Singing the song of myself

So, I mentioned the other day that I had looked into the work of Asian Suler? And, you know me, I'm always seeking the fire that'll ignite my various piles of tinder into some kind of passionate purpose. She has this course about finding one's Earth-given voice. Seemed like a decent idea.

This was one of the exercises - to write a piece modeled on an ancient Irish poem, "The Song of Amergin". There are various translations, but, following the example Asia selected, the idea was to write thirteen lines starting with "I am" and three starting with "Who". In the original, the poem starts with very real things - "the wind on sea" - but moves to conceptual or imaginal ideas - "a hill of poetry". I didn't quite manage that. The exercise was restricted to ten minutes.

I am the scream of the swift

I am the moon-crazed gaze of the hare

I am the robin's red breast

I am the whirl on a stallion's forehead

I am a mare's soft muzzle

I am the crown of the mother oak

I am a well in the cold dark earth

I am spring water on a hot summer's day

I am the joy of a raptor's swoop

I am the fierce glare in a midnight wood

I am the promise of starlight

I am the lost islands in a forgotten sea

I am the silence of the polar sky

I am the crushed leaves of late autumn

Who directs the flow of phloem?

Who gave the rose her fragrance?

Who makes the stones glisten with dew?

Well. That's that then. I am not sure how much that's helped me bash through the brick wall of my inner (and outer) obstructions. At the start of every journey, I think, "Yes!!! THIS is the way to go! Yay! I've found my tribe, my guru, my purpose!" Within a week, I'm all "Meh." Now, one could say this is VERY borderline personality disorder. Let me just go into the genealogy of these turnarounds though... I mean, look, I still like, er, soil and worms and trees and crows. My feelings, what I WANTED, from having horses, was largely what I feel with the robin. OK, there was also the desire to do dressage, which I did, but it's like, well, maybe that was the false clothing... the connection was the real thing? Same way with conservation, it's more about feeling part of a place than being a valuable volunteer. I want to connect, entangle, be with. And I want it at the bodily, earthy, material level of mattering. What happens is people and ideas and plans and methods and rules and guidelines and thoughts and concepts and beliefs about things and ideologies and organisations and just bloody people and the contents of their minds.

I want to leave behind the concepts in people's minds. I want to let go of theories and ideologies and belief systems and strategies and visions and management plans. All those thoughts are like dust or silt in the clear water of being.

They try to make you think in a man-made pattern or to a man-made scale - but there are millions of other patterns and other scales. All life has to fit in one box. But it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't.

I bash my head against the brick wall again.