She Will Rise

Stand long enough on the wet sand
And eventually
The ocean will rise to meet you
Licking at first your toes
Then kissing your thighs.
In time
taking you wholly into Herself
At the wild churning edge
Where land and sea meet
and mix it up.
Then, she is gone
leaving you wet and shaken and wondering...
What just happened?


MJO
4/16/11

A Memory of Rain

It's just me
and the slow,
warm,
Louisiana rain
on my small upturned face
in the front yard
of Granny's house
in the country.

Just me and the rain
on the aggregate driveway
of river pebbles
and smashed shells
so rough there are thousands
of tiny puddles
splashing each drop.

Me,
rain,
roughness
and the scent of wet pine needles
in drifts beneath the trees
where the rain
falls
quiet.

The creak and slap
of the screen door,
and she is there,
towel in hand,
with the smell of supper
on her clothes.


MJO
5/13/11

A Ritual to Read to Each Other--William Stafford

This poem has been with me lately--meaning it keeps coming to mind, wants to be read over and over, holds some kind of mystery I can't quite fathom. What does it make you think of? Or Feel? 

A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER--William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider--

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

  Ashes and Snow by Gregory Colbert

What Remains

A couple of weeks ago I attended a four day writer's retreat in the beautiful foothills above Santa Barbara, led by my favorite professor from Pacifica Graduate Institute, with 40 other kindred souls in love with literature, mythology, philosophy, and Jung. It blew my mind, touched my heart, and got the creative juices flowing.

Now that the 'afterglow' of the retreat is starting to fade, what remains? The challenge of going to these gatherings is, of course, to bring something back to everyday life. Joseph Campbell called it the "boon"--the treasure of great value, that is hard won by the hero and brought back to the people. Although seeing the sacred spiral in Dante's terza rhima was a sparkling intellectual jewel, right now I can appreciate the dull but solid rocks I hold in my hands--a fledgling practice of writing and walking (nearly) every day that I actually WANT to do. I had been 'wanting to want' to write and walk for some time, so what's different now? I think I have faith now. Faith that if I just do it, boring and uninspiring as it may seem, something else will happen, something else will eventually come out of it.


Trust in that process had been lacking, even though I KNOW what Marie Louse von Franz had said about showing up every day to meet Psyche at the writing desk, even though I know what Marion Woodman has said about making your way to the river every day, because Sophia is making her way,too, from the other side. I knew these things, but couldn't live them. If you lack faith, you cannot be faithful, you cannot show up for self or Self.

The faith I feel, and the faithfulness I am showing now is still new and tentative, but seems more rooted than ever before. The experience of the weekend was a weaving together of threads I had been gathering for some time. Observing the patterns in my intimate relationships, I found the grief tied to multiple emotional abandonments--nothing dramatic or tragic, but subtle and pervasive. Getting beyond the mythology of being the victim, and through a fair amount of bodywork, I have seen the deeper pattern--how I routinely abandon myself in the subtle and pervasive decisions of everyday life: what to eat for breakfast, whether to take the stairs or the elevator, whether to sleep in or walk the dogs, whether to journal or spend 3 hours on Facebook, whether to REALLY take care of myself or keep looking for someone else to do that for me.

This is the boon I still hold in my hands. This is what I most needed to hold onto.

I Have Travelled for Miles

I Have Travelled for Miles

Something in me

has detected

Something in you

that resonates.

Sonar reverberates

around my bones,

signals the presence

of a Like-Mind.

I have travelled for miles

waiting for the tone

of Something

solid and trustworthy

in the deeper waters.

 

(About the image: Sound Engineer, Mark Fischer, has transformed recorded conversations between whales into visual art. http://www.greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-92.html )

You know

What you need.

Maybe that knowing sits

Right there on the tip of your tongue

Waiting to leap out loud

To someone who will smile.

Maybe it is sleeping,
Hidden
In a safe corner of your heart
Where it crept
back when things got really crazy.

Maybe
It is dancing inside your bones--
the aches and pains of not moving enough--
The hurt you have to listen to.

You know what you need.

The Antidote to Answers

I am ready to give up
the galloping
insatiable
desire to know.
The drive to find
the right answer
to whatever
perplexes
confounds
or confuses the mind.

This horse has ridden me long
and I must dismount,
fall,
really,
to the ground of my being,
rest in the soft loam of my uncertainty
and, like Rilke,
learn to love the questions themselves.