Showing posts with label jung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jung. Show all posts

Saturday, June 12, 2021

The Muse of Deep River

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

by the Deep River Poets

Esse in anima (Live in the soul)
—C.G. Jung

Cover Art by Kent Butzine


The Muse of Deep River
Our way is the way of the poet, who knows that poems have lives of their own. Poems need us, their poets, to listen to them, see them, feel them, wrestle with them until their hidden natures emerge. In return they reflect us, revise us, refine us, play us like musical instruments; they shape shift our stories and light up dim corners of our souls. The craft of making a poem becomes a craft—a vessel—for knowing ourselves and our world.
from the Introduction
Those of us who are called to write poems often wrestle, especially in terrible times, with the question: What can poetry do? Poetry is a lightweight feather dipped in ink; it cannot put out a wildfire, stop a pandemic, stop police brutality or voter suppression, prevent an authoritarian coup or heal a furious fragmentation of the social contract. But it can, sometimes, shift consciousness, open doors and windows to a wider vision, a deeper wisdom expressed in compelling images which leap out of imagination or come as dream figures to initiate us into the realm of The Mysteries. The question of what poetry can do became a catalyst for change in the Deep River Poetry Circle—a workshop that meets monthly at the Jung Institute of San Francisco—when the 2016 election shocked us out of our comfortable faith in American democracy.

"Red Fishes" by Marianna Ochyra


Deep River has been meeting for over fifteen years. It emerged out of a mountain spring in my soul, when my Muse, better known as The Sister from Below, informed me that writing poetry was my spiritual practice. We write under the influence of great poets and have explored poetries from many cultures all over the world and all over America. But when the Spirit of Our Times took such a frightening turn in 2016 we realized we needed each other and poetry for support and it was essential that we ‘get political.’ We could no longer indulge the luxury of exploring for the sake of broadening cultural horizons. Poetry doesn’t boast a big bully pulpit in America. It speaks from the margins, from the depths of the river, from night terrors, about the state of our world. Making a poem is wrestling with the angel: it is shaping a vessel to hold what we fear. We understood that we need our poetry to address the attacks on our democracy by callous, greedy politicians, out for their own aggrandizement and immune to the suffering of ordinary people in a terrible pandemic. We needed language to tell the dreadful truth revealed by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many other Black and brown people at the hands of police, and by the growing consciousness of systemic and structural racism. We needed images to express the suffering caused by extreme weather events and wildfires in our own landscapes, the destruction of habitat and the decimation of species all over our earth.

So we studied the poetry of witness and of engagement, wrote under the influence of poets whose work flows between the political and the spiritual—James Baldwin, Carolyn Forché, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Judy Grahn, W.S. Merwin, Ada Limón. Our circle became a ritual space, in which great poets guided us into our own poetic expression. They showed us the ways of their soul and gave us permission to try new modes of writing. They helped create that space in which the conscious and the unconscious meet—Winnicott calls it “potential space;” Jung calls it “the transcendent function.” Deep River became a sacred river we wash ourselves in, as the Hindus do in Ganga Ma—Mother Ganges—to cleanse our souls and heal our broken hearts.

“Women Bathing” by Lionel Walden


When Covid hit we retreated to our individual homes, like cloistered contemplatives in the Dark Ages. Deep River met on Zoom. Surprisingly, the ritual of our meetings seemed to deepen, despite its virtual nature. We found ourselves writing “pandemic poems.” Someone suggested we make a collection of them. Someone else said, let’s make it broader, more inclusive of our writings. We wanted to speak to our Jungian community about what we were learning—that in bad times, the inner work of poetry is a way to tend the soul, to bring together the realms of spirit and the world. It is healing for the poet, healing for the reader; a practice which reminds us that there is a greater reality in which soul and polis, soul and nature, soul and word, mingle.

And so it was that we began gathering this harvest of our recent years together, Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow. We give it as a gift to the Jung Institute of San Francisco in celebration of its passage from a beloved old home to a transformative new home, and as an expression of deep gratitude to Extended Education, which has given Deep River support, visibility and a place to gather for so many years. We offer it as a manifestation of the Jungian belief in the creative arts as a way of healing psyche and culture. We offer it as a gift to you, dear reader. May it help you remember ‘what happened.’ May it help you find your way through The Valley of the Shadow and The Realm of the Dead, to The Tree of Life, The Living Symbol and The Way of the Soul.

A dream showed me a deeper meaning for this gift of Soul Making: In the dark, by the sea, there is a “Jungian Grave—” a white, glowing monument commemorating our dead. It is the only bright spot in this moonless, starless scene, providing a bit of light by which we see a gathering of living Jungians, sitting on logs on the beach. There is feeling of excitement and of awe. We are doing a ritual to honor our ancestors.

“Mid-Summer Night’s Dream” by William Blake


Soul Making follows the mythopoetic path of the soul’s progress from the realms of shadow and death to rebirth into embodied life through the magic of the symbolic process and the awakening of the Self. When I was editing this book I followed an intuitive structure, dividing the anthology into five sections separated by quotes from Jung’s Red Book. These epigraphs set the themes of the sections. But until the dream, I was in the dark about the collective ritual significance of the book’s arrangement as our community moves from our beautiful old home in the Presidio to a very different beautiful new home in the Mission. We are in the dark about how it will be. For many of us this move signifies an interest in engaging with our new neighborhood, as part of a growing feeling that our psychology needs to be more attuned to the outer world, though we are in the dark about how this might manifest. However, we carry a structure within us that I associate with the work of Joe Henderson—one of our founding analysts—an understanding of the initiatory path in which “to cross a threshold is to unite oneself with a new world” (The Wisdom of the Serpent p. 48)

What follows is a sketch of Soul Making, illuminated by quotes from some of the poems. Forgive me, dear reader and dear contributing poets, if I offer slight fragments from the work. Truth be told, we’re hoping you’ll buy the book, enjoy the poems, and the collection, whole.

