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: Friday Morning at the Jiffy Lube
It’s hard to write poems
in the oil change bay,
White Stripes on the radio,
thin and grubby men
with their hands deep
in your engine,
the sounds of cars
rolling by behind you.
I wonder things about them,
like how much they get paid
to go in and out
of this pit in the floor every day,
about the one drinking
Monster Energy
at eight o’clock in the morning,
his black-stained fingers
slowly dipping a breadstick
into pizza sauce
as he leans under the hood.
“It’s hard to have a conversation like this,”
my husband says,
“Shhh!” I say,
“I’m writing a poem about it.”
We affix the sticker
to our windshield
and slowly roll back
out onto the street,
shafts of sunlight
cracking through
the clouds to illuminate
the way forward.
#30DaysofGoddess happens everywhere, even at the Jiffy Lube, with a prayerbook on your lap. The prompt on this day was “Illuminate.”
Later, we walked in the park and found ripe mulberries on the trees along the walkway, which we stopped to sample, just like the birds.
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