Dear Readers,
Forgoing eloquence, I’m beginning this post with a button for a discount, good through March 31st, on a year’s paid subscription in case some of you don’t make it to the bottom where I usually post these things. I hope you do, but just in case here is where you can sign up. I’m beginning two new series, most of which will be for paid subscribers only. You can get a taste of the first, Poems from the Water, right now, and the other, an exploratory journey through the stories I told in the ceremony that became my book, Piko, by reading last week’s post here: Living on Mythic Ground: The Paradox of the Modern Day Oracle. Forgive my gauche introduction this week. Let’s move onto something more poetic!
What are poems made of? The most obvious answer is words, which begs the question, what are words made of? That questions has layered answers because words, when spoken, are made by mouths, by teeth and tongue and palate. When written, words become silent, though they can sometimes be loud, and they are made by hands, too, more often these days by fingers typing on keyboards, or even phones where words shrink in size and scope to fit small screens who break lines into quick bursts when once they would have swept across a page like a waltz.
But beyond the hands and mouths that form them, words are made of air, the invisible element we take into our lungs to oxygenate our blood, which keeps this whole cycle of life going in its current form. Air is where words come from, right? Yes…and no. Words are made of air, but before that they are water. I can’t back this up with facts. It’s something I just know, and I don’t believe this is just metaphorical. On Earth, air, in fact, was here before water. Yes, words are literally made of air, but sounds came first from water. Words are meant to flow, which is why eloquence of speech is so important in indigenous people who design their cultures to be in harmony with the elements, and why poetry, the kind that I prefer at least—for there are many ways of breaking lines into poems—brings us closer to the secrets of creation that first manifested on earth as spirals in the water, shaped the human body itself around its own form. For a marvelous elucidation of this process, read the book Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, by Theodor Shwenk. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)
Saying something is secret implies something is being kept from us we want to or should know. It also implies that the person who says they have secret knowledge is an authority, which I am not. I am a poet, one who has gained some mastery of my own flow, who has at times managed to translate that into words. I also spend a lot of time in the water.
What I want to do in this series is share some of my poems where I feel I really tapped into aquatic consciousness, not just in subject, but in shape and rhythm. Direct experience is better than ideas, although sometimes ideas can help us let go into the direct experience. As I’ve grown older, I recognize the wisdom of titration. Not every shift has to hit with the force of a tsunami. I also have no problem with paradox. I embrace and celebrate that every word, every experience, can and usually does have multiple meanings, a qualityvI was born with, as most children are, and never really lost this capacity despite training to be an English professor. Even then, my self-preserving instants were good. As an undergrad, I had two specialties, 18th Century drama and Medieval literature. I somehow rode the line between the brittle wit of the rationalist Enlightenment and the illogical mysticism of Medieval mystery plays. Unbelievably, I had supportive professors who didn’t try to steamroll me into one vision, and although I’ve forgotten most of the texts I read in college, I don’t regret my studies because they showed me that I could walk the line between imagination and logic successfully anywhere I went, even the halls of academia, and because those professors cared about me so much, I learned that I could be myself, that it was not just ok to write an honors thesis on the correlations between 18th century and Medieval plays, but that I would be celebrated as a creative original. Though I abandoned academia for poetry, and abandoned three MFA programs where I could have been an academic poet, in order to learn directly from life itself on a small island off the New England coast, by exiting one spiral and choosing another, I eventually entered one (or it entered me)—or maybe we found each other?—that better suited me when a fellow island poet opened up her inn each April for The Block Island Poetry Project, where I got to study with some of the great American poets of our time, and from there on to Robert Bly’s Great Mother Conference, where the man himself once reached up to me and took my hand as I descended the stage after reading a poem in front of a gathered congregation of true devotees to the word. I don’t have any good Robert Bly stories to tell because I was far too intimidated to talk to him during the years our paths crossed, but we did once hold hands in a Sufi zikr, where spirals wove their way through us as we danced, and though if you asked me before today what my greatest influences were as a poet, I probably wouldn’t had said dancing, it’s true, more than any teachers, dancing in a spiral has informed my vocation, and even more than the dance, the spiral itself.
It’s taken me a long time, at least in my eyes, to tap into this innate whirling energy, though I don’t think about time much. I feel young, even when I wake up stiff from my massage job. I don’t know why, except to say I renew myself through creation, which is the same thing as saying I allow myself to be carried by spirals until they’ve had their way with me and passed me on to the next whirling dance.
I don’t believe my body is immortal and I also know it’s eternal. “We are stardust,” Joni Mitchell sang. Even scientists back that one up. And when I am aware of time, it’s only because I want to dance as much as I can while I’m here on Earth.
The Poems
I mentioned before that my goal is to tap into aquatic consciousness, not necessarily to write about water as a subject. In the first poem I’ll share today, the subject actually is water. I wrote it about ten years ago, and I think when you compare it with the second poem, completed yesterday, I think you’ll see how the process of titration allowed me to move beyond subject matter to expressing the nature of water itself.
The poem, “Confessional,” first appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal and is also included in my chapbook, Breaking Up With the Moon, published by Finishing Line Press in 2014.
Confessional
There is no past tense for falling water and no way to go back: only round. Clouds swell and let go of edges they aren't aware of, waterfalls bomb down gulches, funneled by flat land that gives way to get what it wants, slowing the water with its curves to feed the roots so trees can lift their leaves to the clouds. If the river ends in the ocean, it’s impossible to say where a raindrop goes, but I still want to say it, as if syllables could absolve me from what came after I took off my clothes at the waterfall. I don’t want to need you to witness my shame any more. The river has overflowed its banks many times since I stepped in. Please accept this gardenia opening to the rain whose scent saw me through afternoons I believed it would never stop falling.
I began the second poem, “Prayer to the Lake of Seven Colors,” around seven years ago, inspired by the Laguna des Siete Colores, in Bacalar, Mexico, who drew me into her colors and shattered the defenses around my heart through aquatic bodywork and dance. I loved the laguna so much I moved there, and probably would still be there now if the spiral hadn’t thrown me out in the form of an illness that required U.S. health insurance. But this spiral that threw me out was also the one that released me to the spiral that called me back to Moku o Keawe, where I found refuge within myself, a process which I document in my memoir, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming.
This second poem doesn’t have as much of a sense of place as the first, in my opinion. It feels more universal, which is ironic since it’s inspired by my beloved laguna. It felt, in the writing, that I am moving beyond biography, beyond the need to be absolved by the confession in the first poem, to be a voice for forces beyond my individual life. Spirals within spirals within spirals. I can’t see the end of it, nor do I want to. All I want to do is add my voice to the song.
Prayer to the Lake of Seven Colors
Oh water, I offer you my eyes before they open, even though I long to see the lake's seven blues break in waves that become words like indigo, cerulean, ultramarine, cobalt, azure, lapis, aqua. No more mourners at your shore throwing ashes. No more need to settle into mud to be clear. No flowering lotus. Oh water, I offer my ears to your song without adding words. Even though I love them I will listen beyond my spiraling doubt and need for an echo to affirm there's a bottom. I don't want to die, but I will. Oh water, Oh Lake of Seven Blues, could there be more colors on the other side of the rainbow's clouds? Does every spiral really begin and end within itself? Swallows stitch orbits in the sky's open wounds. The return is always the beginning. I hold a shell to my ear and listen to the song until I am sung.
Announcements
Are you interested in working with me? I’m opening up spaces for mythic or writing mentorships. If you’re a writer of any genre looking to add a mythic dimension to your work or seeking guidance in your life through myths and fairytales, reach out and introduce yourself. Mentorships can be craft-based, to inspire creativity, or a combination of both.
To schedule a free consult, contact me, Jennifer Lighty, at waveofchange@gmail.com or leave a message by responding to this email.
Get a Signed Copy of Piko
I had a wonderful sharing my book with the good folks at Kona Stories, a successful independent bookstore here on the Big Island holding down the literary scene in a place where most people would prefer to scuba dive than read books. Thank you, Kona Stories.
If you’re on island, you can stop in there to purchase a signed copy of Piko. I can also personally inscribe a copy and mail to you for $25, postage included. Message me if you’d like a signed copy.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light