* * * * *

Godville Game


The Valley of the Shadow

Section I
And so we had to taste hell… 
– C.G. Jung
Anita Cadena Sánchez opens our anthology with a short essay, “Why Poetry?” (p. 5) in which she writes that the 2016 election “revealed this country’s steady descent into the valley of its historically unrecognized shadow” and hopes her poems will “weave a medicine basket” (p. 5). Now there’s something poetry can do. Her first poem, “Will This Ever End,” (pp. 6–7) does it elegantly, naming our trauma, which is the beginning of healing. Here are the opening and ending lines. 


Without notice the White House grows whiter still
invisible swastikas slide off the frozen walls…

The president conflates
Black Lives Matter with hate

So I draw in breath to settle and center
Yes, I can breathe but I witness who can’t

Another black man dies
again                   and again                   and again


Kent Butzine’s poem, “In the Soup” (p. 8), places us in the messy, befuddled, ‘fine kettle of fish’ we know all too well from our recent past:

I am walking through soup
a thick heavy soup that slows
me down    makes it hard to see…

Don’t know if the soup is hot
or my soul is burning…

In a few short lines the poem takes us to the possibility of new life:

Don’t know if I’m ready to die
Or to live at last in aliveness

He brings together the opposites of death and life as they so often appear at the crossroads of our journeys.

* * * * *

Dante and Virgil in Hell by Crescenzio Onofri


The Realm of the Dead

Section II
Take pains to waken the dead… 
–C.G. Jung
In my short essay, opening this section, I argue that “we owe the dead our poems, and our awe.” This follows Jung’s idea that the dead need our attention so we can help them heal. Raluca Ioanid takes on this task for the living as well as the dead in her “Bucharest 1958 Sestina (p 46).” She gives us a powerful image of intergenerational trauma:


History churns inside the family of ghosts
we cannot forget,
unmoored by our
ancestral loss
unravelling backwards from a nightmare–dream
we search eternally for Anita and Paul, our disappeared parents…


In “Funeral Cot” Daniela Kantorová invites us into a surreal and frightening scene:


I’m rocking a funeral cot
The fire is burning…
I’m singing a lullaby
to the rhythm of bones
cracking in the fire
There is a baby in the funeral cot


What a grim image for our times, for the next generation, for the fate of humans, species and the earth. And yet, Kantorová, through the magic of her poem, finds a way out. The poem’s speaker invites the reader, or perhaps it is the Divine, to “Breath me/Breathe my dust” which would seem to breathe life and hope back into her and the poem.

* * * * *

"Tree of Zhiva" by Marianna Ochyra


The Tree of Life

Section III
I became a greening tree… 
–C.G. Jung
In her opening essay to this section Clare Marcus compares two Saturdays, one at an academic, highly rational workshop, the other, Deep River, where “the psyche was allowed its freedom to soar, explore, pour out its fantasies into the warm receptive ears of fellow poets (p. 59).”

In the drought ridden Sierra foothills Sheila deShields’ poem paints the miracle of an unexpected storm and how it transforms the lives of the “Nine crows in my backyard (pp. 66-67)” who “sway high on the row of towering trees” until the skies clear and they descend to enjoy:


The bounty
worms rise
above the soaked sable soil
while the crows
eat
and eat.


Earth is alive again, wet, full of worms, and the creatures feast on the pleasure of plenty.

* * * * *

“World Creation Music” by Marianna Ochyra


The Living Symbol

Section IV
The Symbol is the word…that rises out of the depths of the self… 
– C.G. Jung
In her essay, “A Way to Love” (p. 77), which opens this section, Connie Hills remarks that it is often an encounter which moves her deeply that sparks a poem’s beginning. She writes: “Poetry is a way back to love.” In her poem, “God of Garbage, (pp. 78-9)” a “tall muscular Jamaican” garbage man fills the poem with life and joy. His magic:


Remover of filth, ferment
Everything that is dying…

His smile, like heliotrope
in warm bloom…
I could have loved him.


Through this beautifully drawn character, we experience again, how death is transfigured by the living symbol of the man’s smile.

In my poem, “Ghazal of the Boy in My Dream,” the encounter is with a dream figure, a black boy, symbolic of the magic of poetry and dream:


After gumbo and jazz after rain on my head you befell me in a dream
Strange boy your spiraling hands your eyes ablaze cast a spell in my dream…

How long have you lived in my heart child    alphabet balm    for sorrow and ache?
You open the door to The Mysteries compel me to enter by way of the dream


The boy shows up in the context of New Orleans, a decade after Katrina. He turns out to be a psychopomp, who initiates the speaker into the mysteries—the magic of language. There are many dream poems in this collection, appropriate to our Jungian context. In “Healing the Wound” (pp. 89-90), Clare Marcus remembers a dream in which a black bird with white beak comes to heal the wound “brought by the surgeon’s knife”:


It is a coot
exploring the unconscious
to retrieve sustenance for life
diving the waters
of the Nile
algae and mollusks morphing
to messages of resurrection


What a succinct description of how dreams feed and nurture the damaged psyche and body with the riches of the collective unconscious.

* * * * *

"Pilgrimage to Shiva" by Janaka Stagnaro


The Way of the Soul

Section 5
I am weary my soul, my wandering has lasted too long… 
 –C.G. Jung
In his essay introducing this section, “How Poems Come and What They Bring” (pp. 97-99), Kent Butzine writes of the Muse, that she is “both a part of oneself and a part of the natural world, a part that is ‘wild’ and cannot be controlled.” He gives us a wonderful quote from Galway Kinnell: “There is no work on the poem that is not work on the poet.”

Virginia Chen’s poem, “Old Song” (p. 102), is a lyrical evocation of the experience of Self. The poem’s first line and refrain—borrowed from a poem by W.S. Merwin—shows the power of poetic influence on our work.


When I was me I remembered
The songs of the stars
Before I was born…

When I was me I remembered
I once was me


It is the work of poetry, as well as the work of Jungian analysis, to find our way back to the one we’ve forgotten we are. And as my dream shows—in the dark by the sea in a gathering of Jungians doing a ritual for our ancestors—we are not just individuals, we are a group with a lineage, finding our way back to our ancestral roots. And though the work of writing poetry is mostly solitary, a writing circle in which we read poets who help shape our work and become our common poetic lineage, a circle in which we share our poems and get feedback on them, can become a vessel for collective creativity even, or maybe especially, in dark times. Can an anthology created by such a group, become a crucible which can carry the spirit and soul of Deep River’s years in the Gough Street Institute library, to our new home in the Mission?

"Ancestors" by Marietjie Henning



Tuesday, January 9, 2018

The Muse of Endurance

The Poetry of Resistance V

Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the
whirlwind
—Gwendolyn Brooks
“The Second Sermon on the Warpland”

Bear's Ears

Living in the Warpland
all about are the pushmen and jeapardy, theft—
all about are the stormers and scramblers but
what must our Season be, which starts from Fear?

          —Gwendolyn Brooks
          “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”

Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz
We live in a strange dissociated time, in a warped land. We’ve spent a year in fear—demonstrating, raging at the TV, looking for saviors. I see none on the horizon. We’ve had some victories, in Virginia and in Alabama. The Russia Investigation grinds on. But we’ve had to watch so much we value slashed, decimated—Bear’s Ears, The Arctic National Refuge, Obamacare, DACA, Civil Rights, abortion rights, the Paris Climate agreement. We’ve seen extreme weather events. Texas has never seen as much rain as Harvey dumped on it. California has never seen a wildfire as huge and unstoppable as the Thomas fire in Ventura. The coast of Louisiana is washing away. Puerto Rico suffered two hurricanes in a row—Irma and Maria—which knocked out the power grid for months. Hospitals couldn’t function, water and food was scarce. Pleas for help from Puerto Rican officials like Carmen Yulín Cruz—the feisty mayor of San Juan—were met with disdain and insults by our berserker president, throwing paper towels and blaming the people of the island for their troubles. Cruz responded: “You can’t handle the truth.”

The truth is—the intensity of these catastrophes is symptomatic of climate change; we can expect more. The truth is—he whom we prefer not to name is a master of hocus-pocus and deceit. He manipulates the news with incessant provocative tweeting, causing political storms and wildfires as he shamelessly exults in public about how rich the Wall Street tax cut will make his cronies, and of course, himself. We are at risk for burning ourselves out with outrage. The greed that stalks the land is mind boggling. What has become of caring for the poor, the homeless, the sick, the stranger? What has become of Dr. King’s arc toward justice? What about our souls?

In this dark time of the year I see a sea change in myself and in those I know. We are withdrawing into ourselves, connecting with our deep roots, our souls—not in defeat—but in order to endure. We are remembering how essential it is to tend our intimate lives, our families, our friends and our dreams. Dan and I take walks, watch “Stranger Things,” see children and grandchildren, make soup with root vegetables. Dan spends time texting “Rapid Resist” messages to organize the resistance. I spend time reading, writing and teaching “poems of resistance.” But I can feel how the center of our lives has dropped down to the vital and the eternal, far below the “noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks is good medicine right about now. Her “Sermons on the Warpland” feed my soul and remind me of the importance of tending one’s “blooming.” She wrote these poems 50 years ago, in times which brought civil rights to national attention and in which we suffered the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. She reminds us that we’ve been through terrible times before. She asks a question that is painfully relevant today: “what must our Season be, which starts from Fear?” Not much.

Night Blooming
The time
cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face
all unashamed.
          —Gwendolyn Brooks
          “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”

Brooks’ “Sermons on the Warpland” are blunt and truth telling. She is preaching to her own people, to “Big Bessie” whose “feet hurt like nobody’s business,” but who “stands/in the wild weed…a citizen.” In the first “Sermon” Brooks urges her brothers and sisters to “build your church…With love like lion–eyes./ With love like morningrise.” It is a love poem to a people who have not been treated with much love in a land still warped by slavery and Jim Crow. These “Sermons” are poems of direct address, of exhortation; they speak to the power of endurance and seem to me to be especially pertinent in our times.



Endurance takes many forms. My friend and poetry buddy Rich Messer sent me a poem recently that takes a more subtle, slant approach to resistance and to endurance. The word “endure” is related to Old English and Old German word roots for “true, “trust,” “tree” and “Druid.” This linguistic kinship web connects us to our pagan, oak seer roots, to the spirit of the earth, to our animal familiars, and to our ghosts. Messer’s poem is an example of what Jane Hirshfield, borrowing from Emily Dickinson, means with the phrase: “Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant” in the American PoetryReview, Sept/Oct. 2017. Hirshfield writes:
Good poems travel in ways that are strongly or subtly, meandering, askew, counter, extravagant, peculiar, free, and freeing. Their pelts are freckled. They loosen the map lines of the literal, underslip narrowness, and let us see more than would be possible by looking at things directly. They are raids on reality that allow raids on the heart. They are lies whose intention is truth exposed more fully.
That glorious freckled pelt is camouflage. “So it is with poems,” says Hirshfield, arguing that “any good poem has lurking somewhere about it the Houdini–esque energies of the Trickster…”



Here is Messer’s poem:

Night Blooming

The anniversaries fade, waves coast

up the beach and memories retreat

unrecognized. It happened. We went on,

Knowing, uneasy, we opened

the back door, to whistle home the dogs.


