Drawings of Meher Baba and his companions in this post
are copyright Sufism Reoriented 2024
East Challacombe is a farm on the north-west edge of Exmoor in North Devon. To this remote spot on the coast, near Great Hangman’s (the highest sea-cliff in England), came Meher Baba in 1931, to meet his new English companions. The farm was then a spiritual retreat centre, run on strict lines by a seeker and poet, Meredith Starr.
Mischa’s “Gently Sweetly” song has a retro 1930s poignancy: in it, Farhad Shafa reads the poem in Farsi, and also his own translation. In those days, visitors to the farm before, during, and after the Light it held, wept: they didn’t know why. I do too, when I hear and watch the song unfold: in tears with the sea, the coast and the waves – the tide of the world breathes back and forth.
I grew up just 60 miles from this romantic coastline which enriched my childhood. As I became a Baba Lover, my imagination was seized with his presence there. In May 2022 I set out to discover his footsteps along the cliff paths.
Here is my journal of the pilgrimage.
A drawing while on the train London to Barnstaple –
… And a Gene Keys Dream Arc painting
***
CONTEMPLATION
A Kingfisher pierces its reflection in the lake. The stag and the seahorse meet and gaze at one another across it. Inhale deeply …
It cascades softly in my capillary. It kicks and surges and bursts in my being. IGNITE! … open my heart with wings and fly: It throws me around in a gasp like entering the sea. Our troubles are in His Hand. Who could place a foot without Him?
Meher Baba and friends on Wild Pear beach, 1931
***
16 May 2022 – Touch
Ready for off.. It is 6.24 this birdsong morning, I will stretch open this week, change my tempo of life, sit by the sea and pause. Goodness! I’m going to Challacombe!
What a funny small keyboard this new iPad has. I call it “Little Slab”. My Macbook pro which I’m leaving at home is called “Jumbo”. Most of us just bash on with our tablets, which are proof against the flailing unconscious monkey, but there is an art – don’t bang the screen, touch it with precision. Fingertip print – as with my fingerprint password. Respect the device for its beauty. Skill and fear are opposites! Unfold the brown paper of my thoughts. Skill is an intimate interaction.
There are gentle pointers, sauntering out with my bag for the next 6 days, my drawing stuff just in case. Sit and rest my back; the birds are busy outside. If I met a snake suddenly, I might be afraid, but I love their movement in the grass and their limitless symbol wealth and the way they curve a coiled knot into a straight ripple line.
On the train to the west country, I listened to Murshid J’s wisdom and thought of the Andean Quetzal with its wonderful colours – a higher-plane ripple of the cosmic serpent. A Sufi loves God without restraint. Take Rumi with me! Be a sea creature – the whole field: the living cell-membrane and its chorionic villi. Cultivate peace and clarity.
Mehera described Baba’s voice when he talked and sang – he sang with so much warmth and beauty. I recalled what he said to Murshida Duce when she told him she doesn’t want to be a Sufi Master, all she ever wanted to do was sing; and he looked at her and brought his hand in a slow zig zag down the Tree of Life and said, “Through the Ages, I SING!”
THE BELOVED is the song. When I love someone, it is that I am tiny beside them as their earth; and they sing. They are their measureless being.
Eruch said “people ask us what did you gain with Baba all these years? That’s the wrong question, they should ask, what did we LOSE?”
Lose my winter coat to the Sun.
***
17 May 2022 Arrive and case the joint
Coast path and view to Little and Great Hangman’s –
click on gallery to view, and wait a moment
Looking down into Wild Pear beach at high tide from the slopes of Little Hangman’s.
The b&b where I stayed is in a valley the other side of the headland.
***
I feel at home here, and know where everything is – including a fragrant ale called Legend at the Pack of Cards up the road – and yestereve after I arrived by bus from Barnstaple I walked the whole magnificent Hangman’s and Baba coastline. I met a weasel watcher who said Yes this path zigzags all the way down to the beach very steep – some of it slid away near the bottom – I shall go there today. Beware of ticks, he said.
When I arrived in Combe Martin “the Beloved” knew where to go – intuitively I got off the bus and walked along the high street, expecting to ask the way; and there stood Saffron bed&breakfast. It is placed very near the foot of the coastal path and the paths going up to Challacombe. Great Hangman’s is just 2 miles away. As I saw from the bus along the tossing green hills around Ilfracombe, the pointy mountain is Little Hangman’s. Great Hangman’s is a higher dark elephant-back beyond it.
Walking up into the postcard photograph was a thrill, all being huge and steep; myself in mountain goat mode. The sea is quiet, hazy, and still. I pictured Baba with his white garments flowing around him on these steep footpaths – his companions battling along behind him. I’m a bit doddery and cautious – especially downhill in my new 5-finger shoes. It drizzled a bit on the tops.
Baba bagged for himself a pointy peak here in North Devon, rather like Seclusion Hill at Meherazad – as did Ramana with Arunachala. These holy mountains bob up everywhere.
I feel tired and clean and blank, I like the high-street b&b and my room, it isn’t posh, it has a big white bed and a neat tiny shower/loo and it looks towards the small town and the green hillside opposite and up into the baby blue sky washed with silk white cloud undies. Bacon and eggs for breakfast, then the town and the harbour, then up to the coastal cliffs again and … shall I climb down to that secluded beach?
On my walk yesterday I peered at farms nesting in the hillsides, to guess which one is Baba’s. To case the joint and establish my panorama, I throw a wide noose and follow gently where led. Seagulls and distant crooning pigeons.
***
18 May Dancing with Rumi
Yesterday I took an immense adventurous gulp, and this morning am grumpy. Got into a tiz last night trying to communicate with my friend on this thing. Email aborts if there are too many pictures and words: fb-messenger was elusive. Etc.
Today is sunny again.
Here’s yesterday: scrambled out to the headland between Combe Martin and Baba’s beach, tide dropping. Swam and then played and danced in the jewelled amphitheatre’s of Baba’s rocky beach, climbed up the overgrown zig zag trail to the cliff path, explored the country towards the Challacombe’s, got tired and lay down to snooze in a field, it started to rain, came home down a sweet wild-garlic perfume path. Wind came up and the tide raced in with big waves.
I wrote:
“I came to the rocks and sea’s embrace again and cried. Wept. Then I lay like a seal along a ledge close to the tide, just above the water. Rainbow tints the play of millions of sanskaric fibres just as MJ said – the whole of life and its wars and generations breathes – I rested along the rainbow threads, the ripples, the soft gurgle slap suck back and forth and everywhere, my bones sinking softly into their barnacled couch ahh — sanskaric as in the sea water, all of it the rock – aligned. Snake, water, stone. Union.
(Getting my balance back over rocks) – move slowly like a creeper or sloth, take your time, the balance will return. Caressing the strata with hands and feet, check each hold lest it break – this isn’t the indoor climbing wall! The rock glistens with jewels.
Watch ALL OF LIFE in the breathing sea water as if visiting Earth for the first time, this is how she feels, breathes and is, this is how it feels inside her element.
Soak up the cool damp of the rock, the warm sun.
Used to have occult and esoteric learning, ornaments and language – all of it NOTHING besides the primordial wisdom and Beauty of the seawaters sliding over the rock.
Human tinsel in the town.
I am a rock for ever and forever. I cry out with the swelling white wave.”
(Click on gallery to view, and wait for it to upload.
Low tide on Wild Pear Beach)
The zig zag trail above Wild Pear beach
This morning the Rumi book while waiting for breakfast – let page fall open and finger find and touch the Oracle, then look – just look what Rumi tells me for today!
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest
Where no one sees you,
But sometimes I do,
And that sight becomes this art.
*
Drum-sound rises on the air,
Its throb, my heart.
A wave inside the beat says,
“I know you’re tired,
But come. This is the way.”
Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
This joy to anyone?
Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim the huge fluid freedom.
*
We’ve come again to that knee of seacoast
No ocean can reach.
Tie together all human intellects,
They won’t stretch to here.
The sky bares its neck so beautifully,
But gets no kiss. Only a taste.
This is the food that everyone wants
Wandering the wilderness, “Please give us
Your manna and quail.”
*
We’re here again with the beloved,
This air, a shout. These meadowlands
An astonishing myth.
We’ve come into the presence of the One
Who was never apart from us.
When the water bag is filling, you know
The water carrier is here!
The bag leans lovingly against your shoulder.
“Without you I have no knowledge,
No way to touch anyone.”
When someone chews sugarcane
He’s wanting this sweetness.
Inside this globe the soul roars like thunder.
And now silence, my strict tutor.
I won’t try to talk about Shams.
Language cannot reach that presence.”
(RUMI – Coleman Barks translation)
Cormorant and whale
***
P rang and I told him all this. X
Having scribed this, Little Slab is my Friend again like when it took photos of Baba’s beach at low tide yesterday and played Mischa’s Meher Baba Rumi songs through the earbuds – Dance Dervish Dance over jewel rock-formations, the delicate beauty of the sea’s paintbrush, once I slipped on wet seaweed, fell, and banged my thigh badly but bounced up again at once. Spreading out my arms a great deal on this wild terrain, like tentacles, butterfly wings, balancers.
I have to learn also what kind of light fingertip touch Little Slab is primed to and obeys best, without skittering around. Precision is care. Care for life and family.
(Click on gallery to view, and wait for it to load)
(This was written after I got home … )
These fish and seals and sperm and breast are a miracle of the whole of life – and the precision-craft of the streaming waves and curving flake-ripples – look at it and look at it and look at it, all the wisdom, beauty and abundance is there – and if I hadn’t taken this picture I would not see it, the flash it shone in me would be forgotten – and so is any day’s Oracle or advice.
Spirituality earths to ground through feet – Siddhi or way of illumination and Lightness. The nourishment flows into my willing veins, the heart’s wonderful crimson capillary. Explore these threads today! Change again the pattern of sludge that builds up in my body. Dissolve! Don’t lose what it’s like on the coast path and those beautiful flowing rocks on the beach. The Treasure ripples out … diamonds, rubies, amethysts, pearls, emeralds.
It is a wonderful irony that technology’s accelerative rush and density in the human tissue is in fact the PAUSE BUTTON! STOP – see this – be glad no artist on earth can paint it. Mr Fishy.
Look at the watery ripples he swims in – at the same time an accompanying crocodile – such beauty – such companions and streams and beasts and soft noses and bears and breasts and seals and mushroom spores. Just one caress of the ocean – a picture of aeons, of the beginning of Earth and everything She would ever dream up in her epidermis and the glory of her interior organs.
How could I presume to sketch such beauty without the vast époques scribing into being each delicate line? How valiant stupid we humans are. But we invented camera to pause ourselves with. Pause. Pause. Pause. Thousands of precious pauses whenever our family pleases us – disappear under the scrolling prayer-wheel of grubby thumb.
THANK YOU THIS WONDERFUL REVELATION. And do you know? Exploring my Baba beach photos, enlarging details to close-up contemplative mandalas – as dear Jim says, thus are we ourselves, each human whether considered good or bad at present, the balance and fluidity of millions of lifetimes born and decorated with barnacles. Seeing with God’s eye, here is love.
***
19 May 2022
The Wave moving through rock
It started to rain yesterday and is still grey and wet this morning – good timing – I had fallen exhausted, couldn’t rock climb. At a low tide swim on the beach when still sunny, the small sharp waves smacking through me stripped away my aura – had to go back to the b & b and into bed – felt cold and kept needing to pee perhaps kidneys in shock.
I met the adventure as usual with the Spirit’s enthusiasm – the Spirit. Poor old legs and feet! But … look how God keeps drawing …
***
Earlier I clambered cautiously out to that place in the headland again now surging with big white waves and lay sweetly, gently beside it for a while. My balance over the rocks was poor.
I slept last night but still feel frail and this morning upset with communications-failure on Little Slab. I feel rather miz and far from home this morning but … after breakfast I’ll go inland up that high valley to the Challacombe’s, I bought a map yesterday at the village museum, on it there is an East Challacombe AND a North C … go up a narrow lane that says no access … and “stroll” without haste up to Great Hangman’s. The Highest Cliff in England plunges to the sea, over the hidden side, I want to see it.
On that rock where I lay by the waves in the headland yesterday morning I wrote:
“I have no occupation but
The wave moving through
The ocean’s sanskaric fibres
Swelling
Into a fringe white
Corner of the seas.”
Given my obsession with communicating, the failure to talk on Messenger while here hits me hard – and that is so silly because there is email; technology invented a host of superfluous problems anyway like busy gnats.
I shall gentle my weary self up the wild-garlic path to realise my mission – see the place where the Beloved One and his companions stayed. I was given one great day packed with splendours. Who knows what may happen next? We are seasoned travellers.
Baba with Minta Toledo and neighbours near the farm
Rumi page falls open to:
“Memory raises his penis, straining it in thought
Toward the pushing down and the lifting up
Which make that member grow large with delight.”
**
“Spiritual experience is a modest woman
Who looks lovingly at only one man.
It’s a great river where ducks
Live happily and crows drown.
The visible bowl of form contains food
That is both nourishing and a source of heartburn.
There is an unseen presence we honour
That gives the gifts.”
(RUMI – Coleman Barks translation)
***
***
20 May 2022 The Heart is infinite in everyone and everywhere
The drawing I did of Baba looking sweet when I was on the train is over-shaded but not all that bad!
Yesterday I walked up the wild-garlic path – do you know, overnight almost all their white flowers were gone – over – how lucky I saw them the day before, but it still smells delicious … to where it meets the lane in the valley dip, the lane crosses it and the brook by a ford and ascends to Challacombe Farm. I started to take photos. Up the steep lane to where it turns a corner I imagined Meher Baba appearing suddenly round that corner dressed not in woollen plus-fours, stockings, shoes, and raincoat, but a warm coat over his flowing white trousers and sadra, smiling radiantly, his nut-gold dark hair flowing …
Meeting his embrace, my arms-around … I was back in my body which the sea waves knocked me out of, the day before. The fatigue when I’m not completely in my body is a weight to carry – what a difference, subtle soft and eager as I settled back into my tail. What a LOVE this is, with the Master, with the doorman.
Immediately above this, the lane divided to North Challacombe farm on the left and East Challacombe farm on the right – it is not a right of way. Up I went to the right, pausing to relish the view as it opened up into sunshine. By the farm I was met by FOUR cheerful but businesslike dogs doing their job very loudly, I entered the farmyard and saw the white house, the side of it, the side door, and kennels. In the 1930s photos it is grey stone or pebbledash. The owner an elderly man limped out to the barking dogs, and I said I knew some people who stayed here in the 1930s and may I have a quick look around and take a photo? (I am shy with boundaries and didn’t ask if I may go in the front garden).
Click to view gallery and wait for it to load
Through which window did Baba throw cherry stones at the Meditating Meredith?
It’s a weathered white T shaped house and it is called Combe Cottage. Near it, on the right of the farmyard is a new timbered one-storey building like an extension or guest house. I stayed only a few moments. The place is remote and private on its hillside.
Going back to the entrance I climbed over a gate to a steep farm track into the field; the moorland fringe of Great Hangman’s began just two fields away up there, and I’m sure this is where Baba and his rapt companions escaped for their walks. Very happy: beautiful views of the valley flowing down to Combe Martin as I ascended; a herd of pale cows and their calves; a white stallion stood observantly on the hillside – YES the Kalki avatar stayed here …
It isn’t a compulsion to draw. It is love. It is love like how it felt to touch the sunny rocks again, hands and feet, heart embracing. My drawings are rocks. Enjoy Baba’s nobility of expression standing quietly near the farm. Darshan is available each moment.
..
On the map I’d seen “highest cliff in England” to the side of Hangman headland and determined to find it. My step was now light and easy – around the huge hill I went and began to descend/short-cut a steep diagonal, curving round to the left to a much lower path, the explorer’s brilliant cautious happiness. I came to an extraordinary formation below me, like a giant axe had cut into the mountain. It is called Hangman’s Gut, a sheer gully cleft descending perhaps 800 feet to the sea, steep and grassy with red sandstone shale between sheer cliffs. I might just be able to scramble up or down it all the way if I had to. It is dramatic.
. click to view gallery and wait for it to load
The right hand crest of the “Cut” as you look out to sea is an arête, a great wave about to break and then chopped through; behind the wave swoops a brilliant green (with young blueberry bushes) vale down to the intense blue sea. It looked perilous but possible to creep down the wave-crest, the ridge?
First I followed the footpath around the flank and along where the map says “dangerous to proceed” – the heathery brink of the main cliff. I took photos of the tide far below. And then returned to the spectacular breaking-wave ridge and crept very carefully down it to join up my viewpoints … far, far down I went; and there was golden vetch and brilliant sea-pink. On the vale’s easterly crest as I descended were stags. They roared at me. I made a throaty sound back and sent peace and then they were quiet. The land formation is extraordinary, sharply tilted as in a dream dimension or tsunami, a plane of the ocean itself.
So I reached at last a grassy place on the ridge I could sit soaking up the sun and watch the shore below and the mystic blue expanse – misty further out – of the world’s waters, a wrinkle of breathing sanskaric fibres in any focused spot. I am rather purist for no other sound but the sea and silence but presently got out iPad and earbuds and Mischa’s Sufi songs in the scented heather softly. It was miraculous – all the way from across the pond – and I am in awe of his music and its beauty, his huge creative oeuvre and celebration.
Began with “A time for heroes” and on down the tracks into the Rumi songs – when Days have no Nights. Circle turn spin …
And I wrote …
How is it
That Beloved’s smiling feet tread
A far-off coastal homeland
Timelessly
And through a half century’s tincture of time
Your songs in California
Here this remote Devon moment
Raise a curve of paradise
Over the Sea –
Without time
In the whole round world,
How could you know your songs
To Baba speak
this wild place and its heart
How did you make
Such Beauty
The Heart is infinite
In everyone
And everywhere.
Climbing back up the steep goat-path arête, my feet and hands an upward tango are carefully placed in rhythm to the music; the dance is effort-free!!
It rocks.
It is stunningly beautiful to feel this. It continued until I reached the nipple cairn atop Great Hangman’s massive breast, I moved a little over its crest again to sit and watch the endless depth of the sea. After that I was fading and put the music away.
The Vision I had during this was and is: the heart’s depth is infinite. The heart is endless in each individual good or bad, each beast and insect, each blade of grass, each fish and predator awakened or not to awareness. Love has no end or beginning. We humans have such stuff in the way that rarely do we plunge into our intimate inheritance with the Divine Beloved, loving at every level and in every ancient strata of the rock and every sweet salt-flower … the Song of the Sea.
Loving touches and is this peace; in Baba’s arms and in his lap.
Who can say why or how? It is in the music and I am surely not the only one to receive it so, and to dance around my table and sing. Who could chatter about it? Here at the edge of Exmoor our Beloved One came all the way from India and stayed for just a week; the whole region is printed privately with his feet. Today’s earth-blue crystal falls into ocean immensity.
Return to Combe St Martin along the coastal path? Or down the valley again? I opted for the valley, wanting to visit North Challacombe farm and further verify Baba’s location. I descended again through the cows and past East Challacombe to the T junction, then a steep weary ascent through pines to the North Challacombe “farm holiday centre”. People round here don’t use their feet, only four-wheel-drives. The place is spanking smart in a conifer clump, I met the woman there, horsy and urban, and asked for her card; she said they’d been refurbished and open since 2017. I thanked her and departed.
Some writers in the Meher Baba UK fb group said East Challacombe got converted and renamed North Challacombe. Clearly Baba did NOT stay in that modern chopped-out setting – I went up there on my FEET to verify; East Challacombe, the house although renamed, is still there, very much so.
Back to the b&b down the wild-garlic path, still sweet-smelling … fulfilled. Unfortunately I had too large an evening meal with ale at the friendly place on the seafront; went to bed footsore, congested, exhausted, and didn’t sleep. I miss my home now. Tomorrow is my last day here. I rang my mother while still atop Great Hangman’s, to share with her this place and its delight and what a crazy family we are and how happy she is that I still do these things, and she remembered her solitary ecstatic journey around Sutherland not so long ago, sleeping in the car.
Click and wait, to view gallery
The photos I took are poor relations to the adventure. Try to accept my surface sludge of life and its noise and worries, obsessions and fatigues. It only veils the Real Beloved Life, which is oceanic, the heart; the shifty surface doesn’t matter.
The Light of Home is breaking the clouds asunder wherever “here” is. Isn’t that the weather pattern? The Shadow makes the Light radiant. His divine energy flows through my tiredness. Hold onto Meher Baba’s daaman, to calm all modes of being, the One crossing through always into the One.
Today It’s been raining again. The sunburn on my arms is sore and I’m worn out; but the sun breaks through and I shall be off soon for another “gentle stroll” – into the woods – who knowswhere to.
Baba and his companions were confined to the house by Meditating Meredith. Am I doing the stretchy landscape things they longed for the liberty to?
“Baba’s Wild Pear beach” is a steep descent from the cliff path – if they also walked down the wild garlic path to the beach at Combe St Martin, it’s only a mile or two. They took photos on the beach, and explored the wind-swept coastal path over Great Hangman’s, above the farm. This evening I shall look at it again online in the “Meher Baba travels” website.
***
21 May 2022 May the Light of His Silence break in every Heart
View of Combe Martin from the west.
Great Hangman’s crest with East Challacombe just visible below it is to the upper right.
The farm at upper centre is West Challacombe.
I go home today. I’m tired, away from my nest. Yesterday I found and removed four or five ticks on my arms and legs and one near my neck– ENOUGH OF THIS! Then I explored a bit the other coastline to the west, but the footpath there is clogged with property development. I caught some views up the Challacombe valley and its high romance. Then it rained and I scarpered to the b & b and into bed for the afternoon. Then a stroll up into wet sunny woods the opposite side which I see from the bedroom window – a long view-top with lush green meadows, walker-friendly, I enjoyed this.
In the evening a rock scramble out around the point, the tide had turned and I came to the other side of where I swam on the first day. Balance was stronger, hands and feet prehensile.
Touch and hold that flake or surface before you trust it!
Mischa Rutenberg is gathering together a peace project for Ukraine (2022) involving musicians internationally, and sometimes he is “impatient” with the recording process. Isn’t it curious (no it isn’t at all) that I listened to the perfection on Great Hangman headland, the clarity under the sea.
***
This morning I looked up Baba at East Challacombe online, https://www.meherbabatravels.com/location-gallery/england/east-challacombe-england/. Tony Zois who created the site, collected a mass ot fascinating research and stories. Someone visited in 1995 and took more photos; I didn’t take any pictures of the actual paths where he walked around on Gt Hangman’s and feel at the moment that I didn’t accomplish my mission.
I DID connect with him in my special way. Go home and cultivate the Tree, the plant … it is only ever a matter of moving into my inner being, wherever I am – so at the moment I’m a tick crawling around, but when I am in my home I shall expand into my body’s embrace.
This is a gene key ‘Dream Arc’ whose shadow (inertia) is the tick – the gift (determination) transforming the shadow is the busy beaver – the siddhi (invincibility) or way of illumination is the cormorant – From my paintings for the Gene Keys transmission based on the I Ching.
***
Baba on the beach with Kitty Davy’s brother Herbert
***
22 May 2022
Home with my proper good coffee and sunshine. Dear Ris my daughter cycled Ramsgate and Margate sea-coast yesterday her birthday and met a Cycling Chap. The sea was quite rough and she didn’t swim.
On the train yesterday I listened to MJ on sexual energy:
“… Since there is no successful blocking of sexual energy there is successful expression, and this successful expression is transformative. Leading into “the right” side of the body will lift it. Meher Baba asked people not to repress but recognise the source of the ancient thought/feeling in experience and to let it purify in our mind.
“When (still in the) winding phase, it makes good sense to build STRONG BLOCKING FORCES to hold and construct that energy …”
Earlier, MJ tells how sanskaric fibres and the whole well of Life are constructed and shaped in the forms of genitals and breast and the necessity for many male and female incarnations to develop and balance them. As I know, it is the Spirit and the forms of the sea.
“It is impossible to hold certain kinds of love without fully developed breasts … …
When Unwinding, if one loves others or loves love, it is quite impossible to block, force, push, pull. You fail!
“Wave of sexuality is not lust.
(Lust is me-obsessed for gain, pressure, or greed in any area).
“Any wise person is aware of the whole range and does not act in fearful or threatening ways.
“The pure mind considers and understands the range of feeling and its levels and purposes and the way one level is transformed into another.
“All matter/thought wishes to propagate itself and spawn a whole family.”
THE MUSIC IS A LIVING ENTITY. It flowed me in and as the sea, essence of the deep. I recall with romance the high green hill behind the town where the b & b was/is. The Little Hangman peak like Arunachala dances high above the footpaths, big and steep.
It was MJ’s birthday yesterday, as well as Ris’s, and Gary C was in a hospice and died – the grapevine told me – “A potent day”. On the journey home in the train I felt wobbly in the soul’s portal of arrivals and departures. I felt so very happy to reach my house and wrap its Treasury around me and open Jumbo Mac’s big solid screen and be easily in touch again with my friend. I am behind and backwashed with the creative. I want to sketch Baba in 1931 in that place where I have been.
At the moment I am in the gentle sound of MJ’s voice, whom I listened to on the single-track Tarka Line train through bucolic villages of Umberleigh, Eggesford, and Crediton.
***
23 May 2022 Watch God’s hands
Oops. Got my knuckles rapped for my whim of Baba on the Combe Martin coastal path near Little Hangman’s blended with Seclusion Hill which I sketched yesterday morning –
Sometimes JA’s playtime puts her in shtuck with Those Who Know. However the point is made, and thank God quickly, otherwise my whim might have bounced along unwitting. I feel downcast at “failing” with my portraits – three I sent yesterday – no matter how hard I try to see and get them right. However, the result of collaborating is ALWAYS so much better than when it was just me doing it. Every time. When my efforts bounce back it smarts a little, but then I see what was off, which I couldn’t see before. The pictures are done in tandem – two eyes are better than one. And where am I happiest? Not in blowing my bubble, but in sharing, serving, and rediscovery.
I shall relocate my “Baba in Challacombe” landscape to Seclusion Hill, in the light of the universal work he did there, which dawns on me. It is sacred work, not an artist’s fancy, nor confined to my inner meanings. Value the shared Virgo-ascendant precision with my dear friend on the path, and stay kind to the un-flattered child.
I feel shy of telling my adventures and revelations … and bereaved, it is the sorrow when a peak has passed. Watch God’s hands, the veins of those trillions of threads in the sea. And feel my Sun dawn – recognise yet again, Meher Baba is not my project but the Avatar of that Hill and in the world. Recognition steps forth again, liberated from the struggle with how to position his arms.
Ris told me she no longer listens to the news or to the torrential diet of disaster on the media. She became selective and listens to Louis Theroux whom I used to enjoy. He goes around talking to people nosily. I made her weep with laughter yesterday when I struggled to tame my unruly toes into five-finger shoes on the Underground train – having been in too much hurry to put them on in A and H’s house. She showed me on her phone the photos she took of converging waves clapping their hands at Ramsgate … the sea’s narrative textures which both of us love. For her birthday present yesterday I printed the pictures I took when I danced on Baba’s beach – the infinite swirls, colours, and textures in the rock: God’s art.
My walks on this map are the red and blue dotted lines.
The b & b where I stayed is the small red circle with a cross.
Suddenly realise – all this little stretch of coastline is sacred to Meher Baba’s presence and his work there in the 1930s. The layer wakes up again like a leaf. What about a blog post to share with Baba Lovers and Sufis? … the photos taken in 1931, alongside mine in 2022 … with a gallery of the Jewels in the rocks offsetting rolling green hills and drawings of Baba and his companions at the farm and by the sea. Let it season, sink in and sober up.
Ris and I walked and talked a little behind H who strode stockily with his phone ordering Indian takeaway for dinner – when we got back to Bounds green it had arrived and A was setting it out on the white wrought-iron table in the garden.
Some of the creatures in the aeon of “God Speaks” …
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24 May 2022 THE HILL
I’m busy on a photo of Baba taken in E Challacombe, he is limpidly beautiful, wearing the black/white stripy fur jacket, the alphabet board held on his chest, his finger on the Y points to his heart I had a struggle in the drawing with achieving detail too soon. Nearly every time this happens and constrains it; constant adjustments and re-doing eyes and trying to make him NOT look like Mrs Salter. My plan is to background this portrait with a landscape impression, the fields and hilltops..
I would like to contour the land with his face, I managed that yesterday when I redid the Seclusion Hill background … the ancient Hill and its wisdom (see May 17 entry, near the beginning of this post). From its peak where he built a cabin to do his work, there is an immense view of the Deccan plain, and in the distance are other lumpy hills and mountains. It is like Arunachala. Great Masters, Sadgurus, Avatars unanimously find and settle on nature’s pyramids. Seclusion Hill is near the scarp of a long beast or ridge-back.
Last week’s feeling of the coastal path and its little mountain is unexpectedly restored! They merge …
Mischa’s music gently, sweetly, danced up Great Hangman over the sea … and by providence (the way birds carry seeds and straws) to how many remote places around the world ? The inner Wise One tucks him or herself into a hill or a rock or a sea-wave or the sky for a moment or a lifetime of the divine countenance. That moment, the Light of the All, is irradiated eternally without concern whether it shall last.
The human sentinel is a moment’s sea-pink.
Try when drawing Baba to look further than my window, conscious of what he means privately to others, and honour that.
There are surprisingly only 2 pics of Hangman online.
The bit which sticks furthest out into the sea like a nose is where I climbed half way down, sat and communed with Mischa’s Rumi songs, then danced with them all the way back up! It was like planting a flower … allmost 45 degrees, grassy with heather and deer paths.
The Hangman cliff is a strange formation – that vertical slice across the hill-loaf. On its brink is where I also sat. Look at those prehensile claws/paws on the sea.
I have bites on my legs still developing and itching – must have got them from there, and the ticks, even through proper shoes and long trousers. I don’t think there were any more ticks other than the ones I found and pulled off. My right ankle is swollen from when I fell on Baba’s wild pear beach, and from a couple of times it was wrenched over on rough ground/grass hummocks. P was horrified when I showed him the black bruise on my left thigh – he screamed Arnica, Arnica, it might get infected.
How lovely that garlic-flower scented path is. This came to mind yesterday: the companion on the rope. We are in His Hands? Rock-scrambling at the low-tide point, my hands and feet were sensitive feelers stretching, curving, embracing, trying to keep a slow rhythm and flow of movement over the Beloved. When I was young I ran and jumped and “read” the pattern of several leaps ahead – this is impossible now; the way I creep around is less showy and more sensuous.
The fire in my soul at the beginning of the month became serene water, constantly I hear the gurgle and slap of soft waves in caves. High on the cliff curve I tune into the ocean’s essence within my spine, the core. Lighthouse. The breath. In Early Human before getting cluttered and clammed up with intellect what can there have been but LOVE?
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25 May 2022 GESTATING
Well, good morning. A bit battled with the inner low-tides across each other.
In the evening I started from the photo in 1932 to draw Baba in winter coat & plus-fours with Minta on a windy hillside – but only room in it for four figures. I wanted them full length and am bursting out of little A4.
25th today … rediscover, refresh and bask with ocean threads. Such moments don’t cling to the personal surface; It doesn’t matter what I do in life, it is the LEVEL which counts. There is a green river of that mile of coastline and the wild-garlic path and the weathered whitish grey farmhouse, the silent Avatar of the Age strides around there with his little flock … God speaks. There is wonder in their eyes. In the 1930s it was remote, and must have taken all day to reach by train from London – ah no, they drove. Up the muddy lane to the farm they walked, carrying their suitcases.
When I’m drawing – struggling to get it right and then breakthrough – all my body goes into it and is used up, I am then tired, flat ,and uninspired. Sometimes it is enough to step outside for half an hour for my body to refill, return, and show me what to do.
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26 May FOOTFALL OF TIME – TWIN HELIX
Yesterday I completed the one with Minta Toledo – she was Delia’s sister and not a seeker but when Delia introduced them, Baba poured out light and she fell in love and there are many photos of them holding hands or having a cuddle – I tried hard to capture her facial expression from the photo – and also began to draw this one of Baba coming round the corner in the lane to me, opening his arms.
It was the usual delicate rock-climb with Baba’s face but not too arduous, and trial/error adjustments to his coat and his stride and his arm curving out to welcome … the drawing became leafy, the spring-tide banks of the lane, the leaf-shadows on the ground – the textural density of my work/play nowadays. The Beloved One comes to meet me with suggestive patterns around his presence like a heart … an ear around him … a figure of eight through his centre … we embrace, and now this one is done, the two or three more won’t give much trouble …
I was reminded yesterday that power flows through the system when it feels weak. Picture a remote agricultural lane, this extraordinary character with long curly hair and shining eyes emerges! This memoir takes me forward by the hand – worry not. It will accomplish its purpose for which it planted JA in Combe Martin with her faculty, her loving heart, and willing feet.
So now, what is the quality of time?
An Illustration from Richard Rudd’s “The Gene Keys”.
DNA twin-helix spiral … the cosmic serpent throughout the universe …
an interwoven dance of pentagons – the Code
Time is, as Murshid J would say, not linear but a sphere.
Baba’s footfall is created across … more than 90 years! Goodness-sakes. The spontaneous scribble of leaf shadows on the lane drew a ripple from his sandalled foot – (I should have drawn him shod in welly boot or heavy slipper, but this is a fairy tale) – a tremor of time and music.
This one from Persia and Maharashtra arrived in my heart’s homeland, mysterious and remote … the magic is in the telluric and cultural interface of our rolling fields and rugged rocks with his ancient sunny landscape: here are small rural homesteads, the dung of browsing cattle, and leafy lanes. He shivered in the rain and mist and mud, they gave him boots and warm socks.
He arrived with the waves breaking onto the beach “of endless time”: hearing this sound, he speaks with it:
A MESSAGE FROM THE MASTER… Given on the seashore at Combe Martin, England, April 22 , 1932
“BABA is like the sun … anyone whose heart is pure can receive the rays. Make the heart pure by thinking of the Master, and then loving Him.
“BABA is like the sea, which receives weak or strong, diseased or healthy, dotard, sinner or saint.
“BABA is like an Infinite Ocean , and in order to realize Him, the ego must be annihilated altogether.”
Courtesy of ; The Awakener – Vol.1 No.2 1953
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Meher Baba with Margaret Craske, Kitty Davy, and Margaret Starr, 1931
I am charmed at the way Baba’s “Seclusion hill” (alias Little Hangman) bobs up along the coast, an echoing sentinel, look there it is again in the distance, near Ilfracombe. To my regret I hadn’t taken a photo from this point, but after I got home I watched a class of Murshida Conner’s in which she talks of Challacombe … and there was the providential photo I needed! (above the drawing.)
Shadows and outlines swim under the scene, like whales and creatures beneath the sea. A sentence slowly forms. There is an ascending continent. I seem to see and feel an ocean bed rise up to clarity through deep water in simple sequence: a mandala of five lifetimes is spoken in these hills … beyond speech.
The curves across this landscape please my eye very much. It is a response to this week’s “topography” contact with an earlier lifetime or group of lives. Look over the side of a boat and catch sight of rippled sands, a pattern of fields and cities; the hidden is revealed and almost speaks. I saw in Abdullah’s smile the other day, my mad mute joy when I connect to the Companions of the Light and my bounden duty to draw them – and when I’m dancing – and the old terror and dullness when I fell away from the boat and lost it all. And Oh what a long labour the drawing is – need to be faithful – just to sketch/scribble/Art is not sufficient.
Here Baba and four of his Lovers fountain from the path. I drew them first, and then the landscape. Is the number 5 significant?
There it is in the DNA helix diagram above … the dance of pentagons!
Seclusion Hill at Meherazad has transformed, it was planted with trees to develop soil cohesion. Siva’s mountain Arunachala in Tamil Nadu likewise was “greened”. Did Baba note, amused, how faithfully in this far-out place Little Hangman echoes the sacred mountain where he did his work?
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27 May 2022 – Unwind the threads … to weave a picture of Him
Why so grumpy today? Didn’t you catch sight of the illumined Quetzalcoatl bird ? The cosmic serpent, the mountain and the doubting grasshopper?
Oh! I listened to dear Jim on the Underground train, again on Reincarnation – very carefully, kept stopping it, backtracking to hear again. So cheer up, old thing!
He said basically in his language, long-drawn out and precise … he said the soul in her current incarnation carries the woven mixture of millions of lifetimes human, animal, aqueous, and mineral, and to realise this is to see with love, see God. Each of us, each individual good and bad is the entire Divine Universe.
This stops me in my track and cannot be written down or formally taught, any more than to write upon the sea – but the sea scribes the rock. To look at the world and people thus is how God sees.
Incarnation is the way of life within and as this FORTUNATE STAR. The next incarnation might be a contrasting veil of attractive obscurity. Incarnation does not proceed in linear mode. It complements, balances, offsets, and buffoons the woven pattern in the Divine Design. It is not linear at all but back and forth in time and in history as the waves. To unwind the threads and see through the veil is to witness and be Totality – a glimpse glad and free. I emerge with tattered rags into clarity.
On the hangman’s nose – it is, it was a DEEP DIVE – the chasm – into and as the heart. The dimension opens and plays back to me. Undress with joy and depth the world as it truly is. It bursts up from the deep. Each and every one of us is loved, as is every atom, every rock-form, and each creature – and the Treasure beyond expectation has, as Yeshua once said, no place in the world, nowhere to lay its head …
Silence and the downward-cleaving song of the fountain.
Here is the link again with more information and many archival old photos of Meher Baba’s visit to East Challacombe:
What is the ocean’s sound
waves moving through waves
around the earth
his voice?
… a sound of one hand clapping
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My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom. See also Aquariel and Gene Keys Diary.
All art and creative writing in this blog is copyright © Janeadamsart 2012-2024, except where otherwise stated. May not be used for commercial purposes. May be used and shared for non-commercial means with credit to Jane Adams and a link to the web address https://janeadamsart.wordpress.com/
My artwork of Meher Baba and his companions is copyright (c) Sufism Reoriented.
Winter – after Botticelli
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