(This wonderful passage was given to me by a dear friend who perhaps herself also runs with the wolves)

By way of this metaphor of innocent sleep, the fisherman trusts the life/Death/Life nature enough to rest and to revivify in her presence. He is entering into a transition that will take him to a deeper understanding, a higher stage of maturity. \ When lovers enter this state, they are surrendering to the forces within themselves, those that have trust, faith, and the profound power of innocence. In this spiritual sleep the lover trusts that the works of his soul will be worked in him, that all will be as it should be. This lover sleeps the sleep of the wise instead of the wary. There is a wariness that is real, when danger is near, and wariness that is unwarranted and that comes from having been wounded previously. The latter causes men and women, both, to act touchy and disinterested even when they feel they would like to display warmth and caring. Persons who are afraid of being “taken for a ride” or of “being trapped” –or who vociferously state their claims over and over again of wanting to “be free” –are those who let the gold slip right through their fingers. Many times I’ve heard a man say he has “a good woman” who is enamored of him and he of her, but he just can’t “let go” enough” to see what he really feels about her. The turning point for such a person is when he allows himself to love “even though”…even though he has pangs, even though he is nervous, even though he has been wounded previously, even though he fears the unknown. Sometimes there are no words to help one’s courage. Sometimes you just have to jump. There has to be at some point in a man’s life a time when he will trust where love takes him, where he fears more being trapped in some dry cracked riverbed of a psyche than being out in lush but uncharted territory. When a life is too controlled, there becomes less and less life to control. In this stage of innocence, the fisherman returns to being a young soul, for in his sleep he is unscarred, and there is no memory of what he was yesterday or before. In sleep, he is not striving to gain place or position. In his sleep he is renewed. Within the masculine psyche, there is a creature, an unwounded man, who believes in the good, who has no doubts about life, who is not only wise but who also is not afraid to die. Some would identify this as a warrior self, but it is not that. It is a spirit self, and a young spirit at that, one who regardless of being tormented, wounded, and exiled continues to love, because it is in his own way self-heal, self-mending. Women will testify to seeing this creature lurking in a man outside of his awareness. This young spirit’s ability to bring the power of healing to bear on his own psyche is so awesome that is is astounding. His trust is not dependent on his lover not to hurt him. His is a trust that any wound that comes to him can be healed, a trust that new life follows old. A trust that there is deeper meaning in all these things, that seemingly petty events are not without meaning, that all things of one’s life –the ragged, the jagged, and the lilting and the soaring–all can be used as life’s energy

(p.162-163, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype).

In Christian circles we say that sin separates us from God.
The concept of sin is, at its root, the forgetting of who you really are.
When you remember that you are indeed, one with God
and of necessity everyone else, then you do not do those things
that we love to categorize with terms such as ‘sin’.
Our forgetfulness separates us.
One of our many illusions.

“Nothing can separate us from the love of God…”

This in response to a discussion about the extinction of species while sitting in meditation this morning:

Classic query: What is the sound of one hand clapping?
My response: There is no hand, there is no clapping,
there is no sound.

Query: What is the sound of one species demise?
It is the thunderous sound of one tear
crashing to the ground.
It is the tear of all form and its joy.
Form arises for a season.
Its mortification sure.

Save what can be saved. Weep for the moment.
That is what we do. Rejoice in the emptiness
of all form. Form is the illusion
that arises to make emptiness seem real.
Is there no thing?
Is there something?
Yes.

.

sonnets

i like my body when it is with your
body.  It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body.  i like what it does,
i like its hows.  i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss,  i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

of under me you so quite new

~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~

viva

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance—-

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

-Ranier Maria Rilke