Art notes from the studio

Going through that crash/burn out end of a long series hit the wall creative surge ride the wave all the way through time (when time shows up again all of a sudden and smacks me in the face) is never pretty. I'll check the backlog of photographs to see when "3 Shields" was started, but it was May or June. I thought it would never end, be finished, be resolved. And then for a few minutes in a light drizzle those last few marks of white paint made it sing. It was finished. I slept on it. I put it back over there where I couldn't see it and waited. I waited a week. It seems like a century. Time. I checked it out and it was still ready for my signature. I didn't feel like dealing with it right then. I waited. Finally on Sunday it got "Oliver!" along with another canvas and 8 works on paper. It all came to a head at once. The last sheet from a packet of 30 sheets of watercolor paper. More is on the way but until then, break time. Crash/burn. I went "mental" the next day. Monday, October 20, 2014. When a person is in the "zone" with creative energy they are insane by most standards, except there is something that results from this insanity that is positive (most of the time). If there isn't an outlet for the creative energy then it gets a little interesting all of a sudden. Crash/burn. It is over. Now the bird of fire slumbers until time to rise out of its own ashes. Smoke break. Love.

“3 Shields”

Acrylic on canvas

24 x 36 inches | 61 x 91.5 cm

October 19, 2014

For more information regarding my work please visit the Loveday Studio web site.

Sidewalk Meditation

I walk on these sidewalks

And I feel the sky evaporate beneath my feet

I detach from these feelings of falling into nothingness

While I am feeling myself falling

I walk across the sky

As I feel the boundaries of non-attachment

I detach from these feelings of non-attachment

Like a bird who is free from the limitations of feathers

I soar across the Universe

While I feel myself being released from time and space

I detach from these feelings about this Universe as home

Like a hobo whose only home is being on the road

I write poems about people's need for sidewalks

Like Han Shan's jokes about wasp's wings

Freedom is like a childhood rhyme about sidewalks

Step on a crack and break your back but don't fall through

I fell through a crack in the sidewalk

And almost broke my back

The pain of enduring the journey on a common thoroughfare

Never exceeded the bliss of knowingness in spite of feelings

I walk on these sidewalks

And over on the grass where dandelions grow

The illusion of freedom is not a feeling

But I feel it anyway

A-ho!

Oliver Loveday © September 9, 2014

“Astral Sidewalk”

Pencil, conté crayon, charcoal, pastel, oil pastel, watercolor and ink

12 x 9 inches | 30.5 x 22.9 cm | 50 lb acid free Canson

November 8, 2013

For more information about Oliver Loveday's work visit Loveday Studio.

Raising Hope

Not the television show, “Raising Hope”, although it is some good slapstick comedy. No, I'm talking about that other hope – hope. Hope is something that is ingrained in a person as part of their emotional development. That is to say, we give each other hope. When a person reaches a state of hopelessness where they feel like they have no reason to adhere to a sense of integrity then they will become controllable by anyone who can project the illusion of power over that person.

A tribal people who are taken into captivity and suppressed to the point where they become completely controlled by their captors will do whatever those in control demand of them. Often it will be at the threat of death to refuse to co-operate. That is the ultimate control of a People, to enslave them with no hope of freedom. When the People or individuals within that tribe maintain a sense of hope that freedom is possible, they will become at risk of escaping and will seek out any opportunity to skip out, even risking their life to do so.

A successful escape from one's captors is called an Exodus. My favorite example of a successful escape from captivity is that of my ancestors who left the confines of their captors, The United States government, and after walking from what is now referred to as the State of North Carolina over the Great Smoky Mountains range into East Tennessee, assimilated into the local society of both settlers from Europe (and their entourage of slaves and indentured servants) and the indigenous population.

A holocaust is a situation where a people are taken captive and never escape through their own efforts. History has many examples of how a People were completely destroyed or assimilated into the dominate culture, as well as a few examples of how a People were rescued from captivity before they were destroyed.

Today I live in a society that has been taken hostage by a captor that offers no hope. It is called drug addiction. The only way those caught up in the throes of addiction can escape is through the hope that is provided them through one of several avenues. The most successful path to a productive and responsible life is through the fellowship of other recovering addicts who embrace a spiritual discipline that includes sharing hope with each other. An important part of the hope a person is instilled with is a sense of being valued. As they follow the spiritual path into recovery they are introduced with a sense of purpose that can only be embraced by remaining drug-free. Having a sense of purpose is the greatest antidote over hopelessness.

Often times a person loses hope through rejection from their family. When a person has a sense of purpose that doesn't fit into the family dynamic, they will need to seek out a peer group of people that accept them for whom they are in order to overcome this rejection. Familial ties are very strong in a person's sense of well-being, so rejection can feel like a death sentence. The greatest challenge of all is for a person to feel like they have nothing in common with anyone and their purpose in life is not valued by society. In order to endure this experience one must have a strong spiritual discipline that allows them to see past the immediate situation into the greater aspect of reality. There are many Paths that will guide a person through this discipline, and mine has come through my indigenous culture.

Within the tribal spirituality of Turtle Island (North America) there are two models by which one can gain a sense of well-being that transcends person ego and social ego. One is modeled from the symbol of the Spiral. This motif is common throughout tribal culture globally and represents the Warrior's journey into nothingness. In order to “tap out” at the center of the spiral, the Warrior must let go of all illusions of self until he becomes nothing. At that point in the journey the norm is for the person to be restored to their full sense of self and be identified within their community as a person who has traversed the Spiral. In my own journey I was given the additional task of walking the Spiral back to the point of beginning while functioning in the society of my immediate environment.

The second model is referred to as the Maze of Liberation from Self. While there are many overlapping aspects of these two spiritual models, the second is not gender-specific. This discipline is present in every human being throughout their existence upon this planet. The teachings are ingrained in the spirituality of every tribal culture globally. It has also been presented as a “School of Spiritual Discipline” under many names. Buddhism is one of these paths and offers a person guidance through instructions on how to achieve liberation from ego as represented in their desires and expectations. A person arrives at this level of functionality, identified as one with the Buddha-mind, after having arrived at the other side of the Maze of Liberation from Self.

As documented elsewhere, there is an additional discipline within my indigenous tribal culture referred to as “The Seven Challenges of a Cherokee Medicine Man”. The instructions regarding this discipline were imparted to me by the Cherokee Medicine Man, Rolling Thunder, in Carlin, Nevada, in April, 1991. As events started to transpire in 2003 I recognized that I was entering into the Seventh Challenge, which is to lose all support from my community and Spirit Helpers, and function in this reality for an undetermined amount of time until I have proven myself to be capable of adhering to the spiritual teachings without attempting to alleviate any duress throughout this time period. The best example of this is The Book of Job, where Job never lost his sense of connectedness to his purpose or the Universe as he observed all material aspects of his reality dissolve around him. The difference between Job and myself is that Job got to remain in his home throughout his challenge. I lost my physical place through foreclosure in 2007 and was evicted into homelessness.

In January, 2010, I completed all three models of spiritual discipline simultaneously. According to the feedback given to me through that intuitive relationship with the Ancient Ones whom I dialogue with during deep meditation and/or dream time, I am the first human being to complete all three disciplines at the same time. I am also the first person to complete the Seven Challenges in over 120 years. I really had no interest in doing any of this. I was invested with a sense of purpose and was willing to risk my life if need be, but I wanted to hold on to who I was as an entity no matter what. Rather than be reintroduced back into society at that level of achievement, I must continue to do a reversal of the Warrior's Spiral back to the point of beginning. This left me hanging out there without support of any kind for brief periods of time, including the absence of Spirit Helpers.

Signs would appear along the way that indicated that these Spirit Helpers were returning to be present throughout my daily life. One of those was the sudden intense odor of what smelled like the seasoned hide of a buffalo one day while staying with a friend in Seymour, Tennessee. I had all my belongings of the time in my car and was sleeping on their floor in a sleeping bag. One day I went out to get clean clothes before taking a shower. The odor was familiar but it took me a few days to figure out what it was. I refer to it as “my clean clothes smell like a buffalo wallow”. The odor is the sign that the White Buffalo Calf Woman has given me a blessing. I joked with a friend back in 1989 about getting fired from a job because I smelled like a buffalo. (I never did get paid the $2000 I was supposed to earn based upon a contract with those folks. I blew it off as part of my support of the wife of the couple who had hired me, as she had recently lost a child during miscarriage and went off the deep end for a little while.) Now I really do smell like a buffalo sometimes, which is hard to do in this society that is ignorant of such blessings.

Throughout my life there have been challenges that were difficult to work past, other than what has been discussed so far. Life goes on in spite of one's living a disciplined life. One of those challenges has been the presence of an energy that has been identified as a jin. There are a number of schools of thought that offer models by which we identify challenges in our lives. Some are better than others at this process but none are perfect in the naming of reality with respect to spiritual challenges. When using the model of “Demons” to identify adversity, all some schools of thought suggest that one's reality is an external representation of one's spiritual self, serving as a mirror of where one is at. Others suggest that the effort to achieve greatness in the face of adversity is responded to with enough adversity to make sure the person really wants to get there. Sometimes adversity is there to show the person that they really are who they have become when they have completed a spiritual journey.

I don't remember the exact date when I first encountered a jin. I remember waking up one night while sleeping next to my wife of that time and sensing that someone was in the room with us. I struggled to wake up and protect my family from this invader. I felt like I was trapped in deep sleep and couldn't wake up. Finally I was able to open one eye and look at the foot of the bed, even though I couldn't move any other muscle in my body. I saw this man sitting there who looked like the ugliest man I had ever seen. His body looked like it was made out of a sponge or something very porous like that. As soon as he sensed that I was looking at me he looked directly into my eyes for a second, then blinked and dissolved into smoke. He moved to my wife's face and she inhaled the smoke flowed into her nostrils and was gone. I knew then that she was hosting a demon. I didn't know that it was a demon until many years later when a friend who followed the Islamic Way told me the kind of demon I had seen based upon my description. She also related that according to the historical information, a person would go insane if they looked a jin in the eyes like that.

I think the person hosting a jin goes insane whether they ever see it or not. It is not a healthy energy to host. We were divorced a few years later and it stayed crazy anyway. She always projected this sense of having domination over me no matter what the circumstances were. I intuited that she was deriving this false sense of security and control from the jin. As things transpired I was cut off from any relationship with our two sons. I would send letters as they grew up but I was told that they would not read them or keep any presents I sent out of fear of reprisal from their mother.

As I entered into the next marriage in this timeline, I became aware that things weren't as they appeared on the surface. I could tell that there was a similar dynamic going on. As the marriage ran its course and was terminated via divorce, I found myself talking to yet another “former spouse”. As we sat talking about the financial needs of our daughter I observed her skin being transformed into a sponge-like texture and this very ugly man projected an image of his self over her skin. I blinked a few times and it was still there. I didn't know what was going on in the moment, but remained calm and completed the conversation. Later, during meditation, I realized that the jin that this person was hosting had become so emboldened in its sense of control that it allowed itself to be seen by me, perhaps anticipating that I would go crazy when I looked into it's eyes. It should have known already that I had already been field tested. I was riddled with anxiety, which was an understandable response to the situation I was in, but I didn't go crazy.

I love the ending to this story about the jin, and I think it is important to include this information in a narrative about raising hope. While attempting to reconnect with anyone who was willing to do so following the completion of the Seven Challenges, I sent a few e-mails to an old friend, Donna Schoolfield. In the fall of 2012 she brought it to my attention that she had been following the activities of a person who had been in active duty but went rogue from his military station in his respective country. As she related his profile I started to intuit that he was hosting a jin. Her request was that I neutralize the demon he was hosting. Her expectation might have been that once the demon was exorcised that he would realign himself with goodness and come in out of the cold. That wasn't the case, and I realized it as I worked through this challenge. I started having dreams of this man. I started identifying news stories of unusual events to be associated with his activities. He was not a good person at all.

The person has free will and how things work out in that regard wasn't part of my participation. I had only been asked to address the negative energy the person was hosting. As I surmised that this was a jin and started to figure out how to engage the jin in some manner that would cause it to exit the premises I discovered what set the jins apart from the rest of the lot of demons. Jesus was able to dialogue with the demons that “Legions” was hosting and arrive at an agreement with them to exit the premises in that situation, but it was no help in this case. Anytime a jin was in duress it would send out a distress call and all the other jins in the Universe would stop what they were doing and arrive to assist the threatened jin. That culmination of a host of jins was why it was impossible to use the more common methods of neutralization with them. I had no idea of what to do, really, but I knew it was time and at some point, documented in e-mail messages to Donna Schoolfield, I waved a red flag in that jin's face like it was a charging bull in a bull fight and off we went.

Since nothing else would work and I knew that any demon would feel at home in hell, I dove into hell. As we went deeper and deeper into the nine levels of hell, the jin started to experience a bit of duress and sent out a distress call to it's kind. Suddenly I was being chased through hell but all the jins in the Universe. There was only one place to go and that was to the deepest depths of Hell. When I got there I was in a sea of nothingness. I knew that the deepest levels of hell would dissolve all aspects of “self” and I didn't have much time to do something. The jins were moving in unaware of their situation, intent only upon engaging in conflict with me. I had been into the nothingness through the spiritual disciplines and noted that this level of nothingness wasn't that much different from that of liberation for self. I sensed that the highest peaks of “heaven” were just on the other side of a very thin membrane and in order to pass through that membrane I would have to become “nothing”, if only for a nanosecond. The aspects of not doing this looked about the same, but for a much longer indeterminate time. I did the exercise of “nothingness” and moved towards that membrane. I felt myself passing through it. As I got to the other side I sensed that a Thunder Being was waiting for me. As soon as I was fully through the Old Man threw a spark in my direction and I became self again. The entire body of jins were left on the other side to bounce off that membrane for a very long time. When they change the direction they are going in and head back to the greater good of all things in this Universe, they will become better entities for having gone through this experience. The video, Voices (a desert song) was inspired by this experience.

Meanwhile, I knew that I had done something that had never occurred before in the history of the Universe. It was completely unknown before that moment that it was possible to pass through the membrane separating heaven and hell. I had to make an appearance before what I refer to as The Council, a body of ascended entities who have some voice in how things are going in this Universe. I made an appearance during a dream. They related that they appreciated my efforts to occupy the jins with the challenge of liberation from the depths of hell, and they said they would overlook how I managed to escape, but they also asked that I never did that again. Whew! Some mornings I wake up from dreams that are better than any science fiction that I've ever read.

Anyway, I was given a task and experience that helped me to identify the validity of my spiritual condition. I had lived and survived in what appeared to be a hopeless situation as I traversed the Maze of Liberation from Self while also muttering along through the Spiral and Seventh Challenge. I don't think it takes near as long to do one as it does to do all three, as they all have to line up just right for me to progress to the next dissolvement of any illusions I might have about self. Liberating myself from all those jins who had been making my life as difficult as possible from as long as I can remember was the icing on the cake.

I have an opportunity to convey this narrative of hope to the Universe in order to let others know that it is possible to transcend all challenges that would appear to hinder one from achieving liberation from selfish desires and expectations. That doesn't eliminate the pain of interacting with others who are still hell-bent upon achieving their selfish desires and expectations. We are like the jins in some respect. We are all related and we are all in this together until ever human spirit has achieved liberation from self. Jins may be highly damaged human spirits who are starting all over again from the bottom of the heap, so we keep them in our prayers as we seek to have all our relations find this Sacred Path into Freedom.

