Well, it was bound to happen. Life took hold of me and for the first time in 20 weeks, I published a day late.
But hear me out.
I’m fresh back from Mexico from leading a psilocybin retreat in 100 degree weather, where I hardly slept on account of the heat. Mexico City, where I spent four days to “recover,” was filled with anything but that.
Today, I started my third cohort teaching with Inner Trek, one of the leading legal psilocybin facilitator training program in the US, and certainly in Oregon. It’s always a bit of a mad dash, this year especially because a dear friend and colleague who was going to join our team was sent back by the good people at the US immigration to his home country of Mexico, all because of a misunderstanding around differences between a “scholarship” and a work trade. Ugh.
May we all live to see the day when such calamities cease to exist. May walls and borders and bureaucrats disintegrate into the ruble heaps which they are all ultimately destined to become. May those who pride themselves by keeping others out of whatever castle ramparts they peer down from know what feels like to be the others on the ground.
Anyway, this week I was inspired by my recent retreat time to share a bit about poetry: why I read it, what I read it for, and a few of my favorites. May these poems serve you, wherever you find yourself on this spiral road.
Anyone who has been in a group circle I’ve led, be it a men’s group or a psilocybin retreat, will tell you that I read a lot of poetry.
I do this for two reasons. First, to honor the mythopoetic tradition and many of the elders of that movement, most of whom were poets, troubadours, and feral storytellers. They played with and celebrated the oracular arts and the spoken word - the nearly extinct ability to get up in front of a room full of people and speak something beautiful and vibrant into the ears of those listening.
Martin Prechtel is one of these mythopoetic elders. While I’ve never studied with the man directly, I’ve heard it said that one of his foundational teachings is that the gods gave humanity tongues and thumbs in order that we create beauty, which in turn feeds the holy. To not use these divine gifts to speak or craft more beauty into the world is an affront to the sacred. The gods, and the earth itself, demands that beauty flows from us as a way to repay our debt. Seen in this light, beauty creates balance.
Robert Bly, who largely “discovered” Martin’s work, was a lion of a poet, and brought a well of poetic knowledge and spirit into the emerging conversations around myth and masculinity that he and others like Michael Meade, James Hillman, and Malidoma Somé were weaving. Listen to any of those talks from the late 1980’s all the way into the early 2000’s,, and they begin each gathering by reading piles of poetry.
The second reason I read poems when facilitating groups is because poetry takes us into the imaginal world, the world of the soul. When a group of people close their eyes and enter into that realm together, a sense of community takes root. There is a doorway that opens when a collection of humans all agree to enter into the realm of the soul together. A certain spirit, or perhaps a communal purpose, begins to weave itself around everyone present.
This is how this amorphous idea of “community” begins to take shape.
Malidoma Somé, a genius teacher from Burkina Faso who I had the pleasure of hearing lecture only once, said,
“Community is formed each time more than one person meets for a purpose ... What one acknowledges in the formation of the community is the possibility of doing together what is impossible to do alone. This acknowledgement is also an objection against the isolation of individuals and individualism by a society in service of the Machine.”
That last line is the kicker. I’ll say it another way: poetry can become a powerful force of resistance precisely due to its ability to bring people together. Poetry is dangerous. The Roman emperor Augustus decreed Ovid’s exile. Persian sultans imprisoned many famous Sufi poets over the centuries. And the fascist Chilean dictator Pinochet was so troubled by Neruda’s riotous and revolutionary spirit that he assassinated him.
Today, poets are still being killed, with Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer being the most recent example.
All of this and more, is why I use poetry as a foundation of my practice in group and ritual space.
The poet’s words come from somewhere beyond the poet themselves, and draw us towards that same place when we let them settle into the dark groundwater of our being. They point towards the ineffable, and are beautiful attempts at articulating something utterly vast and unknown.
So I wanted to offer you all a selection of some of my favorite poems that I reliably draw upon. I’ve heard many great poets say that the words are meant to be spoken aloud, so I invite you to do the same as you read through these.
Widening Circles, by Rilke (trans. Robert Bly)
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
Lost, by David Wagoner
Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
Antidotes to Fear of Death, by Rebecca Elson
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
The Journey, by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
For Earth’s Grandsons, by Joy Harjo
Stand tall, no matter height, how dark your skin
Your spirit is all colors within
You are made of the finest woven light
From the iridescent love that formed your mothers, fathers
Your grandparents all the way back on the spiral road–
There is no end to this love
It has formed your bodies
Feeds your bright spirits
And no matter what happens in these times of breaking–
No matter dictators, the heartless, and liars
No matter– you are born of those
Who kept ceremonial embers burning in their hands
All through the miles of relentless exile
Those who sang the path through massacre
All the way to sunrise
You will make it through—
Stealing Sugar from the Castle, by Robert Bly
We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.
The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder’s plan of the castle of sugar.
Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!
Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.
I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.
I don’t mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.
“You’re a thief!” the judge said. “Let’s see
Your hands!” I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.
Heartfelt selection, brother. Thank you.
Thank you for these voices ❤️