I Go Away 12/22/2015

12/2015

Farewell, I'm off to the woods,
Where the little birdies are

To the river,
Where the crows and the eagles are

To the grassy meadow
Where the Deer people paw the snow
And no-one is blown in wordy winds of war

Farewell, I leave you arguing for your crown
My diadem is made of leaves
That have floated to the ground

River of the Heart. December 4 2015

Do you remember freedom?
How the men of the people walked in their splendid nature
Before the captivity of their disappearance?
Do you remember?
How the women walked in their noble beauty
In the waxing and waning of the majestic moon
Before they were reduced to cattle?

Little more than seven generations
And the memory in the blood
Still mourns the bodies in the dust

I ask now,
Do you remember freedom?
How we walked barefoot
In the holy place
Wearing cloaks of skin and hair?

Seven times seven generations
And the memory in the blood still moves.

Can you remember before this here now came to be?
It is a long walk back
To where we were free

Yes, I can remember, but only because the blood informs my heart.

The blood informs my heart
With the memory that flows beyond seventy times seven
All these generations of the people before this:
When we were free and walked where we would, unafraid.

And now!
We are all sectioned out, lined and crossed out
By denial of blood and ransacking of the sacred ground
That holds the dust that once drew the breath down
Into the blood that informs the heart.
The heart, which carries the torch of the splendid nature
And the noble beauty
The one who stood, and of whom it was said,
"By the hand of the Creator."

We must all walk through our times
But to surrender memory?

For a brief eternal moment
The soul fluttered in the hand of God.

Memory fords the river of blood
The life of the people
And I must walk forward
Walk forward
With the river pounding in my ears.

We were once a little stream
A rivulet in the high mountain
Now a river coursing to the delta
Rich in fertile mud
The delta
To the sea.

12/4/15 

To The Heart of the Sacred

To the Heart of the Sacred                                   December 4 2015

(Where are You calling me?
You have come up from the ground for me, this I know.)

In this great horde of tribes, I am looking for mine.
I am not of the dry tribes.
They had their true seers, but they have little in me; neither their logic
Nor their legal brilliance
The zeal, the stony damnations

For a season, I settled there in that sandy city under the silent shawl
My heart understood, but how tired I am now of all the bloodshed
So much blood in the name of God.
I wandered off, looking for the River, and lost the way back, so I kept on.

I traveled with one from a Green Island,
Who sat in the trees and delighted in birds and bees
Antlered like an elk, like a Hawthorne Tree
And he was wise, he showed joy to me
And a heart that my own skipped after.
Music comes from there.  Healing also, and histories of the sun.
My memory dances, there.

I traveled as well with one from a New World
All up and down, like a tree in the ground
Spreading, like an Oak, like a Joshua Tree
And he was kind, he showed wonder to me
And pattern that my word could not describe.
Music comes from there. Medicine also, and milk of stars.
My memory rests, there.

The golden moon sometimes slays me
The sky sometimes translates me, with beauty
Or the incense of trees
Of grass
The smell of the forest, her aromatic apothecary
Rising up from the ground

Before the city and her ruffians,
Merchandise and politics and religion and their unnatural seduction and hell
I was working out the walkabout
By heart, and You were my lover.

These ones in all fervent foolishness
Keep offering You blood
Blood of their enemies
Like some kind of propitiation
Blood also of land and sea
Until all becomes dry dry dry

Here now, one grows more kind
Another, more bloody.
The ground waits for all.

You came up from the ground for me
I will follow thee.

As A Woman Who Watches Over The Earth 12/4/2015

I think that before Europe invaded the new world, the Americas were like Eden.  The people who lived here had not yet been cast out, but were living an unbroken life in an unbroken land.

As for Europe, Europe was conquered by Rome and eventually by the political Church, and group after group of indigenous were controlled, or cast out, or quenched, or enslaved, and sadly much worse, once the Church fell to politics and murder instead of conversion, until all of Europe seems nothing but a confusion of trauma and abuse.  With such history, how could there have been anything but tragedy for the American, the New Zealander, the Australian indigenous?

They came upon people who were unbroken in unbroken lands, and did not recognize the new world.

I come from European stock, mostly English, Irish and German.  These are all fierce people in their own right, and in their own lands, Celts unbroken from their sacred lands.  Dispersed for every reason now to other corners of the world, the call of the homeland is still audible in the heart.

My ancestry in America goes as far back as the mid 1600's, when Josef Bartels got tired of the border fighting between France and Germany over Alsace Loraine, and gave it up. And there is a huge assortment of bloodlines and countries all in my genes, yet my ancestry is here, in America, for between 12 and 20 generations.  Is this long enough?  Once here, many families suffered further as their particular group was singled out for prejudice, even though we all came here from somewhere else.  Is it any wonder we live tentatively, on the very top surface of this land?  Insulated in houses and barely connected through various cultural impositions? Displaying the shattered patterns of our lost souls in our inability to connect?

My quest over my life has been to retrieve the connection with the land, and to dream of living here imperceptibly.  To dream of community there.  My success has been slow and gradual, marked frequently with the stories of how cruel we are, and how devastating.

I watch in deep sorrow as the first people are dispersed and harried and all their words, wisdom and knowledge lost, replaced with the mind functions of science, chemistry, gadgetry, machinery, and the people who have lost their souls to a colonial church/government that sanctions such.  For whatever Christianity was in the Deserts of the Middle East, by the time the title was assumed by Rome, and a single man was ever ordained as the only representative of Christ, every particle of spiritual reality seems to have evaporated in the edifice.

For people who have lost their souls, there is God who restores the soul.  I have met this God.  In my own personal life, I have evidence of the love of this God, and the slow restoration of my soul that has been, in this lifetime, scattered in the winds of this age.  I have experienced the gentle power of this God. But this is not government, or parties, or denominations, or gerrymandered territories, or mandates, or loud culture, or warring religious factions. This is a foundation grid that predates all that, rendering them unnecessary, or obsolete.  There is a river in the desert, that brings the green life back.

I cannot make a difference, anymore.  That is, I must conform to this foundation grid, realize that this is holy, that this time, this place, this soul, this is holy.  This ground, this very ground, obviates the need for a built altar, a temple, a ritual.  Because I am the altar, my body is the offering, we are the temple, and breathing... Breathing is the ritual. The beating of the heart, this is the ritual.

Such is the state I am in.