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.”
Midsummer Fairy Dance
I watched fairies dance
in the midsummer twilight
waltzing with fireflies
and skimming through treetops.
It is true that they could have
been moths,
but as I stood in the shadows
with my children
all of us gazing upward in wonder
the sky deepening to night
I saw the certainty shining
in their faces,
the enchantment in their eyes
and I knew
without a doubt
that we were seeing the true nature
of these winged creatures.
And we will never forget what
it felt like to watch
real fairies taking flight
right before us
as we dared to name
the magic in the night.
Last week, my sister-in-law hosted a fairy tea party for our little ones at the river. We had an enchanting time eating tiny cupcakes and drinking sparkling raspberry-chamomile tea while wearing fairy wings as the sky dipped toward twilight. Then, we headed home and the kids asked me to stay out and catch fireflies. As we did so, a "fairy" suddenly flew across the sky in front of us and it is this experience that I share in my poem above. It was a priceless, magical, powerful moments with my son and daughter. The next day they wrote tiny notes of thanks to the fairies who let us see them and set up a fairy-sized tea party with tiny cups of cherry juice as an offering beneath the rose bush.
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