Goddess Centered Practice
In the woods behind my house rest a collection of nine large flat rocks. Daily, I walk down to these “priestess rocks” for some sacred time alone to pray, meditate, consider, and be. Often, while in this space, I open my mouth and poetry comes out. I’ve come to see this experience as "theapoetics"—experiencing the Goddess through direct “revelation,” framed in language. As Stanley Hopper originally described in the 1970’s, it is possible to “…replace theology, the rationalistic interpretation of belief, with theopoetics, finding God[dess] through poetry and fiction, which neither wither before modern science nor conflict with the complexity of what we know now to be the self.” Theapoetics might also be described, “as a means of engaging language and perception in such a way that one enters into a radical relation with the divine, the other, and the creation in which all occurs.”
Poem: Ode to April
Ode to April:
you arrive with thunder and wind
and then settle yourself
across the land
with pink and white grace.
The mulberry and pear trees
are resplendent in white,
the apple, peach, and crab apple
blushed with pink.
Shy purple violets
and bright dandelion suns
spring open beneath our feet
as bloodroot, trillium, and toothwort
make their way across stony slopes.
Soon mushrooms will lift their heads
and iris will spread her petals.
Daffodils have already started to retire,
but magnolia is dropping by
to share her secrets
and the buds on the lilacs and redbud trees
speak of sweetness to come.
There are turkeys gobbling between the trees
and cardinals nesting in high branches,
cedar waxwings stopping by for a spell
and yellow bellied sapsuckers
investigating promising trees.
April, you dazzle me.
April, you delight me.
April, you bring beauty trailing after you
and leave sunlit possibility in your wake.
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