Cosmology – Spherical Education

LET EVERYONE BRING THE GIFTS say the Bird Women

Let everyone bring the gifts!
The air is full of wings beating,
calling.
Let everyone bring the gifts!
This is the calling, the sound of spring,
the birds singing the plants out
of the ground, the buds
ready to burst,
the color, the immediate saturation of a
sigh
the word ah —again and again—
the sound of the origin,
a beginning,
ah,
Thank the Goddess, angels, Universal
Mother beings, thank the
ancestors, thank the bird people
and the seed people and the sea
people and the wee people.
Thank the forest and the wave and
the clouds and the seals and the mountains.
Thank the trees and the sands and
the chemicals and the stars.
Thank the pens and the inks and the
poets.
Thank the swimming creatures without bones.
Thank the eyes glowing in the dark,
thank the tremors and the volcanoes,
thank the dance classes and the musicians,
who feel the life blood of the spring,
thank the tender Earth, in whose footsteps we
walk, thank the curled and unfurling
ferns, the softnesses of the Earth’s body and
our own bodies.
Thank you cats’ fur, thank you breasts,
thank you sheep, thank you lions thank
you reeds and berries.
Thank you fungi.

The glow we receive we return back
again, again, again.

The birds sing and I remember.

The birds sing and I remember,
and my memories become a song in my body.

The flowers sing and I am reminded
instantly, to exhale, to feel the muscles
deep in my belly, my neck, my throat,
my ears, unclench and re-order,
ready to listen again
for more

xoc
3.18.21

words and image C.Savage 2021

listen to this poem read by the author (on Soundcloud)
LET EVERYONE BRING THE GIFTS say the Bird Women

On Landscape and The River Is the Path

photo Luis chumbe

On Landscape

Texture and Heat. Having been there makes a difference (does it?). (It does).

What I say is: “My body misses Latin America.” What I mean is: After 3 days in Iquitos, my body has recycled most of its water. I am now a living exchange with the air breathed by the Amazon River via the trees. I am made up of madura tierra, dolphins swim my blood, my body re-orients itself as a boat—after all the river is the path. (Wow, that one took a long time. 10 years maybe.)

As I am re-inhabited by the river, my body re-orients itself as a boat. The river is the path. As many times as I need to hear it and lose it. I lose it again.

Presently my body feels hollow, greedily metabolizing rare sunlight, missing the rainbow-haze droplet filtered quality. The water is life component. The swimming in the water-air component. The each footfall is a blessing communicated to the earth and lifted back up and out through the trees to be reabsorbed component. The roundness of walking as blessing and being blessed by the moisture in the air component. The Softness—if earth can be silty, slip silky, this is the quality applied to air. A warm stone feeling, hand warmed clay as walking environs.

Yesterday someone asked: How could you not miss the forest (la selva)? I miss the forest like I miss my sister, like I miss a birthplace, like I miss knowing where I actually AM.

Well! That was true! And elicited some breaking up of the dam inside of myself. I place myself there inside of it and the river land calls me, immediately, you can come home, you can come home. Yesterday I thought about it as my “spiritual birthplace” and that is not really it. It is the place where I became (and become) re-oriented to myself and to the world. My first and dearest long-term, long-distance relationship—with a river, weaving herself underground. Yes, I’m getting it, I’m hearing it.

Do I have to say, so obviously, the paintings with the black backgrounds are true. They are dreams, map flashes of landscape, they are connections of the human turned back in to communion with/of the larger experience. In the realities of Westernization we have an idea that perhaps were are floating in a kind of void, why we are obsessed with a cold-metallic-alone version of space craft and exploration, instead of an organic, community version. In the forest, I met a tree who is a spaceship. The presence of this craft-self was so obvious that it reminded me to myself, and that is a feeling that no longing for it could match. Coming home. Coming home.

That I will not be returning to this beloved, to this mother, this sister, this homeplace this turn is suddenly present with me. The recognition shuts something down in me, in the relationship, in the dreaming. But perhaps something else is being born in me, some hybrid seed of self that is both river and boat.