In my efforts to continue the work of passing on my experiences, I have the opportunity to instill hope for all those who seek freedom from bondage of selfish intentions. While every breath that I take exhales into a spirit of freedom that spreads throughout the atmosphere for as long as I am alive, I have other ways of sharing this hope as well. A touch, a song, a voicing of hope in any manner, visual art, poetry, video works, and music are all vehicles by which I am able to imbed the spirit of freedom into the mind's of others. It is my intention to honor my purpose in the Universe. I will embrace every opportunity to do so. I am able to share these milestones of where the Path leads and mark the Path with these signs of hope, that it is humanly possible to achieve this goal of total freedom from all illusions. I achieved this status in this life-time as per the instructions that were given to me in 1977 during my first effort to seek an audience with Rolling Thunder in Carlin, Nevada. On the morning I was to meet with him I heard a voice telling me something right before I woke up. “You don't get a teacher this life time. The entire Universe is your teacher this time.” From this experience I can relate that it is humanly possible to achieve liberation and freedom without a teacher or instructor of these spiritual disciplines, but I don't recommend it. Be grateful for those teachers that put up with you. I know I am grateful for all those who guided me up to that point where I was able to take that leap of faith and do it without the presence of an on-going, hands-on guide. They did a damn good job of it.

Love,

Oliver!

© Oliver Loveday June 4, 2014 2:40pm EDT

“The Lizard King”

w/inscription – “glazed flow of tripping when Max Ernst was the Lizard King”

Watercolor, oil pastel and pencil

9 x 12 inches | 30 x 22.8 cm 50 lb

June 3, 2014

Collection of Eric DeVos

Loveday Studio

Archiving Photography in the Digital Age

When you meet Narcissus along the road, shoot him. Use good film when you do.

I'm an analog sort of fellow myself. That is to say, I like to make pit-fired pottery, the original way to get things done. My favorite method of making an image is to do woodcut printmaking. I like to shoot photographs with film in the camera. Never mind the thousands of hours I've spent generating fractals on the computer or an equal amount of time spend digitally editing photographs and videos. I would rather listen to all my old vinyl albums on a turntable than use ear-buds and listen to digitally compressed music off my cell phone. Right now I have mp3's loaded on my I-phone. I don't have access to any lp's or a turntable.

So I'm a list of contradictions. Now that that is out of the way, there's a greater question riding the airwaves of various conversations regarding the value of photograph in modern day society. I'm currently reading a book about Eadweard Muybridge. I started it in 2009 after I bought it used at the library for fifty cents. I haven't even got to the part where he takes a “selfie” of himself and a couple of indigenous tribesmen in California before they (the Indians) were all wiped out in the “Indian wars”. So that's how informed I am on the topic. I've read a couple of books on film making as well, just to impress you with my lengthy knowledge about photographic film and film making. They were both books about film making before the twentieth century. It might have started with the work of Muybridge but like I said, I haven't gotten that far yet. So this is where we start.

Thanks to digital photography and the cell phone, I've seen more photographs of people on Face Book with them holding up the phone in the mirror of the bathroom (or public restroom) with the commode in the background in the past few years than anyone in history has seen before “social networking web sites” and digital photograph happened. Face Book is currently hosting the largest archive of digital photographs in the world. One gets a sense of this all being disposable reality. At least these are selfies with the commode in the background and not with indigenous people who are in the way of progress. This is the age of disposable reality, but one does hope they flushed first, then took the photograph of themselves.

Somewhere in between archeological digs of old village sites with pottery that was pit-fired and digital photographs of earth from satellites in space, there was a moment in time when there was concerned about creating work that would be available for future generations. Never mind that pottery has proven to be the most archival work that humans have created so far. Smoke soot and clay on cave walls comes in a close second. There is actual information that needs to be preserved for usage in the future. How to get that information to last that long and be in a physical form that can be accessed is a good question. One could look at what has lasted the longest already and see if that is a good model to work from.

