Soulcraft, Emergence
The following poem emerged at the tail end of a Wild Mind intensive late last year. It is significant for two reasons. First, it tracks something of my life myth, the soul-centric blueprint out of which I am constellated. Poet David Whyte describes soul as the truth at the centre of the image we are born with. It represents our greatest offering to the world, the unique ecological niche we were born to inhabit, and the largest conversation we are capable of having in our lifetime.
Secondly, the poem marks a significant passage in my life from one life stage to the next. Specifically, from what Bill Plotkin describes as the Wanderer in the Cocoon, wherein we have our soul encounter, to the stage of early mythopoetic adulthood, the Apprentice at the Wellspring, wherein we find ways to deliver the riches of soul to the world. He writes extensively about this human journey in his book, Nature and the Human Soul.
In my experience, soul encounter was the culmination of an extended period of wandering the cocoon. During this time much of who I took myself to be, and the life I had built, utterly unravelled, paving the way for an encounter with something that is at once powerfully familiar, yet also infinitely mysterious. This encounter ultimately happened in the wilds of Wollemi on a solo wilderness fast. Without exaggeration, it changed the entire course of my life. After years of wandering, I had been initiated into something profoundly sacred. Something that is intimately human, that nature-connected cultures have always embraced, but with which industrial growth societies have almost entirely lost touch.
I will write more about the unfolding of my life myth in another post but, in essence, it uniquely constellates me to guide others to find the truth at their centre: psychologically, spiritually and soul-centrically. Truth buried in the fertile darkness of the unconscious, prior to words, concepts and received ideas about who they are. Truth precipitated by repeated time in nature, dedicated inquiry and a frame-shifting of ordinary consciousness.
The poem thus reflects both the retrieval of a treasure from the subterranean rivers of soul, and my emergence back into the day world with that treasure. It points to some of my sacred wounding, to shadow work and the path through it into an embodied wholeness. Ultimately, it speaks to the mysteries of nature and psyche, to wild encounters with dream figures and to the wild mystery of dreaming while awake. And it speaks to the incredible alchemy of awareness itself, which longs for us to embody all of who we are.
If you are tracking your own descent to soul, or would like to know more about this work, get in touch.
EMERGENCE
Expecting grand words
I sat
In silence
Pen to paper
To pen much later
That the old is over
And new life
Erupts
Electric green from midnight black
I walk the night now
Bringing silver fish for my people
In a glass jar
Of night stars
Hewn from the cosmic walls of a wombat's belly
Drunk on phosphorescent whorls
And Eddie’s
Of the animate earth
Gratitude flows as amber sap
In this lone tree
But the path was seldom free
Or easy
No walk in dappled shade
Thank god
For I am made
Of each and every agony
Now I live and love with dignity
Grown from graft and grit,
Ground by savage words
And witless wit
Oh, long ago
I came to die
On hallowed grounds
As Odin did
Hanged in search of sacred runes
From Yggdrassil
The world tree
Woe is me
Half blind
Half wild
Pitch poured black,
The devil’s horde,
Seething
Roiling
Breached the sides of me
And at the helm
No demon,
Ghost
Or overlord,
Coal charred and black abhorred
But the radiance of
The inner sun
Krishna dancing
Friends,
All things that roil on troubled seas
Are doorways
Into deeper truth
Like rainbow medicine
That radiates as gold
In darkness
From silent wells
Where silence blooms
And truth alone prevails
This patina of light and dark
Flows as it has always done
As all the names and forms of god