A silk of quivering birds (anemones of sound, gliding out from universal anima), drift in through Hathorian gateways; tiny, triumphant gods of numinous rhythm come fluttering upon vast tides of vibrating light.
I am crowned in crimson rivers of their golden flight, swallowing the radiance of stars in their turbulent love, yet, watchful as my feathered journey-men dress me in fanciful visions of some grim, imagined human suffering.
PLEASE don’t try to imagine yourself taking a long, slow breath as you slipped right into your own comfort zone, that’s right, up….or down….(you can adjust it to fit), so you’ll be ready for your next step, or you could leave that idea just over there because it’ll be right where you left it when you come back to that.
Can’t you see what happens when you l i s t e n to your self relaxing, relaxing so easily… that your body is becoming so…. oh! but please don’t take that next step down now, not just yet…. because there’s some very important business to attend to first, and you could take a moment, (or a very long while), to notice the time, and you could really pay attention to your self when I ask you “How are you feeling now?”
Are you remembering to breathe?
You know, as you continue to Breathe, I wonder when you’ll discover just how automatically supported you are, really, that You’ll just keep Breathing in and out, so easily, that you can forget all about doing that and let yourself just keep remembering that your breathing is taking care of you, while you take a look at this….
Here it is,… here’s that picture of you, maybe you’ve been looking all over for it and it was there right in front of you, showing you exactly how you appear right now, gently making your way towards something that’s so important to you,… that’s right, just ahead, I hear you thinking, what’s that sound?, …it’s just audible enough to remind you to really notice how curious it is that time is slipping by like silk ribbons through your fingers and the sheer pleasure of discovering yourself drifting through time is something that you can enjoy in so many ways that remind you of what it is that you really wanted to get so clear about now, to discover all those new ideas that really inspired you and helped you to pay attention to the best ways that you create new choices, and how you’d already achieved all those goals.
If you’d listened now to the small sounds, to the tone of comfort that you’d already created for yourself, you might have heard the rhythm and the quality of your own resources, nourishing you with fresh and new ways to discover the increase in your energy so that you can enjoy it right now, and as you began travelling, and really lifted yourself in so many ways that stirred your creative abilities and your awareness with such purpose and attention that if you were to take just….one….more…breath, you would find yourself wide awake NOW… in a fragrant landscape of new opportunities, totally refreshed in the conscious realm of possibilities as you opened your mind to be fully here right now…
CROW
Circle-centre, wagon wheeled hub of ridicule. Lord of eyes and limbs of awkward innocence hidden in indigo richness of unfolded gifts. Self-stabbing, sharp craving suppression, aversion to echoed stones of stupid words aimed at the softest joy-heart of curious genius
Singled, for downpayment, out-cast for the part. Congealed, powered by surrendered thought. Driven under, mined into chaotic asylum
Brave small beauty, wander away now. Dance it out, all eyes to the open ground, nestled to the thump of loving crept so far close. Peace dreamer, drummed visions arcing, in this clear deep port of opportunity, gently, in widening strides of the circle centre
SPIRITUAL PEELINGS; HEXORCISMS, LOCATING ALL LOST and COSMIC KEYS WHILE-U-WAIT
If you would but wear me, I could drape your Dover bones in plump foldings of succulent heaviness, as a viscous river of fluid nectar flowing to moisten your cracking, shallow scrabble for joy.
Purely for your pleasure, I am a full-weighted sack of shiny toys, a playful charisma for your loneliness-show, a deep, full larder of festive feastings, a prime lubricant for your stiff and brittle pain .
Yessss, I will press you into so many glorious shapes that will dazzle and perk the brilliance of your imagination, that you could ever be so proudly ribboned, so boldly bolstered.
I will whet your dreams. Anoint you with such glorious, grainy colours, that you may sniff at the banquet of my death, that I have long prepared, honed, sliced and browned in these flagrant, flavoursome poverties and wandered forlorn in such grisly groans, to tempt, tedium upon tedium, until your moods could bind the mighty sun in ropes of bitter bile and I would fly, in tiny, tender, ancient pieces of me.
Free…
BOOK NOW!
