Another way of looking at it

I sat with the poplar for a while on a sunny morning in the middle of a longer-than-usual trot.

And I thought about her roots, my experiences and the seven processes.

Here's what I came up with. I have bound in with it the thoughts from the tarot and previous meditations.

When you are present and attentive and feel the presence of a living being with all the context of who and where and what you both are, the communities or community you are both in, there is a fire that burns away all of the ego stuff and all of the worries and desires and thinking and you are just attending. That is experience. It's what it does and how it changes you - at least for a little bit.

You take that experience and let it sit in your whole big self that's not just your thinking but is also your dreaming and your feeling. You let it dissolve into all the wideness and wildness of an unconstrained psyche: an underground sense that you value greatly.

When you next draw upon that experience, separate it from everything else, it has a uniqueness, an all-itself-ness about it, which is special to the living being who inspired it... and you celebrate this uniqueness.

You then allow yourself to return to the sense of being with that being - you, without ego; the other, as itself. "Bring the chaotic strands together and weave them into a harness that will fuel your travels."

Now you take that purer version of the experience and let it evolve, let it grow, however it wants to… you let it happen in its own way, you do not interfere.

You focus upon it and wait and wait – letting it distill into the very essence of what it is to feel at one with that one other.

And then you allow that experience to be both part of you and part of the other so that you feel that this connection is a two way thing and that to harm that other is to harm yourself, at some deep and important level. You are developing into "An untamed soul ready to journey beyond the known place to find their destiny... the greater danger is found in not pursuing your dreams."

Have that experience for Gaia as a whole, and you cannot, just cannot, do that which harms this system that is part of you and of which you are a part.

This led to a painting.

The cats walked on it when it was wet.

I add here, from a course colleague, his interpretation of the seven processes...

Seven operations

‘Visit the innermost part of earth and set things right’

- Calcination (BLACK): reduced to ashes, finding hidden essences against pressure of the super ego

- Dissolution (PURPLE): ashes+water are acid, further breaking down of psyche and immersion into the unconscious

- Separation (RED): first coming together of soul and spirit… insights of what can be saved from past operations or discarded

- Conjunction (GOLD): recombination of pure elements… rebirth… sacred process of setting it right. Marriage of thought and feelings and start of synchronicities

- Fermentation (GREEN): solid matter is putrified and set on fire and with more passion. It’s the desire to live something greater than us

- Distillation (ORANGE): extraction of essences of the physical matter, combining power of the matter and above. It’s done by the higher power of love and shakes out identity to keep only the wanted parts

- Coagulation (SILVER): sublimation of the essence fermented and distilled. Sense of consciousness beyond all things and everything is connected and the same light