Riding the Vision

Why do I feel like I have to wait till I have something really important to write here? Is it perhaps, due to the public nature of the blog format? Is it because I feel like I should only write when I have something important enough for public consumption? But isn't that the whole point of a blog? To share information and thoughts with the public? Or at least your friends who are interested or pretend they're interested to "follow" you?

These are rather neurotic thoughts and not really what I want to express in the world. However, I think it's sometimes necessary to move through these thoughts to get to the truth on the other side of them. The truth is always much quieter than these loud thoughts which take up so much space in our minds until we release them. Quieter even if they are really loud, like ocean storm waves. A friend who I sent some poems to recently gave me what I consider the ultimate compliment. She told me that I had bypassed the intellect in my new poems. I felt such a sense of accomplishment because, now, looking back at the poems in my last book, Apocalypse Diary, what I don't like about them is the voice--how chatty and brittle it sounds. I know it sounds that way because I was brittle, and that chattiness was a defense, a pose that the reader was supposed to move beyond....and some of the poems do go there (the ones no one ever comments on. The strange poems dealing with past life memories from soul retrievals!). I suppose this voice bothers me so much because it is no longer my voice. Like all humans I have an ego to help me forget the part of myself that is divine, and that ego wants to be "truly" seen, not mistaken for someone else! I guess I just feel so close to everything I create that I assume everyone else will assume that the poems are me--which they were, but since that's not the case I am neurotically worrying that anyone who actually comes across the book now will think I am still that brittle, wounded voice.

My point here as I prattle, is that sometimes you need to move through the intellect in order to get to what really wants to be said. Not what you want to say.....although sometimes the two intersect and that is when the most beauty is released into the world like the hatching of a bouquet of blue morpho butterflies. Truth and Beauty are abstract, best known in images. What are your images of truth? Of beauty? How does your voice want to be known in this world?

I may have begun writing this blog thinking I had nothing important to say, but as always happens when I surrender myself to words, my voice (the song beyond words) manages to rise up through the cracks in my intellect and entwine itself around the beams of my house, pushing its way out the windows and growing up and over to cover the roof with a soft, green canopy of vines and moss that is the perfect nest for butterflies and birds. I lay in my room in CT, still recovering from this illness and listen to the birds and wonder if butterflies in their cocoons can hear them. What's more important than that? Tell me. I really want to know. I suspect your answers will involve moments where trees whisper to you, where peaches moan in pleasure just before you take a bite, where you walk into the ocean at dusk and welcome the rising moon into your body.

It may be a crescent moon, it may be full, but it's always a reflection of the light within us all.

I want to finish by saying how excited I am about my new manuscript The Secret Language. I look forward to sharing the poems with you when it's finished, which is still a secret to me. I don't have a plan for anything these days, let alone for how to manage and control poetry! I was advised by a wise sage f a teacher last year (Fran Quinn for those of you who know him), that I was riding a wild horse of a vision and the best thing I could do was stop worrying and just hold on! The poems would take care of themselves if I could do that.

Well, the thing about riding a vision that I've discovered, is that you can't predict how long the ride is going to be. The trip may just be a few hours, but the way it plays out in your life afterwards is impossible to predict. I am referring to both psychedelic trips here and to the experiences in your life that just happen without ingesting psychotropics, which is pretty much all the time once you cross a certain threshold.

This can be a good thing, or a scary thing, depending how you roll with it. i had no idea my experiences with ayahuasca in Peru two winter ago would still be affecting me so deeply, but I can clearly see now that this past winter on Hawaii was a deepening of the vision I received in Peru. Madame Pele, goddess who destroys in order to create, tore through my body. I know that this illness is a gift from her that will completely purge me of all the negative (wounded) emotions that have stopped me from sharing my full radiance in this lifetime--if I can ride it all the way out. Right now it is a fine line between medicine and faith for me. I feel like the medications are stopping me from fully surrendering to the faith that I am the authority of my body and all I create, but I'm afraid, for numerous reasons, both physical and social, to stop taking them. I'll admit, now that I've come close, I don't actually want to die now. I'd like to keep it at a metaphorical stage--a beautiful image of a deep indigo butterfly disintegrating into a sky big enough to contain the silent song of its wings.

What is your song? Where are you flying?