Gaia Matrix Revisited
laury ostrow
.jpeg)
32 full color original illustrations by
Rowena Pattee Kryder
108 pages $29
The complete Gaia Matrix Revisited can be viewed, in its entirety, at no cost, on Blurb before purchase. Just click the above, then click on the image of the cover and finally click on "Review"
Blurb also offers a 30% welcome discount on first orders.
Entering the Gaia Matrix: A Participatory Work of Imagination
Entering a work like Gaia Matrix Revisited is not like reading a book in the usual way. It is closer to stepping into weather. You don’t stand outside the storm and label it. You feel the pressure change. You notice what in you tightens, what loosens, what turns toward light, what turns away. The work meets you where you are, and that meeting is part of what it is.
We are trained to treat images as objects and meaning as something we extract from them, like ore from rock. But some works aren’t built to be extracted. They are built to be inhabited. They invite a different kind of attention—one that doesn’t rush to interpret, but lingers long enough for the imagination to begin moving on its own.
In Gaia Matrix Revisited, the images do not behave like illustrations of ideas. They behave like thresholds. Each Portal is a crossing—a place where the mind’s quick naming falls quiet and another kind of knowing begins to stir. You may feel it as memory. You may feel it as a bodily recognition. You may feel it as a mood entering the room. The point is not to decode the image, but to let it begin decoding you—gently, without force.
This is why I call the work participatory. The viewer is not an outside observer. The viewer is an ingredient. Meaning is not delivered whole. It emerges in the living space between the image and the one who is looking.
Nature has always worked this way. She rarely moves in straight lines. She turns. She spirals. She returns. She weaves continuity and change into the same gesture. The vortex gathers what is scattered and brings it back into coherence. The helix carries life forward while it repeats, making variation without breaking the thread. We see these gestures in shells and storms, in galaxies and rivers, in the growth of plants and the shaping of the human body. They are not decorations. They are how coherence travels through time.
Rowena Pattee Kryder—visionary artist and creator of the original Gaia Matrix Oracle in the 1980s—painted in a language that recognizes these living geometries. Her work does not treat pattern as mere ornament, and it does not treat the human being as separate from the patterned world. Again and again, her images suggest that consciousness is not outside the weave. It is one of the ways the weave becomes aware of itself.
Gaia Matrix Revisited is my way of re-entering that field—of listening to it across time, and of bringing it forward as a living sequence of Portals, each one a place the imagination can step into. The “revisited” is not a correction, not an update, not an explanation. It is a return. A willingness to stand inside the images and ask what they still want to say, now.
And what they say, most insistently, is simple: you are not looking at a world. You are participating in one.
This changes how the work is approached. If you come to it seeking certainty, it may frustrate you. If you come seeking relationship, it will open. The Portals don’t demand belief. They ask for attention. They ask for time. They ask you to notice what happens when you stop trying to master meaning and instead allow meaning to arrive as a resonance—an inner movement that you recognize as true before you can fully explain why.
In our era, we are flooded with images that want something from us: our clicks, our outrage, our allegiance, our money, our fear. Rowena’s images do not operate that way. They feel more like companions. They don’t shout. They don’t chase. They wait. They invite. And if you meet them with patience, they begin to move.
This is also why the work naturally forms a collage rather than a linear argument. Meaning here does not proceed by proof. It proceeds by accumulation. A Portal touches something. Another Portal deepens it. Another Portal complicates it. Another Portal softens it. A voice speaks alongside an image. A sentence echoes in the body. A color becomes a mood. Over time, a field forms. You begin to sense the whole not as a conclusion, but as an environment.
Harold Bloom used the phrase “Imaginative Fiction” to describe works that don’t primarily operate through literal realism or straightforward explanation—works whose meaning becomes visible only when the whole is apprehended: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Goethe’s Faust, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Gaia Matrix Revisited is not those works, and it does not imitate them. But it shares a kinship with that lineage in one essential way: it trusts the imagination as a real organ of perception, capable of knowing through participation.
This is not escapism. The imagination is not fantasy. It is one of Nature’s instruments—one of the ways she teaches us to sense relationship. When imagination is awake, the world becomes less like a pile of objects and more like a living conversation. You begin to see how things belong to each other. You begin to feel how the whole is moving through the parts.
If you enter Gaia Matrix Revisited in this spirit, the work becomes fluid. It meets you differently on different days. It offers different passages when you are grieving than when you are celebrating. It changes when you change. That is not a flaw. That is the point. A participatory work isn’t finished when the artist finishes it. It finishes itself again and again in the presence of the one who enters.
If you’d like to explore the work itself, you can experience Gaia Matrix Revisited online in full. Take your time. Move slowly. Let the images lead. And notice what begins to move in you. You can learn more about the project here:https://gaiamatrixrevisited.com
We are trained to treat images as objects and meaning as something we extract from them, like ore from rock. But some works aren’t built to be extracted. They are built to be inhabited. They invite a different kind of attention—one that doesn’t rush to interpret, but lingers long enough for the imagination to begin moving on its own.
In Gaia Matrix Revisited, the images do not behave like illustrations of ideas. They behave like thresholds. Each Portal is a crossing—a place where the mind’s quick naming falls quiet and another kind of knowing begins to stir. You may feel it as memory. You may feel it as a bodily recognition. You may feel it as a mood entering the room. The point is not to decode the image, but to let it begin decoding you—gently, without force.
This is why I call the work participatory. The viewer is not an outside observer. The viewer is an ingredient. Meaning is not delivered whole. It emerges in the living space between the image and the one who is looking.
Nature has always worked this way. She rarely moves in straight lines. She turns. She spirals. She returns. She weaves continuity and change into the same gesture. The vortex gathers what is scattered and brings it back into coherence. The helix carries life forward while it repeats, making variation without breaking the thread. We see these gestures in shells and storms, in galaxies and rivers, in the growth of plants and the shaping of the human body. They are not decorations. They are how coherence travels through time.
Rowena Pattee Kryder—visionary artist and creator of the original Gaia Matrix Oracle in the 1980s—painted in a language that recognizes these living geometries. Her work does not treat pattern as mere ornament, and it does not treat the human being as separate from the patterned world. Again and again, her images suggest that consciousness is not outside the weave. It is one of the ways the weave becomes aware of itself.
Gaia Matrix Revisited is my way of re-entering that field—of listening to it across time, and of bringing it forward as a living sequence of Portals, each one a place the imagination can step into. The “revisited” is not a correction, not an update, not an explanation. It is a return. A willingness to stand inside the images and ask what they still want to say, now.
And what they say, most insistently, is simple: you are not looking at a world. You are participating in one.
This changes how the work is approached. If you come to it seeking certainty, it may frustrate you. If you come seeking relationship, it will open. The Portals don’t demand belief. They ask for attention. They ask for time. They ask you to notice what happens when you stop trying to master meaning and instead allow meaning to arrive as a resonance—an inner movement that you recognize as true before you can fully explain why.
In our era, we are flooded with images that want something from us: our clicks, our outrage, our allegiance, our money, our fear. Rowena’s images do not operate that way. They feel more like companions. They don’t shout. They don’t chase. They wait. They invite. And if you meet them with patience, they begin to move.
This is also why the work naturally forms a collage rather than a linear argument. Meaning here does not proceed by proof. It proceeds by accumulation. A Portal touches something. Another Portal deepens it. Another Portal complicates it. Another Portal softens it. A voice speaks alongside an image. A sentence echoes in the body. A color becomes a mood. Over time, a field forms. You begin to sense the whole not as a conclusion, but as an environment.
Harold Bloom used the phrase “Imaginative Fiction” to describe works that don’t primarily operate through literal realism or straightforward explanation—works whose meaning becomes visible only when the whole is apprehended: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Goethe’s Faust, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Gaia Matrix Revisited is not those works, and it does not imitate them. But it shares a kinship with that lineage in one essential way: it trusts the imagination as a real organ of perception, capable of knowing through participation.
This is not escapism. The imagination is not fantasy. It is one of Nature’s instruments—one of the ways she teaches us to sense relationship. When imagination is awake, the world becomes less like a pile of objects and more like a living conversation. You begin to see how things belong to each other. You begin to feel how the whole is moving through the parts.
If you enter Gaia Matrix Revisited in this spirit, the work becomes fluid. It meets you differently on different days. It offers different passages when you are grieving than when you are celebrating. It changes when you change. That is not a flaw. That is the point. A participatory work isn’t finished when the artist finishes it. It finishes itself again and again in the presence of the one who enters.
If you’d like to explore the work itself, you can experience Gaia Matrix Revisited online in full. Take your time. Move slowly. Let the images lead. And notice what begins to move in you. You can learn more about the project here:https://gaiamatrixrevisited.com
This book began as an act of listening.Not listening with the intellect alone, but with the deeper faculty that recognizes pattern, rhythm, and meaning
before words arrive. The Gaia Matrix images of Rowena Pattee Kryder have always carried that kind of intelligence
— not symbolic in the usual sense, but alive. They do not explain the world;
they remember it.
Gaia Matrix Revisited is an invitation to enter that remembering.Here, the images are not treated as static illustrations or oracle cards to be decoded, but as living Portals —
thresholds of imagination through which consciousness moves, circles, descends, and returns.
Each Portal stands as a complete world, a moment of awareness caught in color and geometry,
yet each also participates in a larger continuum:
creation awakening to itself through form.This revisiting is not an act of revision, but of relationship.
The words offered alongside these images are not meant to define them,
but to accompany them — like breath alongside heartbeat, like echo alongside voice.
They arise from lived experience, mythic memory, science, poetry,
and the long human conversation with the Earth as a conscious being.This book is not asking you to believe anything.
It asks only that you look slowly, feel honestly, and allow imagination — that most human of faculties —
to do what it has always done best: reveal the deeper order hiding in plain sight.If these pages succeed, they will not give answers.They will restore a sense of participation.
Gaia Matrix Revisited is an invitation to slow down and enter a living field of images and words where art, imagination, and deep listening meet. This book is not meant to be read quickly or decoded intellectually. It is meant to be experienced — page by page, image by image — as one might wander through a garden, a dream, or a remembered landscape that feels strangely familiar. Each Portal opens a visual and poetic space that reflects the rhythms of nature, the movements of consciousness, and the quiet questions we carry about who we are and how we belong to the world.
At its heart, Gaia Matrix Revisited is a dialogue between image and language.
The illustrations speak through color, geometry, and symbolic form; the accompanying texts respond
not by explaining, but by listening and giving voice to what the images evoke.
Together they form a kind of contemplative journey
— not linear, not prescriptive — but circular, relational, and alive.
Readers are not asked to believe anything, only to notice what stirs,
what resonates, what awakens curiosity or recognition.
This is a book for those who sense that meaning does not live only in answers,
but in patterns; not only in thought, but in imagination;
not only in the mind, but in the body, the Earth,
and the unseen connections between them.
It speaks to artists, seekers, lovers of myth and nature, and anyone drawn to beauty as a way of knowing.
Gaia Matrix Revisited does not tell you what to think.
It offers a space where perception can soften, widen, and remember its own depth —
where the world feels once again intelligent, intimate,
and quietly luminous.
Gaia Matrix Revisited is a visionary re-encounter with the living intelligence of the Earth,
weaving image, imagination, and myth into a unified cosmology of becoming.
Drawing from Rowena Pattee Kryder’s original Gaia Matrix Oracle,
this work re-voices the Portals through poetic reflection and archetypal insight,
revealing a world where geometry breathes, light remembers itself,
and consciousness unfolds through relationship rather than hierarchy.
These pages invite the reader not to believe,
but to feel—to enter a field where art becomes perception,
and perception becomes participation. What emerges is neither doctrine nor divination,
but a living map of wholeness: the Earth awakening through the human heart,
and the human rediscovering itself as part of a vast, compassionate pattern of creation.This is not a book of answers.It is a field of remembering.
