Wind and Water

The High Priestess

art by Laura Borealisis

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar

"...I'd been here before, my eyes misting up like the white fog hugging these forested cliffs, unfettered for the first time, feeling like maybe the breast was coming to my own messy face, not just for milk, but as a subtle home for my desires, luring me like a trumpet flower, asking me to leave what I knew and become the shiny bird I had to be." ~ Martín Prechtel

Paragon Twin Flame

Through worlds,
through worlds vast
i have sought your face
searching the stars glimmering
jeweled net of majesty
for the paths through the wild
to the heart of a jungle untouched
i skywalked the path of Venus
8 year pentacle in my steps
took to the air-
blue eagle winging
steep peaks of alien climes
priestess i
climb these 13 steps to completion
have lain in the temple
solstice anointed
and parted space time
between these thighs
for you my hanabku reflection
to sit as kuhul ajaw in heaven
within me
seeding a new earth
we orbit the ages
spinning in this dance of creation
fill the quartz basin
and scry story-branching possibility
owl cries through the wood
i cry out in the voice of birds
across the water
crystals bursting from my skin
as the serpent twines higher
dreamspell mage angel
your eyes held mine
as the moon moved my waves
to the final shore
through worlds,
through worlds vast
i seek your face

cyclic muse

sunrise - sunset
these days i see both
pink glow resting atop trees
beginning and end
today the sun finds tears on my cheeks
to sparkle through
eyes blurring with emotion
a suddenly flurry like snowflakes in April
here then gone
as her words soothe my heart
i pull up from deep roots
and spiral outward
sheltering my children
under soft curved wings
orphan heart little mother
wearing smiles like crescent boats
to sail into a new future

The Vacant Present

My head      is full of sand
     it sifts through
                the cracks
in my skull  a pale rain  of grit
    f a l l i n g slowly
            over my body

This all happened   after
       my mind
    expanded
               so much
i had to rent it
           it's own apartment
  across town

I really don't
    miss it
as much as i thought   i would
   i have so much    more space now
  for nothing
        and no one.

"It is possible we do not yet understand the true pathology of homesickness...
Have wood, field, rock, and stream vested in us something of theirs? -E.M.Thomas

Head-sick, Heart-sick, Home-sick
days sliding by with the orbs across the sky
closed eyes
I open my mouth to speak and the words stick.
Woods-sick, through these walls the forest calls
& and I can find no rest
in my mind from the siren music
mantra haunting dryad's song
as I struggle to find the difference
between myself and stone
so far from home
in my dreams my heart has flown
to the places of the wild
pathways of the child
reaching roots deep into sweet earth
circling rebirth on wings of light
golden flight ignites heart fire
ascension with both feet on the ground
song of my heart resounds
through this land
don't want to wake from this bliss
gentle kiss of dreamscape
lovers tryst arrayed in green
curve of stream, wonder dream
transcendent state of being
crazy things I've wished wash over me
& flow away, blow away,
leaves in the wind
lost friends
on the this winding road with no end
dawn & we begin again, alone.
Head-sick, Heart-sick, Home-sick
broken dreams subvert this perfect Universe
convert beyond religion
to converse with the stars
echoing eternal inferno.

Laura B~2007

The Face of Gaia

How can my tongue not sing with joy
on a day so dearly blessed?
spring flowers burst from
mossy tree roots
& the face of gaia is my smiling reflection.

Heart Growth

pure coeur
anahata green my fields stretch
to embrace forest
horizon kissing sky

Nexus

here the air smells of heather and bracken
the bread of our Mother's hearth
moss and loam gloaming
fragrance drunk i sing unbidden
pausing in the rain to remember myself
before crossing the stoop
worn by myriad foot passages
here in my inner room
shadows fall heavy against brilliance
grey alive with rainbow tone poems
my being a totem of love
fingers grazing surface
i gasp grasp
breath with gratitude
calm lapping ripples out
relax into bliss
this haven for a wildheart unbroken
enfolds
and i dance-
limbic tree-wise wind-woken
shift tetonic
i quake awake
as gaia serves on these plates
bittersweet lessons to we students of the moment
a single child born of stars
i dance-
cloud-swift limbic systematized resonance
vortex cortex
interpretations of motion
this loom weaving rhythms
this womb of Man bleeding with the moon
i dance-
stylized reality
bolding your italics
rune-writ sans-script
i've transformed perception to house
new thought
processing your circuitry
i've mapped this place like a blind man
honed vision
on the stones of experience
i raise humble altars
pour myself as libation
laid prostrate before Divinity
endless mantra of liquid gold
pours from my lips
musical composition
scarab vishudda
speaking my True Being
here, threshold of the event horizon
the air smells of primal creation
rose heart aflame
seeds and ashes
we effloresce on the precipice
poised against dawn remembrance
heart of my heart
i am
how far i have traveled
to find you here again within me
entered silent and sure
subtle knife carving doors
your entrance reshapes my Temple
i -suddenly- am open to our union
your love moves through layers
dust flies motes displaced
laid bare i stand
pale rose blooming for the Sun
i shed this skin
return my bones earthward
and rise in this vision only light
alive only in dream
while your love typed long letters
on the pages of my heart
and left them
crumpled and rustling in the wind
by a window just visited by rain
here inside my room of self
eyes awash
i pause to remember myself
gasp grasp
deep breaths of gratitude
here the air smells of heaven
cedar smoke rising from my heart
moss and loam gloaming
now pausing as cherry blossoms
drift across my path
i remember myself
as an angel
here in  my inner dream
i habitate the wild
rainbow prism bones
i dance-
for the Ancestors
my being a totem of love
finger-forming i reform this Temple
with gratitude
calm-encased drifting astral streaming
breath ripples out
this creation
i dance-
bird-like wing crest
dissolves into wave hitting sand
smudge my heart with the smoke of ancient wisdom
i purify this land
a single child born of stars
i dance
in my empty house
free bliss movements of moments
for the joy of being
alive

Tea Time

Art by Saliwanchik

High time for a cupa tea, methinks...

Roger Dean

 

The Library of Babel

By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters... The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant. Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible. There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms. First: The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, cannot be placed in doubt by any reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical. Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number. (1) This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids. This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm ... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.) For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite different from the one we now speak; it is true that a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the following one and that the value of MCV in the third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not prevail. Others thought of cryptographs; generally, this conjecture has been accepted, though not in the sense in which it was formulated by its originators. Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (2) came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books. When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero. At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity's basic mysteries -- the origin of the Library and of time -- might be found. It is verisimilar that these grave mysteries could be explained in words: if the language of philosophers is not sufficient, the multiform Library will have produced the unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and grammars. For four centuries now men have exhausted the hexagons ... There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything. As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous sect suggested that the searches should cease and that all men should juggle letters and symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books. The authorities were obliged to issue severe orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I have seen old men who, for long periods of time, would hide in the latrines with some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine disorder. Others, inversely, believed that it was fundamental to eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons, showed credentials which were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves: their hygienic, ascetic furor caused the senseless perdition of millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those who deplore the ``treasures'' destroyed by this frenzy neglect two notable facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or a comma. Counter to general opinion, I venture to suppose that the consequences of the Purifiers' depredations have been exaggerated by the horror these fanatics produced. They were urged on by the delirium of trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and magical. We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god. In the language of this zone vestiges of this remote functionary's cult still persist. Many wandered in search of Him. For a century they have exhausted in vain the most varied areas. How could one locate the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? Someone proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A's position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity ... In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe; (3) I pray to the unknown gods that a man -- just one, even though it were thousands of years ago! -- may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified. The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the ``feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.'' These words, which not only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously prove their authors' abominable taste and desperate ignorance. In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters dhcmrlchtdj which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and useless epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons -- and its refutation as well. (An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?) The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret. I have just written the word ``infinite.'' I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope. (4)  ~Jorge Luis Borges

goddess

Art by Laura Borealisis

The Prophet

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
...And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, "Joy is greater thar sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