And to think–I was trained to feel that weaving myself back in to the dream is lonely. But that’s not true. It is Full To Bursting with Life, Blessing, Purpose, Meaning, and Beauty. It is filled with Truth. It is filled with the Real World.

Blessings on Your Heads,
Ashe
Charlotte

The Impasse

The implacability of it. the unmovableness. the immobility. the stuckness.
Two mountains face off. the size doesn’t matter.
A bird flies between them. sigh.
No rope can be stretched taught enough to hear between them.
A slack bridge is erected. we run out of wooden slats less than halfway through.
Is it better to burn down a half-built bridge? Does It, Itself, pose added danger?
Some people will cross on foot (ok Many Many people will cross on foot, especially the people who were here Forever—long before any idea of how many wooden slats would it take to…)

A bird flies overhead. sigh.
My mouth is dry and I drink gulps of joyful water. after months on this bridge-building expedition I
hear something
I hear the mountains talking
I am swallowed up in their singing
I am between the two, radiating to one another
Have I crossed between worlds?
(Certainly I have crossed between worlds.)
I am pressed through to the languaging of mountains, to older ways of hearing.
I am at the bottom of the river, the salmon rushing over me in their leaping.
I am dancing. I am the dancing water.
Do I have eyes, still?
(Most certainly I have eyes, still.)

A bird flies overhead. I am the bird.
I sigh.
(I sigh and a mist fills the valley, covering it in quiet, wrapping and warping the airs,
dampening, bringing down from the mountains the hovering, quivering sound. The waves of language sink and become the joyful river,

20.6.2
c.savage

Real Magic is in Relationship

I dream you
dream to the reaches
beyond my own ability to conceive—
what has been carried
was not carried by “us” only
but by things we didn’t know we once were
we still are
things that (we) will continue to be
long, long after we are gone…
maybe, just maybe, until we are here again…

what, in you, gives me the gift of sight
of breath catch in sudden altitude,
what, in me, allows you to star-skip
freely, with the whisperings in your ear and
galaxy seedings in your palm

what is it, in recognition, in relationship,
in allowing, that allows the fun-house
distortion of space-time,
inward, outward, inside-outward,
zoom lens like a merkaba ball,
like a slinky sent sideways down
a wormhole, like water become wave
like…something I cannot place because
it is not fathomable by myself *alone*

real magic
is in relationships
the trick is we have been deceived
to think we cannot see
that which is right in front of us—
it must have been veiled, concealed,
sewed up in a bag, hidden, buried
it is right here

it is right here for the taking,
right here for the making
spinning into now like lightning
strike
like sound that makes the Earth wave
boom
like molten core made island like
gas made environment— things that we in our minds
have made separate that laugh, laugh,
laugh at these imposed restrictions…
ah, but let it be
let it be. let “it” melt back into “be”
verb become noun, concept become wing,
bird become sky and toadstool become voice
ah, let it all be

the miracle is in the heartbeat, that we
can see it, hear it, feel it, touch it
in self, in other.
inward/outward, so far outward…

it reaches, us to us,
it is imprinted, unable to be removed
I see you
I hear you
I love you
Sonic
Boom

listen to this poem read by the author

Real Magic is in Relationship

Casting the Net Wider, and Coming Back Home

we are insatiable—
our minds designed to crave,
to seek to hunt to track to
record to remember to find to
experiment
to pass on these traits to our progeny,
to figure out how to share these winding ways as far and wide
as can be imagined
and

we need to both cast the net wider
and come back home

we need to cast the net wider:
“man” has not made it past the moon.
a child born after 1969 does not know the taste
of that thrill
(Mars rovers incorrectly programmed between the archaic
“King’s Own” and
near-globally agreed upon metrics do not hold quite the same j’uj)

we need to cast the net wider:
our possibilities need to be set free,
released from the restrictive confines of
just one way (or the other), from mono-anything,
that we might see hear taste and
rejoice
in the Everything, in the
muchness of everything

we must cast the net wider:
we must begin to believe, once again,
that something new can happen, that
alchemical change can bring forth
something never before seen
in our neck of the universe (or not for a long long time), that
something new can become, out of our selves

and so, like those ascended of every age have tried to impress,
like tired children, like birds, like whales, like herds of
multitudinous ungulates (caribou and deer and such) we must
(don’t you think)
recover, dust off and shine up our inner compasses
and come home.