The temperature changed quite dramatically as the light quickly faded into a close radiance of a single flame. Time ceased to exist, all sound had disappeared after the door to the outside world had been completely sealed. The tiny flame burned constantly in a small bowl of oil, maintaining it’s steady glow upon the smooth black basalt of an enormous figure of Osiris, a figure whose shadowy presence dictated the atmospheric purpose of the small chamber.
The dryness of the air caused a shallowness of breathing whilst in the chamber of Priests, and each hour dragged past in a confusion of time.“Was it day or night?” Long after the funeral procession had left the temple, the only sounds remaining in the underground chamber had been the soft shuffling of bare feet upon the white sand that lay scattered across the floor. Even these soft sounds seemed to be swallowed up in the heavily concentrated attention of the priests.
At an agreed stage of the procession, they had entered into a meditative silence which allowed them the opportunity to communicate in a far more complex and sophisticated language. Their thoughts flowed in a sharing of energies. The enormous stone sarcophagus lay in the centre of a sacred burial room, far above the chamber of Priests, and they commenced their ritual in a ceremony of preparation that would stretch into days and nights. All of their training would be necessary now to assist them in their long abstinence from food, water or rest. The High Priest made the first incision as a pungent smoke poured out from the clay censer, filling the chamber.
Each priest carried his own supply of precious unguents and anointing oils that were magically prepared from cedarwood, frankincense and myrrh, the expensive and small golden globules of tree-resins that were carried to Egypt from far away and ground into a fragrant paste of aromatic richness. Blending the bittersweet camphor-lemon smells with the overwhelming stench of an opened body was as familiar to the priests as the yeasty smell of new-baked bread is to the baker. Releasing the viscera, the High Priest made note of the way in which the man’s organs lay, checking the size and colour of his liver and heart, as the priest-scribe dutifully made his symbolic markings upon the papyrus. Each jar received it’s wrapped organs into a fluid of oils and resins that had been prepared especially for the purpose of preserving human tissue indefinitely.
As the priests completed their linen wrapping of the onwards journeying guest, they recognised that the time had finally come for them to make the resonant sounds of voices blended in a harmony of tones. A powerful sound that would vibrate and carry the soul of their guest into a tunnel of transformation, a powerful sound that would vibrate and carry the body of their guest up and into it’s enormous sarcophagus in the burial room above. Placing the magnificent death-mask upon the face and head of the now mummified body, the High Priest began to intone the long chant of initiation. His voice rose and fell in a rhythmic pattern of such commanded energies that each priest automatically aligned himself with the initiation chant and commenced a long and complicated cycle of tonal sound and sequenced breathing until all light faded, all time faded, and every atomic molecule within the chamber let go it’s agreed contract of orbital attraction and repulsion.
All tension fell away and a doorway opened into the subtle regions of the space in-between. Anubis maintained the fixed-design pattern sequence of every priest’s living essence as his chanting continued to hold the doorway open for them to journey through and alongside the body, up and into the sacred burial room. With satisfaction he noted that every initiate had easily accomplished the task. Bowing to their High Priest, the entourage completed the long ritual of the burial ceremony as Anubis offered his hand to the newly arising soul to follow him into the dark passageway and on into his next life. The remaining priests slid the lid of the stone sarcophagus closed and travelled smoothly out of the temple and into the dawning light of a new day.
My own silent and spectacular moon once roamed around, loosely in these open skies, scornful in her defiant gaze, full-faced and tilted at those supercilious wane charters, silvery, boldly sudden at all those predictably dark and brooding, cosmic arithmeticians, late and early and furtive as she pleased, blithely smooth and empty upon their waxing expectations. Her reckless cycles and syncopated tempos followed me into my own tidal dreams, my teeth shattered as her totemic snakes rose up and embraced me, petting and sweet in their sexual ardour, I danced in the wetness of each caress and fear found me, groaning in small shadowy burrows, while others played and murmured of their cheap-life winnings, bragged of their power, their impact upon the masses, their market reach, their effectiveness at being alive, and so in control. As I watched and puffed up my mind and body with hoarded snippets of the political bullshit, I learned fast to play dead. Stepping alongside that other world, I marvelled at their rules, the social games, costumes, masks and motivations, I eagerly limped and carted my limbs so awkwardly that they shuffled back and away from my touch and I smiled, just inside my mouth so they wouldn’t see, but the stretch marks remain there inside my teeth, just behind my face. The sorrow was so perfect. I clung to that blanket of doom and surfed the outer limits of a sleep so deep that an encounter group sprang up at my pillows, a sleeper’s anonymous, and a world was born. I created the hole of my own reality. A deep and ravenous black pit, sucked and sucked until I sighed and knew that it was high time to rise, because the light was so bright above me, and the clutter noise of that stalker-self, that witch-within was pacing, ravenous for my secrets, and I had lain there, terrified of those silent, empty and creeping eyes, until we met in secret, me and I, and we made a promise not to tell her about the moon. She would for certain rape the moon, sell and cut and eat my moon and I would wander forever in the moonlessness of an uninitiated blackness, and I could never afford to give away so much power again.
I am eating you.
Just now I swam to the surface of this page, I smelled the warmth and the sugar of your blood the instant that your hand made contact upon these words, and even now I roar and leap to watch your curiosity bring you close enough that I could stretch out my rasping tongue and ravenously devour your whole hand in one gulp, and, as I swallow, the rest of you will follow, flowing in silken rivulets of unresisting fluidity at the softest dreamy pleasure of being tasted, down deep inside of me and I am you, now, and you are utterly mine.
I am so many people living inside this stretched and stripy predator’s skin, and each and every personality within me speaks from it’s own fully clawed and feathered perspective. Attempting to separate those speaking parts would be to take away my right to see through such focused night eyes, hobbling these defiantly stalking and chunky legs at full pelt.
Each of the people I have eaten has a voice, has opinions and perspectives on the topic of “what is” and the following is my inner tribal collection of viewpoints, essays, symbolic and mythological explorations and rantings on how we might just get together. All of us, here inside me and all of me inside you in the whole wide world.
Gaia’s Mouth speaks for Child, Healer, Traveller, Wounded, Storymaker, Poet, Cynic, my twins – Dark and Dishevelled, and reaches out from a silent and tightly bound woman that shyly stepped up to the megaphone and trembled……
Each chapter is an incomplete work, an essay held captive inside a larger playing field, expressing the core truth of an aspect of my thinking that has an identity, a questing name and a purpose for contributing to the big picture of my learning and integration.
Pitched in the fires of a living hell, they scorched my hard-earned eyes, alive until blind as battle, I lasted for days on end, tho’ you were long gone as I soared across the land, how did I ever find our summoner’s clan?
“This is war” you roared, as the drummers rolled and I have come to claim a boon, good sir, may I come inside for a warm bed and a winter…?
Customarily, it was the women who heard it first. They listened in a flowing together of consciousness as if they had but one mind. The melding happened at the instant they noticed the first subtle difference in the wave tempo.
Hitimai had just given birth to her first child, a daughter, Tuipaha, named for her great grandmother. All the women gathered closely around her as the golden dusk clouded over in a wildly dark cover, blanketing the whole island in a silent cradle of uneasy comfort. Tuipaha made her first mewling sound as a living acknowledgment of her journey’s end, and as she suckled at her mother’s breast all her aunties, and girl cousins offered her their first welcome to life. Each woman and girl came forward and presented her with a gift, an ocean treasure harvested from the last sacred sojourn, and Tuipaha was greatly blessed with each gifting, blessed not only in being surrounded by so much warmth and loving connection to her family, but by the sudden change in the rhythm and sound of the ocean’s pitch. The one-mind of the women surged now, urged on by an awareness of altered weight, a subtle change in the density of the water as it crashed onto the rising sandbar, and each woman knew the call, deep in her belly, and in her being. Hitimai gathered her basket and wrapped a lopa-lopa around her daughter and tied it tightly to her body as she strode down onto the beach. Glittering ripples of tangerine radiance blessed the water with a last, lingering warmth that melted into the purple weight of night. The children’s eyes fell closed, fast and heavily into their full-belly slumbers as the women gathered their baskets and waited until the men finished spreading the last of their nets over the long, low walls of the common hut.
At the very first glance of the women standing along the beach, each woman silent, in company with her own basket, patiently proud in the new moon light, the men also knew. The men saw the call.
