Some food for thought and a hiatus

So, I'm headed out on some travels again and will be taking a hiatus for the next few weeks. I promise to return with fresh thoughts, poetry and photographs. I'm excited...another one for the bucket list.

In the meantime, I wanted to share some of my favorite Joseph Campbell quotations with you. These are taken from Sukhavati - a wonderful DVD featuring bits of his lectures about myths. (nota bene: the "I" he uses is the universal "I"...not the "I" if the ego self.) Enjoy!

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"I am yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I have the power to be born a second time. I am the source and creator of all the gods."

"And man was not breathed into the earth but came out of the earth."

"Dreams are self-luminous. They shine of themselves as gods do. Myths are public dreams. Dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth world in which you live."

"The passage is from dream to vision to the gods and they are you. All the gods, all the hells, all the heavens are within you. The god is in you. It is not something that happened somewhere else a long time ago. It's in you. This is the truth of truths. This is what the gods and myths are all about..so find them in yourself and take them into yourself and you will be awakened in your mythology and in your life. In deep, dreamless sleep, consciousness is still there but it is covered over by darkness. But suppose you could find that consciousness. Suppose you could go into deep sleep awake -- to go awake into that sphere where there is consciousness but consciousness of no specific thing. Waking consciousness deals only with what has happened. Deep sleep holds all that is future because the future can come from nowhere else but the energies of the psyche."

"We are in accord with the universal rhythm."

Mona Lisa Moon

they blasted the moon today
--our protector--
the he-she entity
with a scientific one-two punch.

i tuned in,
glued to the tv
keen for satellite images
of exposure
in the expected
six-mile debris field.

newscasters during the countdown
said that discovery of ice
would shave billions off the space program.

human greed in a soundbite.

disbelief. dismay. depression.
the moon doesn't behave as expected.
there is anger. some scientific embarrassment.

later,
i look up into the ink
and study the moon's revolution.
so sly, this mona lisa moon,
grinning through rotation
and safeguarding truths from men
who rocket slap her face and are bewildered
when she does not yield.

Shakesperian Toe Tale

damn.

i catch a glimpse of my right big toe
and notice chipping paint and uneven lines.
i am annoyed.
so, i bend over and let my thumb
remove hyperbole to reveal naked nail.

i schedule a pedicure
and let mood dictate color.

today it's romeo and joliet.
i like the implied tragedy in the name.

days later,
paint flakes when life rubs.

joliet wonders where romeo has gone.
and so do i.

Brand X Religion

it's laundry day
and i'm using an ultra concentrated detergent.
what a modern marvel!
cleaner clothes in 1/4 cup!

i gloat as i sort,
clapping myself on the back
on not falling for those flashy brand x versions
promising to do more with more out of my pocket.

isn't religion the same?
we distill god down to
a word or a book or a vision
and we applaud our efficiency.

hell, with all this concentrated power,
we need less!
we marvel at our creation
and wonder if this version of god
will still lather us of our sins
and keep us cleaner, longer.

THANK GOD for 2x Ultra God!

Enlightenment in a bottle
and specially formulated for
high efficiency human machines.

Charnel House

i push into loamy earth
that holds a thousand bones.

my fingers wiggle through
centuries
that pile
and hug
and caress
below the epidermis.

life and death
mingling in a great orgy
as ancestors cavort with strangers
and prim echoes of "indecency"
and talk of a savior
are muffled by soil and rock and worm.

what does it matter when we all reduce to chalk and dna?

and what stops the greedy mother
from sucking marrow
and breaking bone into food for the unborn?

Prophets and Men

there are men who sit on the desert floor
and wait for god.
but there is no god but time and its various expressions.

shadows shorten and lengthen
and the moon cackles at the unnatural displays of immobility.

and in that moment
when fear and calm marry
and man is uncertain
"god" settles nearby and whispers mystery
into his ear.

a shout.
a shock.
revelation tickles.

trembling with an unknown feeling
dust is raised
as legs raise and move from the remote.
running now.
running from the promise of ecstasy
like virginal lovers in the first blush of fever.

Birthing

I've got a couple poems forming in my mind's embryonic fluid but it's not time to birth them yet...soon. For now it's enough to feel joy as each new word flutters into existence.

In moments like this, I turn to other writers for company and inspiration.

From Proust's Swann's Way:

"When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form."

From Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm:

"Esoteric Christianity, I read, posits a substance. It is a created substance, lower than metals and minerals on a "spiritual scale," and lower than salts and earths, occurring beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets, but never on the surface of planets where men could discern it; and it is in touch with the Absolute, at base. In touch with the Absolute! At base. The name of this substance is: Holy the Firm."

From Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree:

"Granma said that the spirit mind was like any other muscle. If you used it it got bigger and stronger. She said the only way it could get that way was using it to understand, but you couldn't open the door to it until you quit being greedy and such with your body mind. Then understanding commenced to take up, and the more you tried to understand, the bigger it got."

From Linda Hogan's (Chickasaw Indian tribe) story "The Feathers" found in Reinventing the Enemy's Language - Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America:

"There is a still place, a gap between worlds, spoken by the tribal knowings of thousands of years. In it are silent flyings that stand aside from human struggles and the designs of our own makings. At times, when we are silent enough, still enough, we take a step into such mystery; the place of spirit, and mystery, we must remember, by its very nature does not wish to be known. There is something alive in a feather. The power of it is perhaps in its dream of sky, currents of air, and the silence of its creation. It knows the insides of clouds. It carries our needs and desires, the stories of our brokenness. It rises and falls down elemental space, one part of the elaborate world of life where fish swim against gravity, where eels turn silver as moon to bread."