Paul Stamets and the Speaking Earth

More about how everything is alive and speaking to us..............love this man's work!

https://youtu.be/2wzBPSbTGYM

The Secret Life of Plants - Derrick Jensen, Cleve Backster and Deep Ecology

"Gaia" (2005)

“Even mainstream scientists are stumbling all over this bio-commu­nication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for us to keep missing this fundamental attunement of living things. Only for so long are we going to be able to pretend it’s the result of ‘loose wires.’ We cannot forever deny that which is so clearly there.”

It was my pleasure to encounter the work of deep ecologist and activist for the Earth Derrick Jensen recently, whose passionate and "nothing held back" books should be required reading for anyone who hopes to live into the future of our world, particularly anyone who has invested the future with the children they love.  But sadly, very few people even know what Gaia Theory is, or the name of Derrick Jensen or James Lovelock. In the current presidential election one of the candidates, Donald Trump, "doesn't believe in global warming".  And the environment has not entered into the debates.

Yet I believe the truths Jensen, and Lovelock,  speak of may very well be the most important truths of our time.   Derrick Jensen kindly gave me permission to quote from him, and so I share here an excerpt from his site, from his most recent book.  I was so struck by this interview with Cleve Backster, who showed that plants, even micro-organisms, are sentient and responsive to the thoughts and intentions of life around them,  The interview below demonstrates what scientists like James Lovelock, and his biologist collaborator Lynn Margulis spoke of  in their Gaia Hypothesis - that the Earth is a living being, and all aspects of life on Earth are interdependent, self-regulating, and evolving.  Which includes us.  As Backster comments, “The implications of all this … are staggering."

What also excited me about  Mr. Jensen's excerpt was the way it revealed the mythic strands of Spider Woman, shimmering like the almost transparent, and yet infinitely strong, strands of the Great Web...........all life connected, interdependent, responsive, reciprocal..............part of the "Great Conversation".

Excerpt from :  "The Myth of Human Supremacy"

by  Derrick Jensen
www.derrickjensen.com 


Almost 20 years ago I interviewed Cleve Backster about plant intelli­gence. No, he wasn’t a botanist. He was one of the world’s experts on the use of polygraphs, or lie detectors. I know that sounds like an odd con­nection, but listen to his story, and the connection will become clear. Just after World War II he was a CIA interrogation specialist, and founded The Agency’s polygraph school. In 1960 he left the CIA and formed the Backster School of Lie Detection, to instruct police officers. This school is the longest running polygraph school in existence.

Backster could name the moment the focus of his life changed for­ever, from lie detection to plant intelligence: early in the morning on February 2, 1966, at 13 minutes, 55 seconds of chart time for a polygraph he was administering. He had threatened the subject’s well-being in hopes of triggering a response. The subject had responded electrochemically to this threat. The subject was a plant.  Here’s his story:

“I wasn’t particularly into plants, but there was a going-out-of-business sale at a florist on the ground floor of the building, and the secretary bought a couple of plants for the office: a rubber plant, and this dracaena cane. I had done a saturation watering — putting them under the faucet until water ran out the bottom of the pots — and was curious to see how long it would take the moisture to get to the top. I was especially interested in the dracaena, because the water had to climb a long trunk, and then to the end of long leaves. I thought if I put the galvanic-skin-response detector of the polygraph at the end of a leaf, a drop in resistance would be recorded on the paper as the moisture arrived between the electrodes. … I noticed something on the chart resembling a human response on a polygraph: not at all what I would have expected from water entering a leaf. Lie detectors work on the principle that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they physiologically respond in predictable ways. If you were conducting a polygraph as part of a murder investigation, you might ask a suspect, ‘Was it you who fired the shot fatal to so and so? If the true answer were yes, the suspect will fear getting caught lying, and electrodes on his or her skin will pick up the physiological response to that fear. So I began to think of ways to threaten the well-being of the plant. First I tried dipping a neighboring leaf in a cup of warm coffee. The plant, if anything, showed what I now recognize as boredom — the line on the chart just kept trending downward.

