‘This is my picture and I dunno what it means’ – A Journey of Revelations

by

S. Willson-Disher (Susannah MacDonald)

In getting down to the task of writing this essay, I had my usual academic writer’s block. I didn’t know what to write. I went round and round writing rot. But then a very funny situation from some years back popped into my head. I was running an esoteric art workshop in Melbourne, Australia, with husband Alan. It centred on encouraging people to draw as a means to access messages from Spirit. These workshops always went well. The participants drew their little hearts out and at the end of each hour or so long session they were encouraged to share any revelations from Spirit as to the meanings of their drawings. We looked at dreams, past lives and life paths among other things.

            All this rolled along very nicely, until we got to the final session of the day. The people were having the time of their lives, cheerfully describing the images in their art and what God was telling them about themselves. Lots of laughter. Then one of the women got on her feet. She hadn’t said much in our sharing sessions all weekend, and we all smiled expectantly at her. She was pretty, intelligent and funny, her comments during meal breaks full of good Australian humour, so we waited for her revelations which we sure would be intriguing. She stood with her picture turned away from us and in her broad Aussie accent said;

            ‘This is my picture and I dunno what it means.’

Alan said;

            ‘You haven’t shown us yet.’

Giggling, she held up her picture, full of colour and images. It never fails to amuse me how adults revert to the age of five under such situations.

            ‘This is my picture and I still dunno what it means.’

Alan said;

            ‘You haven’t started talking yet.’

She said;

            ‘This is my picture and I still dunno what it means, but over here is a….’ and off she went, explaining what each image meant to her, and half way she stopped and said ‘Shit I do know what it means!’

General applause and loud guffaws.

            Now I am just like that as a writer, and when I started writing these books within books, I felt like our friend;

            ‘This is my writing and I dunno what it means!’

But I went ahead regardless. My ‘dumps’ gave me some idea of where these themes were heading but taking a leaf out of my own facilitator’s book, and not stopping to analyse, I kept going, pulled along by my long nose by some unseen hand.  Halfway through the first book I got inkling as to what it was about.

            Part way through the second book the curious water-centred symbols started to reveal things to me, but not in a this-is-what-it-all-means-and-this-is-a-definitive-answer kind of way. Nope. I don’t think for one minute philosophers and seers got their messages encyclopaedia style either, so if it was alright for them it must be alright for small-fry like me.

            I must have smelt the proverbial rat when verse and poetry started coming to me. I had always considered that I was no poet and that now brings me to another story. I have a protagonist in another piece – I blogged it – the title is; The Biggest Gravel Mound on Earth. My very winsome protagonist is a poet named Amelia. I told myself that I can’t write poetry but Amelia can. So between us, Amelia and I did just that. There is very little of  her poetry actually in the story – I left most of it out as so not to interrupt the narrative – but what I discovered was a little like;

            ‘This is my picture and I dunno what it means.’

I hadn’t started writing yet and once I started dumping words, the thoughts tumbled out.

             So, to my book Echoes from a Time Passage…

The book is set initially, 200 years in the future. There have been great plagues and seismic catastrophes. All is not as it was. The first connections between the planes occur in what we know as Australia and New Zealand, but which are Australis and Zealandia in this future time. Part of the ancient continent of Zealandia has surfaced creating many changes. As I dig into literature and documents about the place, hints of the possible future rise to the surface with the words I write, like the continent itself.

            Ever since I was a small child, scraps and sometimes chunks of ‘stories’ from my imaginary friends who really did live at the bottom of my grandparents magical garden where I grew up, appeared in stories and masses of drawings which cluttered up my untidy bedroom. They kind of disappeared for a year or two, then a prompt in the form of someone or another’s illustration gave me a prod, out they popped and off I went again.

            I included this experience in the first books where ballet dancer April says in conversation with protagonist, ballet dancer Markas, who after spotting this Earth girl dancing on his father’s communication machine, finds his way down the Time Passage to reach her. She says;

‘I lost you,’ she said, ‘because I thought you were a figment of my child’s imagination. I immersed myself in my dance and university studies. Then of course there was a young man. There is always a young man or two when you are a student. I stopped being receptive…’ She paused and went on in a reflective tone: ‘Those years of late childhood had retreated along with that receptivity that goes with them.’

            That was my experience, and I felt it to be so true, for even in my painting practice, I have to continuously beat down the notion that my work is ‘not quite nice.’ No it isn’t nice, it’s metaphysical, mythological and semi-abstract, which as I will explain further on, got the support from my Mom who was never puzzled by anything that came out of my mouth or off the end of a pencil.  But of course I never came face to face with Markas, and somehow I don’t think I would have run shrieking in the opposite direction if I had. That receptivity of children, which I see in my students every day, is something which can indeed go the way of the expectations of adolescence and young adulthood and it is a brave person who sticks with it in the face of conventions.

            So four years ago I began writing again after years of dabbling due to a lack of confidence but it all started with Poet Amelia. Then I dipped my toe in the Universal waters and decided to swim.

            It came to me as a child that the other plane could be accessed through the trees, or water or anything really. I heard no stories along these lines, the word ‘plane’ meant something you flew to Australia in. I also learned that fairies were not just pretty things with wings, but took some very curious forms.

So as a much older adult I started writing about my first protagonist, diving into the Vast Waters from my fictional (?) Prophet Ezsk.

They who travel on the Vast Waters

Are one with the Creator and Creation.

            The first protagonist in the first book of ten, with the over-arching title of Echoes from a Time Passage, Markas Xanders emerges into a tradition of the theology of his people from the Plane of Ezskiasia, named for their prophet Ezsk.

            The theology and religious structure is in itself fascinating. As well as the central ‘god’ who I like to equate with the Jewish H-sh-m, and New Zealand Maori, Io – the name which must not be spoken - there is a raft of deities. There is the God/Goddess, a trinity of the Mother or Lover Goddess with her two consorts who represent the Word already in existence and the Word which is yet to come.

            As I wrote, a notion kept coming to me, and keeps clarifying, that when we write we clear the memories on our DNA, as much as from our past lives. The symbol of the sea keeps resurfacing and seems to wash away the religious bigotry from the ancestral line, but also the persecutions the ancestors suffered for their faith or ethnicity. Within the narrative are references to Judaism, Presbyterianism, very distant Catholicism, and very ancient Norse and Celtic mythology and theology.

            So to take a sideways step into another plane of existence in order to do this, harkens back to poet Amelia, and my I-can’t-write-poetry-but-Amelia-can diatribe.  In the writing of this narrative, I can take a sideways step and my own archetypes, in the forms of my characters, can clear the decks for me, and the rest of the greater family.

            The title Echoes from a Time Passage, arises from the sense that everything which has been written, seen, heard or sung remains in existence on a time line which is not a time line, but a continuous knot of conscious through which we can hear, see and feel information from the past – but contained in the knot is the idea that there is no past or future, it just ‘is’.

            From the outset of this book project, verse from their scripture almost demanded to be written down. Throughout the narrative, the writing is peppered with slivers of verse and as each sliver presented itself I saw a reflection of my own understandings but also verification of other esoteric revelations which had already come to me through poetic writing.

            I felt like a child raiding the cookie barrel when I began writing, with that sense of something forbidden, or ‘not very nice’.  I thought ‘Better not put this in’, quickly followed by the mask of Markas saying ‘You better had.’ I could almost hear my final protagonist, the frequently bad-tempered Kyrren saying; ‘your art is not “nice” so why should your writing be any different?’

It was a curious notion that my characters were always on my tail, but I had heard exactly the same idea from famous authors and concluded that this was quite normal.

            So I got around to considering what was being said in the first piece of verse and, Markas aside, saw that the Vast Waters were a metaphor for Consciousness, with the Creator at its centre. Axzis, Markas’ great-nephew wonders if God believed in Himself, a notion which amused me as I wrote, but I understood it very well at some level.

            Here again was the notion of the reflection, this time, not me but of God/Goddess looking back at Her/Himself.

‘Hold me in your Hand on the rolling swell of the Universes’ waves

Let me observe the revolutions of the stars and turn with them’

This verse offered a reminder, of being part of the Universes and all that is contained within them. 

They who travel on the Vast Waters

Are one with the Creator

Who alone spreads out the waters

Before them

The next verses directly refer to recurrence – the returning of matter and spirit to Consciousness.

They enter into the place from where all comes and then returns

The notion that one can access past lives while in the physical form rears its head several times and indeed, by the time we get to Kyrren’s narrative, the question posed by Captain Deshka, lover of the second book’s protagonist, Rieyniz, asks about a realm of white noise and light into which she wants to sail, is actualised.

            The next piece of verse is a reference to the concept of ‘lost souls’ – or rather those between incarnations, seeking their soul family. Sometimes it takes many revolutions of lives until they are all reunited then as a new soul body, are able to leave the plane of matter and continue on into the next phase of consciousness.

