Goddess Centered Practice
In the woods behind my house rest a collection of nine large flat rocks. Daily, I walk down to these “priestess rocks” for some sacred time alone to pray, meditate, consider, and be. Often, while in this space, I open my mouth and poetry comes out. I’ve come to see this experience as "theapoetics"—experiencing the Goddess through direct “revelation,” framed in language. As Stanley Hopper originally described in the 1970’s, it is possible to “…replace theology, the rationalistic interpretation of belief, with theopoetics, finding God[dess] through poetry and fiction, which neither wither before modern science nor conflict with the complexity of what we know now to be the self.” Theapoetics might also be described, “as a means of engaging language and perception in such a way that one enters into a radical relation with the divine, the other, and the creation in which all occurs.”
Bonewind's Return
Bone wind has returned 
mother of winter’s chill
sweeping through bare branches
and rattling dusty leaves.
The remnants of summer
have completely faded
and the doorway to the new year
has cracked open.
With the skeletal swirl of frost and freeze
I see the hint
of new things
waiting to burst from behind the door.
Hibernating now perhaps
hunkered down to wait it out
resting, biding time, percolating
nestled in darkness
but, oh so ready, to grow.
It is only on the surface
that the world prepares to take a long nap
underneath the crust
change boils
life bubbles
new ideas gestate
and time crowns anew
with the promise and potential of birth
held in cupped hands.
The flame of fresh ideas flickers
and catches
until the blaze of possibility
envelopes the cold.
This morning as I stepped outside to gather newly fallen snow to make snow ice cream for my children, a Jack Kornfield quote kept repeating through my mind: “If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.” I've lived in the woods for almost my entire life. I have seen snow plenty of times, but I cannot ever recall having seen snowflakes like I saw this morning. In fact, I confess that until a few hours ago I assumed that the only way to take a picture of a real snowflake-shaped-snowflake was with an extreme close up (not an iphone). I'm used to a fine powder snow that is too fine of grain to distinguish separate flakes or a clumpy, wet snow in which no individual flakes are distinguishable either. I am so unfamiliar with the flakes I witnessed today, that when I first saw their starry patterns on my little girl's hair, I thought, "look, the little grains of snow are clumping together and almost looking like real snowflakes." When I saw that they were, themselves, real snowflakes, I was exhilarated. I was so excited it was like a genuine miracle to have seen them. Since, I already had my snowboots on, I went down to the woods with my drum and delighted in the snow like I've never seen it before. And, in I way, I never have. This is a beauty of taking a sacred pause. We see things that cause our whole lives to change.
(Poem previously posted: Bonewind’s Return | WoodsPriestess.)
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