The conch blowers began, long and softly, up and along the wide, curving silver ribbon of beach that lay before the village, until the signal brought every man into the collected vigil, the gathering of male instinct, forming the sharing-shield of their own language, the protective one-heart of the men. It pounded in their blood, quickening in the pace and rhythm of duty and strength. To care, and to hold the loving space for the duration of the call, especially for the young ones, was their most sacred promise to the women.
The women’s familiar eyes were gone, their soft and tender faces now seemed suddenly empty and terrifying, wild as the waves, unpredictable as every wind or wonder of the great mystery, deeply disturbing to each and every husband as the long line of their wives strode powerfully into the roaring black sea.
The call had come and now the monstrous waves towered and burst forth, erupting in explosions of churning foam, pounding down and back and out, rolling and swallowing the land, smashing down again and rolling forwards with a thunderous drumming upon the earth that hammered and crashed and sizzled along the line of the break, hissing it’s hoarded waters into wavelets, spreading it’s gargantuan force out wide in relentless gorging of the land’s edge, a mountainous army of waters rushing in a tempest of tidal motion.
The call had come.
The very last of the women to leave was an ancient grandmother, slow and luscious with the velvet of age and speckled years, the heavy olden heaved her basket up onto her breasts and grunted, low and heavy at the sea. She reached into her basket and then her fist hurled a cloud of ash at the ocean. She stamped, lightly and quickly on the sand and her round soft body curved and swaggered it’s hips at the water.
“Kuh-kape, kape, k’shipu, ti ane, no ane wak a pia ngahhh”
Stamping again and chanting again, the olden made the mark, the land line mark, the last point of agreement where the waters would stop and retreat back into the sea, away from the village. The village was the place of her people, her family, her great grandchildren, now warm and deep-sleeping in their clustered huts, but the ocean was the home of her power. As she finished her chant, the men turned away. This was the last part of the call that they were permitted to observe. To stay would break the ptomena, the sacred law, and to do so would cause the rushing waters to submerge the entire village and claim the lives of everyone. Grandmother finished marking the sand, throwing the shells of her sacred workings into the darkness, as she disappeared into the waves. The roaring immediately ceased, and the wind calmed and blew itself out to the horizon, leaving the men to sit and watch the sky and the silhouettes of the palms against the white moonlit sand of the village in the sudden quiet aftermath. The strange sense of loneliness and the tension of their vigil caused an uneasy presence to roam their one-heart until the first bloom of light cast her rose into the dawning of a clear and perfect shore, an azure island of tranquility, a perfect paradise.
Every man’s heart quickened in hope upon each wide and rolling wave for the return…
Such a panorama of tellings have cascaded into me that I have warped and wondered exactly what story I could sing to you, that would cause you to be moved, and cause me to regain my youth.
I have nested upon the summary, drowsing in a tea lit twilight for an age, questing for the privilege of a righteous truth, wondering, what tale have I eaten, whereupon the regurgitation of it’s plot and placement could set me free?
It dawned on me as soon as I stopped talking, that it was the story of trance.
Once upon a dream everything was trance. We each lived inside our own trances and yearned to be with others with whom to share our trance landscapes, to be with the people that agreed with us that our reality was the right reality.
We shunned those, whose trance-sets threatened our perceived realities, and we murdered or castrated those stalking shadows, initially, only in our imaginations, especially when we were out driving in traffic, until eventually the mass of our destruction spilled out nightly from the electric blaring-boxes of our collective trance-realities, in booming segments from our home-dictators, our trance maintenance stations, and that’s exactly how we discovered where all our fears lived.
Trapped within a servitude to our deepest fears, and mesmerised by the repetitive broadcasts of the most terrifying hordes and unfathomable enemies of each other’s trances, we froze, impossibly overwhelming our own desires and suffocating our truths as we slept on, because mostly we were asleep and in those poignant, odd moments when our consciousness aligned with our reality, so obscurely that it must indeed have been a stark, waking moment, we recognised the landscape of our own limitations and we cried out, “witch”, “thief”, “infidel”…. and we kicked out in harming ways until eventually we slumbered on, deaf to the sound of the whole world breathing and staggering under the weight of so many trances that were, in actuality, flowing along the same path, and we ate into the sky of the same endless oblivion until we were all, fully gone.
Where did we go? What are we? Did we really go, anywhere? Where are we now?
“Where am I?”
