2008, in summary, and some words on process
This was the year I got my poetry book published, and got a job offer in New Mexico. This was the year I found out I have 11 times the normal amount of mercury in my body. It's not lost on me that Mercury is my ruling planet. Nevertheless I refuse to connect the mercurial aspects of words to the literal heavy metals in my blood.
I just read a poem about trauma that seems to depict those that suffer it as broken. I'm wondering what breaks open when we break? What's the darker message? We can never go back. Do we want to?
And I also read, right before the poem, a fantastic Yuletide story to Robin McKinley's "Sunshine", which makes the point of Contantine's shadow power as an ally to Sunshine's sunlight one. And about how each power contains its opposite, and to fight a power, don't try to counter it (that just feeds it its complement), rather, come at it obliquely (which is another way of changing the terms entirely).
It seems to me in attempting to fix or heal something we see as broken, we continue to buy into the broken conception. There's something oblique to either healing or brokenness. Some alchemy or dark birthing of light, that recognizes the necessary connection of both.
I'm working on a poem about how no one can tell you what to do. How the best advice is always the worst advice, by virtue of being advice, outside your most vital connection with your self. How nothing you can say, including, "don't listen to advice" can ever be real. I've got a decent draft of it, but it needs to marinate a bit yet. Perhaps distil down some.
I need something more on the oblique part of it... the part of what IS there... what that connection IS, to self, to one's truth, without playing the part of one more advice-giver about it. Which, maybe, isn't possible. Hence the need to be oblique.
It's something like seeing stars out of the sides of your vision, or remembering a name only when you deliberately turn your attention to something else. Something about shyness. Shy knowledge. It hangs back from the more urgent light of the fire. We must learn to be seductive... to entice... to listen as if we don't care, really, whether it leaves or stays, or reveals its name today, tomorrow, or ever.
I hope the world finds its obliqueness. You can't solve a problem from inside the problem. You can't solve depression, or violence, or anything, from inside the patterns of depression, or violence, or whatever. I dearly, dearly hope for something transcendantly oblique to happen in the Middle East, to bring about peace that surpasses anyone's understanding of it -- really, that would be just fine -- in Gaza and Israel and all the places connected to those places.
May all beings be free. Shalom, Salaam, Namaste. May we live to sing the song of a brighter time. I am so grateful for all I've been given.
I just read a poem about trauma that seems to depict those that suffer it as broken. I'm wondering what breaks open when we break? What's the darker message? We can never go back. Do we want to?
And I also read, right before the poem, a fantastic Yuletide story to Robin McKinley's "Sunshine", which makes the point of Contantine's shadow power as an ally to Sunshine's sunlight one. And about how each power contains its opposite, and to fight a power, don't try to counter it (that just feeds it its complement), rather, come at it obliquely (which is another way of changing the terms entirely).
It seems to me in attempting to fix or heal something we see as broken, we continue to buy into the broken conception. There's something oblique to either healing or brokenness. Some alchemy or dark birthing of light, that recognizes the necessary connection of both.
I'm working on a poem about how no one can tell you what to do. How the best advice is always the worst advice, by virtue of being advice, outside your most vital connection with your self. How nothing you can say, including, "don't listen to advice" can ever be real. I've got a decent draft of it, but it needs to marinate a bit yet. Perhaps distil down some.
I need something more on the oblique part of it... the part of what IS there... what that connection IS, to self, to one's truth, without playing the part of one more advice-giver about it. Which, maybe, isn't possible. Hence the need to be oblique.
It's something like seeing stars out of the sides of your vision, or remembering a name only when you deliberately turn your attention to something else. Something about shyness. Shy knowledge. It hangs back from the more urgent light of the fire. We must learn to be seductive... to entice... to listen as if we don't care, really, whether it leaves or stays, or reveals its name today, tomorrow, or ever.
I hope the world finds its obliqueness. You can't solve a problem from inside the problem. You can't solve depression, or violence, or anything, from inside the patterns of depression, or violence, or whatever. I dearly, dearly hope for something transcendantly oblique to happen in the Middle East, to bring about peace that surpasses anyone's understanding of it -- really, that would be just fine -- in Gaza and Israel and all the places connected to those places.
May all beings be free. Shalom, Salaam, Namaste. May we live to sing the song of a brighter time. I am so grateful for all I've been given.