Thanks — for the cookie crumbs!

There is a great Ground of Being
a Mystery of Being
into which a Self is born.

An ego forms
so individuation, differentiation
and separation
so the tensions of polarity
within the union, with the
One-ness of all things
might again become known.

So the story is again lived
to be told
of a great mythic wounding
by the fires of being — simply human
humus, the soul-filled
embodiment of spirit

Born into a world
where The Winds-of-Change
are a blowing,
where Life itself exists
only through a dance
at the edge of chaos.

Balance! Adaptation! Transformation!
All tools, skills, arts,
for living in a world in turmoil.

Turmoil itself being born also
of the tensions inherent within polarity;
And polarity too giving birth
to The Shadow Realms,
where Darkness lives
and transformation too.

What is unknown
and often feared,
the darkness of Death, itself
the Great Transformer

is an ally of intimacy
with all things
large and small
and must become known to us
if we are to travel
The River of Life
knowing wellness
hardiness
and wholeness
as allies too.

I found myself listening to Michael Meade‘s Alchemy of Fire—Libido and the Divine Spark CD yesterday, where he talks about the two traditions or paths of alchemy. One is where the practitioner tries to create gold out of lead…, the path of literalism, of the law, of domesticity.
The other path, also alive and filled with traditions of its own, and perhaps less well know, is the path I have spoken of elsewhere as that of ‘the poet,‘ the artist, the mystic…. It is a path where the alchemist’s lead is the domesticity of one’s own soul, if you will, and the gold one seeks is the refinement of that soul into an experienced intimacy and oneness with Spirit.
Mead describes this path within Alchemy as one where the map or territory must ultimately be discovered and explored by one’s self. And so within this tradition it was (is) not uncommon for each practitioner to develop a language of their own as well, as a personal description of their own experience. And so it is too, that to understand these masters of old, one must delve deeply into their writings to learn their language.
Joseph Campbell, on the other hand, describes part of the challenge of the hero’s journey, as “The Return.” It is a movement back ‘to where one came from,’ but now possessing the boon or gift of one’s adventures—to be shared for the enrichment of one’s community. It is often not an easy movement, as he often described it in story and myth, and is not uncommonly a failed movement. That is, there is no guarantee of success, of recognition or of acceptance….
Sometimes the prodigal son remains ‘the prodigal son’ and no feast is held as a welcoming home. I resonated with all this thinking as I struggle in my own small ways to share the celebration of life that I have come to, as I continue to be ‘refined’ in the fires of my own humanity, in the fires of transformation inherent to our times.
The model of wild resiliency is one with a ‘language’ of its own, as encountered in the Seven Keystone Processes. I felt a need to move outside the bounds of common languanging in order to describe something paradoxically both common and rare. The resulting WR model is an integration of positive psychology and of ecology and mythology, of the western and indigenous sciences, and so there can be an apparent complexity to it… but in truth, it is a model as old and simple as a child at play.
I am that child at play, that child looking for language to describe the world as I encounter it, discover it, mapping its smells and textures and shapes and wildness… as best I can. The above 2 AM scratchings on paper being one such attempt. Detachment from outcome, of all my endeavors, remains a continuing lesson.
Here however, I simply offer gratitude to the multitude of elders and travelers through time who have left ‘cookie crumbs’ along the paths of their journeys… to be found by the likes of me.
Reflections: What is the map you are navigating by? What language do you use to describe it? Is this language yours, or is it an inherited map and language?