Recently, I’ve been sharing about my participation with Heka, Mū Hawaiian magic, particularly through my gift of casting spells. I have always loved spells, though I was calling them poems. Now not all poems are spells, but the ones I love most are, like “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by William Butler Yeats, “King’s Mountain” by Muriel Rukeyser or “A Spell for Creation” by Kathleen Raine. (That one’s kind of obvious since the poet actually called it a spell!)
A poem can be a lot of things, but a poem that’s a spell has the ability to actually shift reality, to carve a human form out of marble or make you hear a lark’s song. I’ve written hundreds of poems, many which I consider decent, but only two that are full-fledged spells capable of reaching through time into the physical and re-arranging it.
Trauma healing does this-goes into the past stored in the body and resolves it so the suffering person can be restored to more wholeness in the now. Poems have done that for me.
As I made the connections between spells and poems, I thought of two poems I’ve written that people have told me have had a powerful impact on their lives. Both published were originally in esteemed journals, one a prizewinner, and the other nominated for a prize. Though they may not have a name for it, people know a spell when they encounter one. They feel its power because the material world shifts around them. They get chicken skin on their arms or feel gut-punched. Sometimes even the wind rises out of nowhere when the poem is spoken into the air or far-off thunder comes so close the kitchen windows rattle.
Why were these two poems considered my best, the ones that made people come up to me after readings with awe in their voices and even tears in their eyes? I had a suspicion it was because I had unknowingly tapped into the formula for the Pāiwa, the nine parts of the oscillation of magic according to Heka. I decided to see if I was right and dug through my cabinet for my personal favorite of the two most admired poems, “Breathing Again After a Long Time Underwater.”
This poem began in a workshop at The Block Island Poetry Project facilitated by Li-Young Li, a poet in touch with such a deep vein of mystery he is awestruck and has a hard time speaking about it because he knows there’ s no way he’s going to be able to truly convey it. Being a generous soul, he got up at the podium at The Harbor Baptist Church, our workshop host, and did his best to teach a group of eager writers how to invoke the mystery and shape it into something holistic and beautiful. It was one of the loosest workshops I’ve ever been in, but the best, not because we were given permission to do whatever we wanted, but because Li-Young offered us a structure to summon and shape our words.
Accompanied by live sitar music, Li-Young asked us to begin writing and see if we could incorporate what he’d identified as four aspects of awareness that appear in truly great poems. The first was the public-info that anyone would have access to-something on TV or published in a newspaper. The second was the private- something you’d only tell a close friend or lover, while the third, the secret, was something you’d only admit to yourself.
I’m sure you can all find many poems that incorporate the public and the private, and most likely some that reach into the secret, but the fourth is much more rare-the unknown.
The unknown is hard to describe. Impossibly really. It can’t be forced, but it can be courted. We know it when it enters a poem. It’s the feeling that a great holiness is among us, that we are blessed beyond anything we can measure. To convey it in words involves deep surrender to pain and a willingness to lose control. When the unknown enters the poet becomes a vessel. Li-Young said some people call the unknown God.
In “Breathing Again After a Long Time Underwater” the unknown enters. I can’t tell you on what lines, but I’ve seen it in the faces of readers. The poem is infused with God the way incense wafts through a Gothic chapel toward light breaking into petals through a rose window. I analyzed the poem, and sure enough, it corresponds to the nine oscillations of magic, explaining why it’s moved so many people. I wrote this poem over ten years ago before I’d ever heard of the Mū. Any correspondence was not intentional. Rather, I tapped into this structure because I had made contact with the unknown. These holy forms permeate the organic and when we align and surrender to them sometimes we can channel them into our creations. In this way, a work of art becomes a reclamation of the organic human. So many of us are separate from nature. We can always come back by making space for what we don’t know. Maybe it’s on the other side of the wall listening in to you breathe as you read this in bed in the middle of the night wondering why you can’t sleep, aware that dawn is coming soon whether you want it to or not.
Below you’ll find the poem, and following a list of the nine oscillations with brief descriptions of each property. Even more astounding, is that the nine oscillations correspond to the seven properties of light according to science. Ke’oni Hanalei, who taught a workshop on Heka you can access here, believes two were left out by science, Revelation (1) and Completion (9). Before I make any conclusions about that, I’d like to give you some space to think about why that happened. Please feel free to explore that in the comments at the bottom of this post. I’d also like to note how incredibly honored I was to participate in Part III of this workshop. Ke’oni asked me to compose a spell in Heka format which you can hear me recite and also read in this post: A Spell of Returning Wonder.
Breathing Again After a Long Time Underwater
Reaching my hands into the late afternoon light glowing on the river's final curve, I didn't believe I was beautiful, like the valley's wild horses hiding in high ferns I parted with my hands like lace curtains, air closing behind me without a ripple. I came to a learning. Light streamed down. From the far side a mare rose from crushed ferns. She watched me with the liquid eyes of one who can see in the dark without stumbling. I wanted to come closer, but her foal, still in its slick caul, stood on shaky legs, fell back onto ferns slippery with birth blood. For a few moments I forgot I was a human who could kill what I loved. At dusk I bathed at the rivers' edge where the horses came out of the ironwoods to face the river's mouth. Sharks waited there for pig carcasses to wash down, jaws hacked out by hunters to mount. People disappeared all the time in that valley. I was just a girl at the edge of a clearing. I don't need to tell the story of how I was broken anymore. Now I can speak of how a wild horse watched me from the ironweeks and of how warm the river was when I knelt to lift late afternoon light of the water. How I poured it over my head. How it flowed down my hair and shoulders, gilding my skin, returned to river unbroken.
Pāiwa-The Nine Parts of the Oscillation of Magic in "Breathing Again After a Long Time Underwater”
1. Revelation-Disclosure 2. Reflection-Exposures 3. Refraction-Organization by way of the linear (speed & direction) 4. Diffraction-flexibility and tolerance (First four concern the phenomenal world.) 5. Interference-amplification and voltage 6. Polarization-condensing of extremes/assembly. (Realm of the holistic.) 7. Dispersion-clarity of intention. (Realm of spelling.) 8. Scattering-contribution and spectrum (Realm of fractals and replication.) 9. Completions-circumnavigations (Realm of the oscillation and convergence.)
I seem to be using the word astonished a lot in this post, but it’s true. I was astonished when I applied the Heka formula to the poem and saw how my words corresponded to this ancient structure of magic. How did this occur? As I said, this was not intentional, and really not that special. These primordial structures (The Golden Ratio is another) are the foundation of all art that has lasted through the ages. We have access to these structures because we are made of them, too. What excites me is wondering what I can create now that I’m aware of them, now that I can be a participant with magic instead of its unwitting benefactor who somehow wrote a poem that people love and just might read a thousand years from now of how a girl was broken and became whole again, not as a victim, but to know herself as a whirlpool in the river, of light streaming down through ferns.
Kō aloha la ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
What a discovery, Jen! To be a conscious magician is a powerful thing. I’m struck by the conditions in which the poem was brought forth - the church, the sitar, the incense. I will be thinking now about public, private, secret, unknown as I work. It reminds me of the Johari Window, which I learned about in high school psychology class and never forgot! X