Metamorphosis

 The endlessness of forms, the immense variability of fragile and fleeting beauty, myriads of fluttering wings of aerial angels ‒ my virtual collection consists of over eleven hundred images of butterflies, a result of my unswerving fascination. Nothing is random: All that comes near us, that fulfills us, that we surround ourselves by, has a deeper meaning. Shamans, interconnected with nature, believe in "spirit animals" that play a role of guides in our lives, thus I ask myself: Is it the butterfly in my case? Whence has become part of my corporeal canvas the very Monarch Butterfly (or, its white morph, rare among its colored, usually orange, mates), on the spiritual meaning of which in relation to my own life I am about to reflect in the following lines.

In view of the monarch's life cycle, I must be in the stage of a cocooned caterpillar (chrysallis) that has yet to become a butterfly: It indicates a passage from passive inner development into active physical manifestation, which results from metamorphosis (egg-larva-pupa-butterfly); the inner transformation the butterfly undergoes until its rebirth ‒ like I, a human being, do in my life, thus resonating with my spiritual path.

The monarch migrates for thousands of kilometers for several generations until its "super" generation reaches its destination. It caries a message of unwavering faith that, even though our journey that we embark upon covers a great distance and leads through the unknown, uncertainty, changes and obstacles, we can stick to it successfully to come home in the end ‒ where we are meant to be and belong to in life. It is a creature of the spiritual world, connected with its entities (ancestors, angels...), that, despite its apparently fragile beauty, symbolizes strength, endurance and joy.

This butterfy is typically active in daylight only, being drawn to it, and uses its inner compass in accordance with the sun when migrating (as opposed to moths that are nocturnal, thus symbolically related to darkness). Figuratively speaking, it is our inner guide that leads us through the dark along the right path to the light.

That which appears to be the end is but a new beginning, a transition from the the old (that which is going) to the new (that which is coming). I believe that all in nature is in the process of a continual, ever-lasting transformation, in which sense the end ceases existing: There is no ending ever, all but metamorphizes. Energy ‒ the immaterial and unpalpable, yet perceptible and perceived, which is the essence of all life ‒ endures. The butterfly shares the symbol of transmutation and resurrection with Phoenix, which is also depicted on my body but, mainly, impressed on my psyché, as I have gone through its inner fiery transformation.

✾

Truth be told, I do realize the importance of pursuing my soul purpose and fulfillment in life, with my inner voice being quite incessant in this regard, the more so when I am middle-aged but still struggling with its materialization. My dwelling in the spiritual world (that of dreams, visions, ideas, thoughts and feelings), my preoccupation with it, is dividing me from the material world to a fault ‒ as the monarch's metamorphosis depicts ‒, as things can only be manifested in the physical world. Art transforms non-matter into matter, the "dance in my heart" is expressed through my physical body used as a tool. Therefore, without a connection between mind/spirit and matter/body, nothing sensorially perceptible comes out of it. There occurs a transformation from imagery to the physical (or, bodily movement as in dance), not vice versa, in my case, so having a vision (as a mental image) is a must, but it still needs materializing. Only then can I reveal, verbally or nonverbally, my inner world ‒ via poetry or dance.

In the aftermath of past trauma, we may be filled with paralyzing fear and a loss of (self-)confidence, which hinders the free flow of a creative and loving energy of ours, affecting our creative self-expression and deeper connection with another/others both in an artistic and societal setting as we struggle with a sense of personal deficiency and vulnerability. That is closely familiar to me... The time for my dance creation was ripe long ago, but I will never feel quite ready (that is/would be a futile waiting) and could only procrastinate ad infinitum, so it feels rather like "now or never" ‒ it is just that it feels as if I was to jump off the cliff believing that I will not fall but spread my wings and fly. Only after my longing has prevailed over my fear can I make it. I am self-aware enough to know that, once I find the resolve in me, from that critical point on, I will be able to stick with it and persevere ‒ in the same vein as I have vowed I will never give up on dance (only if paralyzed or dead, seriously). 

The best aspect of it ‒ and, simulataneously, the biggest challenge of all ‒ is that it depends on me mainly, on my overcoming inner obstacles, not (so much) outer ones. Should we believe in ourselves, no-one else need to (however morally uplifting it feels when somebody else does!), nor can anyone stop us! Even though my path remains stony in this, at times I do experience those shiny moments which my healthy self-confidence shines through, during which I am connected with my inner creative force and emanate inner peace. Tormenting and destructive self-doubts disappear then and I recreate my ideas into reality in flashes of happiness with a childlike spontaneity. I observe myself as if from the outside and behold myself treading my path with faith in its rightness and meaning while attracting to myself the longed-for, as in such moments all springs from my full awareness deep inside that I am innerly complete, that I am infinite within, that I can do it, thus I will make it! And it is in that time when the dance in my heart, the love of artistic creation and human connection springs out.. 💕

Metamorphosis © Ladanseuse

Written bilingually, in Czech "Metamorfóza", on 5. 10. 2021, edited & published on 29. 11. 2021

The Essence of Art

What seems to be a sad paradox of the present time is the fact that despite the quickening and simplification of mutual contact and communication people appear to be growing apart, as if their communal time has shrunk into a couple of fleeting moments, as if the space they perceive by their path, around themselves, was just a few meters distant from them. It saddens me at times ‒ which may be why I am so drawn to art, which defies indifference, as it builds bridges that arch over such distances, as, through it, the creative relates self-expressively to the world, with which (s)he so connects as the creative energy comes out from within, from the spiritual into the material, as if it was within him or her wherein, unconsciously and spontaneously perhaps, lay the pure power of co-existence, which expands, and a certain connectivity of a world suddenly complete.

Art is strong. It is a world in and by itself, a sphere of distinctiveness the form of which is dependent on its creator, for it is the creator who says: This is how I see the world! Thus we can look at the world through different eyes, from a unique perspective. Art is a light that transcends itself and its partakers in a life-giving force in the embodiment of our earnest longing for spiritual deliverance ‒ such art is London's Star Rover in the undying poetry of life, since, even if restricted, it will throw off its hurtful shackles and slip out of darkness. It springs from the soul that knows no physical boundaries. In this, it is larger than life ‒ at least the ephemeral physical one.

The notional realm has no end, being chiaroscuro, clair-obscur, fumbling, and reveals itself in an impalpable artistic message personified by people themselves. May my inner world be the heart and soul, may anything be my kingdom, it is the outside world that represents contact ‒ albeit not only with beautiful materialized dreams, but also with empty and needless cruelty ‒ and it is life, rhythm, motion, direction, growth. And I cannot get arrested, or I will die ‒ but now that the faraway is unfolding before my eyes and thoughts are whizzing past in the crazy of world of ephemerality, I am falling to the hard ground; now I am getting lost but without going astray as I notice a fixed point while dancing in a musical embrace.

We fear that whatever we create will be taken by time ‒ that said, as though during our life we each drew our own picture that will speak on of what we were like, thus leaving our mark on the map of the world. There exists no world ‒ we are the creators. We are footprints in the dust of roads, writings engraved in stone, echoes among mounts, ships at a stormy sea, trees reaching up to the sky, raindrops in sun heat ‒ we are life. We create, recreate ourselves, our own essence through our artistic creation. Art ‒ whether it be a paint, a sound, or a motion ‒ is a dream build upon thoughts, our mark of a gone life in infinity; art is a way toward us.

It is through art that passing moments endure, being captured, transmuted, immortalized. Not everyone will understand them, but the perceptive will try to grasp them. One must be open to get the message. Understanding dwells in the acceptance of distinctness. There is wealth and beauty to be found even in the unseen, unheard, and unnoticed. The secret lies in the art of feeling ‒ feeling art. In that, art teaches us how to live.

It is my conviction that the essense of true art inheres within its spiritual outreach. Despite working with palpable tools to self-express in the outer world, it is not only to play with superficial forms but to stem from inner wealth, shaping an immaterial energy, thus allowing the select of us create something that will exceed themselves in space and time. Something of this kind must not be marginalized or suppressed because where there is art, there is the heart ‒ and the heart is life. The artist cannot but make art, he or she must hallmark it by distinctness, put the heart into it and let it sing and weep, look for its essence. Even the best technically created harmony feels empty unless it is a living story and dream.

