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Manifestival

February 11, 2016 in Art Matters, Quoth the Raving, Spirit Matters

Whatever is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate. –Carl Jung

This is the quote that’s been on my consciousness–collective and otherwise– all week. Sometimes we have to listen; sometimes we have to act. It’s a balance that will assert itself even when we try to tip the scales in our favor. It’s a tarot card, a tipsy aside, a happy or unhappy catastrophe waiting in the wings. It’s a Jung quote, which in and of itself settles the score.

Februa, Again

February 1, 2016 in Quoth the Raving, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters, Weather Matters

February begins, and we feel the stillness of the Earth, our gardens, our streets, ourselves. We are awaiting germination and do that best by keeping still. Not unconscious but subconscious, latent, receptive. Quiet. I used to hate this month but now embrace it as the gentlest lesson in faith. There are no more festival of lights planned, no bracing rituals to keep the wolves at bay. Rather, it is time to take long, solitary walks and to cook slow, root-laden meals. To trust rather than test. To listen rather than list. To sleep and to dream but not to dance on anyone’s grave. Not for nothing does Imbolc, the Gaelic festival that literally means “In the belly,” fall on February 2. This is the time to honor fertile seeds still buried deep. We must believe that this bare ground, this stony silence, can grow everything we’ll need or else it never will. I think of Philip Larkin’s words and am once again grateful for his guidance through life’s necessary seclusions:

Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

The Jazz of Herstory and History

January 12, 2016 in Book Matters, City Matters, Quoth the Raving, Spirit Matters

Two quotes I didn’t know I needed until I encountered them in my reading marathon last weekend. They speak to my heart, which clamors for mending; they fuse its two sides with a resolution I could never achieve alone. This is one of the many reasons I read so copiously. I am always searching for blueprints undetectable in my regular life.

She knows that her name will find its way into his speculations. So will his. Because there are things you do for people you’ve known your whole life. You let them save you, you put them in your books, and you let each other begin again, clean.—Erika Swyler, The Book of Speculation

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one make some dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible—like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: here comes the news. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, y’all, and everything’s ahead at last.–Toni Morrison, Jazz

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy