Friday 18 March 2016

When the night is a careless mother...


When the night isn’t so lonely;

when the lampshade isn’t the only light on

in the whole world;

when you’re not the only one awake;

when the heat is a gentle breathing upwards into the dark,

a delicious warm breath that cradles you loosely, like an arm;

when the night is a dozing mother,

young and slightly careless in her sleep…

 

When you wake up loosely

in the heat-sweet crook of night’s milk-sour embrace;

when the bluish sap of night stains the air with its must,

with its fusty damp;

when the salt of the night, the night’s motherly sweat stings,

clinging to the back of your tender neck…

when the night is a slightly careless mother

holding you closely, but loose, and heat-drugged;

when the night hums her unconscious lullaby against your ear-drums…

 

When the night is like a young wife who left the window up

to let in the waves of perfume, heady and cloying,

from a bush outside the window

with butter-pat blooms, creamy and fat and oozing,

their perfume, their purring and pulsing feline stink,

seductive, musk, filling the granular night with motherly abandon,

with a sprawled dreaminess,

a foetid, moonlight creaminess…

 

…then, the night is a young wife

exhausted by the surprise of the day,

wrung out by the winding mangle of the day.

When the night holds you softly, loosely, to its rising breast;

when the night shares your dreams, breathes when you breathe,

stirs when you stir,

its dear, blurred nightliness a barely-there embrace,

a barely-discernible, sleep-heavy mother’s face.
 
 

The Mountains and Waters sutra...

It is not only that there is water in the world, but there is a world in water.  It is not just in water.  There is a world of sentient beings in clouds.  There is a world of sentient beings in the air.  There is a world of sentient beings in fire...There is a world of sentient beings in a blade of grass...( A Buddhist text)

Everything is alive and wants to communicate...

"Every flower was a word, a thought.  The grass was speech; the trees were speech; the waters were speech; the winds were speech." (- George Russell, Irish poet and mystic)

Wednesday 16 March 2016

Najagneg, an Inuit shaman...

...the soul of the universe has a voice so fine and gentle that even children cannot become afraid.  What he says is: Be not afraid of the universe... (Joseph Campbell, The Way of Animal Powers, Vol.1)

 

!Kung shaman K"xau from the Kalahari...

I dance.  I enter the Earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel in a long way, very far.  When I emerge...I am climbing threads...I follow the thread of the wells...(Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy)