Thursday, January 15, 2009

Visualization, Monday Morning, In The Fall

Just plodding along here...Visualization happened in the afternoon of Oct 26 and Monday Morning happened the next morning...

Years ago now, I was directed by a medium's spirit guide to check the work of Snuffy, as she said it, and she gave me a website or something, I forget. Anyway, this was in answer to a question I had. I described a communication difficulty and said, "I need a new language." What I meant was "emotional language". Snuffy turned out to be Thomas Ashley-Farrand, an accomplished Hindu priest, speaker of Sanskrit, and an educator in these matters, with books and cds and such, all or mostly through Sounds True, and also probably still self published, the early works. My magical strain favors Hindu over Buddhist in many areas. Here is one of them. On the way to work at some point in the commute I will be chanting Sanskrit Mantra. Precisely how this started is as the answer to that need, "I need a new language."

I want to say about this turn in my life, be careful what you pray for. Also, I might observe the almost practical joke nature of God's sense of humor. This is a principal reason I like Coyote from the First Nations.

Visualization

I see you in me.
I practice bowing to you
While floating in air.

I practice floating
Off the ground in your presence,
This in my mind's eye.

I am sure I can do this.
I see it so clearly now.

But perhaps it comes
To me only after time,
Only after years,

Perhaps only somewhere else.

********************************

Payette lake is in Idaho.

Monday Morning, In The Fall

I sit in the buzz
Of my cubicle and dream
Of lake and kayak
Then enter the dream to find
My friend already drifts down
Payette Lake right there
In the middle of my dream
This Monday morning.

14 comments:

  1. Your poetry are breathtaking. Keep writing :)

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  2. Ida, welcome to you. Your profile says you are from Sweden. As it shows, you will be awake when I'm asleep. Thank you for your kindness.

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  3. there's a lot there in your poems and where i point....

    you..."I might observe the almost practical joke nature of God's sense of humor. This is a principal reason I like Coyote from the First Nations."

    somebody else"..whoever has created a dance, a song, written a ritual, tailor-made a job, birthed a child or invented a game has partaken of a controlled Trickster energy.

    .... in Northwest Native and Inuit tradition, Raven created the world; Loki is known to the Norse as a co-creator (and the bringer of Ragnarok); Anansi the spider-trickster among the Ashanti of Ghana and Nareau the spider in Micronesia; Coyote among the Southwest Natives --these are the creator aspects of this wild and uncontrolled energy.

    trickster often begins in the void, desiring to bring Order out of Chaos; once Order is imposed, however, Trickster represents the breaking free of negative power from the Universal Order of things.

    as a shape-shifter, Trickster is all things to all people, at one
    time or another, and often simultaneously.

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  4. Amen to that. I am not surprised that you can contribute profoundly to a discussion of the trickster. I will add,

    Hermes (Mercury) is the classical Greco-Roman trickster. Out of that comes all the European hermetic disciplines, including astrology, magick, and the pursuit of the Philosopher's Stone. And just as you say, this cannot actually happen without accepting darkness as well as light.

    And you are right that all these concerns lurk behind my poetry.

    It is very important to not take all this too seriously.

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  5. The Grail is a trickster quest too.

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  6. I love both of these poems. But I say that about all of your poems, don't I? Well, it's true. So beautiful.

    What you say is also so, so true. "Watch out what you pray for." That one made me gasp. I'm finding that out the hard way:)

    Excellent work...I'll keep reading!

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  7. "Amen to that. I am not surprised that you can contribute profoundly to a discussion of the trickster."

    why would you say that Christopher?

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  8. Golly! Yer upside down...

    Ghost, your name suggests a connection with the First Nations. In the end of their free ranging days, the tribes gathered in a new religious apocalyptic vision. In order to bring back the spirit power they had to act. They wished to reclaim for God what God had given to them, the responsibility for the earth. White men were stealing and claiming that which no man could claim, and they were taking it for good. They were devils and ignoring God.

    What they did to call the ancestors and all the other forms of spirit power they could, what they did was the Ghost Dance.

    That is why I would expect that you knew a thing or two about this stuff.

    If you do not call yourself what you do after that, then what is your meaning?

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  9. there are some more idiosyncratic meanings for my name, more inpenetrable due to lack of widely understood social meme...... one having to do with the nature of humanity on the internets per se.....

    However the Ghost Dance was certainly an influence.

    the Ghost Dance and the Ghost Dance religion have some interesting aspects that thread through religions in general.....

    if you wear this shirt you will be protected from the soldiers bullets....

    poetry can be viewed as a magical incantation...... a spiritual invocation.....

    it is important not to take all this too seriously....

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  10. Yes, I see.

    And I agree that poetry goes into the magical distances. In the life of preliterate societies, the poet is the bard, a carrier of what you call memes. The bard weaves together the social fabric. Because of movie depictions bards are thought of as singers, and they sometimes were, but mainly they were story tellers and what the told took a form and flavor of poesy and song.

    Poesy is primarily oral, where the rhythms become inflections and the voice an instrument of weaving. In postliterate culture, some of this translates to the form a poem takes on the page, but within the poem (what makes it really a poem) is the possibility of a voice dance.

    A voice dance is a ritual, an incantation.

    Modern poesy can pattern more after a much wider variety of forms, most of them visual. I choose to stay closer if I can to the spoken forms.

    In this recent cycle it is the 12 count, divided into 5 and 7, both prime, the first the number of man and the second the number of destiny. 12 is the number of the entire company, as in the 12 apostles, or the 12 months, or the dozen eggs (themselves symbols of the future). And twelve itself divides by 2, 3, 4, 6. This is why 12 keeps its place despite the decimal system.

    Though my style comes from haiku, it is not haiku. It is the weaving of 5 and 7 supported by 2, 3, 4, and 6.

    Indeed an incantation or ritual.

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  11. Monday morning, in the fall-- I can so relate to this one. Yes, we all sit in kayaks on the lake, in our minds, those days.

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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