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Statement of Purpose For This Site

You might well ask— why are you doing this?

Well, I’m putting together my own inspiration as I continue my lifelong search for meaning and beauty. Absent will be my congenital obsession with justice. My Facebook page has a surfeit of that.

I’m learning also that every site has its own DNA and that it will resist pressure to be something it’s not. My Facebook page became something I never imagined when I started it. My intentions influenced it, but it grew into something unexpected. Maybe it pulled things out of me I didn’t know were needing expression—justice, for one thing—towards the earth, towards other life forms, toward humans.

Because of my engagement with found content on Facebook I began to recalibrate my focus on what is inherently important to me and for me to say, namely that kindness is paramount, beauty and meaning are central and connectedness is essential. This site will focus on what I find exceptionally beautiful or fascinating. It has to have a wow-factor for me to include it.

The current situation in our country and in the world is frightening, we know that. There is no lack of news about the dystopia the world is sliding into. Every example carries a little hit of poison to your system. Yes, we need to be aware of what’s actually going on but it seems to me we need more news of the beauties in our world.

I’ve created animafire.com because I became dissatisfied with that Facebook page. It seemed to me it had become a bit overburdened with examples of what’s wrong. This site and my Facebook thread represent two related areas of interest because they both come from me, but they are distinct. It being true that a site has a will of its own and that I am not a dictator in absolute control, both pages can now follow their inherent missions.

I can’t tell precisely where these sites are going but they seem to be going toward creating a vision of a kinder, more just, more beautiful world.

I dedicate this site to the miracle we are all living.

I’ve added a donate button if you wish to support this search for beauty and meaning. Any help to buy another book or paint another painting is greatly appreciated.

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By the Barn Gate
by Donna Robertson copyright 2019.

When I am gone just bury me by the barn gate.
When they come up for breakfast in the morning
Brush them and feed them.
Run your hands along their lovely necks,
Across their faithful backs,
And down their trusty legs with tenderness.
Tell them I love them.
Clean their hooves and spray away the flies.
Kiss them on the nose and jaw.
Scratch their ears and stop to smell their manes.

Once in a while, sit on the bench by the barn gate.
My memory will be there.
Smell the flowers, enjoy the blooms.
Remember all the joy and laughter.
Mourn when you must, then move on.
Enjoy the sunsets there.
Welcome friends. Live.

When they come up for supper in the evening,
Give them the best you can.
Blankets for the cold, dry for the wet,
Always fresh water, Always my love.
And if they have to have a new home,
Never sell them. They are family.
Give them to someone I knew and loved.
Someone who already loves them.
Who might sit on the bench by the barn gate
Once in a great while
And laugh and smile and remember.

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“I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.”
-Irvin D. Yalom

Art: Alex Alemany

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Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

Mary Oliver

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James Hillman

Psychologists who do not attend enough to spirit forget that it is one of the essential components of the conjunction and cannot be dismissed as a head trip, as intellect, as just theology or metaphysics or a puer flight. Spirit neglected comes into psychology through the back door, disguised as synchronicity, magic, oracles, science fiction, self symbolism, mandalas, tarot, astrology and other indiscriminations, equally prophetic, ahistorical, and humorless. For it requires spirit to discern among the spirits.

Diakrisis(discernment) itself is a gift of the spirit, and psychologists who refuse the puer chug along empowered by doctrinal mechanisms of dead masters, their own imaginative sails decayed or never even hoisted, circling in the doldrums of low-profile, low-horizon humility: the practice of psychoptherapy.

Once the spirit has turned towards the soul, the soul can regard its own needs in a new way. then these needs are no longer attemps to adapt to Hera’s civilizational requirements, or to Venus’s insistence that love is god, or to Apollo’s medical cures, or even Psyche’s work of soul-making. Not for the sake of learning love only, or for community. or for better marriages and better families, or for independence does the psyche present its symptoms and neurotic claims. Rather these demands are asking for inspiration, for long distance vision, for ascending eros, for vivification and intensification(not relaxation), for radicality, transcendence, and meaning – in short the psyche has spiritual needs, which the puer part of us can fulfill.

James Hillman

Peaks and Vales