In the simplest sense, yet strangely, one day it seemed to me, that as I looked around I noticed I was fooling about with large and small pieces of paper imprinted with numbers and letters that belonged to someone else’s critical moneymaking endeavours in order to justify my use of each daily lifetime allotment in order to gain a pittance of that other person’s critical money so that I may spend it on goods (and bads) that would really, effectively help me to know where I am.
“I am back at work”
“I am just leaving work”
“I am on my way home from work, did you want me to pick up anything on the way”
“Oh God, I am running late for work”
I was frequently offered (ridiculed for not having, given, sold, persuaded and threatened into owning) small, expensive plastic communications options for broadcasting and educating the others within my trance-family as to how well I was learning to play
“where am I?”
I wasn’t attempting to clamber onto some inferiority soapbox of altered perception, mostly I just desperately wanted to enter the same glittering dream as all those other smiling and pretty gymnasts, so I could attract a mortgagee and be allocated my own gold-coated plastic shackle every year. I was certain that I absolutely wanted a smart, grey-uniformed man/slave who would leak his life-gift away to satisfy my needs, who would eagerly sell the bulk and the beauty of his brave muscles for me, and thresh the vibrancy from his heart’s dreams for the privilege of entering the matrimonial trancescape that every mother lovingly trains us to command.
I thought I knew I really required all those shiny appliance gadgets to prove my worth and I wanted to make sure that all my daughters would learn the very same trance rules, and I wanted to ensure that they would follow the script that oiled the mechanism for the great and elegant trance perpetuation.
Yet, I fell from grace, and hit my head so hard, and so many times that a vast bruise covered my mind and the swelling and the constriction of oxygen to the central trance-map shuddered me awake in a dark and confusing place where no one else would wander in their right minds, nor their left minds either. I had discovered the shunning.
How do you know when your left-brain is rejecting all your right-brain distinctions? What device alerts you to the sly and furtive monologue that undermines and sabotages the pure and unobstructed flow of imagination and colour? The logical order, the calm and reasonable thinker seeks simple evidence and sighs aloud in pleasant, industrious company over a low-fat lunch.
The chaos of my room, my life, the uprising of all my emotions has forced me to cast out all my chances for moving into the social paradigm that seemed so attractive and desirable to most other folk in the white western middle class world of my apparent reality, and yet……….
One day I noticed a tiny portion, just a mere sliver of me whispering to the supposed big, dumb, loud-mouthed and bumbling dork of the rest of me, whispering in sleek and deadly messages with a smooth and critical overtone of utter superiority, lording my hoarded intellectual cookies over the head of the suddenly sad bozo that the most of me had just collapsed into being, completely unwitting as to the cause of my sudden misery until I heard the fading, poisonous footsteps of the final commentary.
“Pathetic, you think you’re talented, and you’re just an embarrassment to yourself. Why do you want to draw attention to yourself like that, you’re not creatively talented at all.”
I halted mid-stride. I looked to my left and slightly behind my shoulder, as that’s the direction that the voice had traveled into my consciousness.
“Wait a minute, ……whoa……just wait a minute,……. I’m onto you!”
That was the exact moment of my awakening. That was the second I took my very first breath and learned to claim myself to be mine own creation, that was the day I decided to write my own trance. That was my bugle call to the centre of the dream.
Thirteen moons of initiation are the gradual rise from a slumber so cosy, that the sheer weight of my eyelids caused me to fall back, again and again, wet with a deep and somnolent skin of exhaustion holding me tightly, over and over, eagerly re-entering me into the shadowed roads of a dreamer’s paradise, boldly lined with glittering promises that only and ever proved themselves to be the discarded truths of others. Every time.
Perhaps I should gather some scraps of those distant and primitive livings, my own Lemurian fables, my Pacifica dream and weave a blanket, pour the tea, as we read from a curiously comforting picture book with wistful songs to lull you, to make you safe as I carry you deep inside my dark cave.
Please do not attempt to seek meaning here, please encounter this meaningful meaninglessness with a reader’s utter freedom to wander away, parting company from the structured chronologies and thematic formulas of so many more popular stories. I see that all life is a perfect chaos, beautiful, wild and unpredictably savage in her patterns and all her colours.
Gaia’s Mouth offers nothing more or less.
