What is this?
I don’t really have any idea.
So…when I was a kid, my mom would drive my sister and I through the flats and valleys of West Texas and on into Arizona every summer to visit my grandmother. There are great empty fathoms of the world there that seem to stretch on for an eternity, followed by red rocks and cacti and the dreamy majesty of faraway mountains. After dusk, if you were an imaginative, nerdy child, you might believe that you could see small campfires peppering the land in the inky blue-black darkness of the night desert, where magicians met in secret to sing to the stars. I‘ve been in love with big skies and long car rides since. And it was on one of those trips that a door opened for me.
We’d stopped to get gas. It was probably well over 100 degrees outside when we tumbled out of the car to stretch our legs. And just as my feet hit the asphalt, a great summer wind full of light and heat and flame came ripping over the desert and slammed into me. And then it went right through me. Today I might say that my soul left my body, or that I knew what perfect presence felt like, or that I heard the singing of great choirs of angels, or that my spirit hovered in a pocket of concentrated joy that lasted microseconds and felt like years. At the time, I said nothing at all. We got back in the car, and we commenced our traditional game of looking for the first saguaro cactus of the trip (the winner got a quarter). The road took us away.
But the window in my heart had been cracked, on the road in the middle of nowhere, when the wind and the flat floor of the desert and the blue bowl of the immense sky all bent down to my nobody soul, and said hello.
--------------
emergence
it is only half-remembered
from the shadowy pocket within layers of snow, then a truck filled with memory, then learning about the map of light and how to make that relationship work - from the dark warm nest of asphalt, of grackle down, of dove song, oak branch and lights around the bookcase, scattered on the cave floor…the spring comes soft in on nervous feet and holds its hand out, to say i am familiar, and kind, and you can come out now.
come out. the plum tree has bloomed, and there will be grapes this year.
--------------
There’s a lot I don’t know. Whole football stadiums worth. There are some things I thought I knew or wished to know but now realize I don’t and might never. I used to write and stopped writing and now might be writing again and in that time some things have happened and others haven’t, because time and age and some growth and some stagnation have all tumbled over themselves in loops and cycles the way they do and the way life does.
But for now, instead of going on about what I don’t know (into the bottomless abyss), here are the few things that I do know. Well…feel more than know maybe. Or hope. Or at least strongly suspect:
Poetry is bedrock. It is new fruit, and fresh water, and sunlight on winter skin.
Ritual is poetry in motion. Spring comes in and we don’t do anything to make it do so, but if, when it comes, we stand barefoot in new grass and heap great plates high with hyacinths and offer them, singing, to people still pinched from a long season of darkness, we may not move the planet with our bodies and our hands, but we participate in its moving in ways that ring out through our souls like temple bells. We become notes in the song.
Music is a living river that can be actively travelled to places beyond the Fields We Know.
Dreams, the imagination, and image/metaphor are staggeringly — shatteringly — powerful.
The Earth is sacred. And this is a truth so profound that it seems like we’re barely able to hold it in our bodies very long…and so we need constant reminding (which is yet another purpose for ritual, and poetry, and dreams).
Storytelling is critical.
All these things, together, constitute the purpose and practice of magic.
So I might say this is a little blog of doorways maybe.
A corner in which to wonder aloud about these suspicions, rooted in the living planet, tied to a desert wind. Not to convince anyone of anything, but just to dream. And record some new poems, and some old ones maybe. To wedge open windows, to crack doors.
To invoke and evoke. To offer hymns to the summer sky, the smell of creosote, the poetry of light, little fires in the dark. To open a door on the night desert. To see if the word can keep up with the wind.
To try to describe what light looks like, from the inside.*
— — — — — -
*And to occasionally recommend books, because that’s not something I’m capable of NOT doing. In this case, my reference to experiencing the light “from the inside” comes from The Flip by Jeffrey Kripal. It’s an amazing book and you should read it (this is the only kind of convincing I plan to do, I promise).
Comments