Into Manannan's Realm

I sing of a voyage, and a voyager, sails furled in the dusk, yet ready to spread before a favoring wind.

   The black goose sails before, into the fire below the sunset rim of the world. The way leads to the sunken lands, and to the earth beneath the sea that land-bound men will never touch.

Watch how the waters turn and swirl, opening a tunnel between the elements. Let yourself flow through the passage.

You are entering the realm of Manannan mac Lir, most unknowable of the Old Ones, one who escapes definite and conventional forms. Your kinsman. You are at home here. You breathe where others drown. Sea-born, sea-girt, salt blood in your veins, coral sprouts from your marrow. You surge with the horses of the sea, into a rare kingdom

Away, away come away my love

To fields of coral and pearl

Away, away come to me my love

To she who one was your girl

                                               

I heard the siren song, though I had long since turned my back on the sea and lived in a tamed country, in a gentle valley.

   She found me there, as surely as a kelpie finds a lone fisherman in a curragh on a lonely night with the whisky in him, or the fire of the stars.

   Something out of memory. But whose?

   The memory of the cell? A current in the blood? Something held in the mirror of dreams without bodily substance, yet alive in the silvered deep of the glass, in suspension between the middle world and the worlds that escape form?

Do all such visitations come from the past, from those beneath the earth or sea? Or do they come from the same time, but a parallel realm of being? Why not from the future?

Questions, questions, while her lilting song echoes in my inner ear.

Away, away, come away my love.

                                                        ~

Put this down. Etch it on stone, mark it for memory:

There is one time, one art that encompasses all. Look through the hole in the stone. The Holy Man knows. See through his single eye the oneness of things. All created things, all that is past, or present, or to come, will and can be seen in this glass without a lens.


Note of Origins

These words came streaming through me on a night when I was writing some reflections on how more is available in dreaming than is understood by the daily trivial mind. I wrote these lines: 

Dreams are the doorway between the worlds. In modern Western society, we have a diminished understanding of the word “dream”, reflected in the common expression, “it’s only a dream”. Let us push deeper, beneath the surface clutter of day residue and “inferior thinking” and the smorgasbord of broken memories, to what Sri Aurobindo calls “the sleep of experiences".

I paused from writing these notes, because I felt a deep shift in the atmosphere, blowing like the wind off an unseen sea. I felt the power of a deeper source, moving with me and through me as wind and waves. I adjusted my inner senses and let braver words come, both fresh and ancient.

Photo: Bow Fiddle Rock near Portknockie on the north-eastern coast of Scotland. The natural quarttzite arch is thought to resemble the tip of a fiddle bow. 

Flooding, or The Making of a Poet

It is said of a people who live east of Fez that they value poetry above all other human activities. There was a man among them who despised poetry. He said it was for the weak and for women. Bashir was a warrior and a hunter, sudden and violent in his moods, given to strong drink. 

One night he was caught by a dream. The moon threw down a lasso of light. It pulled him down, spilling his wine, extinguishing the lamps. He fell into blackness that became the sound of rushing water, more water than the village had ever seen. When his sight cleared he saw that the little river where the women washed clothes had become a great torrent, waves rising mountain high. The sky sheeted heavy rain. There was no horizon except endless water. 

In the savage flood, he saw trees and houses, donkeys and camels, carried away, and a woman he might have loved and a man to whom he owed money and the witch who sold him a charm against the evil eye after setting the curse on him, and a fat grafter whose neck he had broken though the thief had been buried for three years. He wept when he heard the howls of the sight dog who had hunted with him. Then the flood took him too. He had nothing to hold onto, nowhere to stand. This was the end of the world. His life memories swirled in his head like water going down a drain. 

He was thrown up by an immense wave, and hurled down with bone-shaking force. He tasted sand and rust. He opened his eyes. He smelled coffee and warm bread. His woman was making him breakfast. He brushed this aside, more gently than he might have done on another day. This gave her the courage to ask if he was well. She did not say that the noises he was making in the night were not human, or even bestial. 

He told her he was going to see Shaykh Omar. He must go at once. He paused only to put on a clean garment and his sandals. Omar the Blind, they called him, not because he had cataracts but because he saw with inner vision. He lived in a house no better and no worse than most in the village, under a date tree. He was famous for his beautiful ghazals, lyrical poems of erotic encounters between the soul and its beloved. He was the judge of the poetry contests that were more popular here than football. 

