Writing on the Walls

Understanding your life as a prophecy

Dear Readers,

My goal for this newsletter is to be as spontaneous as possible. I try not to plan too far ahead what I’m going write, instead letting the week’s topic well up inside me and pour forth from my hands through the keyboard onto your screens carrying the freshness of cool spring water.

What I’ve learned over the years, is that spontaneity can be courted. One way to do this is through devotion to craft. Build your muses a sturdy boat and they are going to feel safe enough to come aboard for a long sea journey. They know you can handle their wind and weight. Another way of courting that works, at least for me, is to provide them with your undivided attention-the muses respond to long stretches of unscheduled time and solitude. They also like a big desk or table where my computer can feel enthroned, surrounded by the lightning bolts of my notes-scribbled in notebooks or whatever scraps are on hand. Stacks of books surround us, my computer and me-ready to provide support and inspiration. Books of poetry and symbols, or books of esoteric knowledge like the wonderful one I’m reading now on hieroglyphics, The Dawning Moon of the Mind, by Susan Brind Morrow. (I have a lot more to say about this book, but I’m not sure what it is yet. All I can say is that Morrow’s really got me thinking about what a word is and why I love words so much, the written word specifically, poetry even more specifically. Morrow is making my intuitions about the written word concrete without reducing them. I look forward to exploring whatever discoveries her wonderful book is unlocking within me. I highly recommend you read this book and listen to the podcast “The Emerald” where I first heard of it.)

Recently I moved. I’m renting a room in someone’s house, which means I spend most of my time in my bedroom. I am also working double what I’m used to as a massage therapist. And I don’t have a desk! I’m sitting on my bedroom floor typing this out on my lap. Without solitude, unstructured time or a desk, I am going to have to find new ways to court the muses, because I know for sure I won’t offer you half-dead words. I know when my writing has lost vitality and I’m forcing it and I’m sure you can tell, too.

Right now I’m pretty close to that edge. I have a terrible headache that’s been building in intensity all day. I just wanted to lie down, but I know that pressure is also something to which my muses respond, so I lifted my computer to my lap and began to type.

This may not be the most brilliant of my posts, but it is honest.

I woke with this headache. I worked through it, saw clients. In a way, it helped me bring my whole attention to them because I had to focus so much to get through the sessions I couldn’t think of anything beyond what was happening as my hands and forearms and elbows surfed over their bodies. The feeling is immensely satisfying, for me just as much as them. Pain is something we fear and say we don’t want, but it is the gateway to ecstasy.

I have a relationships with a disease called ulcerative colitis and have been hospitalized in terrible pain, feeling very close to death, six times. Although I resisted going in the hospital every time, each time has been an ecstatic experience that has expanded my heart and consciousness far beyond what I was experiencing in a healthy body.

In surrendering control of my body to the Western medical machine, I experienced the ego death I’d sought so hard in spiritual practices. One night, drifting on a sea of steroids and morphine, I listened to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” until the sun came up and was carried outside my body by going deep inside it. I didn’t see anything. I don’t have any words to describe what I experienced because there was nothing to describe. None of my physical senses worked in this place. I wasn’t given a vision to bring back with me, at least not one I could describe. But I was different. More tender. Quieter. I needed people even less, though I appreciated the care they took of me as I recovered. When the nurses came in to check my vitals I was still alive. Little did they know I’d died and been reborn right there in Hilo Hospital.

After that night, most of me lived in another realm-a deer’s thicket, a wren’s nest. Ever since then, though I may not have known it until now, my life has been an attempt to tell you what I learned in those wild places, not in the facts of the scientist, but in the way the wren or deer themselves would tell you, a hieroglyphic way in which the letters mean more than the sounds they stand for, but are the things themselves, magical and holy.

As I’ve been writing the headache is getting worse and I’ve shifted onto my belly and am typing this lying down. The pressure has not lessened, which makes me think this is a preamble to something greater, or at least something else.

There is no climax here, no denouement, just Earth turning on its axis and all of us held here by gravity. I heard someone say recently that gravity gives us the opportunity to commit. So what I don’t have a desk or enough unstructured time, or solitude (not sure about sacrificing that one yet)-If I’m committed I will find away or change these things.

Here’s a poem about being asleep I’ve rewritten many times over many years. I wonder if it will ever be done?

I do know I’m more awake than the first time I wrote it, which may be the only proper way to judge anything, poems or people. That kind of judgment doesn’t require sentencing from an outside force, or jail time. “I once was lost, but now am found,” sings Amazing Grace. I hear her, and him, and you. I hear us. We are singing, together, through the pain. It is ecstasy.

A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme.

Asleep in The Ruins

I needed to be held by grass,

sleep with ear to earth,

be sung by underground water.

I needed to drink from the spring,

release gold spores with my breath

when I bent to the water, swim

in the pool under the waterfall

haunted by the shark god.

Nobody told me

about the blood-

how the land craved it,

or how I would lose my will

in rain that washed away

riverbanks, tearing out torch gingers

by the roots.

So close in sound,

innocence

and ignorance.

I slept in the ruins

thinking they were only stones.

What did I find there

all the way down?

Shame

waiting at the source

where the ferns cast rippling shadows

and water bubbled up

through unmourned blood-

I began my attrition

for the sin of being born.

Kō aloha la ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Jen

Hieroglyphics photo by Tom Podmore on Unsplash

works cited:

The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts, Susan Brind Morrow, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2015.

The Emerald Podcast on Spotify

A Love Supreme, John Coltrane, Impulse Records, 1965.