Uniformity is not of art's own, it is not monolithic, neither does it obey the principle of fixed delimitation ‒ the only limitations lie in our fear and humanity itself.  Just as the piano has a certain number of keyboards but the music it makes is infinite, the body as a tool is delimited in space but the creative soul knows no boundaries. Thus, each of its pieces can be differently colored, like a mozaic, and into each of them another human fate or experience in many a rendition and intensity can be projected. It is such freedom of expression that endows it with expanse and development, although it has its "buts": If art is limited or, God forbid, banned, the mere miserable existence of a more or less dead form or even its demise is imminent; if it is absolutely limitless in its freedom, it can be enriched or degraded by it. In this, art reflects its creator.

Therein arises the question of authenticity. Can authenticity be referred to all that is original, an artistic act as unique as a newborn child, which is not yet another blind carbon copy of whoever or whatever? Or, does authenticity spring only from the source of a tradition that sees to the preservation of certain features to make a given creative act what it is proclaimed to be? Even if your life is intertwined with that of others, the uniqueness of your human experience is beyond doubt; thus, if you tell your story in your own words and put yourself, your true Self, into it, you, as an artist, remain genuine.

Art is my pillar. It is "the little something" that is all that suffices to make my whole world shine. As if, out of a sudden, my nameless life and faceless existence gained content and meaning. It is to me what water is to a river. It is the breath that sustains my beating heart. Music speaks to me and I do not know what it says, but I can feel it and understand, so I cannot remain motionless, with it moving my body on an emotional wave, I feel like dancing, perhaps because my inner world has never been blind to beauty or to pain either, and this world within me wants to live, open its arms to freedom and never be silenced.

Art is liberating, cathartic and healing. It is abstract in its dancing poetry, soulful and divinely inspired. With its self-expression stemming from inner imagery, divergent from any externally given or reality-based form, you, as a creative, free from any dictate, are given total freedom in authenticating and materializing your own unique percepts. The interrelationship of us and God is not necessarily religious, and I feel it on a spiritual plane as an omnipresent, all-embracing and all-permeating energy that infuses wisdom and inner guidance, animation and creative inspiration into our soul, as if the Universe was re-creating and expressing itself through us. You draw from within that which is sourced from without all there is.

To the one whose views are earthbound and conservative, whose focus is on the material and pecuniary, the world of art(ists') is "peculiar" while I am the embodiment of an impractical nefelibata who places art upon a pedestal as I weave my long-winded emotive stories. If only I could, I would devote my life to art solely but for being a soul trapped in the material world, faced with the need for a means of subsistance, not by choice but of necessity, and art is my life but not (yet) living, even in need of investment itself, so I will struggle on the material front while nurturing the dream of an artistic breakthrough. The more the one who measures any endeavor against profitability (seeing it as an end, not a means to an end) equates my creative dreams to "pointless" pursuits, the longer I dilly-dally, literally dancing around it, in fear, so, with my external and inner critic united, there you go....

The more so, amid predominant materialism, capitalism and underappreciation of art as something "dispensable", one's genuine love of art that exceeds business is applaudable. What if, to some, it is a reason to live, this making it a must? Dance is everything to me and permeates my life to the point of being synonymous with it. What would a society be without culture? It would become but soulless, empty, dead.

And yet, mine is a rebellious heart that will scream, "The critics must be silenced!" and "Carpe diem!," and go on dancing this ever-lasting dream and will not let me rest until I go and fulfill it in reality, as this calling toward artistic creation I feel so strongly drawn to is a purpose to live for that stems from undying passion and, as I would like to believe, indomitable spirit. What I see as an inevitable part of success is the cessation of living in my head and the adoption of a can-do attitude with courage, faith and trust in myself and my odyssey.