"I've been waiting for you," the shaykh told Bashir. 

"I dreamed of a flood. It took the whole land. It was the end of the world. Does it mean I am going to die?" 

"You have died already, my son. Welcome to paradise." 

Bashir gaped, then looked carefully around. The landscape was surely the same as yesterday, and the smells, and the hot dry wind gusting from the south. Yet there was a subtle shimmer to things, as if nothing was quite fixed or tethered to the earth. The wind carried the sound of stringed instruments. With the music came birdsong that became words. The words shook their wings inside him, then took flight from his lips. 

"You broke the vessel and I became wine." 

Bashir sat open-mouthed, shocked at what he had released. 

Omar the blind sipped his glass of red tea and made a sound like a kiss with his wet mouth. "My friend, everything will be different. You have been made a poet. It is known that all poetry comes from flooding."

Art: Claude Monet, "Flood Waters" (1896)

The Ambush

Down there in the root cellar of my life,

in the breathing dark, is a beast

that would terrify others but I know

to be a vital ally capable of taking on

the world. Not this time.

When I part the darkness

I find the sweetest of dinosaurs,

a confirmed vegetarian, 

willing to bend his neck to the children 

who are riding him with happy smiles. 

The kids are taking over my energy map.

I am amazed but not altogether surprised

because they have been setting ambushes for many years.

I go up one level and am on more adult ground

in the juicy space of my sex creative center.

There is the lovely insatiable leopard

admiring her beauty in the flowing stream.

The tiger comes through the lush undergrowth to join her.

I start to suspect that though we are old allies

 he has come this time in the children's cause.

The bright young girl has a tiger who lives in a striped sofa

 when he wants to stay unobserved

 and likes to sing songs in French.

Wait. There is more going on. A magnificent salmon

rears from the waters arching his gleaming back.

I revel in his potency but shed no tears

when a no less magnificent eagle drops from the skies,

talons outstretched, and claims him for dinner. 

I go higher, to the place of the animal powers in my solar plexus.

A great savannah opens before me, teeming with wild things.

The lion comes at once, tolerating no confusion

about who is boss in this energy domain.

But he comes to direct me to further discoveries.

I must know the elephants. I watch them move

with the precision of ballet dancers under their heavy majesty.

The leader carries a howdah in his back.

Under its bright fluttering canopy are children again,

delighted by their high adventure. They wave to me
and I know I must join with them to receive an incalculable gift.

It is the most magical of all tools for writing.

I see it now, Ganesha’s tusk, in the hand of the green-coated

elephant king the children invite to their tea parties.
I can’t miss the message: if you want the strength of a deity to write

a big story, you must bring the kids with you and in you. 

- Barcelona, October 13, 2018

A band of adventurous children,  among whom I recognize several of my Boy Roberts. have been pursuing me for many years. wanting me to write books for them and with them. While I was drumming for a group shamanic journey through the energy centers in my Barcelona training, they succeeded in taking over my own energy map. I think they have made their case. We'll see what stories we bring through together.

Journal drawing by RM

A place to write from (Red Ink)

Write from the place that is raw

from the night when you lost your skin.
Write of the time in the war-torn city
when your heart was a quivering bird in your palm
and the blood pool kept filling, and you knew
no doctor could heal this wound
though the world would end if you failed
to keep the wounded lover alive for three days more.

Write from the night you wished yourself dead
and spirit flew from your heart, winged by your desire,
down to the lightless lands of the dead
that no one escapes without help.
Write from the day when, incredibly,
there was enough of you topside
to bribe the ferryman with the ribcage boat
and carry home the part of you that married Death.

Remember the promises you made her:

"You'll never be hurt again." "Every day you'll make poetry."

Write from the night you could not keep those promises
and had to hold the young lover in you by force,
rough as a jailer's armlock, soft as lambskin,
when she thought the one you were losing now
was the one she lost before. And when your heart
breaks again, hold her fast, willing a greater power
to embrace and join you, and write from that.

Dip your pen in the blood pool. This is the time for red ink.

- This poem is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming. 

Art: Georgia O'Keefe's Red Poppy

Soul alchemy in the friendly silence of the Moon

When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture - love, art or something else that is really worthwhile - we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen. According to the direction of our will and desire, and the depth of our work, those minds may include masters from other times and other beings. We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.
      There is great clarity on how this works in W.B.Yeats' essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae. The title means “The Friendly Silence of the Moon”. He borrowed it from Virgil's description of the Greeks approaching Troy by stealth. Under the poet's moon, Yeats explains how we  can develop a co-creative relationships with minds operating in other times and on other planes of reality. Let's notice that when he refers (in the first line) to "fellow-scholars" he is not thinking about people of his own time, but minds that are working and reaching out from beyond time and space:

I had fellow-scholars, and now it was I and now they who made some discovery. Before the mind’s eye, whether in sleep or waking, came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never read, and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a Great Memory passing on from generation to generation.
    But that was not enough, for these images showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet were an extension of one’s knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of gold, as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of cabbalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his never-published manuscripts, and who can have put it together so ingeniously?...
   The thought was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and that these minds still saw and thought and chose. 

As well as the "mingling with minds" from other times and dimensions, Yeats wrote, with poetic clarity, about relations with the creative spirit he called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and withdraws its presence when we choose against the grand passion and the Life Work, the soul's purpose. 

    The daimon loves us best, Yeats perceived, when we choose to attempt “the hardest thing among those not impossible.”

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

Art: "The Silver Apples of the Moon" by Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh (1865-1933)

Opening the Spring of the Muses

Hi
Hooves on Helicon

Harder. The hooves drive sparks from the rock.
The great wings beat the air, driving a warm wind
Across the snowy slopes of the mountain.

Again, the hooves come down. And again.
The rock groans and yields, releasing the jets
Of the secret spring. I am down on my knees,
Catching the water in my open mouth.
Shockingly cold and pure, it floods my senses
And a figure takes form before me, from the mist.
I know her as grey-eyed Clio, muse of History.
Her sister appears at my other side. I know she is
Sophrosyne, or Tempering. She is not on the roll-call
Of muses; she has come because I need her instruction.
Above my feminine guides, huge as the mountain,
Is their mother, Memory. Knowing is remembering.
I am here to help people remember the origin
And purpose of their lives. My sun-father shines
A blessing on the peak, twin ravens, black and white.

- from my collection Here, Everything is Dreaming: Poems and Stories.

In the myth, the Hippocrene spring on Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses, is opened when Pegasus drums his mighty hooves on the rock. It's a way of creation.

Sophrosyne is, indeed, not in the roll-call of the Muses. But she appeared in the lucid dream that gave birth to this poem.

Image: Apulian red-figure vase, 4th century BCE.

-

Literary yeast and the mating of books

Reading, even just handling, lots of books puts literary yeast in the air. It means, as anyone who bakes knows, that good things tend to rise faster. If you want to get a book of your own in the oven, make sure you have literary yeast.
     I don't have a reading plan. I am a non-linear reader, jumping from one thing to another, easily driven or distracted by shelf elves, ever ready to take on reading and research assignments suggested by dreams and the play of synchronicity. I have at least twenty books on the go at any given time. I read novels from beginning to end, generally at high speed, but will open anything else where I please and read forwards and back. I am pleased that Montaigne approached reading the same way. "I leaf through one book, now another," he wrote, "without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments." Yet as his biographer Sarah Bakewell informs us, "he took up books as if they were people and welcomed them into his family."   
     Family, yes. And a huge one. This helps to account for the fact that I welcome into my home, on average, at least three new books a day, to mingle with the thousands already there. My books form a very lively society, and their mixer parties are remarkable. Right now, for example, on my desk, a trio of goddesses (books on the Sumerian goddess Inanna) are getting to know Victorian ghost hunters (W.T. Stead, F.W.H. Myers), and some mysterious Romanians  with French accents (in Mircea Eliade's fiction, which I am reading in French). Fairies loosed from several anthologies are dazzling a cohort of neuroscientists, physicists and anthropologists from a mountain of academic works.
     When I'm not looking, the goddesses give the Bull (from Michael Rice's The Power of the Bull) a fine gallop around my study. Jung or Yeats, Robert Graves or Arthur Koestler, swoop down from time to time, from eyries above my desk, William Blake arises, flourishing drawings that he made for Dante's Divine Comedy. Philip K. Dick mutters, "The Empire never ended" and looks for something strong to drink.
    I want to be at these parties for longer than the night allows. I always want another four hours with my books before the sun comes up, winter or summer.
    At some point, I have to leave the books to carry on without me, while I go to bed or head off to an airport. Later there is evidence that carry on they did. The disarray around my desk or reading corner suggests that the Victorian ghost hunters staged a seance, or that the goddesses scared the pants off a neuroscientist. Philip K. Dick has crashed and lies sprawling face down on the floor. There is something in the air that indicates that the strange magician Andronic from Eliade's novella went on making magical passes to raise the serpent. I hear the echo of a lecture I would like to give on how dreaming is the key to understanding quantum reality on a human scale.

