INVOCATION by Robin Williamson at Mabon

Brushwood 2016 by Theresa Guzman

"I, the Song, I walk here."

........Lakota poem

I've posted this before..............and like a loop, it returns to my mind at this full moon Equinox,  so beautiful, this Day of Balance which was also, in olden times, Mabon, the Second Harvest Festival.  

You who will come with me

I will consider it Beauty

I will consider it

Beauty, beauty

,,,,,,Robin Williamson 

 

Every morning when I rise with the sun to water my garden, I find myself  talking to all the people that live there.  The tall sunflowers, making seeds beloved by finches and sparrows.  The desert tortoise, Augustus, who has decided to live here and occasionally makes his mysterious appearance.  My cats of course.  The green scarab beetles getting drunk on tree sap.  The bees, having a drink at the bird bath. The heavy pomogranates pulling the tree down now, the cosmos flowers as tall as I am now.  The  woodpecker loudly telling me that I need to fill the bird feeder,  butterflies and funny looking caterpillars eating holes in leaves. The morning is not so hot now, and it is tender, reminding me of some song I can't quite remember, but a Song that is infinitely sweet, with a touch of bitter sweet, like Irish music, which always seems to remember the transience of things.  

As a child, the garden was full of people.  Now, as an old woman, I seem to have returned to that happy experience.  I try, in my very little eco-system, to create Good Relationship with all My Relations that honor me by living there.  Even the ones that chew up my flowers.  

"To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension.  In traditional Bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced:  every place had its legend and its own identity....what endured was the mythic landscape."

    R.F. Foster

There was a time when humans thought of themselves as part of the Circle of the majestic cycles of the planet, and as part of the great family of life - when they negotiated with the animals and the elementals, when they listened to the voices of the trees and the medicine plants, when they thanked the buffalo or the reindeer or the seals for their sacrifice, when, I believe,  they celebrated the harvests and the auspicious days as part of the great Song, their voices adding to the chorus.   ("Chante:  to sing").  We can re-member ("to join")  this en-chanted paradigm,  and learn to speak to each mythic landscape again.   I feel Robin Williamson's beautiful poem so fully captures that vision.

I share it again and again because I love it, the Bard, because I want this Voice to not be forgotten.  And Oh!  As the moon shines down in its fullness on this day of quinox,  I wish all, all, all it's fullness and abundance and promise.

Found at the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, UK.

You that create the diversity of the forms:

Open to my words
You that divide it and multiply it

Hear my sounds

Ancient associates and fellow wanderers
You that move the heart in fur and scale

I join with you

You that sing bright and subtle
Making shapes 
that my throat cannot tell

You that harden the horn
And make quick the eye

You that run the fast fox 
and the zigzag fly

You sizeless makers of the mole
And of the whale:  aid me and I will aid you

You that lift the blossom
and the green branch
You who make symmetries more true

Who dance in slower time

Who watch the patterns

You rough coated
Who eat water

Who stretch deep and high
With your green blood
My red blood 

let it be mingled

Aid me and I will aid you

Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, UK

I call upon you

You who are unconfined
Who have no shape
Who are not seen

But only in your action
I will call upon you

You who have no depth
But choose direction

Who bring what is willed
That you blow love
upon the summers of my loved ones
That you blow summers
 upon those loves of my love


Aid me and I will aid you

I make a pact with you

You who are the liquid
Of the waters
And the spark of the flame:

I call upon you

You who make fertile the soft earth
And guard the growth of the growing things
I make peace with you

You who are the blueness of the blue sky
And the wrath of the storm
I take the cup with you

Earth shakers

And with you
the sharp and the hollow hills
I make reverence to you

Round wakefulness 

We call the Earth

I make wide eyes to you

You who are awake

Every created thing
both solid and sleepy
Or airy light,
I weave colors 'round you

You who will come with me

I will consider it Beauty

I will consider it

Beauty, beauty

by Robin Williamson 

Published by  WARLOCK MUSIC, LTD.

https://youtu.be/7xvIDX9gKhg

David Whyte and "Belonging"

It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need to change you.
If you can look back with firm eyes
saying "this is where I stand."

I want to know if you know how to melt
into that fierce heat of living
falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing to live,
day by day,
with the consequence of love
and the bitter unwanted passion of sure defeat.
I have been told, in that fierce embrace,
even the gods speak of God.

 

.............from "Fire in the Earth", by David Whyte

 

I increasingly crave refuge from the harshness and distracting speed, speed, speed of modern life, and perhaps most of all, the awful numbing desensitizing of it all, the lack of focus or passion in the midst of nano-second, scroll down life .  

I found my way back to the familiar poetry of visionary David Whyte.  Although the second poem is a winter poem, and it is almost Mabon, the Harvest and advent of beautiful fall, still, I wanted to  absorb it again. 

David Whyte's poetry has always had a way of bringing me home.

 

From "The winter of Listening"

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and

 intense round every living thing.

 

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.

All those years forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make itself heard.

All those years
forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow difficulty
of remembering
how everything is born from
an opposite 

and miraculous
otherness.

Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

. . . . . . . . . .

by David Whyte

Remembering 9/11: "On the Beach"

 

"I call you back, girl, I call you back.

I am at the other end of this life now

yet your footprints touch mine beneath the sand,

I follow them.

On the beach your sand prayers

ring here still,  the Earth

is my witness."

I wrote this poem on the beach at Mendocino, California, exactly a month after the twin towers fell in New York on September 11th, 2001.  It was a beautiful day, children were playing in the surf, seagulls calling overhead.  And there I sat, while I felt a great cloud of death and destruction gathering far away, a cloud that would soon affect all our lives.  And so it was:  we saw a 20 year war in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq.  Millions died, mostly civilians.  All for what?  

As I sat there I remembered a famous  1959 movie with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner,  based on the book by Neville Shute  "On the Beach".  Written at the height of the Cold War, it was about a radioactive cloud that had destroyed America and Europe and Russia as the aftermath of a nuclear war,  a doom that  was slowly moving toward Australia.  The people of Australia had just a year  to wait for their own demise, and the film depicts how they do that.  

Since then a new Tower has been built, Afghanistan has returned to the same tyrants that controlled  the country before 9/11 and George Bush's wars,  the dead are mostly forgotten, and a whole generation of young people view the whole thing as ancient history.  What remains,  then and now?  Gaia. 

ON THE BEACH (Oct. 11th, 2001)

One month after the world ended

The little island world we,

the privileged few, could pretend

was safe, forever, and righteous

The fallen towers, fiery messengers

of unfathomable destruction yet to come.

Tourists walk barefoot on the familiar beach.

They came here, I imagine,

as I have, not to forget, but to remember.

To remember driftwood and high tide -

a red dog and a yellow-haired child

as they enter the water -

their cries of goodly shock and honest forevers

always new, always cold,

always blue.

A white heron,

balanced in perfect equanimity on one leg.

Wave forms overlay my feet......

transparent hieroglyphs of infinity.

Her way of speaking.

Gaia.  Her manifest, unspoken words.

A brown man lies beside the mossy cliff,

spread-eagled between sky and sea and land.

Sand sunk, leaf-molten,

blackberry thorn,

into the green:  

toes, fingers, flesh

reaching into the green

redeeming Earth.

He is rooting himself.

He is taking himself back.

I lie down in grateful imitation,

a stranger in companionable human proximity

sharing this rite of remembering.

I  see her now,  I see a girl

walking on this very beach.

Yesterday, and 40 years ago.

Sourcing, she is 

sourcing the one who lives here

a river Goddess with no name.

She has made a mermaid offering

of sticks and sand and seaweed.

Companions arrive, offer shells,

and return to Berkeley.

To Vietnam, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall,

the war, the wall,

the war, the walls.

The war,

and the summer of love.

("the revolution will not be televised")

A generation to end war, raise hell,

raise consciousness,

raise Atlantis,

and raise the new and Golden Age

("the revolution will not be televised")

How did we get here from there?

I call you back, girl,

I call you back.

I am at the other end of this life now

yet your footprints touch mine beneath the sand,

I follow them.

On the beach

your sand prayers

ring here still,

The Earth

is my witness.

Lauren Raine (2001)

from APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices 

The Rune of Ending

I see now that posting poems  from APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices  has become a means for me to explore my memoirs as well as my poetry.  I find it good to see where these poems came from......they are all touchstones along the way.

This one was an Obituary for the end of my second marriage.  I wrote it shortly after the divorce was finalized, and just before I left my home and the community we shared  on the East Coast and headed West with my cat and worldly goods in my van,  for destinations  unknown.  I felt very much that I had to begin a new life at that time, and I had to give honor to the life that was over with the divorce.  Which included grief, anger, and remorse for my own unconscious  and sometimes abusive behavior.  Sometimes the end of a relationship is as much a gift for growth as the beginning.  

Eventually I ended up in California, back in Berkeley, where I had started from more than  20 years before and a whole new adventure began.   But that is another story, fraught with synchronicities and creativity.  But first I had to grieve and praise.

I have never done marriage well, and I bear my ex no ill will, indeed, I think of him with affection.   I doubt he shares my opinion, which is ok.  At the end of the day, are relationships really "failures" when they end?  They last however long they last.  Or don't last.   What we take away, be it friendship or enmity, memories kept or discarded,  is experience and growth.  At the time I wrote this poem he had just met a woman who, I believe, he is still with, and I am glad that he found a partnership I could not give him. 

 

The Rune of Ending

 What can be said, now

when all words are spent

and the word has finally been spoken: 

we go now to our separate houses

relieved.  At least a course has been named.

 

Our lives are severed, our story is told.

We will each surely tell that story, and strive and laugh

and talk late into the night, and kiss lips salty

with tears and love;

but not with each other, not again.

 

Here the tearing ends, here ends remorse and reprisal,

here end dreams and plans.

 

We will not travel to Scotland,

Walk together among ancient monoliths

in the white mists of our imagination.

We will not walk, again, on a warm beach in Mexico,

toasting each other with margaritas.

That was once.  It has to be enough.

 

I will not call you mine, husband.

You will not call me yours.

And our cat is now your cat, our teapot is now my teapot.

I touch a potted plant,

remembering its place on our breakfast table.

We divide the spoils, humane, courteous, fair.

 

A canyon has opened between us, we are each old enough

to know its name, to view its depths without passion.

There is no bridge to cross this time.

 

Beloved, I must now forgive myself as well as you,

cast my stone into this abyss

and bless the woman who has not yet come

to stand by your side,

wave with grace from across this canyon's lip,

then turn,

and walk my own path.

(1997)

from APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices 

"Mything Links": Mythic Resources

 
Since I'm neck high in mythology most of the time when I venture into the studio, I felt like re-introducing one of my favorite sites,  Kathleen Jenks "MYTHING LINKS"
site.  In fact, I feel like sharing here more sites dedicated to "mything" self and culture,  all links to journals,  videos, and individuals that have been important to me.  For those, like myself, who walk the "mythic ways", enjoy!

* Mythic Passages
* Mything Links

* Clarissa Pinkola Estes

* Kathy Jones and Mother Land
* Mythic Mojo: Catherine Svehla
* The Imaginal Institute-
* Joseph Campbell Foundation
* Mythopoetics
* The Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts
* The Journal of Mythic Arts

*Emergence Magazine
*The New Stories Foundation
* Parabola Magazine
* Black Earth Institute 
* Mythic Musing Blog

* Immanence:  A Journal of Applied Myth, Story and Folklore

* In Celebration of Marilou Awiakta

"Our challenge is to bring the Goddess back to life, to envision, create, and inhabit the re-membered living  body of the Earth."

Starhawk

And just as the false assumption that we are not connected to the Earth has led to the ecological crisis, so the equally false assumption that we are not connected to each other has led to our social crisis.

--Al Gore, EARTH IN BALANCE

Mango Season

 

There was a powerful Monsoon storm this afternoon, it rolled in perfectly on time (between 4 and 6 as always), the Great Thunder Gods announcing themselves as they came.  Suddenly the skies opened and rain came roaring down, bring it's blessings and cool air and winds, and once again the streets filled with rushing water, the sidewalk became a river, and it all ended within an hour as the Monsoon moved on.  I was reminded of the same phenomenon in an entirely different place,  more than 20 years ago when I was in Bali.  

I went to Bali to study sacred  mask arts and traditional masked theatre, and worked for a while with Ida Bagus Anom, a Brahman traditional mask artist, although Anom was anything except traditional! Bali truly embraced me!  Within a matter of 2 months there I had had a show and performance at Buka Creati Gallery in Ubud, became friends with an Australian healer and an Australian artist whose work was all about the Goddess, I'd travelled through the country, had many conversations with both Balinese and Ex-pats, and was completely in love with Bali's art, culture, and spirituality.  I remember being at the airport, getting ready to board the plane, and thinking "Why am I leaving?  I am so much more at home here than I am in Tucson?"  I assumed I would be back, but I never did go back, and I will always have some regrets about getting on that plane.  In time, I became responsible for the care of my brother, and then my mother - it was while visiting her at an assisted living facility where she eventually needed to live that I wrote this poem.  It's  not about monsoons, but about Mangos, which are literally the fruit of Monsoons, the gifts of the Gods.

Mango Season

 

Parking on the second level,

I struggle sometimes with fate and duty.

 

Turning the key, my tropical imagination

carries me far away

to wander among volcanic archipelagos,

I remember the Island of the Gods

in mango season.

 

Here, summer heat rises

from waterless pavements.

I walk to the "Memory Care" unit

a long beige hallway, too familiar now.

 

Bewildered eyes regard me from wheelchairs.

The old man in the white striped shirt says,

 

"Take me home. I don't belong here".

 

If I could, if I only could,

I would take us all home.

 

Instead, I bring fruit

imagining for them

mango season

in all its splendor.

 

(2011)

from APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices 

La Llorona

La Llorona

 

Sometimes you walk out

under an old, cold moon to call.

You call, but there is no answer,

no heartbeat, no rhythm to follow or find.

 

Dry.  All you hear is traffic, dust,

Smoke obscuring the distance. 

Your time is eaten by long lists of little things.

The sounds of human discord ring like a broken bell

where once the lucid air sang among the stones,

this you know with bone knowledge,

bone history, you know this with your feet.

 

Where once the lucid air sang among the subtle stones,

metates, petroglyphs.  Where once a river flowed.

Even here, a river, before the cattle,

cars, too much thankless taking.

 

As if the waters would always flow.

As if the breast would never run dry.

As if, as if there were no children lost

And yet unborn, their open mouths,

Crying just beneath your feet.

 

Dry.  I look into my life, the river is dry.

I have also been eaten. There is no magic to replenish

these years made of too many little things. 

Sometimes, you hold your hands to the mountain

You ask, "whose hands are these?"

 

Am I not also this land?

One small and moving piece of it?

You call, but there is no answer.

 

Where have they gone?  Coyote moon celebrant,

even Snake and Scorpion, who leave all stones best unturned?

Plastic katchinas made in China invent them.

Spirals written among the holy rocks are silent,

where old men push little balls across green grass

among the desert's drought.

 

Here, where once a river ran,

A river that ghosts among the stars.

(2002)

In looking at my 2018 illustrated poetry collection  APHRODITE IN BROOKLYN and Other Mythic Voices  I've had the urge to share some of them here (well, some of them I've already shared over the years but they are finally finished  now!) Since very few people will ever read it, and I'm not doing any copyright infringements, I think I will share some of them here.  This poem "ghosts" a river that sometimes I glimpse, a river lost in the dry arroyos of consumer culture.  Perhaps, not my most optimistic of poems.............