They who wander the desolate realms

 mourning their lost forms,

May yet again take form

And dance into the Realms of the Living

Where they who greet them, dance the same dance…

The ancient Greek concept of the Afterlife being a place of contemplation, seems to link in with this.

            The refrain  at the end of each verse, is the voice of the Soul asking Consciousness once again to be one with Her/Him.

Hold me in your Hand on the rolling swell of the Universes’ waves

Let me observe the revolutions of the stars and turn with them

They speak the words of the Heavens

In the last line ‘they’ seems to refer to the Heavenly Bodies or planets which influence our lives. It is a veiled reference to our choices of what we want to bring into our lives.

             In Time Passages the folk we would call astrologers are here, named Seers of Prediction but in essence they have the same function. One of Markas’ earliest experiences is when his father takes him to the Seer to read his chart of Predictions and it reveals his preoccupation with people of other places and planes of existence.

            I found the following verse one of the most intriguing. In the book the protagonist talks of a realm where there is apparently nothing, and makes a direct reference to the state of Enlightenment or God Realisation.

They murmur the utterances of the Deep

Where the Singing of the Seas ceases

 you will sail into the Realm of the Resolved

The Knot concept arose quite early in the narrative which was the over-arching philosophy contained within all ten books of Echoes from a Time Passage, and states;

Time is merely a loop in Consciousness

It has no beginning and no end…

Markas’s father attempts to describe his vision of time being a loop, a knot which like the infinity symbol has no beginning and no end. In writing this down I got a glimmer of what is meant by the Alpha and the Omega. Putting the feeling into words which mean something for the reader is another matter.

The Way is paved with Light and the Wings of the Immortals.

This is hardly unusual in Earth systems, in its reference to The Way which is of course the path to Consciousness Unity or as it is sometimes described Unity Consciousness.

At the edges of the Great Void

Swims the Mind of all Minds

Where all will enter

And from here depart.

 If we tread the Way, so too do we become one with them

 and our Wings raise us upwards.’

 Once again the verses refer to the Union with Self if Unity Consciousness is chosen, and the  material body can be left behind.

            For all the scripture in Time Passage, like the passages themselves, I was given words as starting points, and had to follow where they lead. There was no planning or editing. It was exactly like the process of channelling when one is conducting a reading either for a client or oneself, or to use the analogy of the book itself, to keep walking no matter what and do not stop.

‘Behold in my outstretched hands

Is the answer to all your desires

On the Great Waters of the Great Void

Take my hands and come

Come to the Edge of the Great Void

Of The Great Waters

The Great Sphere reveals itself’

Here the Prophet Ezsk speaks to his followers and to the writer hammering away at her computer. There was no doubt that another Adept was saying ‘Write all this down and you will get what you want in this lifetime.’ For the Great Void is in all probability, referred to by us Earthies, as a Black Hole and contains everything there is. But it seemed to be more The Black Hole – the Mega Black Hole into which fall all the Black Holes.

When you channel your own Adept you are left in no doubt, even though part of you says: ‘This is my story and I dunno what it means’.

            Then other imagery started filtering in.

Swallowed up by the Waters of the Great Mind

Between the Edges of the Great Void

And the Great Waters

The place of parting and of Departing

Follow the many hues

Through the Vortex

The Cone of Light

Contemporary quantum physics makes direct references to vortices and light in relation to matter and creation, so after writing this, lo and behold, information from the above discipline started turning up from various seemingly random sources. But there are of course no accidents or random events. Now, the vortex appeared in connection with the sea voyagers being contained within a vortex-like a tornado to carry the characters through the Divides, which are the oceanic connections between the Plane of Ezsk and Earth.

            May/ Alexandra, the third protagonist, living in Scotland describes riding into the sea-based vortex. The fishers, out beyond the Irish Sea, sail into an unfamiliar zone, and then things start to get strange;

‘Then the compass began spinning wildly but the boat was by now, stationary and rocking on the oily sea. It seemed only a moment later that the cauliflowers loomed in on us from all sides, spinning like a maelstrom. The sea resembled water going down the plughole, but Big Iain seized the wheel and fought to stop keep the boat on an even keel. The rest of us clung to anything we could find as the boat spun and rolled. For the first time in my seafaring career I felt as if was going to be sick, as I tried to see the horizon. Then as soon as it had started it stopped. The boat dipped and rolled for a while, the compass readjusted itself, and as the clouds cleared again, we looked out onto a familiar scene of grey sky, grey sea and evening falling.’

Alexandra finds that she is the child of Markas and April and her unusual appearance is not just her physical characteristics but something within.