Return home like a wren to the nest, to where
life comes forth, to where hearth is warm
(or supposed to be), to where
loved ones wait with open faces,
open arms, open hearts, open minds,
just for the chance to light up
in greeting, in sharing story and song and
willingness to collaborate, to
sift through and shift orientation
to home, home, home, like a puzzle piece
turning to be settled and nestled
in place, it cannot be
reshaped by force or complaint, but
by movement, re-orientation, patience,
and time.

and now, now of all nows, it is time to come home.

it is time to come home to ourselves, to the possibilities,
to the potentials not yet uncovered nor turned over,
it is time to reformat old systems of
disparity—between I and other, between mind
and body, between self and world

coming home to ourselves as an act of
closing the gap and sewing it shut, of
leaping chasm and bringing two sides of
something together, forever (or for the mean time)

coming home as a radical act of care for
self and planet and universe and any and all
lands we walk in, home as beam
of light, home as beacon

come home body, come home Earth, come home tree, come home water,
come home wind, come home squirrel and antelope and humpback and hummingbird and snake and crawling thing and winged ones calling from the skies, come home to me rabbit and fox and fur and tooth and dirt and rot and claw and antennae. Come home to me transmission and transformation. Come home, home.

And so, in our capacity to cast the net wider,
let us not forget to catch
ourselves, too.

And in our coming home, let us not forget
the chance to include other.

May we hear and heed the call,
may we become, already, that which
we do not know we seek, but that which we are.

listen to this poem read by the author on SoundCloud:

Casting the Net Wider and Coming Back Home

Magical Missions P.2 How Children Come Into This World

Magical Missions
requesting children
having spirits leave my body
curled up and hurting
clutching rocks and praying on the forest floor
the moon bleeding out of me
I cried.
requesting children and a flood of children appearing to hold my hand and walk me through their lives
requesting children and being sent whales, and guava, and dolphin-eyes and pregnant dolphins and fishes and eels and the Io Valley
requesting children and finding loneliness and drinking and comfort of friends
requesting children and finding no-job
requesting children and going to grad school instead
requesting children and finding myself as my own child
requesting children and making my house into a joyful place for everyone
requesting children and encountering Indira’s Net again and again
requesting children and receiving dreams, and poetry, and stories of other women
requesting children and continuing to walk with them down the paths of neighborhoods
requesting children and watching love unfurl in others around me
requesting children and encountering rage, and more blood
requesting children and facing my fear of the dark, and aloneness
requesting children and one heard me, and made an agreement, through several strange trials, and made of me a chrysalis , a chrysalis who repeated the Bene Gesserit litany against fear into the mirror on a daily basis, a chrysalis who could not eat enough, or get out of bed most days, a chrysalis who dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed as if making up for lost time on the way, a chrysalis who read and watched movies and frequented target and made tallies of the items necessary, a chrysalis who swam and chanted mantras into the ceiling of the gym pool, a chrysalis who was able to leave world-worry for focused task, and then endure a trial by fire of ancestor women in caves, the long lineage weaving and winding, sending smoke in lines through the ages humming and murmuring by fires, the ash lines being drawn out, predictions made, singing, making enchantments over the mouths of those venturing near to hear the cries of the mother, the first cries of the baby, say nothing that is not peaceful, encouraging, say nothing of fear, of potential of danger, do not call the darkness in. women with black smudged mouths and eyes keeping rattles occupied, drum skins tight and soft talking and in communication with that which is making its way though.
in spanish an expression for “giving birth” is “dar la luz,” meaning to give the light. bringing light through the tunnel, through the fire, through that which we have forgotten, or do not know, bringing the light.
my child, when he was born, was pearlescent, and quiet. he was tired, the journey was long and his ears were still whooshing with heartbeat and intestine and exhale. the midwife picked up his left pinky finger, splayed on my chest, and he opened one eye like a napping old man, scrunching up his face. with what emotion? raw exhaustion? disbelief?
it takes a long time, it takes a long time, it takes a long time.