The next little big project...

Maybe making a rough cover for my next collection will get me going on the re-writes? Sometimes you just have to put stuff in a drawer (ie, a computer file) for a year. 8-Sided Drum is hybrid and intended as a chapbook. I've limited it to eight pieces and keep changing my mind about what fits and what doesn't. Since anything goes with hybrid, the choices and order are a challenge. The title came about as I worked on repairing my octagonal drum, which was coming apart at the frame. Everything's a metaphor.

#chapbook #hybridwriting #bibliophile

Recipe for a New Year's Ritual

This ceremony was enacted for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Alamosa, Colorado and the article appeared on the blog, "Postcards from Shamans", January 2019.

    The word “ceremony” in its original Latin form is “awe”. Repeated behaviors related to reverence and awe, with a sense of connecting to powers greater than us – this is Ritual. 

In its true form, ritual is one of the most meaningful channels for our awe and sense of worship. A ritual can be defined as a symbolic behavior consciously performed. It is a physical act that affirms the practitioner's intention and represents a change in inner attitude.

    Robert Johnson, a Jungian therapist, writes about working with Active Imagination in Inner Work. He tells us that to cement our intention, the body, feelings, and intellect must be simultaneously involved. In other words, to manifest, our thoughts must enter into the emotions, muscles, and cells of the body. To bring our thoughts into material form we can start with the metaphor of ritual.

    Rituals and ceremonies, in general, are ways of using small symbolic acts to set up a connection between the conscious mind and the unconscious. They provide us a way of taking principles from the unconscious and impressing them vividly on the conscious mind. But rituals also have an effect on the unconscious. A meaningful ritual sends a powerful message back to the unconscious, causing changes to take place at that deeper level where our attitudes and values originate.

                            Here is a step-by-step recipe for a New Year's ritual:

1. Place candles on the floor in a circle. Colored candles mark the cardinal points and the elements (use a compass if necessary) north/earth/white; east/air/yellow or green; south/fire/red; west/water/ blue or black. 

2. Place a black bucket, vase, or cauldron filled with water in the center of the circle.

 

3. Pass around small stones to everyone in the group. If there is a child or children in the group, give them this role. Each person takes two stones. 

 

4. The facilitator then points out the basic archetypal elements of earth-based ritual: In the group, there may be people who symbolize the dualities of male and female, young and old, so we act as priests and priestesses. We have the cardinal directions. We have a circle of power. We have the elements: water, fire (candles), earth (stones), and air (our breath). 

5. One stone is held in the left hand, one in the right. To change the idea of the left always symbolizing negative, dark, and feminine, the right as being right, bright, and male, think of placing the stone of the past in your least dominant hand, the stone of the future in your dominant hand.

6. Think, not in the abstract, but with words you can hear in your head, or pictures you can see, the things of the past year that you want to let go of, realizing that to make space for the new, you are letting some things go. You should focus on one thing, that way your INTENT will be stronger. If you feel comfortable whispering or saying it out loud please do, because the closer we get from a thought to a physical action, the more powerful the act. 

7.When you are ready, blow those things, whether a habit, toxic relationships, belongings taking up space, or whatever you want to release from your life...into the stone you hold in your least dominant hand: the stone of the Past. 

8. Then toss the stone into the caldron of black water. It's ok to make a little splash. Watch the stone and your negative things disappear into the darkness.

9. Say aloud as a group chant: “It is done. It is done. It is done.” Three times is fine. 

10. With the stone of the Future, think of, or say, what you want to manifest in this new year. It doesn't have to be logically connected in any way to what you're leaving behind, because all things are intrinsically connected. Psychic space has been made for the new to enter. Blow that thing into the stone.

11. Chant: “It has come. It is come. It is come.” 

12. Put the stone in your pocket and handle it often. This will remind you that the next step is an actual manifestation through your own small actions toward those goals. Feeling the stone will also remind you to give gratitude for the future manifestation and have faith that it will be accomplished.

Hugs all around and wish each other a "Happy New Year!"

~ Blessed Be ~

Photo Credit: Rajesh Ram, Unsplash

Silencio

Poems and stories can arise from the oddest prompts. This one came by way of a call from a women's publication (The Ethel) for an essay on "My Favorite Thing".  Immediately picturing a scene from "The Sound of Music", I knew I couldn't produce anything so corny, but I did start thinking about one of my favorite things: Silence. I performed it at the Mesa Verde Writers Conference last summer.    

                                                                 Silencio

Silencio. Seduction whispered in Spanish

Silencio. The seconds separating lightning from thunder 

Oh-dark-hundred in the pre-dawn desert 

Streets muffled with snow

Sand dunes mute in starlight

A cenote’s cerulean depth

The sun eclipsed.

Silencio. After the baby finally falls asleep

Silencio. Between a flutist’s inhale and the note

The breath you hold as your daughter raises the flute to her lips

The theater’s hollow hush when rehearsal ends

Smoke from the last cigarette 

Spilled wine, blood-bright, seeping into a linen tablecloth

A brush about to touch canvas, the painting titled, “Still Life with Stopped Clock.”

Silencio. A legend about insanity should you linger in the quietest room ever built 

Silencio. The E.R. with no patients at 3 a.m. 

Old cemeteries; empty cathedrals; sitting Zazen 

Your dying mother opening her eyes and smiling 

Night so deadened you hear your own heartbeat 

Yet, Silence is impossible to know… 

The inner ear’s white noise a song that will never abandon you

Photo credit: Michael Frye Photography

 We all remember our first love. It's been decades since mine left me behind. But three months ago, he showed up in a dream so intense, I had to respond. Hence this poem. I just heard he's recently passed on...

                                                  You Are Still Seventeen

                You are still seventeen

                When you slide into the pool of my dream

                Bare-chested, smooth-faced

                Dark hair slicked to one side

                You reach across the water

                I am still fifteen

                When you lace long fingers through mine

                A surgeon’s hands, I say

                You read my palm

                An artist’s hands, you say

                You would be seventy-five today

                Why have you swum out to visit me at 3am

                The last morning of September?

                To say you’re sorry? To say goodbye?

                I will always love you

                    photo credit: Darran Shen, Unsplash

 This is Haibun, a form created by the famous Haiku poet, Basho. It consists of 1-3 paragraphs of prose poem in first person and ends with a haiku that sums up or relates to the narrative prose. Themes are travel, time, and place. American Haibun is less rigid in its requirements, but I liked the challenge of the traditional form. I recently had to opportunity to stay at a retreat center in Colorado and this poem arose from the experience. If you're curious about Chod, here's a link to my article: 

https://www.spiritualityhealth.com/feeding-your-demons

                        

Upon Encountering a Ghost at Red Jewel Mountain Monastery

My winter solstice sanctuary is a one-room guest house behind the Buddhist temple where raveling prayer flags beseech the wind. I hobble the stoney path between here and there, to meet the nuns. We practice Chöd, feeding our demons in an ancient Tibetan ritual of drums, bells, chants, and visions. 

I’ve spoken only once to the wine-robed women this week, so perhaps that’s the reason an old young lover visits in a morning dream. He folds his slender white body over mine like a blanket; he curls against my spine as if it were possible to warm himself. Why do I apologize to him, after all these years, when it should be the other way around?

Peaceful and Wrathful

Deities stare down from the walls

All of them are me

photo credit: Sylwia Bartyzel, Unsplash 

Northwind Writing Award

The top ten winners of the Northwind Writing Award are featured in this anthology. "She Who Hears" has been published again. If you've read it before, it's in good company here, so I hope you can read the entire collection. Thank you to tara and Candice of Raw Earth Ink for organizing the competition, publishing and supporting our work.

 

The 2024 Northwind Treasury is now available

Here are the links:

 Lulu

Amazon (US)

 Kindle

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                ART FOR

TRANSFORMATION

Curious about shamanic art? WINTER ROSS dives into a practice to explore your own mind.