     I am pretty sure these nightly book parties turn into orgies when I have gone to bed. The literary sex that goes on may be wild but I think it is also sacred, the hieros gamos of a dozen or a hundred minds slipping in and out of their covers. The proof will come if new books are born, through me, with the DNA of many, many literary ancestors and a character that is all their own, When the mating of books is as wild and free as it is around me, around the clock, I am quite sure of this: What happens in Bookland won't stay in Bookland.

Photo: I took this one in Shakespeare & Co in Paris. I was going to photograph the books on my desk this morning, but they made it clear that some things do need to stay in Bookland.

The howler on the plane

en route to Prague

I have a whole chapter in my new book Sidewalk Oracles on my adventures and misadventures during my airline travels around the world. They are evidence that my survival strategy as a very frequent flyer often works: if your plans get screwed up, look for a new opportunity or at least a fresh story. Real writers know that if nothing goes wrong you don't have much of a story. However, as I embarked on nearly 20 hours of straight travel from my home to Prague on Monday, I decided I could do without a new story on this trip. I announced as much to the airline gods: "I don't need a new story today."
They heard me, up to a point. All my flights arrived on time, or early, connections were easy, and my bag came to meet me as I walked to the carousal at Vaclav Havel airport. On the longest flight, from Dulles to Vienna, the only empty seat on the plane was the one next to mine. So I got extra legroom and sprawl space, but no interesting conversation with a stranger. There was the small matter of the baby three rows ahead of me. This was the loudest howling baby in human history. Every time it started up, it felt like an air raid siren had gone off just above my head. This happened every fifteen minutes, without preamble, for the whole 8-hour flight. Goodbye to any chance of sleep or proper rest on that redeye flight, though I had boarded sleep-deprived afetr staying up reading most of the previous night. However, the howler in the night brought me an unlikely gift. As I was ripped again and again out of drifty liminal states, I found that I had strong imagery and compelling ideas for a possible new book I had never considered before, though if I bring it off it will marry many of my life themes, dream adventures and experiences of walking on the mythic edge. I can't say more until the writer in me has had a chance to work on this. Writers write. I have never been inclined to say too much about what may be in the works until the work is done. But I'll share my one liner from the trip: A howler can monkey with you to a purpose.
Drawing by RM.

Flying in Dreams and Awake: The Winged Art of Reet Kalamees

When I arrived in Tallinn, Estonia last month to lead a dream workshop, I found the hotel lobby filled with marvelous paintings of luminous winged beings. I was thrilled to learn that the artist, Reet Kalamees, was coming to my workshop and that her theme was "Flying in Dreams and Awake". Our meeting received a little nod from the universe. Her exhibition at the Euroopa Hotel had been scheduled to end a week before my event, but had been unexpectedly extended.
   At our first meeting, Reet told me how she felt that one of her pictures was for me. She showed me a striking canvas with a blue figure whose huge wings are crackling with sparks of light. She explained that the image had come to her in a powerful vision, in which she felt the presence of a great bird, six months before we met. With great generosity, as described in my last post, Reet insisted on gifting me with the painting - "He Sees" - and it is now at home in my home.
   Over lunch that weekend, Reet described how her paintings are often inspired by dreams and visions. I asked her to write an account of her work, and to let us know the birthing process for some of her individual paintings. Reet has now generously contributed the following inspiring account, with the stories of several of her pictures:

PAINTING WITH ANGELS

by Reet Kalamees

For years now I've felt a strong urge to paint. And not just paint, but to paint angels, beings of light and the beautiful spiritual world. For me angels represent the connecting link between heaven and earth, between humans and the Creator. Cooperation with them has been truly inspiring. 
Visions of my new paintings are often given to me through dreams and meditation.
I've had over twenty exhibitions and my paintings have found homes all over the world.

Mostly I paint in two ways:

1. According to the vision I get from my dream or meditation or a vision related to a person I’m painting for.
2. Without a vision- I just open my heart and I accept what the universe wants to express through me.

