The Paradox of Poison

A Meditation on the Solar Eclipse

Jennifer Lighty

Apr 12, 2024

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Perchance to Dream

The night before the eclipse I couldn’t sleep. All night I lay awake. At first, I resisted, wished I’d fall asleep. Early tomorrow morning the sun would disappear. I wanted to be awake for it. Finally, I accepted my wakefulness and the strange peace of exhaustion cocooned me. I surrendered. Do what you will with me. Some things can only be seen in the dark.

Even though we would only experience a partial eclipse on Moku o Keawe, which I wouldn’t be able to see at all on the West Side of the island because the sun took so long to rise over Mauna Loa, my intention was to get out of bed and write during the two hours or so of eclipse to see if anything would be revealed, forgetting that eclipses first conceal. I was also buying into the hype about the event on social media where people who were much more lauded than me from following their bliss à la Joseph Campbell, were saying things like cover your head so bad spirits couldn’t nab you, wear white and gold, don’t eat or drink, and definitely don’t sleep because it was important to hold the energy of the life-giving sun while the moon’s shadow passed over it. I would be like them. Get up early, hold the energy, seek a vision when the moon’s shadow crossed the sun to bring back for my community.

“Comparisons are odious,” wrote Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and Cervantes. I won’t disagree. In fact, I’ll affirm they are not only odious, they are also “odorous” as Shakespeare comically adapted the phrase in “Much Ado About Nothing.” In other words, comparisons stink.

If by now you’ve guessed I slept through the eclipse, you’re right. After a sleepless night listening to layers of sound expand out from my bed as temperatures changed, wind shifted, and the mountain itself dreamed, I drifted off before the sun rose, diving into my own dream.

I was at The Great Mother Conference. (A gathering I’ve attended many times “awake” that focuses on the life of the soul in individuals and cultures.) Others were already assembled when I entered the venue, sitting on stone risers that looked like the Greek theater at Epidauros I visited at age 19, so dumb with longing and confusion I wouldn’t have been able to hear the Oracle of Delphi if she spoke right to me. I took my place on the risers and looked down on a group of young balllerinas wearing long tutus like Degas dancers. The dancers were topless. Kore, I heard. The Greek word for maiden. The part of me that was observing them recalled the Minoan bull dancers of Crete, who vaulted over the bulls bare-breasted, wearing long skirts, not tutus like these young ladies. I didn’t know what to make of these hybrid French-Impressionist Ancient Cretan dancers, but that’s ok, because what’s important to me is I actually finished a dream. Usually, I wake up before my dreams complete, which may be why I don’t remember them. I want to finish a dream. Step out of the shadows whether I’m awake or asleep.

And how did the dream finish? With a voice, someone in the crowd surrounding me, saying, “Those breasts are portals.” This was not some kind of lewd innuendo, it was a serious proclamation. We were at The Great Mother Conference after all.

Minoan Bull Dancers, fresco from the palace of Knossos, Crete

Portals to where? That’s what I might have asked if I had stayed asleep, but I woke up because the birds were singing even louder than usual below my window. Was the eclipse over? I looked at the clock. Totality had passed, but the eclipse was still on. I could still get up and write, which I did. These words are the evidence, though I’m transcribing them into my computer a couple of days later after having had some time to think about what a tailspin I sent myself into with my pathetic self-comparisons to Instagram influencers, judging myself with the usual refrain:

Why are they successful and not me? Must be because I’m not disciplined enough, not devoted enough to a spiritual practice, too esoteric, too intelligent for the masses, deluded I have any talent, too old, unglamorous, unphotogenic, who would want to look at me or hear anything I have to say?

It’s horrible writing it out like that. Too much, not enough—the endless seesaw of inadequacy. I want to be content and humble, offer my best self as a contribution to humanity, but I’ve still got this comparison thing tainting what I offer. I figure the best thing to do is expose myself and say it, even though I want to perform confidence to convince you I’m an authority on the mythic journey like the people who get book deals and have thousands of subscribers. Maybe if I admit it, the wound will heal like tearing off a band-aid. Fresh air has a way of doing that.

Deep down I know the only thing I really need to be is an authority on me. It’s a powerful act to stop pretending.

My authority comes from sharing my process, admitting my vulnerability. It’s the show-and-tell model of authority. In fact, what this makes me is an authority on vulnerability, which feels good when I write it. I feel doors opening, instead of closing, fresh breezes coming in through the windows.

Be Yourself

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
—E.E. Cummings, ”A Poet’s Advice to Students”

I may have missed my opportunity to receive a big download from the eclipse because I slept in, but I was also true to myself. Sleep is what I really wanted. Maybe it’s just not my calling to hold the energy of the sun. Maybe my calling is to dream.

Right now, if humans went extinct, the legacy our species would leave is war. Is that what you want to leave? You, the human I’m writing to, who has been given air, water, earth, and fire for free. Yes, the elements have been polluted and are now for sale, but whose fault is that? Ours. We are the ones who can change that.

I realize it may not seem that way because historically not everyone has been able to have a say in those choices as violence has been the primary tool for governing on our planet for a couple of millennia, but it’s true. Don’t let resentment poison your heart. Forgiveness is always possible and will be what evolves our species into a more enlightened way of living together, but we have to choose it. One by one and day by day.

This week I was thinking about the phrase “all is love,” or “God is love.” They are very reassuring, aren’t they? I want to make a proposal. What if all is not love? What if love is something we only get to experience in certain dimensions, and being human is one of them? I have read accounts by psychonauts who have traveled to dimensions on DMT where love doesn’t exist. I remember a scene in a movie whose name I can’t remember. The character floated and spun in a black space without gravity surrounded by a geometric grid of square shapes. There were no emotions there. It was terrifying.

Right now we are on a course to exterminate ourselves. Why? Do we need to know? Will an answer help? Maybe it’s because we are re-living past catastrophes when floods and fire wiped out our civilizations? Maybe we are stuck in repeating loops of ancestral and genetic trauma? Maybe we are possessed by demons who feed on the despair, hatred, and fear generated by war?

If answers like that help you, good, but we have to come back to the heart.

Instead of searching for answers to why our waters are poisoned, why war exists, why we are so divided, consider this: what if Earth is one of the places, maybe even the only place, where we get to journey through every emotion you can think of, and that love is the culmination of all those feelings?

“All is love” makes it sound easy. As E.E. Cummings said, it’s not. To feel every emotion and release it, which is how an emotion is truly integrated, is the real hero’s journey. It requires more forgiveness than you’ll think you are capable of, but I know it’s possible. Just last night, I read an account of a murdered man’s relations asking for clemency for the murderer, along with 70 correction officers who said this man showed genuine remorse for his actions and had devoted his life to serving others for the 20 years he’d been on death row. The state denied their pleas and the man was executed by lethal injection.

I cried when I read that. My heart opened. The poison injected into the murderer became my medicine.

The state may not be capable of being an agent of forgiveness, but we can be. The state tries to convince us it controls us, but we are more than the state. We are living technology, not machines. Yes, we can be programmed by the media, the education system, and even our own families, to hate each other, but we, unlike computers, can override our programming. We can return to love. We can be programmed by God.

May we awaken from amnesia. May we remember forgiveness is a privilege. There may be dimensions where it’s not possible to forgive because love doesn’t exist, just a grid of black squares without gravity to hold us to Earth, or anything. Nobody’s hand to hold. No eyes to meet. I’m telling you—don’t lose your chance to love.

Maybe that black emotionless grid is a place the soul has to go eventually in its evolution, but I’m not in a rush, and I bet you aren’t either. We have so much more loving to do.

Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as it sounds because most likely we’d have no identities or awareness of time, but I’m not taking my chances. I will share my sense of inadequacy because it makes me vulnerable. I won’t pretend I have it all figured out. I will trust you.

On Monday, millions of people looked up at the sky wearing funny glasses to see the intimate union of the moon and sun. The light died and was reborn. If that’s not a prophecy, I don’t know what is.

The Reckoning

One night three years ago, as I was in the thick of the ceremony that became Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, I walked upstairs to my bedroom and turned on the light. Usually, I just jump in bed in the dark. I don’t know why I chose to turn on the light, but when I saw what was at the foot of my bed, I was glad I did. Here’s how I described it in the book:

I usually go to bed in the dark. Tonight when I reach the top of the stairs leading to the sleeping loft, I inexplicably flip the the light switch to the left of the doorway and discover a centipede at the foot of my bed. A big one, a fat four or five inches. I’m not sure if I’m frozen in fear or amazed that my body knew to turn on the light, but I slowly make my way toward it as if it wasn’t one of my greatest fears, a stinging monster whose bite is supposedly way worse than a bee’s, a beast with a hundred writhing legs who can leap across a room almost like it has wings. Snaky and sinister, I dread centipedes. Finding in one my bedroom is one of my worst nightmares.
I don’t know why I’m so calm. Maybe it’s because it seems so inevitable. Here it is, right on schedule. My ceremony is bleeding out into my life up the hill where I still have a job running Paliuli Farm, tending to the Airbnb guests’ needs. In a way, it’s affirming, which may be why I’m not terrified.

Sometimes the world—all the life around us, shows up for us with exactly what we need. Not in the sense of material things like food and shelter, but what we need to grow into the greatest versions of ourselves we can be.

Sometimes what we need is poisonous like a centipede, who, if you’ve read Piko, you’ll know I didn’t kill, even though I wanted to. On closer examination, I could see it was already dying, flipped on its back wriggling its legs, which is what insects do as they die. The leg wriggling was an attempt to right itself. It would have been easy to smash.

Instead, I contained it with a plastic container to see if it would revive and went to sleep. I slept just fine, and in the early morning, dreamed the centipede came back to life. When I got out of bed and looked under the container its legs were still wiggling and I scooped it up and carried it outside to a stone altar near my house, hiding it in the grass until a mongoose found it. In its native land, India, a mongoose feeds on cobras. It didn’t hesitate.

I watched it writhe as the mongoose crunched its hard-shelled segments, still fighting to live until the last moment. Pincers and antennae hanging out either side of the jaws. I swear I could hear the crunching, and then it was gone, all that stealth and fury coiled tight, dissolving in the dark acid of the mongoose’s belly.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Ode to a Centipede  

Thank you for dying at my feet,
for allowing me to carry you 
on your final journey  
to the mongoose's teeth.  

I'm sorry I was so afraid of you. 
The next time I will bring you 
a bowl of water to drink 
so you don't die thirsty. 

All night you stalk roaches 
while I sleep and dream of the day 
we shake off the dust 
and remember the light
is born in the dark.

A leader knows her own shadows, 
when to fight, and when
to surrender. Praise terror that teaches us
we are only borrowing these bodies.

To be a real human, not a facsimile, is not just to accept that paradox is inevitable, but to celebrate it. Who would Snow White be without the poison apple? Who would Eve be without the snake? Who would I be without the violence I experienced? Or without ulcerative colitis? Who would you be without your pain? The process of waking up is worth the poison’s sting. In this, my faith abides.

Circles Around the Sun

It’s true, the sun gives us life, but who gave life to the sun? That is where we are all going.

Astronomers, with their ever-expanding instruments that collect data we can’t really process with the logical mind, may say they know, but their facts are only part of the story. The rest of the story is unknown because we get to finish it, and for that we need imagination.

We say imagination is housed in the brain. It’s not. Imagination is houseless. It lives on the street, or in the forest where it can always see the stars. It is always changing shapes. As soon as we think we know it, it becomes something else. This happens again and again, and will keep happening until time ends. In the meantime, we get to know everything in our world by what it’s not, through metaphor, endlessly adaptable and slippery as an otter, leaping from stone to stone like I did as an 11-year old girl running upstream as wild as the water itself, fleet as a deer and the arrow that will bring it down.

We all, at some point, are prey and predator, weapon and target, killer and victim.

In naming our connection to everything, we swim in the deep ocean of the heart where forgiveness reigns.

Long time readers of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles may have noticed that this project has undergone a metamorphosis in the past couple of months. While memoir has often been an element here, it has now become the focus. The tag-line of this publication is, “Bridging the gap between imagination and logic through poetry, myth, and story.” Through the process of doing that in this space, I’ve discovered that my particular gift is to show how that happens in my life. Thank you for joining me in my intuitive search for mythic ground. I hope you find inspiration here.

The personal relationship to all things, which is condemned as subjective, limiting, I found to be the core of individuality, personality, and originality. The idea that subjectivity is an impasse, is as false as the idea that objectivity leads to a larger form of life.

—from the Diary of Anaïs Nin

I’ve developed enough self-awareness to know when I’m sharing from a true place of wanting to give, rather than wanting to receive attention, and if I do write from a need for attention, I promise to call myself out. I want my notes to ring true and for you to sing with me. That is how we all learn and grow together, and is how this project becomes a collaboration between us. Through the union of reader and writer, we create a third body, one who will live beyond ourselves and carry our wisdom into the future.

In gratitude for this shared space,

Jen,

Word Dervish