The Man with the Moon & the Woman with the Sun

Paris, 10th arrondissement

There they are, on a little grassy island where the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis meets the Boulevard du Magenta, a few blocks north of the place where I am staying and leading an adventure in Active Dreaming in Paris this weekend. I admire them from all angles, recalling Yeats' lines

Though I am old with wandering
through hollow land and hilly land
I will find out where she has gone
and kiss her lips and take her hands

and walk among long dappled grass
and pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun

And I am thinking that the Turkish sculptor Cem Sagbil must have a fine instinct for how things operate in regions of the mythic universe that I have come to know well, and that work for me. I am one of the most lunar men you are likely meet (not to be confused, I hope, with "lunatic"). I have traveled much in the astral realm of Luna, and conversed with some of its more interesting residents. I have led shamanic group journeys to this realm. In my life I have been blessed to be balanced and warmed by the energy of the Solar Feminine. I resonate with traditions in which the Sun is a Goddess, as in Japan (Amaterasu), and the Baltic (Saule) and among many Australian Aboriginal peoples, and where the Moon is a male deity or at least a leading man to the Moon Goddess.
    I wander on into marché Saint-Quentin and admire glorious displays of cheeses and charcuterie, impossibly fresh and glistening fish, live eels and flowers that promise "20 Ans de Passion", Twenty Years of Passion. I buy a bag of cherries and munch them for breakfast, before coffee and croissant. I have to go back to the Moon Man and the Sun Woman and have my photo taken standing between them, balanced or otherwise, juggling dreams and spheres.
     This feels like the gentle beginning, in the Parisian spring sunlight, of another of the mythic irruptions that have stirred and confirmed or redirected my life. I like the word "irruption", which means a "bursting through". A mythic irruption, in my personal lexicon, is when archetypal powers of a deeper world break through the curtains of our ordinary perception and consensual hallucinations and carry us into a deeper game. This can be profoundly subversive of regular plans and expectations, of course. It can come as a blessing, as when we feel that an unseen hand has been placed over us, to protect, or that a sacred guide and ally is coming through - under many masks, or naked to our view (if we are able to look) - to help us find our way, as Athena came to Odysseus and spoke through a beam of the ship called Argo.
     So, on a lovely spring day in Paris, I give thanks for the day, and for the sense of the imminence of powers of the Otherworld within this one.  And I reflect that part of the practice of living consciously at the center of the multiverse is to be myth-prone, or even mythopoeic: to be willing to engage with those deeper powers, and in doing to make anew the myths worth living and reliving, telling and retelling, in the neverending, never static story of the interplay between humans and the more-than-human.