I don't think that Narcissus was that much of a freak in human history. There is some merit to the idea of self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-consciousness. Dancers watch themselves in the mirror a lot. That is how they improve with their form. Spiritual growth happens through looking within. Self-replication is a form of species survival. (Okay, I just like that line so never mind.) When we follow history from what is known to be preserved from pottery and cave paintings on down through stone sculptures and oil paintings on treated canvas on forward to photography with film and the digital kind, there isn't a lot of hope for the modern technology in the archival situation. Photographic prints don't last very long. What good is it for Narcissus to take a selfie and then outlive it?

That conversation comes up a lot when discussing art and photography. This is a disposable society that treats everything like cigarette lighters; use them up and toss them. While there is a degree of appreciation for the lack of attachment to the fleeting digital reality that keeps sweeping over us on a daily basis, there is a lack of integrity in the greater scheme of things. So of this information might be relevant beyond the individual seeking instant gratification. I mean, don't let me throw a wet rag on the party here but some of this attitude is borne out of a response to the nuclear age where the push of a single button could reduce a good deal of the human population to radioactive dust in the blink of an eye. If that possibility became a reality then there isn't much reason to invest a lot of energy into creating anything that is going to be here 20,000 years. The pyramids in Egypt would be a lump of glass in the post-nuclear age.

Others have a different response to the importance of time. This is, after all, a conversation about time. That's what brought Eadweard Muybridge into the conversation to start with. He made important advancements in the camera in order to capture images on glass plates. He created ways to capture multiple images of the same subject to show motion over a period of time. Others took the idea and created cameras that could do the same thing through a single camera and invented film making. Narcissus didn't survive his own obsession of his reflection in the water. The rest of us may not either.

I watched several video documentaries about the preservation of photographs and digital art today and that prompted me to rejoin the conversation with others with this short essay. On some levels the technology of being able to create an image is advancing faster than the ability to produce that image in an archival manner. Even the crisis of the hour that occurred when the Star Wars movies were being released several decades after they were produced brought the issue to light. The film they were dedicated to and distributed was not very archival and the producers never bothered to have them preserved onto an archival film. There was just enough footage of the first movie from all the films in storage to recreate the first film. Another year in storage and the film would have been lost to time.

A lot of work has been produced and left to face time alone in boxes in storage on very fragile media. How important this work is remains in question. If left to Narcissus, it is all valuable. In a world where half a billion photographs are being uploaded to Face Book daily, Narcissus wins the argument as long as there are funds to keep investing in more digital storage facilities and programmers to keep up with the databases. In the video, The Invisible Photograph: Part 1 (Underground), one commentator states that we can participate in this process for free. That isn't an accurate statement, but compared to the expense of buying a film camera, film, developing the film and making prints from the film, this does look like a free medium now. I can take a photograph with my I-phone and post the file to Face Book and have it seen globally to an audience of thousands in a few minutes. For someone who made a living by taking photographs on film in remote areas of the world, hoping the film would survive the trip back to the darkroom and a print onto a magazine editor's desk, and finally to print, this ability to produce and distribute work is mind-boggling. To have a show of photographs in a gallery forty or fifty years ago and compare that to what is being done today blows the mind.

I like these videos. It just gives me a little hope, after all.

The Invisible Photograph: Part 1(Underground)

The Invisible Photograph: Part II(Trapped)

Oliver Loveday © May 20, 2014, 11:30 pm EDT

More about the work of Oliver Loveday can be found at Loveday Studio.

Deconstructing the Impending Ice Age: A Logistical Narrative

Geologists, climatologists, anthropologists and astrophysicists examine dust to generate data. That may be all they have in common, even if it is a small overlap in the larger picture they each look at in their respective fields. Dust can be a fleeting particle with a finite amount of information that can be derived from it before examination corrupts the data. There is no room for warm fuzzies when data from three diverse schools of science is crunched down to address a single question – what is live going to be like twenty years from now?

Twenty years can be a long time in a reality measured in nanoseconds. The same time period is more fleeting than a nanosecond in a discussion about a 120,000 year cycle, especially when that twenty year period is at a major transition point in that cycle. We don't know and the data isn't all in regarding that question. Check back in twenty years and we might have enough data to express an opinion. The real knowledge of what the next twenty years will be like won't be discovered until much later. The implications behind the question suggests that there will be something different enough about the next twenty years to merit some projections based upon current scientific knowledge. That's a lot of weight that has to be carried by a few collective grains of dust over a vast pool of non-integrated systems of information collecting and analysis.