There are people who do not begin

and end each day, glued to the screen.

There are people who sit quietly

in their living rooms, doing nothing

before bed. These people did not

follow our leader down to the dark waters.

They speak to each other and know

wisdom and joy. I swear this to you.


We endure and go on like boulders

swallowed by a glacier, nudged farther

south every year, etched with dark furrows.


When I sit late at night

with all my animal familiars and ghosts,

the news whispered around the circle

avoids his name. The things


we love we lose.

Who will take care of the garden?


"Night Blooming" is achingly sad, lyrical, tender, deep. The first stanza casts a calm, meditative spell on us, transports us gently into a realm of fading anniversaries, waves on the beach and memories. Things happened. “We went on.” We are in the world of the aging, watching the cycles of life. What makes us “uneasy” is not named, but it casts a shadow. What feels most vital is “to whistle home the dogs,” our loyal animal familiars.

Messer moves on to a subject more complex than growing old. We are in a political poem about endurance in dreadful times which avoids all political language and reference. The poem’s speaker describes a people who have not lost their way in the “Season…of Fear," a people “who do not begin/and end each day, glued to the screen…/These people did not/follow our leader down to the dark waters." They are not complicit. There is a hint of biblical language in "the dark waters,” a sense of mystery. We are told of a people who continue to live soulful lives with "wisdom and joy." By the end of the second stanza the calm tone of the poem has risen to a passionate oath—"I swear this to you." We, the readers, receive the speaker’s intensity with relief. We are no longer in a warped land. We haven’t blindly “followed the leader” into danger and deception. We want to join this wise and joyful tribe, or rather—through the poem’s magic—we have become part of the tribe.


Here is where Messer’s trickster comes in, and, to borrow from Hirshfield’s language, “punctuate[s] pomposity and shake[s] things up.” 

Our peaceful moment among trustworthy folk is, lest we take ourselves too seriously, unhinged. The wily speaker casts another spell, turning us into "boulders/swallowed by a glacier, nudged farther/south every year." We haven’t been able to escape the fate of our times after all. We are pushed around by climate change like everything and everyone else. We do have to face our terrors, even if—like boulders— we endure. As Hirshfield says: “Trickster stories…make spells to break the spells that…grip us.”

In the fourth stanza we return to the eternal realm, the realm of what Jung calls the “Spirit of the Depths.” The poem’s speaker has shifted from the first person plural to the first person singular. Does he want to be alone with his late night blooming? Is he casting us out? We are uneasy again, as we were in the first stanza. The real news, it seems, comes from “animal familiars and ghosts,” who avoid “his name.” Of course, in true trickster sleight of hand fashion, to announce that his name is being avoided is to bring the unnamable one into the poem and the circle, while, at the same time, diminishing him, casting him out of the great cycles of life and death, and the terrible truth that “the things//we love we lose.”

Remember, he can’t face the truth. The trickster voice of the poem has put a spell on us, and out tricked our ephemeral trickster president. The poem resists the times, resists the screens, hangs out with dogs and with ghosts, and faces the ultimate loss, our lives, with that marvelous last line—"Who will take care of the garden?"

She Who Dances with Veils
It was the summer of ’43. What did my young parents know
about the Europe they’d fled

the trains the chimneys…
          —Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
          “Birth Day”

A poem of my own has just been published in the online journal Front Porch. It too is a “slant” poem, a trickster poem of resistance, which refers only tangentially to the “evil spirits” that spook our times. Like Messer’s poem it undermines the fearful “Spirit of the Times” by casting a larger view of life as seen from an ancient cave: “Your little life and mine in the flow/of all the mothers of mothers the grandmothers of magic/the daughters of ritual skill.” The poem invokes Maia, the goddess of illusion, creation and imagination—herself a trickster. I hope you’ll check it out.



Sunday, July 23, 2017

The Muse of the North

The region to the north…is the seat of the highest gods and also the adversary…
—C.G. Jung

From the North comes the power to keep silent…to keep secrets, to know what not to say. The Goddess as Dark Maiden, the new moon that is not yet visible, and the God as Sacred Bull are the totems of the North…
—Star Hawk in The Spiral Dance
I can remember, decades ago, a parade of my elders heading North to Alaska. They took cruises, or traveled on Elder Hostel journeys, returning with a new light in their eyes; they’d loved it. I never understood exactly what it was they loved. I was in my busy mid life. I didn’t really listen, didn’t really take in, what their joy was all about. Now I know. Dan and I have recently returned from such a trip to Alaska, and there’s a new light in my eyes.

We left in the middle of June. I was feeling disoriented in life and in our country, devoured by the daily news cycle, unable to see what kind of drama we are in. Is it a farce, a tragedy, a soap opera, a crime drama, a reality show, a vast right wing conspiracy? Are we watching “Saturday Night Live,” “The Sopranos,” “House of Cards,” “The Americans,” “The Apprentice?” My Muse complained bitterly. She felt hijacked by the manic spirit of our times, unable to dive down into the depths where She usually lives. It was time to take my Muse on vacation. Dan’s Muse came along too. She’s the one who takes photos.

At the airport the TV screens were all about the Warrior’s victory, which cast a glow on people who, even in endless lines at Starbucks, were good humored and kind. This seemed a good sign as I tried to shake off the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings, the Attorney General claiming not to remember anything at all about his associations with the Russians.

