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Bridging the gap between imagination and logic through poetry, memoir, and myth.
More of my work can be experienced on my website.
We have imprisoned ourselves in a black and white version of the world. How do we evolve into the full-spectrum consciousness of the rainbow? How do we see what’s beyond the known colors?
Sight occurs in the brain. Our eyes are receptors, the organs of sight. Technically, they can receive the unknown rays of the spectrum the infrared and ultraviolet. Why aren’t they visible?
The problem abides in the brain. So does the solution.
We need to revitalize our imaginations. Put down the phones and learn to generate our own images. Repair the frayed synapses between left and right brain hemispheres.
Scientists describe the corpus callosum as white matter that connects the left and right brain hemispheres. Nowhere in the words “white matter” do I get the sense this is living tissue carrying electrical impulses back and forth, marrying logic and intuition in polyamorous splendor in order to create the perfect union of an embodied human soul.
Let’s change that.
Consider the rainbow:
In one familiar story it’s a covenant sent by God after a flood destroyed most of us to let us know he was still committed to us humans.
In other stories, the rainbow is a woman who carries messages between human and spirit realms.
In both stories, the rainbow is a metaphor, and metaphorical thinking is exactly what we need right now.
In one story God is a he, and a proper noun. He has no other name but God, and he sends the rainbow to uplift us after the cataclysm.
In other stories, the rainbow goddesses have names like Anuenue and Iris, and they themselves are the rainbow.
In both stories, the rainbow is a message, but in the second story, there is no separation between the message and its bearer. When we look at the rainbow in that story, we are seeing the goddess.
This is not a publication that favors the feminine over the masculine. I’m not trying to reclaim an ancient past, though I may refer to it sometimes, because there is deep wisdom there that can help us repair that hard, cracked bridge, so that we can walk across it with a spring in our steps toward an integrated future where we are imagining better possibilities for our world, while acknowledging the gifts of being able to create through a world of contrasts. Love live the binary. Let’s just allow ourselves to experience both sides so we can access the greatest potential of each one.
The way for us to do that, is for each one of us to see the rainbow ourselves. Stop outsourcing the spectrum to God and goddesses.
In the next story, we get to be the rainbow.
Metaphors are bridges, linking things that seem like they aren’t connected. When they land, they ring through us like temple bells whose sound keeps coming out of flowers once the ringing has stopped. (Thank you, Bashō.) When we hear the sound coming out of the flowers, we know we are part of something far greater than ourselves, and hopefully we appreciate our ears that enable us to hear the spiraling sound.
When we hear and see like this, we make the choices that will benefit the next generations. And we heal the generations before us, too.
We revitalize culture and begin to stand up taller, take pride in our accomplishments, no matter how small.
Nothing is small any more. In fact, nothing ever was. Everything matters.
When we understand our own lives as a story within many other stories, as a bridge between the human and many other realms, we begin to make the choices that can lead to happy endings for all. And by happy, I don’t mean endings that evoke only positive emotions.
One of my favorite living musicians, Nick Cave, said in an interview I watched this week, that joy is a complicated emotion, because it contains its opposite, despair. To me, the ability to experience the exultation of joy after experiencing despair, after abandoning yourself to the soul-wracking devastation of loss, is a happy ending. That is a tempered human, one who has been through the fire and become stronger for it, and who lives these truths with the self-evidence of simplicity, never denying that life, though it’s painful when you permit yourself to really be here, is a blessing.
We may not be successful in the ways we want, but when we live with this simple and painful truth as our guide, the spirit world knows we are paying attention. Feathers will drop in our paths. Mating hawks in the sky will cry out for us to look up and then disappear in the clouds on the mountain.
The Corpus Callosum Chronicles is my own excavation of mythic ground, my personal archaeological dig into the depths of my own consciousness and my culture’s. Thank you for being here. I hope my words feed the hungriest parts of yourself.
Are you ready for this journey? Pick up a shovel and be careful not to step on any bones! They are evidence of where we’ve been, and auguries of where we’re going.
Time to dig, my friends. Who knows what we’ll find? I used to hear rumors about an entire ocean inside the earth. Turns out, science now has evidence of it.
Our instruments of measurement and detection are catching up with what our ancestors once knew.
Now is the time of remembering, repairing, rebuilding, and finally, reimagining what the human experience is about.
Now is the time of remembering, repairing, rebuilding, and finally, reimagining what the human experience is about.
Some things may be predestined, like the fact that this is a world of polarity, but that does not make us powerless or doomed. We get to choose. We get to wield swords of truths, and sometimes those swords look like feathers, sharp and light enough to lift us skyward.
To fly is a choice. It doesn’t matter if you have wings or not. Joy exists because there are shadows.
Knowing this, is the beginning of seeing in color.
