She is hidden there–under the stairs– a beauty in white marble lulled to sleep by the water flowing next to her. She is the keeper of wishes and the goddess of the wishing well. The coins sparkle under ripples. She is warmed with pink stone, and if you choose to sit with her, it will be at a respectful distance, back to back.
It is her quiet company I seek sometimes when I am feeling overwhelmed or drawn out or lacking in some way. Visiting the well replenishes me and restores some clarity, presence and grace to an otherwise hectic life.
But what if I’m a mermaid
In these jeans of his
With her name still on it
Hey but I don’t care
Cause sometimes
I said sometimes
I hear my voice
And it’s been here
Silent All These Years
…
So you found a girl
Who thinks really deep thougts
What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?
Boy you best pray that I bleed real soon
How’s that thought for you
…
Years go by
Will I still be waiting
For somebody else to understand
Years go by
If I’m stripped of my beauty
And the orange clouds
Raining in head
Years go by
Will I choke on my tears
Till finally there is nothing left
…
But what if I’m a mermaid
In these jeans of his
With her name still on it
Hey but I don’t care
Cause sometimes
I said sometimes
I hear my voice
And it’s been here
Silent All These Years
I’ve been here
Silent All These Years
All these men were there inside
when she entered, utterly naked.
They had been drinking, and began to spit at her.
Recently come from the river, she understood nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The taunts flowed over her glistening flesh.
Obscenities drenched her golden breasts.
A stranger to tears, she did not weep.
A stranger to clothes, she did not dress.
They pocked her with cigarette ends and with burnt corks,
and rolled on the tavern floor in raucous laughter.
She did not speak, since speech was unknown to her.
Her eyes were the color of faraway love,
her arms were matching topazes.
Her lips moved soundlessly in the coral light,
and ultimately, she left by that door.
Hardly had she entered the river than she was cleansed,
gleaming once more like a white stone in the rain;
and without a backward look, she swam once more,
swam toward nothingness, swam to her dying.
I actually can’t put words to it, even to give you juicy details to laugh about. I am a veteran of fifteen years of intense self-enquiry…and twenty-five pages of fiction just left me flummoxed. I’m not sure what to say, except that I have discovered a potent and terrifying new tool, one I am rather afraid to use.
Novelist Shawn Klomperans recently said, “Writing a book shouldn’t be therapeutic; you should need therapy after writing one.”
I read that on Twitter a few weeks ago and while I thought it was funny, I didn’t get it.
After this week though, I get it.
Needless to say, I’ve been avoiding writing the novel. It’s now linked in my mind with Things I’d Rather Not Think About. It made me sick all last week, complete with fever! However, with only ten more days to go, I’ve decided to confront my demons head on and keep writing, despite a 16K word deficit. Onward! Upward! And I will run for cover if need be.
Also, be forewarned, there’s no way I’m ever going to let anyone read the damn thing.
The Day of the Dead is something I celebrate a bit earlier than everyone else.
Traditionally for me, it consumes me during the middle week of October. I’m always a bit agitated. I fall asleep with the lights on. I get restless and stuck at the same time, both introspective and prone to drowning everything out with movie marathons. I get sad, I take stock of my life, and areas I find wanting really start to piss me off. When I was younger I didn’t understand why six weeks into the semester everything would suddenly fall apart. Finally Halloween would come, and my favorite holiday would always cheer me up. After a while the pattern began to emerge… I wondered why. It became clear one day when my mother mentioned October 20th was the day my father died.
Beneath the Halloween revelry, there is a tradition of communion with those that have passed. The Celtic roots of Halloween, or Samhain, mark it as a time when the veils between the worlds are thin, making it a prime time for divination and communicating with dead family members.
Dios de la Muerte
Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations line the stores of Colorado with cartoon skeletons living life: riding bikes, getting married, getting drunk. Basically it’s one big party, when the living and the dead dance together all night because their worlds finally intersect. It’s comforting to know I’m not the only one hanging out with ghosts, and it’s more fun to celebrate it as a time of passing than to just sulk in my bedroom.
I love the caricatures of ghoulishness and the way people become who they secretly believe themselves to be, or want to become. A well-chosen costume plays on some element of the personality, drawing it out of the dark and into full glorious view. Like Batman, we embrace and identify with what terrifies us, and it makes us stronger. Or what inspires us, unnerves us, delights us. To me, it seems the perfect celebration of life.
