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.
