The Dream is Dead, Long Live the Dream
Attasalina and the Legend of Seraphim Rising
I never try anything, I just do it.
Wrestling with the Angels
In 2008, in Ojai, California, I formed a rock n roll band called The Seraphim Rising.
The Legend foretold the coming of the Lord Profit who would destroy the truth of the word and cast a glamour of corruption over the land. The people who would maintain a connection to their own heart and could see true, would band together, rise up and ultimately defeat the Profit.
The band debuted in Spring 2009 at a former mortuary turned independent theatre.
We recorded in 2011 and released one album before disbanding. A custom painting was created for the album art in 2012 illustrating the legend.
Four years earlier, in 2004, we sold nearly all our possessions in order to escape Hollywood. We were knee deep in the Bush 2 years. We bought a Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalia and went on the road for a bit, attempting to find an America we could live in. It was essentially un-fruitful and we returned to Ojai, Ca. where we were living prior to the Hollywood venture.
In 2023, here in Santa Fe, I had an exhibition of my photographic work which was a combination of images from the early 2000’s era and the post-Seraphim Rising era in which I went into exhile as a chronically ill and disabled person.
I keep thinking about 2004. That’s also the year I wrote the song The Soldiers of Everyday. It’s a year that keeps cycling, that everything in my life hangs from and is defined by.
It’s also a nine year, I was twenty-seven.
Checkerboards and War Games
I have this pattern. This checkerboard pattern. And I was meditating on what that was about. What came to me was, strategy. I have always been in this neverending game of strategy trying to defeat an unwinnable situation. It never stops. And I am enourmously exhausted.
I have run out of strategy. Game over.
Let the river carry me away.
Upside Down
Is another pattern that struck me as I worked on this piece the other day. I turned it upside down and wrote, the dream is dead, long live the dream, which is the title of this piece that I created in 2007.
The Hanged Man tarot was a guiding muse in the Seraphim Rising concept.
In his 1910 book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, A. E. Waite, the designer of the Rider–Waite tarot deck, wrote of the symbol:
The gallows from which he is suspended forms a Tau cross, while the figure—from the position of the legs—forms a fylfot cross. There is a nimbus about the head of the seeming martyr. It should be noted (1) that the tree of sacrifice is living wood, with leaves thereon; (2) that the face expresses deep entrancement, not suffering; (3) that the figure, as a whole, suggests life in suspension, but life and not death.
It has been called falsely a card of martyrdom, a card of prudence, a card of the Great Work, a card of duty…
I will say very simply on my own part that it expresses the relation, in one of its aspects, between the Divine and the Universe.
The Grid of Nine
This emotion
I can’t describe
Like the Universe
Opened Up Inside
Photographed in 2015 and created in 2018, the oak tree reminds me of the oak grove from my youth where the Krishnamurti talks were held. This view is very low, as if from a small child’s perspective. Surrounded by these great trees is the space in which to contemplate freedom.
Three by three is a kind of spell of protection. It happens to create a window into another space. A portal. A stitch in time…
But we didn’t fix the problem, and now it’s a gaping hole.
That’s something from the past. The idea that it can be fixed later.
Life happens in the present.
War Pony
Photographed in 2002 on Kodak HIE with a Nikon FE2 in Bishop, California… Paiute land. Printed 16x20 platinum palladium 2022 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The pony’s name was Protector.
'Direct experience' (paccakkha ñāṇa) refers to an immediate, personal form of insight (ñāṇa) that arises through direct experience, rather than through intellectual understanding or borrowed knowledge from others. It is the direct perception of reality as it is, without the interference of concepts, words, or theoretical approaches. Such a form of experience is essential for the attainment of wisdom (paññā), which is deeper and more liberating because the insight is not only understood intellectually, but is truly lived and experienced.
'Direct experience' therefore refers to the insight that comes from personal experience of the impermanence (anicca), the unsatisfactory nature (dukkha), and the selflessness (anattā) of all phenomena.
~ Guy Eugène Dubois explaining the Buddhist path
Three Poppies
Inspiring the question may help others wonder about the answer.
Direct experience requires looking. Engaging with what is. I don’t wish to fill in all the blanks. The blanks are the gold. The space within which to become.
We make our own meaning.
But that doesn’t mean, we make it up. Truth is not a lie.
Aho Mitakuye Oyasin
We are all related.