"I wish to see with your eyes," says the angel

 

“Every angel is terrible,” Rilke says in his Duino Elegies, "and yet, alas, I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul.” Wings - and the resemblance to birds - is what most of us first associate with angels, though the earliest angels to appear in Judeo-Christian texts are wingless.

This morning a friend sent me video of a recitation of a French translation of Pushkin's poem "The Prophet" in which a desperate spiritual wanderer, thirsting in the desert, meets a six-winged angelic being, one of the high order of seraphim. His eyes are changed to those of a young eagle. In his ears he hears "the shudderings of heaven" and the "huge wingbeats of angels". His heart is ripped out and replaced with a flaming coal and - utterly changed - he can fulfill his calling as a prophet.

Pushkin was inspired by the Old Testament (especially Isaiah 6: 9-13), Rilke by the angels of Islam he had read about in a French biography of Muhammad. I am inspired by their winged poetry to post the illustration I made this week from one of my many dream visions of the "almost deadly birds of the soul".  

 

March 13, 2024 

From a lucid dream that unfolded spontaneously in the hypnopompic zone.

"I wish to see with your eyes," says the angel

The camel appears first, pushing its nose up close. I see a vast expanse of desert and a city of verdant gardens beyond. I think of journeys I have made along the path of Gimel (the Camel), the path of the High Priestess in Kabbalistic Tarot. Why not?

I don’t have to mount the camel. As soon as I consent to the journey, I am looking at the sculpted profile of a mythic bird, its curved beak sharply defined against a deep blue sky. It reminds me of the homa birds on capitals at Persepolis, as I have seen them in European museums.

The next instant the eye blazes like a fire opal, the statue comes alive and soars up into the sky. I try to follow it. I fly up above the clouds and see a great white tower. I have been here before.

I descend gently towards my body on the bed. I hear an inner voice I think is that of an angel: "I wish to see with your eyes and feel with your senses."

Feelings: excited, curious

Reality: Persian traditions have often called to me and I am fascinated by the heaven birds of Persian mythology. In The Conference of the Birds the homa does not join the flight because he has obligations to make kings. He confers spiritual radiance on a true king; Inayat Khan takes this as a metaphor for spiritual consecration beyond earthly coronation. The homa according to legend never touches the earth and is hard to find. The Sufis say that even a distant sighting is a blessing.

Illustration: "Camel and Homa" by Robert Moss

 

The Soul of an Irish Priest Is Called Out of His Body

 

One of the oldest Christian accounts of a visionary experience written in the vernacular is a fragmentary text titled The Vision of Laisrén. It was translated from the Irish by the great German scholar of Celtic literature, Kuno Meyer. I report a visionary encounter with him in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. Meyer thought Laisrén was probably an abbot who died in 638, while the surviving text was copied a couple of centuries later.

In the narrative, Laisrén is a priest who falls asleep in a church he has been working to purify, exhausted by fasting and labor. A voice tells him to get up. "Arise!" When he ignores it, the command is repeated. Struggling to his feet he sees the east end of the church ablaze with light. There is a shining figure between the chancel and the altar. He hears the command, “Come towards me!”

The cleric shakes from head to toe. Then he sees his soul hovering over the crown of his head and does not know how it came out of his body. He sees the roof of the church open and “two angels taking the soul between them and rising into the air.”

He sees a host of angels coming to join them. But legions of demons bristling with fire are gathering too, armed with spears and darts and javelins, with “fiery hair growing through them like the hair of a thistle. A battle is joined for the soul of the priest. Despite the horror show graphics, it is fought with words. The chief demon lists the priest’s derelictions. The head angel declares that the charges are inadmissible since the priest has been cleansed by confession. The demon argues cleverly that there is one charge from which Laisrén may not be excused: he is guilty of failing to follow the command in Matthew 18 to “become as little children.”

Laisrén's angelic advocate ends the trial by asserting that the priest was called out of his body on a mission. He is going to be shown hell so he can report back to humans with an up-to-date weather report. He now takes off in angelic company on a flying visit to a sinister mountain glen and a peek into the black mouth of pit. Laisrén’s perspective has shifted. Instead of looking up at the soul with the eyes of the body, he sees through the eyes of the soul, or perhaps more precisely, the subtle body. There is the island - or Ireland - in the far distance. The text breaks off before he gets back.

Source: Kuno Meyer (trans.) Stories and Songs from Irish Mss  1. "The Vision of Laisrén". Otia Merseiana (Publication of the Arts Faculty of University College Liverpool, 1899) pp 116-9.

Illustration: St. Molaise island, County Fermanagh from Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae. Laisrén is said to have lived on the island as a hermit in earlier years, and Molaise may be his other name. 

The Angel Whose Wing is the Color of Peacock Feet

 

I love the small discoveries in my overnight studies that bring a subject to quivering life. I am reading the visionary tales of Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi in Henry Corbin's French translations published as L'Archange empourpré. Suhrawadi, the medieval Persian Shaykh al-Ishraq ("Master of Illumination") melded Neoplatonist philosophy and mystical Islam. I read some of his visionary treatises forty years ago, in a translation by W.H. Thackston that I found in the tiny offices of the publisher opposite the British Museum on Great Russell Street [1]. I was called to deepen my study of Suhrawardi by lucid dreams and inner conversations in the liminal space between sleep and awake, and the play of synchronicity, of dreams literally spilling onto sidewalks. 

In a story whose Farsi title Corbin translates as "The Rustling of Gabriel's Wing"[2], the teller walks the night in a half-dream state until he encounters ten sages of shining beauty, only one of whom can speak to him in a way he can begin to understand.

The sage tells the traveler "that everything in the four corners of the world proceeds from Gabriel’s wing". Then he explains that Gabriel has two wings. light and dark. The left wing is dark because it bears a reddish "imprint", the color of "the moon at its rising or of peacock feet." It is from the shadow of that wing that human events unfold. 

What a stunning image, and goad to contemplation. A difficult and barely animated philosophical text whose terms resist easy translation and definition is suddenly gloriously alive, its words swishing and fluttering in the air. The peacock would have been quite familiar to Suhrawardi's audience, both the literal bird with its gorgeous many-eyed back feathers (not actually its tail) and the symbolic bird central to many forms of religious art and belief in the general area from the Peacock Angel of the Yazidis to the companion of deities in India. What are we to make of peacock feet in a mystical account of emanation from the Highest Word down to the human plane? Will we hear the peacock scream, as Yeats did?

There are other phrases to bite on and savor in Suhrawardi's didactic story. Why does the angelic speaker declare that the business of the ten sages is "tailoring" (in Corbin's French translation, couture)? We know that 'garment" is a term often used in theo-sophy of many stripes for the vehicles of soul or consciousness on various levels. 

[1] The Mystical & Visionary Treatises of Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi trans. W.M. Thackston (London: Octagon Press, 1982)

 [2]"Le bruissement de l'aile de Gabriel" in Shihaboddin-Yahya Sohravardi. L'Archange empourpré: Quinze traités et récits mystiques. trans. Henry Corbin (Paris: Fayard, 1976)

Images

Top: Detail from "Muhammad's Call to Prophecy and the First Revelation" Folio from a manuscript of the Majma' al-Tawarikh. Herat c. 1425

Bottom: "Calligraphic Composition in Shape of Peacock," Folio from the Bellini Album, Turkish ca. 1600

Both in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the Public Domain.

Rilke's angels

He hears the voice in a howling wind on a cliff path above the Adriatic, and it gives him the first line of what becomes the Duino Elegies. 

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?

Who, among the orders of angels, would hear me if I cried out?

He warns at the end of the first verse that “every angel is terrifying”. He picks up that refrain at the start of the second elegy, where he calls the angels “almost deadly birds of the soul”.  He gives a longing glance at the gentler appearance of the angel in the apocryphal Book of Tobit, as a gentle, very human guide who escorted the boy Tobias along the road 

Where are the days of Tobias,
when one of your most radiant stood at that simple doorway,
 dressed for travel and no longer frightening…?” [1]

The author is Rainer Maria Rilke, who was born in Prague and is recognized as one of the greatest poets in the German language. His imagination was angel-struck, from his early poem about the angel of the sundial at Chartres to his ghost writing for the Angel of Death in the last lines he ever wrote. His angels rarely have much in common with the familiar figures of Jewish and Christian angelology. He told  Witold Hulewicz, his Polish translator, that he was more drawn to the angels of Islam. [2]

Before he arrived at Duino Castle, near Trieste, in 1912 as the guest of the Princess Maria von Thurn und Taxis, Rilke had wandered Andalusia with a Koran and a copy of a French biography of Muhammad in his book bag  He wrote a poem about Muhammad’s summoning.

The 96^th sura of the Quran (“Recitation”) corresponds to the night of January 12, 611, when Gabriel first appeared to Muhammad – who was sleeping in a cave in Hira -and ordered him to read. In the hadith Muhammad is roused by a blinding light. When his eyes adjust he is terrified by a radiant figure that spans the whole distance between heaven and earth. The angel lifts him by his hair (he feels no pain) and speaks to him in a voice that fills him with fear. In the name of the creator, the angel hands him a scroll and orders him to read. Muhammad protests that he cannot read.In some versions,the contents of the book enter his heart and three years later, on the orders of the angel, he starts to deliver them to others. 

When Muhammad reads, in Rilke’s elaboration,the angel submits.and bows to him.

The Angel bowed its head
before him, one from thenceforth who had read:
who knew, and carried out, and who decreed. [3]

From the birth of the Duino Elegies in the storm above the Adriatic, it took Rilke ten years to complete all ten, after the trauma of the Great War, in what he called a thunderstorm of the mind. Often, in these lovely, wild and mysterious verses,we fell the aching distance between the human condition and the untouchable beauty of the angelic realm. In a letter to his Polish translator Rilke explained that "the angel of the Elegies is that being that vouches for [our] being able to recognize a higher level of reality in [the realm of the] invisible than in the visible.” 

“You are the bird whose wings came/when I wakened in the night and called.”  This is how Rilke addressed the Guardian Angel (Der Schutzengel) in a poem with that title.

What shall I call you? Look, my lips are lame.
You are the beginning that gushes forth,
I am the slow and fearful Amen
that timidly concludes your beauty.
You have often snatched me out of dark rest
when sleep seemed like a grave to me
and like getting lost and fleeing, -
then you raised me out of heart-darknesses
and tried to hoist me onto all towers
like scarlet flags and bunting.[4]

In the last lines Rilke composed, in the unfinished poem that begins Komm du, du letzter ("Come on you, you last") the poet gives voice to an angel. This time it is Azrael, the Angel of Death. 

As I burned in spirit, I burn in you.
The wood that blazes held back for so long has aged;
now I feed it and burn in you. [5]

Rilke gave us a gentler version of human-angelic interaction in one of the many poems he composed in French. 

From “Vergers”(Orchards)

3

Reste tranquille, si soudain
l’Ange à sa table se décide:
efface doucement les quelques rides
qui fait la nappe sous ton pain.

Tu offriras ta rude nourriture,
pour qu’il en goûte à son tour,
et qu’il soulève à la lèvre pure
un simple verre de tous les jours.

3

Stay still, if the Angel
suddenly chooses your table;
gently smooth those few wrinkles
in the cloth beneath your bread.

Then offer him your own rough food
so that he can have his turn to taste,
so that he can raise to that pure lip
a simple, common glass.[6]

The hint that an everyday angel may sit down at our table brings shivers of recognition and hope. In these lockdown times, it's good to know we may have visitors who don't need to enter by the door or come masked. Also helpful to have guidance on the correct table manners to observe when the angel calls.

References

1. Rilke, Duino Elegies II trans. Stephen Mitchell
2. 1925 letter to Witold Hulewicz quoted in Karen J. Campbell, “Rilke's Duino Angels and the Angels of Islam” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics No. 23, Literature and the Sacred (2003) 191-211.
3.  Rilke, "Muhammad's Summoning", translated by Leonard Cottrell. https://dailypoetry.me/rilke/mohammeds-summoning/ 
4. Rilke, "The Guardian Angel" in  in The Book of Images translated by Edward Snow.
5. Adapted from an unsigned translation of “Komm du” published in the Times Literary Supplement in December 1975 accompanying an essay on Rilke by Walter Kaufmann, who is presumed to be the translator.
6. from "Vergers" (Orchards) trans. A. Poulin, Jr,, in Rilke, The Complete French Poems.