The Essence of Art © Ladanseuse

Original English groundwork undated, 

text expanded upon and translated into Czech on 18.. - 19. 11. 2021 to be published bilingually on 22. 11. 2021

Self-perception

The only way leads through unrestraint because only that can open the door to any challenge out there. 

Self... used to be my identity: the breathing existence of a tangled mass of thoughts, silenced being in the roar, a self-defeating fear, a miniscule stary fraction, dust floating in the air, something so familiar that it became mystification... Did it form in emptiness, or was it nought in space?

Now... in a kind of peculiar vegetative state, in the interspace, in the intertime, Self is gone... and there has arisen a haunting question, What is Self? What on earth is it in essence?  Self is beyond itself, Self has ceased being itself, if it ever existed at all ‒ thus, is Self a mere concept, a construct serving our own urge for egoism; is my Self truly identical to your Self, with our Selves in the sphere of the absolute ‒ and ‒ can it be unique in the relative world only? Self has become meaningless, is nought, since God knows what it is.

The inner entity has come to dwell within me ‒ effortlessly, as if it was part of me from time immemorial, being both all-embracing and itself exceeded by all, all-enduring, ever-lasting, constant, unshatterably certain and calm. I am a soul, as if I had no body, was no-body, could be anywhere, anytime, and yet remain changeless.

While Self used to be represented by run-aways, now my being is interpenetrated with a higher power, as if transformed into a kind of alter ego; everything and everybody that my eyes are set upon, all is focused upon and seen through, for fear has vanished... As if Self has entered another dimension. Boundaries are nonexistent, this is getting to the core of things.

If Self is not, what is left? Consciousness? Consciousness of what? Of that all is limitless? How can I be a victim if I respect no limits? Limits created by my mind out of fear of infinity... and the mind identifies itself with Self.

If my life has been like reaching the end of a tunnel, whereat there is nothing but a wall, against which I am hammering and can only reverse..., then I can no longer grow, I have no freedom anymore. But, I need to grow and expand within ‒ I cannot get arrested, become a bogus, turn into a shadow...

All that is onging will continue. All the people will keep on passing through my life as until now. My feet will step onto familiar ground a hundred times and my mind will get lost in unknown places many times more. Even fear will come, and fear cannot be discarded nor eliminated, but ‒ just as anything else unfavorable and unwanted ‒ it can be accepted as something that creates balance; it can interpenetrate me, just passing through and out of me, leaving me unchanged. There is no need to suffer from it ‒ I can go through fire, I may be in pain, it may be uneasy, but I can do it without being burnt, and that will be it. 

Given all that has ever flashed through my life, only that which prevails, that which withstands all changes is of merit.

I can always escape into solitude, possibly craving for being the only living thing in the boundless horizons, only if I am certain that all these walls that devide me from the embodiment of my pier ‒ another human being, my precious one, a strenghening bond ‒ can be torn down anytime. Will I be able to gain strength unsupported one day?

Now... I fear not, even though I cannot be more open...

Break free from Self. Break down the wall. Let things pass through you and go. Become a constant authority. You need no crutches that will not support you, no strange faces that will overlook you, no inner heat that will burn you. Just be and stay in wisdom.

All the weakness, the pettiness of labor, the pain... all of it has led me as far as here, to the other side, and had me seeking deliverance.

Power, power, power... There is no Self... no restrictions... no victimization... There is just creativity... like the passing of time and the beating of my heart... I can but be a life, I am a life, not an arrested existence that is just growing old, but a life that has no end.

I cannot be any Self unless I know what that is. All is just the substance... immaterial and prevailing. What a strange feeling it is, even head-spinning, roving the stars...

Self-perception © Ladanseuse 

Written on 26. - 27. 9. 2005, translated into Czech, edited & published on 16. 11. 2021

The Infinite "I"

 I observe four fundamental levels of so-called "multividuality", which is an existential question of a personal identity (Who am I?), uniqueness (but of heterogeneity too) and correlativity of oneself and the surroundings.

💞 Level One💞
The so-called "I" is but an ego-made mental construct designed for self-identification and identity, but it is also the delimitation of Self in relation to others. The "I" has built up walls, in fear of losing itself, the "I" fears "You", the "I" cannot be "Us" then. 

