Taking Hand

As I continue navigating a strange tunnel of sacred derangement amplified by the Saturn return, wisdom tells me to ground to my writing practice.  To hold myself to that in the ever shifting winds of this passage, I will attempt more posts this month, even brief ones,  as circumstances do their best derail me.

Today, Padraig O’Tuama’s Poetry Unbound newsletter asked us contribute a reflection on:

…”what gestures have shaped your life. What their smallness was then, and whether they proved to be meaningful as time and action and reflection occurred in their after. ”

I took the bait and responded as follows:

Decades ago, I arrived early for a chiropractic appointment. My practitioner was hosting a gifted palm reader that day, I discovered. That well-appointed gentleman and I arrived in the public treatment room first. I smile at him. He said “Look at that smile!” and asked to look at my palm. I happily assented. As he traced what I assume was my life line, he said something like: “Hmmm. Wow. Yeah, you’re in it for the long haul…”(His words carried more message than was stated.) And then, looking up from my hand into my eyes, “…But everything is okay right now, yes?” Meaning, IN THIS MOMENT, ALL IS WELL.

Through the many challenging years since, his words have resurfaced periodically, as a seed, the gift of a wise mantra, a touchstone. My only task has been to remember.

Onto a Vast Plain     (listen by clicking on title)

You are not surprised at the force of the storm —

you have seen it growing.

The trees flee. Their flight

sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:

he whom they flee is the one

you move toward. All your senses

sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.

The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel

it wants to sink back

into the source of everything. You thought

you could trust that power

when you plucked the fruit:

now it becomes a riddle again

and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know

where each thing stood.

Now you must go out into your heart

as onto a vast plain. Now

the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind

sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.

It is what you have.

Be earth now, and evensong.

Be the ground lying under that sky.

Be modest now, like a thing

ripened until it is real,

so that he who began it all

can feel you when he reaches for you.

– Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Joanna Macy)

As I lie awake most nights for those hours before rising, resting in prayerful meditation but never quite able these days to touch Ground through the spinning Celtic loop of conundrums my mind(s) and circumstance have become…

As I watch the ever accelerating oscillations of identities vying for ascendance…

As I surrender what will not surrender…

As I watch what breathes steadily through it all, in twin bed with a sometimes sleeping death wish…

This poem is remembrance that I am alone, that something here is always not only reached for but held, holding what is here is always, even numbly and blindly, reaching back.

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”

― Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

I know that there are so many hearts and bodies besieged by the world’s many mad conflagrations who would not be consoled by those words of Isak Denisen. And I begin this post acknowledging with revitalized gratitude the privilege inherent in this post; that even as an empath who feels like a living antenna for all that seethes in the ethers, this body, so far, is safe today.

 The preceding weeks had been Deep SEE Diving Blind in the Karmic Cauldron that has been this Saturn Return.  Silly to keep banging my head against the walls and right angles of buildings, when I know home is found in wall-less wilds…and in Circle.  

Wednesday, feeling pressurized as coal squeezed of any hope of diamond-hood, I left it behind, drove dervish-ward, climbed into the pines for some days of whirling service at the first October Wazifa Dance of Universal Peace camp since 2019.

The hills were aflame with Autumn’s answer to sunshine; a Gold Rush for the eyes, as medicinal as anything I know. Along the vast pin-cushion of burn scar that overlooks the Valle Caldera, the ground was glad and giddy with the fire of young Aspens.

Still it took almost the whole week to recover; yet by the second morning, I could again see beauty, hear the river, know truth and hope among the trees, know that I might eventually among people!

Second Sunrise

Breath visible for the first time this season

Tumbles in gold frosted celebration

catching in its billows the resounding miracle

Look! I’m Alive.

Droplets dolphin tumbling

Look! I’m Alive!

Second Sunrise

Melting down the lip of facing cliffs

a long Cheshire Cat smile

vaulting upward from the deep heart of Gaia

Alive, Child. Alive.

Second Sunrise

The crust of city clutter, collective clatter blown free

Soul re-suffusing with her native song.

What once took two hours has taken two days

But all complaints, including that one, can only careen around like the season’s last flies

Cannot alight for long, slighted by the cold shoulder of a cool head,

and dwarfed now by trees and stone, truth and solace.

ML. October 13, 2023, Hummingbird, Jemez Springs

The camp near always coincides with my mother’s birthday. This was no exception. Monday, I took some time to recline on a bed of pine needles and remember her.

Today you would have been 89.

As I lie under these pines along a road we drove together just that once

I hope you would be proud.

I know you would be worried; but I hope you would also be happy

that here among my brethren of bark and skin, my kin with wings visible and invisible

I have found my song.

I may carry in my mind-field still your parsimony, but I carry always in my heart Rosemary…

and also Sage….And in this body, I carry all time.

Today I also carry rosemary under my armpits

in honor of a woman whom I don’t remember seeing sweat; fret yes, often, but not sweat.

You must have, but being from Mississippi, perhaps, you got it out of your system early.

You once said, much later in life, that you had no tears left.

Perhaps your elixir of life was spent early in sweat and tears, and this is why you required so many transfusions near the end; your blood and skin so thin.

But you, beloved Rosemary, were more beautiful than I knew how to see or say.

I can scarcely see or say it now. But, knowing that better now, I leave space for it in this silence

and let it flow in my own blood and tears,

and even, occasionally, sweat with the good old family frets.

 

 

Epic Log: Epilogue

She woke from the slumber of domestication naked against the body of Wrath that had never slept. Woke from a bender on sacred wine and whining, dizzying dervish whirling on the rings of Saturn. Take no prisoners. Leave none either. This life is about Freedom.

Don’t be fooled by delusions of constancy, certainty, control. On this ride you will be fooled again and again; it is part of the game, part of the mastery, the mystery, the mischief.

It’s a game of chess. You are every piece; and you are the seeing sky poised above the battlefield, the wind blowing its banners and bugles. But do not expect to see the game’s end from the blindered eyes of the Knight. The Rook that takes you is your self, your friend come to liberate you from the battlefield for refreshment and remembrance.

Checkmate was only a problem while you believed you were King. A crown is a blinding burden. What a relief when it falls away and the spirit can once again see Heaven.

Autumn Dawning

I wake hours before dawn into midnight blue, silver stars, and then pyrite protection of the blinding butter glare of a motion sensor flood light casting tarnished rainbows upon the window’s dew breath.

Rising still hours before sunrise I meditate in curtained darkness, watching the preference for the luminous void over the bitter blare of my own deep sensor light, stuck on, in the charred mine shaft of a black diamond not yet ready to give up its secrets, nor its emptiness, and give over to the mass and magnetism of the Holy Inevitable… the Holy Asymptote to all yearnings here never to hold their Grail.

I rise again to daylight, to sound infiltrating silence; I rub together the trappings of modern life softly as I can and depart the house.

I drive through nearly but never empty streets, up into hills, toward light igniting the mountain’s morning stubble.

I drive into green, into gold, to find where the streets have emptied today..Aspen Vista. Scores of cars already arrived, but a spot waiting or me.

I walk through this chattering snapshot of Anthropocene paradox, feeling the fire of my own mis-Anthropocene era, my Saturn return, futilely flinging the blame around me. But I am too far up this spiritual mountain of Light for my shadow to stick to anyone but me.

I walk beyond the islands of human people into the legions of tree people. I let my mind take as long as it takes to switch languages, to see it is home, it is safe.

I walk and walk, past all the familiar turns and stones. I walk on and watch gold encroach and encrust the slopes.

I pass a boisterous bevy of my own species, whose vocal enthusiasms, long before I could see them, volleyed into my present their stories competing for best memory. The righteous poet, lured into aphoristic aggressions, begins briefly to compose in self-defense: The gold we are all here to see is a treasure to be sure, but the silence you are cluttering far up and down this trail is more precious and endangered still. …

Then I repent and walk on…until Gold’s true standard begins to glisten inward, to belie the pyrite protections of the treasured alloys, the false allies, the fool’s good and no-longer-white lies. I reach a destination I didn’t know I had, with a knowing I’d forgotten I could trust… where water tumbled ceaseless with a chuckling, noisy quiet that refutes all noise of disquiet.

The stream reminds me what is more precious to human life than even silence. I offer her a currency of contrition that I myself can scarce accept. I let her forgive me where I cannot, let her remind me how it is done…in undoing.

There may be no cure for me

but here there is a cure for the hope of cure,

which lures me from Presence, from present,

from the imperfect perfection of Now.

And as I rise to leave, I muse:

Dog is God’s mirror; and that is enough for many here today.

But NOW, in the water’s magic mirror, has WON.

And I skip down the trail greeting and mirroring every smile.

Pinned to every smile I met was a number. Joy may be immeasurable, and happinesses countless, but turns out there today was not simply a run on the peak fall colors, it was the Big Tesuque Trail Run. I’m glad I missed the rush but not the fun.