Image: Duino Castle,near Trieste, where Rilke composed the first of his Duino Elegies in 1912.

Night Journey and Ascension with Gabriel

I have been re-rereading an excellent scholarly study of early accounts of Muhammad's "night journey" under the aegis of Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic), the angelic patron of dreams and astral travel. These "primitive" narratives, like the ascension discourse of Ibn ‘Abbas, are sometimes wildly different from Islamic orthodox teachings. The first angel the Prophet encounters in Ibn ‘Abbas’ narrative is a Rooster Angel (no kidding) - a giant with emerald green and blazing white feathers whose wings spread as far as the eye can see. Its function is to wake everyone up on Earth below. 
    Then the Prophet meets an angel who is half fire and half snow, split down the middle. Somehow the fire does not melt the snow and the snow does not put out the fire. Next the traveler meets the Angel of Death, who is studying a kind of cosmic laptop on which everyone's expiration date is inscribed - with the whole Earth between his knees, so none can escape him. He now encounters the Angel of the Hell Gates.
   The Prophet's ride is the Buraq, a mystical steed with a beautiful human face.  
   There are angels all the way up, through seven heavens. They get bigger and bigger. Higher up they stand in rows, with a distance of “50,000 years” of normal travel between each row,
   Muhammad is terrified by cherubim whose bodies are full of faces, and by seas of fire and wild water. These are the “veils” of God. Gabriel gives "firmness" to Muhammad’s vision, at last leaving him to trade in the Buraq and fly up in a strange green vehicle called a rafraf (for which there is no translation). It’s been suggested that it is a flying carpet. It dips and rises like a bucket seat on a tilt-a-whirl and will interest aficionados of UFOs.
    Muhammad leaves Gabriel behind to whizz up for a face-to-face with God (an idea frowned upon by orthodox imams). God "inclines' himself until he is the distance of "two bows", then reaches between Muhammad’s shoulder blades until the Prophet feels a cold hand closing around his heart, that delivers him from fear.
     Recurringly, Muhammad falls into a swoon, from which he emerges to tour the numberless palaces of Paradise as far as the Lote Tree of the Boundary, also known as a sidr tree. He then makes his homeward journey, stopping to greet the earlier Prophets in the lower heaven (Jesus in the lowest, the First Heaven).
     The authenticity of the narrative, attributed to Ibn Abbas, a contemporary of the Prophet (he was 13 when Muhammad died) revered as the "Interpreter of the Koran" and the "Great Sea of Wisdom" is contested. Yet the scholars concur that this version of the isra (night journey) and mir'aj (ascension) is very early, and gives us some insight into the type of visionary experience - embarrassing to organized churchmen - that is the fundament of religions..
     Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who melded Christian faith with neoplatonist philosophy, gave us in his fifth-century Celestial Hierarchy tiers upon tiers of angels, from seraphim and cherubim closest to God down to archangels and angels nearest to earth and humans.  Ibn 'Abbas has angels in myriads, ordered in rows seventy rows deep, separated on their various levels by those 50,000 years of distance which the Messenger of God is enabled to cross in an hour. When the Prophet returns to his body he finds that the jug of water overturned by the hoof of the Buraq when they took off has not finished spilling. With the help of the archangel of dreams, he has visited heavens and hells and traveled to the outermost limit of what it is possible for a human to see and know, in less than the time it takes to empty a jug of water. 

Source: The book I quote here is Frederick S. Colby, Narrating Muhammad’s Night Journey: Tracing the Development of the Ibn 'Abbas Ascension Discourse (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2009). 

Art: Mounted on the Buraq,watched over by Gabriel, the Prophet visits the paradise of ḥūrīs Illustration from the Mi‘rājnāma (Book of Ascension) from the Timurid period in Persia, c.1436. In the Bibliothèque nationale de France

What if the dream angel spoke to you tonight?

