phoenix

in my heart i draw together

all that has been rendered

with the graceful hands 

of self-compassion

i honor my wounds

in the warrior's way

exploring my altered vessel

as a new territory

allowing the cutting of my feet

to strengthen the soles

as i continue to walk

learning

i am a stranger here

 the ancestor, baby and bride

in my own land

in the land of my dreamtide

beckoned beyond the veil of has-been-known

into the sensual rhapsody

of yet-to-know

such colors never beheld by eyes such as these

flourish riotous

and cast me as innocent

where i had been weathered

born fresh through fire

that yet still burns

i revel in the sincerity

of my passions

in their severity

flames and freeze

in new time

i become

**************************************

etheric snow twists and flutters through the cool air of a confused season in flux.  it is the fluff of the cottonwoods, our ancient grandmothers and fathers, that looses into the whirling air and gathers softly into corners, to then be soaked by these intermittent rains.  in late june, the sky is heavy with the promise of water, the nights cool with the sharp chill of a summer not quite come,  the vibrant flora of the mountains spills lusciously over every contour of the land and settlement.  it "should" be hot, dry, bright days and warm nights, the river trickling (though this it still does, for she is endangered and never flows more than an inch over the ground), the black and red bugs crawling through every crevasse and the crows mating in the high branches of trees swaying in a hot wind.  but no.  this time not.  and it puts me to mind of a line in a poem that i love}

"it's 3:23 in the morning

and i can't sleep

because my great-great-grandchildren ask me in dreams

'what did you do once you knew?

what did you do

when the animals all were dying?

did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was stolen?

surely you did something 

when the seasons started failing?

what did you do

once you knew?'"

i ask myself that question often.  what do i do, with my knowing?  

i have worked to become the radiant divine essence that i lives within the crust of hard living that i have steadily melted over the last few years, since i stopped indulging it.  i have worked hard at that healing, that becoming.  these last weeks have been the opportunity to see how that work has progressed - where i have succeeded and what i have not worked with enough.  i see the still bleeding eye of my original wound and i see the vast and breathtaking beauty of my essential truth, laying as a wolf and a jaguar with crowns touching on the event horizon where this body and this soul commune.  i see the radical love with which i can finally embrace myself, and the brilliant light that shines through that love as a salve for this family of mine, this family of incarnate being.  i see the wrath, hatred and envy that still live within me, and the grace with which i can regard them and still negotiate their presence in my totality.  i see the tremendous brilliance of my being, the awesome scope of love and grace that is my self in this world.  i see the innocence of my soul, golden as the day i arrived here, and the silent ancient wombon that i am beyond time and incarnation, and how they hold each other in tender stillness, energetically calibrating the frequencies of their nature to be a beautiful music.  i see the beauty of being, i see my beauty in being, and i see the road laid long into the hills before me, full of love, beauty, magic and freedom.  there is a soft diamond knowing within that exists transcendent of terrestrial entanglement, and it is this place in which i now rest, not yet freed from process, but yet resting in the nature of what is this moment, acknowledging that the experience is only that - the experience.  the truth is yet greater, beyond words and bodies.  they say the truth shall set you free, but it goes beyond that.  freedom and truth are one.

i have delved deeply into the mystery of the dimensions, for i do not think that this world can be saved or salved through actions born of the mind.  there is a great sickness here on our earth, something that is not born of us or from within us, that needs healing for all of us to be free.  and it is not the mind that will heal it.  we have been corralled, like slave animals, into an experience of living through the mind.  but we are sensual beings, comprehensively intelligent and meant to live on the brilliance of sunlight and the love of earths breath.  we are not meant to think, think, think, and analyze, analyze, analyze.  we are meant to experience, be affected, affect and become through the entire sensory phenomenon of the body.  we are a comprehensive intelligence utilizing our most treacherous aspect as our primary modality.  the mind as it is used now is a dictator that runs amok with our spirits wisdom by being put into such a ludicrously improper position of power.  it could be the ally that guided the collection of experience and the cultivation of wisdom into the ascension through the material plane into embodied communion.  but there is not yet a system in place for that to be the way, for all of our systems are based in duality.  this present moment of incarnation is the development of that system, that system of transcendence through unification and expansive consciousness.  we are meant to integrate the divine knowing of source consciousness within the vessel of terrestrial experience.  this little world of coffee and computers and jobs and rent and what-fucking-ever is not the way to realize this - it is a game for entertaining slaves out of their own potential of self and collective realization.

