The Living Tree

If there’s one thing I need to be reminded of sometimes, it’s that looking at new stories, not just the old, is a key part of my path, and essential for my own spiritual life. I need to look for inspiration and thought not just in contemporary authors’ works of fiction, poetry and sundry, but in the new storyteller and medium unique to the twenty-first century, the blog and its author, the blogger. Heck, it’s one way I’m telling stories, after all.

One of these new storytellers is Cuan, at Song of the Old Wanderer. I recently discovered him and am intrigued by his own Celtic pathbuilding work. This post in particular, Life Is…, has some resonance with me, not just for its poetic sensibility, but its attempt at codifying and communicating the basic values and principles of his path (called the “lifeway”) in a unique and, moreover, consistent and intelligent manner.

This description sounds too clinical to really convey the sense of story and language Cuan expresses here, but I find that one of my main issues, particularly with keeping up with this blog, is finding a unique and succinct way of communicating, and distilling, all the thoughts that roam around my head that concern my pathbuilding work. Laying out my principles and values took a lot of out me, and the work isn’t even over yet. My basic beliefs are in a constant state of flux because my specific view on spirituality and my personal expression of them is constantly changing.

In the coming weeks, I hope to have a new list of my principles, and I want to try to look to work’s like Cuan’s, and my friend Juni’s at The Path of Mist, for inspiration and motivation.

In closing, I’d like to take this thought and dream it out:

The living tree makes natural, pure poetry by its standing, its growing, its leaves shaking, its blossoms opening.

Sometimes I think that in order to be considered seriously in my search for wisdom I have to be flawless, static, and above all, solid, in the sense that I cannot be vague, or dreamy, or be open to changing my mind or refining my essential viewpoint. Poetry is built on a sense of the concrete giving way to the abstract; it is in the stasis of the language that the flow of the emotion can be discovered.

It is however, more subtle than that. The tree, the woman I am, is rooted and immobile in deep soil, but is subject to change. Her leaves fall, and grow again, in season, and she bears fruit and blossom in her time. To be principled is not be to be a boulder, but to remain upright even while the seasons change, and you with them.

To be a poet, principled and strong in her beliefs, is in fact, to be a poem: every word, every letter placed deliberately, with meaning and intent behind every action, but overall open to a myriad of interpretations and emotions. Poems change through drafts, and revisions, in constant change and fog while the initial intent remains the same. I make poetry through my own changes; it should naturally follow that my path should do the same.

 

The Dark Night of the Soul

From the same-titled poem by St. John of the Cross, translated and introduced by Mirabai Starr:

 

“The dark night is not an abstract notion on some list of spiritual experiences every seeker is supposed to have. The dark night descends on a soul only when everything else has failed. When you are no longer the best meditator in the class because your meditation produces absolutely nothing. When prayer evaporates on your tongue and you have nothing left to say to God. When you are not even tempted to return to a life of worldly pleasure because the world has proven empty and yet taking another step through the void of the spiritual life feels futile because you are no longer good at it and it seems that God has given up on you, anyway.”

“The emptiness of the dark night is a yielding emptiness. It is an emptiness that gives way to the fullness of all possibility, which manifest as limitless diversity, which circles back to emptiness. It is the impossible-to-translate sunyata of Buddhism. It is the living substratum of all reality. It is rooted in quiet. “God spoke only one word for all eternity and he spoke it in silence,” says John, “and it is in eternal silence that we hear it.”

 

I said somewhere once that I was afraid my depression would be turned, by other parties, into a spiritual disease instead of a medical one. I’m still afraid of it now, because I realize now that there can be a spiritual element to this disease as much as there is a medical one. 

I write my Story through my own suffering–I write myself through my own lack of self.

 

Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy

Another quote post, though brief–despite being able to write several books about it, about how it relates to me, and so on, I’ll save commentary for later. I’ll also probably be posting something later tomorrow about my grandmother’s visit this past weekend, but for now, I leave you with this:

From Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy by Eric G. Wilson

“Melancholia pushes against the easy “either/or” of the status quo. It thrives in unexplored middle ground between oppositions, in the “both/and.” It fosters fresh insights into relationships between oppositions, especially that great polarity life and death. It encourages new ways of conceiving and naming the mysterious connections between antinomies. It returns us to innocence, to irony, that ability, temporary, to play in potential without being constrained to the actual. Such respites form causality refresh our relationship to the world, grant us beautiful vistas, energize our hearts and our minds.”

“Suffering the gloom, inevitable as breath, we must further accept this fact that the world hates: we are forever incomplete, but fragments of some ungraspable whole. Our unfinished natures–we are never pure actualities but always vague potentials–make life a constant struggle, a bout with the persistent unknown. But this extension into the abyss is also our salvation. To be but a fragment is always to strive for something beyond oneself, something transcendent–an unexplored possibility, an unmapped avenue. This striving is always an act of freedom, of choosing one road instead of another. Though this labor is arduous–it requires constant attention to our mysterious and shifting interiors–it is also ecstatic, an almost infinite sounding of the exquisite riddles of Being.

