Here is a vision of the way it once was. I am drawn to pieces of this vision like I belong there, would belong here if it was more like this. I have a serious belonging problem. It is no accident that I am alcoholic.
Yet I am also aware of the advantages that civilization has brought to us. I am what I call a "hot house flower". What I mean by that is modern civilization has saved my life often enough for me to know that had I been born with this body in an earlier time I would never have made it out of infancy or early childhood. That has been carried forward as well. My skills are all civilized skills. In other words, not only am I still alive because of civilization, if it were taken away I would not survive either the transition, and if I somehow did, I could not make the transition myself to some form of more basic tribal society role, unless somehow I could be the shaman.
An Ancient Spring
The tribal drumbeat
matches, leads the dancing girls
while the shaman chants
at the edge of light
further from the fire than crones
go this night, well placed
to bridge the dark gaps
between the warming of spring
and the cold white shards
of winter to north
of this hopeful dancing clan
seeking a new life.
February 15, 2009 10:02 AM
Contraction
1 week ago
What a world you've created in these few lines!
ReplyDeleteYour comments make me think of a book I just finished - Cormac McCarthy's The Road - a most chilling and bleak look at a post-apocalyptic world, one that, like you, I would never survive.
Karen, yes, I read that book some time ago. A strong picture of what it takes to survive.
ReplyDeleteSometimes you so much sound like my hubby. The name of my hubby's CD he is working on is Bipolar Shaman. For many reasons. Similar to your description.
ReplyDelete****
A drumbeat reaches into everyone's being, to the core, and we each hear with our inner ear at whatever level of learning we are at the time, hopeful of a good outcome.
Hmmm, what do you mean, by i have a belonging problem?
ReplyDeleteI feel i might have it too, your poem makes me long for a life like that. I am still one of the dancing girls, no Crone yet. Where the sipmple drumbeat sets the rythme of life, not so complicated.
Haha of course that's the life i try to live. But what is my tribe and where is the drum?
Never underestimate the power of the shaman or the folk healer. You could have been saved many times over; you never know. After all, what are our modern-day doctors but shamans, given how much of modern medicine is ritual?
ReplyDeleteDark, night, fire. Who wouldn't want to crawl into that? "It's time to go into the dark, where the night has eyes to recognize it's own."
ReplyDeleteRachel, I guess when it comes to food allergies (protein sensitivities for most of us), I suspect the doctors have a handle on the mechanics. What I nearly died of as an infant was pneumonitis several times and I think that is infant mortality at earlier ages. These were driven by food allergies and later transformed into severe asthma, long before serious air pollution.
ReplyDeleteI would have died at several points along the way without the techno/pharma of the forties and fifties.
W&W, the night cuts both ways. We as a species need fire.