Gaia Matrix Revisited is an imaginal journey through art, myth, and lived perception — a conversation between Earth and consciousness, geometry and breath, image and inner knowing. Drawing from Rowena Pattee Kryder’s visionary illustrations, these Portals invite the reader not to analyze, but to enter — to feel how creation thinks, moves, and dreams through the human heart.Here, light does not descend from elsewhere.It rises from within form.
The sacred is not separate from matter — it is matter remembering itself.Each Portal opens a moment of recognition: lovers at the threshold of the Orb,
the serpent awakening along the spine, the heart revealing its living pulse, the Infinite discovering itself as dance.
These images are not symbols to decode but experiences to inhabit —
mirrors in which perception meets its own depth.
Woven through this work is a personal voice — the Seeker’s voice — carrying memory, ancestry, imagination, and wonder. It is a voice shaped by lived history and by myth, by the gravity of Earth and the playfulness of spirit. The result is not doctrine but resonance: an invitation to see differently, to feel more deeply, to remember what has always been quietly present.This is a book for those who sense that imagination is not escape, but participation.That consciousness is not above the world, but within it.That the plural gods — forces, patterns, intelligences —
are still speaking, if we are willing to listen.
NEW OFFERING!
EPIPHANY OF THE LIVING TAPESTRY.
an imaginative exploration into the 3 formative patterns of Nature: Spiral. Helix. Vortex.
(follow the link above)
Epiphany of the Living Tapestry explores a way of seeing the world that recognizes pattern as a primary expression of intelligence in Nature. Rather than treating form as static or accidental, the work invites attention to the movements through which coherence arises — the spirals, the vortex, and thehelices that organize energy while allowing continuous change. These recurring gestures appear across scales, from galaxies and weather systems to shells, plants, and living tissues, not as decoration but as functional solutions evolved by Nature to hold motion in balance.
The spiral expands and returns, carrying growth without rupture. The vortex gathers, concentrates, and redistributes energy, creating centers of transformation. The helix braids continuity and variation into a single trajectory, allowing stability and adaptation to coexist. Together, these forms describe a grammar of becoming — nature’s way of sculpting complexity without fragmentation, order without rigidity
.At the heart of the work is the Dancing Helix, a kinetic mobile that serves the function of both a tangible model and a visual metaphor that renders these principles visible in motion. Neither diagram nor illustration, it serves as a perceptual bridge, showing how energy moves through matter as rhythm rather than force. As energy circulates, reverses, and returns along the helical path, structure emerges organically — not imposed from outside, but shaped from within. The Dancing Helix makes tangible how Nature generates richness and resilience through circulation, tension, and release.
Epiphany moves fluidly between physics, biology, culture, and lived experience, not to unify them under a single theory, but to reveal their shared foundations. Meaning, in this view, is not an overlay added by the mind, but an intrinsic property of relational movement — of how things respond to one another through time.
This work offers no doctrine and demands no belief. It asks only for attention. In learning to see pattern as living intelligence, the world becomes readable again — not as a collection of objects, but as a continuous tapestry of motion, relationship, and form in evolution.
An excerpt from the work:
There is a way of seeing the world that does not divide it into parts, nor force it into the rigid shapes of our assumptions. It is older than science and younger than every newborn child. It is the eye that perceives pattern before object, relation before boundary, movement before name. It is the Imaginative Eye — the one that remembers that the world was woven long before we learned to cut it into pieces.For most of human history, this eye was open.
Sages, shamans, and sky-watchers did not need microscopes or satellites to know that life moves in currents, rhythms, spirals. They looked with the same clarity as a child, unarmored by concept, unburdened by inherited certainty. And what they saw — what they knew — is now echoed by the most sophisticated sciences of our age: that the world is not made of things but of energies; not of isolated objects, but of interwoven patterns; not of fixed structures, but of ceaseless transformation.
gaiamatrixrevisited.com
lauryjo@comcast.net415-302-1375