I thought of my paternal grandparents, who fled Russia in the early years of the twentieth century to escape Russian pogroms and the dread twenty-five year draft for Jewish men. The Russians were stirring up a ruckus in my heart. I can hear my father’s voice: “Russians are passionate, they are wild, they are profound and mystical, they are wily and can’t be trusted.” I am descended from Russian Jews. I spent much of my adolescence engrossed in Russian novels. My ideas about life were shaped by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment. Is Russia my “old country”? Are the Russians ancestors, enemies, or both? In the grips of a culture complex inflamed by our dangerous times, I was haunted by the catastrophes my family had escaped. Our trip to Alaska snapped me out of it! So did a dream, in which I found a carved wooden Buddha—about the size of a chess piece—amidst the vegetable parings I was throwing away. The little Buddha’s right hand was holding his head in a look of amused dismay, as though to say, “Oh my, oh my.” I understood that this was the attitude I needed to cultivate.


What the Traveller Brings
I’d grown up fearing the coming hordes of Everything-Wanters.
Ordinary Wolves
 by Seth Kantner
Another helper was a novel, Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner, set in the Alaskan backcountry, among the Iñupiaq Eskimos. The narrator is a boy, Cutuk, who becomes a man in the course of the tale. His father, Abe, is a white guy from Chicago who has gone native. His mother, a native, has abandoned the family. They live a subsistence existence in the wild. Their home is an igloo built by Abe. Cutuk, whose tribal name clashes with his blond hair and blue eyes, gets picked on and scapegoated in the village where they go for supplies. The novel introduced me to a world I’ve never experienced, in which so little goes so far.
Abe had taught me to skin and dry foxes…And though we often used only the thick warm fur for mittens, he made me skin to save the toenails, tail, eyelashes—out of respect for the animal we’d taken.
Cutuk’s world is stark and wild and tender: “Our dogs raised their nuzzles to inhale the sweet scents of love, food and fights.” The story begins in the ‘70s, when the natives were entirely dependent on their sled dogs for transport in the cold North. In the isolation of such a life, the traveller is a welcome break from the every day, bringing news of other realms, and companionship. Enuk, an elder of the tribe, is a frequent guest in Cutuk’s childhood; he is the great hunter the boy longs to become.
My mother…was a fairy tale that kept fogging over, while Enuk, even vanished down river, stood in my life as sharp as a raven in the blue sky.
Cutuk showed me my shadow as a white person from the native point of view:
It was annoying and white to talk too much or ask questions, especially when a traveller arrived. Shaking hands, also, was a sign of being an outsider.
I was living a double life. One life happened in Cutuk’s world, in which everything he wore and ate was carefully taken from what the family hunted. In the other life—my “Everything–Wanter” life—I inhabited the glamour of our cruise ship—a magical vessel with beautiful staterooms and common areas. We sat in the aft of the ship, watching our wake, as the little yellow Pilot, our tugboat, pulled away, leaving us to the gray blue waves.

Seven Seas Mariner
Saxman Village Woods
Our first stop was in Ketchikan, Alaska, where we were transported by bus to the Saxman Village, home of a group of Tlingit people. They welcomed us travellers, made us feel valued, and showed us a video about their tribe. I remember the strength of the people’s faces, especially the women. The narrator thanked us for coming, said by doing so we helped them claim their heritage. Tears sprang to my eyes. Maybe there was a good side to being an Everything–Wanter. Our hosts were gracious, but they also teased us. They taught us a Tlingit phrase, an answer to their question, “How are you?” which we, being mostly old folk, promptly forgot. We were the slow children and they the authorities in their own ways and language. In Alaska, there are no Indian reservations. I could feel the difference. We were guests in their house.

We were guests, also, on the lovely forest path we walked to see the totem pole collection. We were guests in the Beaver Clan House, made of red cedar, smelling like the forest—a sacred space painted with animal faces and a dark doorway like a vulva. On either side a beaver totem looked as though it was giving birth to a human.




An elder in a red and black costume, with beautifully stitched leg warmers and an impressive staff, introduced the dance, performed mostly by children. They were all decked out in their red and black tribal costumes, with their different clan totems on their backs: Eagle, Raven, Beaver, Halibut, Whale, Wolf, Frog. I had the sense they knew they all belonged to one another, but had plenty of room to be different from each other. I paid special attention to one boy, perhaps 12, who, like Cutuk in the novel, had blond hair and blue eyes. He sang and danced as passionately as did the others, and looked like he belonged to the tribe, or so I hoped. Dan and I were charmed by a toddler, who wandered around in her tribal finery, pacifier in her mouth. We learned that the Tlingit are a matriarchal culture, not surprising, given the quiet authority in the women’s faces and the values of Potlatch, expressed in a dance in which whites were invited to dance with the tribe, and honored by being wrapped in tribal robes.

Mother of the Forest
It felt strong and good to be near mountains without names.
—Seth Kantner Ordinary Wolves
Our ship slipped through gray waters, past dark green forested shores, hills fingered by mists, mountains streaked with snow, sudden waterfalls. There was something at once breathtaking and mesmerizing about the ship’s slow passage along steeply wooded cliffs and rocky shores, as the waters glided away from us. My Muse had made a full recovery, and was busily writing down images phrases for this blog about voyaging north. I had cut myself off from the news. There was space in me, and silence.


We made an excursion to the Mendenhall Glacier. This was important to us. Though we had liberated ourselves from the Washington drama, we were still reeling from our President’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords. I wanted to pay my respects to the glacier, while it still lived. I was amazed at the power of its presence, glowing blue and white. It has been retreating for hundreds of years, going back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Behind its great mass arose an unnamed mountain range, which looked like a fairy tale city.

The story of the glacier was more nuanced and complex than I had understood. It was told to us by a Forest Ranger, a young woman who improvised a charming story about the sick glacier and the black bear who loved it. She spoke in the voice of the dying glacier, getting weaker and slower. She spoke in the voice of the black bear who was grateful for the life the glacier gave her. She spoke of the love between them, the interpenetration of species at all levels of being. For the glacier creates new life as its retreating weight grinds rock into silt, which flows into waterways and provides nutrients for fish and other creatures. In its dying the glacier created the Tongass National Forest, a vast temperate rainforest, luxuriant with hemlock, yellow cedar, alder, pine, and Sitka spruce—known by the natives as “The Mother of the Forest.”


