About a wild place

I am a wild place - 

carved by thoughts

spreading winds 

and wings 

I am master

of this rare castle

towers windows 

skies and cliffs

a tempest sea

and a sky that opens and 

swallows me

This piece is a composit of more than one image that enchants me and to which my mind has retreated many times. The images of castle Pyke (GOT) which in turn lead me to images of Dunlace Castle (N. Ireland) are spectacular catalysts for imagination. I wanted to see if I might inhabit them more literally in the process of creating the images. I am captivated by the stormy sea and the idea of perching upon it in a stone castle with swinging rope bridges . I read recently in "The Faerie Folk" (an academic study conducted in 1909 by A scholar and researcher in which he interviewed a number of Celts from the Celtic lands of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. In it, he describes how dramatically changing weather is a reoccuring theme in faerie lore and is a foundation for the premise that the material world is but a symbol or skin of the dynamic world of forces that give it rise. It is to this world that the faerie folk in their various manifestations belong. For me, reading about esotericperspectives is a way of reconciling and reclaiming my own sense of the wild mysteries of creation and of becoming. This, and working with the imagination, losing myself in the potent practice of envisioning and creating an image, remind me that the potency of mind and the meaning of words like ‘magic’ may indeed represent awe-inspiring and very real experiences and levels of 'reality'. I think it important to acknowledge subjective and cultural underpinnings of perspective and the fact that one participates (or not) in the shaping of one's subjective reality depending on a willingness to question, challenge and inquire/exercise one's own perceptions and assumptions about the nature of being. 

The planet that hovers large in the sky behind these cliff towers was inspired not by the moon, but by the Planet Jupiter - the gas giant. the photographs I found of this planet, with its 14? moons bewitch me, and contemplating the guargantuan storms of swirling gas always stuns me for a moment. This too reminds me, of how small and narrow my ideas about what is possible are. Had I lived a mere few hundred years ago, would I have been able to conceive of the existance of such a massive entity? fascinatingly, it seems that many of the ancients did conceive, in their own way, of this Kingly Giant and he became (in the Roman Empire) the god Jupiter.

Of course I considered dragons for the skies here, but can a dragon not be rivaled in beauty and strangeness by the Owl? With his silent flight and 360 degree vision, he is at least as incredible a being. Gladly for us, he is not Dragon-sized.