Last night, considering my present sickly condition after returning from Paris, I thought a moment of “sitting” or meditation might be a good recuperative effort.
I lit some candles, burned some incense, turned the lights down low. And sat. And sat. I drifted away, far away, into another space. In fact, I may have wafted away into the realm of a sleeping state, sitting.
I “awakened” to a flickering. And there, before me, on the candlelit “altar” of objects of meaning that I have gathered throughout my ventures in the world of the spiritual, I noticed a lengthened stroke of lightness.
This was, in fact, candlewax.
One of the candles, burning brightly, its wick lengthened, had extended from its containing cylinder and dripped its hot effluvia down the shelf, across the tip of a ritual dagger from Tibet, down the chain of a vishavajra pendant from Mongolia, to the carpet below, where it formed a waxen berm, spattering the objects nearby: a ritual box, a carved woodblock from Nepal, a tapestry from Tibet. Curious…this connection.
The trailing wax made its way and created a thread of linked symbols, from one, to the other, to the other, spreading out in a fashion and weaving the objects, and their symbolism together. This taught me that the tapestry of meanings can be “shown” in surprising ways, if not alarming, in their revelations. Firestarter?
The stalagmite created a network of meanings…and in the end, in it’s dripping, expressed comically the fact that I had a cold, and this was the exhausting burden of “staying awake” for this sitting. Being sick, I couldn’t hold on to the path, the stream of concentrating, I “dripped away”. And there, in the end, was the dripping link between all of the elements, the thread regained.
Anyway, anyone know how to get candlewax off a 18th century woodblock, a woven object…carpeting?
Thanks for listening…
—
Tim Girvin