Saturday, February 20, 2021
Pisces
Pisces' February Fog
I have often meditated thought/felt about unnecessary suffering,
thinking about all the tragic, miserable suffering based on misunderstandings,
or suffering based on situations which further down the timeline
no longer exist. Diseases for which cures have been found, injuries6
in wars that never needed to be fought, mistaken enmity, all the gays
and witches stoned and burned, all the mentally ill subjected to
horrendous "treatments," all the twisted secrets that never needed
to be kept keeping people entrapped in violent abuse.
In the way of meditation, I am drawn to thought about Christian mystics.
Many were highly intelligent women who would never have been taken
seriously as everyday wives, but cloistered from early ages,
encouraged to give their minds and souls and bodies to Christ,
their writings preserved show their grappling as mystic philosopher
seekers, trying to make sense of the suffering and brutality all around
and within them. Christ is love. God is good and merciful.
If we suffer, it must be to bring us closer to our blessed saviour.
Suffering (Piscean empathy) not so much about healing as opening up
to the holy well of pain we as mortals must experience to learn true
compassion, to take our share of that pain from the shoulders of
Christ and by the grace of our ecstatic burdens enter the realm
of the holy, the loving spirit.
But there is another way along this route, where the suffering is
about healing, is about transcendence and transformation, alchemical
catalyzation. If I can enter the pain and find my way within it, learn its
language, learn to speak with it, understand it to the point of being of it,
work with it artistically and in a comradely spirit, learn its secrets and
its fears and its beauty, I can learn to transform the pain within me,
and find avenues to send that transforming out into the world of
suffering, into the pervasive pain and misery of those who are caught up
in traumas and dramas and debilitation.
Though Christ died for our sins and transubstantiates to lead us into the
kingdom of heaven, perhaps the mystical way can lead us to live through
the pain and into that untimebound plane where the pain has evolved6
into awestruck beauty that doesn't hurt at all, a way of ecstatic
celebration in mutual love, support, opening into pleasure and health,
release into another kind of consciousness.
Or maybe we should just shut up and take our Prozac. The soul therapists
sanctioned by the AMA don't appear to have a clue.
Healing
Pedestals in intricate geometric arrangement
Empty
since the sculptured gods have run off
seeking glories and adventures
in less structured realms.
Petitioners never notice,
leaving putrid mewling remains,
sacred sacrifice,
rotting stench to keep the altars
holy.
Out on the playfields,
breathing in hearty exercise,
laughter expanding lung strength,
crying leaving damp rich soil,
incremental mineral deposits
essential to health.
Close to the Edge
Close to the edge, so close.
The music's playing old familiar memories.
It's a grey day, fog of Pisces,
a year of fear and hopeful reawakening --
is there hope of resurrection?
in these grim, grim times?
But so grim?
A time to newly discover
strength within;
to again see life as a discovery
-- can it be done?
On a day so grey, in a year so fraught with peril
and misadventure?
Slowly, one at a time: take things one at a time,
and they seem so small and easy.
Why hold expectations that lead to dismay,
hiding from fantasy?
Breathe, meditate.
Build dream towers to climb to,
not nightmares.
But it seems so safe and easy to hide
In the darkness,
to never utter another "I"
to cease.
Why not?
Close to the edge, so close.
The fool looks over his shoulder.
The wise goat climbs with care.
The lonely may jump in despair.
How to be alone and strong?
Ask the high priestess --
All is within/without you.
But to find that smile of understanding?
It is a search worth taking.
Slow, easy, breathe.
February snows through conflated years.
Fear was my ally, hailing me on, hugging
with glorious laughter, carrying unsure steps through
onerous trails. And those ebullient ecstasies of survival.
Drunk on the gold that surpasseth science or light.
Touch the cold sting, letting the song sing through me.
Do you?
Feel the music? Abandon your amygdala to dance free
awhirl in a swirl of laughing snow?