~ Kahlil Gibran 

Astral Perception

The Jewel in the Lotus

 

 

The Mantra of Bliss is:

I Am everything... 

he immortal glory of the moment-

my astral body is infinitely
divided  into one magnificent whole
      I am the way of Wonder
      I am the words of the Sun
Oh, dawn...heal me anew
      the wings of angels have brushed through my dreams
             and the light rises speaking truest being-
Unbegotten child of the Cosm
   bring us Miracles
from the boundless crypts of our souls

We are the circular circus of Wanderlust
     answering riddles of mind
and across the Universe
      a million voices of myself are calling me Home
           to I
perfect in the Eye of my beholder
  I stretching across the sky
rejoice in presence of astral saints
filling me as a vessel of Illumination
       to light dark paths
       and answer
       the call to Dance-

            
              

::rawr::

Blue Voyager

For I have seen the source of light and being a child
Whose tutor is love I will not grow up ignorant.
I will rise like a flame out love’s fire and become infinite like love.. ~Rumi

~art by Keith Spangle~

Revoluton

                   

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK

              

“ Psychological death is worse than physical death. ”
 ~An Egyptian Protester in response to questioning why they are risking their lives.

"we have brought down the regime!"

Rose of the Galaxies

today i am wandering
between worlds
uncertain where
the stars end
& i begin

girding my chakras
with scarabs & dragons
i am skywalking
on the music of the spheres
knowing no language
but love...

this ardent adoration
bursts from my heart
like infinite spring flowers
from the blessed surface of Gaia,
dancing in constant celebration
of the rain and the sun.
undone by the fragrance of countless flowering prayers
i weep with gratitude at the source of Love
for the miracle of Being.

i have effloresced into a glowing rose
sculpted from galaxies by gods at the dawn of the ages.

~xoxo~

The Storyteller

"We are resolved into the supreme air,
We are made one with what we touch and see,
With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair,
With our young lives each springimpassioned tree
Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change."

                                                                                                                      _{- Oscar Wilde}

Unabashed Electric Indigo

dimly remembered emotional lace
fragile connections
synchronized synapses
jeweled web of perception
dream weaving we walk
in heart toward eternity

Seven

 

 

Honey Thief

sipping my nectar from afar...
     celestial shapeshifter
  innocent bee
collecting source luminescence
 offered on this altar
i feed your need to breathe
ether twines
us whole
twin strangers
reflecting star hearted  
    nebulous dreamers
streaming astral across space
 face to face
to transform we preform
this seamless sacred dance
of divine flow
paragon shaman
with
hummingbird thirst
 for purest nectar
 ambrosia silk honey kiss
...illumination guiding starships
across constellated skyscapes
i in your i eternal archetypal angels
role form translations
dream weaving
speaking beyond language
seeking
a taste
of bliss
One moment beloved
hanging in surrender

                                                                    without beginning or end we take our leave
                                                                                      into the mobius path
                                                                                        of deepest unity
                                                                 rising a thousand petals bright eastern sun blazing
                                                                                      in the timeless vision
                                                                                           of the divine~

The skin of my emotions...

The Red Tent

Bringing honor and truth back to ways of woman and menstruation.
   

 

Interview with Jasmine Starchild on Blood Magic 
Metaformia: a journal of menstration culture
Red Moon: a Medicine Movement

in the flow...

Gaiadon Heart

 

As the man and the woman in me
unite in love,
the brilliance of beauty
balanced on the bi-petaled
lotus bloom in me
dazzle my eyes.
The rays outshine the Moon
and the jewels
glowing on the hoods of snakes.
My skin and bone
are turned to gold.
I am the reservoir of Love,
alive as the waves.
A single drop of water
has grown into a sea
unnavigable.

~Rosita Gatita

art by Valdimir Kush

Mind of Freedom

 

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

~Voltaire