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.”
Poem: Still Blooming
There are cracks
where inspiration dwells
and hope still wanders,
places where wonder seeps back
onto parched terrain
and breathes a promise
of joy to come.
There are droplets of courage
sprinkled across buds of faith
and tender shoots
taking root in hidden spaces
where they will twine into possibilities,
seeking and extending
tentative petals to the sky,
keeping the pact they made
before being,
to bloom when they can.
At this point in the year I feel held suspended in a space between summer's fire and summer's fatigue. The air is thick and stifling, the flowers are wilting, the ground is parched, and I feel a sensation in the air of the approaching time to "turn the page."
The time of the festival of First Fruits, Lammas, approaches.
(a past resource kit and audio ritual is available here [not all links within it are still current])
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