Climatologists know that there is a cycle of Ice Age periods and data collected over the past 25 years has revealed that these cycles function in a much different manner than had been originally thought. It doesn't take several hundred years for the transition to occur. It takes less than a decade. In some parts of the world it can happen in a 24 hour period. That became obvious when woolly mammoths were discovered in glaciers standing upright with grass in their mouth, frozen on the spot and entombed in ice for 120,000 years.

The data is there to support the theory that this planet hasn't always maintained its current orbit or axis rotation. The north and south poles aren't carved in stone. The gyroscopic function of a planet is subject to change. That change changes everything, should that change occur also. There is no data that would support the theory that there is a possibility for that to become a factor regarding what could happen in the next twenty years. That doesn't eliminate that as a possibility. That does eliminate any warm fuzzies from the discussion if one were to project that at some point in the future, even as early as twenty years from now, the Ice Age will have begun a new cycle with the anticipation that the next one is going to follow the same patterns of glacial activity that the last one did.

Given that this is still within the realm of possibility, one would anticipate a glacial landscape that would include the start of a wall of ice that ends somewhere along the banks of the Ohio River along the northern border of the State of Kentucky, with Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois once again under the ice. Climatologists study animal behavior as part of understanding climate change. It would be a lot easier to derive some data from animal migrations that would suggest whether or not the next Ice Age is going to follow the same construct, were it not for the fact that those animals have been forced into extinction or are so vastly constraint as to not be able to respond in a timely manner. We know the polar bears are moving somewhere else. We just don't know where yet.

Astrophysics is a much thinner bit of cosmic dust in the big picture, but that big picture doesn't take a lot of space dust to become data. The stars go through cycles of heating up and cooling down. There's a lot of them out there and we don't get a lot of dust from the cosmos, not that we can screen out and sift through as such. That brings it back to a point of relevance much closer to home, the sun. It is entering a 50 year cooling period. That's what some scientists are saying. All it takes is one small boulder to impact the planet to cause a huge amount of change on the planet. We know this from the data that has been collected from previous events. There's a lot of dust in sedimentary rock that proves that point. We know the mathematical probability of such an event occurring again. Recently there was an asteroid that passed close enough to this planet for it to be observed via orbital satellites. Computer models can work up the orbital paths of large objects and know when they will coincide with our orbit. What hasn't been finalized is the discovery of every asteroid out there. We don't know.

What we do know is that there are a lot of things happening all at the same time that could contribute to radical climate change. Enter into this discussion a new book by David Archibald, The Twilight of Abundance.

http://www.iwp.edu/news_publications/detail/research-fellow-david-archibald-to-release-new-book-the-twilight-of-abundance

Professor Archibald got a quick interview on Fox News recently to discuss his book. It is obvious that Fox News has a different agenda than Professor Archibald from the interview, but that is of little merit in the larger picture. It happened. There was an interview. That is enough. I'd like to hear more about the scientific process that the data was derived from that lead astronomers and astrophysicists to the conclusion that the sun is cooling down. That isn't Fox(worthy)News, so that didn't happen.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/3466714510001/age-of-abundance-over/?intcmp=obnetwork#sp=show-clips

There's a lot of questions that come up with this interview and book. Add them to the on-going discussion regarding the transitional technology needed for the human species to survive on this planet into, during, and beyond the next Ice Age. I've been a participant of that discussion for the past 40 years. My life's work has been based upon concerns regarding the transitional technology needed for humanity to survive and remain inhabitants of this planet. It is a precarious relationship at the most optimistic end of the spectrum.

