Tuesday, April 30, 2013

The Muse and the Flame


Before I went up on a magic mountain in the Adirondacks  last Friday to lead a gathering of frequent flyers over the weekend, I dreamed that I was handling the completed typescript of a book, and very happy with it. Associated with the book was a single sheet of paper on which I had written words as an offering. I knew, waking, that my ability to bring through the very best in this book would require me to make an offering.
      I thought of the opening of the Odyssey, where the poet begins by invoking the Muse in lovely speech: "Sing in me, O Muse". Not "sing through me" but "sing in me". I borrowed this locution as the opening for a poem I wrote on Saturday. I decorated the text with my drawings, and offered it to the fire when we did "wishcraft" on Saturday night in front of the great hearth in our lodge on the mountain. 
    The original poem has gone upward on the smoke of the fire. But I have written a version that resembles it.

Offering

Sing in me, creative spirit
of the boy who died and came back
and the man who flew through the black sun
and returned to walk the roads of this world
as the envoy of a deeper world;
and of how (being human)
he falls down and gets up, over and over,
forgets and remembers,
remembers and forgets.

Let me explain through his story
how the world is a playground, not a prison
when we awaken to the game behind the games.
Let this story help those who read it
to find their bigger and braver stories
and live them, and tell them well enough
to entertain the spirits,
win the indulgence of the gods
and bring through effortless healing.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

beautiful offering Sir Robert. I will strive to create my own of equal prose. I love being inspired by your 'work' to connect more deeply with the spiritual dream world.

Patricia said...

I now believe writers to be extremely brave people. Gregory Maguire wrote this in the forward of The Little Prince: "The Little Prince brought me back to a time in my reading life when I first began to think that writers and readers were secret lovers. No one knew what went on between them. I loved the feelings of intimacy and connection that reading gave me then, and I love the feeling now. It is one of the reasons I read: to trace the arc of my life across the arc of somene else's."
I am learning to brave up. Thank you for all you bring into the world Robert.

Patricia said...

I forgot that I was going to write:) I use to get frustrated with the remembering process. Well the forgeting side of remembering I suppose. Now I feel it as to be more delightful, then frustrating. Like presents you hide and you or friends find again. I suppose memory is intimate with the human remembering process. If memory were seen as a soul process then perhaps forgetting allows the ego to survive and live a life full of gifts?