"Can you imagine a modern American man coming to his wife, who had just had a baby, and saying 'I had a dream last night, and I received a message that we need to move to Mexico because our baby is in danger here'?  Can you imagine her discussion with her parents, as they’re packing up the house?  The conversation at work when they quit their jobs?"

     The question was put to me by a Christian friend after he read an article I had written on the dreams that saved the life of the infant Jesus. My friend continued:

     "Somehow we seem to think that lives 2,000 years ago were simpler, and that these decisions weren’t as 'big' as they would be today, but in an era when the average person probably never traveled more than 50 miles from the spot they were born, this was a very large decision indeed.  They knew how to listen."

      A thought transference exercise of this kind is like stoking a fire, and bringing the glowing coals under the cold ashes alive. It carries a fierce and luminous story that may have grown cold and gray through mindless repetition into blazing relevance for how we live today.

      My friend had further questions. "Where, and when, did we lose the ability to listen to our dreams? How do we get it back?"

       Here's part of the answer I give in my book Conscious Dreaming:

For centuries, the church applied crushing weight to deny the validity of personal experience in the worlds of spirit. Personal revelation is always perceived as a threat by religious monopolies. To impose its control over bodies and souls, the medieval church not only demonized half the cosmos; it demonized the dream source and the personal unconscious - a poor name for what is also our channel to higher consciousness.

     Carl Jung, the son of a Protestant minister who had lost his faith, observed that organized religion exists to protect people from a personal experience of the divine. Hopefully, we and our churches will evolve beyond the need for such defenses. In these things, there is simply no substitute for personal experience.

     If fear of dreams breeds witchfinders, it also spawns reductionists, who are perhaps more deadly (or at least more deadening) because they invoke scientific jargon in a society where 'science' is widely presumed to have all the answers. Turn a certain kind of scientist loose on the dreaming mind and you will soon be informed that dreams are hallucinations spawned by the wash of chemicals, or nonsensical clutter generated by random neural firing. Such findings are usually reported without a single reference to the researcher's personal experience of dreaming, which speaks eloquently about their value.

     There is all the difference in the world between a genuinely scientific approach and scientism, the dull ideology that denies the authenticity of what cannot be quantified and replicated under laboratory conditions. It is scientism, not genuine science, that is the enemy of dreaming. True science is hungry for fresh data and new experiments, ready to jettison theories that our understanding has outgrown, ever alive to the possibility that the universe (like the dream source) is putting bigger questions to us than our best brains can put to it. It is no accident that the pathfinders of modern science - Einstein and Pauli, Kekule and Bohr, even Sir Isaac Newton in his day - have been dreamers and practical mystics.

"How do we get it back?"

I've spent nearly thirty years in that cause, and have founded my own school of Active Dreaming, training dream teachers from more that 20 countries. Part of what we help people to understand - to revert to my friend's initial questions - is the need for discernment. Working with dreams, as with any other source of information, we want to check the reliability of our sources and fact-check the details. Active dreamers learn to do this in a  number of ways, for example by (a)  identifying and trusting their true feelings and gut instincts about a dream; (by) getting feedback from others according to the quick, clear and action-oriented Lightning Dreamwork process and (c)  mastering the art of dream reentry, which means going back inside a significant dream, wide awake and conscious, to develop further information and dialogue with the source.


Image: Russian Orthodox icon of the archangel Gabriel

Gabriel has a sister

Never judge the depth of a dream by the length of the dream report. From my first cycle of sleep dreams last Sunday night, I harvested just one line, spoken to me by an unseen voice:

The Archangel Gabriel has a sister.

I was surprised, not least because in my first conscious visions of Gabriel, more than thirty years ago, I encountered a being of such feminine beauty that I was inclined to call him/her "Gabrielle".
     One of those visions is indelible. Under bright sunlight, in front of an old white oak on the farm in upstate New York where I was living at the time, a being formed from condensed light, radiant and beautiful and winged. In the presence of this luminous being, I felt cleansed and renewed. My heart swelled in my chest. I fell to my knees on the dirt road by the cornfield, weeping with joy. A poem burst from me. I chanted it aloud, half-singing. When I returned to the house, I wrote it down, like this:

Song for Gabriel

My heart is a song that rises
It is a rainbow bridge

spanning abysses
of place and time

My heart is a song that rises
to walk in the One Light
to heal the wound
between earth and sky

My heart is a song that rises
It is the crystal fire
that wakens the sleeper
into the dream

My heart is a song that rises
It is the pure waterfall
that cleanses my path
with tears of joy

   I knew something of Gabriel, All three peoples of the Book - Jews, Christians and Muslims - know this great angel. In all three traditions, Gabriel is the patron of dreams and of astral travel. Gabriel is the angel of annunciation. In Rumi's powerful vision of the annunciation, Mary is seized with terror by the coming of an immense power into her space. Fearful of violation, she flees from her body. The angel smiles on her and says (in my paraphrase): "You flee from me, from the seen to the unseen, where I am lord and master. What are you thinking of?"
   Coptic Christians, I have heard, identify Gabriel with Anubis, who is also a patron of dreams and of travel between worlds.
   I have met Gabriel many times since the vision under the white oak. In troubled times, the archangel has sometimes appeared armored for battle. In some visions, I have seen Gabriel as both male and female, light and dark - and as something before the opposites held in dynamic balance in this winged form. 

    But what did it mean to be told, in this recent dream, that "Gabriel has a sister"?

    I posted the one-line dream report on my personal Facebook page and received a bevy of suggestions from other dreamers, some of whom are steeped in angelology. The general view was that angels are neither male nor female but will exhibit forms adapted to the character and perception of the beholder. I recalled a remarkable and wildly funny story by Stephen Mitchell, the distinguished translator, in which Gabriel appears to him in such an alluring feminine form that he is possessed by lust.
    My mind moved, like a long-legged dragonfly upon a pond, over all the associations.
    Then I decided to share my one-line dream report with a dear friend who had been expecting a baby. She has very strong angel connections, and I have often joked that in her presence I find angels unavoidable.
     Here is an excerpt from our email exchange:

RM (April 5): You may have seen this on my Facebook page, from a dream over the weekend:

The Archangel Gabriel has a sister. I was surprised to learn this in a dream last night, especially since in some of my visions Gabriel appears feminine 

As I think about this today, I am wondering whether you have news of the bright angel who is coming into the world through you.

Friend (April 7): This is amazing. 

First - yes, my beautiful daughter landed on the 5th of April, the day you wrote to me. She is wonderful - and we are enchanted by her presence. 

Second - a few days before birth, I had this dream: 

I was in a long line, in front, waiting to enter a beautiful, white church. As I am almost at the entrance, I am wondering what I am doing there. I see then that I have in my right hand a piece of paper. A single word is written on it: Gabriel. 

Amazing.

Yes angels are. And I see that my dream of Gabriel may have been a dream of annunciation. Gabriel ("the seer of the Virgin" in an old Irish blessings) is good at that.

Images (1) Icon of the Archangel Gabriel from the royal gates of the central iconostasis of the Kazan Cathedral in St.Petersburg (2) RM drawing from a vision of Gabriel as male and female, light and dark.

Flying in Dreams and Awake: The Winged Art of Reet Kalamees

When I arrived in Tallinn, Estonia last month to lead a dream workshop, I found the hotel lobby filled with marvelous paintings of luminous winged beings. I was thrilled to learn that the artist, Reet Kalamees, was coming to my workshop and that her theme was "Flying in Dreams and Awake". Our meeting received a little nod from the universe. Her exhibition at the Euroopa Hotel had been scheduled to end a week before my event, but had been unexpectedly extended.
   At our first meeting, Reet told me how she felt that one of her pictures was for me. She showed me a striking canvas with a blue figure whose huge wings are crackling with sparks of light. She explained that the image had come to her in a powerful vision, in which she felt the presence of a great bird, six months before we met. With great generosity, as described in my last post, Reet insisted on gifting me with the painting - "He Sees" - and it is now at home in my home.
   Over lunch that weekend, Reet described how her paintings are often inspired by dreams and visions. I asked her to write an account of her work, and to let us know the birthing process for some of her individual paintings. Reet has now generously contributed the following inspiring account, with the stories of several of her pictures:

PAINTING WITH ANGELS

by Reet Kalamees

For years now I've felt a strong urge to paint. And not just paint, but to paint angels, beings of light and the beautiful spiritual world. For me angels represent the connecting link between heaven and earth, between humans and the Creator. Cooperation with them has been truly inspiring. 
Visions of my new paintings are often given to me through dreams and meditation.
I've had over twenty exhibitions and my paintings have found homes all over the world.

Mostly I paint in two ways:

1. According to the vision I get from my dream or meditation or a vision related to a person I’m painting for.
2. Without a vision- I just open my heart and I accept what the universe wants to express through me.

I would like to thank the Universe and the Creator for the inspiration and support.Who am I? Angel artist? Spiritual artist? Visionary artist? All of my paintings have a very special purpose - to help people - whether you are in need of spiritual guidance, positive energy, support at a difficult time, to strengthen your relationship with someone etc. 

    I have loved to draw and paint since childhood. As grown-ups, we often forget the child in us and tend to take life too seriously. But then some life event(s) will remind us who we really are. Already as a child, I had a strong feeling that besides our ordinary everyday world, there is something way greater-the invisible, eternal and infinite Universe. In my childhood, during the gloomy Soviet time, dreams were a great way to escape and I have always been a great dreamer.

    A few decades ago I was brought back to painting, because all of a sudden through my paintings beings of light, angels, spiritual guides, teachers and counselors showed up. For years now I have been painting the world that remains invisible to many, with all its power, energy and the characters from its light vibration. And this journey has been so incredibly fascinating, enriching and full of blessings and miracles.
     Often when I start painting I do not have a clear idea what I will paint, I simply open my heart to allow the Universe to express through me what it wishes. For me it is important, that through my paintings I can bring people more light, higher vibration and that, without exception, we are all divine beings.    With my creation, I would like to thank all those extraordinary people who have played an important role in my spiritual journey. I would like to thank the Universe and the Creator for all the inspiration and support. May these paintings touch all the people who have an open heart and are willing to take on more magic and miracles into their life.

 The story behind some of my paintings:

JOIN ME
Stay in the wind of my wings.
Keep close to my heart.
To take flight, all we need is to believe.

This is one of my first oil paintings from 2007 and it is very special for me. The vision for this painting was given to me in a  fraction of a second. I saw two different sides of a whole, which formed a divine union in higher consciousness. Everything and everyone is connected in total synchrony and harmony. When I look at this picture, I still to this day feel a great longing. A lot a people have given me feedback on this picture and said they feel a sense of recognition when  looking at this painting as if they are reminded of  something they have turned away from.

Many pictures are coming directly from my dreams:

Heavenly Horse or Creature of hay

  

HEAVENLY HORSES
Heavenly horses in their heavenly stable.
Talking to the stars.
Say a word on behalf of the humans.

CREATURE OF HAY
Heavenly horse galloping through a dream.
Looking into our hearts.
Touching our longings.

Heavenly horse is a dreamlike mystical being resembling a horse and vibrating in a very high frequency. In my dream the horse was made of hay and was not in any way an ordinary creature All over its body were doors and gates, which served as hideouts during danger. Like a heavenly Trojan horse. In that particular dream I was with my mother and we went to hide in the horse and came out after the danger passed.

     Somehow I knew that heavenly horses protect our dreams as well. Consequently, I have drawn a lot of heavenly horses for children to bring them warm, safe and supportive dreams.

At the Source of Life

Standing midst flowing light.
Letting go of all that has been.
The presence is all that remains.

Two transparent creatures standing midst running spring water. The water is not the water we are used to, but a liquid flowing light. In the dream the beings of light consume that light, they drink that light and pour it all over themselves until one moment they will become that light  and diffuse into eternity.

TWIN SOULS

Reflection within a reflection
Light within a light
To be where you belong and present.

In my life I have met a lot of souls, whom I remember and know from previous lives.  Some of them have been my twin souls. Meeting those souls creates synchronicity and the feeling of being present. Even if those encounters are meant to be brief, they create a new impulse, help me better perceive my journey and make it more meaningful. 

All art (c) Reet Kalamees. Please visit her website, where you will find both prints and original artworks available. You can find some of her art with English commentary on this American site.