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)

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)

 

Traditional Inuit Songs

!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)

Doña Erudita del Maldiciòn de la Broma de la Puta-madré

Notas Biograficales:- Doña Erudita was born  from the union of a leprous whore and a floating saint, San Ernesto de Puta-madré.  On that accursed wedding day, the whore’s own father repaired to the village outhouse, dowsed himself in tequila and set himself on fire.  All that was left of him was a pair of purple glass eye-lids, handed down to him from a famous glass-maker and optical prosthetist from Seville.  Little Erudita was born into the hands of her father some fourteen months later, after a prolonged pregnancy.  Indeed, the local midwife had claimed that she had heard the infant speaking Castilian from inside her mother’s rabid womb.  At the age of three years, the little girl started writing poetry, which she said she heard when she put her head inside the stone holy water font at the church of St Alfonsina del Mar.  In later years, when a fireworks accident (an exploding iguana) caused Erudita to become stone deaf, she started deriving her poemas from the patterns that the geckos drew with their slime on the steps of the Jardin Botanicál de Rey in  Xoacotquetloaxcs.  On being deposed as a saint, Ernesto emigrated to the Antipodean backwater known as The Mallee, where, with three black pigs named Chancho, Tocino and Chorizo, he set up a lucrative magic mushroom-hunting business.

 

"Untouchable" published online in The Prague Review May 2015

Untouchable

Animal Soul

 

How beautiful are our animals:

my feet pummelling your sweet hind;

your thighs astraddle my ankle.

How innocent and beautiful - my hand

lathering between your peach-cheeks,

bending my face close to sandlewood soap

your scribbled shins.

It is not sin.

It is merely terrifying.

It is terrifying to know each other

naked as dumb animals;

mute and swollen with animal soul.

No longer is this mellow drama for

my climax or your syntax.

It is the rugged theatre of the primates;

it is the ritual at the rough conception of all others.

It is the world’s first terrible sacrament.