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awakening
May 2008 
day has come
evelyn
I'm taking a break away from keyboard (too into my head, too far from the breath of people and grasses and bark and coyotes and clinking forks) for a day or so to recall that all's right with the world and reconnect to Self.
And to heed Byron Katies's sage advice: "I don't let go of concepts. I question them. Then they let go of me."
So as I take this little break, I'd like to share what feels naturally my style of writing-being with you from an entry on my other blog from this past winter solstice 2006:
I am not afraid of the dark.
This late spring, I could smell the Mediterranean breeze and Tuscan vineyards in the orange trees and in the bend of the olive trees in this sun drenched valley.
Late summer, I gave myself the nom de plume, Evelyne, because inexplicably the petite patisseries and boutique lingerie shops of Paris - the City of Light - were in my bones as I strolled through the promenades of Palo Alto, Los Gatos or Los Altos.
Late fall, the Celts weave their harps and faeries and thick mossy stones into my sinews and midnight black hair. I am dark Morrigan incarnate.
"Few forms of Christianity have offered an ideal of Christian perfection so pure as the Celtic Church of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries," wrote Ernest Renan. The Catholic monk Thomas Merton agreed: "I am reading about Celtic monasticism, the hermits, the lyric poets, the pilgrims," he wrote. "A whole new world that has waited until now to open up for me." - Steve and Lois Rabey, Celtic Journeys: A Traveler's Guide to Ireland's Spiritual Legacy
Wednesday the new moon, invisible pure potentiality. Friday the winter solstice, seventeen minutes of pure light filters into the innermost tomb, the centermost womb. Today the eve of Christmas.
My creative writing tends toward the mythic, the symbolic, a finger pointing to the moon.
Except light is always light, no less.
Both Stonehenge and Newgrange's ancient engineers ensured that both monuments came alive with the sun's rays on the darkest day of the year, and among the thinnest, gossamer veiled days of winter. Even the snow carpets cannot obscure if you but open your eyes.
Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You've never used them before. - from the film, The Matrix
Poet William Bulter Yeats, not to mention the Celts, whisper of thin places - like holy wells and sacred stone circles - open portals where drifting mercurial between worlds and dimensions is seamless.
"The world is holy. Nature is holy. The body is holy. Sexuality is holy. The mind is holy. The imagination is holy. You are holy... Divinity is immanent in all Nature. It is as much within you as without." - Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon
No, I am not afraid of hidden crevasses, evergreen forest shadows at 3 a.m., the depths of the well waters, the grey girth of the round Celtic crosses strewn in the cemetery. I am not afraid of the mere absence of light. No thing.
a match is struck
against the box of your body
ochre flames dance
crimson twirls spritely
on the torso
of the willow yule log
a slow burn on a long night
Yielding
into consummation
"Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day has come." - Rabindranath Tagore
Access: Public
I read your line about your “creative writing” and almost laughed … Evelyn, I don't believe that, since I've known you, a single uncreative sentence has flowed from your fingertips. I think all your writing is creative.
And don't you find that darkness reveals much that light cannot?
Good point. Why do we distinguish activities as creative and non-creative? I have tended to view my blogging as “non-creative” as compared to memoirs, short stories, etc. maybe because it doesn't feel to come from a so-called deeper well of inspiration, but I'm assuming I even know where any of it comes from. I like how this paper distinguishes creative and reactive mind, I think that's what matters. Is it coming from aware, spontaneous mind or is it re-acting, repetitive mind?
On darkness, I don't know really if it reveals more, or less. Why what do you think?
It is just what it is. The new moon calls me more than the full moon these days. There is a comfort in midnight that maybe isn't there in the noonday sun. Something maybe more feminine in quality?
In a recent email, my friend Wyatt, whose had his share of the dark beyond anything in my experience shared:
I've found the worst turns to the best because contrast is all really see
live it be humble enough to see it and then tell it in your own words……..
glory be to the one ones who know that every footfall is their own
Ooh. Thank you for that link to your paper, and your clarification on what the qualitative feeling of blogging - compared to other writing - is like.
I think both darkness and light have the potential to reveal near-infinite amounts … I know I could never answer the question of more. Light reveals, sometimes, higher truths; darkness, deeper ones. Both are important … at least for me.
Wyatt is amazing.