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: Into the Mist
It was mist this morning
that lured me away,
straight out of bed and into the trees
to see the glow lifting
from the valley and sliding through
the rising sun,
particles of water vapor
drifting sideways through the air
so that it looks like the woods
are breathing.
I almost think I hear the fairies
of the land whispering
as the rays of sunshine
lay down enchanted paths
between tree trunks,
unmapped lines of discovery
that are only revealed
with the light is just so
and a crow zips silently by
carrying something mysterious
in its beak.
I see why we are warned about the mist,
pathways that are shrouded and uncertain.
After all, if you step into the mist
how will you know
what to buy or what to feel
bad about.
How can anyone capture
and sell your attention
if you’ve reclaimed it
and let it settle into the mist
instead of into a screen.
If you are focused
instead of fractured,
if you are no longer listening
to how it has to be,
or what to think,
or where to look,
or what to buy,
perhaps it is you
who becomes dangerous,
free as you now are
to slip away
into the mist,
into the real and pulsing
world,
breath from cedar trunks
rising up to meet you
where you are.
Comments
-
Monday, 29 March 2021
Thank you so much!
-
Please login first in order for you to submit comments
Molly,
Solid gold! That poem makes you a dangerous rebel, in all the right ways.