There won't be a Noah's Ark that will come along and save us all. There never was one in the first place if science is integrated into the conversation. That can be a perilous place to move the conversation for those invested in non-realistic mythos. It is unrealistic to suggest that all the species of animals on this planet could have ever been boarded up on one boat and survived for forty days. That isn't the important merit of that myth when one discusses transitional technology. The first check mark regarding the story is the fact that one man was able to intuit the need to build a boat at a locality that would later be under water after the ice melting at the end of the last Ice Age floated the basin of what was to become the Mediterranean Sea. He was chided and ridiculed prior to the event. He survived and left a mark on history because of his efforts. No one knows if he was the only one that had this insight and attempted a similar effort. It's a big sea and there were a lot of people living in the area that is currently submerged from that flooding. What we do know is that humans do have the ability to foresee events in some manner and act to survive those events. That is a very important bit of knowledge to ingest in the overall discussion about what is about to happen.

The discussion hasn't been limited to what we will be eating in 25 years, although that is an important part of transitional technology regarding the Ice Age. One event that I brought forth in the fall of 1990 was the Sacred Run for the Return of the Buffalo as part of my vision (that role of envisioning what can be done to make the world a better place to live for the next seven generations) and I was able to continue this as an annual ritual for a number of years as a contribution to the current list of rituals that are being done within the Native American communities across the North and South American continents among indigenous peoples. That ritual, shortened to “The Bull Run”, was discontinued as an annual event due to factors beyond my control, but there are indications that it will be revived and continued once those forces at play that deter it from being held are no longer present. We'll see.

Equally important to me in my work is the need to provide a way to convey important information over a long period of time that can be accessed in a manner that transcends language or cultural confluences. This need is a reversal of the physical “Noah's Ark” anxiety. Invested with the ability to imbed information in literary works, visual art, and audio recordings, I have considered this challenge to be of some merit. Succinctly, I am attempting to convey the spiritual information regarding the process of liberation from the self-imposed limitations of awareness that are a function of self-centered ego aberrations. I am attempting to do this outside the current framework of culturally divested schools of thought without leaving any of the information conveyed through those schools of thought out of this archival project. Then we raise the bar a little higher, just to make sure we surpass any construct of possibility, and endeavor to make an object that will not only survive for 100,000 years, but will contain information relevant to the situation then that can be accessed from the physical object.

The most archival object that could be used over a long period of time is pottery. It is more resistant to acid rain than most stone would be. Stone carving is till a major way of preserving information over long periods of time. Cave painting has also served humanity in this manner longer than we are aware of at this moment. Imparting information upon a cotton canvas via oil paint or acrylic is less certain, but more intuitive in the range of spectrum opportunities. These are pigments derived from the earth after all. The lack of fire in the process as would be the manner of preservation via pottery is duly noted. The use of gum Arabic as a binder for watercolor on paper takes this information storage to another level. The chances of survival are less probable. Getting that information down and making it accessible for those that would see the merits of making copies that would extend the existence of that information further into the history of the future makes it more effective on the working end of conveying the information in the quickest manner possible, as there is a lot of information to be conveyed. There are limitations but they become less a function of reality in the long run if they are continually preserved through duplication. The continued process of canonization of spiritual information is a common practice among humans. Just don't anticipate it being as good as the original work. (That's a joke, I think.)

The final point in this deconstructing process is the need to impart a familiarity of this information to the largest number of people possible over a broad spectrum of humanity at this moment. That process is borne out of the understanding that many of these people will participate in this process further into the future via incarnate beings. That point isn't limited to any construct regarding reincarnation. There isn't any concern for what a person believes. That is their spiritual challenge and human reality transcends belief systems that would impart limitations upon their spiritual growth. There is little impetuous to support this process in a social environment that is invested in a materialistic, ego-centric construct. However altruistic (or not) a person might be, the Universe recycles, and I am participating in that process over a large span of time. So is everyone else. It isn't a choice. The choice is how that person integrates into that process. The model of deconstruction imparts an awareness of choosing without implying the outcome of individualistic choices. There will be participants.

end of transmission

Oliver Loveday © April 28, 2014 12:30 pm EDT

http://www.lovedaystudio.com/