The Danger and Delight of the Snake Dance as it brings us Death / Rebirth / Transmutation / Transfiguration...

                                         "Tiles"   cement / copper / silver solder  ~ Rachel L.

Joy and Dancing to you Dear Hearts!

I look forward to being invited to the next incarnation of Imunuri.

xoxo,

Rachel

OVERTURNED - Mediteranean memory bowls

 

Forged copper ~ Rachel Levy 2014

The dying art of letter writing

Today, I recieved a letter in the mail from an old friend.
A New Mexican who loves the stark and barren romance
of the landscape that envelops her.
The look of her hand-written script was as pleasing and artfully disheveled
as I remember her to be.

My eyes joyfully followed the line of letters and bold, punctuating marks
in their fervent effort to describe.
I could tell that she relished each stroke of that drugstore ballpoint pen.
The pressure, release and glide of it's crown
translating her mood as sensitively as an artist's sable-haired brush.

I wondered whether she realized, or cared
that every tenth word or so was illegible.
Causing the eye to stop and tumble over them.
Words that looked like balls of tangled thread.
Others like hastily written musical notations.
Or ancient Japanese calligraphy by the "Wild Sisters of Zen."

I was surprised by the intensity of my gratitude
for the drop of water or tear or tea that bled the ink
and curled the corner of the page.

This simple hand-written note.
Like a relic, a keepsake, a remembrance.
A true oddity among the daily scroll
of digital salutations.

The sage-scented sheet extended out like an invitation to a handshake.
A tactile way to bridge a distance seperating two friends.
A way to touch.

Drought

Much too early

In the Spring of 2014

Native wild bulbs were blooming in full

Unwinding from their underground Winter spools 

On the hillsides above the creek.

Along sidewalk gardens

The Daffodils 

Planted only for the pleasure of the eye,

Were plump.

Their split yellow buds deepened in color.

Reminding me of Canaries bringing a warning 

Of dangers near at hand.

Late Fall, 2013

In dry, hot California,

Peoples minds turned to water.

We dreamed of rivers and creeks.

Those impartial carriers of sustenance

Or poisons introduced

By our ancient fantasy of dominion

And the injury of merely 

Standing aside as an onlooker 

Or a newsagent 

Who broadcasts reason

While well-mannered rhetoric

Masks destruction.

Mid Winter 2013, 

Brought the record drought we all feared.

Unprecedented since 1929.

Our dreams brought us images of

Women singing for rain.

Their bodies merging with 

Alders and Salmon in the shallow creek.

We knew that our lives were 

Completely dependent

On those northwest winds lifting off the ocean

Just forty miles away.

Eventually I saw them 

Pushing and forming the hint of a cloud

Reflected in a pool along a brook

Where a fallen tree had stilled the flow of water

Creating a mirror for the sky.

Late Winter, 2014

Real rains came on the cusp of our despair.

Gradually.

Constantly.

Adding weight and expanse to the sponge of soils.

Settling into underground streams that ran joyful

Like sleeping snakes awakened from long hibernation.

Set free to play their sinuous games once again.

Anchored in service to an inexact compass.

Elastic.

Adaptable.

Unforeseeable in it's shifting.

After the wreckage: The torrential questions

1. Where have I offered my slander of another
    When I was feeling the most desperate for connection
    And all that was available was an allegiance
    Against a "common enemy" ?

2.  Where have I divided or fractured what
     Knowing it's best and most beautiful truth
     Would remain whole ?

Desert road trip

White dust rose in our rear view mirror
Inexhaustible silence pushed us in deeper 
We became vast in its presence 

Whenever we slowed or stopped
Wherever our feet touched ground
We found a hundred sorrowful things to love

Inside the Navajo nation
our tires hit washboard road
A clunky expedition met
the imposing dignity of ancestral desert 
Where ancient cave dwellings converge 
with patches of mobile homes and abandoned Chevy trucks 

A ghost town feeling threads through random settlements
Here and there, they seem to thrive...but most appear as if stranded

Pueblo ruins and corrugated aluminum shanty-villes  
Mirror each other at a distance
Collapsing into the sand,  the ground... as if trying to return home

Still,  the strength of the tribe endures
As does the Dwarf Oak and the Cottonwood with its 
complex Sage understory

The ways of  Song and Story are protected here
by those with a powerful will to wait 
Who suspend themselves upside down on the oldest limbs
of desert trees
Watching the land intently as they have for millennia
With all other eyes ( more than human )
They peer through their canyon wall windows
Whispering blackened or nearly extinct languages
who speak the textured sounds of  the woven Place
  
Songs guide, tales navigate wilderness 
and negotiate threat
   
These we imagined embedded in thousands of caves and Kivas 
The refuges of the still threatened land
Vast reservoirs veiled by darkness
Vulnerable to pillagers and thieves  
even now.

Windkeepers

                                                           "Windkeepers"   sheet copper / Rachel L.  2013

Sermon On The Pile

“The morning will begin with an educational orientation.”

Says the farmer,

As she tries to convey the difference 

Between topsoil and compost.

Attempting to answer their bewildered questions.

Becoming visibly surprised when someone asks :

“Is dog poop compostable or should I throw it in the trash?”...

Congregations of people are surrounding their mounds.

Pushing clods through their sifting screens.

Pulling out accidental forks, bits of plastic,

Undigested mystery clumps.

”It's like kneading dough”...

Says another in childlike delight.

Then the man who asked about dog poop surprises again :

”I get it!" He shouts.  "Everything is dissolving and coming apart...becoming a part of...becoming the whole!”

His hands absorbing knowledge from the sweet smelling mix.

The farmer is stunned.

Then it seizes her :

The Sermon On The Pile

+++“Friends ... What you see here is NOT topsoil!   Impossible! /// Hear me Dear Ones! /// When those precious top inches of centuries old fecundity are removed / that complexity has truly evaporated /// Sisters and Brothers! / Nothing can replace it /

Hear me now!/// In the nameless name of the source / Of that which we erode and that which we preserve / We do not make the topsoil! / All we can do is feed / protect it // 

This! // Our truest Wealth!

So I say unto you

Give yourselves to the ordinary compost pile / Tend it well / This sacred culture ///  Feel the revelation // YES! / The biotruth // Not available in digital form /// Eternally more complex than your latest computing device /// OH !! /// Forgive us the arrogance that would posit the World Wide Web as superior alternative to the breathing Web of Wisdom encoded in this heaving pile ///  YEAH!// This living compost /// Spread it open handed on the ailing soil /// Lay your salt belly down on it's medicine! /// Commit it's scent to memory /// Sanctify it /// This Holy tributary /  This taste of that most fundamental Darkness ///  Precursor to all Light /// The absence that speaks of an all encompassing embrace // Of verity // Of consolation /// Hallelujah !" +++

When Her Activism Goes Blind~ for K.N.

Trauma  brings on the fervor of belief
Insidious virus of an ideal
Looking over her shoulder
Hiding her core, unbearable shyness
The condition of shame
Driven to do the good that will bring her 
Some paltry imitation of Fatherly love
Her reward for the stalwart habit of turning away 
From genuine touch 

Preferring the practice 
Of cunning and slippery skills
Masked betrayals that bring glory
Among the cheering tribe 
Riding the momentum of  One True Cause
Powering the hopeful back and forths across
A Common  human fear :
The terror of not belonging.   

Belly Brain~for Greg Sarris

Some say if you you adopt a sitting place in nature / say by a creek / and visit it regularly / alone and in silence  

A first note may be offered to you / on any random inhalation  
( easily missed )
The re-routed red signalling of rock and moving water store the ancestral Holdings of the spot
Some say songs are embedded there for preservation / bestowed on a few
And only the most patient listeners of voices once eroded and damned.  Now Testifying.
Revealing a * "storied landscape.''

Some say that chapters are held in layers of soil
Parables buried in sand silt and clay
Indigenous memory ( when we were all indigenous )
Of story-song that comes from the intrinsic 
Inclusiveness of the "particular place" / the "every place" in all directions.

Some say our deep listening will act like a fertile Delta of reclamation
Present like the presence that redeems it's past / the future that sees itself  Unborn
The thrum of live elemental tapestries
Knotted to the well-being of individual~ family~ tribe.

 * "storied landscape": a term used by Greg Sarris, Chief of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria in response to my inquiry about an area of Miwok land in West Marin.

River ~ for Steve Young

This clock we watch has been flooded   
A snarl of river deities meander ruefully across it's ordered surface
As mercifully disruptive as wilderness can be
Running the ruin of measure and predictability
No comforting intervals or segmented parts 
No way to slice or divide it's ribless nature
Slam of metre and rhythm unbound
Close to Insurmountable
A river walks her prowl and riddle
Seedless in origin and cause 
And each of us the inevitable straggler 
To eddy and curl in her underflow 
Becoming loyal devotees to the process 
Offering gifts that fill the roots of the Mother Tree
Gathering to feed her forest
Her understory
The mysterious soil

Anemia

everything is
dragging me down/pulling me 
across the floor in wide surrender
of limbs/trunk/crown hung out/putting out 
an overstated posture of burden
of resistance to 
lift

the hunger : to stand firm under ground

Winter stories about my mother

//My 78 year old mother is a heavy set, anxious woman
With a propensity for head spins and passing out in crowds//

~~ Picture her voluptuous ~ rolling ~ undulating form as she falls>~~

" Don't worry!!!!  + Fainting on public transit* is just my blood sugar's way of getting my attention...and I  get to meet the all the good folks who come to my rescue!"
  
On one of my Winter visits, she befriends a stranger on a bus

I witness her over-heating and over-empathizing ways
A bad news magnetism that solicits his lament 
As they stand shoulder to shoulder rocking back and forth with the horde
Her eyes slowly beginning to dissociate as the intensity of his story mounts
Beneath an unbelievably tight girdle~bra and under layers of full winter garb
Her body begins to swell with heat and contract with resistance

Later she feels dizzy and we sit on a bench in the snow

She tells me about her Father. 

