Healing at Hell's Gate

I'm glancing at a directory of "25 places with healing powers" at an excellent nurse practitioners' website. My eye slides over the familiar and over-touristed places (Stonehenge, Macchu Picchu etc) but pauses at "Hell's Gate." Now that's an intriguing name for a place of reputed healing!

I slip over to the Hells' Gate site and discover that this is a geothermal park in New Zealand, run by a Maori tribe, with the hottest waterfall in the Southern Hemisphere. It was given its name by George Bernard Shaw, the English playwright and wit, who - though an atheist - speculated that the steaming hot falls could be the gate to the Inferno. The Maori name for those falls is more original, and no less cautionary, than Hell's Gate: they are called O Te Mimi O Te Kakahi, which means The Urine of Kakahi, a legendary warrior who came here to heal his wounds, renew his energy and look into the future.

The hot pool of Hurutini derives its name from a more sinister story. Hurutini was a Maori princess who killed herself by throwing herself into the boiling waters after being shamed and abused by her husband, a local chief. The Maori name for the whole park - Tikitere, meaning Precious One - is derived from her mother's lament.

I can't vouch for the claimed benefits of the mud baths and hot sulphurous waters of this place. But I'm reminded of an undoubted place of ancient healing with close ties to the powers of the Underworld: the pool at Bethesda, where Jesus told the lame man to get up and walk. I write about the long association of Bethesda with deities of the Underworld, especially Serapis, in the chapter titled "The Angel That Troubles the Waters" in my Secret History of Dreaming.

Kahaki falls, Tikirere geothermal park, New Zealand

On a state of almost indescribable busy-ness

When people ask me, "How are you?" I am more and more inclined to include this truthful phrase in my answer: "I am almost indescribably busy."

Playing witness to myself, let me observe what I am doing here - and was doing long before I became fully aware I was doing it.

Since I am a writer and love to play with words, I cannot truthfully state that I am unable to describe how busy I am. I might say, that on my "day off" today, after leading three back-to-back workshops right after doing the Coast to Coast AM radio show live from 3-5 AM on Friday, I am:

- writing and editing a book that I must deliver before the end of August
- walking the dog
- working actively towards publication of two new works of fiction
- arranging publication of my first collection of poetry
- paying bills
- writing 4 articles for my two blogs (this one and my Dream Gates blog at Beliefnet)
- journaling
- buying groceries
- bringing myself back up to speed on my e-course for Spirituality & Health which has a global interactive forum that never sleeps
- playing travel agent and conference planner and hotel reservations clerk for several upcoming trips and programs
- fielding a few hundred email and FB messages
- doing my Synchronicity Walk, when I gather pop-up symbols and messages from the world around me
- reading several books at once
- having 8-9 conversations with the builders who are working on new steps for my house
- doing online research
- making sure I have at least one good deep uninterrupted conversation with my brilliant. deep-thinking daughter who is home for the summer
- getting ready to lead future seminars and trainings that sometimes require me to spend 12-14 contact hours a day with my students

ENOUGH!

The point is that once you start making an inventory of your busy-ness, you give up time and energy and can succeed in laying yourself and your unfortunate listeners flat. .

I will probably never inflict a list of this kind on myself, let alone readers or listeners, again.

Which leads me back to the virtue of being almost indescribably busy.

On any day but this - when I am breaking my general rule to deliver a cautionary tale - I could always tell you in how many ways I am busy, but I won't do it.

Haven't you noticed how people who aren't doing all that much can never seem to find time or energy to do just one thing more? By contrast, people who are truly busy can always manage to do one thing more - as long as they don't slow down to tell you how busy they are...

The bridge

I am the bridge between the tame land and the wild.
I was made by your hands but I am
the making and unmaking of your kind.

If you fear the crossing I narrow and heave..
If you seek to avoid what is on the other side
I will meet you halfway, in the form you most fear.