i have been playing that game, with half of my self in and half of my self out because i have yet to find the allies that would truly journey the change with me, and i am afraid of being alone.   we are all in the system that we yearn away from, and my experience has yet to include communion on the path.  my experience thus far is of separate creatures on the same path, or on paths very close together, but not traveling together.  i have crafted my experience this way, so i know that i can craft it differently as my impulse shifts from self-cultivation to collective ascension.  one necessarily preceded the other.  the yearning in my heart is a genuine yearning for all of us to go together into the brilliance of being.  we are not meant to suffer this world in the ways that we do, but for the experience to change, there must be enough of us in resonance and we must hold the invitation open for everyone to come.  division is demise.

so when my great-great-grandchildren ask me in dreams, "what did you do when you knew?" i sit in prayer and breathe into them with all of the love that flows through me and say, "i am still searching for my way in and for my way out.  and i am searching because we are one.  i am searching because this wandering is a wisdom that is my way, and ceremony is the way that i live this wisdom".  and this is true.  ceremony is the way, because ceremony transcends the divisionism of this field, transcends the tyranny and arrogance of the mind, transcends the duality dimension and brings us into the truth of our resonant selves.  would the dominating religions need to eradicate ceremony, ritual and exstasy if it were not the way to liberation?  would the dominating structures need to crush the bodies and spirits of womyn if the salvation of the whole did not rest in the natural transdimensional grace and potency of our beings, and in our awesome power to steward new life into this realm?  would the dominating structures need to cultivate men into emotionally castrated killing machines if the softness of their caring spirits were not an integral aspect of the peace of this world?  would the dominating structures need to slaughter the animals of the earth if communion with them were not a means of expanding the consciousness of humanity?  when the state is threatened, they outlaw gathering, because gathering in circles, singing, dancing and prayer, change the frequency of the field.  these seemingly simple actions alter the resonant nature of space-time and cause the unravelling of diseased systems as truth essence flowers from the center of creation through the vessels of being.  critical mass is important.  without a critical mass of people, we are each one in the night, unwoven, and our songs, though potent, disseminate into the night without their fullest potential realized in relation.  

so when my great-great-grandchildren ask me in dreams the question that i am always asking myself, i say "i searched for my people, and for a way to bring us out of the slavery of separation and into resonance with each other, because it was what i knew how to do.  i sat in ceremony with myself and with anyone who would sit with me, because it was what i knew how to do.  i held space and looked for elders, allies and wisdom teachers, internal and external, because it was what i knew how to do, and it was the way the path unfolded for me".  but i don't yet know how to make it all bigger than the moment.  i know how to look, and i know how to invite, and i know how to deal with the sticky slowness of the process of awakening when people come to ceremony with a watch on, wondering when they'll be done so that they can go back to their lives.  i have yet to know how to coalesce all of this energy and information into a cohesive offering, into a cohesive field for the expression of a greater pulse.  i have yet to know, but the knowing is coming.  i have awaited an ally, or allies, like to the kindred in warriors tales of other times, and this has not come.  it is an essential aspect of the sickness of this time that we isolate, fraction our time and busy ourselves with false idols.  i have almost been in community more than once, but it falls away just as i am to take the step in, so for now my journey is the solitary path and i walk into the rising sun alone to realize that there is no alone in this world.  for as soon as i sit to prayer, all of creation is there with me.  and when i sit down singing, the sound draws the resonant heart to my side.

someday, perhaps, my song will be clear and i will sit in community with a cadre of resonant souls, all of us singing the ascension song together.  perhaps someday soon.  after all to which i cling has been released, and the true needless nudity of being flows through me as a brilliant river of pure love water.  after all of my poison has been healed, and i can carry only love to the circle.  after i have journeyed to the mountain and have carried down the wisdom intact.

perhaps someday soon.

for my great-great-grandchildren who ask me in dreams, "what did you do once you knew?".

and for the animal kin, whose wisdom guides me, holds me, and reminds me when i get lost.

may it serve...