My Devotion is to Her: A Poem

My devotion is to Her.

My thoughts turn towards Her.

I listen to what She has to tell me.

My silent singing devotion, my poetry, is dedicated to Her.

I ask that She blesses and comforts me in my time of need.

I ask for Her benevolence, generosity, and fierceness.

 

Gifted with strength I will overcome this dullness, 

And transform in the womb of my pain.

My own blood rebirths me each month.

I honour it as a sign of Her hand upon me, 

Her heart beating next to mine. 

This devotion grows stronger in me, 

as I trust in the process of psychic death, 

as I welcome change, and accept the fickleness 

of my own internal weather.

Please, Mother, send me a dream to send me on my way. 

Send me blessings from the darkness.

(Reworked from text, October 2018)

Nectarine blossoms with bee, August 2017

Wise Words: Words Have Power

I hold to the traditional Indian views on language, that words have power, that words become entities. When I write I keep in mind that it is a form of power and salvation that is for the planet. If it is good and enters the world, perhaps it will counteract the destruction that seems to be getting so close to us. I think of language and poems, even fiction, as prayers and small ceremonies. 

(Linda Hogan, quoted in Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, 1993, p.  73)

A Prayer To Her

If you are here always, and a part of me, will you help me? Will you send me what it is I need to live, to survive, to create? I do not want to always be asking questions. I should be listening to the answers, knowing them within me.

Why have I been made this way if I was not meant to be this way?

We must learn to be thought 

by the gods, not to think them.

           ~Robert Bringhurst

Do you think me? Am I thought through you? Thought Woman—Creatrix—She-Who-Is. Please think through me, let your thoughts become my thoughts, calm and profuse.

Earth, teach me. Darkness, teach me. I want to learn from the ground beneath my feet. I want to descend, to fall below the rational, the known, to find the core, primordial ways of knowing—the earth/water/air—all-one knowing. The love that binds and holds all together, like a prayer muttered, an incantation, a mantra that chants the world’s being. In my dream is a circle, a wholeness, a wondering within the Mystery that is my own life, in-held … blessed and born into flesh. A circular dimension, womb-like, the yonic shape of eternity’s folds. Veiled from matter, yet behind it all, like a fire, a warmth that suffuses life.

The Wise Woman must assert herself, her knowledge and ways. Have courage, she says. We are returning. We are within you, held in blood and bone, in genes that speak of past lives, of who we were. You know us, like you know yourself, and we can speak through you, direct you towards fate, destiny, life that is full of living. You must trust us, must simply listen, and rebel against those who would belittle and silence. There is so much more you need to know, and can, if you open your heart, open bodymind to our voices. We are all around you, in the ground, in the air, in the trees and birds. We whisper on the wind, we weep in the rain. Water carries us far.

In the mountain there is a heart, a core of being that is yours. It belongs to all, a gift from earth to her people. An opening into the earth can be found, a bountiful hollow that is filled with source, filled with essence, elemental energy. You feel it within you, like a name, a word, a practice of living, open to life and spirit—inspired and enthused. She-Who-Is compels you to try, to keep trying, to live and love and create from your body, like a star, an essence-filled fleshly being, a life of triumph, of power with the Others. Shared. Opened. 

I feel you within me and want you to grow, to strengthen, to gift me with what it is I seek: A wellspring that flows endlessly, to guide me through life. A torrent of aliveness, like a blessing, a bounty, a cornucopia of gifts and nourishment.

Hagia Sophia, by Meinrad Craighead (1987)

There is a blade I must use to cut away extraneous matter, to destroy thoughts that deaden and constrain. Cut away all that is not truth, is not woman-thought, is not love for what is. I defy the patriarchs: I sing out my curse over their dead lands, their prisons of suffering and despair. We will escape, back into the wild, with wildness in our hearts to replace the drug of civilisation.

Carrying this torch, this light that endarkens, bringing what is missing to the world, I step beyond myself and towards what is necessary, what is desired by earth-fast stone, tree, the greening life and the waters. All hearts yearn for this—the drumbeat of being that dances inside everything—I hear it, feel it, beckon it. It will enliven me, consecrate my actions, so they burn with a power that has not been seen for centuries. To be part of the turning—come what may—is a privilege—one of pain and sorrow—but we are alive within these times, and striving to become more so. To let love flow out over the land like a balm. 

I will defy the proscriptions of the masculinist world. I will defy and defy and defy. There is a strength in me that is more than I know, that is hidden and biding its time, but so powerful, it will awaken me from sorrowful slumber and turn me inside out, dismember and re-member this broken, wounded body, this self of confusion and hopefulness.

Creation is a cauldron of possibility. My body is a womb of light—blood-red and sensuous, of itself, made and formed by the Mother, blessed by her blood. 

What foremothers have made me? Who are my people? How do I find them, my ancestors, my spirits?

Listen. Pay attention. Be still. Look out at the world around you, the mountains, the trees, the blessed air, the winged ones, and the water.

Trust. Know you are held, loved, and born for something.

* * *

I wrote this several weeks ago, and gave it the above title when I turned it into a blog post; and then I read Sarah Elwell’s beautiful piece, A Hymn to Her, which I thought a beautiful and extraordinary synchronicity. It seems She really is returning, sung out by different voices in different ways, but needed and longed for no matter Her words.

Earthling: A Poem (and Prayer)

Earth 

teach me 

how to be 

human

(December 2017)

* * *

I wrote the above little poem over a month ago, but over the last few days a couple of apt synchronicities have come to my attention, which I thought I would tack onto this post. 

Firstly, I’ve been reading The Dream of the Earth (1988) by cultural historian and ecotheologian Thomas Berry, and have come across his own articulations of part of what I mean in my poem, when he identifies 

… the earth as the immediate self-educating community of those living and nonliving beings that constitute the earth. I might also go further and designate earth as the primary educational establishment … with a record of extraordinary success over some billions of years. (pp. 89–90)

He goes on to say:

… Our difficulty in appreciating the earth community as primary educator is that we have little sense of or feeling for the natural world in its integral dimension …

A sense of the earth and its meaning is particularly urgent just now, for the different sciences have developed an immense volume of information about the natural world in its physical aspects, and a corresponding power to control it. Yet the earth is still seen as so much quantified matter. Life and consciousness as integral and pervasive dimensions of the earth have until recently found little appreciation except as more advanced phases of a mechanistic process. Because of this, the human community, the psychic component of the earth in its most complete expression, has become alienated from the larger dynamics of the planet and thereby has lost its own meaning. That we are confused about the human is a consequence of our confusion about the planet. (p. 90)

It is also, I think, a consequence of our desecration of the planet, our destruction of wild places and beings—the very places and beings who are meant to, by their wild and numinous presence, and by our interactions and relationships with them, teach us how to be ourselves. Berry writes,

… The natural world is the maternal source of our being as earthlings and the life-giving nourishment of our physical, emotional, aesthetic, moral, and religious existence. The natural world is the large sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence. (p. 81)

The earth is indeed so damaged in many parts that I believe we are diminished as a species, and this is one of the reasons for the amount of confusion and helplessness, and also illness, that exists today. 

How, then, do we become fully human when our most important teacher is so injured? How do we heal when our healer is herself sick?

I have no easy answers. Only that wildness and beauty do still thrive. The earth still lives and contains immense powers, both physical and psychic, so perhaps there is time yet to change our course as humans. Thus we must seek out and protect wildness wherever it is found—including the wildness in ourselves (for we ourselves are microcosms of the earth)—and particularly in the remaining indigenous cultures that have so much to teach us about how to live, if only we would listen.

This brings me to the second synchronicity, a beautiful film called Humano, which provides an insight into the old ways of earth–human relationship and education that we once knew so well. I highly recommend it.