To be against happiness, to avert contentment, is to be close to joy, to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is the call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of existence. This is the elation of circumference. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.”

 

Death and Afterlife

No, this isn’t going to be a post about that. I’m reading a book of the same title edited by Stephen T. Davis in order to get back into the headspace of a novel I am writing: this is “research.”

And so, I have a couple of quotes for you, on panentheism, a view of the world I find not contradictory to Irish cosmology and Filidecht in general.

 

The Other Within

I’m reading a book called The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture and Psyche by Daniel Deardorff. Though this blog, and this book, aren’t necessarily about “Otherness”, in the sense that they talk about Otherkin and the like, they are about the “Other.”

I am becoming ever more aware of myself as “Other”, even if I don’t identify as ‘kin, and, as such, my path is stretching out, or rather, finally embracing, that “Otherness”, and is becoming a path in which otherness plays an important part.

For those who need a primer on Otherkin, look here:

What Are Otherkin?–by Tirl Windtree

A Day in the Life of Otherkin–by Lupa

or

A Field Guide to Otherkin–by Lupa

Being Other, and being a Poet, go rather hand in hand. For the poets, though a considered part of the structure of the tribe in ancient Ireland, were also necessarily outside of the structure of society. Even kings had to submit to poets. Much of the same issues, as will be seen, occupy the minds of Poets as of Others, and much of their journeys are ritually (or psychologically or spiritually) the same. In a word, Poets are Others.

The other perennial Others, or Outsiders, of Ireland were, of course, the Fiana, the warriors that lived between society and nature. Many Fiana were poets, though not in an official sense.

But one doesn’t need to be official to be a Poet… or Other. And that is the whole point, isn’t it?

Being Other and being depressed have a great deal to do with one another, at least in my own case. Identifying as Other, and as depressed, are stories, in and of themselves, that add a depth and a resonance to the story I live. The same mentality accompanies both of those stories; the mentality of depth, death, betrayal and wounding, exile, loneliness and despair. But within this mentality also lies resurrection, initiation, life, wisdom, change, soul and humanity; the mentality of the essential soul, and the essential self is a mentality of plurality, of liminality and marginality, and the descent into the underworld.

And now, some quotes to ponder:

 

More Quotes on Polytheism and Stories

Once again, from David Miller’s The New Polytheism:

“If you are deeply gripped by a story, so that is becomes a pattern and paradigm for your entire life, it is inevitable that you will think and speak about that story, even if only to yourself. You will theologize. Faith (being gripped by a story) always seeks understanding–as the medieval theologians put it. But it is not inevitable that when you are gripped by a story you will think and speak about that one story in the way that professional theologians have: in doctrines, dogmas, histories, systems, and philosophies. Homer was compelled by one story, and then another, and then another, and so on, and he wrote a novel, an epic, a narrative: a story of the stories. Hesiod was likewise seized, and he wrote a poem, a song, a group of lyrics: a song of songs. Aeschylus was also moved, and he wrote a trilogy of plays: the drama of dramatic actions. To tell a story, to sing a song, to enact a drama–these too are theologia. They are what the people do.”

“Polytheism is not just a matter of having many roles in the social order that each individual plays from time to time in his life. … It is not that we worship many Gods and Goddesses (e.g. money, sex, power, and so on); it is rather that the Gods and Goddesses live through our psychic structures. They are given in the fundamental nature of our being, and they manifest themselves always in our behaviors.”

“Psychology, sociology, history–or any form of monotheistic thinking and speaking, be it theological or otherwise–cannot be identified with the stories of the Gods and Goddesses. They remain who they are, and their stories are constant, though they continually contend with each other in some lively Titanomachia. Psychology, sociology, history–and some two thousand years of theology–may seem to give meaning to man, but finally it is the Gods and Goddesses and their stories who provide this function.”

 

Quotes on Polytheism

From David Miller’s The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (1974), a very thoughtful, interesting, and philosophical little book on polytheistic theology and philosophy, and one that certainly belongs on my bookshelf. The central and radical claim (for its time) is that Western thought and theology is rooted in polytheism, and that socially, psychologically and theologically, we are at heart polytheists.

“The announcement of the death of God was the obituary of a useless single-minded and one-dimensional norm of a civilization that has been predominantly monotheistic, not only in its religion, but also in its politics, its history, its social order, its ethics, and its psychology. When released from the tyrannical imperialism of monotheism by the death of God, man has the opportunity of discovering new dimensions hidden in the depths of reality’s history. He may discover a new freedom to acknowledge variousness and many-sidedness. He may find, as if for the first time, a new potency to create imaginatively his hopes and desires, his laws and pleasures. … The death of God gives rise to the rebirth of the Gods. We are polytheists.”