“Then at 13 minutes, 55 seconds chart time, the imagery entered my mind of burning the leaf. I didn’t verbalize; I didn’t touch the plant; I didn’t touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart. The only new thing the plant could have reacted to was the mental image.

“I went into the next office to get matches from my secretary’s desk, and lighting one, made a few feeble passes at a neighboring leaf. I real­ized, though, that I was already seeing such an extreme reaction that any increase wouldn’t be noticeable. So I tried a different approach: I removed the threat by returning the matches to the secretary’s desk. The plant calmed right back down.

“Immediately I understood something important was going on. I could think of no conventional scientific explanation. There was no one else in the lab suite, and I wasn’t doing anything that might have provided a mechanistic trigger. From that split second my consciousness hasn’t been the same. My whole life has been devoted to looking into this.”

He called what the plant was doing “primary perception.” He found that not only plants were capable of this: “I’ve been amazed at the percep­tion capability right down to the bacterial level"........“Interestingly enough, bacteria appear to have a defense mechanism such that extreme danger causes them to go into a state similar to shock. In effect, they pass out. Many plants do this as well. If you hassle them enough they flatline. The bacteria apparently did this, because as soon as they hit the cat’s digestive system, the signal went out. There was a flatline from then on.”

Cleve continued, “I was on an airplane once, and had with me a little battery-powered galvanic response meter. Just as the attendants started serving lunch, I pulled out the meter and said to the guy next to me, ‘You want to see something interesting?’ I put a piece of lettuce between the electrodes, and when people started to eat their salads we got some reac­tivity, which stopped as the leaves went into shock. ‘Wait until they pick up the trays,’ I said, ‘and see what happens.’ When attendants removed our meals, the lettuce got back its reactivity. I had the aisle seat, and I can still remember him strapped in next to the window, no way to escape this mad scientist attaching an electronic gadget to lettuce leaves.

“The point is that the lettuce was going into a protective state so it wouldn’t suffer. When the danger left, the reactivity came back. This ceasing of electrical energy at the cellular level ties in, I believe, to the state of shock that people, too, enter in extreme trauma.  Plants, bacteria, lettuce leaves … Eggs. I had a Doberman Pinscher back in New York whom I used to feed an egg a day. One day I had a plant hooked up to a large gal­vanic response meter, and as I cracked the egg, the meter went crazy. That started hundreds of hours of monitoring eggs. Fertilized or unfertilized, it doesn’t matter; it’s still a living cell, and plants perceive when that con­tinuity is broken. Eggs, too, have the same defense mechanism. If you threaten them, their tracing goes flat. If you wait about twenty minutes, they come back."

“I met a dental researcher who had perfected a method of gath­ering white cells from (people's)  mouths. This was politically feasible, easy to do, and required no medical supervision. I started doing split-screen videotaping of experiments, with the chart readout superimposed at the bottom of the screen showing the donors activities. We took  white cell samples, then sent the people home to watch a preselected television program likely to elicit an emotional response — for example, showing a veteran of Pearl Harbor a documentary on Japanese air attacks. We found that cells outside the body still react to the emotions you feel, even though you may be miles away.  The greatest distance we’ve tested has been about three hundred miles. Astronaut Brian O’Leary, who wrote Exploring Inner and Outer Space, left his white cells here in San Diego, then flew home to Phoenix. On the way, he kept track of events that aggravated him, carefully logging the time of each. The correlation remained, even over that distance.”

“The implications of all this …”He interrupted, laughing. He said, “Yes, are staggering. I have file drawers full of high quality anecdotal data showing time and again how bacteria, plants, and so on are all fantastically in tune with each other. And human cells, too, have this primary perception capability, but somehow its gotten lost at the conscious level.”

“How has the scientific community received your work?”

