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: Samhain Descent
As the trees go bare
and the winds chill,
we hear ancestors
whisper in dreams
and in stones,
we hear a summons
rising on the steam
and trailing through our bones.
We set forth
seeking mystery,
craving understanding,
determined that we will listen,
we will change,
we will keep our promises.
We descend and we remember.
We find the cauldron full-bellied and black.
We gather by the fire.
We peer inside the depths.
We have been steeping
in the broth of our own liberation,
brewing dreams
and stirring in as much hope
as we can find.
Finally, we pause,
patient with all that is undone, unknown,
and unfinishable.
We recognize that we may never arrive
and yet,
we are here anyway.
Slowly,
we begin to consume
the stuff of our own renewal,
the sustenance we crave.
Quietly,
we savor the taste
of what we've made of our lives.
With gratitude,
we realize:
it is good.
Happy Samhain!
My newest book of poems: In the Temple of the Ordinary, vol. 2 is available now via Amazon and Barnes and Noble and also open for pre-order on Kindle.
Comments
-
Please login first in order for you to submit comments
