Spiced Apples and Lemon Perfume

November 28, 2007 at 8:57 pm (Pagany Musings)

Greetings, best beloveds, from the fog-enshrouded fields of the not-so-wild midwest!

Snow gathers in the thick of low-hanging clouds that smell like the North and have a Woman cackling in them. Mother Holle gathers her bedclothes and makes ready to shake down over the corn stubble, making modest the naked Land. The first snows of late fall. Signaling fine, they come, they come. Dusting the branches of skeletal trees.

Oh, and here I am. Full and brimming and struggling to find words. Dissolving in the delicious golden light of a dimly lit room, sipping cinnamon & turmeric tea touched with the miracle of honey, thinking of vanilla brandy. Wondering what a perfume called “Winter Light” might smell like, dreaming with my eyes open, steeping homemade cranberry midwinter liqueur and reading about coffee filled with cardamom.

The achingly cold nights that have led me so far into my bones now tease me out into my tongue and hands. The fastest way to bring me back to myself is with a spicy cup of tea. My body was made to touch and taste, to smell and hear and see. I can’t help but roll through the gorgeousness of the world on the best instruments the Mama has given – a sensualist’s manifesto.

I have had a full to bursting couple of weeks – brought out of my bonewalk into an explosion of color and light, into laughing and city wildernesses, into labyrinthine bookstores and storytelling concerts. The season of richness and smallest lights in the darkness is cusping. My mystic’s hat seems permanently affixed to my head lately – it’s good to be brought up to the breathing world by pink cheeks and dancing. The path of my beloved Pagani is a sensualist path, and I am reminded of its joys and its loveliness, plucked even in the teeth of the grotesque, here in the gloaming, when just this evening the sky caught on holy fire and no one was left unmoved. What were these bodies made for but to celebrate and mourn and eat and sweat and pray?

Over here, the smell of cloves. Over here, a ragdoll made of thrownaway pieces of gingham and velvet. Over here, a stretch of fiddle music or a crusty bass line, impossible to resist.

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No Work and Pie Day….Still Denial

November 22, 2007 at 9:53 pm (Culture War, Politics)

Thanksgiving.  No Work and Pie Day. Every year I struggle with what to say about it, to my friends, on this blog, in my heart…because most of the time there are those that say it so much better than I do.

This year is no different.

Robert Jensen explores the continued frustration in acknowledging that Thanksgiving is a federally and culturally sanctioned denial of genocide and not necessarily knowing what to do about it.

The general answer to that question is simple, though often difficult to put into practice: We must keep speaking honestly, as often as possible, in as many venues as possible. We must resist the conventional wisdom. We must reject the cultural amnesia. We must refuse to be polite when politeness means capitulation to lies.

I have not always been strong enough to meet even these basic moral obligations. Most of us in positions of unearned privilege and power would be wise to avoid pontificating about our moral superiority and political courage, given our routine failures. Can any of us not point to moments when we went along to get along? Have any of us done enough to bring our lives in line with the values we claim to hold?

Still, we need to help each other tell the truth, even when the truth is not welcome.

Amen.

Gratitude is something I like to try to engage in the entire year ’round.  If I need a special day to be thankful, I choose any one of the Harvest festivals of my religious faith, who have at their heart the celebration of life and the overwhelming gratitude I feel for the blessings of living on the Mama.

This day, I struggle.   With owning the truths behind the country I live in, behind my own privilege and my own complicity, with telling the truth to myself, and seeking a way to hold my hands out around a table, seeking community and thankfulness and joy, still holding that truth, and making a promise in my heart every year to continue to struggle.

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Hunting

November 13, 2007 at 4:32 am (Pagany Musings, Theology)

& at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason – Coleridge, for instace, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

-John Keats in a letter to his brothers Tom and George, December, 1817

The year grows dark, best beloveds. The moon greets me thin and clever in the early night and the Gingko trees have chosen to drop their golden leaves all in a single freezing blue day. I have been lost in a funny blissful nonbeing…passing demons and ghosts with no notice. Ruminating on the long dark, absorbing the lessons of Samhain, which are taking longer this year to soak into the organ of my skin and the meat of my heart. I have become a ravished lover of gravity. I am a mendicant in a world of bones and old leaves.

The fields that were flush with rustling at midsummer are flat and cut, stripped and swollen with dust. Exhausted, the soil gasps in huge breaths, weary from bearing the burden of greed and desperation. I am swaddled in guilt – feeling the season’s spirit blooming and germinating around me like a delicious moss and cradled in the rapture of chill while at the same time caught in the devastating point of loss and confusion – joy and beauty and despair. The Mama breaks me down and builds me back up every season, each time with a piece missing and a new piece added. An extra heart, a missing tongue.

I’ve wandered off into the imaginal barzakh of the Mama’s exquisite squeeze – the season of Beauty and Death. Beauty and candlelyte and darkness. Beauty and poetry. Beauty and the shattering of everything, everything made out of glass. I’m waiting for the darkness to break, and some kind of presence to come back to me. And in the moment, my beloved Keats sidles up to me on the devil’s side (Is there a poet on the angel side? Who on earth would that be? Has there ever been a poet unfamiliar with horns?) and whispers all this deep marvel into my ear, summoned from the crusty tectonics of his home.

This season strips me down and robs me of reason…an enormous season – the sky like a bowl of shining fruit, in which the mystic, the poet, the human, feels the stirrings of sugar in the inky pools of the soul, and the Mama shakes out winds and clouds pulsing with the Longing, the same Longing that kept Keats wrapt in the savage joy of a fast star, spending his 25 years shining like a million matches onto paper. Crying “IO!” on the hilltops, dancing in the Penetralium.

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
-from Ode on a Grecian Urn

Traveling into the inner Deep in search of Beauty – hunting the soulskin down into the infinite point between the last second of the long night and the breaking of the solstice dawn. This is the season of the hunt for the Self, and the organic place where the Self and Beauty that underlies all things become impossible to separate. It’s a season that digs deep, and speaks in a multitude of poems and rhymes and singing. Every time I surmise that I am finished my meditations, it worries my skin some more with its sticky teeth.

That is, the Penetralium is neither anima personified as Sophia, nor a temple. “The Penetralium of Mystery” is organic: it is the body, not just of Sophia, but of Sophia and her lover. When mouths meet in a kiss, there is both entering and being entered. The Penetralium is the place of being joined. – Brian Charles Clark, Puck

Words are just fingers pointing at the moon. But in a poet’s hands, there have been moments when words become the moon, and the moon becomes a silver dish of words, if only for a nanosecond. Reaching the place of being joined. Reaching relationship. Uncovering the place where the fact of Beauty leaves the mind and floods instead in a wash of bare branches.

Oh, I am still empty of concrete thoughts. I am on the hunt. Tossing and turning in the night. The season of Negative Capability. Cheers to that delicious boy John and his poems – ancestor to every dreamy heart that sobs in reaching and hunting towards It Knows Not What. Towards the Beloved, and the Home, and the Presence.

Hey.  It’s a really really really fucking gorgeous everything, friends Pagani.

Slainte! Go forth and haunt the thickets and tidal pools. Dream of honeycomb communion and a thousand veils. Here’s a cup of spiced mead and a handful of hazelnuts. May your days be encrusted with mystery and your nights spent in the savage luxury of the hunt for the Mabon, the Penetralium, the infinite point and the Beauty that Moves Through All Things.  May you find the place where all your weeping becomes all your laughing.

There is a seed of darkness that burns in the light.

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Initiation

November 7, 2007 at 4:00 am (Random Thoughts)

What is born this time of year.

The sky is freezing and bright – the stars are shattering. I am breathing in and shuddering at the sight of the manifestation of sleep and night and dark. The moon is high and silvery and shocking. Crisp. Like fresh cucumber slices. And ice.

The Time Before Death 

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think…and think…while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten -
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

-Kabir 

————

Sometimes I think there is little else to say that poetry cannot say it.

And at the same time, I think that I dump a lot of pretty words out there with little substance attached to them and become afraid that all I’m chewing on is a little sack of bones.

It’s the bone season.  Rich and empty.  Full and slack.  I have nothing but a bunch of contradictions and poems.  And an urgency. I try to remember that it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.

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