💞 Level Two 💞
We are each a miniscule fraction of the all-embracing universe, a piece of a giant mozaic, and, as such, we are part of a bigger whole that exceeds us. Therefore, we may feel tiny and insignificant. Small things become big ones though; a whole is composed of all its parts, so even a single missing part, even the tiniest of all, will cause such a whole cease being whole, as it no longer is complete. We are thus an integral part of entirety, without us, there is not what surrounds us either.

💞 Level Three 💞
We are alike rather than unalike. We are born of the identical source, we come from the same environment, we are of the selfsame essence. We are all interrelated, all in the cosmos is interconnected. Another person is a variation to me myself, in which sense I observe myself in You and You observe yourself in Me, thus You are Me and I am You: We are each unique and yet one. There is no "I", neither is there any "You" ‒ there is only "Us", and only "Us" means a loving harmony. In this regard, the answer to the question, "Where do You end and I begin?", is: Nowhere. There are no boundaries in the sphere of the infinity of our soul.

💞 Level Four 💞
The world is neither black nor white, it is multicolored, and the truth lies in one of the shades of gray ‒ like Yin and Yang: there is a bit of black in white and there is a bit of white in black. A human being is such too: being not monolithic but multicolored, multilayered, and, yes, "multividual"... There is duality within him or her, ligh and dark, joy and pain... People play different roles in life, go through various phases, some hide behind their masks... There is a certain kind of ambiguity. And so does an "individual" exist at all, or is there but a "multividual"?

The Infinite "I" © Ladanseuse
Transl. "Nesmírnost ‘Já’", written on 4. 10. 2021

An inspiration to this loose reflection essay of mine, through which I offer my own insight into the main motif, was the beautiful brainchild named "Mnohodinec" (whence the neological "Multividual") of Lucia Kašiarová & coll., who has presented it in the frame of her "performative non-solo" in Studio ALTA (seen on 19. 6., 5. 10. , 23. 11., 15. 12. 2021; 2.. 3., and 22. 9. 2022).

→ Mnohodinec (site in Czech)
→ Lucia Kašiarová & Ufftenživot: Mnohodinec (English)

Catharsis by Fire

Baptism by fire will purge you;
you behold the fire's formidable glow,
which will burn down
but the old, but the evil,
for the new
from it will arise
unscathed!

Catharsis by Fire © Ladanseuse
Written bilingually, in Czech "Katarze ohněm", on 15. 11. 2021

Girl, Bound in Fear

 Girl,
wounded,
bound in fear,
her bashful eyes can only see
miniscule moles as giants mounts;
the mind engulfed  in thoughts
her lips cannot tell of;
her closeness drowns in the distance,
and yet she hides the whole world in her heart
from fear, the thief
that from her will steal 
all things and souls
that to her are dear.

Girl, Bound in Fear © Ladanseuse
Written bilingually, in Czech "Dívka strachem spoutaná", on 14. 11. 2021

Carpe diem II.

The present moment
is lying in your hand
like a gem ‒

do not let it go:
only it is breathful,
malleable, emotional, zestful;

only into it life can be breathed
before it has swiftly gone
and become a memory engraved in stone;

it whispers: Here and now is where and when I dwell,
reach for me FULL of love,
present your being in art with an open heart,
hear out my "carpe diem"!

For any "next" you wait not,
for what is behind the door is unknown,
a story to be told,
another moment may as well be "never more".

Carpe diem II. © Ladanseuse
Written bilingually, in Czech "Carpe Diem", on 14. 11. 2021

Nefelibata II.

I am a cloud walker,

a Peter Pan of the skies;

what is not, I dream up;

what is, only dreams realize;

only in reverie I feel alive;

it makes me ask whether you are real,

or whether I've dreamt you into being ‒

you, my too-good-to-be-true one;

a dream of my heart,

which would stop beating

if you were gone.

Nefelibata II. © Ladanseuse

Written bilingually, in Czech "Nefelibata" on 14. 11. 2021