The forest as a whole is a fertile mother, a generous mother, producing flora and fauna in the cyclical dance of death and rebirth. I said to the Forest Ranger, “that’s a more nuanced story than the one we hear in the lower forty-eight.” She nodded. “The glacier is not just about death. It is a creator of life. But,” she added, “what will happen when the glacier is gone?”

The Mother of the Forest, as Sitka spruce, provides food and shelter for the bald eagle family we visited in a small boat. These impressive birds mate for life. They stand three feet tall and have a wingspread of six to seven feet. The pair we visited were protecting their enormous nest, in which, we were told, there were three chicks. To see our national symbol in the wild, as such a stirring, devoted creature, shifted something in me.


The Mother of the Forest, provides nourishment for the humpback whale. We were part of a gathering of strangers on a catamaran, bonded in awe and reverence as we watched the great whale blow, breach and dive, displaying her black flukes with distinctive white markings. Every whale, we were told, has different markings. Her name, the naturalist told us, is Flame. She comes every summer to the feeding grounds of her youth, and spends the winter near Maui. Some years she has a calf with her. Not this year. These whales had been on their way to extinction. But since industrial whaling was forbidden in the 1970s, the population has come back dramatically. “Thanks to you,” the naturalist said, “who make seeing whales a profitable business for Alaska.” Again, as when we were thanked by the Tlingit people, tears sprang to my eyes. Compared to Cutuk and his people I was certainly an Everything–Wanter. But perhaps maybe there is something to be said for us Everything–Wanters, at least those of us who want to see whales, grizzlies, wolves, to engrave them in our psyches, to shoot them with our cameras, instead of wanting to shoot them dead.


As our ship took us through the Inside Passage we saw more dazzling scenery created by receding glaciers. We sat in the aft of the boat, sipping an aperitif, and watched the glory of all this creation pass by us—a surround of jagged mountains rose above the rainforest. It was almost summer solstice and the sun stayed up late with us. In the long, long evening the waters were smooth and blue gray. The first growth forests gave way to saw tooth mountains behind silent mountains beyond silent castles of rock and ice—a parade of odd angles, askew ridges, jagged mystery. I knew I was in the presence of gods that gave no thought to human concerns. I watched my fellow passengers put down their iPhones and gaze at the mystery. The sun dreamed on through an endless twilight, and finally called it a day long past 10pm.


In Sitka we saw the Russian influence in architecture and history. The Russians came two hundred years ago to hunt sea otters, whose beautiful pelts were used to make expensive fur coats. The otters were hunted almost to extinction. Thanks to a ban on hunting them for all but native Alaskans, the charming creatures have made a remarkable comeback. We were delighted to see one, floating on his back in the middle of Sitka Sound, admiring his webbed toes. We learned his fur is so dense that he can float, effortlessly. He has an opposable thumb and uses tools to open clams. Somebody said, “Hand him a martini!”


The Great One
That wolf—how many miles and years had he walked under this smoky green light? Walked cold, hungry, in storms, wet under summer rain, walking on this land I’d always called my home…How was it that I’d never considered carefully that an animal could know infinitely more about something than I could?
—Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner
On the Solstice, we arrived at Seward. Here we had to say goodbye to our lovely ship, and clamber unto a tour bus, which would take us to Denali National Park. The mountain, Denali, was named by the Athabaskan Indians, “the high one,” “the great one.” We were blessed. Denali revealed herself again and again as we were driven from Seward to Anchorage. This doesn’t usually happen. Only 20 % of visitors get to see the mountain, which is over 20,000 feet high, the tallest mountain in North America. We saw her again the next day, on our bus tour of Denali. Our eloquent bus driver/tour guide said: “You never know when she’ll show up, or not.” He said the same thing of the animals. We were blessed again by the sight of a mother grizzly, playing with her two cubs. She lay on the ground and pawed at them. They climbed all over her.

A Park Ranger had climbed unto our bus to greet us when we first entered Denali National Park. She got political. She told us the park was celebrating its centennial this year. She said it was a treasure of a park, an intact ecosystem—no invasive plants or creatures—one of very few left in the world. Protect it, she said. And please tell your congress people to support it. The bus full of strangers applauded. We were all on a pilgrimage to see wildlife. We were in the company of people who yelled “Moose on the Right!” “Eagle in the pine tree to the left!” “Caribou in the ice fields!” Poor caribou. They are created for weather that is 50 degrees below zero. It was 60 degrees above zero and they sought out what ice was left to lie on; they are suffering climate change.

