Poetry in Motion

Photo by Alia Wilhelm via Unsplash

Sometimes, when we are stuck in the mundane daily routine - especially when each day is the same as the next in these continued lockdown corona-times – the rigidity, restriction, banality etc can wear us down. It can deplete our energy, it can weaken our soul power. Our energy needs to be reinvigorated, to be spiked, to be charged up again in cycles. Only this spurt can set it free again to create magic and help us live out our soul’s purpose. It needs the potential kick, perhaps even a diametrical pole swing. Open our eyes to magic!

Pivoting to an opposite can set up tension between dualities that is often enough to relight our fire. Energy as we know cannot be created nor destroyed in thermodynamics – but it can be transferred. Like money, it needs to keep moving. If our individual soul’s energy is stagnant, static, stuck-in-a-rut, dead in the water – ain’t no regenerating gonna be happening here. It is our responsibility (and our privilege) as individual beings to take back control of moving this energetic form around. With our determination, creative imagination, dogged self-sacrifice and bulldog will, we can seek to revitalise that force of power. We can make a choice to get the circle circulating again, to get the jog on and the game afoot. This energy is like currency, and it needs transactions, transference, transmutation and flow. If we can root ourselves in the intuitive knowledge that our intentional energy is our resilient magic power, then we can start to use it. And put it in motion. Like the Creatrix we truly are. O! For a Muse of Fire.

This energy, my magic, ties me to everything and everyone, it connects me up to the big mainframe Universe and down to the smallest atom. Consciously, I can will and direct and focus that flow. The goal here is to get a better balance, a new form. The potential is always carried within me, in my acorn inside. I am the host and this is my offering, its is a sublime process. I am full of charge. What I believe, what I think, what I write, what I do – they are all full of potential charge, electric. I sacrifice my energy into new different forms, in order first to survive, then further to give meaning and purpose. Sprinkle me with stardust, rattle Shakespeare from the cosmos.

My energy (magic) is inside-out, it begins as an inner experience. It’s in my imagination, my values, my history, my capacity as an individual unique in this world. It is intuition, ideas, the creative process itself, my art and poetry of living, it is my love. And this magic, it needs to be in motion. And it requires my mind to help direct that flow. Most of all, it needs integration. Like the cerebral meets the cosmic in some ecstatic union of opposites, directions are set and things are put in play. Like the wind, it needs harnessing – as a wild horse does. Stuck down entrenched in the seeming reality of the “new normal” narrative, the slog, the routine, the dull thud, to rot, the run-of-mill, the duty – well the entropy starts to take hold. Nothing changes, until the energy changes, transfers, moves. Perhaps you like I have been unwilling to change, or unable to move, holding on to things that once were good but now no longer serve us. The fuel tank empty, one's development and growth, deadened. We need to make the art come back, electric and alive! Beauty and Truth.

The pull of the habit, the familiar, the comfort, the norm, the yesterday, the safe – so strong a current. But, illusion, inert. The dialectical calls, the diametrical solution. To try on, just for a while. To stop me clinging to dead old magic, to start me-up towards the new instead. The challenge, the conflict, the uncomfortableness, the shock, the jolt – it reroutes, it resets the sat-nav. The force takes new form, new journey, balances is restored again, a new cycle begins and another is put to bed. Motion.

To really know oneself and to trust in that being (and take responsibility for that) – that’s the ask. Not to escape or run. But to transform and from which to create new tangibles. To trust one’s power and process to take two opposites pull then together in a clash of cymbals and brass and boom a new union, a creative synthesis, a hybrid, a new magic is conceived! Like poetry for the soul.

Fierce focus. Charged vision. Directed weapons of art (this blog, words) – to make it happen. In the fire of an alchemical furnace, a new treasure is forged and charged. It is potent. It pulsates. It wants to be born and to rise, anew.

So here we are, energy rising. Rising out of the ash like a phoenix. Speaking of that, I stumbled upon this tweet by Nell Latimer this week and it brought me great joy. A poetry quote by Sylvia Plath combined with a detail from Joseph Lefebvre’s C19th painting of Artemis. Gorgeous alignment of arts 

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair 

And I eat men like air ~ Sylvia Plath

 

Another poem also lifted my soul this week. I read it as a child at school in Sussex and I had forgotten its nature magic beauty. Food for the soul with the magic of words, like a spell of syntax.

A Musical Instrument - by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What was he doing, the great god Pan,

 Down in the reeds by the river?

Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,

And breaking the golden lilies afloat

 With the dragon-fly on the river.

 

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,

 From the deep cool bed of the river:

The limpid water turbidly ran,

And the broken lilies a-dying lay,

And the dragon-fly had fled away,

 Ere he brought it out of the river.

 

High on the shore sat the great god Pan

 While turbidly flowed the river;

And hacked and hewed as a great god can,

With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,

Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed

 To prove it fresh from the river.

 

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,

 (How tall it stood in the river!)

Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,

Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing

 In holes, as he sat by the river.

 

'This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan

 (Laughed while he sat by the river),

'The only way, since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed.'

Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,

 He blew in power by the river.

 

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

 Piercing sweet by the river!

Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

The sun on the hill forgot to die,

And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

 Came back to dream on the river.

 

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,

 To laugh as he sits by the river,

Making a poet out of a man:

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,—

For the reed which grows nevermore again

 As a reed with the reeds in the river.

Pan, painted by Mikhail Vrubel in 1899

And seeing as I’m in a poetic frame of mind this Saturday morning, gazing out across the ships on the sea in sunny Singapore, here is an old favourite. Everytime (well in the old normals, remember them?) I stepped into a LUSH store this poem (a favourite of its founder) came sensually evocatively alive.

The Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, illustrated by Florence Harrison

Back to the books now, to write. History & Magic to read. Right now I’m enjoying:

  • Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World
  • The Book of English Magic by Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate

Until then, let’s keep to the light and collectively intend that Byron’s poetic vision of Darkness be only a bad dream, let’s keep that in the imaginal realm only and not reality.

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d

So we keep travelling on, with active hope. A fitting service to the Saint of the road, St. Christopher who's Saints Day it is today. To the patron saint of all us travellers, to the warrior cynocephalus, dog-headed man from Lycea. To Hermanubis. Blessed Day! Guard all the ways our feet and hearts may travel dear St. Christoper. Hail Hermanubis.

Keep us safe on the road ahead, protect the way. Keep us moving on. In poetic motion.


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