In dreams, inchoate, unremembered, do we play in those
moments of bliss to keep us balanced, to give courage in a life
less lived, less honored?
Old, glazed-over eyes seek momentary solace, look long,
longingly, into a silly mist of snow beyond windows closed
securely against the cold. Dream world revealed,
in the interplay of eyes and mind.
February snowflakes
Flitter Flutter
Feathery powder
Melt into my mind.
let loose into this foggy dawn.
colours, still subtle,
arranging,
catch liquid,
dissolve in
undulating air --
tell a story.
A new day dawns cloudy and forbidding.
We are entering San Francisco in the morning fog,
early, early, the world still dreaming.
Or maybe it was Cambridge, Mass.,
lost in the fog, unsure of time or space.
Sometimes there is singing:
something about a "Yellow Submarine" or "Strawberry Fields"
or sometimes haunting melodies without words.
But it's all about the words, even those implied by the music.
Wine can help.
By the gods, wine is sometimes all that can help
(tho sometimes even wine betrays me).
The stinking debris of mornings after the night before,
or just morning by the coast with the stink of rotting fish,
the cries of gulls or sirens, the emptiness without tears, the cold of morning
-- I remember that too.
That no more mornings could touch me,
that I could hide contented in the night dreaming
flying dreams so none could touch me.
Fragments. Taking life in fragments. Folding each shiny fragment
into tender velvet pockets sequined to reflect the light,
let them be all right, feel cared for.
Let the nights protect us from the days.
Like a wandering hermit with a self-igniting lantern . . . .
zoom back into throng
the very pain of life a Holiday song
metaliminal passion play in several actions
foggy notions, robes of myst
limbic video bliss
Here, in a world of fog and fury,
blurred in twilight vengeance,
crows, ravens, portents of
black flight circle above.
A crown of shrieks, feathers
cascade, rain like pestilence.
No blame in blindness.
"I could not see through feathered fog;
could not save you."
Collar up against the wind and dark.
Rising smoke creates warmth illusion.
Wrapped in sanity's delusion,
fog's memory of mist, imagined tide.
Seated here, salt-etched wall
alone between vast sand and
murmuring waves.
No one sings.
The notes, the voices
appear
Singers in the fog.
Outlying voices thin, yet growing;
accruing sound, like liquid, flowing.
Emoting tales of woe, resistance.
Shouted sighs of denied existence.
Insightful chants insist persistence.
We never died. We're knitting strong.
Born into a world-wide village.
Only from ourselves to pillage.
Hear our song.
Some bright good morning of
fish and loaves, cake and wine,
capacious tribes adjoin in movement.
Shining line of peace.
Cloud imagery morphs, calls forth
enchantment effused through morning firmament.
Pulls memories, wishes, muses’
wordless cinema
enhanced by rhythmic score.
Loosed within foggy aurora,
birdsong. Voices conflate
sums of experience.
Mauves, shades of color still subtle
coalesce;
mist rainbow
undulates. Moist air
shares, surrenders whispered tales.
Prismatic atmosphere,
diffracted light.
Layered clouds, sustain
perfect
inspiration.
Ecstasy dissolves the lock
dividing everyday from magic.
World-eating fog encroaches.
No capacity to breathe in this miasma.
Rotting from lung to core,
gasping for something clean
to inhale, to cure.
Release.
Ooze gently
into nothingness.
No trace of panic
around which to coalesce
fear, malice.
Let turmoil bleed off,
dissipate as airless mist.
Creature, being, created from singular experience
cocooned in dreaming.
Sitting, silent, still, watching artfilm of revealed
truth waft, oracular smoke. Mesmerized by beauty,
this deep-blue pond contained
in floating ice offset in fog-faded mountain promise.
Those dreams, those dreams, to live only there,
where it all makes nonsense that feels so inevitable.
Stories unencumbered by beginnings, logical progression,
by boundaries, yet pure and strong as sacred text.