 ‘They who walk the way of Righteousness

Carry the Fire of Knowing within their eyes.

‘Righteousness’, according to the Prophet Ezsk, is rightmindedness and the Fire of Knowing, the revelations which come from rightminded action and thought. Alexandra follows the way of right action, despite the challenges life presents her with.

            The next phenomena I have yet to experience, but here it is. Protagonist Kyrren in the final book describes something which I’ve yet to read about anywhere, though I’m sure it exists. The closest I can get to an Earth expression is the concept contained with New Zealand Maori regarding their communication with their ancestors. Their belief is that your ancestors stand before you, not behind you.

            But the reference here is to being able to observe oneself as one carries out activities and here, Kyrren the musician and the Dance Master are trying to knock some esoteric discipline into a generation of Temple Dancers who have lost the ability to see themselves as they dance. It refers to a broken chain due to political action, secularism and the breaking up of the esoteric families, and the resulting loss of abilities.

They have installed floor to ceiling mirrors in the Temple studio so that the students can see themselves. Kyrren makes a comment that this is a new step.

 ‘‘I know,’ said the former Dance Master ‘but this lazy lot need them. We used to be able to see ourselves through our inner vision but they don’t.’’

            The arts and reference to the natural sciences are the building blocks throughout Time Passages.  I have long felt that the arts are conduits for esoteric learning and music itself provides a conduit to the next life, with direct reference to this theory at the funeral of Book Nine’s protagonist Willa’s mother. Guitarist Kyrren sitting in a Glasgow chapel, plays first the Bach E minor Saraband which in itself has special reference, and then he says;

‘With that I broke into a gigue, and a bouquet of applause greeted the music which danced its way around the chapel and out into the ethers.’

The soul of Maire is taken to the next realm in the channel of music.

Throughout the entire narrative there are composers, musicians, painters and dancers, and in the writing of this project I know without a shadow of a doubt that these forms are potent channels of Divine Wisdom in all its forms. This idea is hardly new, but to experience it and own it is the difference between reading about a chocolate sundae, and eating one.

            In each instance, the channel is the conduit for a very high vibration. The indigenous Australian composer Carl, friend and mentor to Markas when he comes crashing into the Earth Plane, composes music in the channel of his people, who are often referred to as Aborigines. But Carl does something else – in his compositions he elevates the folklore into higher realms of vibration in order to heal the psychic scars of his fore bearers. His Ezsk painter wife is physical representation of one of the goddesses and her attributes, but Carl elevates her to the level of the Divine Mother.

            In the writing of this I went in search of contemporary ‘Aboriginal’ composers and studied the contemporary art. I was fortunate to pay a visit to Australia with my siblings to return our mother’s ashes to the place she grew up in. This had a profound effect on my writing for Mom would, in spirit, have remembered my childhood drawings of someone who looked like Markas. She would have agreed with my writing project. Not a writer herself – she was an artist – she was always intrigued by my ‘characters’. Like April in the first book, I laid aside my muzzled protagonist and got on with trying to be an un-eccentric teenager. We all know that doesn’t work, for in my case, he wandered back when I was in my early forties, and after much procrastination I finally made that breakthrough between a handful of scattered ideas, and something taking form.

            But to return to the point about Australia – the very soil oozes mystique, and it was this that I hope is conveyed in the character of Carl and his compositions. Given a fat grant and lots of time, I know I could compose his music but as I don’t have a fat grant I will content myself with describing his compositions, and references to those of Jesphaxia and Kyrren in Book Ten.

            Zeffir, the great nephew of Markas Xanders reflects on the Van Gogh-like trees revealing a concept of the Underworld more like the ancient Greek view, and perhaps in part, the concept of Norse Hel.

‘As I left the vault, feeling a little more resolved, I looked down the avenue of blackly swaying trees. They were ancient trees, said to line the corridors of the Underworld, the place of contemplation for those who had strayed in their physical lives. It is said that as the Souls resolved the errors of their thinking, they climbed the twisting branches until they came out in a new life on the Plane of the Living, in order to start afresh with the wisdom they absorbed in the Underworld.’

Zeffir is the cousin of Kyrren and they come to represent a physical manifestation of the Three in One Nature of Creation, with Scottish-Ezsk Willa representing the Divine Goddess.

            I have yet to see how this plays out in the here and now. I have seen many references in mythology to a supreme god figure and his women, and am ready to start digging for an example of a goddess, the holder of the power, and her two consorts.

            Throughout the narratives, the archetypal quest and discipline which leads to higher knowledge is played out in the lives of the protagonists, and examines the concept that one does not attain that higher knowledge by parroting doctrine or dogma, or simply waiting passively like a princess (for the women) to be saved or rescued.

            Markas is a reluctant leader, focussing on dance in order to attain Self Realisation. At his coming-of-age presentation he dances and his experience is thus:

Concerns of the material realm were dissipated with something approaching spiritual ecstasy as described by the Prophet Ezsk. Somehow I lost track of everything but the music and my movements. Then I wasn’t there at all. My leaps took me to Heaven, my soul soaring with each leap.

            I spun and wove my ecstasy into a textile which materialised above me, so like that of Rieyna’s poetry. I closed my eyes as I completed the dance, my feet and arms assuming a classical pose as executed by the temple dancers. But I was not there. Below me, the last running passages of music on the lute came to a close with three broken chords. As I returned to my body, I stood in my final position, energy flowing from my finger-tips and into the vastness of the Universe.  My fingers touched the stars.

He compares his dancing to the poetry of his sister, Rieyna, who is Self-Realised.

 Each of the women pursue their inner callings, not to ‘get the prince’, but for their own understanding of their positions in the Cosmos.

The secondary character Rieyna, who escapes from marriage to someone she doesn’t like and ends up via a Time Passage, in North Africa. Her trials on a journey on foot, following what she hears in her head as ‘Song Lines’ take her to Australis, to the home of Carl Butler and reunion with her brother, who has been backwards and forwards several times. I included the Indigenous Australian ‘Song lines’ as the concept is a beautiful one, being both a sung map to the various parts of Australia before the Europeans arrived, and a spiritual path. Rieyna hears them as well, and follows them with determination.

            Alexandra, daughter of Markas and April overcomes the deprivation of her childhood in psychiatric institution (she is put there because of her inconvenient origins), pursues her dream of her Selky lover (Scottish and Scandinavian mythology) and becomes a writer. I was not consciously thinking of the great New Zealand writer Janet Frame, but she was a real-life example of one who was incarcerated with a condition described as ‘schizophrenia’ but wasn’t, and by sheer doggedness, determination and much talent, wrote her way out of hospital.

            Lucy, the New Zealander, paints her way to God Realisation, and becomes a poet in her new home in Ezskiasia, but none of this is a walk in the park for her.

            Swordsmistress Thela, daughter of Rieyna and niece of Markas, arrives at Universal Consciousness through her discipline, her music and motherhood.

            Willa the Scot, lover and wife of Kyrren has, like the Celtic goddess Olwen, many trials to overcome – thirteen in Welsh mythology – but succeeds. Part of her quest is overcoming her fears, revulsion of her Ezsk heritage and expression of the Divine Mother through the Trinity through her love of the two cousins, Kyrren and Zeffir.

            Marama the Self-Realised singer remains steadfast to her revelations throughout her life. She marries the beautiful Maori boy, Te Ururoa, who she sees in her inner vision as a child. He is a leader of the Pounamu Network which is an inner network between Zealandia and numerous planes of existence. Pounamu is the Maori term for nephrite jade and is highly significant to Maori, being much prized as an adornment but also representing esoteric principles, the symbols carved having specific meanings and significance. So the Pounamu Network is in itself, a symbol of eternity.

     “Satisfy people’s need for the ridiculous         

  And they will accept your vision of the sublime.”                 

    Maurice Willson Disher

I am concluded with this quote from writer and my late great-uncle Maurice, because in some way it speaks to me about how I arrived at writing what and how I do so. I used humour over those missing years as I like to call them, as a cartoonist, the ridiculous, bubbling away on top of a still and deep flowing current, like Zealandia itself, beneath the surface.

             As with a number of my characters, their approach to life is peppered with humour and no more so than Kyrren’s father, who, because of his manner of preaching was dubbed ‘His Homeliness’ on account of his down to earth or rather, down to matter approach to his calling. Although he is a secondary character, he succeeded in amusing the congregation, created a sense of ease and from there the flow of the sublime was able to enter their lives. Spirit was not some far off, unattainable entity but something, to misquote ‘A Course in Miracles’, ‘as close as your own mind.’

The sense of the ridiculous brings us back to the beginning of this essay, but instead of ‘I dunno what it means,’ I think I can say now;

            ‘This is my writing and I do know what it means’.

But the last word would have to go to Kyrren, who spends a lot of time denying that which is in front of him, may say;

            ‘This is my story and shit…I really do know what this means.’