Our time to return home began to loom. My dreams expressed alarm. In one dream children were being hit over the head with two by fours, which was how I imagined I’d feel returning to my life in the “lower forty-eight.” Obama showed up in another dream, his back to me, piloting a ship in dark waters. Back in the Eskimo world of Cutuk, things were terrible. He was a young man now, who had become a fine hunter. But, influenced by his sister, whose life expanded when she went to the city, he made the journey to Anchorage, and suffered profound culture shock:
Hotels with a hundred windows loomed. The roar was constant. Nothing at home was this frantic…Everything had words. As if someone had cut up a magazine, glued it to the sky. No reading the river, snow, ice, tracks—the city took it literally; reading signs meant reading signs.
He felt the suffering of trees: “Trees stood alone, dreary and dripping and surrounded, roots weighted under heavy stone.” He was mad at the city “for taking the animals’ beautiful land and turning it into ridiculous things: parking lots and strip malls, pensions, section lines and new hair styles.” He realized something that I was beginning to understand: “more than in wind or cold or [spring] Break up, the power and absoluteness of wild earth resided in its huge, uncompromising silence. Anchorage conquered silence, left not a trace.” Cutuk returned home to the backcountry, but home had changed. Sports hunters used snow mobiles to murder wolves. The village where he got supplies was not what it had been. Electricity and machines changed everything.
Suddenly, the past was over. It would never come back to protect us. We’d been pretending as well as any actors. The chasm between legends around the fire and surround–sound TV, snowshoed dog trails and Yamaha V–Max snowmobiles was too overwhelming, and no hunting, no tears, no federal dollars could take us back across. I felt an avalanche of grief…
The land of Cutuk’s grief, a land of ruined lives and many suicides, is “as haunting and beautiful as it had been ten thousand years before the introduction of sports hunters.” For Dan and me, who are city dwellers, livers of fast, noisy lives, it was a life altering experience. Now I can see that the light in the eyes of my elders, when they returned from their pilgrimages North, was the gleam of the silence of mountains, the mystery of wild landscape and wild creatures, a spiritual experience they would have called “Mother Nature,” a blessing whatever you call Her, be it Silence, The Great One, the Inside Passage, sea otter, Mother of the Forest, bald eagle, grizzly, or a whale named Flame.

The Great One

Thursday, June 8, 2017

The Poetry of Resistance III


The Muse at the Oasis

Chaos has awoken from a long nap
is putting on dancing shoes and heading for the streets…
—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “In the Wild Wake”


High Anxiety

The Kali Yuga say the Hindus is a dark age lacks holy law
a time of hubris greed war

—Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, “In the Wild Wake”

We could use an oasis right about now, as the nightmare news cycle beats us about the head, invades our left temporal lobe, where speech dwells. It is hard to find words for the chaos we’re in. We wander a wasteland, our world torn apart at the seams, as our new president proceeds to rip up the careful advances of the Obama administration: Health Care, the Paris Climate Accord, Prison Justice Reform, wholesome food for school lunches, I could go on and on.

Taken by the Boogey Man

The boogey men are out—white supremacists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-Semites. Our rampaging president does a sword dance with Arab potentates while his supporters and his opponents duke it out on–line and in the streets. The phantoms of slavery emerge in Jim Crow–like laws, in police shootings of unarmed black men and in the Prison Industrial Complex. Immigrants who have been living in the U.S. peaceably for years, working hard and paying taxes, are deported for no good reason, their families splintered. Gunmen shoot strangers to make who knows what statement in a land where guns are king. The Russians it seems have hijacked our election. The President’s people may have colluded. There are investigations and more investigations; we are holding our breath for justice, for sanity, though we know all this will take time to untangle. We have a President who doesn’t believe in facts, in science or in climate change, who seems to care only about money, power and towers bearing his name, who keeps us in an anxiety state with relentless tweet attacks on all we hold dear: the earth our Mother, our democracy, our immigrant ancestors, our civil rights and liberties, our moral compass, our soul as a culture. He represents our cultural shadow, the worst, most shallow, materialistic, greedy side of America. How do we gain the consciousness we need to confront this?

March for Science (April 22, 2017, New York City)

Soul Medicine

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
—Emily Dickinson

Let me offer you some medicine in the form of a poem: Lucille Lang Day’s magical “Oasis.” Day comes at the truth slantwise. She gives us a poem that resists our collective chaos by creating a green and fertile place in our consciousness, a space where soul visits and the Muse begins to sing. Listen:

Oasis

At an oasis deep
in my left temporal lobe,
I encounter my soul
just before it leaves the party
at 33,000 feet, where
the dead do as they please,
and time is a circular target.

Where does meaning
lurk in a universe
where mountains are mangy
from fires and logging,
the president brags about
forcing himself on women,
and marksmen take aim?

In the heart of a hummingbird
beating more than one
thousand times each minute
during a rapid dive
in a high–speed chase,
while outside a bright theater
night ripens like an avocado,
and a gunman decides
not to shoot after all
because consciousness
is a moth that finally got in.

(First published in Talking Writing)

Mangy Mountain 

I imagine the poem’s speaker sitting scrunched up 33,000 feet above the earth, in that dissociated state we call airplane travel. Suddenly something shifts in her left temporal lobe, and she is released from the engine noise and the busy glow of lap top screens into another reality, where she encounters her soul. I know that moment—a sacred moment, a moment of grace—space and time open up, the dead show up, past, present and future converge and the poem begins to sing. The “Oasis” speaker looks down at the mountains, which, like a miserable dog, suffer from mange—a contagious skin disease caused by parasitic mites. In the case of the mountains, the disease is caused by parasitic capitalistic practices, which abuse the forest and the earth much as the president abuses women. The “Oasis” speaker looks for meaning in this ugliness. With the power of the pen she transforms reality: meaning lives in “the heart of a hummingbird/beating more than one/thousand times each minute…” This is a quintessential Lucille Lang Day move—merging a living symbol and scientific fact. Day holds a doctorate in Science/Mathematical Education; her poetry is full of healing medicine in our science-bashing times.


According to American Indian lore, hummingbird medicine evokes joy. Hummingbirds dart from one bright flower to another, sucking nectar, pollinating, able to fly backwards and forwards or to stay in one place. The poem, like the hummingbird, darts from one strong image to another: oasis, soul, the dead, mangy mountains, our misogynistic president. A single hummingbird makes a “rapid dive,” and everything changes: 

…a gunman decides
not to shoot after all
because consciousness
is a moth that finally got in.

