La Mariposa

 Here is a story I wrote a long time ago, at a time of great change.  I was in one of those liminal zones that can be so very transformative - I was living in a little trailer in the deserted grounds of the Arizona Renaissance Faire, months before it would open.  Just me, winter in the Sonoran Desert,  and my cat. And a few refugees from winter like myself, scattered throughout the ghostly Renaissance Faire village.   I had left my life in the East Coast, and had no idea, yet, where I would go next.  It had not revealed itself, the "direction of the road", and I was not ready to know yet anyway.  What I found that winter was the solitude and quietude I needed to open to a new life, and to bless and release the old one.   This little story came from that time..........

LA MARIPOSA 

by Lauren Raine (1998)

Once upon a time, in a dusty village like any other village, a village with three good wells, fields of blue and yellow corn, a white church, and a cantina, there lived a woman who was neither young, nor old. She was brown of skin, and eye, and her hair was as brown as the sandy earth, and her clothes were brown and gray as well.

She was neither beautiful nor ugly, neither tall nor small, and she walked with a long habit of watching her feet. 

One day, she saw a tree alight with migrating butterflies. Their velvet wings fluttered in the wind of their grace, and one circled her, coming to rest upon her open hand. She thought that her heart would break for the power of its fragile beauty, and she held her breath for fear of frightening it.  La Mariposa was as orange and brilliant as the setting sun falling between indigo mountains, as iridescent, as black and violet as the most fragrant midnight. 

 At last the butterfly lifted from her hand to rejoin its nomad tribe, and its wings seemed like a whisper that called to her: "Come with us, come with us..."

The next morning they were gone. She held her hand out to the empty tree, as if to wave farewell, and saw that where the butterfly had rested, there remained a dusting of color, yellow, like pollen, the kiss of a butterfly wing. And she thought something had changed. 

She went to the well to draw water, and saw her face reflected there. She was not the same - there were now minute lines, hairline cracks, along the sides of her face, at the corners of her eyes. Later, she noticed little webs of light beneath the sturdy brown skin of her hands, barely visible except in the dim twilight. This was a frightening thing. She drew her skirts more closely around herself, pulled her scarf over her eyes. But as time went on, there was something that kept emerging, something that would not be denied. She was peeling open. 

At first, it simply itched, like a rash, like pulling nettles.  But as weeks went by, what had been easily born, what could be endured, became painful, became an agony. Try as she might, as tightly as she wrapped herself in her cocoon of shawls and skin and silence, as tightly as she wrapped herself within the comforting routines of her life, still, colors emerged from her hands. Colors spilt from her mouth. Colors and tears, deep waters that seeped from within, washing away the dust of her life. 

Soon, sleep became impossible. Standing by her window one day, shivering, she shook with fear. "Please help me", she cried, "I'm not the same". 

Then she noticed a beam of sunlight that fell across the floor of her little room like honey. Motes of dust gathered in the golden light, becoming a flurry of butterflies. Butterflies, dancing through an open window, a window opening into a sky as blue and as vast as forever. 

And La Mariposa opened her arms, took the gift of wings, and rose. 

When her neighbor came to walk with her that evening, she found only a dusty shawl and an old brown skirt upon the floor, the early stars glimmering through an unshuttered window.

The Summer Solstice 2024

 

SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD

by Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions,

cruelties, dreams, concepts,

crimes and the exercise of virtue

in and beside a world devoid

of our preoccupations, free

from apprehension—though affected,

certainly, by our actions. A world

parallel to our own though overlapping.

We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.

Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,

our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,

an hour even, of pure (almost pure)

response to that insouciant life:

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices, mineral hum, wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal—then something tethered

in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch

of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.

No one discovers

just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again

into our own sphere (where we must

return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)

—but we have changed, a little.

Denise Levertov

I woke early, on this longest day:

the light rose among

 the green conversation 

of  trees, a fading star, exultant starlings,

  two grey squirrels 

performing their morning ritual

greeting the only God 

they know, 

the Sun

Lauren Raine

The Night Blooming Cereus

With wishes for fullness of life, nature, and friendship for all

 at this most potent of times.  

A Poem by May Sarton

 

                                               "There is time and Time is young."

i have been thinking of this poem, as the Summer Solstice again approaches.  It seems perfect, somehow, for who I am now, in my 7th decade, and all my friends who also are in their 7th decades, and for the fullness and ripeness of the Solstice, and for the Great Mandala of the glorious planet we live upon, more appropriately, live within and the Great Mandalas of our lives within that Greater Circle.  

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
‘Hurry, you will be dead before-’

(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)

Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.

All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.

Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

May Sarton

                         

A Blessing by Mary Oliver

Photo by Theresa Barney

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

~Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses

 

          

                   Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
                   Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
                   is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

                   ............ Mary Oliver

Persephone

                                                My audio poem Persephone's Feast Day 

was presented at Kathy Keler's Carport Theatre recently, put to the extraordinary  music of Metisse (the piece is from their album Nomah's Land)  

I was pleased to share this poem, which has a lot of meaning for me.  Persephone is the Goddess of the turning wheel of planetary life;  for she is both the Spring Maiden who brings the rebirth of the world at the spring equinox, and she is also the fearsome Queen of Death, who rules for part of the year in the underworld with Hades.  She is the ever changing Goddess of liminality.  

 https://soundcloud.com/user-972033003/persephones-feast-day

The Ghosts of Mendocino

 

There are seamless  moments that reveal

a pulse

rolling down 47th street, or the freeway

a pulse, not apart perhaps

from a white capped wave that just

broke on a summer shoreline in Mendocino

and now ripples a white farewell to Africa.

I want to tell someone (who will believe me?)

that if I lift this foot

a spiral galaxy

will spill like cream

across the fine dark pavement of eternity.

(1989) from "A House of Doors - Open Poems"

Saying Hello to Mother Ocean

The Way I Think It Really Is......

 The green plants

         magically
from water      air
the soil
from water      earth
    air
earth        water
air            light
earth and sunlight

sunlight
vibrating waves
        shimmering
grasses in the sun

........Felicia Miller*

Saying Farewell 

Pink Ladies say "Hello"

 "Then what is the answer?— Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times.
To keep one’s own integrity, 
and not wish for evil and not be duped
by dreams of universal justice or happiness.
Those dreams will not be fulfilled.
To know this, and yet know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. 

Integrity is wholeness, beauty is
Organic wholeness

Love that, not man apart from that"

Not Man Apart - Robinson Jeffers

 

*My friend Felicia passed away in 2010 - she was a mermaid never entirely easy on land.  Robinson Jeffers spent much of his life wandering the Big Sur coastline of California.  I always think of them both when I visit the coast, feeling perhaps their spirits leaving footprints in the sand still. 

After the Eclipse, the Blue Stars

 

Eclipse, slow, breathless, silent 

even the sparrows  are silent, the cat

pauses, round eyed like a statue of Bast, 

listening,  The Sun

the Sun is disappearing: 

the Great Dragon, or warring Gods 

are eating the Sun.  Shades of distant 

Ancestors watch in terror among their offerings,

their chanted prayers.  But we just stop, 

pause to watch with awe, and unspoken, primal fear 

a great celestial event.  

And then slowly 

shadows of crescent suns appear on the pavement, 

flickering like silver coins  

announcing the return 

of the  generous, triumphant Sun. 

 

At night, quiet still remains, the Stars appear,

singing their songs of magnitude, of suns 

birthing and dying on the black canvas of time,

On the ground, crescent shadows seem to  linger.

April 8, 2024

Beannacht ("Blessing") for the New Year

 On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets in to you,

may a flock of colours,

indigo, red, green,

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the Earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

~ John O'Donohue 

Blue Stars

 

A poem I wrote a long time ago for someone, and never shared with anyone. He died very recently.  Remembering him, I think it is time to share the poem.  Beyond even what we call love, there is a place where we meet, perhaps, where we go Home.

Blue Stars 

"Who wants to understand the poem must go to the Land of Poetry"

...... Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

 

Weary ideas rise and fall

the mind retreats at last into blessed exhaustion

I taste that blood-red honey wine

 

I entered a lucid dream,

and found a lucid life.

 

Through an open window,

Night reveals a black, far horizon

a landscape layered with memories

made of memories

 

I hear the blue stars singing

 

     "Wait for me,

      Wait for me"

 

I wish I could tell you

what I have seen

in the homelands.

 

Perhaps,

in that country,

we are of each other at last......

