Excerpts from "Bees of the Invisible – Awakening of a Place" by Václav Cílek

The Rule of Home

• A person is at home in a landscape, some people can encompass two or three landscapes, but no more. Despite that, we need to travel abroad – for comparison, for the recognition of the smallness of home, and the realisation of where we belong.

The Rule of Resonance

• A smaller place with which we resonate is more important then a great place of pilgrimage, where one is only a visitor.

The Rule of Irreplaceability

• There are places that cannot be replaced by other places.

The Rule of Breezing

• The spirit breezes, where it pleases, but some places prefers over others.

The Rule of Various Viewpoints

• One perceives the beauty of a place, the other myth or poetry, another understands the charge and flow of energies. None of these ways is superior to any of the others.

The Rule of a Lid

• Some places, or even whole landscapes, are open and friendly. Others are hidden under a lid – closed or injured and suffering. Deeper, perhaps, there is a crooked, but nonetheless beautiful inner life.

The Rule of Return

• Just as between people there exists love at first sight, so there exists one between a person and a place. Usually though, it is necessary to keep returning, to observe, and to grow intimate with the place. Certain places (and certain truths), only reveal themselves when they are not clearly visible.

The Rule of Slow Approaching

• Some places are shy, other places behave like a director in chief – they accept you, but you will need to wait. We never arrive to unknown sacred spaces directly, it is much better to walk slowly, to hesitate, to circle the place first and only then to approach. An unknown place is not only one that we do not know, but also one which doesn’t know us.

The Rule of Friendly Teasing

• If we want to get to know a certain place, it is necessary to vary an active and passive approach. In the active part of the approach one prompts a place with the question who are you, please? And after that usually nothing happens, the place lives in a different time than the human. Sometimes a reply follows. Quick replies are usually misleading.

The Rule of Sacred Games

• There are places or lines where strange things happen and sensitive people perceive unusual images. There are many playful places or those endowed with a strange (sometimes almost malicious) humour, that produce images which should not be interpreted.

The Rule of Culmination

• A place, which is also a being, matures and grows. (…) Certain lazy and messy or enchanted places confuse times or even sleep through whole eras and then awake into a period in which they are disorientated.

The Rule of Reciprocal Awakening

• By journeying to places we awaken and reinvigorate the earth, which returns this to us. A place within a landscape corresponds to a place within the heart.

In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me…. I was there, listening…. I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it…. I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paint to break out. Andre Marchand after Paul Klee

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