“With the exception of scientists at the margins, like Rupert Shel­drake, it was met first with derision, then hostility, and mostly now with silence. At first they called primary perception ‘the Backster Effect,’ per­haps hoping they could trivialize the observations by naming them after this wild man who claimed to see things missed by mainstream science. The name stuck, but because primary perception can’t be readily dis­missed, it is no longer a term of contempt.

“What’s the primary criticism by mainstream scientists?”

“The big problem — and this is a problem as far as conscious­ness research in general is concerned — is repeatability. The events I’ve observed have all been spontaneous. They have to be. If you plan them out in advance, you’ve already changed them. It all boils down to this: repeatability and spontaneity do not go together, and as long as mem­bers of the scientific community overemphasize repeatability in scientific methodology, they’re not going to get very far in consciousness research.

“Not only is spontaneity important, but so is intent. You can’t pretend. If you say you are going to burn a plant, but don’t mean it, nothing will happen. I hear constantly from people in different parts of the country, wanting to know how to cause plant reactions. I tell them, ‘Don’t do anything special. Go about your work; keep notes so later you can tell what you were doing at specific times, and then compare them to your chart recording. But don’t plan anything, or the experiment won’t work.’ People who do this often get equivalent responses to mine, and often win first prize in science fairs. But when they get to Biology 101, they’re told that what they have experienced is not important.

“There have been a few attempts by scientists to replicate my exper­iments … but these have all been methodologically inadequate. … It is so very easy to fail. … And let’s be honest: some of the scientists were relieved when they failed, because success would have gone against the body of scientific knowledge.”

I said, “For scientists to give up predictability means they have to give up control, which means they have to give up Western culture, which means it’s not going to happen until civilization collapses under the weight of its own ecological excesses.”

I asked if there were alternative explanations for the polygraph read­ings. I’d read that one person suggested his machine must have had a loose wire.

He responded, “In 31 years of research I’ve found all my loose wires. No, I can’t see any mechanistic solution. Some parapsychologists believe I’ve mastered the art of psychokinesis — that I move the pen with my mind — which would be a pretty good trick itself. But they overlook the fact that I’ve automated and randomized many of the experiments to where I’m not even aware of what’s going on until later, when I study the resulting charts and videotapes. The conventional explanations have worn pretty thin. One such explanation, proposed in Harper’s, was static electricity: if you scuffle across the room and touch the plant, you get a response. But of course I seldom touch the plant during periods of obser­vation, and in any case the response would be totally different.”
“So, what is the signal picked up by the plant?

“I don’t know. I don’t believe the signal, whatever it is, dissipates over distance, which is what we’d get if we were dealing with electromagnetic phenomenon. I used to hook up a plant, then take a walk with a random­ized timer in my pocket. When the timer went off, I’d return home. The plant always responded the moment I turned around, no matter the dis­tance. And the signal from Phoenix was just as strong as if Brian O’Leary were in the next room. Also, we’ve attempted to screen the signal using lead-lined containers, and other materials, but we can’t screen it out. This makes me think the signal doesn’t actually go from here to there, but instead manifests itself in different places. All this, of course, lands us firmly in the territory of the metaphysical, the spiritual.”
I said, “Primary perception suggests a radical redefinition of con­sciousness.”

“You mean it would do away with the notion of consciousness as some­thing on which humans have a monopoly?” He hesitated a moment, then continued, “Western science exaggerates the role of the brain in con­sciousness. Whole books have been written on the consciousness of the atom. Consciousness might exist on an entirely different level.”

I asked whether he had worked with materials that would normally be considered inanimate.

“I’ve shredded some things and suspended them in agar. I get electric signals, but not necessarily relating to anything going on in the environ­ment. It’s too crude an electroding pattern for me to decipher. But I do suspect that consciousness goes much, much further. In 1987 I partic­ipated in a University of Missouri program that included a talk by Dr. Sidney Fox, then connected with the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami. Fox had recorded electric signals from protein-like material that showed properties strikingly similar to those of living cells. The simplicity of the material he used and the self organizing capability it displayed suggest to me that bio-communication was present at the earliest states in the evolution of life on this planet. Of course the Gaia hypothesis — the idea that the earth is a great big working organism, with a lot of corrections built in — fits in nicely with this. I don’t think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis further and pre­sume that the planet itself is intelligent.”

I asked how his work has been received in other parts of the world.

“The Russians and other eastern Europeans have always been very interested. And whenever I encounter Indian scientists — Buddhist or Hindu — and we talk about what I do, instead of giving me a bunch of grief they say, ‘What took you so long?’ My work dovetails very well with many of the concepts embraced by Hinduism and Buddhism.”

“What is taking us so long?”

“The fear is that, if what I am observing is accurate, many of the theo­ries on which we’ve built our lives need complete reworking. I’ve known biologists to say, ‘If Backster is right, we’re in trouble.’ It takes a certain kind of character and personality to even attempt such a questioning of fundamental assumptions. The Western scientific community, and actu­ally all of us, are in a difficult spot, because in order to maintain our cur­rent mode of being, we must ignore a tremendous amount of informa­tion. And more information is being gathered all the time. For instance, have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake’s work with dogs? He puts a time-re­cording camera on both the dog at home and the human companion at work. He has discovered that even if people come home from work at a different time each day, at the moment the person leaves work, the dog at home heads for the door.

“Even mainstream scientists are stumbling all over this bio-commu­nication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for us to keep missing this fundamental attunement of living things. Only for so long are we going to be able to pretend it’s the result of ‘loose wires.’ We cannot forever deny that which is so clearly there.”\

Excerpt first published at Utne Reader
copyright Derrick Jensen
http://www.derrickjensen.org/work/myth-of-human-supremacy/moving-goalposts-plant-intelligence/

Circle Studio...........Opens its Doors!

Finally  finished my long (and expensive) project this summer.  A space on my property (in central Tucson) where I can teach small (up to 7) classes and workshops, where others can also offer small classes or workshops (including writers retreats).  A space for small weekend exhibits, and not just my own work.  A space for retreat groups to use, and I can offer then housing for their retreats at my rooms and casita.  A space to fill with creative energy.

I, and many artists, can no longer afford to rent storefronts and warehouses to have have the innovative galleries and arts districts I remember from other times - in other cities where I lived, among them New York and the Bay Area, and even in Tucson.  Tucson's art district is mighty  slim compared to what it once was, even though the population has doubled in the years since I first came here - all thanks to gentrification and real estate speculation.  There are a lot more restaurants and wine bars, a whole lot less galleries, althernative bookstores, etc.    So, a number of us have decided to just "get off the grid", and turn our homes, gardens, back yards, etc. into spaces to share our work.  A friend of mine, for example, who is a playright has turned her carport into a sometimes theatre, and "The Carport Theatre" stages productions about 3 times a year. 

Yesterday friends came by and we had a bit of a "Consecration" party for the space, so it can begin to manifest creativity, conversation, abundance, and friendship, and the grace of the Goddess, Creator, and Spirit.  A place where it can.........Circulate.  Circle Studio!

Bill Murrey's Wisdom

"The only way we'll ever know
  what it's like to be you 
  is if you work your best at being you
  as often as you can, 
  and keep reminding yourself:

  That's where home is." 

  Bill Murrey

The "Oracular" in Art Process......

This started out as a journal, but somehow it's become quite political, and I feel at least today like pulling it back to it's original introspective intent.

Here's a very old drawing I found, which of course I completely forgot about.  I did it when I was just 20 years old.   It's not particularly good, but from the perspective of 45 years later, it reads to me like a prophetic page in the book of my life, and the reason I'm sharing this little story is not so much about the content of my personal story, but the way it illustrates the seamlessness and timelessness that we can touch when we are in creative (and mythic) mind space, which is also where the "oracular" can be seen.  There are themes......