I would like to thank the Universe and the Creator for the inspiration and support.Who am I? Angel artist? Spiritual artist? Visionary artist? All of my paintings have a very special purpose - to help people - whether you are in need of spiritual guidance, positive energy, support at a difficult time, to strengthen your relationship with someone etc. 

    I have loved to draw and paint since childhood. As grown-ups, we often forget the child in us and tend to take life too seriously. But then some life event(s) will remind us who we really are. Already as a child, I had a strong feeling that besides our ordinary everyday world, there is something way greater-the invisible, eternal and infinite Universe. In my childhood, during the gloomy Soviet time, dreams were a great way to escape and I have always been a great dreamer.

    A few decades ago I was brought back to painting, because all of a sudden through my paintings beings of light, angels, spiritual guides, teachers and counselors showed up. For years now I have been painting the world that remains invisible to many, with all its power, energy and the characters from its light vibration. And this journey has been so incredibly fascinating, enriching and full of blessings and miracles.
     Often when I start painting I do not have a clear idea what I will paint, I simply open my heart to allow the Universe to express through me what it wishes. For me it is important, that through my paintings I can bring people more light, higher vibration and that, without exception, we are all divine beings.    With my creation, I would like to thank all those extraordinary people who have played an important role in my spiritual journey. I would like to thank the Universe and the Creator for all the inspiration and support. May these paintings touch all the people who have an open heart and are willing to take on more magic and miracles into their life.

 The story behind some of my paintings:

JOIN ME
Stay in the wind of my wings.
Keep close to my heart.
To take flight, all we need is to believe.

This is one of my first oil paintings from 2007 and it is very special for me. The vision for this painting was given to me in a  fraction of a second. I saw two different sides of a whole, which formed a divine union in higher consciousness. Everything and everyone is connected in total synchrony and harmony. When I look at this picture, I still to this day feel a great longing. A lot a people have given me feedback on this picture and said they feel a sense of recognition when  looking at this painting as if they are reminded of  something they have turned away from.

Many pictures are coming directly from my dreams:

Heavenly Horse or Creature of hay

  

HEAVENLY HORSES
Heavenly horses in their heavenly stable.
Talking to the stars.
Say a word on behalf of the humans.

CREATURE OF HAY
Heavenly horse galloping through a dream.
Looking into our hearts.
Touching our longings.

Heavenly horse is a dreamlike mystical being resembling a horse and vibrating in a very high frequency. In my dream the horse was made of hay and was not in any way an ordinary creature All over its body were doors and gates, which served as hideouts during danger. Like a heavenly Trojan horse. In that particular dream I was with my mother and we went to hide in the horse and came out after the danger passed.

     Somehow I knew that heavenly horses protect our dreams as well. Consequently, I have drawn a lot of heavenly horses for children to bring them warm, safe and supportive dreams.

At the Source of Life

Standing midst flowing light.
Letting go of all that has been.
The presence is all that remains.

Two transparent creatures standing midst running spring water. The water is not the water we are used to, but a liquid flowing light. In the dream the beings of light consume that light, they drink that light and pour it all over themselves until one moment they will become that light  and diffuse into eternity.

TWIN SOULS

Reflection within a reflection
Light within a light
To be where you belong and present.

In my life I have met a lot of souls, whom I remember and know from previous lives.  Some of them have been my twin souls. Meeting those souls creates synchronicity and the feeling of being present. Even if those encounters are meant to be brief, they create a new impulse, help me better perceive my journey and make it more meaningful. 

All art (c) Reet Kalamees. Please visit her website, where you will find both prints and original artworks available. You can find some of her art with English commentary on this American site. 