 

You take my hand, we walk together

in that green and splendid meadow.

I offer you a glass; you raise your cup to mine.

Lips touch, a butterfly rises between us

and flies into the morning

from the other side of forever.

 

Through an open window,

I hear the blue stars singing.......

I write this in a small, dark room,

a cluttered here, a mute now

wishing I could be young again,

wishing I could feel something other than foolish.

I will always remember you between, always between

regret and joy, hello and goodbye

delight and sorrow, truth and lies

that bright, endarkened landscape

I saw you in.

(2002)

                           All artwork and text unless otherwise specified is COPYRIGHT Lauren Raine 2024

O Taste and See

O Taste and See

by Denise Levertov

The world is not with us enough

O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,

meaning The Lord, meaning

if anything all that lives

to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,

tangerine, weather, to

breathe them, bite,

savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our

deaths, crossing the street, 

plum, quince,

living in the orchard 

and being

hungry, and plucking

the fruit.

The Night Blooming Cereus

We go about the circles of our daily lives, the chores, the small dramas, the contentments and irritations, occasionally looking up to notice the colors of a brilliant sunset, or a dedicated parade of summer ants bearing purple petals to who knows where, or the delicious, sugared dark taste of the morning coffee, or the familiar cat, radiating pure love as she purrs in one's lap.  Occasionally we notice, sigh, perhaps say to ourselves "Nice".  Or "Wow".  Then back to the lists, the rising and falling of domestic or economic life.

Why does it often take an encounter with one's mortality to awake to the incredible, rich, gorgeous artistry of Life, all around us?  I suppose the answer to that is obvious.  But then....... there it is, and all one can do is stand, with mouth open, noticing, recognizing, "tasting and seeing".  

Lemons from my lemon tree

Just a week ago I spent three days in the ER at a local hospital to emerge with a diagnosis of congestive heart failure and an aneurism.  Now I wait another week to have open heart surgery.  An interim, a "liminal zone" of time in which I am awake.  All of this, all of this I've loved, and built, and collected, the garden I love,  the paintings I've done or imagine are yet to be done, the plans, the disappointments, the squabbles and the friendships, the cup I particularly like to drink tea out of, the sun coming through a yellow bottle I always notice...........it all could be over pretty soon  now.  Or not, but my perception of my "time" will not be the same, ever again.   What does one do with that kind of awakening.  Not a poetic or metaphysical abstraction, but carnal, immanent, solid?  Well,  gratitude helps.  And,...........

                                                                    O Taste and See

What a feast!  What if we daily understood (meaning, to "live under "a truth)  that it's such a Privilege to be here?  To experience and be a part of this amazing world with all of its polarities and struggles, among vast mysterious  communities of other Beings evolving in their own unique ways all around us?  And each moment with its own unique Beauty that blooms and dies and seeds, so fast, so precious, so amazing.  Collateral beauty, ackward beauty,  dark beauty that opens the heart and teaches the hard lessons too.  Who is the Conductor, who the orchestra?

For the past few years I've had the peculiar experience of having "life reviews" without the necessity of being dead. I think a lot of older people experience this.   In other words,  it's like long forgotten moments seem to arise from the well of my memory, often in ways that seem unrelated to whatever I am doing or even thinking about at the time.

I tend to feel those moments are part of the ineffable and  timeless gestalt that I really am, and they are worth looking at for what they may have to teach me now as I try to get an overview of the threads that weave the tapestry of my long life. 

Of  course, so many of those memory moments aren't happy, or illuminated, many are sad or painful or embarrousing or traumatic or show me the ways I may have hurt someone, been very unconscious, hurt myself, wasted time or love or purpose.   Those too are welcome now,  they are wise teachers in the unfolding of this grand adventure that has been (and is still, it's not over yet!) Lauren Raine.  I know, a strange post this, but I find myself in a state of awe.  It's a funny thing, but I find it strange that it would take heart disease to open my heart so.  May healing come to my heart, and may that vision that is with me now, remain.  I think of a line from a poem I wrote a long time ago, so here I quote myself:  

"We are given a vision so bountiful

we can only gaze with eyes wide,

like a child in summer's first garden.

Here is a poem by Rumi that also comes to mind today.  

The Guest-House 

This being human is a guest-house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you

out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.