I didn't know much when I was 20 years old  but I loved to draw.  I had not yet encountered feminism, let alone eco-feminism, Goddess spirituality, patriarchy, the Chalice and the Blade,  Lilith, etc. In fact, most of that was still underground and yet to evolve into the public eye.  Those forces were fermenting.  I had encountered the story of St. George and the Dragon, which is what this drawing was supposed to be about.  

At the time I was living with my first boyfriend, and the face of George is clearly him!  I still remember his angry, bullying face.   He used to hit and humiliate me, classic abusive behavior,  and after I left him I began the psychological quest to  selfhood that most women have to make when leaving such a relationship..........back then the path to understanding and empowerment was not so clear, or so available.  I am fortunate that I lived in Northern California, where the second wave of feminism was making its mark, and "consciousness raising groups" were becoming available, along with the early women's shelters.  

The face of "St. George" was, although I had no such language  for it, the face of patriarchal domination, which was personally playing out in my life and indoctrination,  as well as universally. 

But looking at this strange drawing,  what was the "Dragon" all about?  What a sad face that dragon has, not really fierce at all!  And it rises from depths in the earth.  Behind George is a barren kind of landscape, but behind the dragon, rising from the dark as the dragon seems to rise from the below, are  all kinds of foliage, plants, flowers, the abundance and vitality of nature. 

It was years later that I learned about symbolism of earlier Goddess cultures, the importance of the snake/dragon  as a universal symbol of the Goddess  Earth Mother, the Shakti, the Kundalini force, and the moving forces of nature ("Dragon Lines")  often represented (as in Celtic art for example) as snakes.  Perhaps the "slaying of the dragon", like "St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland" was an intuiting of the loss of an earlier pagan reverence for the earth and the divine feminine.  What Celtic Bard Robin Williamson spoke of as

 "older yet and lovelier  far, this Mystery...........and I will not forget."

And who is the falling winged woman who seems to be part of the dragon? I think she was supposed to be the "maiden" being rescued by "St. George", at least in my conscious mind which was not much versed in mythology.  But a strange maiden she is indeed.   Snakes seem to encircle her as well as her merging with the dragon.........and she does not seem at all happy about St. George turning up.  In fact, she looks quite tragically sad.  From my perspective now, I would say that what we have here is really Lilith, the Goddess banished, along with the Earth Dragon, by the self-righteous sword of good old St. George the warrior.  

I don't know if we can all say that we have (or haven't) "found our life work".  I believe we can have a number of "life works", among them things we have to learn to do our soul making, and these might just as aptly be  called "life themes".  But looking back at touchstones in my own life, I see that the Goddess has always been with me, that if I contributed to anything significant in my life, it was my participation in the great wave of women (and men) who have sought to bring about the Return of the Goddess, with all that means, from women's rights  to uncovering the deeply buried past and understanding the lost and buried mythos and overlay hidden underneath the veneer of  patriarchal religion culture. 

And  the muses can be Sybils.  In fact, the Oracle of Delphi   was called......... "the Pythoness"!

**I wrote a little novel about the Oracle of Delphi based on Riane Eisler's CHALICE AND THE BLADE back in 1993.  It was called "The Song of Medusa" 

"Balance" from the Rainbow Bridge Oracle

I have always loved this Angel, which I painted a long time ago, and it being just past the Equinox, I felt like sharing the Angel again, along with the text from my Divination Deck, the Rainbow Bridge Oracle.

BALANCING ACT

Dancing to Shiva's music

we dance our oppositions

into legends of hate and love,

light and dark

good and evil.

Choiceless and willful,

we return, again and again

to a deeper need for Balance

to renew

rites of reconciliation

with self, soil, friend and foe

again and again

seeing, at last,

at last,

before we forget,

again and again

that reconciliation is beyond balance.

A labyrinth.

And at the center, labrys

the butterfly's shape.

Whole, winged.

