This Bodily Love Of Being Alive

(A favorite piece of writing, a re-posting from my Wordpress blog: The Oracle of Error)

I love the photo my friend sent of being at the ocean, especially fun to see his wife's sandy toes and feet, like she has been freely immersed in playing at the water's edge; so much ease in her stance that speaks to the ease in all of us. Beyond her repose is the steady grounding and holding of the sand bluff, strata of a timeless tempo of change above such temporary tents our housekeeping makes at ocean's edge. I can feel my toes responding--such a primal memory of feet and the grit of sand, salt water, and sun, a liberation into my childhood memories of the beaches of Lake Michigan and later the Pacific.

I've learned a somatic word for this, "resourcing," the felt sensation of intrinsic relaxation, comfort, well-being, and safety, the body knowing what it needs to do in this world, to be open to experience: the visceral love of being alive, the here and nowness we are, the resonance of always presencing in body memory, waves of endless paralleling patterns arising for the tasting, self-similar at any scale, out of the cradle, endlessly rocking, every breath moving us more deeply in the world we came with, the rippling tide of our being spreading wide and swimming on.

The Feather River of my childhood comes as if calling, cold, green, and deep, the channel between rocks, the narrow beach, and above all, the cold, cold baptism of the mountain river, my middle sister's lips blue with so many hours of immersion as we dove again and again and let the water carry us, so quick a rushing, so deep between the solid rocks, the watery plume traveling betwixt and between, the thread of human lives in everyday living: passage; rocky holes borne into the stony lining of the storied river banks, where the Native Americans ground acorn meal, the later boring of nomadic miners, sluicing the water, glints of gold in the grains of sand, then great hydraulic piles of rock and dirt, displaced earth heaping like stone stupas of industrial prayer-making. The lost land beneath Lake Oroville, and then the stratifying incinerations in all directions that perhaps history will sift through, remembering--

this sword of fire, seeds of embryonic return floating like ash, sticking in the spiraling body of the always present dreamtime, openings found in the rock, glyphs and food appearing again, water flowing underground, the circling passage into the heart of living out of the darkness of the edge, the ouroboros horizon around Eve's apple, the mirroring world we fall mesmerized into, the serpent goddess, Chavva, who bore life in all its bifurcated cosmetic chaos, treading from the sea of origin, shiny with the dawning.

Time's up! Interruption--

A neighboring blower starts like a chain saw to aerosolize the dust and debris of our living. Let us breathe in the complications of being human . . . without tension, without holding back, present to what's there without shoveling it into the burying-ground ditch of dissing-stress, hear the time signaling the slower tempo of weekending, the orchestrating mercy relaxing the quickening tempo, a klaxon of annunciatory change, time in its human weather and ritual garb, the man on the dump sifting definite articles indefinitely while the moon rises in the empty sky: welcome home. *

Um, okay, to try to return to some grounding--

So far the day isn't too hot! though last night I was talking with a neighbor, who said there was a 20% chance of rain, which isn't materializing in this moment--so watering and the resourcing power of watery experiences will have to suffice for now . . . and grace and gratitude for a milder day so far.

My poetry group met Wednesday and instead of our usual workshopping poems we've each written and sent to each other, we are taking a little summer break and shared reading some favorite poems.

And I read a poem by Janice Zerfas, she wrote a poem about one of my photographs for Rattle Magazine's Ekphrastic challenge, May 2018. I loved her poem--I got to pick it as my favorite for them to publish, which was fun. I am very drawn to ekphrastic art/poetry; images evoking poetry in me quite a lot. https://www.rattle.com/facial-recognition-by-janice-zerfas/

* Note:
A tiny pun, i can never resist the mythos of endless punning echoes, the return of infinite life in every word's self-similar repetition, that fracturing into infinite possibility, the aptest currency of a-riving presence--see Wallace Steven's poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43434/the-man-on-the-dump
Or perhaps as Joseph Rael said in The House of Shattering Light, we are all fractured light. As rainbows are the water of light congealed and riven, the circle is cornered and squared in the circle of time as the sun and body of earth are always finding annual corners in their dance at solstice and equinox; pendulating stopping stands and swiftly shifting turning balances, places of transfiguration, plexes of hinging, the shifting rhythms plucked and plaited into the rhymes of qualitative time--words are the plectrum plucking the instrument of time's braiding resonance of rhymes, the swift planchet of happenstance that hammers meaning out of meandering.

all those p-words from an old Indo-European root, plak, meaning flat, but flooding out into a whole concourse plain of meanings.

And this turned into quite a word ramble, I seem to have increasing challenges containing a torrent of imagery into words these days--I keep trying to turn this into a short message, but it won't . . .

every time I try to end this more insists on popping out . . . I keep staring at it, but nothing for it, but to post or not--

but if my shadecast model is the pythoness herself, snaky forked-tongue girl, on her triple-toed tripod, inhaling the narcotizing chthonic vapors from the crevices of her infernal cavern, intoning the gibberish where all truthtellings begin--a counter-part to the man on the dump and my other mentor, that raving slut . . .

"A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

W.B. Yeats, from "The Circus Animal's Desertion"

then i'll post it.

And of course, a song for it all: "Mystery" by Beth Orton: