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.”
Sea Goddess Prayer
Goddess of the untamed shore
smooth my edges into gratitude,
tumble me into letting go,
teach me what it means
to let my longings
ebb and flow.
Roll me until my to-do list
becomes rubble
and my bindings become loosened
by the touch of salt and time.
Carve me back to my
most essential self,
erode my need to know
until it is replaced
by space
around my heart
to grow.
Sweep over me
and leave me expansive and free,
help me to remember
to wait for nothing
while somehow also being
as patient as the moon.
Encourage me to
chart my own course
and steer my own craft,
trusting the transformations wrought
by truth and trust and tide.
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