The Swirling Cosmic Mystery

By Tom Shaver May/June 2003

A ball of manzanita branches formed that Mystery that unites and drives the universe.

People wove yarn around the orb and expeienced the power of being the creator of the universe. On the Cosmic Swirl, consisting of the raw material that Mystery uses to create the universe, I placed colored paper stars on which people wrote the answer to the question, "what if you really were the creator of the universe? What would you do?"

The hollow trunk of the Swirl received  black discs of paper on which people inscribed the things in their life that they needed to get rid of in order to fully step in to their roles as co-creators of our divinely mysterious cosmos.

The Swirling Cosmic Mystery was created in my Santa Cruz front yard. The Swirl is a helix of 1/2 and 5/8 inch rebar wrapped in wire mesh, then covered with  berlap coffee sacks that I painted with tinted candle wax.

The first stars and strands were put on at the 2004 Health and Harmony Festival. At times 5 strings of yarn got twirled at once. The mystery rode there and back dismantled in the back of my pickup.

The Swirling Cosmic Mystery also appeared outside of the Tribal Dance on Saturday evening across the street from the festival.

Next stop for the Swirling Cosmic Mystery was our wedding. The tints for the candle wax painted on the Swirl were chosen to coorespond with the color scheme for our wedding; blue, green, yellow, white and red.

A procession led by the Morroccan-Roll  band Hamsalila wove the wedding party to the redwood circle where our wedding ceremony had taken place earlier that day.

Torches held by friends and family lit the tip of the swirl. Flaming wax dribbled from the tip and set the Mystery ablaze. I had wedged large bricks of wax into the top branches of the mystery before the yarn wrapping started. I believe this ball of wax caught on fire and dropped flames through the bottom of the ball that dripped into the hollow of black holes. The tip had stopped burning. Soon a mighty flame shot up from the burning holes back up into the mystery.

I manipulated the movement of the Swirl and Mystery with a 20 foot length of tie wire attached to a 10 foot redwood branch. I got the Mystery to swing widely back and forth, spin and twirl around at the tip of the Swirl. Several people never caught on that I was moving it until they saw me put the pole down at the base of the Swirl when the flame had mostly died out. They thought some inexplicable force was guiding the Mystery.

As the last islands of flaming berlap stalwartly burned, I led a meditation in which people went to a realm of light and created the world of their dreams, then came back this realm with a packet of energy from their dream world.

(Tom and Abeja getting swept up in The Swirling Cosmic Mystery)