~He's been dead for 40 years//nevertheless// she still takes his bad advice##
~Being a man of his times ;;; he was certain that every good woman should:::
~Strap her soft and bulging parts into a proper restraining garment.
  
~Those who did not do so thoroughly disgusted him ~

    there's nothing I can say...
 

Later that season on a usual morning after absentmindedly eating half a pear...

she puts on her gear and delves into the fast moving river of the crowd 

outside the safe isolation of her apartment ;;;; the pear being just enough to jack up her blood sugar ;;;; sending it spiking and then ( at the typically bad time )  crashing///// just a she is ascending the mall escalator == Her body giving into the dizzy spell as her lungs are barely expanding against the formidable resistance of her D cup brazier>><<The backward falling of her hefty mass is broken by  three unfortunate strangers who she will later refer to as her angelic saviors ~~~ she feels her body cradled and it pleases her ^^^ She takes refuge in the strength of their arms when they huddle around her and yell "Call 911!" as they remove the taut fabric of her skirt from the sandwiching pull of metal while the moving staircase delivers them to the top floor where there are more angels who again cry out "911!"   One of them holds her head ))) another takes her hand ((( She gives them permission to unbutton her coat +unhook her bra+///  She feels the rise and fall of her chest}}} 

Bulges  sagging  unharnessed ~~~ everything at ease.+

 

note: after writing this poem i felt very dizzy and had to lay on the floor with my head on my dog's belly

For Sylvia

Mama's sweet boy
Laying in a coma and slipping away
Her clay boy
Soaked in a fool's gold nectar
The fusion of light and paranoia
One very bad night on Meth

Hold her in the embrace of many women as she screams
As she remembers carrying him on her back
Back in her hippie days
When the human potential movement thought they had him covered
Those early Esalen days
When she searched the stars for her golden high 

Cover her in thick layers of mud
Let it draw the grief out from her pores
May she be held by it like a newborn covered in its mother's blood
May she be held by it until the shaking stops
Until it stills her body into a calm and dusty mass

Word after Wordlessness~1st scibblings after a long pause

1st Haiku:

That morning,  I fainted

When I came to,   there was Breath

My loyal servant

( dispassionate master )


1st E-mail:

FROM: "The Maiden"

TO:   Befriended Shadow
CC:   Unfathomable Void

Dearly clearly recognized one,

I no longer doubt you ~~~ nor do I believe you.
The Pomegranate seeds you forced down my throat last Spring  reddened my tongue.  Then the old woman baptized it with her brew.   Now I can easily dissolve your acids!
We two are indeed Eternal friends .....but I am no longer your quarry, your prize, no longer fair game.
 
I will continue to allow our Winter picnics and night time tea parties.

 Tenderly,

"The Maiden"



1st  Interpretation of the  Buddhist "Heart Sutra"

The patient one
free to live her own precious heart's timing.
Releasing the numberless beings and the ten thousand things.
Risking:
for the truth of which truth can name
for the truth of which truth cannot name
for the truth of which truth can neither name or not name...

Re~noodling "Isaac's Flight" ( on a suggestion from Janice Sandeen )

Isaac's Flight

Our lullaby verses for the year

Her words were our shared comfort

The tender new buds of recognition

The stubborn old rifts between us 

 “He was peaceful ”

“They were slow, full belly breaths ” 

Before the morning of his flight

Heavy eyes had watched him all night

In his final bedchamber

That sterile nook that was

Curtained off privacy

While we stood bewildered 

His spirit hovering above us

Like an old Eagle at rest

A strong Semitic nose

The beautiful curve

More pronounced than ever as he lay there

The mouth hanging open and dark

His forehead warm and moist when I kissed it

In the hour after he died

Sweet relief was all around him

Then gone

Slipped out through an opening

No one was watching

The secluded moment

True to form

In the harbour of his sleep

In his mother tongue

He was saying goodbye 

Leaving his hard earned English language behind

Defying all impaired reasoning

Shining through the fog of his Dementia

The anchor of his sweet calm

A near extinct Moroccan Spanish

Picking up speed and entangled memories

With time spent spinning in circles
In that hospital room corner

Papa was splayed out in all directions

KALI

I see a strange dog outside our bedroom window.

Free dog roaming leashless.

Not like our dear old Kali, always in need

Of restraint.

Still, her namesake is wearing out with age.

More bark. Less follow-up.

Could be dog-world envy.

Her worn out hip. His agile gait.

Free dog smelling our laundry.

Kali safely inside.

Your red shirt dripping on the line.

Made in India. Great bargain!

Prone to grieve

                                                                                 painting by Rachel L.
                                                                                         click to enlarge

Storm Owl

                "Storm Owl" ~ copper sculpture by Rachel L.
                                         click to enlarge

Of ancient news 

Of one and no constancy

Looting the dark treasurely spoils

The glare of horn and beak

Mountain high gratitude

                                              "Move me no mountain" ~  painting by Rachel L.
                                                                                              click to enlarge