In the traditional Tarot, this card was called Temperance.  In my own interpretation, the androgynous Angel of Balance holds two cups, dark and light, pouring water into each, representing the energy of a continual exchange of opposites.  The "rainbow bridge" issues from this exchange, which can be viewed as the practice of creating spiritual Balance.   In addition to the meaning of temperance or moderation, this card can be interpreted as symbolizing the blending  of opposites.

The rainbow is the visible spectrum of the  whole of white light.  The rainbow may symbolize the "rainbow bridge of the chakras", which in Hindu philosophy represents the different energy and perceptive systems of the human subtle body.  Balancing the Chakras is  to balance the energy system  If you've chosen this card,  continue to develop this virtue and insight in your life.  Reversed:  You are out of balance, and must seek ways now to bring about harmony, be it physically, psychologically, or even socially.

              

 The Rainbow Bridge Card Deck may be veiwed and  ordered: 

http://rainbowbridgeoracle.weebly.com/index.html

To purchase the accompanying book visit:  

THE RAINBOW BRIDGE ORACLE:  A Divination System

All artwork is copyright Lauren Raine MFA (2012)

Persephone: Goddess of the Equinox

Persephone (2016)

Persephone, it seems to me,  is truly the Goddess of the Equinoxes, because She is both symbol  of spring and life's renewal when she returns to her mother Demeter at the turning of the seasonal Wheel, and she is also Goddess of death, wife of Hades, and Queen of the Underworld in the ending and dormant times of  turning of the wheel.  

Having said this,  I allow myself here to move out of the great universal language of archetype, and will get a bit personal.  The truth of life in nature is that everything is changing, everything dies to become something else, or at least, make way for something else.  As beings embedded in nature, this is true of us as well, whether we like it or not.  The summer ends, and as we feast on the delightful fruits and breads of the harvest, we barely notice, indeed, deny, the slow creep of winter.  And yet that beautiful, or horrific, or both, Leveler is already advancing over the horizon, implacable and indifferent.   Both Demeter and Hades have jobs to do.  

This is true of nature, this is true of biological life, and by golly, it's true of our psyches as well.  When Persephone calls, I believe in listening to what She has to say, whether it occurs in the bright lit flowering fields, or is a painful cry echoing from caverns deep in the Underworld.  And that is the point at which Hecate appears with her torch (but that is another story).  

We all love the Song of Persephone in the spring, the song that tells us "this is the time to BE", to feel the honey sun on your shoulders, to love, to move away from the lonely tunnels of the mind and into the great Conversation of the fields, of the planet.

When Persephone calls from the caverns, not so easy.  Recently I had a meltdown from out of seemingly "know where".  All of a sudden, I couldn't sleep, found my face full of tears that would not emerge from my eyes, was angry, very angry, and having just completed a massive project building a studio, wanted nothing more than to jump into my car and drive east and just keep going, free.  I didn't, but I really, really wanted to.   I decided doing such a thing was very ill advised, although I'm not opposed to such trips when the necessity arises, but I did allow myself to go a bit crazy.  I allowed myself to have those feelings, to walk in the desert, to drink too much, to be educated by the process of their arising.   That's one of those "calls from the deep" that must be heard, no matter how uncomfortable.  You try to discover the language and content of that dark song too, what you need to know to become more fully human, what the soul is trying to tell you.  You don't "transcend" the voice of Persephone, you mature and change, you keep on moving.

This is Persephone's time of Balance, of Equinox, Her Integral being.  Which moving away from psychological jargon simply means realizing that we must, somehow, say "yes" to all of it, and keep moving, keep dancing the light and shadow dance.  Persephone will dance with us, will educate, if one can only accept this Moving Point of Balance.   

We are all, in the final analysis, Wanderers.

"Pesephone II" 2016

"Persephone the Wanderer" 
by Louise Glück,

In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is
consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:

we may call this
negative creation.

I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
“home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion—
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother’s
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

“Persephone the Wanderer” from Averno by Louise Glück.
Copyright © 2006 by Louise Glück.