The poem takes the reader on a journey from a loss of faith and meaning, to the miracle of grace. We find ourselves, with the “Oasis” speaker, in the company of the hummingbird. The moth of consciousness gets in. The gunman decides not to shoot. When the moth enters the poem we are in the presence of a transformational mystery. The gunman is transformed. The world, spared all that evil, that suffering, is transformed. We, the readers, are delivered to an oasis, a healing place with trees and water, where we can imagine that moth of consciousness, like the butterfly whose wings change the weather on the other side of the globe, transforming our world.



Sunday, February 19, 2017

The Muse of Catastrophe

The Sister from Below Announces a New Series: 

The Poetry of Resistance

Hermes, Greek God of thievery, writing, roads, and more
                            
                                     The way of women     is our way   The moon swells
                                     the moon goes dark   pulling the tides    in and out
                                     The way of the trees     is our way   So raise up
                                     your branches   sisters   for we are one   gathering
                                     Soon sap   will rise   apple trees flower

                                     We’ll weave us a canopy    all over this land
                                     It will be uprising time    once again
                                                      in America
      —Naomi Ruth Lowinsky
      “Wishing in the Woods With Hillary”


The Muse of Catastrophe 

But who can resist this all–engulfing force…? Only one who is
firmly rooted not only in the outside world but also in the world within.
—C.G. Jung

Thoth, Egyptian God of Writing

In early 1933 Jung gave a lecture in Germany. He spoke of a “feeling of catastrophe” in the air. We are in such a moment in America. How do we withstand the “all–engulfing force” of chaos, hysteria, terror, and rage which rampages the land? How do we stay connected to our inner life, our deep natures when we are assaulted and over–stimulated by outrageous events and disturbing threats, haunted by ancestors who were slaves, refugees from catastrophe, stateless, disenfranchised, oppressed? Catastrophe, it turns out, can be a muse. That is what the Sister from Below whispered in my heart one day when I was feeling overwhelmed and impotent, struggling to find my mode of resistance. She said: “You’re a poet. You know many fine poets. Do what poets do. Use your blog to post resistance poetry. In times of catastrophe, the people need poetry.

But, you may ask, as did the poet H.D., “What good are your scribblings?” H.D. answers herself, in her great poem written during the catastrophe of the London blitz, “The Walls Do Not Fall:”

this—we take them with us

beyond death; Mercury, Hermes, Thoth
invented the script, letters, palette;

the indicated flute or lyre–notes
on papyrus or parchment

are magic, indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere,

forever; remember, O Sword,
you are the younger brother, the latter–bon,

your triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over,

in the beginning
was the Word.


H.D. is claiming the power of the Word over that of the Sword, the power of Creation over that of Destruction. And yet we know she wrote this during wartime, when all she held sacred was threatened and her city was in ruins. When our souls are battered, our hearts broken, is often the time when we open to the deep river flow of poetry, when we find words to “translate the dry rattle of the newscast into image and myth. Poetry says the unsayable, bears the unbearable, speaks for the voiceless, transports us into the spirit realm, the ancestor’s lodge, ushers us, in Jung’s words, through the “small and hidden door that leads inward.”

A Poem by Daniel Polikoff
The first Poem of Resistance came to me by synchronicity. It was during the recent storms which caused flooding, mudslides and other disruptions in Northern California. The national news was disturbing, causing political storms and public displays of resistance all over the country. At the time I was in dialogue with the Sister from Below, about catastrophe as muse, about poetry as medicine for the soul, about devoting my blog, for the duration, to Poems of Resistance, when a beautiful poem showed up in my e-mail, by Daniel Polikoff. I knew when I read it that I wanted it to open this series.

The weather and the news remind us of Biblical stories of catastrophe as an expression of God's wrath. This is where Polikoff goes in his poem, only his focus is on a "heavenly mother...weeping/for her lost children." The poem's speaker voices our grief and disorientation, and names our collective shadow, for we have "gone forth and built/sky-scratching cities," and we have "forgotten/her name." This is the voice of the prophets--those ancient poets of resistance.

Weeping Icon


Flood
February 7, 2017

Rain floods the streets and overflows
river banks and inlet sluices,
pours from the water-bearing sky
as if a heavenly mother were weeping

for her lost children. The puddle on the red-
brick patio; the streams that run
down the twin cheeks of Spring Drive;
the spreading lake that drowns the footpath—

tears, all tears. For she who bears us
endlessly in her heart
is weeping, weeping endlessly
over her children, the numberless

ones who no longer know her,
all the children who have forgotten
her name. They have gone forth
without regard; gone forth and built

sky-scratching cities; gone forth
and closed their doors against her,
locked their gates and bolted the chambers
of their steel domes. She has come

often to those proud towers; come
and rattled the gate-chains; come
and wrapped upon the heavy doors
of their bronze hearts. But they

do not choose to hear her soft
or loud alarms; dumb and unmoved,
they stand upon their feet of clay,
statues in the hall of a putrid king.

And so the widespread waters of pain,
the tears of grief and of mourning
pour from the sockets of heaven, pour
ceaselessly down, as once did

the flood that drowned the earth—
for the wrath of the Father
and the Mother's deep sorrow
will not part like ancient seas.

Daniel Joseph Polikoff is a poet and internationally recognized Rilke scholar. The most recent of his six books are Rue Rilke (a creative non-fiction account of his initiatory Rilke pilgrimage) and a new translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. Daniel lives with his wife and family in Mill Valley, and will be teaching a course at Pacifica Graduate Institute this spring. For more information see danielpolikoff.com

"Tower of Babel" by Lucas van Valckenborch


Announcement 

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky will be a speaker, along with Steven Nouriani and Carolyn Bray on The Role of the Divine Feminine in the Transformation of Consciousness. The program will take place on March 18th at the SF Jung Institute, 9:30 -1:30. We need Her right about now. Please join us.

[https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-role-of-the-divine-feminine-in-the-transformation-of-consciousness-tickets-26502497684]