Did this picture surprise you? It surprised me. Only…why? If you were to dissect a unicorn, what would you expect to see inside?
I so often see people trashing religion, spirituality and myth as nonsense. Usually the response they get from the opposite side of the fence is a kind of smiling, even sad, shake of the head and the words “you just don’t get it.” Having lived on both sides of this conversation, this former atheist can attest to the truth of this. I see here two separate but equal worldviews, logical mind and mythical mind. (Very roughly equivalent to popular left brain/right brain theories. Apologies to my cringing neuroscientist friends.) Usually one dominates; rarely do they function seamlessly together.
Attempts to bridge the two get ugly. On one hand, you have mythical mind judging its experience by the standards of science and logic. The desire of New Agers to be taken seriously by the scientific community, often accompanied by elaborate and painful discussions of quantum physics, is based on the assumption that for their experience to be true, it must be logical. They misunderstand the role and function of science. The fact of the matter is that science is slow. It is supposed to be. It is careful and precise, trusting that over time truth will emerge. At any given point in time, right now even, we think we understand a lot of things. However, many of these will be reinterpreted later, even proven wrong. The data accumulates, we interpret, we have working theories, and these get trickled down into the common culture. Right now the New Agers and religious folk are combating an outmoded mechanical view of the universe. And rightfully so…we know this is out of date. The problem is, we don’t yet know how. On a tangible day to day level, we do not understand the full implications of quantum physics. We won’t, science won’t, for a very long time. Refusing to wait for the solid research results in misguided attempts to explain spiritual experience with abused scientific lingo…also known as pseudoscience.
Why try to hijack and misuse scientific terms to explain things that are simply not (yet) researched, not proven, not scientific at all? Because for many New Agers, science is still their god. Deep down, they still feel that only science and logical thinking can grant validity. If they truly valued mythical mind and spiritual experience, they would judge it by its own standards instead of making it into something it is not. Please, leave the discussions of quantum physics to physicists. There’s no need to devalue your experience just because they haven’t finished their research yet.
Don’t assume because the unicorn isn’t made of flesh and blood that it does not exist. And don’t get huffy when researchers point out that there is no research to support the existence of unicorn intestines.
I will continue this discussion in future posts. I think it is very important to understand the erroneous thinking that can result from unskillful attempts to synthesize these two worldviews. Next I will address the hidden misuse of mythical thinking by atheists. Fun!
In the meantime, be sure to read the interesting conversation taking place in the comments.
I’ve been compiling a list of the most important books I’ve read in my life. Right now I have seven, and they are not what I was expecting them to be. Only one is a humanities text, and an iconoclastic one at that. I’m talking about Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen. This book blew the top of my head off. Finally I understood why history class was so tedious, despite loving social studies as a younger child. (Partly due to this book, I later went on to work at a local historical society, to this day my favorite job!)
Loewen ripped the standard American high school history textbooks to shreds, exposing them as the vacuous drivel they were. Even now, thinking about his telling of the Columbus story shocks me, not only because of the Mel Gibson level of atrociousness and violence, but because I had never heard about it before. It was truly a hero’s fall from grace.
The most striking point Loewen made, judging by what I most remember fifteen years after reading it, was the way American history texts were written not as fact or analysis of events, but rather as creation myths. This wild country, cobbled together from so many cultures, needed a common creation myth. It needed this because all cultures need them. And since we are in theory a secular state, it couldn’t be a religious creation myth. Instead we wound up deifying historical figures, making heroes out of the cruel but influential, mythologizing the birth of the American state.
My point is this: if we don’t acknowledge the critical importance of myth to our collective psyche, we will be at the mercy of its disguised presence.
I am a commercial freelance writer/editor, creativity coach and artist living in Boulder, Colorado. The pivotal intersection of my passions are art, spirituality and healing, but my work takes me in many interesting directions. I'd love to talk to you about any projects you are working on. My 'About' and 'Writing/Editing' pages will tell you a bit more, in case the obvious tends to elude you. If it does, great! You probably have an unusual perspective and I will surely enjoy our conversation.
Mysterious Artemis 