Reflections on 2009

2009.

2009 was solar and active and very much in the world.

Over the course of this year, I traveled to 4 different countries and traveled through 16 different states! That's a lot of frequent flyer miles! Whew.

Regardless, 2009 found me expanding my horizons in the most remarkable ways.

It was a year of exploring new terrain -- both within myself and out in the world. I discovered new sounds and tastes and my dreams and poetry deepened. Life felt more kinetic, magical and rhythmic. It was fun following the rabbit hole of possibility and synchronicity.

As done in years past, I'd like to reflect upon and compile a small list of lessons learned this year.

1. Poetry cannot be rushed. It does not operate on mechanical time. Trying to force it destroys the art.

2. "Ask, believe, receive" is a powerful way to live life. In doing this, you can manifest the most extraordinary things.

3. Joseph Campbell knows what he's talking about. Jung, too. There is great wisdom in their writings.

4. The dream world is a vast and mysterious place filled with teachers and guides, even if they come from your own interior. Much can be learned if you pay attention and much can be healed if you don't analyze.

5. Your body knows what's what. If it gets cranky during marathon training, maybe it's because your body doesn't really want to run the race. The body will let you know and will differentiate itself from the ego.

6. Health is not something to take for granted.

7. Often, if you allow the dialogue, the people who sit next to you on airplanes can offer powerful reminders. Sometimes, they even help change your life.

8. There are no coincidences. The universe awaits your engagement on a daily basis. It seeks a playmate.

9. While sad, it is important to recognize the things & people which no longer serve you in order to make room for what/who does.

10. Love teaches much. True intimacy is a remarkable and blessed gift.

11. Nature remains a purifier of mood and spirit.

12. Spontaneous giggling is the best!

Again, one lesson for every month of the year.
I look forward to the lessons and surprises of 2010
and ask for blessings upon each day.

May your own new year find you bright, happy, healthy and quite at peace.

Unaware

Yoko and John outside the Dakota building in NYC, Fall 1980.

past stands
with small smiles
to oblige a camera.

present lines up
in the same spot
with different cameras,
wider smiles.

stand where they stood.
it seems the thing to do.

but john was shot a month later
by a lunatic.

center left.

***

unaware smiles.

***

i stand in a blizzard.
someone points out her window.
"the light's on. she's home."

snow swirls and gusts.
what must she think of us,
standing in their spot
near the fields
created to hold
strawberry memories?

Musings, Solstice and Campbell

The light is returning and the Solstice has passed. The shift reminds me to move from lunar to solar; to move from the interior to the exterior. To wake up.

The poetry is waking up, too. December's quiet and the blanket of newly fallen snow has encouraged retreat and slumber...gestation. A new month and year hovers on the horizon but for now these musings emerge.

I dance out the lessons of 2009. This is the crescendo - the final movement until the birth of the new year. It is good to get kinetic. To dance funk in bare feet on hardwood floors. To bounce and move on the boards that creak and squeak and tell their age. And for my knees to reveal theirs. The body's music. I dig it.

I also dig Joe Campbell. I dig his work and I dig into it with gusto. My brain chews on the teachings and my foot bounces in anticipation of new lessons.

Not a bad way to spend December.

So, until the poetry decides that it's ready, enjoy these blips from Campbell. They're taken from Sukhavati.

***

"So yield to what is coming. We're in a free fall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act."

Shift the perspective: "joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes."

"The problem is to find the immovable center and you can survive anything. And the myths will help you to do that. And this is the quest for the inner life that will enable you to float down the stream like a human being instead of just some Babbit or robot in the hands of a political institution. And that's what I'm interested in bringing forward here and I may not be changing the world but I am changing people and that's what's necessary. That's what's gotta be done."

"The figures of dream are really figures of personal mythologization. You're creating your own imagery related to the archetypes but the culture has rejected them. The culture has gone into an economic and political phase where the spiritual principles are completely disregarded. The religious life is ethical. It is not mystical. That is gone and the society is disintegrating consequently. It is. The question is will there ever be a recovery of the mythological, mystical realization of the miracle of life of which our society is a manifestation and all of us brothers and sisters in the spirit of this all-informing mythos."

"There is no conflict between mysticism and science but there is a conflict between the science of 2,000 BC and the science of 2,000 AD. And that's the mess in our religions. We've got stuck with an image of the universe that is about as simple and childish as you could imagine, you know, the three level universe and all that of the bible. It's of no use to us. We have to have poets, we have to have seers who will render to us the experience of the transcendence through the world in which we're living."

Meandering through the Mediterranean

Exterior, St. Mary's Church, Mosta, Gozo, Malta

Colosseum, Rome, Italy

Interior, Vatican Museum, Vatican City

The homebody is pleased to have returned but the nomad continues to dream of honeyed colors and the wine dark sea. Salt spray and olives underfoot and hard local cheese and strolls through plowed farmland are terribly hard to leave but poetry lingers and that is enough.

Also lingering are the stories shared at dusk and the laughter which rang out like bells in a new land.

Poetry forthcoming...stay tuned.

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" of the ego self.) Enjoy!

***

"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 from 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.

so do i.