- Great Hollow CT, July 25, 2010

The badger and the poet

Thanks to American poet Jennifer Moxley, I've added a word to my vocabulary for what can go on inside and around the process of making poetry. The word, in French, is blaireau, and its literal translation is "badger", which immediately brings to mind that fierce and tenacious creature that lives under hedges and won't let go of something it has in its teeth and claws - which could be useful qualities in literary composition, if not overdone.
     But in the usage of the French poet Emmanuel Hocquart, as explained by Moxley in a postscript to her vividly aphoristic Fragments of a Broken Poetics, "badger" has a special and intriguing meaning:

"It is a way to designate those activities in D.I.Y. poetic circles of doing and making things that are not obviously valuable. The name badger" comes from an analogously useless activity: cutting off of all the hairs on a man's shaving brush (traditionally made of badger hair), and then, one by one, gluing them back on. In his book Ma haie [My Hedge], Hocquard has termed this method of poetry and bookmaking "la méthode Robinson" ("the Crusoe method")—that is, an activity, a result, or a concept, all of which look—to any outsider, non-poet type—"ridiculously useless," "private and solitary," and "outrageously speculative and experimental."*

Come to think of it, as I've been bringing together a collection of my own poetry and contemplating fonts and papers and graphic designs, I've had moments of crazy and random delight when the process has felt a little like pulling the hairs off the badger brush and then gluing them back on, though I doubt that this analogy that would have occurred to me spontaneously, outside a dream.

*Jennifer Moxley, "Fragments of a Broken Poetics" Chicago Review Spring 2010

Dreaming by the Book

My in-flight reading on a recent trip to California included Dreaming by the Book by Elaine Scarry, a professor of aesthetics at Harvard. It’s an inquiry into the magic of narrative and poetry that draws the reader into a vivid multisensory experience through the agency of little black marks on a white page. For example, she analyzes how certain writers conjure belief in the solidity of a wall by streaming fleeting or filmy shapes across it. Locke says that in the everyday operations of perception, the notion of solidity “hinders our further sinking downward” – so we are confident of the floor or sidewalk we are walking on.

Some kinds of reading alter the way we see. I looked out the window of my taxiing plane and saw the sun hammer the window of a control tower into a shaman's bronze mirror, flashing light. As the plane came down, its shadow ran beneath us on the tarmac far below, tiny at first but growing fast as we dropped. We flew into our shadow, like lovers rushing into each other's embrace. When we paused for breath, the shadow of our wing erased the yellow line on the landing strip. Beyond the shadow, there were no boundaries.

On the edge of San Francisco Bay that weekend, the legacy of the storm erased solid ground and constructed buildings in the sky. Great puddles of water, shallow but wide and silver-bright, lay on the cement of the Fort Mason docks. They opened windows into a mirror world. Brick by brick, the buildings were meticulously reconstructed, rising towards scudding clouds in a blue sky far below. I was walking at the edge of a limitless drop. One inch to the right, and I would be falling into the sky.

Goethe's colors

This year is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Goethe's Zür Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) in 1810. Goethe was inordinately proud of his achievement in producing this vast tome. He stated “I am the only person in this century who has the right insight into the difficult science of colors...and that is what gives me the feeling that I have outstripped many.”

His sense of accomplishment was not misplaced. While Newton (for example) had viewed color perception as a physical phenomenon, the effect of light striking objects and entering our eyes, Goethe realized that it is also shaped by perception, which involves the way our brains process data. Goethe studied how colors produce somatic and emotional effects in the perceiver. His work on after-images, colored shadows and complementary colors was a major influence on artists and occultists. He anticipated Hering’s “opponent-color” theory, which is one basis of our modern understanding of the perception of colors.


The first plate of Zür Farbenlehre includes a color wheel and diagrams of distorted color perception. The landscape at the bottom depicts how a scene would look to someone who was blue-yellow color blind. Thanks to Tom Cheetham for alerting me to this.

Work as play, or, A Tale of Six Tea Bags

I love it when people turn work into play. Even better when they give themselves and others a lift by doing more, in an improvisational way, than could possibly be asked of them in a job.

Case in point, from a recent flight on Southwest:

The woman next to me asks the young male flight attendant for hot tea. He returns with a selection of six Stash tea bags as well as the standard-issue Earl Grey and chamomile.

"My goodness," my rowmate gasps. "I'm amazed that Southwest has such a wide selection."

"Oh, they're not standard issue," the flight attendant responds. "I just thought that passengers deserve a wider selection than Southwest supplies, so I bring these from the airline hotels where they put us up overnight."

I congratulated the flight attendant, with strong appreciation, for his initiative - and for turning his work into play. He responded by giving me a free drink. Full marks to him, and to Southwest for choosing its staff so well.

At the end of that flight, the fellow at the car rental desk asked if I was in his town on business or pleasure. "I don't make that distinction anywhere in my life," I told him. That is simple truth.

He cocked his head and asked, "Are you a writer?"

"That's a pretty good guess. How did you come up with that?"

"I was trying to think what kind of job you would have if your work was your play."

The Southwest flight attendant's performance with the tea bags suggests that the answer can be: ANY job.