convergent currents

The rains have come. I am sitting in this dimly lit room. A small candle flickers; it’s flame dances with the autumn-like breeze that whispers through the open doorway. Enclosed by a canopy of evergreen, laced with fiddlehead fern, and the scent of Western-red cedar moistened soil, I feel myself becoming enchanted by the melodious songs of Western Tanager and Song Sparrow. I can literally feel my body yielding and seeing a doorway inviting me into a deeper pranic mode of inter-relating.

In just eight days, a new circle will take shape. The circle’s humyn community will be comprised of courageous soul who have not only felt their soul’s calling but have chosen to step into the unknown of the wilderness and their wild self. The more-than-humyn community and other-humyns—the life-worlds who have shaped each one of us to this point, the life-world during the quest, as well as the life-worlds yet to be known—will accompany us on this quest, guiding us to experience the collisions of beauty and grief...the wild fecund of living Earth, with whom we, too, are relating and participating.

I feel immense gratitude for the work—for these opportunities to be immersed in mystery and nature with fellow humyns and more-than-humyns, where communities of being with can emerge, co-creatively. Mystery is a profound mentor for me, especially as the pace of modernity quickens. A thrill of rapture is evoked in me when I am out in the “bush”—in the field, in the wild, and in spaces that expand beyond cell phone service (whether available or not) and the paraphernalia that masquerades our innate vulnerability. These said environments propel me to attune with the “news” of my body, and the body of the life-world within a 30-mile-radius...a different source of “information”. "Information" quote to bring emphasis to an embodied etymology, that is, the "info"—'the fluency of reality, data, knowledge and details’ that are ‘formative’, ‘forming’, and ‘shaping consciousness'. Perhaps because I am conducting an entire study about said phenomenon (and perhaps not), the processes of attuning with the life-world occupy my field of awareness quite often (read: frequently everyday). Yet, as I sit here now in this dimly lit room embraced and shaped by the rainy myst awakening a life-world in the Pacific Northwest, I feel an emergent beckoning to dive deeper with the ‘mystery’ and experience the wonder of the intersubjective phenomenon. I am walking now into that threshold, that open doorway.

My name is Colleen Bishop. I consider myself an artist of depth. Within various contexts and environments, I have been guiding experiences that connect humyns to the depths of their wild soul in relationship with the life-world (i.e., Earth) and awakening inner and outer processes of embodying prana (i.e., life-force energy) for almost two decades. While wandering the highlands of the Icelandic plateau, my Beloved, tbird, and I found an iteration of the Alchemy of Prana murmuring a life-force energy living at the edges, beneath the surface, and within the convergence of geothermals and glaciers.

An assumption I carry to this work is that a substantial degree of subjective experience may be transpiring beneath the threshold of consciousness. As an artist of depth, I work within, beneath, between, around, and beyond the confluences of the ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’ tracks. Held between time and emergent within timelessness, the ceremonies with Earth continue to shape and in-form and un-form the mystery of the phenomena of alchemy of prana.