, and this embedded light offers us a chance for awareness, for self-reflection, and for redemption.



This promise might encourage us to continue our journey into the metaphysical to see ‘with new eyes’ ... to follow the invitation of physicist-philosopher Richard Feynman to “leave the door to the unknown ajar" ... to follow the cadence embedded in this lifetime and to step at will, and respond to each invitation, each spark or impulse being revealed ... to rejoice in life, and to allow ourselves to be seduced even further into the beauty of the seen and the unseen worlds, so full of potentiality ... of possibility.