Again, so much imagary which always catches me at the most opportune time to give it the scrutiny it deserves. I'm going to have to wait for James to illuminate this masterpiece. But what you have left me with is this: "and giraffes reach their heads toward the sky".

This is priceless, to know why check this post out and the conversation we had today - The Bodhisattva Balks. And while you're at it, mind the giraffes.

That's inopportune time, which probably speaks to my drowsy state of mind. Goodnight!

I have editted this poem since last you read it, Newton, perhaps inspired by todays O.S. musings with The Trinity (and where is DJ/Oracle, by the way???)

They've been unusually incommunicado today. That leaves me to venture a guess about your poem. I can't look at all the symbolism separately, but a quick view suggests that we feel (as narcissistic modern man) as if we are drowning in the ordinariness of our lives, that we long for something more, some adventure or escape to some far off destination, yet in the ordinariness - the day to day - yet you find meaning in all of that, to find the spark of life in ordinary existence, regardless.

Though I sense there is so much more to it.

It is interesting you word it in just this way. A focus in my work with clients and students is how one might integrate / apply psychospiritual wisdom within one's "everyday, ordinary life"...So that each "moment" is enlivened, and the "eternal" n/Nature more readily accessed and recognized. Said differently: There is always a danger of descending into aimless psychobabble, circular self-analysis, and perennial philosophizing, which rarely, if ever, leads to genuine intrapsychic healing, self/other connectedness, and an expanding sense of "wholeness"/integrity within one's "everyday" life experience.

Mythos and Oracle perhaps are up to no good, devising plots of a mutinous nature in regard to the taking over of the Cult.

See, Eros goes away for just a couple of weeks and just look at the chaos that ensues!!!

Angie, about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, and before our giraffes disappear inconspicuously in to the African mist, let me clarify the importance of your:
"and giraffes stretch their necks toward the sky".

Not long before you posted that I responded to a post of Consonent's and Vowels:

"Ah my dear, there is beauty in thought. The Giraffe does not see the tree as a thing of beauty, it's its next meal.

To which she responded:

""coincidentally, because who knew you would bring a giraffe?!, I heard this on the radio this morning:

the 2 f's / in giraffe / are like / 2 / giraffes / running through / the word giraffe

The thing is, the day before we discussed the issue of synchronicity on my previous post on grace", and how small miracles happen all the time, but we pay little or no head of it. This just so happen to be one of those small one's, unless you here people talking about giraffes all the time. In fact I did a search, and in total there were 38 occurrences through all of Salon, for as long as they have existed.

Newton sent me here yesterday (giraffes!), but I was being slow about a comment, mostly because I was unsure what to say. But it's good, I think, to take one's time, be slow to act, when Mars is retrograde.

Still don't know what to say. Sometimes it's as though someone's handed you their photo album, or shown you slides from a vacation, and the pictures are beautiful or sad or disturbing but all you can do is look at them, transfixed or maybe wondering in your mind. There's nothing to say, really. But I'm going to say the cowboy on the escalator and carrying grief in the hunch of sunken shoulders struck me. And that I love Blake, not leastwise because the very idea of a ghost of a flea delights me.

Angie,
Please let me take yr course on applying psychospiritual wisdom to one's everyday life! "Everydayism" is reactivating that pesky bipolar virus of mine, sending me last night & this morning into doldrums of densest fog, my own personal "madness I run from...and am constantly seeking."Run from the doldrums (worst thing I can do, of course: better to bend over & accept it til it passes...); seeks the high clear mountain air.

Integrating some damn Psycho-Spiritual wisdom would be lovely...the little of it I am allowed access to, here in the fucking "Insurance State", CT...Anyway...thanks for beginning to reveal personal stuff...not only will it help in my "illumination" of yr masterpieces, but you are one heck of a fascinating woman..

I'm going to go piecemeal on this one, 1.because my energies are only now beginning to marshall again (thanks to access to yr poetic universe, and a big helping of you-tube Bob Dylan videos this morning...), 2. this is a very subtle one I don't want to do disservice to (meet Timid Jim, the alter ego of the loosey-goosey big-mouth Mythos) and 3. Complete Simonetta immersion might send me raving into the placid suburban streets of this former "company-town", now mini-police-state- with -a big -mall, Manchester, or , as our African American brothers call it, Klan-chester.

I was reading your heady comment on "Riding with the Storms" from yesterday, re. Paglaism, and my brilliantly perceptive comment (that I barely recall writing). I was struck by your phrase ""something critical withers and dries up inside when one betrays their own nature". Then boom!, here we are, deposited in a hellish African wasteland...hm...(yet oddly, skin freezing, when one would expect the opposite). "City" beyond reach....in Blake, the City is the symbol of Jerusalem,"a City, yet a woman"....shades of the Biblical metaphor of the Bride of God as his emanation, the outward form of His Inward Holy Essence. The task of Los the Prophet through history is to build up Jerusalem...

City out of reach...a deathscape where Nature is not only triumphant but seriously fucked up...recall from "Marriage of Heaven & Hell" the little aphorism (proverb of "hell"):
"the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction".

Instruction I am ambivalent about: there is good and bad. If we're talking good, then the unlimited energy & fearful symmetry of the tiger, tiger, burning bright is perhaps transformed into, well, a bit of teaching on the above-mentioned "integration" of spritual & mundane you specialize in. I am sure Blake didnt mean it this way, for energy & imagination always trump reason with him...yet he is not one for chaotic energy, as you must know. "A firm outline!" he preached. He hated blurry paintings. So: perhaps your poem is dealing with the very Blakean (impossible, most would say...) great Task of somehow bringing form to these endlessly morphing "illusions", images hologrammatic & vague...

"precision AND desire"...no wonder the school bus (bringing lucky students to yr tutorial?) lurches...and Nature is topsy turvy....

as for the giraffes!! I chuckled at us supposedly transpersonal chuckleheads still timid about actually recognizing the Great Goddess Synchronicty when she reveals herself...o faithless infidels of our own preaching!! I've seen an alarming increase in synchronicity in these halls lately....

later...Jim....still looking up this Hildegaard, which freaked me, cuz I'm about to turn 42...etc.etc...no wonder I'm DSM 4 impaired, i gotta deal with all this wacky shit on a daily basis, here in the damn Northeast where the transpersonalists are few & far between (1 per 7,000,000, the latest census said...)

giraffes changed their very anatomy, transforming into absurd freaks, to reach their heads to the heights...

Talk about synchronicity! Newton and James, you truly might not believe this, but I was completely shocked when I read this latest comment from James about "Mars in Retrograde":

City out of reach...a deathscape where Nature is not only triumphant but seriously fucked up...recall from "Marriage of Heaven & Hell" the little aphorism (proverb of "hell"):
"the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction".

Why? Well, look at the end of my own poem:


"while tigers transform into horses

and giraffes stretch their necks toward the sky."


So what, you ask? Now for my true confession: First, James informs me/us that "horses" to Blake symbolize instruction (possibly explaining my psyche unwittingly grabbing the image of the school bus, and the possible significance of the latest stanza of my own poem). So what (again), you ask? Well, er, the truth is, um, I HAVE ONLY READ A SNIPPET OF BLAKE, LONG LONG AGO - I am just AWARE of him vaguely; I HIGHLY doubt I read Blake's specific reference to tigers and horses...Thus, this perhaps (yet again) EMPIRICALLY supports Jung's assumption that there is indeed a GREAT ARCHETYPAL IMAGINAL COLLECTIVE that us humans draw from, like some Transpersonal Well (at times drawn from heaven, at times from hell, but after a marriage of the two, it is all one and the same, so to speak - the trick is, how to CONTAIN it all, and then drink most carefully, as what at first seems sweet could turn out to be a bitter poison to the body and soul; and, of course, the reverse is true as well, isn't it...)

SO: Let us all drink to our dear Cosmic Friend, William Blake!!!

And let us drink to ALL the giraFFes in AFRICA (and elsewhere too!)

Thanks again for the illumination, James, and also for yours, Newton, regarding synchronicity. Much appreciated. Oh, and speaking which, Newton, you might be most interested in my friend Dr. William Braud's "Cybrary" - go here, and see his article(s) addressing 'Synchronicity' -
http://www.integral-inquiry.com/cybrary.html

Braud and Anderson also wrote: Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences: Honoring Human Experience by William Braud and Rosemarie Anderson - You might be very interested in this book for multiple reasons.

James - I am happy to share more on the "application of wisdom" (my own strategies, that is, so as to avoid falling over the edge / point of no return completely [at least, I hope I can continue on in this way, walking the edge] - and how I work with my own clients on this very thing as well, all according to their own TRUE n/Nature....And I am doing just this, in the poems. Truth is, I am as curious as you are to see what imbedded "transmitted" instructions are possibly lying latent within the Living Words that throw themselves onto the whiteness of the page in an automatic stream-of-consciousness (ENERGY WRITTEN)...So let us each Stay tuned...

Love William Blake! You honor him!

James, I always look forward to your comments, and particular about our dear Eros's work, it's like watching a marvelously choreographed dance. I don't know how you are able to map all these metaphors and versus, but its truly fascinating.

And about "as for the giraffes!! I chuckled at us supposedly transpersonal chuckleheads still timid about actually recognizing the Great Goddess Synchronicty when she reveals herself...o faithless infidels of our own preaching!! I've seen an alarming increase in synchronicity in these halls lately..."

Being timid about it is exactly my point. Let's rejoice in them as it is revealing the underlying nature of it all, underneath the drab and mundane is a mysterious order we are yet to even remotely contemplate.

There was another stroke of synchronicity, All three of us posted all at once. Angie, thanks for that, I will follow up an comment as soon as I can. For now I'm going to repost a previous post on synchronicity, and hopefully I will receive less of a cynical response, but I will not hold my breath.

WSFTC: So lovely to find you here! Thank you for your "imaginal" comment.

Your writing puts me in a different place as I've mentioned before. A good place; nonetheless, but not a comfortable place. I don't have the G-force that you and Newton say emmerling may have - but I know it hits me way too hard to comment most of he time. It takes me a bit. It takes dreams, visions, borderline insanity lol....

I admire you for who you have expressed that you are.
I look at you with glass stained with the blood of heroes for who I see you as being...

Forgive me for keeping the thoughts of this to myself - I have yet to calm the storms within or make sense or share / shape the 'news' of them at this time.

peece,
dj

DJ/Oracle - You are back! We can only see and recognize that which exists within ourselves...Any heroism, pain, or beauty you see in my work and/or Being surely must be a reflection also of your own...Angie/Eros

Angie, thanks for the reference to prof Broad's work. There's a wealth of knowledge which I will use for future reference. I also found this book of his, Transpersonal research methods for the social sciences. There's a good reference to synchronicity on page 143, and why it is important to pay attention to it.