For those in the Charlotte, NC area in March, I'll present a month long series on the Journey into the Writer's Secret Garden at the Cornwell Center in Myers Park.  They reserved a cozy space for us in the lounge.

 

 

Goethe said that architecture is like frozen music.  In 1901, C.W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant in London wrote, Thought Forms and described a series of concerts played inside a church on an organ using music of Mendelssohn, Gounod and Wagner.  They “saw” with their sixth sense, ethereal structures form in the air above the exterior of the church.  The structures drawn in the illustrated book resembled beautiful, lightly formed buildings of varying colors dictinctly different for each composer.  The forms would linger there for sometime and then fade away.

 

This may seem fantastical and strange, but it reminds me of Goethe’s words.  Maybe Goethe saw music take form too.  Perhaps, if we could see with our inner eyes too, then we would be able to define the forms of emotions.  Desire for power would take shape as a heavy, oppressive structure like Milan’s train station built under Mussolini.  Envy and jealousy might take the shapes of demons on Notre Dame’s facade.  Protection would be symbolized in Mario Botta’s  Bergoase Spa or his church at Mogno in the Maggia Valley.  Playfulness might be represented by Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Center in Paris. 

 

William Blake wrote that if we could see things truly as they are, they would be infinite.  He too reveals a hidden life that most of us are unaware of thourgh his poetry. 

 

“It is well for us ever to bear in mind,” writes Annie Besant, “that there is a hidden side of life – that each act, thought and word has consequence in the unseen world”  If we stretch our imaginations and envisage this to be true, how would it shape our views of what we think, say and write and how we work? 

 

Here's the link to my latest article on architecture:  http://www.architectureweek.com/2009/0107/index.html

Copyright:  Debra Moffitt-Leslie, 2009.  www.debramoffitt.com

Two important tools helped me to develop my writing. The first is meditation and the second is dreams.  As an international business executive I believed that dreams and things that could not be seen and touched held little meaning or importance.  But once I made the committment to write fulltime, I began to wake up frequently and recall my dreams.  They not only had to do with my writing but also guided the way I was to live my life. That inner voice that sparked me to change paths when I considered jumping out the window in desperation continued to actively “speak” to me through symbols and images in dreams.  And in that other state of consciousness I was able to perceive and understand things about myself that my conscious rational mind refused to see. In the dream state my conscious mind with all of its defenses and constructs of who I thought I was and what I thought I should be doing remained inactive. Instead a vast new world of possibility became apparent.

 

Dee Niles showed up one night in a dream parking lot in front of my Antibes apartment.  A huge truck pulled up and began to unload baggage. This baggage was not small pretty neat or the type of luggage that I would like to travel with.  It was big dusty, stained, grimy. Dee stood there in the dream appalled at what was being unloaded at her feet.  I understood when I woke up that this baggage was hers but she denied it.

 

Poor woman I thought.  I’m glad that’s not me. Then I realized that she was a reflection of myself.  The baggage symbolized my personal baggage that may have once served me but now weighed me down.  It was time to do the work to let it go. I consciously accepted this task. Over the next months and years, my dreams began to show me the baggage I needed to eliminate.  As I opened the bags in my dreams and meditated on them at regular times during the evening, I learned that the bags contained fear, grudges, coffee addiction, co-dependency, and a series of other challenges.

 

One by one my night dreams guided me to face the contents of the luggage, do the work to get rid of it and let it go.  If I fell back into holding grudges and not forgiving people from my past, the next night as I would get on a dream plane I would find myself and weighed down with the huge crates that I could not travel with. This inner dialogue continued until this last exhilarating luggage dream arrived.  I am waiting in an airport café for a flight.  My guide it comes to get me; she says "are you ready ?"   I reached down under the table to pick up my baggage. But to my surprise I find one piece of carry-on luggage that is completely empty. I stand up with excitement and head for the plane. This marks the start of a new journey. This describes a little of the fantastic interplay that occurs when the dialog with the wisdom heart grows.  It illustrates how dreams and other levels of consciousness can inform writing.  And of course the better that we know ourselves and our own human nature the more able we are to write insightful and meaningful stories, essays and articles.      

Copyright: Debra Moffitt-Leslie, 2009  www.debramoffitt.com