Living the epic

Boulder, Colorado, and the wine-dark sea

"That's the end of it, my story. May the next who tells it tell it better."
    This is the way I once heard a traditional Irish storyteller conclude a spoken tale. What a lovely encouragement for us to improvise and claim the power of a story that calls us by making it our own.
     Great stories are like this. They are more than twice-told tales; they may be neverending in their variants. Over the past two weeks, I've been recalled by dreams, bursting through in synchronicity, reincidence and mythic irruptions in daily life, to revisit the world of the epic poems beloved of the Greeks and of many who have heard them since.  I dreamed I discovered an epic poem, in a neat typescript of maybe 200 pages, that I had started composing in 1987. This seemed just-so. I emerged from that dream feeling that the epic was complete; it was just a matter of reclaiming those pages and getting them to the write people. Why 1987? Well, that was a year when I started keeping very copious and detailed journals that helped me to write my way through a period of immense shamanic crises of ordeal and initiation that involved braving monsters and sirens and clashing rocks, on the inner planes and sometimes in the physical world too.
     I dreamed that I had brought through a book - perhaps the same one - that delighted me and many others, and that this accomplishment had required me to make an offering in words. So I composed a short poem ("Sing in me, creative spirit") that I offered last weekend in a fire ceremony in the midst of a circle of 30 active dreamers on the mountain where we have been gathering for many years.
     Reflecting on all we have shared on that mountain last Sunday, many of us recalled the weekend we devoted to bringing alive the wild odyssey of Jason and the Argonauts in quest of the mysterious Golden Fleece. We thrilled to the tale of passion, sorcery and jealousy in the romance of Jason and Medea. I found myself cast in the role of Phineus, once a king and always a truth-seer, who was punished by the gods because he always aw true and thus exposed secrets of heaven. They set the Harpies on him, to steal his food and crap on the remnants, until Argonauts drove the Harpies away. No shortage of volunteers in our group to play those Harpies!
     Though the best-known version of the Argonautica comes from the Greeks - specifically from the Hellenistic writer Apollonius Rhodius - the story is much, much older, at least as old as a Hittite tablet from the 14th century BCE, now in an Ankara museum, that contains a tale remarkable similar to that of Jason and Medea. And since Apollonius (and before Hollywood) there have been other retellings that are worthy of close study. In my favorite used bookstore in my home neighborhood, last week I chanced upon a book that had just been paced in New Arrivals: David Slavitt's remarkable translation of the Argonautica of Gaius Valerius Flaccus, composed in the 1st century.
     Little is known of Valerius except that he was a member of the group that had custody of the Sibylline Books and the supervision of foreign cults. His special knowledge must have helped him to present fascinating descriptions of many ancient modes of divination. And he is no slouch at describing what happens when a goddess becomes enraged! Through his lines - as rendered into supple, sinewy English by Slavitt - I was transported to the nightmare battle at Cyzicus, and into a dream of Hercules grieving for his lost boyfriends, and to the deck of the Argo on stormy seas, hearing Athena's voice in the timbers of the ship she has infused with her power.
     In all the versions that count, those early poets and storytellers remembered to invoke the Muse. Valerius calls on Clio, the muse of history, as well as Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. Famously, Homer begins the Odyssey with the words

Sing in me, O Muse, of the man of many ways.

The adventures of the Argonauts are rich, and the mystery of the Golden Fleece - stripped from a ram that could take its rider flying and swimming - is something to dream on. Yet Jason, sent on a suicide mission by a paranoid tyrant, is a less interesting protagonist than Odysseus, the homecoming warrior who must be healed and cleansed in the world of the Feminine, and transit a land of dreams, before he can reach his native shore, where his hardest ordeal, that of truly coming home, yet awaits him.

with Odysseus at the Boulder Bookstore

So when I arrived at the Boulder Bookstore on Thursday evening to read poems in my new collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming, I was delighted to be welcomed at the desk by a young lady named Athena. "Where's Odysseus?" I demanded, recalling how he was guided and saved by that goddess. "Odysseus is in the store," said a manager. "I'll call him." Within minutes, Odysseus appeared, a well-built young man with the flowing hair and beard appropriate for "the strong-greaved Achaeans, breakers of horses." He works for the bookstore. How did he come by the name of Odysseus polytropos, the "man of many ways"? his parents lived in Greece and chose his name.
     There are moments when it is impossible not to notice that powers of the deeper worlds are pushing through the curtain walls of our consensual hallucinations, enjoy interplay with humans. When I arrived at the Gaiam TV studios on Friday morning to record an interview, I was offered a cup of espresso by a young lady named Gaia, with a magnificent tattoo of the great Earth Goddess on her arm. Then I was introduced to a studio producer whose middle name is Icarus. "I hope you don't fly too close to the sun," I quipped. He heard me, and raised me. "I don't think Icarus fell to earth," he told me. "He shed something and went on shining."
     That's my Boulder epic, for now. May the next installment be even better.

Lorenzo Costa's version of the Argo (16th century)